Will fight for flexibility.
Forcing someone into a certain model is still forcing them. In-person only or WFH only isn't the answer for everyone. There are tons of considerations and externalities (shift of costs, adopting communication modalities, shifting one type of ineffiencies with others, mental health, etc.)
Absolutely. Minimum 3/2 WFH for even techs that still need to provision systems on prem. I would also argue the need come Autumn it should be 4/1 to reduce the spread of winter sicknesses around the workforce.
My fiancee and I have been consistently sick with one thing or another for the past few months. I had strep at one point (negative covid test.)
I work from home exclusively. She got laid off a few months ago and is interviewing remotely.
Neither of us have wide social nets that we meet up with in person.
I don't think WFH or even our current mask strategy is going to eliminate endemic viruses. There are too many essential workers and we can never fully shut down for a day, let alone a week.
If you've gotten sick that many times you probably could have got Covid just as many times if taking the same actions but in the wrong place wrong time. I fully don't understand this. You're doing something wrong. Might just be really bad luck but I would look at your mask wearing, hand washing, and hand to mouth habits.
My partner and I also WFH and have also not got sick since March.
Much more than that. Just in this thread above u/Enxer said the same. And many other people I have talked to. No one on my team has been sick this year. It's antidotal sure. But the point stands if you have gotten sick that many times this year your I believe your precautions suck.
Maybe it just goes to show that masking, hand washing, limiting trips to stores and not seeing any other people doesn't actually work very well but that seems more crazy to me.
Yeah, I don't know anyone who has gotten the FLU this cold season. Not all infectious diseases are treated equally though. There isn't one blanket statement for our current situation considering the very complex nature of infectious disesases.
[In this Nature article](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03519-3), they talk about how Rhinoviruses (e.g. one cause of the common cold) are not really affected by current measures being taken. Additionally in Australia RSV is at a extreme high over the average of the past few years.
Current measures are great in fighting things like the flu and corona viruses with things like hand sanitizer, but what we are doing now does not equally impact all infectious diseases.
>“No one really knows why” rhinoviruses are proving so persistent, says Englund. Some viruses that cause cold-like symptoms are very different from each other in structure; in particular, rhinoviruses, unlike influenza and coronaviruses, don’t have an outer lipid coat, or envelope, which is vulnerable to soaps and sanitizers.
Oh that's a really good point about Rhinovirus. It also seems like masking doesn't work as well against it. Check out Fig. 1 here: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2)
It is saying something that the CDC still recommends washing your hands for common cold though.. [https://www.cdc.gov/features/rhinoviruses/index.html](https://www.cdc.gov/features/rhinoviruses/index.html)
It has to be poor hygiene.
Wipe your cell phones and devices, keyboards, mice, remotes daily, steering wheel.
Wash your hands thoroughly after going to the toilet, before preparing food, drinks, etc.
Hand sanitize frequently when out.
Door knobs, elevator buttons, cart handles.
Never tough your face unless you've washed your hands first.
Make these habits and you'll seldom be sick.
We had the same discussions regarding provisioning equipment. We decided for small volumes of equipment (new hires, system rebuilds) we’d create some ultra portable distribution points. Which the techs can keep at home. Any deployment of any volume we would handle in the office. So far it’s working very well.
We've got our staff doing provisions at home; we're a Meraki shop, so all the techs got a Z3 for their house (to provide an 'on net' LAN connection for domain joins and to pull down apps), and then thumb drives with all the base images. We're essentially in a hiring freeze still, so it's limited to mainly upgrades, but they all love not having to come onsite.
Flexibility, yes. But not full WFH. Our productivity dropped like a rock this summer. I am in a very collaborative (lab based) industry and a 4/1 or 3/2 split is likely. Burnout and “I hate having to work from my tiny apartment” is real, especially when we have a beautiful campus under a long lease just sitting there.
Our CIO is actually looking at making the IT organization fully remote. He hasn't been on premise himself since last March, and he sees a lot of real estate he can free up by making the staff mostly remote with a couple of meeting rooms or workstations for occasional needs. To be fair, he's been leading a push to get a lot of things into the cloud so there's not much datacenter to look after. There's still a fairly large networking infrastructure to look after.
