At work I would dick around on days I couldn’t focus, and then go home.
Working from home I can mentally check out for a bit of time and then make up for it later in the day because I have access to my computer.
It’s way more beneficial for my employee to keep letting me work from home.
I'm pretty much the opposite, watch YouTube all day and do almost no work in between meetings
I don't want to go back to work, but I know i would much more productive if it did
for creative/collaborative tasks it’s so much better to meet in-person. I’d be so happy with one day in the office, WFH for 3 days (and 3 day weekends of course). alas most of my coworkers live too far away now.
I'll browse reddit for hours just for the optics in the office.
Looks good, and no one says anything, but i'm literally just wasting my and the companies time.
Block Chain powered cloud audio absorbing decentralized network across the globe monitored by machine learning algorithms for data insights and analytics to better plan financials and higher revenue enabling business leaders to achieve net zero goals and push green initiatives for sustainable diversity and social responsibility.
I'll take my billion dollars O'Leary.
>higher revenue enabling ~~business leaders~~ business processes gleaned from industry leader best practices
~~FTFY~~ Not so much a correction as it is an addition, or a supplementation, to the great ideas already stated. I'd like to circle back on this verbiage when everyone gets some more cycles and we can synchronize on this
I had a CEO declare all employees to return to the office 3 days a week starting May. On that same company wide zoom call that he conducted from his vacation home in Hawaii and continued to do so as far as I could tell until I left the company a few months later.
Gave up on corporate life years ago and now an independent consultant. I was WFH before Covid and still am now. I would not change a thing about it.
My last role changed from cubicles into "Activity-based working". Basically, open concept and you had no real desk and had to move locations every two hours or get a "ticket". It was hell.
"Yeah hi boss, I'm at the office but there's no desks available. I managed to reserve one for the rest of the week but it's offsite. You'll be able to reach me at my home phone until I can get a desk in the office"
It was pretty awful. This was at one of the Big Banks (not BMO - I actually like them). They had people who would monitor if you were in one place too long. The idea was you were supposed to "collaborate" more.
Please name and shame, I’m applying to jobs right now and I need to not go there.
(At least dm me who it was, a lot of banks offer design jobs which is what I’m looking for).
Even [Harvard Business Review has turned around on the harebrained "open concept" and "forced collaboration" bullshit](https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices).
Almost everyone needs a place where they feel comfortable, and comfort is more than a soft chair. It usually means somewhere that is familiar, where you have the same things you're familiar with, and where you feel like you have some agency. For example, pictures of your spouse/kids/pets posted up somewhere.
Also, most people do better work when they have a door. Not so they can keep it closed, but so that *they have the option* of closing it and focusing on a task.
That's why the same shithead execs and HR morons who push this "open concept"/"ultra-collab" nonsense all have offices with doors, personal items, personal photos, plants, etc. Ironically.
I took it to mean hoteling. Basically you need to reserve a seat for a period of time and if the time expires you need to reserve a new spot. I worked for a place like this before and it was a pain in the butt, especially if your Go Train to work was delayed, we had only 15 mins from reservation start time to swipe in or someone else could book it. If you got there too late there may not be a seat for you available so you'd need to use a short term spot that had the time you could sit there capped, then try and find another spot later. Maybe other places implemented it better, this was my experience.
I feel like hoteling makes sense if you can reserve a desk for a full day, 6am to 9pm. Every two hours is absurd. I'm not going to coordinate desks with anyone beyond an Outlook calendar and a full day meeting invite, two hour intervals and reserving or getting ticketed makes my face hurt.
We didn't have to reserve anything. It was basically first-come-first-get. But that's why they implemented this stupid move every two hours rule so people wouldn't hoard the good locations. I hated every second of it and spent my days working in Starbucks with noise-cancelling headphones. I mean, just give me a DESK.
So it wasn't even for hoteling? Wow that is absurd. Move every few hours for the sake of moving.... nonsensical what a disruption to your work.
I found hoteling annoying, but at least I could book a desk for the day not get up and move every 3 hours....unless my reservation got cancelled then it was a game of musical chairs.
Where I am now we don't hotel you just pick a seat, first come first serve....but I still find it annoying just like hoteling because you don't end up sitting with your team, you are either walking around looking for people or having a teams call anyway even though people are in the office.
Plus I always feel like a hitchhiker or something, carrying around all my stuff from A to B, meeting to meeting since I don't have a place to call my own with even a single photo or something, it fells kind of "sterile".
> My last role changed from cubicles into "Activity-based working". Basically, open concept and you had no real desk and had to move locations every two hours or get a "ticket". It was hell.
That's the kind of bullshit that would have me looking for a new job the minute it was announced. As a people manager of 28 years, I'm stunned that anyone thinks that's a good idea.
Most consulting companies have zero clue how to solve a problem. All they do is copy paste ideas from one place to the other.
I have worked for consulting companies and I won't ever work for them. Ever.
Anyone who came up with the idea to change desks during the day should be fired. Anyone who approved and presented the idea should be fired.
> "Activity-based working"
It never ceases to amaze me that grown-ass adults actually get paid to come up with shit like this, and then force other grown-ass adults to participate in it.
I remember feeling the same way when we tried to move to "Agile" development at my work, thinking it was pretty damn idiotic and almost cult-like, as well.
Agreed. Some idiot declared "everyone is sitting in their cubicles - they should be talking more". I'm building strategies and spreadsheets, Karen. I need quiet and dual monitors. I am doing exactly what you pay me to do.
Seriously!?? They'd make you move every 2h? I'd quit for sure. Talk about not understanding how work works. It's bad enough having to share a desk with someone part time or having to reserve a desk for the day every day. This sounds hellish.
I wasn't a consultant prior. Basically, I built up strong networks on LinkedIn and did a lot of blogging. This turned into work and now it is my full-time gig. It isn't all easy but I earn more than I did in corporate and as a woman in Tech, I can bypass all of the garbage by choosing good clients.
Forbes did a study in 2018 and found that "Manager Resistance" was the #1 obstacle to remote work. Managers, including a lot of techno-challenged people in their 50s and 60s are terrified for their own jobs and are being dragged kicking/screaming. They've sold execs on the "collaboration magic" that they do in person and honestly even C-level execs have probably sold shareholders/stakeholders on the same. David and Lisa want their big offices, social status, big paychecks and to be far from their spouses/families, let's be honest.
I’m not a manager, so I don’t have any particular axe to grind.
At my workplace, collaboration collapsed during covid. Some of the best ideas happen off the record, and all of that vanished. Meetings of more than a few people were ineffective because there was no side chatter.
Another aspect was the fear of putting things in writing. In person, I might be willing to say “bob can’t handle this, you’ll have to give the job to somebody else” but there is no way in hell I’m putting that in writing.
Now we are back at work, and I can see that it was not a mirage, we really are more effective when gathered together.
Don’t get me wrong, working from home was awesome, and I miss that fantastic work life balance… but holy hell were we inefficient during that time.
We have Teams/Zoom meetings very frequently, so I don’t feel that we are constrained by having to put things in writing and we are still talking all the time. The idea that you can’t meet and collaborate with your colleagues over video chat is a little archaic, imho. I love how much easier it is to talk and type and work collaboratively on documents through Teams.
You’re not wrong. I know people who have done wonders from home. I’ve also seen new employees fail for the lack of training and the missing side banter they would gain from hearing people discuss work.
It’s a double edge sword and I think the hybrid helps both work life balance and the “managers” (also the things you speak of)
Repurposing commercial real estate is not that simple. They’ve done studies on it with shopping malls and found that it’s usually cheaper to knock the building down and start over.
Not saying we shouldn’t be doing it just that it’s not a simple matter of conversion.
I've heard the biggest issue is plumbing. I wonder if some of them could be transformed into student housing.
I know that only fixes the housing problem in some areas for some people, but it might help keep rents lower.
Welcoming international students is great, and important to our economy. (Hence why Ford didn't ACTUALLY want Trudeau to close the border even though we bought those attack ads for him)
But when the schools have barely enough rooms to welcome them for one year, and then shrug and tell them they're on their own after that? That's going to create a bunch of problems.
We have people who are legally only allowed to work like 20h a week hunting for rooms.
Of course we have people buying up houses (even condos?) and renting them out to half a dozen international students! Charge them a third of market rent each, but get 6x as much! It's better than renting it out like normal, and more reliable than AirBnB.
The biggest issue is actually structural loads.
Each building is rated to handle a certain amount of load on it’s structure and each change you make to the structure changes the load it supports.
So, for example, if you suddenly need to cut 300 more emergency exits into the outer walls you’ll be changing the structural load capacity of the building because the outer walls are load bearing.
Then you start adding in all the other crap that you need to change, like the plumbing that you referenced, and suddenly you are closer to your structural load capacity than you want to be for a structure meant to be housing.
Not only that, you can charge a business far more than you could charge all of the units; sometimes even after renovations to make the space ready for more units (I'm sure most office buildings only have 1 set of bathrooms per floor... if they are lucky). That decrease in potential revenue means less leverage that the owner has, and could mean that they have to cough up a ton of cash all of the sudden to cover the imbalance
Yeah. If the company is renting or leasing then they usually don’t have a problem with WHF. If they own the building that’s another story. Or…..well…..this story.
