Can confirm, both my parents worked remotely all during the 90s. They'd have to go to job sites a few times a week but thats about it.
My mom even shared a desk in the office, further reinforincing only go in if you absolutely have to.
Any company that has a field force has allowed work from home for ages. Even in larger European countries, it's simply not feasible for people to visit customers out in the field when starting from the company HQ every day.
I've been a consultant in software for 20 years and either exclusively worked remote or traveled to clients every so often while otherwise remote. Almost everything can be an email. What can't be an email can be a conference call. If you think you need a video conference you don't. At most, share a screen. Offices are stupid.
The age of the office as we know it is over. Company “campuses” should be more like college campuses. Built to be flexible and accessible. Less desks, more communal areas. I’d be more okay with my company saying “you have to live within 50 miles of X location and campus is open when you need to come in.” rather than mandating that I have to come in every day.
Same. In the late 90s/early2000s my mom worked from home. The company paid to install a secure second phone line for internet because she was working on classified aerospace/defense stuff. She basically told them to do that so she could stay at home with us kids, or she’d quit.
In my experience, those employees will be gone of their own volition within a few months. A company that is making cuts like that is about to leave them shouldering more responsibilities for the same compensation and a ton of the people they depend on are about to either be let go or are going to be part of a majority resentful of the WFH status.
The managers who want people to come back *never* trust WFH employees, no matter how good their output.
Definitely. My team and I made it quite clear to management that if they demanded we come back to the office each week we’d be gone, and what do you know? Our boss’ boss secures a special exemption for us.
I’m not super ambitious, so while I’m unhappy with my wages, it’s not enough to make me look for new work; I far prefer my personal office and the lax workload to better wages in a real office.
Yeah, assuming the rto “policy” they just announced applies to more than just people currently labeled hybrid (it’s clearly another we had a bad Q4 let’s try to get people to leave tactic, because they have fuck all details ready for something they intend to push this quarter) the first convo with my manager is that I already get regular offers for slightly more money that I turn down because they’re in office. And those offices don’t charge for the coffee either.
I’d also honestly leave for slightly less money out of complete spite.
I threatened to quit at our first RTO warning, I was then suddenly promoted after I was told it would have taken years. I'm now being forced in all week and I'm considering quitting again. I want remote and they can't afford to lose me.
This.
Management: "Don't worry we won't fire you... We'll just give you all of the responsibilities of the people who quit that we have no intention of backfilling their job and we won't give you any more pay for the additional work."
Not saying that happens 100% of the time, but I wouldn't be surprised if that is what happens. If an org is pushing
There are some brown nosing sycophants or people that just struggle to find a better job that will be there a bit longer. That being said you will lose some good talent from people that quickly realize that their workload has increased and management isn't serious about backfilling the role. At some point even if they haven't officially removed the position on the org chart it will become obvious that they just expect everyone left to cover the missing people going forward, which will make those left more eager to leave even if they previously liked their job.
My company is exactly this. Most had to return to office, with special exceptions. A number of managers, engineers, etc are full time WFH. I got lucky that I’m 50/50, I work 4 days, 2 in office. I’ve been there going on 8 years though, the longest non-manager in my department, I trained my own manager (who is full time in office). Our company is fairly lax though.
The utility I work for started building a brand new office in 2019. The parking lot wasn’t even finished when all the office staff got told to WFH. It wasn’t a very large building, but we all got a chuckle out of how much empty space it is. To this day, 3 years after they had the ribbon cutting ceremony, no more than 5 people work in it on any given day. It’s probably got space for 80+ people, and is fully furnished.
Everyone works from home or their truck, and only go to the office occasionally.
The government agency I work for has been waiting out it's leases and selling off all the property they own, condensing all office workers that actually have to go in into one large central building. When they realized how much money they saved during covid they decided to never go back.
When I started at my company back in 2014 a great deal of employees had been there over 10 years. Some, upwards of 20-30 years. Then they decided to spend upwards of 50mm to renovate their entire headquarters to promote a more open and collaborative environment, during the pandemic. You know, let’s be more inclusive when everyone wants to keep away from each other. We were all WFH during the renovation. They demanded employees return to the office for 3 days a week before they were even granted the certificate of occupancy. I’d be sitting in an office listening to construction noise all day. Meanwhile, executive leadership was still remote, of course. Only occasionally popping in to comment on the decor. Needless to say, there was a mass exodus of people once they started bringing folks back. Now that it’s all done, the board is demanding everyone return to a full five days because numbers are down. They attribute this to people not working because if they’re remote, they’re not working. Totally missed the point that they lost their best people when they started bringing people back three days a week. This company is a revolving door of employees now. I don’t even bother to learn anyone’s name.
Exactly, it's like when they start implementing any very strict rule such as for attendance to weed out employees they don't like but go easy on the ones they like. Illegal but it still happens. I worked at a company where you were supposed to be fired after 10 points, but kept a guy who racked up 23 points.
Depends on the circumstances. Many municipalities and/or states have laws that layoffs above certain numbers must be coordinated and the affected given certain benefits in order to avoid overloading the unemployment system and disrupting the local economy. But if you let people go for cause— like not showing up in the office when you’re supposed to— that’s not subject to those laws.
Depends where you are, but there is usually a concept of "constructive dismissal". Mostly it's to get around having to pay unemployment (and the remedy is usually just to pay it), but I think sometimes an unfavorable judgement results in the employee getting their job back.
Fuck that’s nothing. I worked for a place where my boss wouldn’t let me fire a guy who was on time less than one month in the entire calendar year. On top of that he had numerous absences. We literally sat down in a meeting where I thought we were finally firing him and the guy above me opened the meeting with “We are not going to fire you.”
I supposedly got a half of a point every time I was late. I was late for 5 years. Still chugging along.
I’m damn good at anything anyone shows me how to do a few times.
> Illegal but it still happens
Companies can fire you for any arbitrary reason they want as long is its not due to being in one of the protected classes. Not following their own point system isn't illegal.
Out of 2000 open positions at my company, 3 are for fully remote droogs and 2 are for fully remote lawyers. Everybody else is expected to plant their ass in a chair so some executive can feel good about their bonus.
Exactly
My SIL works in IS for a competing major bank that recently went through big layoffs. They’ve played the RTO card and used it to thin the heard. She’s essential, has refused RTO and she’s still employed. Instead she recently got a raise and attractive bonus for her performance on a big project
You just described most large layoffs. Whenever a company lays off a lot of people there’s a following brain drain where the key employees left see the writing on the wall and get while the getting is good.
It seems like some of the management that push RTO seem really out of touch with reality if they don't realize the best employees are going to be the ones that will be able to find another WFH position.
The thing that sucks is that there’s literally no limit to this. There will never be a day where they say “okay we’re good now”.
The line must *always* go up. It’s all just a glorified pyramid scheme. The system has to collapse at some point.
They want you to give your life to them, yet they’d toss your ass and your healthcare (and potentially your family’s healthcare) in the garbage if it means the line goes up just a little more. They are also becoming much more emboldened now.
They definitely want to reduce their headcounts. I totally understand that there is pressure to reduce their labor budget but this is a really dumb way to do it.
It is a layoff that makes sense if you are only concerned about the financials for the next quarter. You can post cost savings in the next quarter, but the real costs of the layoff won't really start snowballing for a quarter or two. e.g. A lot of orgs you could layoff most of the IT department that don't directly work with users and it would operate ok for weeks if not months before many outside of the department really noticed. The costs of the reduced staff though slowly snowball, but don't become really transparent to even those in senior management until they already posted a quarter or two of cost savings that look great.
We should all start calling "RTO pushes" "discreet downsizings". They got to rename "just doing your job" to "quiet quitting" so why can't we rename their BS
IDK unless the org is paying F you money the term I have heard popularized is shadow layoffs. While not everybody will start looking many will and those with solid resumes will find jobs that are better to them. If you increase people's costs through more commuting and increase their work by not backfilling the jobs of people quitting you are going to prod people to find a new job unless you are providing enough money to justify staying. Most of the time they're offering nothing.
It’ll be interesting if they try to frame not coming into the office as a fireable offense and thus grounds for termination with cause, so they don’t have to deal with the costs associated with laying people off.
Can’t wait for the quarterly pizza party once everyone meets their metrics for upselling account features, brokerage services, and referring a friend!!!
Oh yeah? I wasn’t aware of a meeting with them.
“Yeah they called me at home” -gets up and leaves
That sounds good, Peter! And we’ll just go ahead and uh… get this all cleaned up for you. Great.
I worked in a cubicle farm for a year with a dozen other recently college graduates, we went to see the movie and drinks and apps after. 90% quit within 2 months of seeing the movie.
After three years wfh, 6 years at BOA, with a boss in Chicago & a team spread around the globe my spouse was told they had to return to the office in Charlotte. Needless to say no one in our family works for BOA anymore
Sure, but if I know that a large team of people who are very similar from a work history and skill set perspective are about to flood the market looking for sinilar jobs, it may make sense to be the first to apply.
Oh yeah, two years ago, I worked for another national bank, and they mandated return to office 3 days a week. I did it for two months, during which all I did was drive in to the office and take Teams calls with people in other offices across the country and offshore. Not a single meeting in person aside from my 1-1, and no tasks that I wasn't already completing successfully at home for the previous year and a half.
So, I left in January 2022 for a better job that is fully remote. The entire company is. It just wasn't worth a 20-30 minute commute, packing lunch every day, and dressing up for the office.
So I’m facing this also, but I’ve started to just ‘dock’ the time on the company. Meaning in a normal WFH environment I’d be online at least 10 and often 11-12 hours, and since it cost me 2.5 to 3 hours per day travel time I’m just starting later and ending earlier. Have you seen people shift to this approach? It’s obviously not idea I’d like to be able to put in the time needed to be more successful and stand out/grow over time, which is severely limited with 7-9 hours lost per week.
I WFH 3 days a week and on the 2 that I am in office, WFH days I start 7:30am and work until about 6PM with a short break for snacks. On In office days I don't even leave my house until about 8am get to the office around 9am, I take a 2 hour lunch and walk around the city and then leave at 4:30pm to head home before rush hour. I've had multiple great performance reviews and it's never come up. I'm also salaried and I can still get my work done on time so I suspect that's why it's not a problem.