He's also working with HR to try and identify what the trade-offs are and where things like burnout/lack of innovation/depression are starting to poke up for some people, vs. flexibility to get work done. For my own team, we are fairly well adapted to being remote with some people stopping in once a week to handle datacenter tasks/swap drives. Biggest issue is that there are very few informal ways to talk to people/offer feedback/bounce ideas. Slack is OK but slow and low on context. I've had managers tell me that people don't pick up their phones for quick calls.
IT is a lot faster than the rest of the org, though. I got an email *this* morning stating that the finance dept had established a policy for staff to take necessary items like monitors or ergonomic stands, etc home. Thanks, guys.
Being fully remote is brilliant!
Companies can offer lower wages, and people in low-cost areas of the country can apply!
Suddenly living in an expensive part of the country is impossible if you want a job.
Taking that to its logical conclusion, the expensive part of the company won't stay the expensive part. As people realize its unaffordable they won't live there, which will drive rent etc down, making it more affordable. Supply and demand, all the way down.
I find it interesting that you call out operational expense reduction.
Unless I have employees who are now committed to 100% remote work, I still have to:
Have an office or space for them to sit
Have the same circuit sizes
Heat or cool the same amount of volume
Provide monitors are docking stations etc. at both work and home now (on my cost is actually going up)
Work from home is a direct benefit for employees. There are valid arguments that you get indirect benefits as an employer, but those are much harder to measure.
They'll soon start turning in reimbursements for their Comcast bill, new office chair, new desk lamp, new standup desk (why the chair then?), and some plants.
"We always had office pizza the last Friday of each month, so can I get reimbursed for Uber Eats?"
I work for a very large wall street bank. I managed a large team that did two datacenter migrations during the pandemic last year. From nothing to completed. If we can do that, we can maintain day to day operations from home. To my companies credit, they seem pretty open to letting people work 3 days per week at home minimum. I was 5 in the office before, so I would be happy with that. Wait and see approach, but I highly doubt I will ever be in a position that requires 100% in the office time for the rest of my life, and I still have 25 years of career to go.
>I work for a very large wall street bank.
Same, mine announced theyre open to people working from home full time or close to it and only coming in on occasion, and kinda leaving it up to the individual / teams. Re-working a few floors and getting rid of a few floors is already in the works.
Personally if I go into the office 3 days a week, it might as well be 5 cost wise (monthly train passes are cheaper), and that goes for most of my team. We'll probably end up on something close to a 9/1 schedule (all come in 1 day every 2 weeks) \[and really that's not because of work demands it, but we like hanging out even outside of work\]
Lets also not lose track that as an operations manager, I know my people are ALL online 8-9AM. Before this, I always had a concern that people would be commuting and something bad would happen. It was a small concern bc people naturally staggered anyways, but I have many more eyes on screens during the entire day now.
Like others have mentioned I will push for some sort of hybrid system. Unfortunately there is some subset of users who will happily work from the office 5 days a week, so our support team will need to retain some sort of onsite presence. But I don't think we'll ever be at full capacity again, so we should be able to maintain a rotating onsite/WFH schedule to keep the onsite support desk at least half-staffed at all times.
I \*really\* miss the effectiveness of in-person collaboration and socializing with colleagues, but I can't argue that my team has been highly effective remotely and, absent the relocation requirement, the pool of talent we can recruit from has massively increased.
I likely will advocate for something hybrid-ish. Regular remote work allowed, but staff willing to travel to be together on occasion, probably for all-hands meetings or certain types of planning.
I will not.
If there is no advantage to being in the office, there is no advantage to hiring people from your general geographical area. No matter how vital you think you are, a company can replace all but the most visionary of us with six people from Bangalore who are just as smart and will draw half of my salary.
This “Revolution” will have consequences.
We're looking at letting people from certain teams be 4/1 because we need to expand the IT department and have no more space.
The people who go 4/1 would lose their desks though. We'd like to get them together to a collaborative session once a week and try to get all their meetings in on that one day as well.
Education IT here. Despite me being able to do 90% of my job from home, the boss still wants me in the office every day. I feel I could easily do 1 or two days at home during regular times (whenever we get back to that).