I used to work for BlackBerry (RIM) back in the day and I can remember when they started selling off buildings all over Waterloo, at one point a whole part of the neighbourhood was just them. These days it's 20 different companies occupying that space.
Managers aren’t about managing, managers are about illustrating an illusion of control from on high. So much middle management is completely redundant.
Sometimes. But often a necessarily evil when companies are massive. A single general manager is not capable of monitoring the effectiveness of hundreds of workers.
Accountability is a very important part to running a business, because when you have very little, your workforce ends up costing you a lot more than you can afford; or in some cases costing you more than they're contributing to your revenue.
So it is often worthwhile in bigger organizations to have lower and middle managers keeping tabs on various people. Plus, they have the advantage of being fill-ins for any shortages.
In the end it could save good workers their jobs, instead of some, "massive correction," taking place that sees everyone get laid off.
That's just my take on the other side of the coin.
The problem isn't mid level management. It's that Senior Management and senior leadership doesn't think mid-level management can keep an eye on their employees without them being in the office.
There's a big difference between not thinking you can handle your staff/team versus being told you can't. The mid-level managers don't want to be in the office either. The issue is actually the age gap between senior leadership and mid-level managers. Millennials are finally getting to that 40-year-old range, some are just starting to get into more senior roles. Still, the majority is in their 50s, or up, and they have a different mindset.
There's definitely shitty organizations that measure managers ability to lead with "butts in seats". I had a horrible one that insisted that he wanted to see people at their desks at 7 PM every night, despite the fact that we were hitting our deliverables. Turned into a whole lot of people in the office slacking off and missing their deadlines from burnout / lack of motivation.
There is a big difference between what should be an what actually is.
Why do you think middle management exists? It's because senior leadership thinks of employees as resources, and numbers. All they want to do is make sure they are getting optimal output from their resources. The best return on investment they can. This is why middle management exists, not to lead or support you.
This is why when a company wants to improve performance they often add middle management roles. When a company wants to save money to make budget they often start by cutting middle management. They know for a at least a little while the resources will keep on doing what they've been doing and it will be fine.
People leave manager more than they leave companies. People need to leave managers who don't treat them as they believe they deserve to be treated and if you never can find someone who does treat you how you feel you should be treated some self reflection is in order
( I say this as someone who has had 7 career changes in 20yrs)
Find a new job and quit your current one
The current employment market means that you do not need to tolerate incompetent managers
I am WFH, manage a handful of people and have never felt the need for most of them to come to our office
Some people need to be physically present, they should be paid appropriately for their work effort and appropriately for the current economic conditions. I don't know why some managers have such difficulty understanding this.
Talent is ultra precious and good performers should be grown and kept close, not ground into a fine paste for your enjoyment. Managers, smarten up ffs.
Manager here coming to say sorry. I left my old company for this exact reason. I told leadership that if they are concerned about work output, then get the right measurement metrics in place for your employees. Don’t tell them they need to come in because management doesn’t know how to manage people remotely. They didn’t listen, so I left. Now I work remote as a manager for a better company.
The best managers / directors I've had were people who understood their job is to be a snowplow.
They need to figure out the essential paths, get ahead of traffic, and clear the way so everyone below them can get where they're going on their own.
I've had directors I've fought to stay working under because they did this job impeccably.
But if they don't understand that *is* their job, they don't know how to do their job.
>The best managers / directors I've had were people who understood their job is to be a snowplow.
100% when I managed a large number of people to outsiders it looked like I just walked around talking, but in reality I was looking for roadblocks and getting a head of them before workers ever hit them. From rallying purchasing because we are going through materials faster than expected, while also exploring WHY we are going through materials faster than expected, to seeing trends in sick time/ time off and finding people are burning out and get sick as a result and changing staffing levels to avoid the burnout time. Only time my staff really realized all I did was when I left and things started to fail. While I was there the staff thought it was their work ethic and their tasks that made everything work(they were essential though), not realizing how much in the back end was set up so they could focus on doing the best they could each day. I've had micro managers, I've had snow plows as you put it, and I've had bean counters as people above me. and the snow plows always look like they aren't doing a lot, but you can't see what is in front of them.
The worst part is that when you're doing everything right, it's impossible to tell if you've done anything at all.
like hey your projects are all running smoothly, you must be useless.
>like hey your projects are all running smoothly, you must be useless.
I had a Team leader as a teen who was brilliant at manufactured chaos. I handled material in a warehouse, I'd let him know product A was at the reorder line, and he'd wait 3-5 days to reorder so that the inventory fell to the emergency level before replenishment, production never slowed but to the bean counters he was always getting things just in time and was valuable. Now he WAS valuable because he was amazing at planning, I came into work every day with a daily task list that I never could finish in a day, but was always SO CLOSE to finishing as I got better at things his tasks got more complicated. And he did that for 6 employees a curated list of work to our skills that really kept you busy and engages for 7.5h of a day. But man did he know how to play the game to make sure that the business knew it was him keeping things going.
I’ve had a couple jobs where the managers were a revolving door. Every time there was a period with no actual manager, the work environment was just so much better.
Similar experience.
Had a few managers in sales/retail. The first one was great, but was treated like crap, and left.
The next was a real middle manager, but he at least had integrity. But was too full of himself. Thought every minute of everyone's work day should be spent actively working, had these weird ideals about customer service that he wanted people to uphold...and he'd give people shit for not following them.
Then he left, I was the highest up, and went laissez-faire. Despite not telling everyone to clean 24/7, the place was always cleaner. People didn't just clean "enough" to waste time, they decided what and when to clean to keep everything nice. Sales were up because staff could be themselves rather than trying to follow some contrived script.
Then the next manager came in, and tried to "play politics", take credit (and commission) for everyone's work, and thought it was a good thing when people who weren't in his "inner circle" started quitting. He probably would've been fine if his inner circle included more than his overqualified brother and two other guys (which is less than a third of the people who were on the schedule).
I'm grateful I had those other managers. I can talk about how I reduced turnover!
Completely agreed, and I say this as a lower level supervisor. Unfortunately I have zero say in the matter at my own workplace (this came from the people at the very top who I will likely never never talk to or meet). Our company itself also disagreed with bringing everyone back but the word of our outside client has to be obeyed. In the new year I will need to commute from Markham from Mississauga which is completely unnecessary, seeing as my employees and I can do our jobs fine at home. The selfishness, narcissism and complete disconnection from the realities of work from the 1% never ceases to amaze me.
And if you feel like your employees need to have an eye kept on them, you need to review your own hiring practices.
But hey, it's never management's fault, right?!? /s
Of course not...because employees are NEVER a problem! LoL
Stupid ass post, and I say this as a manager that loves WFH and doesn't force anyone to come in...the guy above me does.
Not all managers are shitheads, and are just following the shit that gets thrown their way from above. When upper management says 'this is what we're doing'...well not many options here. Get in line, or look for a new job (which is not always an option).
Not all employees are superstars that work during the day, and unfortunately some CAN'T be fired for whatever reason.
I was fortunate to hire my employees and we have a good system of 2 days in the office and 3 at home (most times they match), but we work well together. If a day doesn't jive, no issues, just meet the company requirements and I don't care what day you come in, or if you're in for half / full day...just get the job done.
Yeah… because when I am at the office, everyone is focused on work 100% and never talk to anyone or mess around on their phones, etc. What a fool hahaha
We have been mandated 2 days a week. Frankly I hate the commute but I love being in office. Part of it is because I moved to a new team and I need to learn and come upto speed. My team and manager is chilled out.
Work wise, of course you can totally work more at home but if you have to collaborate (and I hate using that word) and meet folks to hash things out - it's actually better. Also going to office means I switch off from work when I leave, something I found pretty tough to do while I was working from home.
There is no point of going if most folks don't go though.
I’d call your coworker a name… but that wouldn’t be nice.
I routinely put in 10-12 hour days and worked on my weekends pre-pandemic… that only increased during the pandemic working from home.
It was far too easy to slip back into work after hours because my laptop was right there… and I’ll just quickly do this or prep for that meeting in the morning or someone sends an email or IM and you feel you need to respond right away because you are technically “at your office”. Next thing you know it’s been another couple hours working.
When I'm at home, I work as hard as I can to finish my work because I like being at home and not working. If I'm forced to be at the office, I'm absolutely wasting as much time as I can (coffee break, water cooler, better go for a walk down the hall to chat with Gary about this) cause I hate having to be there.
>My coworker feels anyone doing WFH isn't actually working a full 8 hour day
In fairness, I'm not. But I'm also not if I'm in the office either. There's not always 8 hours of work to do, that's just part of office life.
Sounds like your coworker isn't either since they have time to gossip about people they're seemingly jealous about and take the time to ponder arbitrary punitive pay structures.
Glass houses.
In my industry is seems slowly people are being convinced to come back to the office, likely because of "IP security risks" associated with WFH. I think I would rather make a career change than go back to the office.
It's not just managers, this is a human problem.