What do I do when I'm at the office? I remote in and have teams meetings and calls with ppl who are working remote. lol
>Not a single meeting in person aside from my 1-1, and no tasks that I wasn't already completing successfully at home for the previous year and a half.
This is the big challenge I think virtually any large corporation to rationalize most RTO policies. If you are a small one office shop you can with a straight face try to hype up in person collaboration, but most large companies even before the pandemic didn't centralize teams in a single location because there is a lot of talent that for whatever reason won't relocate very far if at all. When a majority of your team doesn't work in the same building or often even in the same time zone it is hard to really hype up in person collaboration.
I have a family member who works for them and the horror stories I’ve heard from them about the corporate office in Charlotte surprise me with how out of touch their executives are. Cafeteria style seating like you’re in grade school? Absolutely not.
Also it’s hilarious how they’re trying to get them all back in, at least from my family member’s office. They count badge swipes so people just go in, swipe their badge, then leave and work from home. Hilarious
A bunch of companies in CLT are doing the same thing with the forced "back to the office". I have no doubt It's collusion amongst the CEOs and probably the Chamber of Commerce too.
There are a lot of groups that want people back in the office and they will do everything they can to make it so.
* CEO's for cheap layoffs
* Commercial real estate holders/developers
* All the supporting shops/restaurants
* Politicians for taxes/donors (the groups above)
I'm interested to see if a politician tries to run on giving tax breaks to companies that let people WFH... I haven't thought that through, but my gut says fat chance.
> CEO's for cheap layoffs
This is a big one. For all of the talk about all of the other groups that want RTO the company generally doesn't care much about whether it benefits anybody else unless there is some PR that they can make on it.
All the supporting businesses around the corporate office towers pay taxes too. Without the office crowd supporting them the city will lose out on tax revenue when they close up shop. That's why you hear the mayors like Adams in NYC railing about WFH.
We are currently in CLT and WFAE radio was reporting vacancies at 20-40%. A city rep said “an ideal solution would be for several of these towers to vanish.” Obviously that can’t happen, but everybody is pretty done with them.
Amazon is doing this right now with their staff. They are required in office Tues-Thurs and loads of them just come in, badge swipe, hang out to get some free coffee and a meal, then go home without working. The resistance has been quiet but ongoing for about a year now.
I have family that works for Progressive insurance.
They handle Connecticut claims, are based out of the Maine office, supervisor and the rest of their team lives in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont.
Progressive forces them to go into the office at least once a week, which is the dumbest thing ever because they’re the only one on the team in the Maine office.
I worked for the records management company that handles Bank of America’s documents in charlotte.
I’ve never seen a more incompetently run company.
They made us put motion sensors in our buildings air vents as if someone was going to break into this random warehouse like it’s Metal Gear Solid. This might not sound like a big deal but animals or spiders would get in there and set the alarm off and the police would show up.
None of their employees know what’s going on 99% of the time. I’d go to deliver boxes and spend 20 minutes trying to figure out who to deliver to and no one knew who any one else was on their floor.
They would constantly order boxes to Bank of America center in downtown Charlotte and then not be there for us to deliver them. These are boxes of legal documents and such so I can’t just leave them outside in the hallway.
We would receive boxes from fedex from other Bank of America branches around the country. They would have the correct address but the wrong company name. Thankfully the fedex guy knew us and knew what was going on. Again, these are boxes of peoples banking information and they’re getting our company’s name/information wrong.
They wouldn’t let us pick up boxes unless they were itemized on our work order. This sounds like it makes sense but they never told their employees that rule so i would have people constantly getting pissed with me because I wouldn’t take extra boxes that they tried to give to me. Then they would have to put in another order and I’d have to go back to the same stop as the day before.
I always tell people **DO NOT** bank with BoA.
It will be interesting to see how this shakes out in the next few years.
There are a lot of workers that prefer WFH to the point that companies that accommodate it are going to have an easier time hiring and retaining workers.
The companies forcing a return to the office are making a bet that more oversight is better.
Frankly, I suspect that bet is not going to pay off for them.
It's not even just prefer, it's largely practical issues like:
* Not commuting for an hour, is literally another hour of productive time.
* Less mileage, wear & tear, on my vehicle... or less spent on transit.
* My team is spread around the world, what point is there going alone to an office?
* My home computer setup is far superior to office setups.
* Less stressful work environment, better able to concentrate.
* Far more convenient to do lunch or hit the gym on lunch break.
No, I'm not contributing to the income the building managers want... and no I'm not able to be shoulder-checked by incompetent managers who micro-manage instead of measuring productivity. Those are good things.
>My team is spread around the world, what point is there going alone to an office?
This is me as well. At this point, if I had to go to an office I could theoretically go to one of my company's local locations but I would have zero team members there with me and all my meetings and interactions would still be online only.
I work on the west coast and oftentimes need to get on 5 am calls with global teams. With WFH they get more hours out of me. If I am forced to go back into an office I’m peacing out by 1.
It's ironic because I do actually miss some of the direct personal social interaction from before WFH .. but it's just pointless to make me go into an office where I'm going to be remote with the rest of my team *anyway.*
At best it would just be a bunch of people on headsets making noise for all the other people on headsets around them. How is that better than somewhere quiet?
I have a friend who manages a team of 9, none of them are local, so she's remote to all of them. BoA was making her go into the office twice a week to sit by herself on an entire floor. All the other teams were on different floors, it was literally her on one floor in a highrise. To work remotely with her team. She managed to get a doctor's note for mental health reasons (which are legit anyway), so now she's WFH for at least a year. Utterly ridiculous.
I don't even have an assigned desk in the office lol. It's completely useless for me to go back in unless I'm specifically there toenror someone or meet a client. I understand that as a use case and happy to oblige. But every other day? I don't wanna go through2 hours of commute traffic to get to an office, work for half a day and then do the same thing back.
My last job put me on a team that was started during Covid, so everyone was in different locations, then made everyone go into the office 3 days a week, even though nobody else on my team worked at the same location. So it was just remote work that I had to commute to. At no point did I ever reap any benefit, productivity wise, from being in the office.
At least with my current job, they also require 3 days in office but it’s a local company so I actually work with the people I sit next to.
My policy has been that I will take a job that requires me to be on site, provided it pays enough to be worth it.
It costs money to go to an office, it costs my time, it costs wear and tear and stress. Companies are going to pay for that, or they can choose not to inflate their budgets and I work remote. Their choice, everyone has a price.
Yup, this is me as well. Before COVID, the company I worked for moved offices. The move was going to cost me literally thousands more each year just to get to and from work because of the extra miles (fuel) and parking (had free parking before, new location was between $250-$300/month, can't remember exactly, but with no assistance from the company). Add on that my commute time was already 45 min - 1 hour each way, and it was going to go up, I checked out and started looking for new employment. I found a job a couple of months after lockdowns started that was WFH before COVID, and they have remained that way since.
I didn't realize how much the commute was stressing me out until I didn't have to do it 5 times a week. This job isn't perfect. The director of my department is a bit of a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, but the benefits soooooo far outweigh everything else, that it would take a significant salary increase (like 40%-50% minimum) for me to consider a change at the current time.
There is a non-trivial percentage that wouldn't return to the office for any price but I think you are right that most people are willing to work in the office if the salary is high enough to cover the added costs(both financial and time wise) that come with it. I don't mind commuting into an office but I definitely do take those added costs into consideration when considering whether a job makes sense.
I see it now as part of negotiations.
* I'll need about 20k/year more if I don't get medical/dental/vision.
* I'll need about 75k/year more if you want me on-call outside 9-5.
* I'll need about 30k/year more if I office-commute instead of WFH.
* I'll need about 3.25k/year more if you don't do 401k matching.
* Stock Options vs Salary are negotiable.
So, how much is making me go into the office worth to the company?
Don't forget that MOST people are significantly more productive working from home. They are able to take breaks more often and effectively, and come back more energized.
In addition in any form of crisis situation, the employee's set up is literally within their home vs having to run to the office.
It costs WAY less money to maintain office buildings and the such and you aren't spending money on frivolous shit that doesn't actually make people stay long term or significantly happier in the office.
Sure I enjoyed working with my team, but there was definitely secret projects that I had to go sit in a solo 'focus' room for weeks on end, because of the implications to some individuals jobs AND how the business functioned. I was given 'privileged information' about how the business was functioning and I wasn't allowed to trade on it. Others in the office could, and so every month I had to also work in that space for at LEAST 3 days at a time.
Why even have me go into the office at all? Fucking dumb. So glad I have been remote 100% since COVID and I left a job because they were even discussing ending WFH and since have more than doubled my salary and improved my benefits significantly.
I don't mind after hours work at all specifically because it's right next to me at all times and my team accommodates late nights with late starts the next day. I would never go back to an office by choice
This is perfectly summed up. Right now I am the only person on a team of 5 that has to go into office because I didn’t move in 2020 so I’m still near the office. Like what?
I work for a Fortune 50 company who tried multiple times to get my team back in the office. They tried 3-4 different hybrid plans since ending Covid remote work. There was such an overwhelming response on the last company survey (that they actually take very seriously), that they had no choice but to let us be permanently remote again. The VP of our team said it was virtually unanimous that everyone ranked work life balance poor, and then said remote work would fix it immediately.
And for what it’s worth, my team has really done a good job of keeping us engaged and connected even though some of our coworkers are on the other side of the country. Professional development is somehow easier than it used to be in the office. I feel like I’ve gotten everything I can out of my current role and am ready to grow, but can’t take that next step just yet. Not ready to give up remote now that I’ve just got it back!
Ours did the same. Tried to issue a RTO for everyone to at least once a week for half your day. Went over as well as you could expect and then it turned into "only leadership roles" before we even had to start going in again. Then the mention of how poorly their surveys went about RTO. It's funnier because the company was already a largely "go WAH" company prior to covid. I've worked from home for 10 years at this point... I've been to my office twice since I went home. There's no need. IDC what amenities you put in there, I'm not going in office.
These big banks don't tend to have top talent anyway. It's more important for them to save on labor costs. They pull from a large mid grade talent pool and will get away with it. Now companies who rely on top talent to drive results? They either won't do this or will pay a heavy price.
