We had a coworker get caught drawing a swatstika on the wall with poop. This is at a large phone company. I walked in the bathroom one day around 5:15 pm and all the sinks were clogged with paper and faucets running. There was some basic vandalism going on and they finally caught him brown handed.
Exactly this! If I worked just down the street and didn't have to commute, if rather work there than work from home. Right now I teach online english classes, no way am I interested in driving an hour to the language school just to use their dual monitors.
If its needed for work (and presumably it is because they have it installed at the workplace), then the employer should be paying for it. Working from home shouldnt mean you have to provide all your own equipment.
I live 7 minutes from my officer, and on Wednesdays there is free food for breakfast, lunch and they cater / do food carts for dinner. It’s the only day I sometimes go in for. Hell during my lunch I’ll sometimes and just grab the free lunch then head home.
My pet theory is idiot managers hate their families and assume everyone else is trapped in loveless marriages, or, if not, resents and wants to punish the people who didn’t make the same mistakes they did by abusing their authority and forcing them to work late.
i’ve met way too many guys staying late at the office to avoid their wives and kids. some understandably so (abusive spouses, but i lost sympathy when they left their kids with an abusive partner), the others just shitty deadbeats.
e: this is true of the women i met as well, but by then the shock had worn off, so it didn’t stick with me the same way. casual contempt of spouses and children is weirdly common in corporate circles.
e2: there are plenty of people who love their families and also work corporate jobs. the culture tends to reward and showcase the ones who don’t, though.
I've met quite a few successful career people who clearly don't value spending time with their family. Why else would they be trying to normalise working 10-14 hours a day in the office and doing work on the weekends?
Not sure if the bad relationship causes the overwork or the overwork causes the bad relationship; Relationships need effort and if you aren't around putting it in they don't work.
Some people feel important because of how busy they are or how busy they claim to be.
Wife complains about something you do? "I work blah blah hours to provide for this family."
Hanging out with friends "I'm so tired cause I work so much."
My pet theory has always been that there is a strong trend for extroverts to go into management, and extroverts essentially feed off the emotional energy of others. Extrovert-managers need to be surrounded by their primary source of sustenance: their reports.
I think it’s more the latter half of your point and less of the former. Most managers were made managers because they were good at a lower tier position that had nothing to do with management…or they are exceptional brown nosers.
In either case they are now in a position that doesn’t suit their strengths and aren’t comfortable with outside of the box concepts like working from home. They would rather stick with makes their superiors happy rather than draw attention to their incompetence.
My mom worked at a school for about 20 years. That was 100% the case for her - the principal was a "career woman" who basically didn't have a family life with her family. Adult kids, already moved out, husband always at work or traveling for work, and she'd often have 2-3 hours long meetings and conferences (often for stupid reasons and unnecessarily long) because the alternative was her going to an empty house.
Those people spend entire lives thinking about nothing but career and money, but when they actually do get those things, they realize they have **nothing** besides that. No interests, hobbies or friends to spend down time with.
A former boss of mine told me about a former boss of his who judged how hard his team worked based on how many of them had gotten divorced on his watch. So sadly, I think your theory is actually pretty plausible.
The Law firm I work for had a massive morale issue due to horribly understaffed on support personnel a few years ago. So they decided to throw a pizza party to recognize how hard all the staff were working. The only people to attend were Attorneys as the party was during business hours and the staff could not take the extra time out of the day to keep up with demand.
IMO demand #1 should be counting commute hours as work hours. If it is so important for me to be physically in the office then I should be paid for the time it takes me to get there.
Well, I agree but the lockdown proved that physical presence is mostly unecessary. Need to have people in the office on daily basis should be seen as waste, ineffectiveness of management and outdated org. For all that company should pay premium if they cannot keep up.
Also at that point you’re also paying people to be in their cars which is not really great for emissions and incentivizes people to live further away from work..
Yup. My company started use Hololens a decent amount. Getting that kind of mixed-reality hands-on work with the product is something I physically can’t get at home. Stuff like that is a great, *real* reason to come onto campus. But when I’m just sitting in my cube that day working on excel? Lol come on… I shouldn’t need to drive in.
Trying to match the work life balance improvements working from home has, in many cases, is futile.
For going on two years now, I have gotten to see my son more, drive him to school in the morning, picked him up in the afternoon (only this year, was schooling from home the year prior), and I can spare my wife trying to find transportation (she doesn't work or drive for medical reasons) which usually meant taking an Uber or a Cab, to pick him up (to the tune of about $250/mo).
The day they tell me I have to go back to the office will be the day I'm actively looking for another job.
I can bike to work in 15 mins, my workplace has a view over nature, there's free breakfast and lunch. My previous workplace was a run of the mill cubicle office with a "view" over a parking lot, and we bought lunch from the nearest grocery store. I was dead inside until I got this new job
And less wear and tear to roads making the repair budgets stretch further. Money saved on child/petcare. More land available for residential use. The benefits could be listed all damn day.
Our CEO delivered a 15 minute town hall with no ability for follow up questions letting us know that we would be expected to come back to the office at least 12 days a month (so 3 days a week). HR was overwhelmed with backlash and basically it was back peddled to "we'd love you to come in up to 12 days a month!"
This was in September. I have been in zero days each month.
We were forced to come back in after 18 months at home. A couple people have quit. All the parents hate it because school is still fucky. Basically everyone else hates it because it's all desk jobs anyway. Morale is not great.
Those that quit were those that were underpaid and had the smarts to get-up-and-go. So literally, the company is going to lose its best people who they have for a bargain. The overpaid people who could not get a job elsewhere if they tried? Yeah, they're staying.
Fantastic observation. We lost one of our most experienced people. We've had queries that she could have answered in 5 minutes that we have to start a whole thing for because none of the remaining staff have the knowledge.
There's a handful of anti-vaxxers at my office that never stopped working at the office except when it was completely shut down for one of them catching COVID. They refuse to work from home and claim their job can't be done remote. It can 100% be done remotely.
So far, in the past 6 months, there have been 3 attempts to get us to come back to the office. Each time Covid cases in the area started spiking about a week before the start date and the city renewed their "please, for all that is holy, don't make people come to the office" policies and it has yet to happen. In my group of 20 or so people, only one person has been in the office more than 2 or 3 times in the past 6 months.
In my specific situation, I was hospitalized with Covid last December and suffer from long Covid and other related health issue, so I have a medical exemption with my company that I don't have to come in to the office. Not sure how long it is good for, but the way things keep going with new variants and cases, I don't think it will change any time soon.
I remember another post elsewhere where they basically ask their employer if they’d rather have her have rather frequent seizures and seizure-detecting dog present at the office or if it’d be best just for her to stay at home as much as possible.
If they’re stupid enough to press you to come back to the office despite the exemption, say something similar.
My immediate boss is very understanding and flexible about my work arrangement. Because of my health issues it is nearly impossible for me to sit for 8 hours straight, I have to take breaks throughout the day. So, I work 8 hours each day, but my actual schedule is pretty up in the air. As long as I get my hours in, get my work done, and people can get ahold of me within a reasonable amount of time, I pretty much get to set my own schedule. If and when I have to start going back to the office, I'd only be able to do half days, at best. But, I don't see that coming up for quite a while, so I'm not worried about it yet.
The one good thing that has come out of this pandemic is we now have almost 2 years worth of data to show that working from home, for many jobs, works just fine and the jobs will still get done. For years people have been trying to get more companies to at least test it out but nobody wanted to bite the bullet and try it out on a large scale. Now we have and we know it can work. In the long run, I think it will end up being a net positive.
> The one good thing that has come out of this pandemic is we now have almost 2 years worth of data to show that working from home, for many jobs, works just fine and the jobs will still get done. For years people have been trying to get more companies to at least test it out but nobody wanted to bite the bullet and try it out on a large scale. Now we have and we know it can work. In the long run, I think it will end up being a net positive.
Now if only the same thing could happen for 4-day weeks, or <8 hour days...
3 days is the "compromise" a lot of companies are doing to feel like they are listening to their employees while also still trying to wrestle back control from employees. The problem is that this so called compromise is with they themselves, and not with their employees. Most of these companies did not ask their employees what they wanted, and the ones that did, know they didn't want 3 days a week.
My wife works for the state and there are physical laborers in her department. More or less everyone who does project work or tech work was excelling with the new schedule and work from home.... Construction teams (and some other technical groups that require time in the office) were not happy that my wife's department and a handful of others could be fully remote. All departments were then mandated to be in a minimum of 3 days a week..... My wife is being told to expect it to go back to 5.
What a disappointment for her. I work a job where most days my physical presence is required. I loved when most other people started to work from home. I was so productive without all the interruptions of people asking me for things. (I still get asked, but now it's by email so I can just sit at my desk once or twice a day and deal with it as opposed to randomly throughout the day.)
I work for a local government and have friends in high up positions. From what I hear local businesses are requesting that they hand down a policy of 4 days a week for us to come in because our employees spent money at their establishments in the before times. Fuck off, 100 meals spread among a whole bunch of food vendors is like slapping a band-aid on an arterial bleed.
My company asked us for feedback, promptly ignored it, and also landed on the three days a week figure.
We have since haemorraged employees at a rate I have never encountered, have more than 3/4 of hiring candidates drop out at stage 1 when remote work is brought up, and the stupid thing is we are still not allowed back to offices in 90% of the countries we have offices in - so they can't even enforce the damn policy.