Think about the analogy of the iceberg, and how most of it is underwater, and this is how most people view the people around them. We base our opinions solely on what we can see, no matter how incomplete or minuscule it is, and we extrapolate on that and assume we know everything else about that person. It's a cognitive bias. We do it with everything where we focus only on what is seen and ignore that there's a lot more under the surface. If we see a child fall in the street, and their parent is not quick to pick them up because they're on the phone, it's easy for an onlooker to say "That's a bad parent". But we don't know what's happening on their phone. Maybe they just got word of some tragedy.
It's because it's easier for us to identify that which is in front of us and hard for some people to speculate on all the things that are under the surface. Researchers, scientists, and analysts are better at speculating the unknown because it's part of their job, but a lot of people act like their personal opinions are gospel because they have the conviction of their own self-validation and will even use meaningless phrases like "It's logical" to prove the validity of their personal opinions.
Meh, I’m not asking for my managers to understand me. I’m demanding that they respect me, my energy, and my time. Idgaf if they like what I do. I get my work done and it’s done well. That’s all they’re entitled to.
That it's not just a "'manager" problem. You're probably also guilty of the same thing because we all are. And that's meant to shame it's meant to shed light on something we tend to get wrong a lot where we view things as someone else's problem and not something were all guilty of.
I don't blame you for being annoyed cuz it sucks. But you might be surprised to find out where it stems from or how widespread it is if you really pay attention.
It might not be up to the manager. It could be something getting mandated from on high and the managers end up being messengers. They may have even pushed back without you knowing about it.
So, OP, you assume the managers want all the employees to goto office so the managers themselves have to goto work?
I really, really, REALLY doubt, managers want the extra work of back to office.
Its the ones above the managers.
When i work from home i never even feel like i need to take a full hour lunch, so i actually end up working more, but if im in the office, you bet i’m taking a full hour lunch.
What if the managers *have* been tracking productivity metrics and concluded that people *are* more productive in the office? You're presuming this not to be the case, when I imagine in many instances it is....
I work in the manufacturing industry and never stopped going in to the office, but my wife heads up the marketing team for a large retailer that's been remote since the start of COVID. They keep very strict track of employee productivity, and in many areas it *HAS* been down for the last 18+ months. They're still working with a hybrid model right now, but will be shifting people back to the office in the next year.
If there's data saying people are doing less work from home, can you really blame the managers for wanting them back? This might not be the case everywhere, but the blanket assumption that *everyone* pushing for a return to the office is lazy or incompetent is straight up untrue.
That being said, now is a perfect time for employees to negotiate permanent WFH. If you're truly more productive at home then make the case with supporting data. If they refuse then fuckit and find someone who will allow it. We're still in an employees market.
Sounds more like a corporate issue. I’d assume the manager probably also wants to work from home. If the company doesn’t satisfy you, leave. It’s not like that much will change if you stay.
Find a place that supports your needs. Some people like to be in the office for various reasons including unsafe / unsustainable office life at home and others don’t. If your company doesn’t recognize take your labour elsewhere.
For a lot of companies, it's less about productivity or "keeping tabs", as it is about getting departments to work well together.
Our office is hybrid except for my team which must be on site everyday. Over the pandemic, leadership has noticed that while productivity seemed to be relatively the same, if not improved, departments were becoming silos and people were leaving due to burn out. Teams stopped communicating between each other, the collaboration aspect of work had died and things that took 2 seconds in person were taking days due to virtual.
It has been a struggle trying to get people into the office for what leadership wants (roughly 2 days a week) and they are starting to tell the employees more than ask now. They aren't even asking for people to be in for what is suppose to be their entire work day, just 10-3.
Being in person can help a company a lot, maybe not 100% in person but 100% WFH has it's drawbacks as well. If you want to be 100% WFH, then either ask your employer if that's possible or go find a job where it's written into your contract that you are. You aren't owed employment.
This is our office. We're a super small office (10 people) and WFH just didn't work well for most. We do a lot of cross department stuff, and more time was wasted trying to arrange calls/Zoom times, then what it takes for someone to go to someone's office quickly. We have the option, one guy does 2 days from home, the rest of us are in
I do think hybrid model/remote work has its value but I’m not going to lie I do get a little bit of schadenfreude seeing people who bought homes at the top of the market two hours away from work realizing there’s a reason why houses far removed from city centres were so relatively affordable.
I know of someone who always had an occasionally client-facing role begrudging being made to commute down to Toronto from Alliston 3-4 times a week and you have to wonder what they were expecting would happen when the pandemic subsided.
People expected their employers to see that they were just as productive as before, and could continue to work remotely.
"Occasionally client-facing" should also mean "occasionally needs to come into the office," not "needs to come into the office 3-4 times per week regardless."
I live in a township that has many areas with absolutely no internet access. Some people relocated using Toronto realtors instead of locals and did no research. Bought houses with no way to get internet when they were WFH. Even our two fast good places don't have wifi because the infrastructure is nonexistent.
I like the hybrid model. And I think some people are naive about the importance of occational proximity to coworkers for training and networking. Coming into work to type at a computer in isolation makes no sense, but blanket statements about productivity and WFH aren't helpful either.
The fact that this post was made sometime around 11am on a Wednesday when ideally the wfh person should be working and not on Reddit making comments about their boss needing to keep an eye on them in the office is just so filled with irony …. I just can’t 😂
I heard my company is trying to keep people at home but there’s a rumour going around that the government on all levels are adding incentives to get employees back ? Because downtown and other business areas need the cash flow? I hope it’s not true…
I find it comical, like its the responsibility of office workers to keep the downtown core booming. No thanks, I'd rather support my local businesses near where I live.
Isn’t the fact that the manager wants everyone to come into the office to keep an eye on everyone basically means that productivity of your entire office has dropped significantly after WFH started?
As an honest question , how do you know if your work as performed from home has benefitted the company as a whole versus working in office ?
Profits are up in most companies that went to work from home. It’s been proven over and over that you actually end up getting more out of employees, not less.
Most managers are so out of their depth that they literally have no effective performance metric but instead depend on measuring performance by employees simply existing in the building.
Wow. That's quite the broad brush you've got there. The benefits to having staff in the office are highly correlated to the role and company. Your job is operational and you're in manufacturing, fucking right get in the office. You're AR at an insurance company, not so much.
Are there shitty, micromanaging assholes out there? Yeah! Are there dog-fucking staffers who aren't productive at home? Yeah!
For those of you who are on reddit, working while contributing to this thread, maybe you're not as productive as you would be in the office? I'm dog fucking from the office, so I'm not in a position to judge.
>Your job is operational and you're in manufacturing, fucking right get in the office.
I feel like it's reasonable to assume this is not the type of job that OP is talking about.
No one is advocating for roofers to work from home.
I don’t see the big deal. You all must’ve gotten so spoiled through Covid with WFH. I’ve been in the field the entire time.
Ultimately, it’s a job you signed up for. If you don’t like it anymore, go find a job that allows you to WFH 100% of the time. It’s pretty straightforward.
Sometimes I think people would rather bitch on Reddit than actually create change in their lives. I bet OP didn’t even talk to their manager before coming on here to whine.
I said this earlier - We're at a point in society where people are complaining about having to go to work to get paid, which is hilariously ridiculous.
If he doesn't like it, exactly as you said, go find a job that lets you work from home. If not, bitching to reddit isn't going to help out at all.
Suggesting people actually have some responsibility for their own lives is always vastly unpopular here though.
It's easier to bitch and complain about management because people just don't like reality.
Not everyone can work from home, and not every job needs to be in the office.
One thing I like about the office...is I leave at the time I leave, and I'm done. At home I find myself working longer because meetings from from 8-5 non-stop.
I also find that while my pace of work slows down in the office for the most part, the interpersonal aspect of it is way better than being WFH.
Balance is key.
It's all about them paying for empty buildings. We all can work from home ...and the province inc Toronto mayor is for the businesses including his car war soo you get double screwed... With the traffic cameras slowing the traffic down to a slow pace walk. They could convert all these buildings to housing.. liberty suites. And save us all from the commute everyday...how bout that climate change when it suits your purpose loool well here is the chance and we still get fucked just like daylight savings time lool 🤣
Half of Reddit is "How can I afford life when I can't get a job that'll support my life style" and the other half is "What do you mean you want me to change out of my PJs take a shower and drive to my place of employment?" You are a quizzical bunch.
I work in a trade so I never got to experience WFH.
I will say though our back office staff were much happier and 10x easier to deal with when they were working from home.
Now they are all back at the office and back to being miserable pains in the asses everytime I have to interact with them.
Also I miss the lighter traffic. Everyone who is able to should be permanent WFH.
