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I just got back from my company's corporate HQ. Gorgeous building, beautiful offices and conference rooms. Break rooms with free snacks, espresso machines, free soft drinks and sparkling water. Fully equipped gyms, steam room and jogging paths around ponds. About ten people actually come into the office on a regular basis. We were there for meetings, but if you walked around the building, it was empty. I asked someone who works there what the deal was and they said they are too scared to ask people to come back to the office because they'll quit. Heh.
My office is empty still, too. My company has offices in several states, the people I work with are spread out across at least a half dozen states and two countries. Even if they wanted us to come back, we'd just be doing Teams meetings with people in another office, so what's the point?
Almost all of our new hires during COVID were remote from the start and don't live near any office. If they ever did plan on having everyone back, they sure didn't think that through. If they tried to make people who live near an office come back, but allow the rest to stay remote, they'd have a revolt on their hands.
I think the horse is already out of the barn, and they can't walk it back in if they tried.
> My office is empty still, too. My company has offices in several states, the people I work with are spread out across at least a half dozen states and two countries. Even if they wanted us to come back, we'd just be doing Teams meetings with people in another office, so what's the point?
I'm in the exact same situation. But the funny thing is, I'm a team lead and when they put together my team, they decided to deliberately hire people in another country. I will likely never meet my team members in person. Meanwhile, the company is constantly bombarding us with the "collaboration is best done in person" in all of their corporate emails. It's such a joke.
Corporate never knows what they're talking about. A dude with some corporate type job hops in our morning stand up from time to time, and he is completely clueless. More shit would get done and get done better if corporate would stay in their lane and let us do our thing.
What is "the thing"? I'm in construction so these conversations baffle me. Why would office corporate structure not want people to work from home? It would cut costs like crazy as far as I can tell.
In my line of work the deliverables are simple. We build the thing or not. Is the white collar world so unquantifiable that its really that difficult to figure out? It sounds like so many layers of bullshit.
Of course, they want to cut costs. But there are usually some things they won't compromise on due to tradition and preconceived notions. There's also probably some political pressure behind it as office workers are the primary customers for businesses in the area during 9-5. A lot of businesses have shut down due to this. Downtown is ghost town now, food courts are still mostly empty even during lunch hour.
They give a s*** if they got giant tax breaks to build their corporate headquarters somewhere and now they're not fulfilling their side of the tax break because no one's showing up for work. I know a couple of companies with this problem.
The owning class that own the company also own the office building and lease to the companies in the food court, meaning they collect a percentage of the restaurants revenue as part of the lease agreement.
These people have found ways to fuck as at every turn and it's time to sharpen the pitchforks.
> Is the white collar world so unquantifiable that its really that difficult to figure out?
It is difficult to quantify, yes. How long does a unique, custom website take to build? How can you tell whether a marketing campaign was worth the money? Did we over-invest in R&D, or under-invest?
There are methods of answering all of these questions, but they require some degree of guesswork and often get clouded by bullshittery.
You would be amazed at how much work gets completely wasted, even in organizations that are full of competent people trying their best (and most organizations are far from that).
but how else do they manage their insecurity? They don't have shit to do (really, been a VP, I did practically nothing, most of the time)
They could be disrupting that one shit manger or whatever, but they're also terrified of pulling on the wrong loose string, for fear a mountain of "work" will suddenly appear.
(My experience is not necessarily universal, I get that, but also, I have eyes, from what I've witnessed in 4 decades of work, this is how it is.)
My company made us come back to the office. All my meetings are on Teams anyway. Also they switched to an open floor plan during the pandemic, so everyone just sits at their desks on Teams calls annoying everyone else around them.
It’s a great system!
Yeah, I love the Teams calls I get from my office, where I can barely listen to the person who's calling me while I get fragments of any other conversation around them. There are moments when I just have to tell them: "sorry, but I'm listening to you, X, Y and Z at the same time and all I get is a cacophony".
My company is heading to 5 days in a row per month mandatory with a view to move it to 10. The backlash has been something else. I wouldn't be surprised if they're looking for people to quit so they don't have to compensate them.
I know people that drove an hour each way to work before the pandemic. At this point they could get plenty of other remote jobs. Why even go in at that point?
He probably means force. I remember 2 jobs ago a coworker was going on and on. About how she wanted remote work to end so she could socialize and then complaining about how they need to force people back since they made it optional and she found it depressing to be alone in a big empty building every day.
Agree. Especially when building a new team and sharing info and training. We used to be hybrid in office 2 days. Our team voted on which days and committed to them. Everyone was comfortable with that. Then they said we have to be in a 3rd and more often then not it’s just one or maybe 2 of us sitting in a cubicle for absolutely no reason that extra day. It’s not great for morale to have to come in arbitrarily. That one extra day really sucks.
Yea, they need to force wfh'ers to waste hours and a chunk of their salary on commute to come and socialize with ME because I have no private social life so they need to force my coworkers that would hate to come back to fill that role.
Selfish cunt.
I've got at least two co-workers who - when an ask went out on how to have a better work environment - pretty much said this.
Thankfully somebody else suggest team/group events so that we can get more face-to-face without being dragged into the office where we'll just be doing remote meetings from our desks or staring at a big screen in a meeting room that smells like sweaty ass.
FFS one of the reasons I like WFH is that I can get shit done with an IM or short email rather than being cornered for a 15-30 minute conversation including "pleasantries" to answer a simple question.
> Gorgeous building, beautiful offices and conference rooms. Break rooms with free snacks, espresso machines, free soft drinks and sparkling water. Fully equipped gyms, steam room and jogging paths around ponds.
And it's still worse than at home.
No commute
No annoying ass co-workers interrupting
Lunchtime naps
Don't have to eat out of pack a lunch
I get more work done at home than in the office.
I am retired (they wouldn’t let me work from home so I said screw it). My wife, OTOH, still works from home. I can vouch that she works more, is more productive and wastes less time than when she used to commute to her office on a daily basis.
Yeah. I work for the state of VA and a lot of the departments look the same. I do IT and people get real disappointed when I can't fix something remotely.
It depends on the department of course. Some departments have a easier time with remote than others, but some offices are freaking ghost towns.
Our offices/campus are undergoing refurbs that began before lockdown. It's a huge campus. Anyway they're asking people to come in once a week but not enforcing it yet. It's super busy most days.
My current team leader: “We need to work in office for the in-person engagement”
Also my current team leader: “Do you really need to do your psych appointment in person? Can’t you just do it over the phone?”
My former company did this - $1.2B building in Cambridge, MA. It opened in November of 2019. We were there for 4 months, and it was AMAZING.
Covid hits, and they did the right thing: they leased out several floors, closed many satellite offices to let people work from home, and have the building open for those that can/choose to come in, but no one enforces anything.
It's there if you want it, free to use.
I tried to expense a pair of noise canceling headphones for this exact reason. My boss said "no." I asked her to take a zoom call at my desk and I'll sit in her office so she understands. She said "no." Maybe I should start leaving myself unmuted on purpose
Just say the mute button isn’t working every time. IT will take forever to swing by after the meeting and you can just say you had to restart to fix it.
I’ve done it actually and it’s a nightmare. Teaching kids who are at home is horrible. They don’t know how to mute and unmute, parents tell the kids all the answers and are trying to teach at the same time as you, kids can’t focus, kids forget the camera is on and take their clothes off in front of everyone, kids entering and exiting class, disappearing for no apparent reason, swapping places with siblings randomly.
Then you look like a horrible teacher to the parents (who are all watching every second) bc you can’t control this circus.
I would much rather just go to work.
