Work in software development companies has become increasingly hybrid with employees altering days of working in the office with days of working remotely from home. Yet, little is know about the efficiency of such way of working because the current scale of remote working is unprecedented. In this paper, we present our findings from a company-wide survey at Storebrand - a large-scale Norwegian fintech company, focusing on perceived performance. Our analysis of 192 responses shows that most employees report being able to perform the planned tasks. Further, half of respondents perceive to have increased work hours. Through qualitative analysis of open-ended commentaries of respondents we learned that remote working has dual effects on the perceived work hours - some employees report working longer hours and others report having more work time due to efficient use of the time throughout the day. Finally, we recommend managers to discuss and address the concerning habits of employees caused by increased connectivity and inability to stop working, before these lead to burnout and disturbances in the work/life balance. 

Background: Modern workplaces have irreversibly changed their attitudes toward remote working, allowing different degrees of remotely working. Decisions about the influence of restricted remote working and mandatory office presence often raise the question of disproportional impact on different genders.

Aim: Our aim is to achieve a better understanding of whether WFH has a gender-segregated motivation and what other factors predict individual choices to work onsite or remotely.

Method: We report results from a company-wide survey conducted in NorBank, a Norwegian fintech company. The data is analyzed using descriptive statistics, contingency tables, Chi-Square test of association along with post hoc tests. We illustrated the results by using diverged chart bars.

Results: The results show that gender differences among software engineers are negligible and insignificant. Further, software engineers work more remotely than employees in other departments. We also found that engineers without managerial responsibilities are less at the office, and those who live further to their job, tend to work more remotely. With respect to preferences to work remotely, we found that younger engineers choose to work at the office more often than the senior engineers.

Conclusions: We found that the strongest predictor of the degree of remote working is not the gender but commute time and role. This also means that any analysis of general populations (as the analysis of all employees at NorBank) shall be approached with care because it may lead to flawed conclusions due to the different distributions of gender and roles in different departments. 

Context: Organizations opt for continuous delivery of incremental updates to deal with uncertainty and minimize waste. However, applying continuous engineering (CSE) practices requires a continuous feedback loop with input from customers and end-users.

Challenges: It becomes increasingly challenging to apply traditional requirements elicitation and validation techniques with ever-shrinking software delivery cycles. At the same time, frequent deliveries generate an abundance of usage data and telemetry informing engineering teams of end-user behavior. The literature describing how practitioners work with user feedback in CSE, is limited.

Objectives: We aim to explore the state of practice related to utilization of user feedback in CSE. Specifically, what practices are used, how, and the shortcomings of these practices.

Method: We conduct a qualitative survey and report analysis from 21 interviews in 13 product development companies. We apply thematic and cross-case analysis to interpret the data. Results: Based on our earlier work we suggest a conceptual model of how user feedback is utilized in CSE. We further report the identified challenges with the continuous collection and analysis of user feedback and identify implications for practice.

Conclusions: Companies use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to infer end-user preferences. At the same time, continuous collection, analysis, interpretation, and use of data in decisions are problematic. The challenges pertain to selecting the right metrics and analysis techniques, resource allocation, and difficulties in accessing vaguely defined user groups. Our advice to practitioners in CSE is to ensure sufficient resources and effort for interpretation of the feedback, which can be facilitated by telemetry dashboards. 

We examine how remote work is institutionalized in eight companies, and solicit employees' needs at the workplace. Based on these insights, we summarize actionable advice for policy makers, facility managers and employees to promote on-site work, which is likely to help many companies to rejuvenate life in their offices.

After the long period of forced work from home, many knowledge workers have not only developed a strong habit of remote work, but also consider flexibility as their personal right and no longer as a privilege. Existing research suggest that the majority prefers to work two or three days per week from home and are likely to quit or search for a new job if forced to return to full time office work. Given these changes, companies are challenged to alter their work policies and satisfy the employee demands to retain talents. The subsequent decrease in office presence, also calls for transformations in the offices, as the free space opens up opportunities for cutting the rental costs, as well as the other expenses related to office maintenance, amenities, and perks. In this paper, we report our findings from comparing work policies in three Nordic tech and fintech companies and identify the discrepancies in the way the corporate intentions are communicated to the employees. We discuss the need for a more systematic approach to setting the goals behind a revised work policy and aligning the intensions with the company’s actions. Further, we discuss the need to resolve the inherent conflicts of interest between the individual employees (flexibility, individual productivity, and well-being) and the companies (profitability, quality of products and services, employee retention, attractiveness in the job market). © 2024, The Author(s).

The COVID-19 outbreak has admittedly caused interruptions to production, transportation, and mobility, therefore, having a significant impact on the global supply and demand chain's well-functioning. But what happened to companies developing digital services, such as software? How has the enforced Working-From-Home (WFH) mode impacted their ability to deliver software, if at all? This article shares our findings from monitoring the WFH during 2020 in an international software company with engineers located in Sweden, the USA, and the UK. We analyzed different aspects of productivity, such as developer job satisfaction and well-being, activity, communication and collaboration, efficiency and flow based on the archives of commit data, calendar invites, Slack communication, the internal reports of WFH experiences, and 30 interviews carried out in April/May and September 2020. We add more objective evidence to the existing COVID-19 studies the vast majority of which are based on self-reported productivity from the early months of the pandemic. We find that engineers continue committing code and carrying out their daily duties, as their routines adjust to “the new norm”. Our key message is that software engineers can work from home and quickly adjust their tactical approaches to the changes of unprecedented scale. Further, WFH has its benefits, including better work-life balance, improved flow, and improved quality of distributed meetings and events. Yet, WFH is not challenge free: not everybody feels equally productive working from home, work hours for many increased, while physical activity, socialization, pairing and opportunities to connect to unfamiliar colleagues decreased. Information sharing and meeting patterns also changed. Finally, experiences gained during the pandemic will have a lasting impact on the future of the workplace. The results of an internal company-wide survey suggest that only 9% of engineers will return to work in the office full time. Our article concludes with the InterSoft's strategy for work from anywhere (WFX), and a list of useful adjustments for a better WFH. © 2022 The Author(s)