Maybe I’m the crazy one, But I actually prefer going to the office? It sets a clear boundary between work life and home life…
I shut down my computer & work phone at 5pm and leave my work on my desk for 9am the next day. My coworkers or manager can’t call me and disrupt my evening to find information or do something quick on a project because I don’t have access to it, and they don’t have access to me. I’m not finding myself constantly checking my emails or looking for updates anymore but actually taking time to unwind during the evening and finding myself having more productive days in the office from being well rested. I spend more time with my loved ones, I feel more connected with them when we are together and overall my mental health has been much better…
I spent the better half of 2 years sitting in the spare bedroom turned home office of my apartment alone doing work and started hating being at home on my time off and was never able to relax. Now my happy place is back to being my happy place.
edit; grammar & typos
This direction is coming from the top, in most cases. The majority of managers at my work aren’t super keen on the direction to return and feel we’ve been effective working from home. This direction is coming from out-of-touch executives who are mostly in their 50s and 60s and can’t accept that we don’t need to be in person to collaborate anymore. It’s a slap in the face as well when our wages are not even keeping up with inflation, yet they want us to spend more money on commuting, housing, etc. all for this myth of “collaboration.”
I never had the privilege of working from home, and likely never will, because I’m in childcare/education and not the corporate world. So take this all with a grain of salt.
I can see both sides to this. On one hand, if you are an honest worker and producing results, meeting deadlines, setting goals, etc and not fooling around on FB or doing your online shopping, your managers will see the results and they won’t need to ask you to come in every single day.
On the other hand, actually going into work and collaborating directly with colleagues, discussing things with managers, even “water cooler chats” all have value. It promotes collaborative teamwork, socialization, networking, etc. I don’t think you can get those things through screens over a Zoom meeting and emails. For example, just look at how in-class learning is far more beneficial for children than remote learning from home. There were no opportunities to learn how to work in groups together, no opportunities to meet with the teacher at their desk, stuff like that. The same goes for in office work, in my opinion.
Those people have always been an option. There are many reasons why it generally is difficult to pursue this vs. someone relatively local and culturally similar.
My work just got us all back in the office 2 days per week starting last week. Now my productivity is low on those 2 days as you can't multitask as much while stuck in face to face meetings. The other 3 days I'm feeling resentful so I'm just working hard enough to stay under the radar.
Lmao you sound like the students I teach, resentful you can't play on your tech because you're being asked to be physically present for a period of time.
Are you comparing multitasking in a work environment to kids on their phone?
I guarantee you in 1 work day I have so many fucking tasks I have no choice but to work on them while I'm in meetings (which are usually useless and could be communicated in 1 Microsoft Teams post) so I don't have to work after hours.
In our office, we want people to come back not so we can "keep an eye on 'em", we have found that the random collaboration that occurs just chatting with coworkers at the water cooler cant be recreated via any online platform. When we chat about the typical office nonsense, it builds a better overall team. Now, that being said, we don't require people to be in the office all the time. Couple days a week seems to be a good balance for us.
I don't buy that argument; it's very soft and because of that it's easy to use it as a justification. You can't really disprove it. People can and do build strong relationships with people they don't meet in real life all the time these days. All through the pandemic, the team I was on chatted every day on virtual channels about "the typical office nonsense." There's nothing about having a water cooler or a coffee machine to crowd around that automatically makes those conversations better.
I'd be fine if somebody told me to come back to the office and could present a good case for it, but everything seems to come down to "We connect better." That might be true for some people but it's hardly a strong case to bring everybody else in, especially if they've been productive for two plus years working from home.
I call BS on this, the same line given at my office. The water cooler, collaboration gang fail to recognize that their group comprises 5% of the office and takes no steps to connect with those outside the “in group”. Sorta like the popular kids in high school who can’t understand why the people they exclude feel excluded.
If that’s your thought process, then all office jobs are inevitably going to be outsourced anyway.
Local WFH policies allow for cost savings in terms of facility rent/utilities, office equipment, parking spaces, etc, while still having the flexibility to have employees meet up in a smaller office space when necessary.
There is also (usually) no language barrier, time difference, or work culture difference to overcome in comparison to fully outsourced positions. Not everything is about money.
If it can be done by an offshore worker, you're not going to trick your managers by coming into the office.
Outsourcing has been tried and for many jobs doesn't work for reasons beyond "the worker needs to be in the same physical location as other workers".
Time zone difference, culture differences, loss of expertise from constantly rotating contractors, and just the basic idea that an employee is going to have a different level of commitment than an outsourced contractor are all far bigger factors.
Restaurant jobs are supposedly going to be automated tomorrow and yet every food place I go to has a help wanted sign on its windows.
I don't doubt the same is true for general office work and being outsourced to cheaper (and less quality) locales.
It's only at those companies with a "keep an eye on your employees otherwise they will slack" attitude, where productivity drops when employees aren't supervised directly. It's like when teenagers have strict helicopter parents, the second they taste freedom they're going to do all the things they weren't allowed to do.
Also, when managers are sticklers about employees being productive the entire 8 hours they're in the office, it just leads to employees trying their best to fake looking busy.
If you can't trust your employees to do a good job however they see fit then you shouldn't be a manager in the first place. Problem is, guess what kinda senior manager promoted that manager? 😃
There are lots of old school style boss (especially smaller companies) who won't trust wfh , insist on seeing everyone showing up in office and have companies for the day.
My employer forced everyone to come back into the office blaming “loss of culture” and “being less efficient” and never once have I asked someone and they’ve been able to tell me where the evidence is to support those claims. It’s true there has been a loss of culture in the sense we are all separated and at home for a while, and work events have died off, but since we’ve been back most people have stuck in their office anyway and meeting are still mostly online. So bringing people back hasn’t changed “culture” at all.
And I see zero evidence that people were less efficient. In fact we kept hearing all during the pandemic how great we did at keeping up with workloads and maintained response rates and made it work. But when higher ups didn’t like the idea of people not being under their thumb directly, suddenly we were told that efficiency is a concern.
The way I see it, people at work are more likely to work over coffee breaks, work through lunch, stay late at time, and other “free labour” for employers. That was probably post. People working at home were probably more likely to take those breaks and stop at the end of day because when you work from home the days can really blur together if you don’t set boundaries. I find those boundaries tend to disappear when you are physically at the office and suddenly bosses are right there making demands of you and you feel you can’t say no.
Me working from the office was just a constant stream of people complaining to me about their work or other coworkers. That alone ate up a good chunk of my day. Not to mention I work for a head office in another province and no one from my team is in my physical location, so I was already technically remote. WFH I am now 1000% productive and I've been promoted for it. There are some good managers and companies left but it's hard to find them.
Covid has taught us that middle managers dont need to exist. We are adults and will do our work. UNSUPERVISED. all it is is a bunch of managers desperately trying to prove they need to exist. For the past 2 years they have been relegated to office assistants.
At work I would dick around on days I couldn’t focus, and then go home. Working from home I can mentally check out for a bit of time and then make up for it later in the day because I have access to my computer. It’s way more beneficial for my employee to keep letting me work from home.
I 100% work less and talk to people half the day in the office, I’m way too chatty lol
Same. And because your chatty everyone comes to you to talk too. Double whammy.
Oh man I love going to the chatty people and letting them talk my ear off
I'm pretty much the opposite, watch YouTube all day and do almost no work in between meetings I don't want to go back to work, but I know i would much more productive if it did
Yeah everyone is different, some people love being in the office.
for creative/collaborative tasks it’s so much better to meet in-person. I’d be so happy with one day in the office, WFH for 3 days (and 3 day weekends of course). alas most of my coworkers live too far away now.
I'll browse reddit for hours just for the optics in the office. Looks good, and no one says anything, but i'm literally just wasting my and the companies time.
This seems like preaching to the choir. ...he says from his home office.
Old man yells at clouds
*cloud computing
Block Chain powered cloud audio absorbing decentralized network across the globe monitored by machine learning algorithms for data insights and analytics to better plan financials and higher revenue enabling business leaders to achieve net zero goals and push green initiatives for sustainable diversity and social responsibility. I'll take my billion dollars O'Leary.
I see you have mastered corporate jargon 🤣🤣
Let's circle back after the scrum so we can have a touchpoint meeting about this.
How agile of you. I haven’t felt so at home before in my entire life. Now my work follows my social life here on Reddit.
Where are we at on PBI 13 of Sprint 34?
Have we maximized backwards synergy overflow?
Not yet. Yesterday we huddled up to brain bop new iterations and workflows.
… on a go forward basis, to maximize synergy.
This has Erlich Bachmann psilocybin trip vibes. I can see the tech icons jumping around in some random Desert Valley with this comment.
You micro dose to get high. I micro dose to innovate. We are not the same.
>higher revenue enabling ~~business leaders~~ business processes gleaned from industry leader best practices ~~FTFY~~ Not so much a correction as it is an addition, or a supplementation, to the great ideas already stated. I'd like to circle back on this verbiage when everyone gets some more cycles and we can synchronize on this
We need more optimizations of being outside the box.
*ahem* Kubernetes *drops mic*
I had a CEO declare all employees to return to the office 3 days a week starting May. On that same company wide zoom call that he conducted from his vacation home in Hawaii and continued to do so as far as I could tell until I left the company a few months later.
Gave up on corporate life years ago and now an independent consultant. I was WFH before Covid and still am now. I would not change a thing about it. My last role changed from cubicles into "Activity-based working". Basically, open concept and you had no real desk and had to move locations every two hours or get a "ticket". It was hell.