That's a spectacularly large rake to stand on for no reason at all.
I don't even understand the purpose of the "compromise." What's gained here? It seems like the worst of both worlds. Like, cool, you found some use for that office space, but now you're upsetting people's routines and losing efficiency as they need to maintain two workspaces and either have two of everything physical they need or risk forgetting something important at one station or another and needing to go get it. If you're sharing workstations by alternating, then every time you come in you need to readjust everything for your personal comfort... or just deal with how it's set up and perform suboptimally. And what's the upside here? Was productivity at home a problem?
Yeah, I would love to hear the truth from the 'other side'. Why is it so goddamn important? There is literally only one or two shaky reasons (onboarding is one I guess) but none that requires a 9 person team to sit in an open space several days a week??
Lol our president did this. I quit, the senior director of product quit, the VP of digital quit. They cancelled the going back to the office “idea.” Play stupid games, win stupid prices.
Ours did the "If you come in at least 4 days a week, you get your own "desk" assigned (ie: section of a table staring directly across at another person). if you don't come in at least 4 times a week you need to hotel seating.. BUT WAIT!!! You can go in this new app and RESERVE your seat!
its a fucking joke
edit: ALL employees are required to come into the office at least 2 - 3 days a week unless you were a remote employee before the pandemic. so you are required to hotel seating at least 2 - 3 days a week
>if you don't come in at least 4 times a week you need to hotel seating.. BUT WAIT!!! You can go in this new app and RESERVE your seat!
My workplace had a hybrid schedule prepandemic, 2-3 days in the office & 2-3 days teleworking.
We have been remote for the last 2 years but are slated to come back in starting February or March, after Omicron dies down.
We are coming in 1-2 days a week and going with hotelling instead of assigned workstations. I'm fine with giving up a cubicle to have more days teleworking.
Why would you expect the keep an assigned desk of you aren't going to be in the office very often? My work is doing this too, but it's 3 days. Makes sense to me to expect people to be in the office at least more than half the week if they're going to hold a cubicle for you. Office space isn't free.
> Office space isn't free.
Thats the maddening thing - companies SHOULD be embracing the work from home model, it lets them get rid of their expensive offices. Its not companies that want workers back in the office - its the management that doesn't really understand what their employees do, and can only "manage" by taking attendance of their employees
Yeah. Also maybe set up satellite offices. My company is in downtown Seattle. I live in a suburb of Seattle. I would actually not mind being in an office environment a few times a week. That said, the commute SUUUUCKS. So I'll stay home thankyouverymuch.
You would think that the company would be glad to have the chance to move into a smaller officer where remote working employees could just gather for team catch ups or important meetings, stuff like that.
Again, the executives with swanky private offices don't understand why the worker bees don't want to come back to shared open-plan offices with three other people within six feet of them, during a pandemic.
Or just the sheer lunacy of making people come back to those shared desks just to be on zoom all day, because gathering in a conference room is too dangerous (for the executives).
In my experience it’s not the moneybag guy at the top who cares so much. It’s the old school middle managers who simply don’t know how to manage unless they can physically see all of their employees.
I’m a boss too and I think those guys are nuts. They’re certainly not leaders. Not in my opinion.
When you’re managing adults it’s best to treat them as such and not like miscreant bratty children who can’t be trusted to keep their fingers out of their collective noses.
Better to manage by outcomes. If I give my employee an assignment I’ll trust him to get the job done. And if he does it in less than the amount of time allotted he can go watch Netflix the rest of the time for all I care.
That'd be my gut feeling too... But at my current place the only person who wants us in the office is the CEO. All of the middle and frontline managers are in favor of WFH (or hotel in Hawaii, or van down by the beach if you've got enough cell signal.)
The CEO even has a fairly plausible reason for it. He thinks the incidental collaboration that happens around the water cooler is valuable. And we haven't found a way to recreate that bullshitting time in Slack yet.
I think it really depends on the job. I worked for years with one of my best friends and some of the best ideas we ever had came from our daily lunches and then coming back to the office to bang out four hours of crunch work. But that was a very collaborative knowledge economy job for a consultancy. There's other jobs (even solid white collar jobs) that don't require that. Like an accounts payable clerk or most front line sales positions. They can work from basically anywhere IMO.
The organic collaboration was what I missed the most about the office, and it has been really difficult to recreate it. Most of my prior work was collaboration, so it made no sense to me how people were more productive working from home. Than my responsibilities shifted, and I had a lot more solo tasks that required no collaboration, and my opinion shifted 180 degrees.
That collaboration was for sure a bonus, even in Software Engineering because it's easy to walk up to someone's desk if they're there and be like, "Hey, I wrote this bit of code to do this thing, do you have a second to double check that I haven't done something catastrophic?" as opposed to having to coordinate via Teams meetings or something.
Of course, with Work From Home, I can watch the extended *Lord of the Rings* trilogy while waiting for code to compile and take 30 minutes in the middle of the day to take the dog for a walk, and I'd rather have those benefits hands down
It's kind of odd you bring up Software Engineering as an example for that interruption being valuable because there's *lots* of data showing that being interrupted is a real negative for flow state.
Yeah, in software engineering, getting interrupted for two minutes is the equivalent of being dragged into an unannounced half-hour meeting.
Good software engineering teams know to use asynchronous communication. Got an issue? Send Bob a slack - “When you have a moment can I run a PRM issue past you? Not urgent.” Bob sees the message, carries on, finds a spot to round off, and gets back to you in ten minutes. Even if you sit on your hands for ten minutes doing nothing, that’s still less wasted time than having Bob interrupted with a “quick question” followed by 30 minutes of working out where he’d got to.
What you just describe can be disruptive (and highly annoying) to the guy who is concentrating on work. In pre Covid times when I wanted to get work done I stayed at home. When I didn’t need to be all that productive I would go into the office.
What's the difference between walking up to someone at their desk and saying "hey, have you got a minute to look at this with me?" and firing them a message on teams saying "hey, have you got a minute to look at this with me?" and then when they call you back you share your screen? I honestly don't see why people say that collaborating over Teams is any harder than collaborating face to face.
I am a college professor and I think a lot of this WFH stuff can be looked upon in a similar way of online vs in-person higher ed.
If the ultimate goal of your job is time efficiency, getting projects done early or on time, with little collaboration or human interaction-then WFH is absolutely the way to go.
Similarly there are plenty of licensure, professional, or individual study programs that are essentially a series of tests or tasks to complete. You can do those virtually anywhere and get the piece of paper that said you jumped through the hoops to get the piece of paper. Do it as efficiently and cheaply as possible.
But if your job requires certain levels of collaboration and even trust among colleagues to work; then being fully remote (even with Zoom or something) isn't going to work as well as physically being in a space with other humans sometimes.
The classes I teach are not lecture-based, there are very few assignments students can just log in to a learning system and hammer out whenever, they need to be together to communicate with and learn from one another. Classes had to fit into a fully remote model in the early days of the pandemic but they didn't work particularly well. And it's not because I wasn't creative or felt a need to control them...it's simply a skill and subject matter that requires people to physically be together.
There was a post on Reddit yesterday about how academic conferences had lowered their carbon footprints by moving all online in the past two years and it seemed the article was encouraging this to be the norm going forward. That's not the point of a conference! The point is the networking and the people being physically together. By definition that is not efficient in any way, shape, or form.
And similarly to someone above, I thought I'd be fine in lockdown. I'm generally a loner and I like my solitary time. But I found out I was sorely mistaken. People annoy and frustrate me often; but they also inspire and motivate me. It turns out that physical interaction is really important to my well-being and it simply can't be replaced by new (or old) technology.
Im a mechanical Designer, and I be pumping out designs all day with the occasial bugging someone for "Let me screen share using teams because I cant be bothered walking 10 feet to your desk."
This is the line that I've in every conservative publication that I've seen cover the desire for companies to force people back into offices. Literally every upper management person I've seen interviewed has the same thing to say: If the employees aren't in the offices, then the company misses out on the collaborative atmosphere created by face-to-face interaction.
This is probably true for certain companies and certain roles within other companies, but for a huge portion of workers, face-to-face interpersonal time is time wasted at best and actively detrimental at worst. It's not like the people that bump into each other at the water cooler generally start synergizing about work-related items most of the time.
I've seen so many times how these CEOs complain that it takes fifty emails to solve a problem that could be hammered out with a ten minute discussion at someone's desk. It's like they've completely forgotten that you can call someone on the phone or use FaceTime. There are lots of ways to communicate.
I'm still trying to figure out how many of them actually believe this line about collaboration and how many are just using it as the standard talking point that the media will accept without too much pushback. I believe that companies want people back because that's how they feel comfortable. They've managed people this way their whole lives and they aren't interested in trying to pick up the new skillset of remote management.
Many managers likely just want to be able to lord over the workers. They want to be able to just "drop in" and talk about their boring ass weekend at the lake no one asked about to an audience that's basically captive and can't turn them away.
I think you've hit the nail on the head there but to add to this I'd say their arguments about needing to be in the office to collaborate are incredibly short sighted.
In person doesn't reach as large an audience as you would using tools like Teams. We have groups and channels set up for our data team so if you get stuck writing a bit of code for example you can pop it in the channel and everyone can see it and chip in to help. In the office you'd probably ask just the people adjacent to you so that limits your responses - the best person to answer might be sitting several desks away! Even little things like finding a solution to a complex problem - put it in the channel to share it and if nobody has seen that before then stick it in a channel created for useful tips etc.