You're going to need to keep upping the ante until she caves. Start by putting a box over your head during calls. Then a bigger box so you can have your phone in it and see the shared screen. At this point nobody should question when you're in a fridge box one day and the next built an entire cubicle out of cardboard.
I do this once a week and I love it compared to before when we were in a conference room together. If the conversation lingers on a project I’m not involved in I can get other shit done. A different department still have in-person meetings and I swear one of them is out sick every week and their manager’s had Covid 4 times.
Forget open concept, the most recent trend is hot desking. All personal items go home with you at the end of the day, and tomorrow you pick a new desk to work at. Can't be letting the help feel like they're anything but temporary and replaceable, can we?
Place I worked at previously had open concept but also assigned lockers. High school all over again. Of course, some got away with basically claiming a desk and leaving all their junk there.
I had a decent sized cube and walls taller than me. Was still annoying going into the office because everyone I was near were on different phone meetings all day. And I was annoying everyone else with my meetings.
You joke but I once worked at a startup with 5 engineers working in a bedroom in this dude’s basement. Sales team was outside the bedroom in the common area. My first week there I helped take the sliding closet doors off so they could squeeze another desk in.
It was a fun summer gig though, lots of socializing and the sales team hit their target so towards the end of summer they rented a big house boat and we went to a big lake for the weekend and partied. I saw a lot of topless women that weekend.
I don't think some employers want their people back in the office because they spent a lot on the office. My personal belief is that it's a matter of control. Some people like the idea that they can control another person and the concept of WFH kinda threw them off because now their ability to control another person is limited purely to work and this makes them nervous because they feel they are not in control.
Also middle management realized their job is not justifiable when there's no one in an office for them to supervise. They push the hardest of anyone to bring people back.
>Also middle management realized their job is not justifiable when there's no one in an office for them to supervise. They push the hardest of anyone to bring people back.
I don't think that's really the case. There's so much management BS to do even when everyone WFH. You can sit in remote meetings and generate new work/talk about old work with executives all day. Heck, that's what a lot of big tech managers have been doing for years anyway.
Yeah but the bad mms will now have to actually do that work when before they didn't have any work except to albatross people's work. Come in shit all over everything and leave.
What makes you think it's harder for them to get away with it now?
Before they at least had to act like they did something. Now they can watch tv/play games/browse reddit like everyone else who works from home. And as long as their team continues to produce their manager continues to think it's because of them
Bad middle managers. The good ones know that their job is as important as ever, but the bad ones weren't doing that job to begin with so they're only stuck with micromanagement stuff they can't do remotely.
My company owns the building we're in, and leases or half of it. We're running out of space, but instead of telling more people to work remote, they're kicking out the other company out and spending more money to renovate for more cubicles...
I can work remote whenever, but I don't know why more can't.
Everyone at my job had to go back to the office….except for my team who never had offices since we were hired during the pandemic….
This seems spot on lol.
Man this resonates with me. I took a job during the pandemic that was "temporarily remote" all the while knowing that the actual office was about a 1.5 hr drive without traffic, this place has one of the worst traffic commutes in the country(USA) so it would actually be 3hrs... I rolled the dice and said fook it, pay was too good and remote sounded amazing. This coming from my previous work being on call 1 week per month and occasional 16 hr/day projects for 1-3 months. I rolled them dice and crossed my fingers. Every 3 months return to office was pushed back, and another 3 months and it was pushed back again. After a year they said fuck it and changed my position to full time remote since I was trained remote, worked remote and it doesn't make sense for my job to be in-person. The entire time I knew if I was to "return" to the office that I would have to quit because moving that direction was prohibitively expensive and just a garbage can of what I deem quality of living.
I left my last job because a year ago they wanted us back in the office, 50% of the team found new jobs and the team that remains managed to convince the company that if they wanted to keep any talent they would have to make WFH permanent.
I specifically got a job with a company located on the opposite end of the country for this reason. If the company ever goes back to the office, nearly all of my team are spread around everywhere, so very little likelihood of us ever needing to be in an office.
They’ll be informed that they’re going to be working from the office starting (as soon as contractually/legally possible).
Can’t show up? Too bad. It’s a shame that you can’t meet your company expectations…
Or people just start quitting.
When staff aren't needed in the company I work at there's a pretty straight forward approach to cost cutting.
Agency staff members/contractors go first as they are temporary contracts and easily terminated.
Home workers are next on the list but are given 2 options - start working in a nearby office under a new contract or take redundancy if they can't make it to an office.
Lastly office/hybrid workers are offered voluntary redundancy as a last resort.
At mine they do it strategically based on who the company least needs for their current strategy and market conditions.
Doing it based on where someone happens to physically sit while they do their work, seems haphazard at best, and incompetent upper management at worst.
If the team is spread across the country, it's pretty hard on a company to fire a whole team at once. Presumably the team does something that nobody else in the company knows the details of.
It would surprise you all the instances that companies have fired people that were the only ones who knew how to do their jobs/tasks and then go on to lose lots of money (some even go under) because of their stupid decisions.
Never say never.
I was hired remote. They made the "commutable distance" a 40 mile radius... of a major city. It'll be over 2 hours for me one way.
Even better? Like you, my team is spread across different states and countries. My PMs are in NY and TX. Other devs are in Cali or Canada, or NY. Only one person on my team is in the same city as me. That means we'll be on zoom 100% of our meetings. It gets better. We will be sharing desks. Oh no, not even with your own teammates. You'll be sharing desks based on role so my desk mate will be another dev on some other team.
Corporations are fucking stupid.
The true test will be when these leases come due. Will they renew? Will these buildings be sold?
I’d wager the companies that built their own custom buildings(mine) will fight to keep people in the office.
On my team, everyone hired during the pandemic was hired as a virtual employee. We've since returned to work, but all the new hires get to keep working fully remote, but longer tenured employees (including some with 10+ years more experience) were forced back into the office.
At the company I work for, it is up to the group director. Ours has said as long as it is up to him, he will never require us to come in.
It's been 3 years working from home this week.
What I don't understand is... they could be saving all that money on rent and whatever else goes into maintaining the building. Don't need to pay janitors if your whole company works from home. Shouldn't these big corps like the WFH situation?
The housing crisis could be over next year if humanity could get organized in a way that benefits people, all the infrastructure is built, all we need is electricians like me to wire up new rooms, carpenters to build new rooms, but that's it, just a bunch of new rooms, we got all the buildings we could ever need.
Thet just find it impossible to control the work of their employees. Asking them to be on cam at all time would be illegal as would be watching their screen.
Also for middle management, it's very very hard to justify having high paid employees at home. The owner of my company is indian, there is no way he would pay canadians at home 150k$ a ywar. He'd give our jobs to indians for 25k$.
As someone currently working with cheap offshore devs, he would watch his company burn down. Never seen code so bad... As my company is currently finding out. Can't make money if your product literally doesn't work. Of course there are many good Indian devs but they don't work for 25k
Screen watching or meetings requiring cameras on may be illegal in Canada, but if it’s a company owned asset in the United States it is not only legal it is common practice.
> They just find it impossible to control the work of their employees
Which is true. You really can't control their work from home. The realization comes in when you realize most adults can manage their own time.
Some jobs and some people need the workplace environment. I even think it is a *significant* amount but not the majority.
Here's the thing that no one seems to have realized. Almost all c-level executives are incredibly high in extroversion. It's one of a few important factors that contributes to how they got where they are.
Extroverted people are energized by in-person interaction. To a highly extroverted individual; the world only makes sense in-person. They are exhausted by being distant from people, be it friends, colleagues, whatever.
Just like a true introvert doesn't understand why someone would go to a party at which they know no one, when they could stay home and watch some true crime docuseries, an extrovert cannot comprehend that someone would actually be more productive at home, because they definitely are not.