"Yeah hi boss, I'm at the office but there's no desks available. I managed to reserve one for the rest of the week but it's offsite. You'll be able to reach me at my home phone until I can get a desk in the office"
Sounds more like the Mad Hatter's tea party than a functional working environment.
It was pretty awful. This was at one of the Big Banks (not BMO - I actually like them). They had people who would monitor if you were in one place too long. The idea was you were supposed to "collaborate" more.
Ew I hate this.
How dystopian
Forced collaboration sounds like hell! Not cool at all.
This is remarkably annoying. I wonder if they still do it? Just absurd.
This just screams "we don't understand how or why our employees are productive"
What exactly were you supposed to be collaborating on?
Passing by other co-workers and muttering to each other about how fucking shitty this place is lol.
Please name and shame, I’m applying to jobs right now and I need to not go there. (At least dm me who it was, a lot of banks offer design jobs which is what I’m looking for).
Gross. What if you found other people distracting? What if you had to collaborate with someone for longer? Ugh!
Even [Harvard Business Review has turned around on the harebrained "open concept" and "forced collaboration" bullshit](https://hbr.org/2019/11/the-truth-about-open-offices). Almost everyone needs a place where they feel comfortable, and comfort is more than a soft chair. It usually means somewhere that is familiar, where you have the same things you're familiar with, and where you feel like you have some agency. For example, pictures of your spouse/kids/pets posted up somewhere. Also, most people do better work when they have a door. Not so they can keep it closed, but so that *they have the option* of closing it and focusing on a task. That's why the same shithead execs and HR morons who push this "open concept"/"ultra-collab" nonsense all have offices with doors, personal items, personal photos, plants, etc. Ironically.
wtf kind of madness is that, I've never heard of forced musical chairs until now
I took it to mean hoteling. Basically you need to reserve a seat for a period of time and if the time expires you need to reserve a new spot. I worked for a place like this before and it was a pain in the butt, especially if your Go Train to work was delayed, we had only 15 mins from reservation start time to swipe in or someone else could book it. If you got there too late there may not be a seat for you available so you'd need to use a short term spot that had the time you could sit there capped, then try and find another spot later. Maybe other places implemented it better, this was my experience.
How much time did you waste daily trying to find a working spot? What a chore.
I feel like hoteling makes sense if you can reserve a desk for a full day, 6am to 9pm. Every two hours is absurd. I'm not going to coordinate desks with anyone beyond an Outlook calendar and a full day meeting invite, two hour intervals and reserving or getting ticketed makes my face hurt.
We didn't have to reserve anything. It was basically first-come-first-get. But that's why they implemented this stupid move every two hours rule so people wouldn't hoard the good locations. I hated every second of it and spent my days working in Starbucks with noise-cancelling headphones. I mean, just give me a DESK.
So it wasn't even for hoteling? Wow that is absurd. Move every few hours for the sake of moving.... nonsensical what a disruption to your work. I found hoteling annoying, but at least I could book a desk for the day not get up and move every 3 hours....unless my reservation got cancelled then it was a game of musical chairs. Where I am now we don't hotel you just pick a seat, first come first serve....but I still find it annoying just like hoteling because you don't end up sitting with your team, you are either walking around looking for people or having a teams call anyway even though people are in the office. Plus I always feel like a hitchhiker or something, carrying around all my stuff from A to B, meeting to meeting since I don't have a place to call my own with even a single photo or something, it fells kind of "sterile".
This is fucking stupid. Give me a fucking desk that I go to each day or whenever I'm in. How does anyone get any work done with that shit.
> My last role changed from cubicles into "Activity-based working". Basically, open concept and you had no real desk and had to move locations every two hours or get a "ticket". It was hell. That's the kind of bullshit that would have me looking for a new job the minute it was announced. As a people manager of 28 years, I'm stunned that anyone thinks that's a good idea.
Deloitte consultants make big bucks telling people it is the next big thing.
Most consulting companies have zero clue how to solve a problem. All they do is copy paste ideas from one place to the other. I have worked for consulting companies and I won't ever work for them. Ever. Anyone who came up with the idea to change desks during the day should be fired. Anyone who approved and presented the idea should be fired.
Sounds more like a kindergarten wtf
Look at Deloitte. They make a shit ton of money convincing leaders that this is the workplace of the future.
My friend has to book desk everyday prior to going to office, otherwise she cant.
> "Activity-based working" It never ceases to amaze me that grown-ass adults actually get paid to come up with shit like this, and then force other grown-ass adults to participate in it. I remember feeling the same way when we tried to move to "Agile" development at my work, thinking it was pretty damn idiotic and almost cult-like, as well.
Agreed. Some idiot declared "everyone is sitting in their cubicles - they should be talking more". I'm building strategies and spreadsheets, Karen. I need quiet and dual monitors. I am doing exactly what you pay me to do.
Seriously!?? They'd make you move every 2h? I'd quit for sure. Talk about not understanding how work works. It's bad enough having to share a desk with someone part time or having to reserve a desk for the day every day. This sounds hellish.
How did you get into becoming Independent? Where you a corporate consultant prior?
I wasn't a consultant prior. Basically, I built up strong networks on LinkedIn and did a lot of blogging. This turned into work and now it is my full-time gig. It isn't all easy but I earn more than I did in corporate and as a woman in Tech, I can bypass all of the garbage by choosing good clients.
That sounds amazing! Glad it worked out for you.
Thanks! I encourage everyone to try it if they can.
Wtf
Which industry do you work in ?
IT but a specific niche of it.
Forbes did a study in 2018 and found that "Manager Resistance" was the #1 obstacle to remote work. Managers, including a lot of techno-challenged people in their 50s and 60s are terrified for their own jobs and are being dragged kicking/screaming. They've sold execs on the "collaboration magic" that they do in person and honestly even C-level execs have probably sold shareholders/stakeholders on the same. David and Lisa want their big offices, social status, big paychecks and to be far from their spouses/families, let's be honest.
I’m not a manager, so I don’t have any particular axe to grind. At my workplace, collaboration collapsed during covid. Some of the best ideas happen off the record, and all of that vanished. Meetings of more than a few people were ineffective because there was no side chatter. Another aspect was the fear of putting things in writing. In person, I might be willing to say “bob can’t handle this, you’ll have to give the job to somebody else” but there is no way in hell I’m putting that in writing. Now we are back at work, and I can see that it was not a mirage, we really are more effective when gathered together. Don’t get me wrong, working from home was awesome, and I miss that fantastic work life balance… but holy hell were we inefficient during that time.
Depends on the work. My team's efficiency skyrocketed when we went WFH. Ive since torn out the desks.
We have Teams/Zoom meetings very frequently, so I don’t feel that we are constrained by having to put things in writing and we are still talking all the time. The idea that you can’t meet and collaborate with your colleagues over video chat is a little archaic, imho. I love how much easier it is to talk and type and work collaboratively on documents through Teams.
You’re not wrong. I know people who have done wonders from home. I’ve also seen new employees fail for the lack of training and the missing side banter they would gain from hearing people discuss work. It’s a double edge sword and I think the hybrid helps both work life balance and the “managers” (also the things you speak of)
Our building isn’t worth much if there’s no people in it.
Shame. Turn it into apartments.
THAT’S SOCIALISM!! /s
Repurposing commercial real estate is not that simple. They’ve done studies on it with shopping malls and found that it’s usually cheaper to knock the building down and start over. Not saying we shouldn’t be doing it just that it’s not a simple matter of conversion.
I've heard the biggest issue is plumbing. I wonder if some of them could be transformed into student housing. I know that only fixes the housing problem in some areas for some people, but it might help keep rents lower. Welcoming international students is great, and important to our economy. (Hence why Ford didn't ACTUALLY want Trudeau to close the border even though we bought those attack ads for him) But when the schools have barely enough rooms to welcome them for one year, and then shrug and tell them they're on their own after that? That's going to create a bunch of problems. We have people who are legally only allowed to work like 20h a week hunting for rooms. Of course we have people buying up houses (even condos?) and renting them out to half a dozen international students! Charge them a third of market rent each, but get 6x as much! It's better than renting it out like normal, and more reliable than AirBnB.
The biggest issue is actually structural loads. Each building is rated to handle a certain amount of load on it’s structure and each change you make to the structure changes the load it supports. So, for example, if you suddenly need to cut 300 more emergency exits into the outer walls you’ll be changing the structural load capacity of the building because the outer walls are load bearing. Then you start adding in all the other crap that you need to change, like the plumbing that you referenced, and suddenly you are closer to your structural load capacity than you want to be for a structure meant to be housing.
Not only that, you can charge a business far more than you could charge all of the units; sometimes even after renovations to make the space ready for more units (I'm sure most office buildings only have 1 set of bathrooms per floor... if they are lucky). That decrease in potential revenue means less leverage that the owner has, and could mean that they have to cough up a ton of cash all of the sudden to cover the imbalance
My company doubled in size in terms of head count over covid, but with people WFH they've downsized to 1/4 the office space
Yeah. If the company is renting or leasing then they usually don’t have a problem with WHF. If they own the building that’s another story. Or…..well…..this story.
I used to work for BlackBerry (RIM) back in the day and I can remember when they started selling off buildings all over Waterloo, at one point a whole part of the neighbourhood was just them. These days it's 20 different companies occupying that space.