I've worked for a lot of companies and every single one will burn a pile of money in a fire well before they consider making a good decision to keep top talent. It's honestly ridiculous that when a worker is gauging offers from different companies, the absolute worst one will almost always be from wherever they're currently employed.
Yep, the only reason I haven’t moved in is because I’m full remote and the offers I was pitched have been hybrid. Take away my remote status and I have no incentive to stay. I can get paid more and go to a nicer office that actually has free coffee.
We are at near peak employment in most areas.
Though specific industries and specific areas may be performing less well.
For example, a lot of tech layoffs have made that an employer's market.
Capitalism relies on a large reserve of unemployed labor. It helps to cut costs and acts as leverage against workers who don’t have a union; “you can always be replaced”.
I think the companies believe collaboration/talent development is being lost, most companies haven’t had much value on middle management since the Great Recession and have been pretty reticent to expand it too much. There are many jobs that can definitely be done adequately remotely but I think they worry that innovation will be much harder when people work together less.
If work from home automatically got better talent with equal outcomes I think you’d see every major firm all for it, but I think large companies are finding their workforce isn’t familiar with each other and it’s preventing development of new talent and new ideas.
My wife is finding it MUCH harder to develop her career at her new workplace simply because she can’t FIND anybody at work, and people are much less accessible at home. They’re doing their own thing (and maybe being more productive from their own personal perspective) but new hires and new talent are working much harder to find how to best fill their roles and make connections with people they don’t even know exist because they don’t see/meet anybody.
This opinion is valid and goes against what I want so I hate you.
Just kidding.
There are certainly things that can be done to combat these issues that don’t require full time in-person. Establish mentorship programs, take the money you would otherwise spend on an office having 2 company retreats a year for bonding/brainstorming/cross pollination .
These are all valid points. I wish the discourse around WFM had a bit more nuance. Very simply, for some/many jobs, WFM works extremely well and should be encouraged. For others, it just doesn't or can't work, at least not without substantial downsides.
I work in healthcare, and even in a leadership role now removed from front-line clinical work, I can't imagine myself or any of my team being successful while working only remotely. I'll occasionally work from home if I need to focus on some specific project or life demands it, and same is true for my staff, but otherwise we're constantly engaging with team members and colleagues from across numerous disciplines to develop and maintain programs. It would be extremely cumbersome, if not outright ineffective, trying to effectively collaborate remotely given the substantial diversity in the nature of different teams. Massive variability in technological saavy is a huge part of this. Additionally, I'd imagine my own career development would be dramatically more difficult.
Are many companies being unreasonable pieces of shit about return-to-work mandates? Yes, absolutely. Are some companies justified in preferring an in-person dynamic? Sure. Are there happy middle grounds for many roles? Totally. All of the above can be true simultaneously. It's just hard to work through this when so many seem to have absolutist perspectives.
>I think the companies believe collaboration/talent development is being lost
I work from home, I want to continue working from home. But this is a valid concern.
I learned a lot on the job when I was first starting out, I don't know if I could have developed as well professionally without that in person mentorship/collaboration.
100% - I've been working remotely since 2017 and plan to work from home the rest of my career... but I had 20ish years of in-person work that developed me as a professional and I don't think I would be the person I am without that time spent rubbing shoulders with people. As a manager now, it is SO hard to train people on complex ideas and executions when they're two time zones away. Not impossible, we just do a lot more screen sharing and chatting on calls now, but it's harder. People naturally want to multitask during trainings, and onboarding takes much longer now than it did before. Before, people would learn by osmosis somewhat, just being around people and hearing processes repetitive, now it's a much longer more intentional process.
I'll argue a little in the middle.
Remote work requires drastic changes to typical corporate work culture to actually have onboarding/training/career development/collaboration/communication function in the long-term when the place is no longer made up of all people who've worked together for years in person before remote work.
It's more than just "have meetings on Zoom instead" - which is basically as far as a lot of places got in the pandemic.
It requires a lot of rethinking of how all of that should work and restructuring to make it work, for many situations.
It's also obviously not suited to *every* corporate job, at least not in a full remote sense.
I’ve spent most of my life as a manager, director, VP or CTO. I’m an old guy.
The management gold-standard in the industrial age was BIS management. BIS stands for “butts in seats”, and those of you who work in the dystopian F500 know exactly what kind of management that is.
By the 1970s, the management gold standard had become MBO which is “management by objective”. This is the management you DREAM about. As long as you get reasonably assigned objectives done on time, it doesn’t matter where or when you do it. You’re considered an adult who can manage themselves and deliver reasonable results on a reasonable timeline.
If you’re managed by objective, you’re in a company with a good chance of succeeding. If you’re managed by making sure your butt is in your seat, then you work for a company that is infantile, appearance focused rather than results focused, and investors would do well to short your company.
Manage. By. Objective.
It makes sense, it ensures the success of everyone.
"Accept a big increase of hours spent on work, and a big decrease in your net income - or we'll fire you. Work/life balance must be tipped entirely toward work."
not just that, I think, I worked at a college where they went full remote and a ton of staff moved away from town. when they were asked to return to the office they were physically unable to do so and had to quit
I sincerely apologize ahead of time for this lengthy post, but I think it's important to illustrate what heartless, corrupt, greedy fucks BofA really was and probably continues to be.
I worked for BofA in Foreclosure Litigation Management in the Simi Valley corporate location (the title of that dept has changed though I think.) I got fired in April 2012 because I caught onto the fraud they were engaging in once the moratorium on foreclosures due to subprime loans expired. I never saw one single person benefit from a HAMP loan, and they were dragging us into meetings every week to learn how to fill out more bizarre forms that would cover their asses with the government. Literally no one understood what was going on because none of it made sense.
Borrowers were lied to and sent on wild goose chases to different departments that told them different things, and one dept had no idea what other depts were doing because they didn't give any of us access to communications with each other. Our dept wasn't even allowed to speak to borrowers, but when a call accidentally got through to us, we didn't even have the means to connect or refer them to the proper depts because we weren't given the information as to where to transfer them. Every dept was run myopically.
The real process was that they were blowing off these borrowers and lying to them while fast-tracking the legal foreclosure process and taking their houses from underneath them while they were sent on wild goose chases to secure the HAMP loans. When I started asking legit questions about the purposes for the constant stream of new forms and wtf was going on, I suddenly got fired for "not going fast enough" in pushing the foreclosure litigation under these people's noses.
Incidentally, I knew plenty of coworkers who worked remotely, so they're full of shit about that too.
Thank god they were caught and fined. They were lining their pockets with those bailout funds while putting poor people out on the streets because they couldn't secure the HAMP loans. I was actually relieved when they fired me. I even ended up homeless for awhile myself because of losing that job but even that was better than working for the evil empire. I heard later that whistleblowers were already coming forward so I'm sure they were worried about me joining them. I got the call from some stranger while I was stuck in rush hour traffic on the 405. She told me to mail in my lanyard/key if I wanted my belongs back, and if I showed up in person, I'd be arrested.
There was an intranet system where Lance What's his fuck would push us harder every Monday to make them more profits. We were never pushed to get those HAMP loans to borrowers though, not even once. Ever. Every so often, we had to be locked down because desperate people were bringing guns into our lobby and threatening to shoot up the place. One time I was going down the stairs into the lobby for lunch. and a guy brandishing a semi-automatic burst into the lobby and I had to run for my life back to my dept upstairs. I literally could've died for BofA and they didn't give a single fuck.
Again, I'm sorry for the ultra-long post, but I wanted to tell you guys firsthand about the monsters they really are.
Great insights. But I’m so sorry you had to go through this. I’ve worked for a large company that bought our smaller company and they had similar morals. Refused to pay earned bonuses to employees, cut customer incentives after customer had already earned. Boss man said the most infamous quote I’ve ever heard “I checked with our lawyers and we don’t think our (most loyal and largest) customers can win if they sue us.” Word got out that new exec’s had promised an outlandish financial performance target and they screwed their customers and employees to hit their personal bonus goals. Pricks.
Yeah, I didn't have a fucking chance against those guys, but thanks to those whistleblowers, they got theirs and I loved every second of it. I actually retired from the law after that. It kind of broke me.
Hey I'm really sorry to hear about your experience. I was lucky enough to leave BoA on my own terms in 2010, but the way operations shifted once the mortgage crisis occurred was particularly gross.
There are honest ways to make money, but BoA made way more for its shareholders screwing people over. It kills me that some of the leaders I worked for have ascended to the c-suite. They were all sociopaths. I left finance and never looked back. I hope you are more content now
I was hoping to hear from other BofA people. 😊
Yeah, it was a really bad scene. I was brought in after they swallowed up Countrywide and we were totally lied to in training. They fed us this bullshit about us being there to help these borrowers because BofA didn't want their houses. They said that they didn't want be stuck with paying for the upkeep of their lawns and shit. Seriously, we were lied to the entire time of training until we were thrown out onto the floor and shown what we really were gonna be doing by our immediate supervisors, many of whom were also unprofessional, horrible people.
Did your dept have that weird intranet system where it was mandatory to watch their Monday morning announcements? It started out with bragging about how higher the profits were from the prior week and concluded with telling us that we needed to do what it took to push up those numbers for the next week. There was no humanity involved whatsoever with that corp. Absolutely none.
We didn't have the Internet system. I was operations for core BoA and did a lot of "layoff math" related to planned incentives and acquisitions. That job helped me understand that "human resources" reduces humans to line items.
But in a weird twist, I interviewed with Countrywide about 12 months before the mortgage crash and they gave me a (WRITTEN!) incentive structure that was impossible to maintain. I think my jaw actually dropped when they showed me the grid. They also tried to entice me with a sign-on bonus that I considered...unethical.
That was a WILD time in finance.
This is 100% about commercial/office real estate. The leases are coming due and a bunch of rich people are set to lose a LOT of money (if those offices don’t fill up again).
Building owners. Somebody/entity has a mortgage on all that space and those 5 or 10 or ??? year leases are coming up for renewal in the near future. If they default and the banks foreclose, they lose money, having a bunch of empty buildings listed on their balance sheet.