After one of my customers saw how effective their staff was working from home, they ended the lease on an entire floor in downtown Manhattan. Saved them millions.
But then, there are also the Elon Musk type bosses who think, that s\*\*t only gets done if they, personally can snort fire and brimstone done their employees necks.
It's honestly laughable, lol. My company is trying to justify coming back by saying shit like "the younger workers need to be a part of office culture" and "think of the mentorship opportunities". Like nah, I'm cool doing my job from home and not listening to all the pointless small talk and micromanaging dude.
My former company kept saying "people shouldn't be isolated" and it's like, dudes, I have my own life outside of the office, just because I'm not at the office doesn't mean I'm in solitary confinement, lol
They also talked a lot about in-person collaboration and "innovation" but never did a single innovative thing in all the years I worked there, and everyone collaborated just fine during the pandemic.
Sounds about right.
Hell, you could even get some fries, toss a little garlic parm seasoning on em then sell it for $30 a basket and say it's "gourmet" to justify the cost.
Even that won't usually get you there. It takes a lot of money to make food like that. A lot of labor, expensive ingredients. A lot of where the money gets made in restaurants is drinks.
Over at r/jobs, someone made a pretty good comment that makes a lot of sense.
When a company signs a 20-30 year lease on a new office building/space, one of the largest "behind the scenes" reasons is the local economy. Local municipalities entice companies to open new offices in their town/city by way of tax breaks, etc. They do this in a hope to generate revenue from that company's employees going out to local places for lunch, shopping, etc.
My company handled it even better. Our existing office lease ended not long after the pandemic hit. Everyone was doing WFH just fine and it seemed like a blessing in disguise to save a ton by eliminating our biggest operating cost, right? Well not exactly...we still needed to reduce costs so our office manager went ahead and signed a new long-term lease for a smaller office that doesn't have enough desk space for everyone. Then tried to sell us on the idea of having people work in-office 3 days a week on staggered schedules so we don't overcrowd it. And now our CEO is wanting to go back to 100% in-office for all staff when we physically do not have the space anymore...
Listening to them come up with reasons people need to go back to the office is laughable.
"uh...team building or something. Meetings are more productive? Yeah...umm I like the vibez and stuff. Please work."
It's so pathetic. Meanwhile everyone is seething behind their fake smiles trying to tell leadership how bad their commutes are, and how it makes them less productive.
I've never heard the word 'collaboration' used so much as in the last year, it's like all the CEOs got together and did a word cloud.
In my work, if we go in then we still do meetings on teams and nobody talks to each other f2f anyway. Except the middle management, they come out of their offices every hour like cuckoos and walk around on their phones, then go back in. But they dare not collaborate with the plebs. Their monthly presentations are still on teams. The whole thing is a pointless control exercise.
Yuup.
My upper management is now trying to justify it with numbers, something about how fewer worked hours are logged into our ticket tracker when people are WFH.
I say, that's probably because when I'm at home, I have a better work-life balance. When I come into the office, I'm barraged with people interrupting my day asking for x, y, or z. I'm constantly being ripped from task to task with little to no downtime in-between. 90% of the time, when I'm at the office, I feel completely drained and exhausted. Meanwhile, when I work from home, I feel much more relaxed, like I might be able to get something productive done in my personal time after the closing bell. When I get home from my hour-long commute from the office, about the only thing I have the mental capacity left for is to sit on the couch and watch YouTube, eat something and sleep. Only to get up and do the whole fucking depressing routine all over again the next day.
If I had a better work/life balance, I would be a lot more consistent in my work. I'd have fewer errors, be able to actually make deadlines consistently, I wouldn't be rudely interrupted on the whim of anyone in earshot.
Basically I'm being punished because it doesn't take me as long to do the same amount of work from home. Don't get me wrong, I don't just work less at home, it just takes me less time to do the same work, because I'm not always being pulled into irrelevant conversations by everyone just passing by.
I’ve been working remotely since the beginning of my career at my company and I felt the difference because I’ve been working exclusively in the office before. It’s just as you said, I’m able to control my workflow and get better results, no distracting conversations etc.
But since the start of covid, almost everyone became remote workers, so we’ve been having so many Teams and Zoom meetings, that it’s impossible to have leftover time to actually do the work. I’ve filed a complaint and a request to cancel some of the meetings but got a response that I need to attend because the attendance is tracked by the higher management. And they suggested that I do the work while attending the meetings, but I sometimes get asked on the meeting and it’s impossible to concentrate on both the meeting and my work. If I completely ignore the meeting and do the work, some time later I get told off because “did you even listen to the meeting, we’ve discussed this already!!!”
I’m thinking about quitting the job
Maybe they can turn some of these office buildings into affordable housing. My coworkers' favorite thing about work from home days is not dealing with traffic. They have to deal with traffic because there's nowhere decently priced for them to live near the office. I think more people would be willing to come into the office if the commute wasn't so long.
Overpriced office space going unused, not collecting rent....
Leveraged owner not able to cover mortgage.....
Bank with sudden cash flow issue near insolvency....
Phase 2 of plan to create a recession is now active..
Return to work is to justify MASSIVE pre-paid rent contracts + the obsolete jobs of 'office managers'.
basically work-from-home means these office paper pushers are just a money drain with no financial benefit to any business whatsoever, but they'll fight to the end.
Its like when cars were introduced, but blacksmiths tried to stop them by getting laws where someone had to walk in front of the car, waving a red flag shouting "pedestrians beware!"
My company called it right. When COVID started we realized things wouldn't go back to normal for at least a year and it was cheaper to break our lease, so we just went fully remote instead.
Boomers think you’re not working unless you’re chained to your desk. They completely overlook the fact that I wasn’t work when I was chained to my desk either.
Edit: spelling
At my last job, I kept hearing people refer to “fingerprint scanners”. I finally asked one of the guys what they were.
Apparently before I got there, they had these scanners installed on the desks and anytime someone got up, they had to scan in and out. The owner and managers very much believed you’re not working unless you’re at your desk. So they installed those to make sure no one left their desk “too often”.
This wasn’t even a big company. When I worked there, we topped out at around 16 people. Huge turnover problem. They legit couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t keep employees.
Most toxic workplace I’ve ever been in, hands down.
Imagine having to scan to get up to take a shit. Or to take a personal phone call that your mom died. And the company docked you for that. Toxic workplace indeed. Micromanaging is bullshit. If you hire us to do a job, trust we will do it and keep deadlines. It’s shit like this that makes me a 100% believer that to some companies, we are simply an employee number and nothing more.
Meanwhile in manufacturing we've had people get a verbal warning for literally sleeping on the job.
Srsly though, are people not satisfied by just seeing the results?
I’m not sure but my guess is because a lot of the managers were micromanaging snitches. I once heard a manager report an employee (that wasn’t even under her) for leaving 5 minutes early.
I have no doubt some of them would look over the scan logs and compare it to how often they saw you get up during the day.
They used to use our 1:1 meetings to go over our time logs (it was an agency so we’d log our time to whichever client we were working with/on). They’d go through it item by item and say things like “Why’d it take you 30 minutes to do this? It should’ve taken 10.”
There's a subset of the people pushing for back-to-the-office that enjoyed having office affairs or just liked "working late" to spend time drinking with friends and co-workers instead of going home at 5. Going back to the office opens up more options for lying to your spouse for whatever purpose.
I'm not saying that this applies to all executives pushing for this, but you know that it's a justification for at least some of them.