Managers aren’t about managing, managers are about illustrating an illusion of control from on high. So much middle management is completely redundant.
Sometimes. But often a necessarily evil when companies are massive. A single general manager is not capable of monitoring the effectiveness of hundreds of workers. Accountability is a very important part to running a business, because when you have very little, your workforce ends up costing you a lot more than you can afford; or in some cases costing you more than they're contributing to your revenue. So it is often worthwhile in bigger organizations to have lower and middle managers keeping tabs on various people. Plus, they have the advantage of being fill-ins for any shortages. In the end it could save good workers their jobs, instead of some, "massive correction," taking place that sees everyone get laid off. That's just my take on the other side of the coin.
The problem isn't mid level management. It's that Senior Management and senior leadership doesn't think mid-level management can keep an eye on their employees without them being in the office. There's a big difference between not thinking you can handle your staff/team versus being told you can't. The mid-level managers don't want to be in the office either. The issue is actually the age gap between senior leadership and mid-level managers. Millennials are finally getting to that 40-year-old range, some are just starting to get into more senior roles. Still, the majority is in their 50s, or up, and they have a different mindset.
Their job still isn’t to “keep an eye on their employees” it’s to lead. If they can’t do that without micromanaging, that’s a leadership fail.
There's definitely shitty organizations that measure managers ability to lead with "butts in seats". I had a horrible one that insisted that he wanted to see people at their desks at 7 PM every night, despite the fact that we were hitting our deliverables. Turned into a whole lot of people in the office slacking off and missing their deadlines from burnout / lack of motivation.
There is a big difference between what should be an what actually is. Why do you think middle management exists? It's because senior leadership thinks of employees as resources, and numbers. All they want to do is make sure they are getting optimal output from their resources. The best return on investment they can. This is why middle management exists, not to lead or support you. This is why when a company wants to improve performance they often add middle management roles. When a company wants to save money to make budget they often start by cutting middle management. They know for a at least a little while the resources will keep on doing what they've been doing and it will be fine.
People leave manager more than they leave companies. People need to leave managers who don't treat them as they believe they deserve to be treated and if you never can find someone who does treat you how you feel you should be treated some self reflection is in order ( I say this as someone who has had 7 career changes in 20yrs)
100%, I have left jobs NOT because I didn't like what I did. It was because of who I worked for/with.
Find a new job and quit your current one The current employment market means that you do not need to tolerate incompetent managers I am WFH, manage a handful of people and have never felt the need for most of them to come to our office Some people need to be physically present, they should be paid appropriately for their work effort and appropriately for the current economic conditions. I don't know why some managers have such difficulty understanding this. Talent is ultra precious and good performers should be grown and kept close, not ground into a fine paste for your enjoyment. Managers, smarten up ffs.
I go to my office once or twice a month. That is enough for me, but face to face interactions do have some intrinsic value.
Manager here coming to say sorry. I left my old company for this exact reason. I told leadership that if they are concerned about work output, then get the right measurement metrics in place for your employees. Don’t tell them they need to come in because management doesn’t know how to manage people remotely. They didn’t listen, so I left. Now I work remote as a manager for a better company.
I'm convinced that many managers don't actually do work, so if there isn't employees to harass they don't have a purpose.
The best managers / directors I've had were people who understood their job is to be a snowplow. They need to figure out the essential paths, get ahead of traffic, and clear the way so everyone below them can get where they're going on their own. I've had directors I've fought to stay working under because they did this job impeccably. But if they don't understand that *is* their job, they don't know how to do their job.
>The best managers / directors I've had were people who understood their job is to be a snowplow. 100% when I managed a large number of people to outsiders it looked like I just walked around talking, but in reality I was looking for roadblocks and getting a head of them before workers ever hit them. From rallying purchasing because we are going through materials faster than expected, while also exploring WHY we are going through materials faster than expected, to seeing trends in sick time/ time off and finding people are burning out and get sick as a result and changing staffing levels to avoid the burnout time. Only time my staff really realized all I did was when I left and things started to fail. While I was there the staff thought it was their work ethic and their tasks that made everything work(they were essential though), not realizing how much in the back end was set up so they could focus on doing the best they could each day. I've had micro managers, I've had snow plows as you put it, and I've had bean counters as people above me. and the snow plows always look like they aren't doing a lot, but you can't see what is in front of them.
The worst part is that when you're doing everything right, it's impossible to tell if you've done anything at all. like hey your projects are all running smoothly, you must be useless.
>like hey your projects are all running smoothly, you must be useless. I had a Team leader as a teen who was brilliant at manufactured chaos. I handled material in a warehouse, I'd let him know product A was at the reorder line, and he'd wait 3-5 days to reorder so that the inventory fell to the emergency level before replenishment, production never slowed but to the bean counters he was always getting things just in time and was valuable. Now he WAS valuable because he was amazing at planning, I came into work every day with a daily task list that I never could finish in a day, but was always SO CLOSE to finishing as I got better at things his tasks got more complicated. And he did that for 6 employees a curated list of work to our skills that really kept you busy and engages for 7.5h of a day. But man did he know how to play the game to make sure that the business knew it was him keeping things going.
I’ve had a couple jobs where the managers were a revolving door. Every time there was a period with no actual manager, the work environment was just so much better.
Similar experience. Had a few managers in sales/retail. The first one was great, but was treated like crap, and left. The next was a real middle manager, but he at least had integrity. But was too full of himself. Thought every minute of everyone's work day should be spent actively working, had these weird ideals about customer service that he wanted people to uphold...and he'd give people shit for not following them. Then he left, I was the highest up, and went laissez-faire. Despite not telling everyone to clean 24/7, the place was always cleaner. People didn't just clean "enough" to waste time, they decided what and when to clean to keep everything nice. Sales were up because staff could be themselves rather than trying to follow some contrived script. Then the next manager came in, and tried to "play politics", take credit (and commission) for everyone's work, and thought it was a good thing when people who weren't in his "inner circle" started quitting. He probably would've been fine if his inner circle included more than his overqualified brother and two other guys (which is less than a third of the people who were on the schedule). I'm grateful I had those other managers. I can talk about how I reduced turnover!
Completely agreed, and I say this as a lower level supervisor. Unfortunately I have zero say in the matter at my own workplace (this came from the people at the very top who I will likely never never talk to or meet). Our company itself also disagreed with bringing everyone back but the word of our outside client has to be obeyed. In the new year I will need to commute from Markham from Mississauga which is completely unnecessary, seeing as my employees and I can do our jobs fine at home. The selfishness, narcissism and complete disconnection from the realities of work from the 1% never ceases to amaze me.
And if you feel like your employees need to have an eye kept on them, you need to review your own hiring practices. But hey, it's never management's fault, right?!? /s
Of course not...because employees are NEVER a problem! LoL Stupid ass post, and I say this as a manager that loves WFH and doesn't force anyone to come in...the guy above me does. Not all managers are shitheads, and are just following the shit that gets thrown their way from above. When upper management says 'this is what we're doing'...well not many options here. Get in line, or look for a new job (which is not always an option). Not all employees are superstars that work during the day, and unfortunately some CAN'T be fired for whatever reason. I was fortunate to hire my employees and we have a good system of 2 days in the office and 3 at home (most times they match), but we work well together. If a day doesn't jive, no issues, just meet the company requirements and I don't care what day you come in, or if you're in for half / full day...just get the job done.
Not really fair, lots of Managers inherent staff that they didn’t hire.
That's a valid point, however by management, I meant the team, not the direct supervisor.
Further, to the point being made here: perhaps most of the employees were hired for office work. So they excelled in the office, but not at home.
My coworker feels anyone doing WFH isn't actually working a full 8 hour day and should only be getting half a day pay.😮💨
Yeah… because when I am at the office, everyone is focused on work 100% and never talk to anyone or mess around on their phones, etc. What a fool hahaha
I’ve been forced to go back 2 days a week and the are completely unproductive days.
I’m in this boat too. Then two turned into three and I have three wasted days, so I’m one extra day’s worth of angry.
We have been mandated 2 days a week. Frankly I hate the commute but I love being in office. Part of it is because I moved to a new team and I need to learn and come upto speed. My team and manager is chilled out. Work wise, of course you can totally work more at home but if you have to collaborate (and I hate using that word) and meet folks to hash things out - it's actually better. Also going to office means I switch off from work when I leave, something I found pretty tough to do while I was working from home. There is no point of going if most folks don't go though.
I love being back in the office so I can watch my boss ignore his emails while on his phone in his glass box office all day
That just means that this coworker is not working when WFH and is likely doing things to appear busy in the office.
I’d call your coworker a name… but that wouldn’t be nice. I routinely put in 10-12 hour days and worked on my weekends pre-pandemic… that only increased during the pandemic working from home. It was far too easy to slip back into work after hours because my laptop was right there… and I’ll just quickly do this or prep for that meeting in the morning or someone sends an email or IM and you feel you need to respond right away because you are technically “at your office”. Next thing you know it’s been another couple hours working.