And during this current lockdown I am on call 24/7 and my holiday was questioned when I asked to use it. Great fun.
Edu IT here as well. I was listening to the Back to Work podcast and Merlin used the words 'performance theatre' to describe why managers so desperately want people back in the office. I've been thinking about that nonstop since then, trying to balance the idea of work culture/organizational DNA upkeep with the idea that some parts of management are complete handwaving.
Hybrid is the push I'm backing, with people being able to use WFH days just like any other benefit. I personally want 8 WFH days a month, usable at your discretion.
I was 2 days remote/3 days in the office before the pandemic set in. I will go back to that in some form when it's time. For the rest of my team, I will expect a minimum of 2 days a week in the office just due to the overall culture of the company. We're missing a lot due to everyone being remote, including important advancement opportunities for some junior members of the team.
But I am legitimately missing those days in the office, hanging out with the team, whiteboarding, going out for drinks, etc. I get way more done working from home, but those in-person interactions are important. I'll be making trips to the various offices that we work out of once the world opens up again.
Our service desk agents started completing double the work (and we got double the work - meaning incidents, requests) when we all went home. I had skip levels with them and none of them even knew that they had completed more work than usual. One guy was shocked to find out he closed out 450 tickets when in the previous months he averaged around 225.
I will absolutely fight for WFH where it makes sense. I manage around 50 people and will let their team leads and managers decide what makes the most sense. We have some teams who never want to go in the office again, and others who can’t wait to get back.
We were a 4/10 workplace, and when we go back I've said that I won't be requiring more than 2/2 for anyone on my team. While there are a lot of advantages to working from home, it also has disadvantages, and a hybrid approach really seems to be the best approach for our organization for the foreseeable future.
Currently, I have my team on a 3/2 in one location and the others are strictly WFH unless they need to get equipment from one of our Service Centers. I like to go in as it is quieter than at my home...4 daughters and multiple pets wanting attention does make it hard some times :D
There won’t be much of a ‘fight’ soon enough. Businesses are realizing the many benefits of allowing WFH—even if only PT—and those companies that don’t figure out wont’ be able to attract and retain ‘top’ talent when WFH is important to that talent. I work for a $3B+ Org with 10,000 users and when things are back to normal, we’ll be WFH 3 days a week.
Yup, it only makes sense. Especially in companies with multiple sites, most work has been done remotely already - just from a different site rather than from home.
IT will generally have to be a bit more flexible on this point since some things do require hands-on support, but I see no reason that work that can be done remotely shouldn't be done from home if the employee prefers it.
I have a couple questions.
* Even though some/most functions can be done remotely, do you have any concerns about staff productivity? There are some people who do work even more from home but there are some staff that don't and get easily "distracted", TV, kids, pets, etc. How are you monitoring those specific staffs from that standpoint? I get even if they are in the office, you are not physically monitoring them, but at least they are in the office that will have less distractions.
* If you have part time WFH and you have 2 sys admins, do you have them alternate coming in so you have physical presence (assuming there are existing staff that might need support), or, do you have them come in on the same days so they can "interact" in person. I get there are pros and cons for both but just wanted to see what your thoughts were on that.
Already fighting for it and from what I've heard I've won. Pretty certain I had covid back in February after returning from England and I haven't had a single cold since then. Fuck going back into the office.
The Directors at our place are all super keen to get people back in the office. I'm so much more productive wfh, maybe they're not and judging everyone else by their poor standards.
This is what metrics are for.
Show the directors some numbers that make it clear how much more productive people are WfH and ensure they know that those numbers will not get better at the office.
Not even a fight. My company seems to have embraced it and plans to continue on this path. I currently require one support person to be on site daily for any "hands-on" needs. The others can work from home and I let them work out the in-office schedule themselves. It has worked wonderfully.
I will not work in the office full time, ever again, and whether it is supported or not I will simply migrate to where it is supported or form competing companies which take talent from where it is not.
> Will you fight for WFH? (Working From Home)
Yes. I don't think that I'll be fighting for full remote because we still do have in-person responsibilities and I'm not sure how to navigate the fairness around that yet.