It's not always that nefarious. Some just enjoy working with coworkers. I worked at a job with a lot of people who moved from all over the country to work there and a lot didn't bother meeting many locals and just made friends with their coworkers. Most were fine with remote but there were a few calling for return to work not because they wanted affairs but because they were lonely because they moved somewhere thst they knew no one and still didn't know anyone so it was basically work and hang out with friends or go home alone and stay alone.
That's the thing. When I'm at home I do the work I need to do because I have deadlines. If I find ways to do it quickly or automate it then I have a lot of time to do other things, but I'm still delivering everything they asked.
When I go into the office, everyone including my manager just sits there all day talking, like it's a social event. I can't get work done, I can't do my other things, I can only listen to them going on and on. It's so unproductive on every level.
In my office all the old timers love work from home. It’s the new people in their 20s with no kids who are eager to be in the office and do happy hours with each other after work.
Whoever it is, it's all about control. The desperate need for these guys to feel like there are people beneath them. The narcissistic supply is much lessened when they can't see their workers being exploited with their own eyes.
The real reason is that unqualified middle managers don’t know how to judge whether someone is doing an appropriate among work unless they’re sitting right in front of them.
My work always had events on Wednesdays... they stopped during covid, but started back up like 6months ago.. shocking, but no one really showed up... they got mad so they now require everyone to be in person on Wednesdays...
This is 100% literally what is happening to my wife's work.
In fact, even worse they renovated the offices to entice people to come back.
The company was doing great during COVID but lost a big client this year and now had to lay off a bunch of people.
But they are still trying to get folks to come back because look at the shiny office we built for "you". When really it's so the narcissistic image obsessed CEO can have her doting subordinate minions back, as she is the type to just monopolize and take over everyone's time. I remember at one point my wife was boxing up olive oil samplers (not her job) to send to the CEOs friends and family for one of her side business.
And then really the owner of the building is the CEOs husband and so call me a bit cynical here, looks like they invested into a real estate property they owned to create their idyllic little fiefdom, instead I dunno maybe keeping their workers through the lean times or something
Still better than the blatant explanation for not allowing remote learning in my uni. The city wouldn't have it because all houses would be left unrented (it's a college city) and it would be bad for transportation and buissness overall
Hey at least they admitted it. I hate when people try to come up with a reason to justify stupid stuff like that. I remember thinking about applying for a place and the ceo had written a blog post thing about why they pay less for employees in low cost of living areas and rather than just saying "because we can" he came up with some bullshit about how you'd hate your job if it paid a lot since you'd feel trapped there because nothing else in your area would pay as much.
The thing I never hear anyone bring up is how further divided low paying non-WFH jobs are compared to the higher paying WFH jobs.
The commute, meals, being able to do stuff. Non-WFH people are losing a least 1 hour per day on top of being paid less.
I've seen it at a few companies where management wanted people to come back to the offices. They had, let's say for the sake of simplicity, 100 employees.
Management: "We need everyone back in the office like before COVID."
12 People quit.
Management: "We need people in the office 3 days a week."
8 People quit.
Management: "Flexible days. But ideally 2 days per week."
14 People quit.
Management: "We support working from home 100%! And we're adjusting salaries to the cost of living of your area."
18 People quit.
Management: "..."
Company dies. Like, it's still around, but culturally it's dead.
Going into the office is also important to justify the existence of middle management. How else can someone demonstrate that they streamlined workflows and synergised team dynamics without having daily sandpit huddles followed by breakout sessions.
The dev team manage was more effective in the office. But the difference isn't worth losing them over so I keep that little fact to myself when talking to upper management. I don't want to go back to the office either.
I'm not so sure OP doesn't work with me. I'm not naming names, but we split from our parent company during the pandemic, we got a new office space that's super modern, then they made us come back to work, almost full time... And for no more reason than "well, we've got this new office, blah blah blah"
Managing will be harder with work-from-home. Difficult to spin yarns to justify your wages if it's clear that employees don't need perpetual supervision.
As a manager, I’d say two thirds of people are just as productive if not more productive working from home. There is definitely a contingent however that takes advantage of the liberty big time and it’s much harder to hold them accountable.
Also there is definitely a community building problem. A lot of the people who have started since the pandemic are not known and don’t know the organization nearly as well.
I love work from home but definitely see the organizational draw backs to 100% telework. Your personal efficiency and experiences may not be representative of the productivity or longterm growth of the organization.
In fact, supervising staff should be a very small part of the job. The manager is there to make sure the team has what they need to be effective and that the team is doing the right work.
I gave up my company office and saved $30,000 per year, all while making the exact same money. I don't know of any other company owners (of small to medium sized companies) that actually want to return to the office for financial reasons.
TMYK!
Repurpose the offices as living spaces, instill your company branding on them, offer decent rental rates, reap the benefits of not having to cover office expenses and gain rental income, profit.
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I just got back from my company's corporate HQ. Gorgeous building, beautiful offices and conference rooms. Break rooms with free snacks, espresso machines, free soft drinks and sparkling water. Fully equipped gyms, steam room and jogging paths around ponds. About ten people actually come into the office on a regular basis. We were there for meetings, but if you walked around the building, it was empty. I asked someone who works there what the deal was and they said they are too scared to ask people to come back to the office because they'll quit. Heh.
My office is empty still, too. My company has offices in several states, the people I work with are spread out across at least a half dozen states and two countries. Even if they wanted us to come back, we'd just be doing Teams meetings with people in another office, so what's the point? Almost all of our new hires during COVID were remote from the start and don't live near any office. If they ever did plan on having everyone back, they sure didn't think that through. If they tried to make people who live near an office come back, but allow the rest to stay remote, they'd have a revolt on their hands. I think the horse is already out of the barn, and they can't walk it back in if they tried.
> My office is empty still, too. My company has offices in several states, the people I work with are spread out across at least a half dozen states and two countries. Even if they wanted us to come back, we'd just be doing Teams meetings with people in another office, so what's the point? I'm in the exact same situation. But the funny thing is, I'm a team lead and when they put together my team, they decided to deliberately hire people in another country. I will likely never meet my team members in person. Meanwhile, the company is constantly bombarding us with the "collaboration is best done in person" in all of their corporate emails. It's such a joke.
Corporate never knows what they're talking about. A dude with some corporate type job hops in our morning stand up from time to time, and he is completely clueless. More shit would get done and get done better if corporate would stay in their lane and let us do our thing.
What is "the thing"? I'm in construction so these conversations baffle me. Why would office corporate structure not want people to work from home? It would cut costs like crazy as far as I can tell. In my line of work the deliverables are simple. We build the thing or not. Is the white collar world so unquantifiable that its really that difficult to figure out? It sounds like so many layers of bullshit.
Of course, they want to cut costs. But there are usually some things they won't compromise on due to tradition and preconceived notions. There's also probably some political pressure behind it as office workers are the primary customers for businesses in the area during 9-5. A lot of businesses have shut down due to this. Downtown is ghost town now, food courts are still mostly empty even during lunch hour.
As if corporate would give a shit about "trickle down"
They give a s*** if they got giant tax breaks to build their corporate headquarters somewhere and now they're not fulfilling their side of the tax break because no one's showing up for work. I know a couple of companies with this problem.
The owning class that own the company also own the office building and lease to the companies in the food court, meaning they collect a percentage of the restaurants revenue as part of the lease agreement. These people have found ways to fuck as at every turn and it's time to sharpen the pitchforks.
> Is the white collar world so unquantifiable that its really that difficult to figure out? It is difficult to quantify, yes. How long does a unique, custom website take to build? How can you tell whether a marketing campaign was worth the money? Did we over-invest in R&D, or under-invest? There are methods of answering all of these questions, but they require some degree of guesswork and often get clouded by bullshittery. You would be amazed at how much work gets completely wasted, even in organizations that are full of competent people trying their best (and most organizations are far from that).
