I see so many articles that feel like propaganda for RTO and why remote work is terrible. It feels like propaganda because my work pivoted to 100% remote in March 2020 and has stayed that way. I...
I see so many articles that feel like propaganda for RTO and why remote work is terrible.
It feels like propaganda because my work pivoted to 100% remote in March 2020 and has stayed that way. I never had a decrease in the amount of work and we onboarded new hires fine.
As expected, some were fantastic, some were mediocre and some just awful. Follows my exact experience in office.
Yes, I know some slack remotely, but they also slacked in office and so I don't see much difference.
I want to hear others on their actual remote experiences since every news piece feels too much like propaganda.
Please, discuss. Maybe I am in a unicorn position where it really doesn't matter if it's remote or not. I completely understand not all roles or work can ever be WFH.
Not just that, if you actually read a lot of their sources (if they even bother providing one - usually they provide a source to a completely different point and use it to make wild conjectures...
Not just that, if you actually read a lot of their sources (if they even bother providing one - usually they provide a source to a completely different point and use it to make wild conjectures about the workers), a lot of them are either bent or straight up contradicted to make it seem like these big shot companies like Microsoft are reporting remote work isn't viable, when the reality is that it's much more nuanced and - shocker - how productive a worker is has far less to do with where they work and a lot more to do with good management. Bad management requires workers in the office as a crutch, while good management can work with their team and find the best solution in a company-specific manner.
The biggest thing in there that made it obvious that the whole article is propaganda. By writing out "one-third" and then saying it "jumped" to 36%. That's a difference in 3%. That's a less than...
The biggest thing in there that made it obvious that the whole article is propaganda.
Nearly one-third of employees told Paychex they found their onboarding experience confusing. That figure jumped to 36% for remote workers, who were most likely to feel undertrained, disoriented, and devalued after onboarding, compared to their in-person counterparts.
By writing out "one-third" and then saying it "jumped" to 36%. That's a difference in 3%. That's a less than 10% difference to the prior method, and I think it's Paychex that has an onboarding problem, not remote work. But they try to hide it by obfuscating the numbers and using action words.
That bit of scummy writing also served as a red flag to me. My brain kinda skipped a beat when I read the 36% and then went back to re-read the sentence and thought: that's not significant at...
That bit of scummy writing also served as a red flag to me. My brain kinda skipped a beat when I read the 36% and then went back to re-read the sentence and thought: that's not significant at all.. And clearly they're trying to make it sound like a 36% increase.
Whole article felt contrived, but that part especially. That said, my job went remote back in 2020, but I jumped at the chance to return to office because I really am more productive in a dedicated work space where my wife and son can't ask me to do stuff all day... I have a very hard time saying "no" to them and need the physical separation to be maximally productive/efficient. At least for now.
Slightly unrelated, but I believe the world would be so much better if a new legal writing form of “news article” would be created, where these deliberately misleading expressions/techniques were...
Slightly unrelated, but I believe the world would be so much better if a new legal writing form of “news article” would be created, where these deliberately misleading expressions/techniques were banned and claims must provide their appropriate level of credibility, like a questionable witness reported X also, vs just X.
A news organization could only market themselves as such if they have well-distinguished blocks containing only ‘news articles’, and the title could be revoked.
I guess having a general media parent company that can’t legally call themselves a news outlet, and having a smaller sister company/division that is a news outlet might work. Also, frankly I...
I guess having a general media parent company that can’t legally call themselves a news outlet, and having a smaller sister company/division that is a news outlet might work. Also, frankly I wouldn’t mind if half of these “news sites” would go bankrupt.
But it might help a bit with everyone claiming everything because they found it on the internet. Surely not much would change, but might be a good start.
What you’re asking for does exist. Check out the Associated Press. There’s also things such as PR News Wire which aggregate press releases. It’s as dry as it goes. The format is pretty standard....
What you’re asking for does exist. Check out the Associated Press.
There’s also things such as PR News Wire which aggregate press releases.
It’s as dry as it goes. The format is pretty standard. They aren’t ad driven, so the incentives are aligned.
There used to be laws in the US around truth in media, but I think they expired in my childhood. All I could find quickly was the Fairness Doctrine, which required (from 1949-1987) news media to...
There used to be laws in the US around truth in media, but I think they expired in my childhood. All I could find quickly was the Fairness Doctrine, which required (from 1949-1987) news media to dedicate some time to controversial public interest pieces, and to present opposiving viewpoints. I didn't see anything on the wiki page about requiring truth in those presentations, but I imagine it was probably in the language of the law.
Either way, something that made it illegal for news-marketed entertainiment to knowingly lie to their audience would be nice...
Paychex is also kinda garbage. Started a job a few months ago that uses Paychex and it definitely sucks compared to ADP, which I've used in other jobs.
Paychex is also kinda garbage. Started a job a few months ago that uses Paychex and it definitely sucks compared to ADP, which I've used in other jobs.
Yup. I work for a remote-first game studio and it turns out that competent management and production practices make remote just... not a problem. I'm literally on the opposite side of the world to...