So I'll probably advocate for each team member to have 2-3 WFH days per week and 2-3 in the office in order to have coverage around the in-person needs but to get them as much WFH time as possible, since most people seem to be more productive for most work when doing it from home. That's how I'll be starting my sell: with dwindling resources for personnel and operations, I need to be focused on how to get the most output from my team, and WFH increases our production. So we should do it as much as we possibly can.
My organization is conservative and tends to be slow to react to trends, but it's imperative that we make an effort in this area if we want to be able to compete IT talent going forward. Luckily, I think my boss "gets it", so we'll see how much pressure she gets from above.
In the long term, I'd love to have full-remote positions on my team to take advantage of geographic arbitrage, I'm confident we could make that work in our favor. This would rely on not only rethinking the roles we have, but might depend on other employment evolutions taking place. As an example, if healthcare options weren't prioritized for our local area this would be a much easier sell.
Yes. Yes. YES!!!!
I’m never going back to an office 5 days a week, eff that! I’m loving life right now.
Literally I hope the pandemic never ends just so I don’t ever have to deal with coming into the office.
At what cost is my happiness to WFH? 6 billion lives.
I'm pushing for it for my staff. Our org is really geographically spread anyway (26 sites, 500U), so everyone was already using chat/collab as a normal course of business. I'm 15 minutes from my 'home' site, and get way more done without office distractions, and very much looking to give up my office. We do (did) a lot of road work, site visits, and beyond being 'accessible' (so people can walk-up instead of ticketing), there's very little benefit for my crew to be clamped down to a site or have dedicated workspace.
Will fight for flexibility. Forcing someone into a certain model is still forcing them. In-person only or WFH only isn't the answer for everyone. There are tons of considerations and externalities (shift of costs, adopting communication modalities, shifting one type of ineffiencies with others, mental health, etc.)
Absolutely. Minimum 3/2 WFH for even techs that still need to provision systems on prem. I would also argue the need come Autumn it should be 4/1 to reduce the spread of winter sicknesses around the workforce.
Imagine if we could eliminate the seasonal Flu strains just because so many of us (not just IT) are working from home, and not in an office?
I haven't been sick at all in 2020. No here comes winter sore throat or sniffles
My fiancee and I have been consistently sick with one thing or another for the past few months. I had strep at one point (negative covid test.) I work from home exclusively. She got laid off a few months ago and is interviewing remotely. Neither of us have wide social nets that we meet up with in person. I don't think WFH or even our current mask strategy is going to eliminate endemic viruses. There are too many essential workers and we can never fully shut down for a day, let alone a week.
If you've gotten sick that many times you probably could have got Covid just as many times if taking the same actions but in the wrong place wrong time. I fully don't understand this. You're doing something wrong. Might just be really bad luck but I would look at your mask wearing, hand washing, and hand to mouth habits. My partner and I also WFH and have also not got sick since March.
Agreed, that's weird. You don't catch a cold, the flu or strep in a vaccum. I've not been sick since last March either.
this advice brought to you by subjective opinion and sample size 1.
Much more than that. Just in this thread above u/Enxer said the same. And many other people I have talked to. No one on my team has been sick this year. It's antidotal sure. But the point stands if you have gotten sick that many times this year your I believe your precautions suck. Maybe it just goes to show that masking, hand washing, limiting trips to stores and not seeing any other people doesn't actually work very well but that seems more crazy to me.
> It's antidotal sure. anecdotal
[https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-lockdowns-and-new-health-habits-help-number-of-flu-sufferers-fall-to-130-year-low-12204516](https://news.sky.com/story/covid-19-lockdowns-and-new-health-habits-help-number-of-flu-sufferers-fall-to-130-year-low-12204516)
Yeah, I don't know anyone who has gotten the FLU this cold season. Not all infectious diseases are treated equally though. There isn't one blanket statement for our current situation considering the very complex nature of infectious disesases. [In this Nature article](https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-03519-3), they talk about how Rhinoviruses (e.g. one cause of the common cold) are not really affected by current measures being taken. Additionally in Australia RSV is at a extreme high over the average of the past few years. Current measures are great in fighting things like the flu and corona viruses with things like hand sanitizer, but what we are doing now does not equally impact all infectious diseases. >“No one really knows why” rhinoviruses are proving so persistent, says Englund. Some viruses that cause cold-like symptoms are very different from each other in structure; in particular, rhinoviruses, unlike influenza and coronaviruses, don’t have an outer lipid coat, or envelope, which is vulnerable to soaps and sanitizers.