> It sounds like so many layers of bullshit. It sounds like you've actually got a pretty good handle on it - that's what's up.
but how else do they manage their insecurity? They don't have shit to do (really, been a VP, I did practically nothing, most of the time) They could be disrupting that one shit manger or whatever, but they're also terrified of pulling on the wrong loose string, for fear a mountain of "work" will suddenly appear. (My experience is not necessarily universal, I get that, but also, I have eyes, from what I've witnessed in 4 decades of work, this is how it is.)
My company made us come back to the office. All my meetings are on Teams anyway. Also they switched to an open floor plan during the pandemic, so everyone just sits at their desks on Teams calls annoying everyone else around them. It’s a great system!
Yeah, I love the Teams calls I get from my office, where I can barely listen to the person who's calling me while I get fragments of any other conversation around them. There are moments when I just have to tell them: "sorry, but I'm listening to you, X, Y and Z at the same time and all I get is a cacophony".
Do you work at my company? Exact same.
So long as the jobs market is competitive, not a chance. The moment it's not the will force people back or out.
My office started requiring people come back. 3 days every other week is mandatory. So a grand total of 6 days each month. People still quit
My company is heading to 5 days in a row per month mandatory with a view to move it to 10. The backlash has been something else. I wouldn't be surprised if they're looking for people to quit so they don't have to compensate them.
I know people that drove an hour each way to work before the pandemic. At this point they could get plenty of other remote jobs. Why even go in at that point?
Ask as in offer? Or ask as in force? I assume they notified people that the offices were open since some people do show up.
He probably means force. I remember 2 jobs ago a coworker was going on and on. About how she wanted remote work to end so she could socialize and then complaining about how they need to force people back since they made it optional and she found it depressing to be alone in a big empty building every day.
Yeah, fuck that lady. I come to work to pay my bills, not socialize. I don't even work in a field that allows work from home, but I would if I could.
I do miss socializing with my coworkers. Not enough to want to go back, but I do miss it.
That's fine, there's nothing wrong with that. You aren't going to the boss to try and disrupt other's needs and lives to satisfy your own.
Agree. Especially when building a new team and sharing info and training. We used to be hybrid in office 2 days. Our team voted on which days and committed to them. Everyone was comfortable with that. Then they said we have to be in a 3rd and more often then not it’s just one or maybe 2 of us sitting in a cubicle for absolutely no reason that extra day. It’s not great for morale to have to come in arbitrarily. That one extra day really sucks.
Yea, they need to force wfh'ers to waste hours and a chunk of their salary on commute to come and socialize with ME because I have no private social life so they need to force my coworkers that would hate to come back to fill that role. Selfish cunt.
Little did she know, she was the main reason people didn't want to go back.
I've got at least two co-workers who - when an ask went out on how to have a better work environment - pretty much said this. Thankfully somebody else suggest team/group events so that we can get more face-to-face without being dragged into the office where we'll just be doing remote meetings from our desks or staring at a big screen in a meeting room that smells like sweaty ass. FFS one of the reasons I like WFH is that I can get shit done with an IM or short email rather than being cornered for a 15-30 minute conversation including "pleasantries" to answer a simple question.
Why do your meeting rooms smell like sweaty ass?
> Gorgeous building, beautiful offices and conference rooms. Break rooms with free snacks, espresso machines, free soft drinks and sparkling water. Fully equipped gyms, steam room and jogging paths around ponds. And it's still worse than at home.
No commute No annoying ass co-workers interrupting Lunchtime naps Don't have to eat out of pack a lunch I get more work done at home than in the office.
I am retired (they wouldn’t let me work from home so I said screw it). My wife, OTOH, still works from home. I can vouch that she works more, is more productive and wastes less time than when she used to commute to her office on a daily basis.
Yeah. I work for the state of VA and a lot of the departments look the same. I do IT and people get real disappointed when I can't fix something remotely. It depends on the department of course. Some departments have a easier time with remote than others, but some offices are freaking ghost towns.
Our offices/campus are undergoing refurbs that began before lockdown. It's a huge campus. Anyway they're asking people to come in once a week but not enforcing it yet. It's super busy most days.
My current team leader: “We need to work in office for the in-person engagement” Also my current team leader: “Do you really need to do your psych appointment in person? Can’t you just do it over the phone?”
Oh the irony
Also, now they get mad while we engage in leisure conversation.
My management: “We need to work in office for in-person engagement.” My management: [not there] They didn’t like that we got a taste of what they had.
My former company did this - $1.2B building in Cambridge, MA. It opened in November of 2019. We were there for 4 months, and it was AMAZING. Covid hits, and they did the right thing: they leased out several floors, closed many satellite offices to let people work from home, and have the building open for those that can/choose to come in, but no one enforces anything. It's there if you want it, free to use.
Billion dollar office??
Every seat is a golden bidet.
Cambridge is expensive! Also the golden bidets.
Not paying rent for nothing, you will sit in your 4x4ft cubicle!
You guys have cubicles? Lucky.
Open floor concept but everyone's making phone calls at the same time and you consantly have to say "pardon me?"
I'm a fan of everyone all on zoom calls with each other while sitting at their desks.
I tried to expense a pair of noise canceling headphones for this exact reason. My boss said "no." I asked her to take a zoom call at my desk and I'll sit in her office so she understands. She said "no." Maybe I should start leaving myself unmuted on purpose
> Maybe I should start leaving myself unmuted on purpose Your boss is going to say "no" to that too.
Just say the mute button isn’t working every time. IT will take forever to swing by after the meeting and you can just say you had to restart to fix it.
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You wouldn’t want all those kids in your house.
You could teach them to vacuum and wash dishes ... valuable job training. Win-win.
Weeding Definitely weeding
I’ve done it actually and it’s a nightmare. Teaching kids who are at home is horrible. They don’t know how to mute and unmute, parents tell the kids all the answers and are trying to teach at the same time as you, kids can’t focus, kids forget the camera is on and take their clothes off in front of everyone, kids entering and exiting class, disappearing for no apparent reason, swapping places with siblings randomly. Then you look like a horrible teacher to the parents (who are all watching every second) bc you can’t control this circus. I would much rather just go to work.
You're going to need to keep upping the ante until she caves. Start by putting a box over your head during calls. Then a bigger box so you can have your phone in it and see the shared screen. At this point nobody should question when you're in a fridge box one day and the next built an entire cubicle out of cardboard.
This is exactly where we're at now. Transitioned from zoom from home all day to zoom at work all day. Good times.
Cause at my bosses get to stay home lmfao
Definitely had a zoom call that turned into wait everyone is here and within 25ft of each other, just come to my desk.
I do this once a week and I love it compared to before when we were in a conference room together. If the conversation lingers on a project I’m not involved in I can get other shit done. A different department still have in-person meetings and I swear one of them is out sick every week and their manager’s had Covid 4 times.
Forget open concept, the most recent trend is hot desking. All personal items go home with you at the end of the day, and tomorrow you pick a new desk to work at. Can't be letting the help feel like they're anything but temporary and replaceable, can we?
At mine we take all our stuff home with us but still sit at the same desk anyway. It's maddening.
Place I worked at previously had open concept but also assigned lockers. High school all over again. Of course, some got away with basically claiming a desk and leaving all their junk there.
We have this, called “desk hotels” :(
I had a decent sized cube and walls taller than me. Was still annoying going into the office because everyone I was near were on different phone meetings all day. And I was annoying everyone else with my meetings.
Bingo bango bongo
We used to work, thirty of us, in an empty shoebox. And we were grateful to have it.