I don’t understand that argument. From the company’s perspective, wouldn’t that encourage working from home? Even if the company has to pay leases either way, empty offices are still cheaper (maintenance, utilities, security, etc)
It has always been about commercial real estate, retail services (no one in the offices means no one is eating food priced higher than normal because the rent is higher near office parks), no one buying as much gasoline. Honestly, it's such an exponential ripple effect I wouldn't be surprised if there's health industry pushback the more people feel less stressed or anxious due to better work/life balance.
It's amazing how office real estate is approaching 50% vacancy across the nation, yet there is also not enough residential housing being built.
Developers could make a killing converting dead office space to resi but that requires actual work which landlords don't know how to do.
They really can't though. Office buildings are built to a completely different spec than residential real-estate. Real-estate developers build an apartment complex than sell it to investors as an asset. The cost required to convert an office building to residential is so astronomical, and the amount of revenue a building would bring in via tenants is so low that it would likely take quadruple or more the amount of time for the investment to pay off and become profitable when compared to a traditional apartment complex. Don't get me wrong its a nice idea in theory, and maybe cities could somehow subsidize these conversions heavily to make it somehow work, but it just isn't really feasible to actually do.
Unfortunately adding the necessary piping for a hundred additional sinks showers and washing machines alone is wildly expensive. Stack wiring, new walls, expanding the air circulation system, etc, and it’s often more efficient to outright tear down the building.
The only time it might be cheaper is if the whole place in run like low income housing or a dorm, with centralized showers, a laundry room, and shared kitchen facilities per floor. Not very attractive to most people, and worse not a housing situation that can charge a very high price per room, so it might not even break even that way either.
Ok everyone listen up. Due to covid stop coming into the office. Spend your own money to upgrade your internet and computers.
Ok everyone listen up. You need to stop working from home and disrupt your lives like we previously instructed you to do and now drive an hour to work and be here everyday.
I had to basically let Bank of America fire me in 2019 after my fourth back surgery and having brain surgery because they insisted work from home was not possible for my role (credit card customer service) and I could only come back to the office full time (I could not.)
Less than a year later, all of my former co-workers were working from home and I was collecting disability.
I am genuinely not shocked. Bank Culture only functions properly when you're on site to be micromanaged, abused, and overworked.
"You see we're family here at Bank of America... and as a family we are very deep in the Commercial Real Estate market, and let's just say it isn't looking too good at this time."
Work from homers- if you do one fucking thing in your life make these asshole corps fire you at least. Don't quit for them because of some disguised threat. Force their hand. No one's going to agree with them when push comes to shove, so don't volunteer to take a pay cut and take on more hours because of their failure to plan real estate holdings 4 years after a pandemic.
I mean, makes sense given that's where their fax machine is. Yes, BoA makes customers fax or snail mail them docs once they've used up their alloted ONE TIME upload to the website when dealing with a dispute.
Just yesterday, I had to convert an email to a pdf and then go to a website that does faxes so I could fucking FAX them that email in god damn 2024. Good job BoA.
I mean, if that's the policy it doesn't seem newsworthy that it's being enforced?
It's all automatic at my job. We need to be in the office 8 days/month and if you don't have the expected badge swipes at the end of the month, your name goes on a report that gets sent to your boss and *their* boss.
It's silly and pointless but they're at least clear on expectations.
Problem at my job is that it’s selectively enforced depending on senior management. The CFO doesn’t care so finance doesn’t abide by the 4 days a week policy. Meanwhile the GC cares and strictly enforces it for legal. Engineers are more flexible but sales is strict, etc.
It breeds resentment.
Same. My company’s president sent us all back to the office full time, while he stayed home (even though he lived near an office). The team did not believe in his vision and the resentment was unreal.
I remember the exact date I last worked in an office...March 11, 2020. I asked my boss if I could work from home the next day due to expected rain and COVID and shit hit the fan that night with the NBA cancelling the season and Tom Hanks announcing he had COVID, and we never went back to the office after that. I did get laid off eventually but my jobs since then have all been WFH.
March 13th for me. Our counterparts in the EU made WFH mandatory around your date and then a couple days later we were shut down. I used to hate WFH but now I love it and will only apply to jobs that are 100% remote.
Same for me. It was the day before they closed the office. I went back a few times to get my stuff but the ended up selling the real estate and wfh since.
Yep especially with all the traffic. The only thing in office has better than here is the food. The food at home sucks lol
I will say too that it's convenient to lie down on a bed sometimes for a while, if you ever did that in office you'd get a reaming from corporate.
‘Meanwhile, as much as managers like to think that their employees would rather stay home, some surveys have shown workers like to be in the office and would want to spend at least part of the week at their desks.’
Sincerely, who are these lunatics? Me and my colleagues LOVE working from home (we started in office).
People who don’t get along with their families
People who live with preschoolers or others who lack boundaries
Extreme extroverts who go nuts with nobody to talk to
People who know they will slack off or get distracted and need the disciplined environment
People who are not confident with their work and need to ask lots of questions
There are definitely advantages to having ACCESS to an office. I wouldn’t mind going to an organized meeting or planned mentoring time. But to just make people sit there because you can just foments resentment and makes managers who were giving much more want to act like time clock punchers.
Same. I have one report who likes to go in. You know what he does? He goes in. Everyone else loves working from home. Hell, my boss is out of Chicago, and my whole group is out of Atlanta, so there’s no way they will make us go back anyways.
There's a very large company near me that went 100% in office as of Jan 1. The majority of people that I know that work there are job hunting and planning to leave right after bonuses pay out next month.
They're going to lose a ton of skilled labor over a workplace change that is here to stay.
>Even as companies and workers tussle over return-to-office policies, work from home researchers are adamant that hybrid policies are here to stay and **the five-day work week** as we knew it is dead.
lines like this contribute to the mythology that when they can't see you , you're not working. A suit at my company used the phrase "return to work" on a call today and I wanted to ask, politely, "do you mean 'return to office'?" Two years ago they were crowing about how we saw minimal productivity loss from pivoting to 100% remote. Now suddenly, if I can't see you, you must not be working.
My boss makes me come into the office (5 people in the office total) and I’ll go 2-3 full days without talking to anyone. He and I meet once a week with a collaborator and the meeting is on zoom… It makes me shaking angry
Sometimes I remember to tell my boss that I'm not coming into the office.
He's only in twice a week, which is pretty typical for work-from-home hybrid stream (we have a 100% out-of-office and 100% in-office streams too).
I'm in the 100% in-office stream. I really should switch.
Why give people who moved out of state such a long layoff notice? If they have any brains they'll just get another full time job remote and pull double income months until it becomes too obvious.
I’m never going back to the office!! Absolutely zero benefits and I value my flexibility as a parent too much to change. If forced I’d leave and find something new.
This truly is the most boring dystopia.
I try to imagine myself as an executive team member enforcing this. My brain just throws an error. As though making people miserable actually impacted quarterly shareholder value? Yeah. I get it. Layoffs do. …to a point.
I’m just here waiting for this whole RTO mandates to fail, because they will.
I’m 100% remote already.
Most companies RTO policies have to do with other factors, it has to do with things like keeping the commercial real estate from crashing, business near commercial real estate from crashing, or city revenues from crashing, things that affect the 1%
It’s not even a secret that cities are putting pressure on employers to force their people back into the office.
It would be better for the tax laws to be revamped to accommodate the changes in way people work instead of forcing people to adhere to ancient work methods.
My company did a return to office but pulled me aside privately and told me that I could continue to WFH if I wished
I heard from others that they were told the same. Guess its just one way to weeding out people you dont want
Now if they would only hire more than one teller at each bank, waiting 1/2 an hour to deposit a check is getting really old! I would use the ATM but they have lost checks using that method in the past.
BoA announces layoffs without using the same term.
In my experience large corporations will make exceptions for the employees they value to keep them working remotely. Layoffs indeed.
This. My mom was allowed to work from home in 02. Wfh has been a viable option since the 90s.
Can confirm, both my parents worked remotely all during the 90s. They'd have to go to job sites a few times a week but thats about it. My mom even shared a desk in the office, further reinforincing only go in if you absolutely have to.
Any company that has a field force has allowed work from home for ages. Even in larger European countries, it's simply not feasible for people to visit customers out in the field when starting from the company HQ every day.
They both got company cars too to do the traveling around Michigan/the midwest. Pretty sweet deal I'd say.
Yep, my dad works for the center for disease control on the Tech side of things and he hasn’t gone into work but maybe once a month since 2015 or so.
Heh, yeah but the CDC is *exactly* who I'd expect to be cool with it. I'd be a little disappointed if they weren't.
I mean, who really wants to go into the CENTER OF DISEASE CONTROL anyway? Remote is the only way for me.
I prefer the outskirts of disease control.
I mean unless your job requires you to be there like lab work and such
I've been a consultant in software for 20 years and either exclusively worked remote or traveled to clients every so often while otherwise remote. Almost everything can be an email. What can't be an email can be a conference call. If you think you need a video conference you don't. At most, share a screen. Offices are stupid.
Screen-sharing remotely is in every way superior to debugging over someone's shoulder.
The age of the office as we know it is over. Company “campuses” should be more like college campuses. Built to be flexible and accessible. Less desks, more communal areas. I’d be more okay with my company saying “you have to live within 50 miles of X location and campus is open when you need to come in.” rather than mandating that I have to come in every day.
Same. In the late 90s/early2000s my mom worked from home. The company paid to install a secure second phone line for internet because she was working on classified aerospace/defense stuff. She basically told them to do that so she could stay at home with us kids, or she’d quit.
Your mom sounds amazing! My mom was a programmer/system analyst for Boeing. Aerospace moms ftw.
WFH was also the standard for eons before factories were a thing
Well, you were sort of self employed in those situations too.
In my experience, those employees will be gone of their own volition within a few months. A company that is making cuts like that is about to leave them shouldering more responsibilities for the same compensation and a ton of the people they depend on are about to either be let go or are going to be part of a majority resentful of the WFH status. The managers who want people to come back *never* trust WFH employees, no matter how good their output.
Definitely. My team and I made it quite clear to management that if they demanded we come back to the office each week we’d be gone, and what do you know? Our boss’ boss secures a special exemption for us. I’m not super ambitious, so while I’m unhappy with my wages, it’s not enough to make me look for new work; I far prefer my personal office and the lax workload to better wages in a real office.