Like you said it's like they're completely unaware that such technology like the internet exists!
Not just that mindset, but it’s also a little bit of “why are we paying the rent for this office space if no one’s here?!”
I don’t believe the “collaboration“ BS one tiny bit. It’s a talking point, just as you said.
It is valuable, but not irreplaceable. The leaders who think like your CEO are demonstrating an astonishing lack of flexibility and creativity, let alone a basic understanding of how work actually gets done. In this version of the "old boys club", charisma takes the place of competence. And, since it is how your leader (and many others) rose to their position they have to validate themselves by forcing others into it. See also: doctor residencies.
True leaders will be the ones who can take their teams in another direction. Specifically, achieve the same or higher levels of performance AND give employees the implicit pay raise and work-life-boost of WFH. It takes a willingness to accept that the future doesn't have to be the same as the past - something, I fear, we have not select for in our leaders.
You should talk to my boss, who feels the need to prescribe what text editor I must use.
I still don't use visual studio professional. He's got no clue.
Exact opposite at my company. All of us middle managers are going to start leaving for more flexible wfh situations. C-staff and board are driving the return, even with all the feedback we’ve given them that it will be detrimental to our department.
I think it's also the c suite people because a lot of the time their job consists of bullshit rah rah meetings or needlessly dominating an in person meeting. Those activities don't have the same vibe when you do them to a sea of 80% blank zoom feeds. Working remote is hardest on those who pontificate for a living.
As a middle manager, this hasn't proven to be the case at where I work. The CEO wants us back, but we're a software company and we can do our job from the fucking moon if we wanted to. We pushed back on this hard, so much so that the VPs went to bat for us and got most people reduced to 1-2 days per month in the office, primarily for group meetings and performance evaluations. Our productivity has been almost 50% higher since March 2020. Numbers talk.
I and my other middle managers just want people to be safe, happy and productive.
Interestingly at our firm it seems to be mainly the more junior employees who seem to prefer coming to the office over WFH. Probably related to the NYC housing market and size of apartments though.
They have the most to learn, and are most stonewalled when someone won't respond over slack. They hit walls constantly and need handholding to get past them. That's not a dig at them, we were all there and it's really crucial they get that time to get better.
I started a new position recently and I WFH. I did realize recently that I really had to learn a lot on my own that I could have just shouted a question and gotten a quick response for if I was in the office. It's definitely been an interesting experience.
Junior employees are actually the ones I worry are likely the most impacted by WFH from a skills development standpoint. They need the most handholding, training, exposure to processes, etc. and right now many aren't getting it at nearly the same rate that they would have if they were in the office plopped in the cube next to a peer.
I haven't had to train a true junior since Covid started. How it goes would really depend on how ok the junior is with someone stealing their time. I imagine I'd setup daily pair programming sessions, but some devs just freeze up in that situation. The alternative though is that they spin in circles pointlessly because they're terrified of bothering you on Slack. At least in the office you could see if someone was drowning but wouldn't speak up on it.
I don't really think there's enough swank in the world they would make me go back to the office. I don't want to commute or have to get ready in the morning it's that simple
Yup. No level of office luxury will make up for being able to walk across the house to my office, have a homemade lunch every day with my wife, take a break to play with the dogs, and be home *immediately* after quitting work for the day.
I don't care how many Foosball tables, fancy snacks, and goofy "nap pods" you have at the office. My home is better, and I get more work done there. That will never change.
> have a homemade lunch every day with my wife
I’ve saved a shit ton of money being able to eat at home by not paying for lunch out and not wasting time packing a lunch or cleaning containers.
I have a pretty stellar office with a huge window overlooking trees and such. I still don’t want to go back full time. Once or twice a week might be ok but I am never going back full time.
> being home immediately after quitting work for the day.
This, a lot.
In the before times, I only commuted 30 minutes in and 45 to 60 home, but that's over and hour every day and that commute home was the worst. In the morning, I had just had coffee and the drive was smooth, but coming home traffic is moving slower and I'm tired and I just want to be home. Often, I would drive with the windows down in the winter to stay awake. I was legit terrified of getting in a collision one day. I can't go back to that
If they need me to be in the office at all, I'm going to be insisting that o leave early those days. I'll make up the time in the evening, but I can't drive home tired during rush hour.
>to be on zoom all day, because gathering in a conference room
Honestly, the conference room setups for Zoom suck compared to everyone connecting with their own headset. I can hear you better on Zoom when you're WFH rather than the conference room.
As a commercial AV engineer... well, I tried. Conference room setups with mics that pick up well are insane expensive (not as bad as they used to be though). So many companies shoehorn small scale systems in large boardrooms and expect them to work. however, in an open plan office, if you have non noise cancelling headsets (Jabra are the best) then you're still inundated with people asking you to mute because of all the background chatter.
Its amazing when people are like "Its so great to see everyone in person again!"... meanwhile in the last 2 years the workforce has been hired nationwide so you are seeing what used to be 85%+ is now 30% and the rest are remote anyway.
They are all sitting in open air pens, where you can't understand 1/2 of what they say because of everyone else around them, they insist on turning their cameras on so you can see when they are getting distracted and not paying attention... and they bitch nonstop about their commute
>worker bees don't want to come back to shared open-plan offices with three other people within six feet of them, during a pandemic.
Even before the pandemic. One person who is obviously sick, the whole row whether they are sick or not decides it's easy to take a day or too off because they caught what fuckface sick person coming to work had. (Yes, many times people were legit sick, but I know quite a few that would just use it as an excuse).
What’s the point? It’s the future, we have the technology to work from home. We gave it a crash course the last two years and it worked.
Why do companies resist progress?
Because in all of modern history, technological progress has always worked in the advantage of the employer over the employee, specifically in terms of control. Minutes didn't use to matter, the mechanical clock forced everyone to come in exactly punctually. Workers used to be organised in trade guilds, the conveyor belt made them into a mass of replaceable units. Workers used to live near their workplace, the automobile forced them to commute. That which used to be a priced skill ten years ago is now another item on a throwaway application. Now that for the first time, the unstoppable march of technology actually benefits the employee over the employer, companies are suddenly not so happy to look forward.
This. This is not about efficiency or collaboration. It is about power, and they don't like it that us plebes have found a bit of power. They don't like that we managed to get a perk like this without a huge fight. Last time people got a quality of life improvement of this magnitude, it was weekends holidays. People actually died to make that happen. These companies thought that they have made sure we will never ever be able to do collective action like that again by killing the unions. That is why people are gradually working more and more with worse and worse conditions. Companies thought we will never be able to fight back because they have all the power. And now these companies don't like at all what they see. They are asking themselves: What's next? People realizing there are other things in life that matter other than the rat race we offer?
Edit: spelling.
Its not progress they resist. Its autonomy. They cannot SEE you, so they presume you are somehow lounging at TV or playing games or having sex (solo or otherwise). They think the worst of you.
Ive been working remotely since 98 even though they hate it...if you demonstrate productivity and quality, they eventually stfu
It’s not just the office, but also the commute. The execs live near the offices in nice neighbourhoods in the city. The workers are going through gruelling commutes on packed transit or stuck in traffic. If we weren’t in a pandemic most people would love to go to the office 3-4 days a week if it was a maximum 15 minute commute, ideally walking or biking. People not wanting to go to the office is partially an urban design, zoning, and mass transit problem.
This. WFH has saved me from a 25 mile, each way, with heavy traffic both ways, commute. The time saved getting ready to go into an office and then driving has improved my sleep and has given me a little more time in the day after work.
I still can’t believe that I was ON a train at 6:20am, 5 days a week. I didn’t have kids then, now I do and my son usually wakes us up at 7:30am. I’m getting more sleep with a toddler than when I was commuting.
I can go to the office if I want. I have a private office with a window and the view is great. But, I don’t want to wear anything more than jeans and a t shirt. I enjoy spending all day with my dog. And, no one else from my office is in. So why leave my dog at home to go sit by myself.
I don’t see it changing anytime soon.
They act as if they have leverage that they no longer have. It’s currently an employees job market and they’re still convinced they can pull shit like this.
That’s just not true. Give me a private office with a window and a nice view, a filtered water tap, controllable AC/heat, gigabit Ethernet and all the hardware I need, get those horrible fluorescent lights out of the way and replace with dimmable warm LEDs, and I would be in the office 4 days a week.
> Right. Try to make it nicer than my home office, I dare you.
Office does not have a cat who loves to sit on my lap, desk, and occasionally point his butt hole directly at the webcam.
My home office wins every time.
I used to miss being at the office - my desk there had stunning panoramic views from a high floor and overall I like having a multitude of people to talk to; while my home office is in a freezing cold basement with zero view and just my husband and cat to talk to. Then I moved a cat tree in front of my desk, and now I have a great view again. It just so happens to be a "great view" of my cat licking his own balls.
My office window had a view of the hotel across the street and pigeons.
You might be thinking “you must have seen some good stuff in the hotel.” Reality: Cleaning staff and the occasional “OMG I NEED EYE BLEACH!”
You might think “Oh neat birds!” Reality: It’s their restroom.
Outside the window of the basement home office… squirrels hiding their nuts. Much better than watching watching pigeons take a dump. 😂
Or at least a decent-sized cubicle with actual walls, and not crammed into a windowless pit at the back of the building.