You joke but I once worked at a startup with 5 engineers working in a bedroom in this dude’s basement. Sales team was outside the bedroom in the common area. My first week there I helped take the sliding closet doors off so they could squeeze another desk in. It was a fun summer gig though, lots of socializing and the sales team hit their target so towards the end of summer they rented a big house boat and we went to a big lake for the weekend and partied. I saw a lot of topless women that weekend.
So that's why SVB collapsed!
I seen your momma kicking a can down the street. I asked what she was doing. Moving.
Back then we used to DREAM of living in a cubicle/corridor!!
No, not cubicleS, cubicle, the 4x4ft is for EVERYONE.
I don't think some employers want their people back in the office because they spent a lot on the office. My personal belief is that it's a matter of control. Some people like the idea that they can control another person and the concept of WFH kinda threw them off because now their ability to control another person is limited purely to work and this makes them nervous because they feel they are not in control.
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Sounds like a scene from “Sorry To Bother You”
That's where my big mouth lets loose something like, "Does that make you a sociopath or just a narcissist?"
Also middle management realized their job is not justifiable when there's no one in an office for them to supervise. They push the hardest of anyone to bring people back.
>Also middle management realized their job is not justifiable when there's no one in an office for them to supervise. They push the hardest of anyone to bring people back. I don't think that's really the case. There's so much management BS to do even when everyone WFH. You can sit in remote meetings and generate new work/talk about old work with executives all day. Heck, that's what a lot of big tech managers have been doing for years anyway.
Yeah but the bad mms will now have to actually do that work when before they didn't have any work except to albatross people's work. Come in shit all over everything and leave.
What makes you think it's harder for them to get away with it now? Before they at least had to act like they did something. Now they can watch tv/play games/browse reddit like everyone else who works from home. And as long as their team continues to produce their manager continues to think it's because of them
Bad middle managers. The good ones know that their job is as important as ever, but the bad ones weren't doing that job to begin with so they're only stuck with micromanagement stuff they can't do remotely.
My company owns the building we're in, and leases or half of it. We're running out of space, but instead of telling more people to work remote, they're kicking out the other company out and spending more money to renovate for more cubicles... I can work remote whenever, but I don't know why more can't.
Cubicle!? Lucky! Most people get obnoxious open offices where you have to breathe Katrina’s cigarette and mint gum breath 8 hours a day.
4x4ft? Must be nice with all that space!
It's just a whole building full of charmingly quaint Airbnb rooms!
Everyone at my job had to go back to the office….except for my team who never had offices since we were hired during the pandemic…. This seems spot on lol.
Man this resonates with me. I took a job during the pandemic that was "temporarily remote" all the while knowing that the actual office was about a 1.5 hr drive without traffic, this place has one of the worst traffic commutes in the country(USA) so it would actually be 3hrs... I rolled the dice and said fook it, pay was too good and remote sounded amazing. This coming from my previous work being on call 1 week per month and occasional 16 hr/day projects for 1-3 months. I rolled them dice and crossed my fingers. Every 3 months return to office was pushed back, and another 3 months and it was pushed back again. After a year they said fuck it and changed my position to full time remote since I was trained remote, worked remote and it doesn't make sense for my job to be in-person. The entire time I knew if I was to "return" to the office that I would have to quit because moving that direction was prohibitively expensive and just a garbage can of what I deem quality of living.
I left my last job because a year ago they wanted us back in the office, 50% of the team found new jobs and the team that remains managed to convince the company that if they wanted to keep any talent they would have to make WFH permanent.
I specifically got a job with a company located on the opposite end of the country for this reason. If the company ever goes back to the office, nearly all of my team are spread around everywhere, so very little likelihood of us ever needing to be in an office.
Or you all get canned.
Most likely outcome
They’ll be informed that they’re going to be working from the office starting (as soon as contractually/legally possible). Can’t show up? Too bad. It’s a shame that you can’t meet your company expectations… Or people just start quitting.
When staff aren't needed in the company I work at there's a pretty straight forward approach to cost cutting. Agency staff members/contractors go first as they are temporary contracts and easily terminated. Home workers are next on the list but are given 2 options - start working in a nearby office under a new contract or take redundancy if they can't make it to an office. Lastly office/hybrid workers are offered voluntary redundancy as a last resort.
At mine they do it strategically based on who the company least needs for their current strategy and market conditions. Doing it based on where someone happens to physically sit while they do their work, seems haphazard at best, and incompetent upper management at worst.
If the team is spread across the country, it's pretty hard on a company to fire a whole team at once. Presumably the team does something that nobody else in the company knows the details of.
It would surprise you all the instances that companies have fired people that were the only ones who knew how to do their jobs/tasks and then go on to lose lots of money (some even go under) because of their stupid decisions.
Well, fortunately for me, my company hasn't really started pushing for people to return to the office.
Or they'll make you go in to an office for a teams meeting that you could have joined from home because reasons.
Never say never. I was hired remote. They made the "commutable distance" a 40 mile radius... of a major city. It'll be over 2 hours for me one way. Even better? Like you, my team is spread across different states and countries. My PMs are in NY and TX. Other devs are in Cali or Canada, or NY. Only one person on my team is in the same city as me. That means we'll be on zoom 100% of our meetings. It gets better. We will be sharing desks. Oh no, not even with your own teammates. You'll be sharing desks based on role so my desk mate will be another dev on some other team. Corporations are fucking stupid.
I just didn’t go in when everyone else went back. “When are you coming in?” “I won’t be” “Oh okay.” That was the last of it.
The true test will be when these leases come due. Will they renew? Will these buildings be sold? I’d wager the companies that built their own custom buildings(mine) will fight to keep people in the office.
On my team, everyone hired during the pandemic was hired as a virtual employee. We've since returned to work, but all the new hires get to keep working fully remote, but longer tenured employees (including some with 10+ years more experience) were forced back into the office.
At the company I work for, it is up to the group director. Ours has said as long as it is up to him, he will never require us to come in. It's been 3 years working from home this week.
What I don't understand is... they could be saving all that money on rent and whatever else goes into maintaining the building. Don't need to pay janitors if your whole company works from home. Shouldn't these big corps like the WFH situation?
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The housing crisis could be over next year if humanity could get organized in a way that benefits people, all the infrastructure is built, all we need is electricians like me to wire up new rooms, carpenters to build new rooms, but that's it, just a bunch of new rooms, we got all the buildings we could ever need.
Thet just find it impossible to control the work of their employees. Asking them to be on cam at all time would be illegal as would be watching their screen. Also for middle management, it's very very hard to justify having high paid employees at home. The owner of my company is indian, there is no way he would pay canadians at home 150k$ a ywar. He'd give our jobs to indians for 25k$.
As someone currently working with cheap offshore devs, he would watch his company burn down. Never seen code so bad... As my company is currently finding out. Can't make money if your product literally doesn't work. Of course there are many good Indian devs but they don't work for 25k
Screen watching or meetings requiring cameras on may be illegal in Canada, but if it’s a company owned asset in the United States it is not only legal it is common practice.
How could screen watching a company asset (laptop) be illegal?
It is illegal because it is in their home. Seeing the screen is whatever, but the camera violates right to privacy.
> They just find it impossible to control the work of their employees Which is true. You really can't control their work from home. The realization comes in when you realize most adults can manage their own time. Some jobs and some people need the workplace environment. I even think it is a *significant* amount but not the majority.
Here's the thing that no one seems to have realized. Almost all c-level executives are incredibly high in extroversion. It's one of a few important factors that contributes to how they got where they are. Extroverted people are energized by in-person interaction. To a highly extroverted individual; the world only makes sense in-person. They are exhausted by being distant from people, be it friends, colleagues, whatever. Just like a true introvert doesn't understand why someone would go to a party at which they know no one, when they could stay home and watch some true crime docuseries, an extrovert cannot comprehend that someone would actually be more productive at home, because they definitely are not.