Yup. I work for a remote-first game studio and it turns out that competent management and production practices make remote just... not a problem. I'm literally on the opposite side of the world to the vast majority of my colleagues but our organizational practices make everything extremely painless. We sync once a day, maximum - turns out calls can just be emails or instant messages instead. And it means I'm not bothering my coworkers during their work day and they're not bothering me during mine. Perfection.
IMHO that's actually part of the problem. It appears that in many corporations people are promoted to management with little to no training and are appropriately terrible at their job function. In...
Yup. I work for a remote-first game studio and it turns out that competent management and production practices make remote just... not a problem.
IMHO that's actually part of the problem. It appears that in many corporations people are promoted to management with little to no training and are appropriately terrible at their job function. In others, managers are useless figureheads who have the power to compel people to do things but don't understand the reason why they do things and often have too many restrictions on their powers to actually run things; they essentially exist only to be another layer of hierarchy. This seems to be especially common in service industries to give customers people to yell at. And of course there are some businesses that aren't run with a hierarchy, rare as they are, and they simply fall apart when they can't work together properly.
Agree that this all comes across as propaganda. I tend to see more and more of these especially as large buildings have low occupancy rates. It feels entirely wrapped around commerical real...
Agree that this all comes across as propaganda. I tend to see more and more of these especially as large buildings have low occupancy rates. It feels entirely wrapped around commerical real estate. People who slack at home will slack in the office.
The only reason I don't work from home all the time is I have to work on networks that can't be accessed remotely. Other than that my team and customers are all over the world. I don't even see my...
The only reason I don't work from home all the time is I have to work on networks that can't be accessed remotely. Other than that my team and customers are all over the world. I don't even see my team members when I'm in office.
%100 this is old school business conglomerates that are basically screwed with the WFH which has destroyed their real estate. They're just way to stupid to adapt, so they produce propaganda like...
%100 this is old school business conglomerates that are basically screwed with the WFH which has destroyed their real estate. They're just way to stupid to adapt, so they produce propaganda like this to make it seem like WFH isn't working.
It's absolutely propaganda. Even when they try to back it up with data, it's the most cherry-picked, choose-your-own-narrative crap I've ever seen. That American Time Use survey even comes with...
It's absolutely propaganda. Even when they try to back it up with data, it's the most cherry-picked, choose-your-own-narrative crap I've ever seen. That American Time Use survey even comes with the caveat that "Working at home includes any time persons did work at home and is not restricted to persons whose usual workplace is their home." So we can go ahead and throw out that entire "Remote workers put in 3.5 hours less per week compared to in-person workers" lie.
I've worked from a home office for 7 years now on a team that's about half remote, half in-office. All our days start and end at the same time. I take my lunch break when most people in my time zone are still having breakfast, because it's literally the same schedule. I was in office for a few years before I went remote, and my job, responsibilities, deliverables, you name it, haven't changed at all--I just do the same thing in a nicer, quieter space with bigger screens and cats.
Maybe it's different in other industries where the work products aren't all digital to begin with, but it seems like a lot of this propaganda is even trying to target the tech workforce and positions where it genuinely doesn't make a difference where the person pressing the buttons is physically located, and where the kinds of people collaborating prefer doing so in chat rooms instead of meeting rooms in the first place.
Either way I've lived 2000 miles from my workplace for the better part of a decade so if there's an RTO push... bye! Not selling my house to warm a cubicle, thanks.
Smallish software dev company (35ish employees). We went remote in 2020 and have had some of the most productive years ever since then. We do hardware as well for some of our customers, so there...
Smallish software dev company (35ish employees). We went remote in 2020 and have had some of the most productive years ever since then. We do hardware as well for some of our customers, so there will always be a need for some of our people to be in office to lay hands on equipment/ship/setup/ect.
However our dev team has been fully remote for the whole time now and it has let us increase the quality of our team by quite a bit. I feel like its for three reasons.
The pool of candidates is just larger. We don't care where they are in the country. A wider pool will naturally have a better available quality.
People want to be fully remote, so that lets us attract better employees, even as a small company who may not be able to match the pay of larger corporations.
Work from home is just more productive in general. Yeah I'm typing this up during my work day. Yeah I am not productive for a full 8 hours. But I wasn't when I was in house either. This lets me work in spurts that are good for me, my productivity is higher than it would be if I were in office, and my happiness is way higher than if I had to go into the office every day.
I'm not a software dev, and there are some things I have to do hands on. Because of that I work 4 days remote per week, and I could never go back to a 5 day in office job.
When I work remote, I get far more done in a day than I do in the office with all the constant distractions. I truly feel like this whole narrative is being pushed and held up by desperate and...
When I work remote, I get far more done in a day than I do in the office with all the constant distractions. I truly feel like this whole narrative is being pushed and held up by desperate and frightened management people who are:
Lazy as fuck. They know that when they are at home, they goof off on Netflix, Reddit, etc. when they should be doing something, and they project that laziness onto everyone else because they think everyone must be lazy, just like them. The fact is, more than half these people goof off in their offices, where they make sure to have their computers facing away to where no one can see what they are doing. I spent too much time in IT with the ability to see their activity to believe anything different. Even the rare middle manager that doesn't spend all their time online typically spends it micromanaging everyone around them, wasting time, energy and good will. 35 years in the workplace has taught me that focused, hard working middle managers who stay busy doing something productive are few and far between.