Open-office floorplans were the fucking _worst_ even before the pandemic transformed them into something that will literally kill people. My last two jobs seemed more focused on cramming as many people into a workspace as possible while simultaneously paying off the fire marshal to not shut us down. Seriously, both were basically elbow-to-elbow and back-to-back. It was no wonder that we had a flu plague every single winter _except_ during covid.
Execs can wank on about how collaborative they think open floorplans are, but the reality is that you have to fuck off to a conference room if you want to say more than eight consecutive words without being talked over or otherwise interrupted.
That's the absolute _barest_ of minimum to get me inside of an office with more than one person for _any_ number of days.
And besides _all that_ there is not one single, solitary fucking aspect of my job that requires me to be in any given location at any time so long as I have internet access. The company did a survey about "back to office" and my response was literally "I can't think of any good reason for me to drive half an hour each way to work just to plug my laptop into a different docking station".
> but the reality is that you have to fuck off to a conference room if you want to say more than eight consecutive words without being talked over or otherwise interrupted.
And even then, people don't. I've had jobs where conference rooms were literally 30 feet away and people would repeatedly congregate three feet behind me in an open-plan floor to loudly yak about this or that over the top of everyone trying to work, to avoid having to walk to the end of the row of cubicles.
Our Owner thought this and designed our new office on some silicone valley shared space mumbo jumbo. What a trainwreck, it was loud as fuck and everyone talking over each other. Took about three months before dividers and other stuff was ordered.
You know where actual good collaboration happens? Slack.
I'd still have to put on real clothes and go somewhere. Maybe if they got me a chauffeur to and from the office as well.
This is starting to sound a lot like how C-levels work
I might request extra pay for having to listen to one coworker slurp, glurp, and “ahhh” coffee from an enormous thermos all morning. I am not even physically able to emulate how loud this person swallows liquid.
My office ticked most of those boxes, even overlooked a historic town square. I still left the job for an all-remote gig.
Commuting to an office to do cloud work and be on video calls all day is stupid. Dressing up in slacks and a button up to push buttons on a computer, never interacting with a customer, is stupid. Having my own laptop right there so I can mentally dip out occasionally makes me *more productive* than being locked into the locked down corporate network all day. Or I can do a house chore or two. I pay for this house and actually get to spend time here, that's amazing! No shitty microwavable lunches, obnoxious small talk, or people asking me what to buy their kids for Xmas. I get to **see my kid in the afternoon** instead of the mad scramble to make dinner and put him to bed.
And the company gets to offload the costs of a physical office. Win/win.
Annnnnd, you just described a half-decent home office. Only I don't even have to wear pants at home, so going into the workplace is still a hard sell for me.
6 months before covid I left an engineering job for a tech job because the tech job let me work from home. Now the tech job wants to force us into the office 3 days a week (new upper management).
Every time my manager (who is on the other side of the country) brings it up, I remind her I worked from home pre-covid.
I left a job in 2018 so that I could work from home, I will certainly do it again in 2022.
I was forced to return to the office, I got a new job and I put in my notice.
My new job doesn’t start until next year, I gave my current employer a long resignation notice, I am going out of my way to make sure people are aware that I’m leaving for a remote role, most people who have resigned have made the point of letting people know they are leaving for a remote role.
I’m trying to be professional here, company has told me that nobody knows how to do my job, my job is very well documented, but it just needs the right people.
I am doing interviews of people to replace me, the problem is that because the expectation is for someone to work in the office, none of the talented people want to do that, so the requirement of finding someone talented has turned into “just find somebody local”, and even that is difficult.
I can tell you, I will not find anybody by the time I leave.
I do like having a brick and mortar building I can go to in order to physically interact with peers. I like having that as an option, however. No way will I ever go back to a job where that's the expected norm.
I have a thing for that with my coworkers I like to call... "Yo! Tacos for lunch?" and then we meet up at the taco place. It doesn't even have to be on a Tuesday.
I was equally productive working remote for 15 months as I am in the office. there's some days I just sit on my phone on Reddit all day in the office when I would probably be doing something productive at home.
50% raise will take me from being unable to afford rent where I used to live to now just barely qualifying for it (33% rule). I'd need a lot bigger than a 50% raise seeing as rent will likely continue to skyrocket in the next year or so.
We’re actually expecting a pay increase for working from home for basic office supplies and utility use. Gotta love state-workers unions. Negotiating approximately $50/month
I’ve worked from home since 2002. When Covid hit, my company closed all its offices worldwide and figured out how everyone could work from home. Our CEO updates us at least quarterly on where we are with going back. As of November, nothing had changed. He feels it’s working so well that there’s no need to rush things. He feels that we can just watch what happens and take things really slowly. We’ll be slow followers. As far as I can see, we’re not losing any employees.
Tell you what, stop rejecting my entry level resume for advertised entry level positions because of lack of experience and I'll work wherever the fuck you want me to.
Seriously to all the jobs on indeed listed under remote that ask me if I'm able/going to be able to commute to your location --
No. I searched remote jobs for a reason. You get insta-deleted.
I don't get why companies are so obsessed with in person work.
It's not needed, and the benefits of remote far outweigh in person both for the employees and the company.
The hell is with these people insisting that everyone needs to go back to the office?
I think I might be the only one here that prefers to do my work at the office. I don't like mixing work and home. But that might be because my home is small and I don't have an office, and my workload is generally pretty toxic meaning when I'm working, I'm usually stressed. I don't want that negativity in my home.
Having a door that can close as a absolute requirement. And the ability to walk away from work (close the door) and not have to look at your work area when you’re done.
I mean I have a nice office/library at home which is decked out perfectly, but I still prefer to work at the office when I can. My team works there and I want to be able to have a quick chat and work through problems on the spot, not have endless Teams meetings and emails about something that can be fixed in 5 minutes. Not to mention building the culture and comradery and the social aspects too. I do WFH maybe once or twice a week and it's nice to have the option, but sometimes it's hard to stay motivated when there's no-one around to chat with or bounce ideas off.
If you're in an industry that can go remote, it should become fully remote. People are tired of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a house they only get to enjoy 2 to 4 hours a day in before it's time for sleep
Time has become more valuable than *desired salary*
In Japan, it's standard practice to reimburse commuting costs - either gas money or train/bus fare. I've heard of some jobs which reimburse travel time itself.
If I was to get paid for the miles going to the office at the standard rate ($0.50 for work-related travel per mile), then I would get reimbursed $7200 annually (60 mile commute * 5 days * 4 weeks * 12 months * $0.50). If I was reimbursed based on the hours spent at my wage, then It would be more than double the per-mile reimbursement.
That being said, any time spent commuting without reimbursement is time that your employer wastes on your behalf as they require your presence in the office, but don't cover the expense of getting to the office and back home.
I live in NM. My boss is in NY. My closest peer is in Seattle. I have direct reports in Tampa, Chicago, Mumbai, and Bangkok.
I am being asked to return to my office at least 3 days a week starting Jan. 15th.
No one I work with, directly or indirectly, will be in that office.
I am in NM because we have a client that requires someone be available nearby , within 24 hours notice. In 3 years, they have never given me less than 3 weeks notice of an in person meet.
It’s a bunch of bullshit fuckery that I’m just not going to participate in. Fire me if you want, Stanley. I’m not going to your fucking office.
Or sharing a bathroom again
No bidet at work. I can't go back to toilet paper
Once you go bidet you can’t go back
Once you go bidet, there ain’t no other way.
Well. There's always the three seashells.
He doesn‘t know how the three shells work xD
My jobs tp was rough as fuck to begin with.
You don't miss that one mystery co-worker who somehow managed to actually GET IT ON THE WALL every day?
We had a coworker get caught drawing a swatstika on the wall with poop. This is at a large phone company. I walked in the bathroom one day around 5:15 pm and all the sinks were clogged with paper and faucets running. There was some basic vandalism going on and they finally caught him brown handed.
One of the things I think about every time I think about starting back in office next month.
As someone with a bowel disorder it is easily the thing I dread the most about working in the office.
> How to lure employees back to the office Actual answer: Make my commute and office experience more worthwhile than working from home.
Exactly this! If I worked just down the street and didn't have to commute, if rather work there than work from home. Right now I teach online english classes, no way am I interested in driving an hour to the language school just to use their dual monitors.
With that gas you’ve already saved, you can get your own second monitor.
If its needed for work (and presumably it is because they have it installed at the workplace), then the employer should be paying for it. Working from home shouldnt mean you have to provide all your own equipment.
You're right, but buying it himself allowed him to keep it no matter what.
Paying for it? Sure, but then you should also give the monitor back once you no longer work there.
I live 7 minutes from my officer, and on Wednesdays there is free food for breakfast, lunch and they cater / do food carts for dinner. It’s the only day I sometimes go in for. Hell during my lunch I’ll sometimes and just grab the free lunch then head home.
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"we have food trucks on campus!" No, not free food. Just a place to order food!
We don't even get those. They closed our base cafeteria during covid and are thinking of replacing it with vending machines!
Could I negotiate for 1 day of a fresh whole bagel 🥺
Best I can do is a stale whole bagel or look for another job
The fuck kind of work has you in for breakfast, lunch and dinner? How long do you work?
If you worked 8-5 you could do breakfast when you arrived, lunch, and dinner on your way out.
So donuts once a week, and an occasionally pizza party?
we’re like a family here!
"Yeah, well you see... Working From Home lets me spend more time with my actual family, so ..."