Onboarding is a process of organizational socialization of the new hires, that includes recruitment, orientation, training, coaching and support. While onboarding individuals into an organization is a rather straightforward task, little is known about 1) onboarding hundreds of developers and 2) doing it on a distance in outsourcing situations. Furthermore, the subject of sustainable growth with respect to organizational capabilities and culture is often overlooked. This paper reports findings from an exploratory multi-case study of two large onboarding campaigns. We collected empirical data from interviews, retrospectives, onboarding documentation and onsite visits. Based on the empirical study, onboarding hundreds of software engineers in a complex agile product development environment which lacks documentation and puts high demands on engineers’ knowledge and skills is a challenging and costly endeavor. To save the costs and for practical reasons, large-scale onboarding is organized in batches with the first batch trained onsite, and the later batches trained internally. We report challenges faced in the two cases and discuss possible solutions. One core finding is that a good plan combined with the organizational agility, i.e., the responsiveness to change, together with organizational maturity determined the success of organizational scaling. The presented cases contribute to the scarce research on knowledge transfer and onboarding in a large-scale agile context. © 2023, The Author(s).

In early 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic forced employees in tech companies worldwide to abruptly transition from working in offices to working from their homes. During two years of predominantly working from home, employees and managers alike formed expectations about what post-pandemic working life should look like. Many companies are experimenting with new work policies that balance employee- and manager expectations regarding where, when and how work should be done in the future. In this article, we gather experiences of the new trend of remote working based on the synthesis of 22 company-internal surveys of employee preferences for WFH, and 26 post-pandemic work policies from 17 companies and their sites, covering 12 countries in total. Our results are threefold. First, through the new work policies, all companies formally give employees more flexibility regarding working time and location. Second, there is a great variation in how much flexibility the companies are willing to yield to the employees. The paper details the different formulations that companies adopted to document the extent of permitted WFH, exceptions, relocation permits and the authorisation procedures. Third, we document a change in the psychological contract between employees and managers, where the option of working from home is converted from an exclusive perk that managers could choose to give to the few, to a core privilege that all employees feel they are entitled to. Finally, there are indications that as the companies learn and solicit feedback regarding the efficiency of the chosen strategies, we will see further developments and changes in the work policies concerning how much flexibility to work whenever and from wherever they grant. Through these findings, the paper contributes to a growing literature about the new trends emerging from the pandemic in tech companies and spells out practical implications onwards. © 2022 The Author(s)

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic triggered a natural experiment of an unprecedented scale as companies closed their offices and sent employees to work from home. Many managers were concerned that their engineers would not be able to work effectively from home, or lack the motivation to do so, and that they would lose control and not even notice when things go wrong. As many companies announced their post-COVID permanent remote-work or hybrid home/office policies, the question of what can be expected from software engineers who work from home becomes more and more relevant. Aims: To understand the nature of home telework we analyze the evidence of perceived changes in productivity comparing office work before the pandemic with the work from home during the pandemic from thirteen empirical surveys of practitioners. Method: We analyzed data from six corporate surveys conducted in four Scandinavian companies combined with the results of seven published surveys studying the perceived changes in productivity in industrial settings. In addition, we sought explanations for the variation in perceived productivity among the engineers from the studied companies through the qualitative analysis of open-ended questions and interviews. Results: Combined results of 7686 data points suggest that though on average perceived productivity has not changed significantly, there are developers who report being more productive, and developers being less productive when working from home. Positively affected individuals in some surveys form large groups of respondents (up to 50%) and mention benefiting from a better organization of work, increased flexibility and focus. Yet, there are equally large groups of negatively affected respondents (up to 51%) who complain about the challenges related to remote teamwork and collaboration, as well as emotional issues, distractions and poor home office environment and equipment. Finally, positive trends are found in longitudinal surveys, i.e., developers’ productivity in the later months of the pandemic show better results than those in the earlier months. Conclusions: We conclude that behind the average “no change” lays a large variation of experiences, which means that the work from home might not be for everyone. Yet, a longitudinal analysis of the surveys is encouraging, as it shows that the more pessimistic results might be influenced by the initial experiences of an unprecedented crisis. At the end, we put forward the lessons learned during the pandemic that can inspire the new post-pandemic work policies. © 2021 The Authors

Although the forced working from home during the pandemic crisis seem to have ended, many knowledge workers choose to continue working predominantly from home as a partial or permanent practice. Related studies show that employees of companies from various industries, diverse in size and location, prefer to alter working in the office with working at home, coined as hybrid or flexible working arrangements. As a result, offices remain empty, managers are confused, and organizational leaders do not know what to do with the often-expensive rental contracts. In this short paper, we investigate the employee presence in the offices in two software companies and dive deeper into the reasons behind the preferences to work remotely, and practices that help to attract employees back into the offices. The latter are based on the qualitative analysis of interviews and survey responses. Our findings suggest that between the fall of 2021 and the summer of 2022, the offices were half-empty and that, on average, the daily office presence varies between 13–30%. The peaks of office presence in both companies are on Wednesdays, reaching up to 50% during weeks with low virus spread in one company, and in the spring months in 2022 in the other company. The reasons for remote work include behavioral and practical motivations, factors related to office equipment and facilities, and the nature of the work tasks. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.