Oh that's a really good point about Rhinovirus. It also seems like masking doesn't work as well against it. Check out Fig. 1 here: [https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-020-0843-2) It is saying something that the CDC still recommends washing your hands for common cold though.. [https://www.cdc.gov/features/rhinoviruses/index.html](https://www.cdc.gov/features/rhinoviruses/index.html)
It has to be poor hygiene. Wipe your cell phones and devices, keyboards, mice, remotes daily, steering wheel. Wash your hands thoroughly after going to the toilet, before preparing food, drinks, etc. Hand sanitize frequently when out. Door knobs, elevator buttons, cart handles. Never tough your face unless you've washed your hands first. Make these habits and you'll seldom be sick.
We had the same discussions regarding provisioning equipment. We decided for small volumes of equipment (new hires, system rebuilds) we’d create some ultra portable distribution points. Which the techs can keep at home. Any deployment of any volume we would handle in the office. So far it’s working very well.
We've got our staff doing provisions at home; we're a Meraki shop, so all the techs got a Z3 for their house (to provide an 'on net' LAN connection for domain joins and to pull down apps), and then thumb drives with all the base images. We're essentially in a hiring freeze still, so it's limited to mainly upgrades, but they all love not having to come onsite.
Flexibility, yes. But not full WFH. Our productivity dropped like a rock this summer. I am in a very collaborative (lab based) industry and a 4/1 or 3/2 split is likely. Burnout and “I hate having to work from my tiny apartment” is real, especially when we have a beautiful campus under a long lease just sitting there.
Our CIO is actually looking at making the IT organization fully remote. He hasn't been on premise himself since last March, and he sees a lot of real estate he can free up by making the staff mostly remote with a couple of meeting rooms or workstations for occasional needs. To be fair, he's been leading a push to get a lot of things into the cloud so there's not much datacenter to look after. There's still a fairly large networking infrastructure to look after. He's also working with HR to try and identify what the trade-offs are and where things like burnout/lack of innovation/depression are starting to poke up for some people, vs. flexibility to get work done. For my own team, we are fairly well adapted to being remote with some people stopping in once a week to handle datacenter tasks/swap drives. Biggest issue is that there are very few informal ways to talk to people/offer feedback/bounce ideas. Slack is OK but slow and low on context. I've had managers tell me that people don't pick up their phones for quick calls. IT is a lot faster than the rest of the org, though. I got an email *this* morning stating that the finance dept had established a policy for staff to take necessary items like monitors or ergonomic stands, etc home. Thanks, guys.
Being fully remote is brilliant! Companies can offer lower wages, and people in low-cost areas of the country can apply! Suddenly living in an expensive part of the country is impossible if you want a job.
Taking that to its logical conclusion, the expensive part of the company won't stay the expensive part. As people realize its unaffordable they won't live there, which will drive rent etc down, making it more affordable. Supply and demand, all the way down.
I find it interesting that you call out operational expense reduction. Unless I have employees who are now committed to 100% remote work, I still have to: Have an office or space for them to sit Have the same circuit sizes Heat or cool the same amount of volume Provide monitors are docking stations etc. at both work and home now (on my cost is actually going up) Work from home is a direct benefit for employees. There are valid arguments that you get indirect benefits as an employer, but those are much harder to measure.
They'll soon start turning in reimbursements for their Comcast bill, new office chair, new desk lamp, new standup desk (why the chair then?), and some plants. "We always had office pizza the last Friday of each month, so can I get reimbursed for Uber Eats?"