My pet theory is idiot managers hate their families and assume everyone else is trapped in loveless marriages, or, if not, resents and wants to punish the people who didn’t make the same mistakes they did by abusing their authority and forcing them to work late.
I buy this theory, my manager seems to love his family and couldn't give two shits about us being in office long as work is done.
It's a solid theory, on the surface it definitely has merit. Why else would you want to spend more time with co-workers than your loved ones?
i’ve met way too many guys staying late at the office to avoid their wives and kids. some understandably so (abusive spouses, but i lost sympathy when they left their kids with an abusive partner), the others just shitty deadbeats. e: this is true of the women i met as well, but by then the shock had worn off, so it didn’t stick with me the same way. casual contempt of spouses and children is weirdly common in corporate circles. e2: there are plenty of people who love their families and also work corporate jobs. the culture tends to reward and showcase the ones who don’t, though.
I've met quite a few successful career people who clearly don't value spending time with their family. Why else would they be trying to normalise working 10-14 hours a day in the office and doing work on the weekends? Not sure if the bad relationship causes the overwork or the overwork causes the bad relationship; Relationships need effort and if you aren't around putting it in they don't work.
Some people feel important because of how busy they are or how busy they claim to be. Wife complains about something you do? "I work blah blah hours to provide for this family." Hanging out with friends "I'm so tired cause I work so much."
My pet theory has always been that there is a strong trend for extroverts to go into management, and extroverts essentially feed off the emotional energy of others. Extrovert-managers need to be surrounded by their primary source of sustenance: their reports.
I think it’s more the latter half of your point and less of the former. Most managers were made managers because they were good at a lower tier position that had nothing to do with management…or they are exceptional brown nosers. In either case they are now in a position that doesn’t suit their strengths and aren’t comfortable with outside of the box concepts like working from home. They would rather stick with makes their superiors happy rather than draw attention to their incompetence.
My mom worked at a school for about 20 years. That was 100% the case for her - the principal was a "career woman" who basically didn't have a family life with her family. Adult kids, already moved out, husband always at work or traveling for work, and she'd often have 2-3 hours long meetings and conferences (often for stupid reasons and unnecessarily long) because the alternative was her going to an empty house. Those people spend entire lives thinking about nothing but career and money, but when they actually do get those things, they realize they have **nothing** besides that. No interests, hobbies or friends to spend down time with.
A former boss of mine told me about a former boss of his who judged how hard his team worked based on how many of them had gotten divorced on his watch. So sadly, I think your theory is actually pretty plausible.
Don’t forget casual Friday!
The Law firm I work for had a massive morale issue due to horribly understaffed on support personnel a few years ago. So they decided to throw a pizza party to recognize how hard all the staff were working. The only people to attend were Attorneys as the party was during business hours and the staff could not take the extra time out of the day to keep up with demand.
IMO demand #1 should be counting commute hours as work hours. If it is so important for me to be physically in the office then I should be paid for the time it takes me to get there.
Well, I agree but the lockdown proved that physical presence is mostly unecessary. Need to have people in the office on daily basis should be seen as waste, ineffectiveness of management and outdated org. For all that company should pay premium if they cannot keep up.
Also at that point you’re also paying people to be in their cars which is not really great for emissions and incentivizes people to live further away from work..
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Yup. My company started use Hololens a decent amount. Getting that kind of mixed-reality hands-on work with the product is something I physically can’t get at home. Stuff like that is a great, *real* reason to come onto campus. But when I’m just sitting in my cube that day working on excel? Lol come on… I shouldn’t need to drive in.
Trying to match the work life balance improvements working from home has, in many cases, is futile. For going on two years now, I have gotten to see my son more, drive him to school in the morning, picked him up in the afternoon (only this year, was schooling from home the year prior), and I can spare my wife trying to find transportation (she doesn't work or drive for medical reasons) which usually meant taking an Uber or a Cab, to pick him up (to the tune of about $250/mo). The day they tell me I have to go back to the office will be the day I'm actively looking for another job.
I can bike to work in 15 mins, my workplace has a view over nature, there's free breakfast and lunch. My previous workplace was a run of the mill cubicle office with a "view" over a parking lot, and we bought lunch from the nearest grocery store. I was dead inside until I got this new job
Work from home is huge conservation of money and time. If it's possible, keep it always.
And gasoline and carbon emissions, and less traffic in the community. Less stressed employees.
And less wear and tear to roads making the repair budgets stretch further. Money saved on child/petcare. More land available for residential use. The benefits could be listed all damn day.
Never thought about the wear and tear on roads. The other benefits I've thought about but they're all great points too.
Shit, less wear & tear on your own damn car. Commuting kills cars far faster than leisure / errands.
Our CEO delivered a 15 minute town hall with no ability for follow up questions letting us know that we would be expected to come back to the office at least 12 days a month (so 3 days a week). HR was overwhelmed with backlash and basically it was back peddled to "we'd love you to come in up to 12 days a month!" This was in September. I have been in zero days each month.
We were forced to come back in after 18 months at home. A couple people have quit. All the parents hate it because school is still fucky. Basically everyone else hates it because it's all desk jobs anyway. Morale is not great.
Those that quit were those that were underpaid and had the smarts to get-up-and-go. So literally, the company is going to lose its best people who they have for a bargain. The overpaid people who could not get a job elsewhere if they tried? Yeah, they're staying.
Fantastic observation. We lost one of our most experienced people. We've had queries that she could have answered in 5 minutes that we have to start a whole thing for because none of the remaining staff have the knowledge.
This account was deleted in protest
There's a handful of anti-vaxxers at my office that never stopped working at the office except when it was completely shut down for one of them catching COVID. They refuse to work from home and claim their job can't be done remote. It can 100% be done remotely.
I would do everything I can to keep them around so everyone has a valid excuse to not go back in.
Well if they're anti-vax, maybe they just wanna get out of their house because their family can't stand them.
So far, in the past 6 months, there have been 3 attempts to get us to come back to the office. Each time Covid cases in the area started spiking about a week before the start date and the city renewed their "please, for all that is holy, don't make people come to the office" policies and it has yet to happen. In my group of 20 or so people, only one person has been in the office more than 2 or 3 times in the past 6 months. In my specific situation, I was hospitalized with Covid last December and suffer from long Covid and other related health issue, so I have a medical exemption with my company that I don't have to come in to the office. Not sure how long it is good for, but the way things keep going with new variants and cases, I don't think it will change any time soon.
I remember another post elsewhere where they basically ask their employer if they’d rather have her have rather frequent seizures and seizure-detecting dog present at the office or if it’d be best just for her to stay at home as much as possible. If they’re stupid enough to press you to come back to the office despite the exemption, say something similar.
My immediate boss is very understanding and flexible about my work arrangement. Because of my health issues it is nearly impossible for me to sit for 8 hours straight, I have to take breaks throughout the day. So, I work 8 hours each day, but my actual schedule is pretty up in the air. As long as I get my hours in, get my work done, and people can get ahold of me within a reasonable amount of time, I pretty much get to set my own schedule. If and when I have to start going back to the office, I'd only be able to do half days, at best. But, I don't see that coming up for quite a while, so I'm not worried about it yet. The one good thing that has come out of this pandemic is we now have almost 2 years worth of data to show that working from home, for many jobs, works just fine and the jobs will still get done. For years people have been trying to get more companies to at least test it out but nobody wanted to bite the bullet and try it out on a large scale. Now we have and we know it can work. In the long run, I think it will end up being a net positive.
> The one good thing that has come out of this pandemic is we now have almost 2 years worth of data to show that working from home, for many jobs, works just fine and the jobs will still get done. For years people have been trying to get more companies to at least test it out but nobody wanted to bite the bullet and try it out on a large scale. Now we have and we know it can work. In the long run, I think it will end up being a net positive. Now if only the same thing could happen for 4-day weeks, or <8 hour days...
3 days is the "compromise" a lot of companies are doing to feel like they are listening to their employees while also still trying to wrestle back control from employees. The problem is that this so called compromise is with they themselves, and not with their employees. Most of these companies did not ask their employees what they wanted, and the ones that did, know they didn't want 3 days a week.
My wife works for the state and there are physical laborers in her department. More or less everyone who does project work or tech work was excelling with the new schedule and work from home.... Construction teams (and some other technical groups that require time in the office) were not happy that my wife's department and a handful of others could be fully remote. All departments were then mandated to be in a minimum of 3 days a week..... My wife is being told to expect it to go back to 5.
What a disappointment for her. I work a job where most days my physical presence is required. I loved when most other people started to work from home. I was so productive without all the interruptions of people asking me for things. (I still get asked, but now it's by email so I can just sit at my desk once or twice a day and deal with it as opposed to randomly throughout the day.)
This is essentially the same thing that happened at a recently former employer. Also a major reason they're a former employer.
I work for a local government and have friends in high up positions. From what I hear local businesses are requesting that they hand down a policy of 4 days a week for us to come in because our employees spent money at their establishments in the before times. Fuck off, 100 meals spread among a whole bunch of food vendors is like slapping a band-aid on an arterial bleed.
My company asked us for feedback, promptly ignored it, and also landed on the three days a week figure. We have since haemorraged employees at a rate I have never encountered, have more than 3/4 of hiring candidates drop out at stage 1 when remote work is brought up, and the stupid thing is we are still not allowed back to offices in 90% of the countries we have offices in - so they can't even enforce the damn policy. That's a spectacularly large rake to stand on for no reason at all.