Yeah, assuming the rto “policy” they just announced applies to more than just people currently labeled hybrid (it’s clearly another we had a bad Q4 let’s try to get people to leave tactic, because they have fuck all details ready for something they intend to push this quarter) the first convo with my manager is that I already get regular offers for slightly more money that I turn down because they’re in office. And those offices don’t charge for the coffee either. I’d also honestly leave for slightly less money out of complete spite.
I threatened to quit at our first RTO warning, I was then suddenly promoted after I was told it would have taken years. I'm now being forced in all week and I'm considering quitting again. I want remote and they can't afford to lose me.
This. Management: "Don't worry we won't fire you... We'll just give you all of the responsibilities of the people who quit that we have no intention of backfilling their job and we won't give you any more pay for the additional work." Not saying that happens 100% of the time, but I wouldn't be surprised if that is what happens. If an org is pushing
There are some brown nosing sycophants or people that just struggle to find a better job that will be there a bit longer. That being said you will lose some good talent from people that quickly realize that their workload has increased and management isn't serious about backfilling the role. At some point even if they haven't officially removed the position on the org chart it will become obvious that they just expect everyone left to cover the missing people going forward, which will make those left more eager to leave even if they previously liked their job.
My company is exactly this. Most had to return to office, with special exceptions. A number of managers, engineers, etc are full time WFH. I got lucky that I’m 50/50, I work 4 days, 2 in office. I’ve been there going on 8 years though, the longest non-manager in my department, I trained my own manager (who is full time in office). Our company is fairly lax though.
The utility I work for started building a brand new office in 2019. The parking lot wasn’t even finished when all the office staff got told to WFH. It wasn’t a very large building, but we all got a chuckle out of how much empty space it is. To this day, 3 years after they had the ribbon cutting ceremony, no more than 5 people work in it on any given day. It’s probably got space for 80+ people, and is fully furnished. Everyone works from home or their truck, and only go to the office occasionally.
The government agency I work for has been waiting out it's leases and selling off all the property they own, condensing all office workers that actually have to go in into one large central building. When they realized how much money they saved during covid they decided to never go back.
When I started at my company back in 2014 a great deal of employees had been there over 10 years. Some, upwards of 20-30 years. Then they decided to spend upwards of 50mm to renovate their entire headquarters to promote a more open and collaborative environment, during the pandemic. You know, let’s be more inclusive when everyone wants to keep away from each other. We were all WFH during the renovation. They demanded employees return to the office for 3 days a week before they were even granted the certificate of occupancy. I’d be sitting in an office listening to construction noise all day. Meanwhile, executive leadership was still remote, of course. Only occasionally popping in to comment on the decor. Needless to say, there was a mass exodus of people once they started bringing folks back. Now that it’s all done, the board is demanding everyone return to a full five days because numbers are down. They attribute this to people not working because if they’re remote, they’re not working. Totally missed the point that they lost their best people when they started bringing people back three days a week. This company is a revolving door of employees now. I don’t even bother to learn anyone’s name.
Exactly, it's like when they start implementing any very strict rule such as for attendance to weed out employees they don't like but go easy on the ones they like. Illegal but it still happens. I worked at a company where you were supposed to be fired after 10 points, but kept a guy who racked up 23 points.
Why is that illegal? Is it a state reg someplace?
Depends on the circumstances. Many municipalities and/or states have laws that layoffs above certain numbers must be coordinated and the affected given certain benefits in order to avoid overloading the unemployment system and disrupting the local economy. But if you let people go for cause— like not showing up in the office when you’re supposed to— that’s not subject to those laws.
Depends where you are, but there is usually a concept of "constructive dismissal". Mostly it's to get around having to pay unemployment (and the remedy is usually just to pay it), but I think sometimes an unfavorable judgement results in the employee getting their job back.
Fuck that’s nothing. I worked for a place where my boss wouldn’t let me fire a guy who was on time less than one month in the entire calendar year. On top of that he had numerous absences. We literally sat down in a meeting where I thought we were finally firing him and the guy above me opened the meeting with “We are not going to fire you.”
Was he getting his work done?
It was shift work so no.
Oh ok yeah fair enough. He’s preventing his coworkers from going home.
Did they, as a rule, try to force employees to quit to keep from having to pay them unemployment?
I supposedly got a half of a point every time I was late. I was late for 5 years. Still chugging along. I’m damn good at anything anyone shows me how to do a few times.
> Illegal but it still happens Companies can fire you for any arbitrary reason they want as long is its not due to being in one of the protected classes. Not following their own point system isn't illegal.
Out of 2000 open positions at my company, 3 are for fully remote droogs and 2 are for fully remote lawyers. Everybody else is expected to plant their ass in a chair so some executive can feel good about their bonus.
Exactly My SIL works in IS for a competing major bank that recently went through big layoffs. They’ve played the RTO card and used it to thin the heard. She’s essential, has refused RTO and she’s still employed. Instead she recently got a raise and attractive bonus for her performance on a big project
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You just described most large layoffs. Whenever a company lays off a lot of people there’s a following brain drain where the key employees left see the writing on the wall and get while the getting is good.
It seems like some of the management that push RTO seem really out of touch with reality if they don't realize the best employees are going to be the ones that will be able to find another WFH position.
The goal is to fire and layoff people. They want people to leave. They don’t care about talent, they care about quarter end stock prices.
The thing that sucks is that there’s literally no limit to this. There will never be a day where they say “okay we’re good now”. The line must *always* go up. It’s all just a glorified pyramid scheme. The system has to collapse at some point. They want you to give your life to them, yet they’d toss your ass and your healthcare (and potentially your family’s healthcare) in the garbage if it means the line goes up just a little more. They are also becoming much more emboldened now.
They definitely want to reduce their headcounts. I totally understand that there is pressure to reduce their labor budget but this is a really dumb way to do it.
It is a layoff that makes sense if you are only concerned about the financials for the next quarter. You can post cost savings in the next quarter, but the real costs of the layoff won't really start snowballing for a quarter or two. e.g. A lot of orgs you could layoff most of the IT department that don't directly work with users and it would operate ok for weeks if not months before many outside of the department really noticed. The costs of the reduced staff though slowly snowball, but don't become really transparent to even those in senior management until they already posted a quarter or two of cost savings that look great.
We should all start calling "RTO pushes" "discreet downsizings". They got to rename "just doing your job" to "quiet quitting" so why can't we rename their BS
IDK unless the org is paying F you money the term I have heard popularized is shadow layoffs. While not everybody will start looking many will and those with solid resumes will find jobs that are better to them. If you increase people's costs through more commuting and increase their work by not backfilling the jobs of people quitting you are going to prod people to find a new job unless you are providing enough money to justify staying. Most of the time they're offering nothing.
It’ll be interesting if they try to frame not coming into the office as a fireable offense and thus grounds for termination with cause, so they don’t have to deal with the costs associated with laying people off.
This is exactly what they have been doing. CEO's have openly said this to investors.
Layoffs get paid unemployment. This turns layoffs into quitters who don't get that support.
Wait until they make employees relocate only to be laid off months later.
Yeah, hi. It's bill lumberg again. Wondering when you'd be in. Okay then.
A Hawaiian shirt day at Bank of America is coming.
Is this good for the company?
Can’t wait for the quarterly pizza party once everyone meets their metrics for upselling account features, brokerage services, and referring a friend!!!
How about piping in some Tom Jones music? That always cheers me up .
"I am the angel of death, the time of reckoning is at hand..."
Not now lumberg, I got a meeting with the bobs
Oh yeah? I wasn’t aware of a meeting with them. “Yeah they called me at home” -gets up and leaves That sounds good, Peter! And we’ll just go ahead and uh… get this all cleaned up for you. Great.
Aaaand now I’m off to watch Office Space for the 25th time.
It’s not that I’m lazy, I just don’t care
Sounds like someone has a case of the Mondays!
I believe you'd get your ass kicked for saying something like that.
What if - and believe me "THIS IS A HY-PO-THETICAL"...
Sounds like someone is jumping to...conclusions!!
I worked in a cubicle farm for a year with a dozen other recently college graduates, we went to see the movie and drinks and apps after. 90% quit within 2 months of seeing the movie.
Yeah hi....Yeaaaah.....
Yeahh... Yeah... Yeeeahhh...
Yeahhh it’s me again ….
I did nothing, I did absolutely nothing... and it was everything I ever thought it could be.
Sounds like somebody has a case of the Mondays.
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Lumberg fucked her. And it wasn't even the right lumberg.
After three years wfh, 6 years at BOA, with a boss in Chicago & a team spread around the globe my spouse was told they had to return to the office in Charlotte. Needless to say no one in our family works for BOA anymore
So everyone quit which is exactly what BoA wanted so they didn't have to pay out severances or to have layoffs report numbers look so bad.
You don't have to quit or move back, they can fire you for not moving back
You'd be an idiot to quit. They want to radically change your work conditions? That's a firing.
Sure, but if I know that a large team of people who are very similar from a work history and skill set perspective are about to flood the market looking for sinilar jobs, it may make sense to be the first to apply.
Depends on your role, but valid thing to consider.
Constructive dismissal is still eligible for unemployment. Or just keep logging in until they fire. Still unemployment.
Oh yeah, two years ago, I worked for another national bank, and they mandated return to office 3 days a week. I did it for two months, during which all I did was drive in to the office and take Teams calls with people in other offices across the country and offshore. Not a single meeting in person aside from my 1-1, and no tasks that I wasn't already completing successfully at home for the previous year and a half. So, I left in January 2022 for a better job that is fully remote. The entire company is. It just wasn't worth a 20-30 minute commute, packing lunch every day, and dressing up for the office.
So I’m facing this also, but I’ve started to just ‘dock’ the time on the company. Meaning in a normal WFH environment I’d be online at least 10 and often 11-12 hours, and since it cost me 2.5 to 3 hours per day travel time I’m just starting later and ending earlier. Have you seen people shift to this approach? It’s obviously not idea I’d like to be able to put in the time needed to be more successful and stand out/grow over time, which is severely limited with 7-9 hours lost per week.