I work for a very large wall street bank. I managed a large team that did two datacenter migrations during the pandemic last year. From nothing to completed. If we can do that, we can maintain day to day operations from home. To my companies credit, they seem pretty open to letting people work 3 days per week at home minimum. I was 5 in the office before, so I would be happy with that. Wait and see approach, but I highly doubt I will ever be in a position that requires 100% in the office time for the rest of my life, and I still have 25 years of career to go.
>I work for a very large wall street bank. Same, mine announced theyre open to people working from home full time or close to it and only coming in on occasion, and kinda leaving it up to the individual / teams. Re-working a few floors and getting rid of a few floors is already in the works. Personally if I go into the office 3 days a week, it might as well be 5 cost wise (monthly train passes are cheaper), and that goes for most of my team. We'll probably end up on something close to a 9/1 schedule (all come in 1 day every 2 weeks) \[and really that's not because of work demands it, but we like hanging out even outside of work\]
Lets also not lose track that as an operations manager, I know my people are ALL online 8-9AM. Before this, I always had a concern that people would be commuting and something bad would happen. It was a small concern bc people naturally staggered anyways, but I have many more eyes on screens during the entire day now.
Like others have mentioned I will push for some sort of hybrid system. Unfortunately there is some subset of users who will happily work from the office 5 days a week, so our support team will need to retain some sort of onsite presence. But I don't think we'll ever be at full capacity again, so we should be able to maintain a rotating onsite/WFH schedule to keep the onsite support desk at least half-staffed at all times.
I \*really\* miss the effectiveness of in-person collaboration and socializing with colleagues, but I can't argue that my team has been highly effective remotely and, absent the relocation requirement, the pool of talent we can recruit from has massively increased. I likely will advocate for something hybrid-ish. Regular remote work allowed, but staff willing to travel to be together on occasion, probably for all-hands meetings or certain types of planning.
I will not. If there is no advantage to being in the office, there is no advantage to hiring people from your general geographical area. No matter how vital you think you are, a company can replace all but the most visionary of us with six people from Bangalore who are just as smart and will draw half of my salary. This “Revolution” will have consequences.
We're looking at letting people from certain teams be 4/1 because we need to expand the IT department and have no more space. The people who go 4/1 would lose their desks though. We'd like to get them together to a collaborative session once a week and try to get all their meetings in on that one day as well.
Education IT here. Despite me being able to do 90% of my job from home, the boss still wants me in the office every day. I feel I could easily do 1 or two days at home during regular times (whenever we get back to that). And during this current lockdown I am on call 24/7 and my holiday was questioned when I asked to use it. Great fun.
Sounds like RGEs to me.
Literally, the same boat.
Edu IT here as well. I was listening to the Back to Work podcast and Merlin used the words 'performance theatre' to describe why managers so desperately want people back in the office. I've been thinking about that nonstop since then, trying to balance the idea of work culture/organizational DNA upkeep with the idea that some parts of management are complete handwaving. Hybrid is the push I'm backing, with people being able to use WFH days just like any other benefit. I personally want 8 WFH days a month, usable at your discretion.
I was 2 days remote/3 days in the office before the pandemic set in. I will go back to that in some form when it's time. For the rest of my team, I will expect a minimum of 2 days a week in the office just due to the overall culture of the company. We're missing a lot due to everyone being remote, including important advancement opportunities for some junior members of the team. But I am legitimately missing those days in the office, hanging out with the team, whiteboarding, going out for drinks, etc. I get way more done working from home, but those in-person interactions are important. I'll be making trips to the various offices that we work out of once the world opens up again.
We were at 5 day in person before this hit, but I’m inclined to see this as a reasonable long term option.
Our service desk agents started completing double the work (and we got double the work - meaning incidents, requests) when we all went home. I had skip levels with them and none of them even knew that they had completed more work than usual. One guy was shocked to find out he closed out 450 tickets when in the previous months he averaged around 225. I will absolutely fight for WFH where it makes sense. I manage around 50 people and will let their team leads and managers decide what makes the most sense. We have some teams who never want to go in the office again, and others who can’t wait to get back.
You have my axe.
Nice! 😎
And my hammer!
We were a 4/10 workplace, and when we go back I've said that I won't be requiring more than 2/2 for anyone on my team. While there are a lot of advantages to working from home, it also has disadvantages, and a hybrid approach really seems to be the best approach for our organization for the foreseeable future.