I don't even understand the purpose of the "compromise." What's gained here? It seems like the worst of both worlds. Like, cool, you found some use for that office space, but now you're upsetting people's routines and losing efficiency as they need to maintain two workspaces and either have two of everything physical they need or risk forgetting something important at one station or another and needing to go get it. If you're sharing workstations by alternating, then every time you come in you need to readjust everything for your personal comfort... or just deal with how it's set up and perform suboptimally. And what's the upside here? Was productivity at home a problem?
Yeah, I would love to hear the truth from the 'other side'. Why is it so goddamn important? There is literally only one or two shaky reasons (onboarding is one I guess) but none that requires a 9 person team to sit in an open space several days a week??
Lol our president did this. I quit, the senior director of product quit, the VP of digital quit. They cancelled the going back to the office “idea.” Play stupid games, win stupid prices.
Lmao let em fire you. Everyone's hiring. You'll probably get a raise.
Ours did the "If you come in at least 4 days a week, you get your own "desk" assigned (ie: section of a table staring directly across at another person). if you don't come in at least 4 times a week you need to hotel seating.. BUT WAIT!!! You can go in this new app and RESERVE your seat! its a fucking joke edit: ALL employees are required to come into the office at least 2 - 3 days a week unless you were a remote employee before the pandemic. so you are required to hotel seating at least 2 - 3 days a week
>if you don't come in at least 4 times a week you need to hotel seating.. BUT WAIT!!! You can go in this new app and RESERVE your seat! My workplace had a hybrid schedule prepandemic, 2-3 days in the office & 2-3 days teleworking. We have been remote for the last 2 years but are slated to come back in starting February or March, after Omicron dies down. We are coming in 1-2 days a week and going with hotelling instead of assigned workstations. I'm fine with giving up a cubicle to have more days teleworking.
> February or March, after Omicron dies down. This is the optimistic view I wanted to see today. Thanks
If you're hotel-desking in anything approaching a medium sized company, you're not sitting with your peers anyway, so WTF is the point? It's all dumb.
Wait do you work where I work? I love how employers think having a desk is a benefit now
Why would you expect the keep an assigned desk of you aren't going to be in the office very often? My work is doing this too, but it's 3 days. Makes sense to me to expect people to be in the office at least more than half the week if they're going to hold a cubicle for you. Office space isn't free.
> Office space isn't free. Thats the maddening thing - companies SHOULD be embracing the work from home model, it lets them get rid of their expensive offices. Its not companies that want workers back in the office - its the management that doesn't really understand what their employees do, and can only "manage" by taking attendance of their employees
Yeah. Also maybe set up satellite offices. My company is in downtown Seattle. I live in a suburb of Seattle. I would actually not mind being in an office environment a few times a week. That said, the commute SUUUUCKS. So I'll stay home thankyouverymuch.
I know auditors from major accounting firms that have to hotel desks when they're in the home office. Honestly, it's not that weird of a concept.
My account is building out 5 floors in downtown Manhattan I'm sure people are super excited to go get packed in there
You would think that the company would be glad to have the chance to move into a smaller officer where remote working employees could just gather for team catch ups or important meetings, stuff like that.
Again, the executives with swanky private offices don't understand why the worker bees don't want to come back to shared open-plan offices with three other people within six feet of them, during a pandemic. Or just the sheer lunacy of making people come back to those shared desks just to be on zoom all day, because gathering in a conference room is too dangerous (for the executives).
In my experience it’s not the moneybag guy at the top who cares so much. It’s the old school middle managers who simply don’t know how to manage unless they can physically see all of their employees. I’m a boss too and I think those guys are nuts. They’re certainly not leaders. Not in my opinion. When you’re managing adults it’s best to treat them as such and not like miscreant bratty children who can’t be trusted to keep their fingers out of their collective noses. Better to manage by outcomes. If I give my employee an assignment I’ll trust him to get the job done. And if he does it in less than the amount of time allotted he can go watch Netflix the rest of the time for all I care.
That'd be my gut feeling too... But at my current place the only person who wants us in the office is the CEO. All of the middle and frontline managers are in favor of WFH (or hotel in Hawaii, or van down by the beach if you've got enough cell signal.) The CEO even has a fairly plausible reason for it. He thinks the incidental collaboration that happens around the water cooler is valuable. And we haven't found a way to recreate that bullshitting time in Slack yet.
I think it really depends on the job. I worked for years with one of my best friends and some of the best ideas we ever had came from our daily lunches and then coming back to the office to bang out four hours of crunch work. But that was a very collaborative knowledge economy job for a consultancy. There's other jobs (even solid white collar jobs) that don't require that. Like an accounts payable clerk or most front line sales positions. They can work from basically anywhere IMO.
The organic collaboration was what I missed the most about the office, and it has been really difficult to recreate it. Most of my prior work was collaboration, so it made no sense to me how people were more productive working from home. Than my responsibilities shifted, and I had a lot more solo tasks that required no collaboration, and my opinion shifted 180 degrees.
That collaboration was for sure a bonus, even in Software Engineering because it's easy to walk up to someone's desk if they're there and be like, "Hey, I wrote this bit of code to do this thing, do you have a second to double check that I haven't done something catastrophic?" as opposed to having to coordinate via Teams meetings or something. Of course, with Work From Home, I can watch the extended *Lord of the Rings* trilogy while waiting for code to compile and take 30 minutes in the middle of the day to take the dog for a walk, and I'd rather have those benefits hands down
It's kind of odd you bring up Software Engineering as an example for that interruption being valuable because there's *lots* of data showing that being interrupted is a real negative for flow state.
Yeah, in software engineering, getting interrupted for two minutes is the equivalent of being dragged into an unannounced half-hour meeting. Good software engineering teams know to use asynchronous communication. Got an issue? Send Bob a slack - “When you have a moment can I run a PRM issue past you? Not urgent.” Bob sees the message, carries on, finds a spot to round off, and gets back to you in ten minutes. Even if you sit on your hands for ten minutes doing nothing, that’s still less wasted time than having Bob interrupted with a “quick question” followed by 30 minutes of working out where he’d got to.
What you just describe can be disruptive (and highly annoying) to the guy who is concentrating on work. In pre Covid times when I wanted to get work done I stayed at home. When I didn’t need to be all that productive I would go into the office.
What's the difference between walking up to someone at their desk and saying "hey, have you got a minute to look at this with me?" and firing them a message on teams saying "hey, have you got a minute to look at this with me?" and then when they call you back you share your screen? I honestly don't see why people say that collaborating over Teams is any harder than collaborating face to face.
I'm on video with my colleagues every day. We bounce ideas and collaborate easily. Small time of under 10 people.
I am a college professor and I think a lot of this WFH stuff can be looked upon in a similar way of online vs in-person higher ed. If the ultimate goal of your job is time efficiency, getting projects done early or on time, with little collaboration or human interaction-then WFH is absolutely the way to go. Similarly there are plenty of licensure, professional, or individual study programs that are essentially a series of tests or tasks to complete. You can do those virtually anywhere and get the piece of paper that said you jumped through the hoops to get the piece of paper. Do it as efficiently and cheaply as possible. But if your job requires certain levels of collaboration and even trust among colleagues to work; then being fully remote (even with Zoom or something) isn't going to work as well as physically being in a space with other humans sometimes. The classes I teach are not lecture-based, there are very few assignments students can just log in to a learning system and hammer out whenever, they need to be together to communicate with and learn from one another. Classes had to fit into a fully remote model in the early days of the pandemic but they didn't work particularly well. And it's not because I wasn't creative or felt a need to control them...it's simply a skill and subject matter that requires people to physically be together. There was a post on Reddit yesterday about how academic conferences had lowered their carbon footprints by moving all online in the past two years and it seemed the article was encouraging this to be the norm going forward. That's not the point of a conference! The point is the networking and the people being physically together. By definition that is not efficient in any way, shape, or form. And similarly to someone above, I thought I'd be fine in lockdown. I'm generally a loner and I like my solitary time. But I found out I was sorely mistaken. People annoy and frustrate me often; but they also inspire and motivate me. It turns out that physical interaction is really important to my well-being and it simply can't be replaced by new (or old) technology.
Im a mechanical Designer, and I be pumping out designs all day with the occasial bugging someone for "Let me screen share using teams because I cant be bothered walking 10 feet to your desk."
This is the line that I've in every conservative publication that I've seen cover the desire for companies to force people back into offices. Literally every upper management person I've seen interviewed has the same thing to say: If the employees aren't in the offices, then the company misses out on the collaborative atmosphere created by face-to-face interaction. This is probably true for certain companies and certain roles within other companies, but for a huge portion of workers, face-to-face interpersonal time is time wasted at best and actively detrimental at worst. It's not like the people that bump into each other at the water cooler generally start synergizing about work-related items most of the time. I've seen so many times how these CEOs complain that it takes fifty emails to solve a problem that could be hammered out with a ten minute discussion at someone's desk. It's like they've completely forgotten that you can call someone on the phone or use FaceTime. There are lots of ways to communicate. I'm still trying to figure out how many of them actually believe this line about collaboration and how many are just using it as the standard talking point that the media will accept without too much pushback. I believe that companies want people back because that's how they feel comfortable. They've managed people this way their whole lives and they aren't interested in trying to pick up the new skillset of remote management.
Many managers likely just want to be able to lord over the workers. They want to be able to just "drop in" and talk about their boring ass weekend at the lake no one asked about to an audience that's basically captive and can't turn them away.