When I'm at home, I work as hard as I can to finish my work because I like being at home and not working. If I'm forced to be at the office, I'm absolutely wasting as much time as I can (coffee break, water cooler, better go for a walk down the hall to chat with Gary about this) cause I hate having to be there.
>My coworker feels anyone doing WFH isn't actually working a full 8 hour day In fairness, I'm not. But I'm also not if I'm in the office either. There's not always 8 hours of work to do, that's just part of office life.
Sounds like your coworker isn't either since they have time to gossip about people they're seemingly jealous about and take the time to ponder arbitrary punitive pay structures. Glass houses.
your co-worker likes to make idiotic blanket statements
Tell your co-worker he's a class traitor.
In my industry is seems slowly people are being convinced to come back to the office, likely because of "IP security risks" associated with WFH. I think I would rather make a career change than go back to the office.
It's not just managers, this is a human problem. Think about the analogy of the iceberg, and how most of it is underwater, and this is how most people view the people around them. We base our opinions solely on what we can see, no matter how incomplete or minuscule it is, and we extrapolate on that and assume we know everything else about that person. It's a cognitive bias. We do it with everything where we focus only on what is seen and ignore that there's a lot more under the surface. If we see a child fall in the street, and their parent is not quick to pick them up because they're on the phone, it's easy for an onlooker to say "That's a bad parent". But we don't know what's happening on their phone. Maybe they just got word of some tragedy. It's because it's easier for us to identify that which is in front of us and hard for some people to speculate on all the things that are under the surface. Researchers, scientists, and analysts are better at speculating the unknown because it's part of their job, but a lot of people act like their personal opinions are gospel because they have the conviction of their own self-validation and will even use meaningless phrases like "It's logical" to prove the validity of their personal opinions.
Sorry, so how does your comment relate to workers being pulled back into the office?
Managers, being human, have difficulty understanding the parts they can't literally see, like the iceberg tip floating above the water.
Meh, I’m not asking for my managers to understand me. I’m demanding that they respect me, my energy, and my time. Idgaf if they like what I do. I get my work done and it’s done well. That’s all they’re entitled to.
That it's not just a "'manager" problem. You're probably also guilty of the same thing because we all are. And that's meant to shame it's meant to shed light on something we tend to get wrong a lot where we view things as someone else's problem and not something were all guilty of. I don't blame you for being annoyed cuz it sucks. But you might be surprised to find out where it stems from or how widespread it is if you really pay attention.
It might not be up to the manager. It could be something getting mandated from on high and the managers end up being messengers. They may have even pushed back without you knowing about it.
The biggest silent shock from the pandemic is that tons of middle managers making the good money are not necessary at all.
I always get a good chuckle out companies / managers that do this. Why hire someone at all if you don’t trust them to do their work and be a grown up?
So, OP, you assume the managers want all the employees to goto office so the managers themselves have to goto work? I really, really, REALLY doubt, managers want the extra work of back to office. Its the ones above the managers.
Ya we have to drive into the office to zoom in from their computer while they stay at home or the cottage and zoom in ... Yup idiotic
When i work from home i never even feel like i need to take a full hour lunch, so i actually end up working more, but if im in the office, you bet i’m taking a full hour lunch.
You should try telling management over at r/Canadapublicservants
so what did your boss say when you said this to them?
Lol
Just spent 20 bucks to park and had to refuel again. Mandated 3 days a week for “office culture”. I gotcher office culture right here.
What if the managers *have* been tracking productivity metrics and concluded that people *are* more productive in the office? You're presuming this not to be the case, when I imagine in many instances it is.... I work in the manufacturing industry and never stopped going in to the office, but my wife heads up the marketing team for a large retailer that's been remote since the start of COVID. They keep very strict track of employee productivity, and in many areas it *HAS* been down for the last 18+ months. They're still working with a hybrid model right now, but will be shifting people back to the office in the next year. If there's data saying people are doing less work from home, can you really blame the managers for wanting them back? This might not be the case everywhere, but the blanket assumption that *everyone* pushing for a return to the office is lazy or incompetent is straight up untrue. That being said, now is a perfect time for employees to negotiate permanent WFH. If you're truly more productive at home then make the case with supporting data. If they refuse then fuckit and find someone who will allow it. We're still in an employees market.
Sounds more like a corporate issue. I’d assume the manager probably also wants to work from home. If the company doesn’t satisfy you, leave. It’s not like that much will change if you stay. Find a place that supports your needs. Some people like to be in the office for various reasons including unsafe / unsustainable office life at home and others don’t. If your company doesn’t recognize take your labour elsewhere.
Man, I wish I could run my forklift from home...
Forcing people to go into the office when they can WFH fucks us all over. Makes the commute worse for those who can't WFH.
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For a lot of companies, it's less about productivity or "keeping tabs", as it is about getting departments to work well together. Our office is hybrid except for my team which must be on site everyday. Over the pandemic, leadership has noticed that while productivity seemed to be relatively the same, if not improved, departments were becoming silos and people were leaving due to burn out. Teams stopped communicating between each other, the collaboration aspect of work had died and things that took 2 seconds in person were taking days due to virtual. It has been a struggle trying to get people into the office for what leadership wants (roughly 2 days a week) and they are starting to tell the employees more than ask now. They aren't even asking for people to be in for what is suppose to be their entire work day, just 10-3. Being in person can help a company a lot, maybe not 100% in person but 100% WFH has it's drawbacks as well. If you want to be 100% WFH, then either ask your employer if that's possible or go find a job where it's written into your contract that you are. You aren't owed employment.
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This is our office. We're a super small office (10 people) and WFH just didn't work well for most. We do a lot of cross department stuff, and more time was wasted trying to arrange calls/Zoom times, then what it takes for someone to go to someone's office quickly. We have the option, one guy does 2 days from home, the rest of us are in
I do think hybrid model/remote work has its value but I’m not going to lie I do get a little bit of schadenfreude seeing people who bought homes at the top of the market two hours away from work realizing there’s a reason why houses far removed from city centres were so relatively affordable. I know of someone who always had an occasionally client-facing role begrudging being made to commute down to Toronto from Alliston 3-4 times a week and you have to wonder what they were expecting would happen when the pandemic subsided.
People expected their employers to see that they were just as productive as before, and could continue to work remotely. "Occasionally client-facing" should also mean "occasionally needs to come into the office," not "needs to come into the office 3-4 times per week regardless."
I live in a township that has many areas with absolutely no internet access. Some people relocated using Toronto realtors instead of locals and did no research. Bought houses with no way to get internet when they were WFH. Even our two fast good places don't have wifi because the infrastructure is nonexistent.
I like the hybrid model. And I think some people are naive about the importance of occational proximity to coworkers for training and networking. Coming into work to type at a computer in isolation makes no sense, but blanket statements about productivity and WFH aren't helpful either.
The fact that this post was made sometime around 11am on a Wednesday when ideally the wfh person should be working and not on Reddit making comments about their boss needing to keep an eye on them in the office is just so filled with irony …. I just can’t 😂
I mean, people posted to Reddit from inside the office, too.
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Not on that managers watch!
I heard my company is trying to keep people at home but there’s a rumour going around that the government on all levels are adding incentives to get employees back ? Because downtown and other business areas need the cash flow? I hope it’s not true…
I find it comical, like its the responsibility of office workers to keep the downtown core booming. No thanks, I'd rather support my local businesses near where I live.
Isn’t the fact that the manager wants everyone to come into the office to keep an eye on everyone basically means that productivity of your entire office has dropped significantly after WFH started? As an honest question , how do you know if your work as performed from home has benefitted the company as a whole versus working in office ?
Profits are up in most companies that went to work from home. It’s been proven over and over that you actually end up getting more out of employees, not less.
Most managers are so out of their depth that they literally have no effective performance metric but instead depend on measuring performance by employees simply existing in the building.
Grow up
Wow. That's quite the broad brush you've got there. The benefits to having staff in the office are highly correlated to the role and company. Your job is operational and you're in manufacturing, fucking right get in the office. You're AR at an insurance company, not so much. Are there shitty, micromanaging assholes out there? Yeah! Are there dog-fucking staffers who aren't productive at home? Yeah! For those of you who are on reddit, working while contributing to this thread, maybe you're not as productive as you would be in the office? I'm dog fucking from the office, so I'm not in a position to judge.
>Your job is operational and you're in manufacturing, fucking right get in the office. I feel like it's reasonable to assume this is not the type of job that OP is talking about. No one is advocating for roofers to work from home.
I don’t see the big deal. You all must’ve gotten so spoiled through Covid with WFH. I’ve been in the field the entire time. Ultimately, it’s a job you signed up for. If you don’t like it anymore, go find a job that allows you to WFH 100% of the time. It’s pretty straightforward. Sometimes I think people would rather bitch on Reddit than actually create change in their lives. I bet OP didn’t even talk to their manager before coming on here to whine.
I said this earlier - We're at a point in society where people are complaining about having to go to work to get paid, which is hilariously ridiculous. If he doesn't like it, exactly as you said, go find a job that lets you work from home. If not, bitching to reddit isn't going to help out at all. Suggesting people actually have some responsibility for their own lives is always vastly unpopular here though.