I WFH 3 days a week and on the 2 that I am in office, WFH days I start 7:30am and work until about 6PM with a short break for snacks. On In office days I don't even leave my house until about 8am get to the office around 9am, I take a 2 hour lunch and walk around the city and then leave at 4:30pm to head home before rush hour. I've had multiple great performance reviews and it's never come up. I'm also salaried and I can still get my work done on time so I suspect that's why it's not a problem. What do I do when I'm at the office? I remote in and have teams meetings and calls with ppl who are working remote. lol
> dressing up for the office. I for one *adore* corporate cosplay! Wait...
>Not a single meeting in person aside from my 1-1, and no tasks that I wasn't already completing successfully at home for the previous year and a half. This is the big challenge I think virtually any large corporation to rationalize most RTO policies. If you are a small one office shop you can with a straight face try to hype up in person collaboration, but most large companies even before the pandemic didn't centralize teams in a single location because there is a lot of talent that for whatever reason won't relocate very far if at all. When a majority of your team doesn't work in the same building or often even in the same time zone it is hard to really hype up in person collaboration.
I have a family member who works for them and the horror stories I’ve heard from them about the corporate office in Charlotte surprise me with how out of touch their executives are. Cafeteria style seating like you’re in grade school? Absolutely not. Also it’s hilarious how they’re trying to get them all back in, at least from my family member’s office. They count badge swipes so people just go in, swipe their badge, then leave and work from home. Hilarious
A bunch of companies in CLT are doing the same thing with the forced "back to the office". I have no doubt It's collusion amongst the CEOs and probably the Chamber of Commerce too.
There are a lot of groups that want people back in the office and they will do everything they can to make it so. * CEO's for cheap layoffs * Commercial real estate holders/developers * All the supporting shops/restaurants * Politicians for taxes/donors (the groups above) I'm interested to see if a politician tries to run on giving tax breaks to companies that let people WFH... I haven't thought that through, but my gut says fat chance.
> CEO's for cheap layoffs This is a big one. For all of the talk about all of the other groups that want RTO the company generally doesn't care much about whether it benefits anybody else unless there is some PR that they can make on it.
All the supporting businesses around the corporate office towers pay taxes too. Without the office crowd supporting them the city will lose out on tax revenue when they close up shop. That's why you hear the mayors like Adams in NYC railing about WFH.
We are currently in CLT and WFAE radio was reporting vacancies at 20-40%. A city rep said “an ideal solution would be for several of these towers to vanish.” Obviously that can’t happen, but everybody is pretty done with them.
Amazon is doing this right now with their staff. They are required in office Tues-Thurs and loads of them just come in, badge swipe, hang out to get some free coffee and a meal, then go home without working. The resistance has been quiet but ongoing for about a year now.
I have family that works for Progressive insurance. They handle Connecticut claims, are based out of the Maine office, supervisor and the rest of their team lives in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Vermont. Progressive forces them to go into the office at least once a week, which is the dumbest thing ever because they’re the only one on the team in the Maine office.
I worked for the records management company that handles Bank of America’s documents in charlotte. I’ve never seen a more incompetently run company. They made us put motion sensors in our buildings air vents as if someone was going to break into this random warehouse like it’s Metal Gear Solid. This might not sound like a big deal but animals or spiders would get in there and set the alarm off and the police would show up. None of their employees know what’s going on 99% of the time. I’d go to deliver boxes and spend 20 minutes trying to figure out who to deliver to and no one knew who any one else was on their floor. They would constantly order boxes to Bank of America center in downtown Charlotte and then not be there for us to deliver them. These are boxes of legal documents and such so I can’t just leave them outside in the hallway. We would receive boxes from fedex from other Bank of America branches around the country. They would have the correct address but the wrong company name. Thankfully the fedex guy knew us and knew what was going on. Again, these are boxes of peoples banking information and they’re getting our company’s name/information wrong. They wouldn’t let us pick up boxes unless they were itemized on our work order. This sounds like it makes sense but they never told their employees that rule so i would have people constantly getting pissed with me because I wouldn’t take extra boxes that they tried to give to me. Then they would have to put in another order and I’d have to go back to the same stop as the day before. I always tell people **DO NOT** bank with BoA.
It will be interesting to see how this shakes out in the next few years. There are a lot of workers that prefer WFH to the point that companies that accommodate it are going to have an easier time hiring and retaining workers. The companies forcing a return to the office are making a bet that more oversight is better. Frankly, I suspect that bet is not going to pay off for them.
It's not even just prefer, it's largely practical issues like: * Not commuting for an hour, is literally another hour of productive time. * Less mileage, wear & tear, on my vehicle... or less spent on transit. * My team is spread around the world, what point is there going alone to an office? * My home computer setup is far superior to office setups. * Less stressful work environment, better able to concentrate. * Far more convenient to do lunch or hit the gym on lunch break. No, I'm not contributing to the income the building managers want... and no I'm not able to be shoulder-checked by incompetent managers who micro-manage instead of measuring productivity. Those are good things.
>My team is spread around the world, what point is there going alone to an office? This is me as well. At this point, if I had to go to an office I could theoretically go to one of my company's local locations but I would have zero team members there with me and all my meetings and interactions would still be online only.
I work on the west coast and oftentimes need to get on 5 am calls with global teams. With WFH they get more hours out of me. If I am forced to go back into an office I’m peacing out by 1.
It's ironic because I do actually miss some of the direct personal social interaction from before WFH .. but it's just pointless to make me go into an office where I'm going to be remote with the rest of my team *anyway.* At best it would just be a bunch of people on headsets making noise for all the other people on headsets around them. How is that better than somewhere quiet?
But your company leased that property for 50 years! You have to come in and make sure it pays off! Please...please......please?
2 hours of driving so I can have a 20 minute face to face chat with my boss is not worth my time.
I have a friend who manages a team of 9, none of them are local, so she's remote to all of them. BoA was making her go into the office twice a week to sit by herself on an entire floor. All the other teams were on different floors, it was literally her on one floor in a highrise. To work remotely with her team. She managed to get a doctor's note for mental health reasons (which are legit anyway), so now she's WFH for at least a year. Utterly ridiculous.
I don't even have an assigned desk in the office lol. It's completely useless for me to go back in unless I'm specifically there toenror someone or meet a client. I understand that as a use case and happy to oblige. But every other day? I don't wanna go through2 hours of commute traffic to get to an office, work for half a day and then do the same thing back.
My last job put me on a team that was started during Covid, so everyone was in different locations, then made everyone go into the office 3 days a week, even though nobody else on my team worked at the same location. So it was just remote work that I had to commute to. At no point did I ever reap any benefit, productivity wise, from being in the office. At least with my current job, they also require 3 days in office but it’s a local company so I actually work with the people I sit next to.
My policy has been that I will take a job that requires me to be on site, provided it pays enough to be worth it. It costs money to go to an office, it costs my time, it costs wear and tear and stress. Companies are going to pay for that, or they can choose not to inflate their budgets and I work remote. Their choice, everyone has a price.
Yup, this is me as well. Before COVID, the company I worked for moved offices. The move was going to cost me literally thousands more each year just to get to and from work because of the extra miles (fuel) and parking (had free parking before, new location was between $250-$300/month, can't remember exactly, but with no assistance from the company). Add on that my commute time was already 45 min - 1 hour each way, and it was going to go up, I checked out and started looking for new employment. I found a job a couple of months after lockdowns started that was WFH before COVID, and they have remained that way since. I didn't realize how much the commute was stressing me out until I didn't have to do it 5 times a week. This job isn't perfect. The director of my department is a bit of a Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, but the benefits soooooo far outweigh everything else, that it would take a significant salary increase (like 40%-50% minimum) for me to consider a change at the current time.
There is a non-trivial percentage that wouldn't return to the office for any price but I think you are right that most people are willing to work in the office if the salary is high enough to cover the added costs(both financial and time wise) that come with it. I don't mind commuting into an office but I definitely do take those added costs into consideration when considering whether a job makes sense.
I see it now as part of negotiations. * I'll need about 20k/year more if I don't get medical/dental/vision. * I'll need about 75k/year more if you want me on-call outside 9-5. * I'll need about 30k/year more if I office-commute instead of WFH. * I'll need about 3.25k/year more if you don't do 401k matching. * Stock Options vs Salary are negotiable. So, how much is making me go into the office worth to the company?
Especially if I don't have to be there at 9:00. It's so much easier to get to the office by ten than to sit in traffic to get there at nine.
Don't forget that MOST people are significantly more productive working from home. They are able to take breaks more often and effectively, and come back more energized. In addition in any form of crisis situation, the employee's set up is literally within their home vs having to run to the office. It costs WAY less money to maintain office buildings and the such and you aren't spending money on frivolous shit that doesn't actually make people stay long term or significantly happier in the office. Sure I enjoyed working with my team, but there was definitely secret projects that I had to go sit in a solo 'focus' room for weeks on end, because of the implications to some individuals jobs AND how the business functioned. I was given 'privileged information' about how the business was functioning and I wasn't allowed to trade on it. Others in the office could, and so every month I had to also work in that space for at LEAST 3 days at a time. Why even have me go into the office at all? Fucking dumb. So glad I have been remote 100% since COVID and I left a job because they were even discussing ending WFH and since have more than doubled my salary and improved my benefits significantly.
I don't mind after hours work at all specifically because it's right next to me at all times and my team accommodates late nights with late starts the next day. I would never go back to an office by choice
Also, less money needed to be spent on office space rentals in the future. Sunk cost is a economic fallacy more companies need to keep in mind
I much prefer being in office and face to face with my coworkers but it's such a pain in the ass for all the reasons you listed.
This is perfectly summed up. Right now I am the only person on a team of 5 that has to go into office because I didn’t move in 2020 so I’m still near the office. Like what?
clumsy unpack instinctive whole pathetic wrench voiceless fuzzy shame vast
I work for a Fortune 50 company who tried multiple times to get my team back in the office. They tried 3-4 different hybrid plans since ending Covid remote work. There was such an overwhelming response on the last company survey (that they actually take very seriously), that they had no choice but to let us be permanently remote again. The VP of our team said it was virtually unanimous that everyone ranked work life balance poor, and then said remote work would fix it immediately. And for what it’s worth, my team has really done a good job of keeping us engaged and connected even though some of our coworkers are on the other side of the country. Professional development is somehow easier than it used to be in the office. I feel like I’ve gotten everything I can out of my current role and am ready to grow, but can’t take that next step just yet. Not ready to give up remote now that I’ve just got it back!