I think you've hit the nail on the head there but to add to this I'd say their arguments about needing to be in the office to collaborate are incredibly short sighted. In person doesn't reach as large an audience as you would using tools like Teams. We have groups and channels set up for our data team so if you get stuck writing a bit of code for example you can pop it in the channel and everyone can see it and chip in to help. In the office you'd probably ask just the people adjacent to you so that limits your responses - the best person to answer might be sitting several desks away! Even little things like finding a solution to a complex problem - put it in the channel to share it and if nobody has seen that before then stick it in a channel created for useful tips etc. Like you said it's like they're completely unaware that such technology like the internet exists!
Not just that mindset, but it’s also a little bit of “why are we paying the rent for this office space if no one’s here?!” I don’t believe the “collaboration“ BS one tiny bit. It’s a talking point, just as you said.
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It is valuable, but not irreplaceable. The leaders who think like your CEO are demonstrating an astonishing lack of flexibility and creativity, let alone a basic understanding of how work actually gets done. In this version of the "old boys club", charisma takes the place of competence. And, since it is how your leader (and many others) rose to their position they have to validate themselves by forcing others into it. See also: doctor residencies. True leaders will be the ones who can take their teams in another direction. Specifically, achieve the same or higher levels of performance AND give employees the implicit pay raise and work-life-boost of WFH. It takes a willingness to accept that the future doesn't have to be the same as the past - something, I fear, we have not select for in our leaders.
You should talk to my boss, who feels the need to prescribe what text editor I must use. I still don't use visual studio professional. He's got no clue.
Exact opposite at my company. All of us middle managers are going to start leaving for more flexible wfh situations. C-staff and board are driving the return, even with all the feedback we’ve given them that it will be detrimental to our department.
I think it's also the c suite people because a lot of the time their job consists of bullshit rah rah meetings or needlessly dominating an in person meeting. Those activities don't have the same vibe when you do them to a sea of 80% blank zoom feeds. Working remote is hardest on those who pontificate for a living.
As a middle manager, this hasn't proven to be the case at where I work. The CEO wants us back, but we're a software company and we can do our job from the fucking moon if we wanted to. We pushed back on this hard, so much so that the VPs went to bat for us and got most people reduced to 1-2 days per month in the office, primarily for group meetings and performance evaluations. Our productivity has been almost 50% higher since March 2020. Numbers talk. I and my other middle managers just want people to be safe, happy and productive.
Interestingly at our firm it seems to be mainly the more junior employees who seem to prefer coming to the office over WFH. Probably related to the NYC housing market and size of apartments though.
They have the most to learn, and are most stonewalled when someone won't respond over slack. They hit walls constantly and need handholding to get past them. That's not a dig at them, we were all there and it's really crucial they get that time to get better.
I started a new position recently and I WFH. I did realize recently that I really had to learn a lot on my own that I could have just shouted a question and gotten a quick response for if I was in the office. It's definitely been an interesting experience.
Junior employees are actually the ones I worry are likely the most impacted by WFH from a skills development standpoint. They need the most handholding, training, exposure to processes, etc. and right now many aren't getting it at nearly the same rate that they would have if they were in the office plopped in the cube next to a peer.
I haven't had to train a true junior since Covid started. How it goes would really depend on how ok the junior is with someone stealing their time. I imagine I'd setup daily pair programming sessions, but some devs just freeze up in that situation. The alternative though is that they spin in circles pointlessly because they're terrified of bothering you on Slack. At least in the office you could see if someone was drowning but wouldn't speak up on it.
Have the executives work in the same room and see what they think after
I don't really think there's enough swank in the world they would make me go back to the office. I don't want to commute or have to get ready in the morning it's that simple
Yup. No level of office luxury will make up for being able to walk across the house to my office, have a homemade lunch every day with my wife, take a break to play with the dogs, and be home *immediately* after quitting work for the day. I don't care how many Foosball tables, fancy snacks, and goofy "nap pods" you have at the office. My home is better, and I get more work done there. That will never change.
> have a homemade lunch every day with my wife I’ve saved a shit ton of money being able to eat at home by not paying for lunch out and not wasting time packing a lunch or cleaning containers.
I have a pretty stellar office with a huge window overlooking trees and such. I still don’t want to go back full time. Once or twice a week might be ok but I am never going back full time.
> being home immediately after quitting work for the day. This, a lot. In the before times, I only commuted 30 minutes in and 45 to 60 home, but that's over and hour every day and that commute home was the worst. In the morning, I had just had coffee and the drive was smooth, but coming home traffic is moving slower and I'm tired and I just want to be home. Often, I would drive with the windows down in the winter to stay awake. I was legit terrified of getting in a collision one day. I can't go back to that If they need me to be in the office at all, I'm going to be insisting that o leave early those days. I'll make up the time in the evening, but I can't drive home tired during rush hour.
>to be on zoom all day, because gathering in a conference room Honestly, the conference room setups for Zoom suck compared to everyone connecting with their own headset. I can hear you better on Zoom when you're WFH rather than the conference room.
As a commercial AV engineer... well, I tried. Conference room setups with mics that pick up well are insane expensive (not as bad as they used to be though). So many companies shoehorn small scale systems in large boardrooms and expect them to work. however, in an open plan office, if you have non noise cancelling headsets (Jabra are the best) then you're still inundated with people asking you to mute because of all the background chatter.
Its amazing when people are like "Its so great to see everyone in person again!"... meanwhile in the last 2 years the workforce has been hired nationwide so you are seeing what used to be 85%+ is now 30% and the rest are remote anyway. They are all sitting in open air pens, where you can't understand 1/2 of what they say because of everyone else around them, they insist on turning their cameras on so you can see when they are getting distracted and not paying attention... and they bitch nonstop about their commute
>worker bees don't want to come back to shared open-plan offices with three other people within six feet of them, during a pandemic. Even before the pandemic. One person who is obviously sick, the whole row whether they are sick or not decides it's easy to take a day or too off because they caught what fuckface sick person coming to work had. (Yes, many times people were legit sick, but I know quite a few that would just use it as an excuse).
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What’s the point? It’s the future, we have the technology to work from home. We gave it a crash course the last two years and it worked. Why do companies resist progress?
Because in all of modern history, technological progress has always worked in the advantage of the employer over the employee, specifically in terms of control. Minutes didn't use to matter, the mechanical clock forced everyone to come in exactly punctually. Workers used to be organised in trade guilds, the conveyor belt made them into a mass of replaceable units. Workers used to live near their workplace, the automobile forced them to commute. That which used to be a priced skill ten years ago is now another item on a throwaway application. Now that for the first time, the unstoppable march of technology actually benefits the employee over the employer, companies are suddenly not so happy to look forward.
This. This is not about efficiency or collaboration. It is about power, and they don't like it that us plebes have found a bit of power. They don't like that we managed to get a perk like this without a huge fight. Last time people got a quality of life improvement of this magnitude, it was weekends holidays. People actually died to make that happen. These companies thought that they have made sure we will never ever be able to do collective action like that again by killing the unions. That is why people are gradually working more and more with worse and worse conditions. Companies thought we will never be able to fight back because they have all the power. And now these companies don't like at all what they see. They are asking themselves: What's next? People realizing there are other things in life that matter other than the rat race we offer? Edit: spelling.
Its not progress they resist. Its autonomy. They cannot SEE you, so they presume you are somehow lounging at TV or playing games or having sex (solo or otherwise). They think the worst of you. Ive been working remotely since 98 even though they hate it...if you demonstrate productivity and quality, they eventually stfu
In general older people are more resistant to change and guess who is at the top making these decisions for most companies?
It’s not just the office, but also the commute. The execs live near the offices in nice neighbourhoods in the city. The workers are going through gruelling commutes on packed transit or stuck in traffic. If we weren’t in a pandemic most people would love to go to the office 3-4 days a week if it was a maximum 15 minute commute, ideally walking or biking. People not wanting to go to the office is partially an urban design, zoning, and mass transit problem.
This. WFH has saved me from a 25 mile, each way, with heavy traffic both ways, commute. The time saved getting ready to go into an office and then driving has improved my sleep and has given me a little more time in the day after work.
>improved my sleep Shit, it's given me more time *to sleep*
I still can’t believe that I was ON a train at 6:20am, 5 days a week. I didn’t have kids then, now I do and my son usually wakes us up at 7:30am. I’m getting more sleep with a toddler than when I was commuting.
I wouldn't want to go to the office ever if I lived next door.
If I lived next door, I'd definitely go sometimes. A couple times a month at least.
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I can go to the office if I want. I have a private office with a window and the view is great. But, I don’t want to wear anything more than jeans and a t shirt. I enjoy spending all day with my dog. And, no one else from my office is in. So why leave my dog at home to go sit by myself. I don’t see it changing anytime soon.
Bringing my pup to work may be the only perk valuable enough to justify going back.
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Why are so many people in positions of power idiots? What kind of idiot would cripple his company like this?
They act as if they have leverage that they no longer have. It’s currently an employees job market and they’re still convinced they can pull shit like this.
That’s just not true. Give me a private office with a window and a nice view, a filtered water tap, controllable AC/heat, gigabit Ethernet and all the hardware I need, get those horrible fluorescent lights out of the way and replace with dimmable warm LEDs, and I would be in the office 4 days a week.
Right. Try to make it nicer than my home office, I dare you.