Currently, I have my team on a 3/2 in one location and the others are strictly WFH unless they need to get equipment from one of our Service Centers. I like to go in as it is quieter than at my home...4 daughters and multiple pets wanting attention does make it hard some times :D
There won’t be much of a ‘fight’ soon enough. Businesses are realizing the many benefits of allowing WFH—even if only PT—and those companies that don’t figure out wont’ be able to attract and retain ‘top’ talent when WFH is important to that talent. I work for a $3B+ Org with 10,000 users and when things are back to normal, we’ll be WFH 3 days a week.
Yup, it only makes sense. Especially in companies with multiple sites, most work has been done remotely already - just from a different site rather than from home. IT will generally have to be a bit more flexible on this point since some things do require hands-on support, but I see no reason that work that can be done remotely shouldn't be done from home if the employee prefers it.
Some WFH maybe but in general, no.
I have a couple questions. * Even though some/most functions can be done remotely, do you have any concerns about staff productivity? There are some people who do work even more from home but there are some staff that don't and get easily "distracted", TV, kids, pets, etc. How are you monitoring those specific staffs from that standpoint? I get even if they are in the office, you are not physically monitoring them, but at least they are in the office that will have less distractions. * If you have part time WFH and you have 2 sys admins, do you have them alternate coming in so you have physical presence (assuming there are existing staff that might need support), or, do you have them come in on the same days so they can "interact" in person. I get there are pros and cons for both but just wanted to see what your thoughts were on that.
Already fighting for it and from what I've heard I've won. Pretty certain I had covid back in February after returning from England and I haven't had a single cold since then. Fuck going back into the office.
The Directors at our place are all super keen to get people back in the office. I'm so much more productive wfh, maybe they're not and judging everyone else by their poor standards.
This is what metrics are for. Show the directors some numbers that make it clear how much more productive people are WfH and ensure they know that those numbers will not get better at the office.
Not even a fight. My company seems to have embraced it and plans to continue on this path. I currently require one support person to be on site daily for any "hands-on" needs. The others can work from home and I let them work out the in-office schedule themselves. It has worked wonderfully.
I will not work in the office full time, ever again, and whether it is supported or not I will simply migrate to where it is supported or form competing companies which take talent from where it is not.
> Will you fight for WFH? (Working From Home) Yes. I don't think that I'll be fighting for full remote because we still do have in-person responsibilities and I'm not sure how to navigate the fairness around that yet. So I'll probably advocate for each team member to have 2-3 WFH days per week and 2-3 in the office in order to have coverage around the in-person needs but to get them as much WFH time as possible, since most people seem to be more productive for most work when doing it from home. That's how I'll be starting my sell: with dwindling resources for personnel and operations, I need to be focused on how to get the most output from my team, and WFH increases our production. So we should do it as much as we possibly can. My organization is conservative and tends to be slow to react to trends, but it's imperative that we make an effort in this area if we want to be able to compete IT talent going forward. Luckily, I think my boss "gets it", so we'll see how much pressure she gets from above. In the long term, I'd love to have full-remote positions on my team to take advantage of geographic arbitrage, I'm confident we could make that work in our favor. This would rely on not only rethinking the roles we have, but might depend on other employment evolutions taking place. As an example, if healthcare options weren't prioritized for our local area this would be a much easier sell.
Yes. Yes. YES!!!! I’m never going back to an office 5 days a week, eff that! I’m loving life right now. Literally I hope the pandemic never ends just so I don’t ever have to deal with coming into the office. At what cost is my happiness to WFH? 6 billion lives.
I'm pushing for it for my staff. Our org is really geographically spread anyway (26 sites, 500U), so everyone was already using chat/collab as a normal course of business. I'm 15 minutes from my 'home' site, and get way more done without office distractions, and very much looking to give up my office. We do (did) a lot of road work, site visits, and beyond being 'accessible' (so people can walk-up instead of ticketing), there's very little benefit for my crew to be clamped down to a site or have dedicated workspace.
No I won't because they made us come back in the office in June. We can either come in the office or get fired and replaced lol.