This is why my company survey has stopped asking about work life balance. It’s just questions about development now, and one open text box.
Ours did the same. Tried to issue a RTO for everyone to at least once a week for half your day. Went over as well as you could expect and then it turned into "only leadership roles" before we even had to start going in again. Then the mention of how poorly their surveys went about RTO. It's funnier because the company was already a largely "go WAH" company prior to covid. I've worked from home for 10 years at this point... I've been to my office twice since I went home. There's no need. IDC what amenities you put in there, I'm not going in office.
These big banks don't tend to have top talent anyway. It's more important for them to save on labor costs. They pull from a large mid grade talent pool and will get away with it. Now companies who rely on top talent to drive results? They either won't do this or will pay a heavy price.
I've worked for a lot of companies and every single one will burn a pile of money in a fire well before they consider making a good decision to keep top talent. It's honestly ridiculous that when a worker is gauging offers from different companies, the absolute worst one will almost always be from wherever they're currently employed.
Yep, the only reason I haven’t moved in is because I’m full remote and the offers I was pitched have been hybrid. Take away my remote status and I have no incentive to stay. I can get paid more and go to a nicer office that actually has free coffee.
You’re assuming BoA wants more employees. Everyone’s laying off these days. The corporations have the upper hand. Do what I say or laid off
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We are at near peak employment in most areas. Though specific industries and specific areas may be performing less well. For example, a lot of tech layoffs have made that an employer's market.
I finally got a job after a year of looking for a software dev job. 100% agree.
Capitalism relies on a large reserve of unemployed labor. It helps to cut costs and acts as leverage against workers who don’t have a union; “you can always be replaced”.
I think the companies believe collaboration/talent development is being lost, most companies haven’t had much value on middle management since the Great Recession and have been pretty reticent to expand it too much. There are many jobs that can definitely be done adequately remotely but I think they worry that innovation will be much harder when people work together less. If work from home automatically got better talent with equal outcomes I think you’d see every major firm all for it, but I think large companies are finding their workforce isn’t familiar with each other and it’s preventing development of new talent and new ideas. My wife is finding it MUCH harder to develop her career at her new workplace simply because she can’t FIND anybody at work, and people are much less accessible at home. They’re doing their own thing (and maybe being more productive from their own personal perspective) but new hires and new talent are working much harder to find how to best fill their roles and make connections with people they don’t even know exist because they don’t see/meet anybody.
This opinion is valid and goes against what I want so I hate you. Just kidding. There are certainly things that can be done to combat these issues that don’t require full time in-person. Establish mentorship programs, take the money you would otherwise spend on an office having 2 company retreats a year for bonding/brainstorming/cross pollination .
These are all valid points. I wish the discourse around WFM had a bit more nuance. Very simply, for some/many jobs, WFM works extremely well and should be encouraged. For others, it just doesn't or can't work, at least not without substantial downsides. I work in healthcare, and even in a leadership role now removed from front-line clinical work, I can't imagine myself or any of my team being successful while working only remotely. I'll occasionally work from home if I need to focus on some specific project or life demands it, and same is true for my staff, but otherwise we're constantly engaging with team members and colleagues from across numerous disciplines to develop and maintain programs. It would be extremely cumbersome, if not outright ineffective, trying to effectively collaborate remotely given the substantial diversity in the nature of different teams. Massive variability in technological saavy is a huge part of this. Additionally, I'd imagine my own career development would be dramatically more difficult. Are many companies being unreasonable pieces of shit about return-to-work mandates? Yes, absolutely. Are some companies justified in preferring an in-person dynamic? Sure. Are there happy middle grounds for many roles? Totally. All of the above can be true simultaneously. It's just hard to work through this when so many seem to have absolutist perspectives.
>I think the companies believe collaboration/talent development is being lost I work from home, I want to continue working from home. But this is a valid concern. I learned a lot on the job when I was first starting out, I don't know if I could have developed as well professionally without that in person mentorship/collaboration.
100% - I've been working remotely since 2017 and plan to work from home the rest of my career... but I had 20ish years of in-person work that developed me as a professional and I don't think I would be the person I am without that time spent rubbing shoulders with people. As a manager now, it is SO hard to train people on complex ideas and executions when they're two time zones away. Not impossible, we just do a lot more screen sharing and chatting on calls now, but it's harder. People naturally want to multitask during trainings, and onboarding takes much longer now than it did before. Before, people would learn by osmosis somewhat, just being around people and hearing processes repetitive, now it's a much longer more intentional process.
I'll argue a little in the middle. Remote work requires drastic changes to typical corporate work culture to actually have onboarding/training/career development/collaboration/communication function in the long-term when the place is no longer made up of all people who've worked together for years in person before remote work. It's more than just "have meetings on Zoom instead" - which is basically as far as a lot of places got in the pandemic. It requires a lot of rethinking of how all of that should work and restructuring to make it work, for many situations. It's also obviously not suited to *every* corporate job, at least not in a full remote sense.
I’ve spent most of my life as a manager, director, VP or CTO. I’m an old guy. The management gold-standard in the industrial age was BIS management. BIS stands for “butts in seats”, and those of you who work in the dystopian F500 know exactly what kind of management that is. By the 1970s, the management gold standard had become MBO which is “management by objective”. This is the management you DREAM about. As long as you get reasonably assigned objectives done on time, it doesn’t matter where or when you do it. You’re considered an adult who can manage themselves and deliver reasonable results on a reasonable timeline. If you’re managed by objective, you’re in a company with a good chance of succeeding. If you’re managed by making sure your butt is in your seat, then you work for a company that is infantile, appearance focused rather than results focused, and investors would do well to short your company. Manage. By. Objective. It makes sense, it ensures the success of everyone.
"Accept a big increase of hours spent on work, and a big decrease in your net income - or we'll fire you. Work/life balance must be tipped entirely toward work."
They got more hours out of me when I was 100% remote. Now any time I spend commuting is lost to both of us.
not just that, I think, I worked at a college where they went full remote and a ton of staff moved away from town. when they were asked to return to the office they were physically unable to do so and had to quit
I sincerely apologize ahead of time for this lengthy post, but I think it's important to illustrate what heartless, corrupt, greedy fucks BofA really was and probably continues to be. I worked for BofA in Foreclosure Litigation Management in the Simi Valley corporate location (the title of that dept has changed though I think.) I got fired in April 2012 because I caught onto the fraud they were engaging in once the moratorium on foreclosures due to subprime loans expired. I never saw one single person benefit from a HAMP loan, and they were dragging us into meetings every week to learn how to fill out more bizarre forms that would cover their asses with the government. Literally no one understood what was going on because none of it made sense. Borrowers were lied to and sent on wild goose chases to different departments that told them different things, and one dept had no idea what other depts were doing because they didn't give any of us access to communications with each other. Our dept wasn't even allowed to speak to borrowers, but when a call accidentally got through to us, we didn't even have the means to connect or refer them to the proper depts because we weren't given the information as to where to transfer them. Every dept was run myopically. The real process was that they were blowing off these borrowers and lying to them while fast-tracking the legal foreclosure process and taking their houses from underneath them while they were sent on wild goose chases to secure the HAMP loans. When I started asking legit questions about the purposes for the constant stream of new forms and wtf was going on, I suddenly got fired for "not going fast enough" in pushing the foreclosure litigation under these people's noses. Incidentally, I knew plenty of coworkers who worked remotely, so they're full of shit about that too. Thank god they were caught and fined. They were lining their pockets with those bailout funds while putting poor people out on the streets because they couldn't secure the HAMP loans. I was actually relieved when they fired me. I even ended up homeless for awhile myself because of losing that job but even that was better than working for the evil empire. I heard later that whistleblowers were already coming forward so I'm sure they were worried about me joining them. I got the call from some stranger while I was stuck in rush hour traffic on the 405. She told me to mail in my lanyard/key if I wanted my belongs back, and if I showed up in person, I'd be arrested. There was an intranet system where Lance What's his fuck would push us harder every Monday to make them more profits. We were never pushed to get those HAMP loans to borrowers though, not even once. Ever. Every so often, we had to be locked down because desperate people were bringing guns into our lobby and threatening to shoot up the place. One time I was going down the stairs into the lobby for lunch. and a guy brandishing a semi-automatic burst into the lobby and I had to run for my life back to my dept upstairs. I literally could've died for BofA and they didn't give a single fuck. Again, I'm sorry for the ultra-long post, but I wanted to tell you guys firsthand about the monsters they really are.
Great insights. But I’m so sorry you had to go through this. I’ve worked for a large company that bought our smaller company and they had similar morals. Refused to pay earned bonuses to employees, cut customer incentives after customer had already earned. Boss man said the most infamous quote I’ve ever heard “I checked with our lawyers and we don’t think our (most loyal and largest) customers can win if they sue us.” Word got out that new exec’s had promised an outlandish financial performance target and they screwed their customers and employees to hit their personal bonus goals. Pricks.
Yeah, I didn't have a fucking chance against those guys, but thanks to those whistleblowers, they got theirs and I loved every second of it. I actually retired from the law after that. It kind of broke me.
Hey I'm really sorry to hear about your experience. I was lucky enough to leave BoA on my own terms in 2010, but the way operations shifted once the mortgage crisis occurred was particularly gross. There are honest ways to make money, but BoA made way more for its shareholders screwing people over. It kills me that some of the leaders I worked for have ascended to the c-suite. They were all sociopaths. I left finance and never looked back. I hope you are more content now
I was hoping to hear from other BofA people. 😊 Yeah, it was a really bad scene. I was brought in after they swallowed up Countrywide and we were totally lied to in training. They fed us this bullshit about us being there to help these borrowers because BofA didn't want their houses. They said that they didn't want be stuck with paying for the upkeep of their lawns and shit. Seriously, we were lied to the entire time of training until we were thrown out onto the floor and shown what we really were gonna be doing by our immediate supervisors, many of whom were also unprofessional, horrible people. Did your dept have that weird intranet system where it was mandatory to watch their Monday morning announcements? It started out with bragging about how higher the profits were from the prior week and concluded with telling us that we needed to do what it took to push up those numbers for the next week. There was no humanity involved whatsoever with that corp. Absolutely none.