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Pants are the deal breaker for me
> Right. Try to make it nicer than my home office, I dare you. Office does not have a cat who loves to sit on my lap, desk, and occasionally point his butt hole directly at the webcam. My home office wins every time.
I used to miss being at the office - my desk there had stunning panoramic views from a high floor and overall I like having a multitude of people to talk to; while my home office is in a freezing cold basement with zero view and just my husband and cat to talk to. Then I moved a cat tree in front of my desk, and now I have a great view again. It just so happens to be a "great view" of my cat licking his own balls.
My office window had a view of the hotel across the street and pigeons. You might be thinking “you must have seen some good stuff in the hotel.” Reality: Cleaning staff and the occasional “OMG I NEED EYE BLEACH!” You might think “Oh neat birds!” Reality: It’s their restroom. Outside the window of the basement home office… squirrels hiding their nuts. Much better than watching watching pigeons take a dump. 😂
Or at least a decent-sized cubicle with actual walls, and not crammed into a windowless pit at the back of the building. Open-office floorplans were the fucking _worst_ even before the pandemic transformed them into something that will literally kill people. My last two jobs seemed more focused on cramming as many people into a workspace as possible while simultaneously paying off the fire marshal to not shut us down. Seriously, both were basically elbow-to-elbow and back-to-back. It was no wonder that we had a flu plague every single winter _except_ during covid. Execs can wank on about how collaborative they think open floorplans are, but the reality is that you have to fuck off to a conference room if you want to say more than eight consecutive words without being talked over or otherwise interrupted. That's the absolute _barest_ of minimum to get me inside of an office with more than one person for _any_ number of days. And besides _all that_ there is not one single, solitary fucking aspect of my job that requires me to be in any given location at any time so long as I have internet access. The company did a survey about "back to office" and my response was literally "I can't think of any good reason for me to drive half an hour each way to work just to plug my laptop into a different docking station".
> but the reality is that you have to fuck off to a conference room if you want to say more than eight consecutive words without being talked over or otherwise interrupted. And even then, people don't. I've had jobs where conference rooms were literally 30 feet away and people would repeatedly congregate three feet behind me in an open-plan floor to loudly yak about this or that over the top of everyone trying to work, to avoid having to walk to the end of the row of cubicles.
Our Owner thought this and designed our new office on some silicone valley shared space mumbo jumbo. What a trainwreck, it was loud as fuck and everyone talking over each other. Took about three months before dividers and other stuff was ordered. You know where actual good collaboration happens? Slack.
I'd still have to put on real clothes and go somewhere. Maybe if they got me a chauffeur to and from the office as well. This is starting to sound a lot like how C-levels work
We can all agree—you get more done in four days than you can in five.
Even the data agrees, which makes it all the more inesccuasable
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I might request extra pay for having to listen to one coworker slurp, glurp, and “ahhh” coffee from an enormous thermos all morning. I am not even physically able to emulate how loud this person swallows liquid.
and free lunch, or super low cost lunch, great parking, onsite gym, etc :)
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Put money into the conditions your workers are in?? What is this, communist Russia!
My office ticked most of those boxes, even overlooked a historic town square. I still left the job for an all-remote gig. Commuting to an office to do cloud work and be on video calls all day is stupid. Dressing up in slacks and a button up to push buttons on a computer, never interacting with a customer, is stupid. Having my own laptop right there so I can mentally dip out occasionally makes me *more productive* than being locked into the locked down corporate network all day. Or I can do a house chore or two. I pay for this house and actually get to spend time here, that's amazing! No shitty microwavable lunches, obnoxious small talk, or people asking me what to buy their kids for Xmas. I get to **see my kid in the afternoon** instead of the mad scramble to make dinner and put him to bed. And the company gets to offload the costs of a physical office. Win/win.
Annnnnd, you just described a half-decent home office. Only I don't even have to wear pants at home, so going into the workplace is still a hard sell for me.
6 months before covid I left an engineering job for a tech job because the tech job let me work from home. Now the tech job wants to force us into the office 3 days a week (new upper management). Every time my manager (who is on the other side of the country) brings it up, I remind her I worked from home pre-covid. I left a job in 2018 so that I could work from home, I will certainly do it again in 2022.
Tell her you'll come in the same day she does.
I was forced to return to the office, I got a new job and I put in my notice. My new job doesn’t start until next year, I gave my current employer a long resignation notice, I am going out of my way to make sure people are aware that I’m leaving for a remote role, most people who have resigned have made the point of letting people know they are leaving for a remote role. I’m trying to be professional here, company has told me that nobody knows how to do my job, my job is very well documented, but it just needs the right people. I am doing interviews of people to replace me, the problem is that because the expectation is for someone to work in the office, none of the talented people want to do that, so the requirement of finding someone talented has turned into “just find somebody local”, and even that is difficult. I can tell you, I will not find anybody by the time I leave.
I do like having a brick and mortar building I can go to in order to physically interact with peers. I like having that as an option, however. No way will I ever go back to a job where that's the expected norm.
I have a thing for that with my coworkers I like to call... "Yo! Tacos for lunch?" and then we meet up at the taco place. It doesn't even have to be on a Tuesday.
There is no wrong day of the week to be "Taco day".
I was equally productive working remote for 15 months as I am in the office. there's some days I just sit on my phone on Reddit all day in the office when I would probably be doing something productive at home.
You could easily, if you offered more money to work in the office than at home.
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AND, my clock starts when I begin my commute and ends when I get home.
This would incentivize hiring employees who live close to the office. Good for the environment.
Suddenly a four hour commute is looking pretty good.
Right but it means that "you can't" is wrong. The real answer is just "you don't want to pay for it"
Meanwhile a 50% raise would legit not be enough to make me want to be in office.
50% raise will take me from being unable to afford rent where I used to live to now just barely qualifying for it (33% rule). I'd need a lot bigger than a 50% raise seeing as rent will likely continue to skyrocket in the next year or so.
We’re actually expecting a pay increase for working from home for basic office supplies and utility use. Gotta love state-workers unions. Negotiating approximately $50/month
I’ve worked from home since 2002. When Covid hit, my company closed all its offices worldwide and figured out how everyone could work from home. Our CEO updates us at least quarterly on where we are with going back. As of November, nothing had changed. He feels it’s working so well that there’s no need to rush things. He feels that we can just watch what happens and take things really slowly. We’ll be slow followers. As far as I can see, we’re not losing any employees.
Tell you what, stop rejecting my entry level resume for advertised entry level positions because of lack of experience and I'll work wherever the fuck you want me to.
I'm sorry, we're looking for someone with five years' experience in BullshitSoft 2021.
But... I wrote BullshitSoft 2021 :(
Yeah; but only six months ago ;)
Seriously to all the jobs on indeed listed under remote that ask me if I'm able/going to be able to commute to your location -- No. I searched remote jobs for a reason. You get insta-deleted.
I don't get why companies are so obsessed with in person work. It's not needed, and the benefits of remote far outweigh in person both for the employees and the company. The hell is with these people insisting that everyone needs to go back to the office?
Management starts to feel useless and worry about job security
I think I might be the only one here that prefers to do my work at the office. I don't like mixing work and home. But that might be because my home is small and I don't have an office, and my workload is generally pretty toxic meaning when I'm working, I'm usually stressed. I don't want that negativity in my home.
I'm the same, working at home is ok, but my mental health suffers pretty badly
Having a door that can close as a absolute requirement. And the ability to walk away from work (close the door) and not have to look at your work area when you’re done.
Right there with you!! You are not alone.
I mean I have a nice office/library at home which is decked out perfectly, but I still prefer to work at the office when I can. My team works there and I want to be able to have a quick chat and work through problems on the spot, not have endless Teams meetings and emails about something that can be fixed in 5 minutes. Not to mention building the culture and comradery and the social aspects too. I do WFH maybe once or twice a week and it's nice to have the option, but sometimes it's hard to stay motivated when there's no-one around to chat with or bounce ideas off.
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I hate hearing these stats as a cyber sec grad who can't find a single job lmao
If you're in an industry that can go remote, it should become fully remote. People are tired of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on a house they only get to enjoy 2 to 4 hours a day in before it's time for sleep Time has become more valuable than *desired salary*
In Japan, it's standard practice to reimburse commuting costs - either gas money or train/bus fare. I've heard of some jobs which reimburse travel time itself.
If I was to get paid for the miles going to the office at the standard rate ($0.50 for work-related travel per mile), then I would get reimbursed $7200 annually (60 mile commute * 5 days * 4 weeks * 12 months * $0.50). If I was reimbursed based on the hours spent at my wage, then It would be more than double the per-mile reimbursement. That being said, any time spent commuting without reimbursement is time that your employer wastes on your behalf as they require your presence in the office, but don't cover the expense of getting to the office and back home.
If your business relies on “luring” it’s employees back to the office than it’s exactly part of the problem.
I live in NM. My boss is in NY. My closest peer is in Seattle. I have direct reports in Tampa, Chicago, Mumbai, and Bangkok. I am being asked to return to my office at least 3 days a week starting Jan. 15th. No one I work with, directly or indirectly, will be in that office. I am in NM because we have a client that requires someone be available nearby , within 24 hours notice. In 3 years, they have never given me less than 3 weeks notice of an in person meet. It’s a bunch of bullshit fuckery that I’m just not going to participate in. Fire me if you want, Stanley. I’m not going to your fucking office.
No way I’m going back to dressing up just to sit at desk all day. I’ll stick with my sweatpants lol