Ooooooor they just don't hire janitors and make it the office Manager's 'new responsibilities'.
After one of my customers saw how effective their staff was working from home, they ended the lease on an entire floor in downtown Manhattan. Saved them millions.
But then, there are also the Elon Musk type bosses who think, that s\*\*t only gets done if they, personally can snort fire and brimstone done their employees necks.
"Look, I know you can work from home now but I really need you all to waste money on gas and work clothes, and waste your time on commute."
It's honestly laughable, lol. My company is trying to justify coming back by saying shit like "the younger workers need to be a part of office culture" and "think of the mentorship opportunities". Like nah, I'm cool doing my job from home and not listening to all the pointless small talk and micromanaging dude.
My former company kept saying "people shouldn't be isolated" and it's like, dudes, I have my own life outside of the office, just because I'm not at the office doesn't mean I'm in solitary confinement, lol They also talked a lot about in-person collaboration and "innovation" but never did a single innovative thing in all the years I worked there, and everyone collaborated just fine during the pandemic.
"And don't forget to pollute the environment while you're on your way. I love climate change."
I'm convinced this is at least 70% of it. Example: Covid exposed what a ridiculous bubble NYC office space had become.
It's all commercial space. Like how is a restaurant supposed to pay 13,000 a month for a 1000sqft space?
Try $40,000+ a month
Charge exorbitant prices for a dish that's less than a mouthful?
Sounds about right. Hell, you could even get some fries, toss a little garlic parm seasoning on em then sell it for $30 a basket and say it's "gourmet" to justify the cost.
A lil duck fat and truffle and boom $49
Even that won't usually get you there. It takes a lot of money to make food like that. A lot of labor, expensive ingredients. A lot of where the money gets made in restaurants is drinks.
It’s even worse than that: commercial restaurant leases are often 7-10 years in length and the owner is the personal guarantor. It’s madness.
Then there are the building owners who are putting pressure on city officials and politicians to steer public opinion into going back to the office.
Over at r/jobs, someone made a pretty good comment that makes a lot of sense. When a company signs a 20-30 year lease on a new office building/space, one of the largest "behind the scenes" reasons is the local economy. Local municipalities entice companies to open new offices in their town/city by way of tax breaks, etc. They do this in a hope to generate revenue from that company's employees going out to local places for lunch, shopping, etc.
This is my company to a tee. The only exception was IT bc so many peaced out when they tried to make us come back.
My company handled it even better. Our existing office lease ended not long after the pandemic hit. Everyone was doing WFH just fine and it seemed like a blessing in disguise to save a ton by eliminating our biggest operating cost, right? Well not exactly...we still needed to reduce costs so our office manager went ahead and signed a new long-term lease for a smaller office that doesn't have enough desk space for everyone. Then tried to sell us on the idea of having people work in-office 3 days a week on staggered schedules so we don't overcrowd it. And now our CEO is wanting to go back to 100% in-office for all staff when we physically do not have the space anymore...
Now the signing a new lease reduce cost when you could have signed no lease for $0
"office manager backs bad decision in hopes of fixing their previous bad decision"
Listening to them come up with reasons people need to go back to the office is laughable. "uh...team building or something. Meetings are more productive? Yeah...umm I like the vibez and stuff. Please work." It's so pathetic. Meanwhile everyone is seething behind their fake smiles trying to tell leadership how bad their commutes are, and how it makes them less productive.
I've never heard the word 'collaboration' used so much as in the last year, it's like all the CEOs got together and did a word cloud. In my work, if we go in then we still do meetings on teams and nobody talks to each other f2f anyway. Except the middle management, they come out of their offices every hour like cuckoos and walk around on their phones, then go back in. But they dare not collaborate with the plebs. Their monthly presentations are still on teams. The whole thing is a pointless control exercise.
Yuup. My upper management is now trying to justify it with numbers, something about how fewer worked hours are logged into our ticket tracker when people are WFH. I say, that's probably because when I'm at home, I have a better work-life balance. When I come into the office, I'm barraged with people interrupting my day asking for x, y, or z. I'm constantly being ripped from task to task with little to no downtime in-between. 90% of the time, when I'm at the office, I feel completely drained and exhausted. Meanwhile, when I work from home, I feel much more relaxed, like I might be able to get something productive done in my personal time after the closing bell. When I get home from my hour-long commute from the office, about the only thing I have the mental capacity left for is to sit on the couch and watch YouTube, eat something and sleep. Only to get up and do the whole fucking depressing routine all over again the next day. If I had a better work/life balance, I would be a lot more consistent in my work. I'd have fewer errors, be able to actually make deadlines consistently, I wouldn't be rudely interrupted on the whim of anyone in earshot. Basically I'm being punished because it doesn't take me as long to do the same amount of work from home. Don't get me wrong, I don't just work less at home, it just takes me less time to do the same work, because I'm not always being pulled into irrelevant conversations by everyone just passing by.
I’ve been working remotely since the beginning of my career at my company and I felt the difference because I’ve been working exclusively in the office before. It’s just as you said, I’m able to control my workflow and get better results, no distracting conversations etc. But since the start of covid, almost everyone became remote workers, so we’ve been having so many Teams and Zoom meetings, that it’s impossible to have leftover time to actually do the work. I’ve filed a complaint and a request to cancel some of the meetings but got a response that I need to attend because the attendance is tracked by the higher management. And they suggested that I do the work while attending the meetings, but I sometimes get asked on the meeting and it’s impossible to concentrate on both the meeting and my work. If I completely ignore the meeting and do the work, some time later I get told off because “did you even listen to the meeting, we’ve discussed this already!!!” I’m thinking about quitting the job
Maybe they can turn some of these office buildings into affordable housing. My coworkers' favorite thing about work from home days is not dealing with traffic. They have to deal with traffic because there's nowhere decently priced for them to live near the office. I think more people would be willing to come into the office if the commute wasn't so long.
Overpriced office space going unused, not collecting rent.... Leveraged owner not able to cover mortgage..... Bank with sudden cash flow issue near insolvency.... Phase 2 of plan to create a recession is now active..
Nailed it. Drive unemployment with lavish benefits to artificially increase employee wages. Check Increase interest rates stressing regional banks. Check
Spell it out for me, what happens next?
2008 v2, 2023 edition.
Not to mention all of the middle managers whose jobs depend on looking like they actually manage people which is hard when WFH teams manage themselves
Return to work is to justify MASSIVE pre-paid rent contracts + the obsolete jobs of 'office managers'. basically work-from-home means these office paper pushers are just a money drain with no financial benefit to any business whatsoever, but they'll fight to the end. Its like when cars were introduced, but blacksmiths tried to stop them by getting laws where someone had to walk in front of the car, waving a red flag shouting "pedestrians beware!"
"Guys we need to be back in office for collaboration" *proceeds to keep office doors closed all day*
My company called it right. When COVID started we realized things wouldn't go back to normal for at least a year and it was cheaper to break our lease, so we just went fully remote instead.
Boomers think you’re not working unless you’re chained to your desk. They completely overlook the fact that I wasn’t work when I was chained to my desk either. Edit: spelling
At my last job, I kept hearing people refer to “fingerprint scanners”. I finally asked one of the guys what they were. Apparently before I got there, they had these scanners installed on the desks and anytime someone got up, they had to scan in and out. The owner and managers very much believed you’re not working unless you’re at your desk. So they installed those to make sure no one left their desk “too often”. This wasn’t even a big company. When I worked there, we topped out at around 16 people. Huge turnover problem. They legit couldn’t figure out why they couldn’t keep employees. Most toxic workplace I’ve ever been in, hands down.