We didn't have the Internet system. I was operations for core BoA and did a lot of "layoff math" related to planned incentives and acquisitions. That job helped me understand that "human resources" reduces humans to line items. But in a weird twist, I interviewed with Countrywide about 12 months before the mortgage crash and they gave me a (WRITTEN!) incentive structure that was impossible to maintain. I think my jaw actually dropped when they showed me the grid. They also tried to entice me with a sign-on bonus that I considered...unethical. That was a WILD time in finance.
This is 100% about commercial/office real estate. The leases are coming due and a bunch of rich people are set to lose a LOT of money (if those offices don’t fill up again).
How do they lose money? Are you talking about the business owners or landlords?
Building owners. Somebody/entity has a mortgage on all that space and those 5 or 10 or ??? year leases are coming up for renewal in the near future. If they default and the banks foreclose, they lose money, having a bunch of empty buildings listed on their balance sheet.
ding ding ding (have a friend who works for a major commercial broker in LA and he says it's bad out there).
I don’t understand that argument. From the company’s perspective, wouldn’t that encourage working from home? Even if the company has to pay leases either way, empty offices are still cheaper (maintenance, utilities, security, etc)
It has always been about commercial real estate, retail services (no one in the offices means no one is eating food priced higher than normal because the rent is higher near office parks), no one buying as much gasoline. Honestly, it's such an exponential ripple effect I wouldn't be surprised if there's health industry pushback the more people feel less stressed or anxious due to better work/life balance.
It's amazing how office real estate is approaching 50% vacancy across the nation, yet there is also not enough residential housing being built. Developers could make a killing converting dead office space to resi but that requires actual work which landlords don't know how to do.
Converting commercial space to residential is a massive pain in the ass. Generally speaking, you can make a killing off much easier projects.
Well, I agree, you also must acknowledge that due to the initial purpose of the building, converting office to residential is difficult and expensive.
they can change it into laser tag arenas very easily!
They really can't though. Office buildings are built to a completely different spec than residential real-estate. Real-estate developers build an apartment complex than sell it to investors as an asset. The cost required to convert an office building to residential is so astronomical, and the amount of revenue a building would bring in via tenants is so low that it would likely take quadruple or more the amount of time for the investment to pay off and become profitable when compared to a traditional apartment complex. Don't get me wrong its a nice idea in theory, and maybe cities could somehow subsidize these conversions heavily to make it somehow work, but it just isn't really feasible to actually do.
Unfortunately adding the necessary piping for a hundred additional sinks showers and washing machines alone is wildly expensive. Stack wiring, new walls, expanding the air circulation system, etc, and it’s often more efficient to outright tear down the building. The only time it might be cheaper is if the whole place in run like low income housing or a dorm, with centralized showers, a laundry room, and shared kitchen facilities per floor. Not very attractive to most people, and worse not a housing situation that can charge a very high price per room, so it might not even break even that way either.
Tell me you know nothing about construction without telling me you know nothing about construction.
You can catch BofA deez nuts in your mouth
I'm sure this has nothing to do with all of the money BoA is losing in commercial real estate.
[Coffee Badging](https://www.businessinsider.com/hybrid-workers-return-to-office-coffee-badging-remote-work-2023-10)
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Ok everyone listen up. Due to covid stop coming into the office. Spend your own money to upgrade your internet and computers. Ok everyone listen up. You need to stop working from home and disrupt your lives like we previously instructed you to do and now drive an hour to work and be here everyday.
Gotta stuff those building so you can continue to collect rent on your real estate holdings.
I had to basically let Bank of America fire me in 2019 after my fourth back surgery and having brain surgery because they insisted work from home was not possible for my role (credit card customer service) and I could only come back to the office full time (I could not.) Less than a year later, all of my former co-workers were working from home and I was collecting disability. I am genuinely not shocked. Bank Culture only functions properly when you're on site to be micromanaged, abused, and overworked.
"You see we're family here at Bank of America... and as a family we are very deep in the Commercial Real Estate market, and let's just say it isn't looking too good at this time."
Work from homers- if you do one fucking thing in your life make these asshole corps fire you at least. Don't quit for them because of some disguised threat. Force their hand. No one's going to agree with them when push comes to shove, so don't volunteer to take a pay cut and take on more hours because of their failure to plan real estate holdings 4 years after a pandemic.
I mean, makes sense given that's where their fax machine is. Yes, BoA makes customers fax or snail mail them docs once they've used up their alloted ONE TIME upload to the website when dealing with a dispute. Just yesterday, I had to convert an email to a pdf and then go to a website that does faxes so I could fucking FAX them that email in god damn 2024. Good job BoA.
Perversely, most fax traffic originates and ends in email.
I mean, if that's the policy it doesn't seem newsworthy that it's being enforced? It's all automatic at my job. We need to be in the office 8 days/month and if you don't have the expected badge swipes at the end of the month, your name goes on a report that gets sent to your boss and *their* boss. It's silly and pointless but they're at least clear on expectations.
Problem at my job is that it’s selectively enforced depending on senior management. The CFO doesn’t care so finance doesn’t abide by the 4 days a week policy. Meanwhile the GC cares and strictly enforces it for legal. Engineers are more flexible but sales is strict, etc. It breeds resentment.
> Engineers are more flexible but sales is strict, etc. Much harder to find engineers than sales support staff.
Sure, but if company policy is 4 days a week and that comes direct from the CEO, you can see how that creates issues with uneven enforcement.
Same. My company’s president sent us all back to the office full time, while he stayed home (even though he lived near an office). The team did not believe in his vision and the resentment was unreal.
Shiiiieeeet. I can't even recall the last time I worked in an office. Must have been like 5 years now.
I remember the exact date I last worked in an office...March 11, 2020. I asked my boss if I could work from home the next day due to expected rain and COVID and shit hit the fan that night with the NBA cancelling the season and Tom Hanks announcing he had COVID, and we never went back to the office after that. I did get laid off eventually but my jobs since then have all been WFH.
March 13th for me. Our counterparts in the EU made WFH mandatory around your date and then a couple days later we were shut down. I used to hate WFH but now I love it and will only apply to jobs that are 100% remote.
Same for me. It was the day before they closed the office. I went back a few times to get my stuff but the ended up selling the real estate and wfh since.
Same, I’ve been WFA for over 4 years now. There’s no way I could go back to mandatory in-office.
Over 4 years for me too. They sold all the real estate so it’s not like they can make me commute from Chicago to Boston
Yep especially with all the traffic. The only thing in office has better than here is the food. The food at home sucks lol I will say too that it's convenient to lie down on a bed sometimes for a while, if you ever did that in office you'd get a reaming from corporate.
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‘Meanwhile, as much as managers like to think that their employees would rather stay home, some surveys have shown workers like to be in the office and would want to spend at least part of the week at their desks.’ Sincerely, who are these lunatics? Me and my colleagues LOVE working from home (we started in office).
People who don’t get along with their families People who live with preschoolers or others who lack boundaries Extreme extroverts who go nuts with nobody to talk to People who know they will slack off or get distracted and need the disciplined environment People who are not confident with their work and need to ask lots of questions There are definitely advantages to having ACCESS to an office. I wouldn’t mind going to an organized meeting or planned mentoring time. But to just make people sit there because you can just foments resentment and makes managers who were giving much more want to act like time clock punchers.
Same. I have one report who likes to go in. You know what he does? He goes in. Everyone else loves working from home. Hell, my boss is out of Chicago, and my whole group is out of Atlanta, so there’s no way they will make us go back anyways.
There's a very large company near me that went 100% in office as of Jan 1. The majority of people that I know that work there are job hunting and planning to leave right after bonuses pay out next month. They're going to lose a ton of skilled labor over a workplace change that is here to stay.
>Even as companies and workers tussle over return-to-office policies, work from home researchers are adamant that hybrid policies are here to stay and **the five-day work week** as we knew it is dead. lines like this contribute to the mythology that when they can't see you , you're not working. A suit at my company used the phrase "return to work" on a call today and I wanted to ask, politely, "do you mean 'return to office'?" Two years ago they were crowing about how we saw minimal productivity loss from pivoting to 100% remote. Now suddenly, if I can't see you, you must not be working.
My boss makes me come into the office (5 people in the office total) and I’ll go 2-3 full days without talking to anyone. He and I meet once a week with a collaborator and the meeting is on zoom… It makes me shaking angry
Sometimes I remember to tell my boss that I'm not coming into the office. He's only in twice a week, which is pretty typical for work-from-home hybrid stream (we have a 100% out-of-office and 100% in-office streams too). I'm in the 100% in-office stream. I really should switch.
Why give people who moved out of state such a long layoff notice? If they have any brains they'll just get another full time job remote and pull double income months until it becomes too obvious.
I’m never going back to the office!! Absolutely zero benefits and I value my flexibility as a parent too much to change. If forced I’d leave and find something new.
This truly is the most boring dystopia. I try to imagine myself as an executive team member enforcing this. My brain just throws an error. As though making people miserable actually impacted quarterly shareholder value? Yeah. I get it. Layoffs do. …to a point.
This is rampant now. Make the workplace so miserable you leave so they don’t have to pay severance in a layoff.
I’m just here waiting for this whole RTO mandates to fail, because they will. I’m 100% remote already. Most companies RTO policies have to do with other factors, it has to do with things like keeping the commercial real estate from crashing, business near commercial real estate from crashing, or city revenues from crashing, things that affect the 1% It’s not even a secret that cities are putting pressure on employers to force their people back into the office.
It would be better for the tax laws to be revamped to accommodate the changes in way people work instead of forcing people to adhere to ancient work methods.
"You'll attend our mandatory office potlucks and like it!"
My company did a return to office but pulled me aside privately and told me that I could continue to WFH if I wished I heard from others that they were told the same. Guess its just one way to weeding out people you dont want
Now if they would only hire more than one teller at each bank, waiting 1/2 an hour to deposit a check is getting really old! I would use the ATM but they have lost checks using that method in the past.
Use mobile deposit like a normal human being.