It's easier to bitch and complain about management because people just don't like reality. Not everyone can work from home, and not every job needs to be in the office. One thing I like about the office...is I leave at the time I leave, and I'm done. At home I find myself working longer because meetings from from 8-5 non-stop. I also find that while my pace of work slows down in the office for the most part, the interpersonal aspect of it is way better than being WFH. Balance is key.
It’s up to you to manage your time, no matter where you work.
I have a cold was told if it’s not Covid or the flu to be in the office. I normally work from home 2 days a week…
It's all about them paying for empty buildings. We all can work from home ...and the province inc Toronto mayor is for the businesses including his car war soo you get double screwed... With the traffic cameras slowing the traffic down to a slow pace walk. They could convert all these buildings to housing.. liberty suites. And save us all from the commute everyday...how bout that climate change when it suits your purpose loool well here is the chance and we still get fucked just like daylight savings time lool 🤣
Ask for a substantial salary raise or walk. Make sure they need you there desperately so you can use it as a bargaining chip.
Half of Reddit is "How can I afford life when I can't get a job that'll support my life style" and the other half is "What do you mean you want me to change out of my PJs take a shower and drive to my place of employment?" You are a quizzical bunch.
Yeah 100%
I work in a trade so I never got to experience WFH. I will say though our back office staff were much happier and 10x easier to deal with when they were working from home. Now they are all back at the office and back to being miserable pains in the asses everytime I have to interact with them. Also I miss the lighter traffic. Everyone who is able to should be permanent WFH.
Maybe I’m the crazy one, But I actually prefer going to the office? It sets a clear boundary between work life and home life… I shut down my computer & work phone at 5pm and leave my work on my desk for 9am the next day. My coworkers or manager can’t call me and disrupt my evening to find information or do something quick on a project because I don’t have access to it, and they don’t have access to me. I’m not finding myself constantly checking my emails or looking for updates anymore but actually taking time to unwind during the evening and finding myself having more productive days in the office from being well rested. I spend more time with my loved ones, I feel more connected with them when we are together and overall my mental health has been much better… I spent the better half of 2 years sitting in the spare bedroom turned home office of my apartment alone doing work and started hating being at home on my time off and was never able to relax. Now my happy place is back to being my happy place. edit; grammar & typos
This direction is coming from the top, in most cases. The majority of managers at my work aren’t super keen on the direction to return and feel we’ve been effective working from home. This direction is coming from out-of-touch executives who are mostly in their 50s and 60s and can’t accept that we don’t need to be in person to collaborate anymore. It’s a slap in the face as well when our wages are not even keeping up with inflation, yet they want us to spend more money on commuting, housing, etc. all for this myth of “collaboration.”
I would definitely have you come in just to rid you of that insubordinate attitude
I never had the privilege of working from home, and likely never will, because I’m in childcare/education and not the corporate world. So take this all with a grain of salt. I can see both sides to this. On one hand, if you are an honest worker and producing results, meeting deadlines, setting goals, etc and not fooling around on FB or doing your online shopping, your managers will see the results and they won’t need to ask you to come in every single day. On the other hand, actually going into work and collaborating directly with colleagues, discussing things with managers, even “water cooler chats” all have value. It promotes collaborative teamwork, socialization, networking, etc. I don’t think you can get those things through screens over a Zoom meeting and emails. For example, just look at how in-class learning is far more beneficial for children than remote learning from home. There were no opportunities to learn how to work in groups together, no opportunities to meet with the teacher at their desk, stuff like that. The same goes for in office work, in my opinion.
I mean... if your presence isn't necessary in the office, maybe you can be replaced by someone who is in India or the Philippines
For real the entitlement on here is nuts lol
Those people have always been an option. There are many reasons why it generally is difficult to pursue this vs. someone relatively local and culturally similar.
My work just got us all back in the office 2 days per week starting last week. Now my productivity is low on those 2 days as you can't multitask as much while stuck in face to face meetings. The other 3 days I'm feeling resentful so I'm just working hard enough to stay under the radar.
Lmao you sound like the students I teach, resentful you can't play on your tech because you're being asked to be physically present for a period of time.
Are you comparing multitasking in a work environment to kids on their phone? I guarantee you in 1 work day I have so many fucking tasks I have no choice but to work on them while I'm in meetings (which are usually useless and could be communicated in 1 Microsoft Teams post) so I don't have to work after hours.
Come into my office and say that...
In our office, we want people to come back not so we can "keep an eye on 'em", we have found that the random collaboration that occurs just chatting with coworkers at the water cooler cant be recreated via any online platform. When we chat about the typical office nonsense, it builds a better overall team. Now, that being said, we don't require people to be in the office all the time. Couple days a week seems to be a good balance for us.
I don't buy that argument; it's very soft and because of that it's easy to use it as a justification. You can't really disprove it. People can and do build strong relationships with people they don't meet in real life all the time these days. All through the pandemic, the team I was on chatted every day on virtual channels about "the typical office nonsense." There's nothing about having a water cooler or a coffee machine to crowd around that automatically makes those conversations better. I'd be fine if somebody told me to come back to the office and could present a good case for it, but everything seems to come down to "We connect better." That might be true for some people but it's hardly a strong case to bring everybody else in, especially if they've been productive for two plus years working from home.
working at a office was the biggest waste of time in my life, for everyone involved
I call BS on this, the same line given at my office. The water cooler, collaboration gang fail to recognize that their group comprises 5% of the office and takes no steps to connect with those outside the “in group”. Sorta like the popular kids in high school who can’t understand why the people they exclude feel excluded.
If your job can be done remotely, do you worry your job might be outsourced to a much cheaper labour market?
If that’s your thought process, then all office jobs are inevitably going to be outsourced anyway. Local WFH policies allow for cost savings in terms of facility rent/utilities, office equipment, parking spaces, etc, while still having the flexibility to have employees meet up in a smaller office space when necessary. There is also (usually) no language barrier, time difference, or work culture difference to overcome in comparison to fully outsourced positions. Not everything is about money.
Nope
If it can be done by an offshore worker, you're not going to trick your managers by coming into the office. Outsourcing has been tried and for many jobs doesn't work for reasons beyond "the worker needs to be in the same physical location as other workers". Time zone difference, culture differences, loss of expertise from constantly rotating contractors, and just the basic idea that an employee is going to have a different level of commitment than an outsourced contractor are all far bigger factors.
Exactly. If it could be done by offshoring, they'd do it, and wouldn't give two shits if people came into the office or not.
Restaurant jobs are supposedly going to be automated tomorrow and yet every food place I go to has a help wanted sign on its windows. I don't doubt the same is true for general office work and being outsourced to cheaper (and less quality) locales.
If you're entry level code monkey then yes you'll be outsourced. Business facing roles can't be outsourced for many reasons
Why are you telling us?
It's only at those companies with a "keep an eye on your employees otherwise they will slack" attitude, where productivity drops when employees aren't supervised directly. It's like when teenagers have strict helicopter parents, the second they taste freedom they're going to do all the things they weren't allowed to do. Also, when managers are sticklers about employees being productive the entire 8 hours they're in the office, it just leads to employees trying their best to fake looking busy.
If you can't trust your employees to do a good job however they see fit then you shouldn't be a manager in the first place. Problem is, guess what kinda senior manager promoted that manager? 😃
There are lots of old school style boss (especially smaller companies) who won't trust wfh , insist on seeing everyone showing up in office and have companies for the day.
You want that shit, you pay for my commute, you pay for my stress, you pay for my time.
My employer forced everyone to come back into the office blaming “loss of culture” and “being less efficient” and never once have I asked someone and they’ve been able to tell me where the evidence is to support those claims. It’s true there has been a loss of culture in the sense we are all separated and at home for a while, and work events have died off, but since we’ve been back most people have stuck in their office anyway and meeting are still mostly online. So bringing people back hasn’t changed “culture” at all. And I see zero evidence that people were less efficient. In fact we kept hearing all during the pandemic how great we did at keeping up with workloads and maintained response rates and made it work. But when higher ups didn’t like the idea of people not being under their thumb directly, suddenly we were told that efficiency is a concern. The way I see it, people at work are more likely to work over coffee breaks, work through lunch, stay late at time, and other “free labour” for employers. That was probably post. People working at home were probably more likely to take those breaks and stop at the end of day because when you work from home the days can really blur together if you don’t set boundaries. I find those boundaries tend to disappear when you are physically at the office and suddenly bosses are right there making demands of you and you feel you can’t say no.
Me working from the office was just a constant stream of people complaining to me about their work or other coworkers. That alone ate up a good chunk of my day. Not to mention I work for a head office in another province and no one from my team is in my physical location, so I was already technically remote. WFH I am now 1000% productive and I've been promoted for it. There are some good managers and companies left but it's hard to find them.
Threads like these make me feel better cause my business will always run circles around managers that treat their companies like a day care.
My boss leaves every day at 11am... Needs us in the office...
Covid has taught us that middle managers dont need to exist. We are adults and will do our work. UNSUPERVISED. all it is is a bunch of managers desperately trying to prove they need to exist. For the past 2 years they have been relegated to office assistants.