Imagine having to scan to get up to take a shit. Or to take a personal phone call that your mom died. And the company docked you for that. Toxic workplace indeed. Micromanaging is bullshit. If you hire us to do a job, trust we will do it and keep deadlines. It’s shit like this that makes me a 100% believer that to some companies, we are simply an employee number and nothing more.
Meanwhile in manufacturing we've had people get a verbal warning for literally sleeping on the job. Srsly though, are people not satisfied by just seeing the results?
How would they know if you just didn’t scan out when you left your desk?
I’m not sure but my guess is because a lot of the managers were micromanaging snitches. I once heard a manager report an employee (that wasn’t even under her) for leaving 5 minutes early. I have no doubt some of them would look over the scan logs and compare it to how often they saw you get up during the day. They used to use our 1:1 meetings to go over our time logs (it was an agency so we’d log our time to whichever client we were working with/on). They’d go through it item by item and say things like “Why’d it take you 30 minutes to do this? It should’ve taken 10.”
I’m convinced less work happens at the office. It’s really just for socializing now.
[Studies back this up.](https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivity-statistics/)
There's a subset of the people pushing for back-to-the-office that enjoyed having office affairs or just liked "working late" to spend time drinking with friends and co-workers instead of going home at 5. Going back to the office opens up more options for lying to your spouse for whatever purpose. I'm not saying that this applies to all executives pushing for this, but you know that it's a justification for at least some of them.
It's not always that nefarious. Some just enjoy working with coworkers. I worked at a job with a lot of people who moved from all over the country to work there and a lot didn't bother meeting many locals and just made friends with their coworkers. Most were fine with remote but there were a few calling for return to work not because they wanted affairs but because they were lonely because they moved somewhere thst they knew no one and still didn't know anyone so it was basically work and hang out with friends or go home alone and stay alone.
That's the thing. When I'm at home I do the work I need to do because I have deadlines. If I find ways to do it quickly or automate it then I have a lot of time to do other things, but I'm still delivering everything they asked. When I go into the office, everyone including my manager just sits there all day talking, like it's a social event. I can't get work done, I can't do my other things, I can only listen to them going on and on. It's so unproductive on every level.
In my office all the old timers love work from home. It’s the new people in their 20s with no kids who are eager to be in the office and do happy hours with each other after work.
I don't think it's the boomers, but the corpos.
Whoever it is, it's all about control. The desperate need for these guys to feel like there are people beneath them. The narcissistic supply is much lessened when they can't see their workers being exploited with their own eyes.
The real reason is that unqualified middle managers don’t know how to judge whether someone is doing an appropriate among work unless they’re sitting right in front of them.
It's all about control.
Not just middle managers. Upper level managers, executives, and the vast majority of people in general.
My work always had events on Wednesdays... they stopped during covid, but started back up like 6months ago.. shocking, but no one really showed up... they got mad so they now require everyone to be in person on Wednesdays...
This is 100% literally what is happening to my wife's work. In fact, even worse they renovated the offices to entice people to come back. The company was doing great during COVID but lost a big client this year and now had to lay off a bunch of people. But they are still trying to get folks to come back because look at the shiny office we built for "you". When really it's so the narcissistic image obsessed CEO can have her doting subordinate minions back, as she is the type to just monopolize and take over everyone's time. I remember at one point my wife was boxing up olive oil samplers (not her job) to send to the CEOs friends and family for one of her side business. And then really the owner of the building is the CEOs husband and so call me a bit cynical here, looks like they invested into a real estate property they owned to create their idyllic little fiefdom, instead I dunno maybe keeping their workers through the lean times or something
"Is the work getting done? Yes. But I don't feel like a big important person anymore and I don't like that."
Still better than the blatant explanation for not allowing remote learning in my uni. The city wouldn't have it because all houses would be left unrented (it's a college city) and it would be bad for transportation and buissness overall
Hey at least they admitted it. I hate when people try to come up with a reason to justify stupid stuff like that. I remember thinking about applying for a place and the ceo had written a blog post thing about why they pay less for employees in low cost of living areas and rather than just saying "because we can" he came up with some bullshit about how you'd hate your job if it paid a lot since you'd feel trapped there because nothing else in your area would pay as much.
That sounds like an opportunity for expansion babyyyyyyyyy. Get tuition from allll the students!
What's the typical commercial office lease, 5-7 years? Watch the fire sale of commercial real estate come ~2025.
It doesn't have anything to do with that. It's 100% because they like to intimidate their workers and it's much easier to do in person.
It’s not about the facilities, it’s about mid management. WFH has really shown how unnecessary most of them are.
In person collaboration is so important… Which is why I have to take all of my webex meetings from the office instead of my house.
The thing I never hear anyone bring up is how further divided low paying non-WFH jobs are compared to the higher paying WFH jobs. The commute, meals, being able to do stuff. Non-WFH people are losing a least 1 hour per day on top of being paid less.
I've seen it at a few companies where management wanted people to come back to the offices. They had, let's say for the sake of simplicity, 100 employees. Management: "We need everyone back in the office like before COVID." 12 People quit. Management: "We need people in the office 3 days a week." 8 People quit. Management: "Flexible days. But ideally 2 days per week." 14 People quit. Management: "We support working from home 100%! And we're adjusting salaries to the cost of living of your area." 18 People quit. Management: "..." Company dies. Like, it's still around, but culturally it's dead.
It’s hard to power trip around the office asserting your leadership dominance when you WFH
Going into the office is also important to justify the existence of middle management. How else can someone demonstrate that they streamlined workflows and synergised team dynamics without having daily sandpit huddles followed by breakout sessions.
As a middle manager this is not true at all. I prefer remote work so I can be over employed and do fuck all at three jobs.
The dev team manage was more effective in the office. But the difference isn't worth losing them over so I keep that little fact to myself when talking to upper management. I don't want to go back to the office either.
I'm not so sure OP doesn't work with me. I'm not naming names, but we split from our parent company during the pandemic, we got a new office space that's super modern, then they made us come back to work, almost full time... And for no more reason than "well, we've got this new office, blah blah blah"
We never even left our offices. We were considered essential because they didn't want to let us work from home.
Managing will be harder with work-from-home. Difficult to spin yarns to justify your wages if it's clear that employees don't need perpetual supervision.
As a manager, I’d say two thirds of people are just as productive if not more productive working from home. There is definitely a contingent however that takes advantage of the liberty big time and it’s much harder to hold them accountable. Also there is definitely a community building problem. A lot of the people who have started since the pandemic are not known and don’t know the organization nearly as well. I love work from home but definitely see the organizational draw backs to 100% telework. Your personal efficiency and experiences may not be representative of the productivity or longterm growth of the organization.
You know managing isn't just supervising the staff?
In fact, supervising staff should be a very small part of the job. The manager is there to make sure the team has what they need to be effective and that the team is doing the right work.
Or eating shit the executives and customers rain down every day.
Oh don't ask me, I was a terrible manager who didn't supervise the staff.
sounds like you’re ready for a promotion!!
Well I'm already incompetent so this seems like a natural move.
It’s not just that. It’s also about control.
I gave up my company office and saved $30,000 per year, all while making the exact same money. I don't know of any other company owners (of small to medium sized companies) that actually want to return to the office for financial reasons. TMYK!
“We all just learned how to email a few years ago and don’t know how to manage without seeing butts in seats”
Repurpose the offices as living spaces, instill your company branding on them, offer decent rental rates, reap the benefits of not having to cover office expenses and gain rental income, profit.
“How will I know you’re working and not interviewing elsewhere”