These are the people most threatened by the WFH paradigm, because even if you give them the benefit of the doubt, their job is to manage interactions between people. When they don't have a physical room filled with people around them to micromanage and hold endless, pointless meetings with, it's glaringly obvious how increasingly unnecessary their efforts are becoming. At best, the middle manager should be facilitating and supporting information sharing and collaboration between and within teams, departments, and projects. Increasingly and rapidly, digital tools and enterprise applications are simplifying or even eliminating processes and procedures that were once arguably necessary.
Remote work is shining a bright light on increasingly worthless roles, and the people in those roles are gonna go down kicking and screaming the entire way, because it means they'll have to get a real job. These are also the people who have the ears of upper management, and it's difficult for regular workers and project managers to speak over them.
I work for a large Fortune 100 tech company. Remote work has not been a problem for us. Even prior to COVID, remote work was pretty common here. Of course it increased during and after COVID....
I work for a large Fortune 100 tech company. Remote work has not been a problem for us. Even prior to COVID, remote work was pretty common here. Of course it increased during and after COVID. Yeah, some people abuse it, but it's pretty easy to tell who they are. Our company is not immune to layoffs, and when they happen, those are the first people to go.
Our company and teams are global. We spend most of our time on conference calls. My boss is across the country. I and some of my team come in a couple days a week just for some in-person collaboration and a change in scenery (we have a nice office), but people make that choice for themselves.
Nobody likes mandates, especially when there's no one size fits all for the effectiveness of remote vs in-person work. That's why I agree that these articles are propaganda.
My company is committed to hybrid work because some teams do benefit from being in-office together. Others simply can't because they're dispersed across the country, so we would all be in Teams...
My company is committed to hybrid work because some teams do benefit from being in-office together. Others simply can't because they're dispersed across the country, so we would all be in Teams from our office desks.
We just had an all-hands meeting in which they directly talked about RTO and they said that there are weaknesses we are experiencing, but the goal is to address them, not force a return to office.
I think it comes down to a company's commitment to its employees. My company claims to be committed to work/life balance and doesn't care too much if we take some time for personal stuff as long as we put it back for work. Maybe it's a 10 hour day, but you spent two hours on laundry or picking up your kids.
I’m at a Fortune 1000 company. We had an all hands meeting last week. Topic was <location> Office Update. We have the main HQ on the east coast and another HQ on the west coast from a major...
I’m at a Fortune 1000 company. We had an all hands meeting last week. Topic was <location> Office Update. We have the main HQ on the east coast and another HQ on the west coast from a major acquisition a few years back.
I knew they had constantly said they had a commitment to work from anywhere, as they call it. Figured it would either be closing then office or asking people to come back.
Lease was up later this year, so they wanted to let the employees know they were closing down the office. Didn’t want people in the area seeing the available signs and thinking they were in trouble. And wanted to set up a way to get all the historical stuff out of the office and preserved.
I think my company might end up going that way. When I was an intern I went to the new office that they used to downsize, and we're already doing hotelling for the desks, since most people don't...
I think my company might end up going that way. When I was an intern I went to the new office that they used to downsize, and we're already doing hotelling for the desks, since most people don't come in, nobody needs one.
I work remotely and there would be no reason for my department to come back. Our productivity is tracked by the software we use. Anyone who is slacking is seen quite easily. Not only this, but my...
I work remotely and there would be no reason for my department to come back. Our productivity is tracked by the software we use. Anyone who is slacking is seen quite easily. Not only this, but my department has employees in every state, most were hired in the past three years. They'd be shooting themselves in the foot trying to bring everyone to a central office. There's just no way.
I get some professions cannot be done remotely and that's understandable, but my last job was done remotely by my team for an entire year. They were forced to come back because we had a few boomers who wanted to socialize and just could not handle the work from home aspect. They could have easily done hybrid work, but just could not be bothered to work it out. Listening to the boomers in the hallways say how happy they were to have everyone back in the office was the most insane feeling.
I work for a major corporation (70k+ employees, worldwide). We went 100% remote in March of 2020, and last year, totally converted to a hybrid. Basically, they polled everyone about what they...
I work for a major corporation (70k+ employees, worldwide). We went 100% remote in March of 2020, and last year, totally converted to a hybrid. Basically, they polled everyone about what they wanted, saying, "if you want an office, you can have one. If you don't, work where you want". I've been to my (now former) office only once in three years, and that was to bring all my stuff home last June. My company never owns real estate, they always lease, so we don't have the pressure of expensive properties sitting vacant that a lot of companies have. And we mostly have people in leadership who can adapt, and don't need to see butts in cubicles to know that work is getting done.
I had already been 80% remote before 2020, and at this point, if they ever tried to force me back into an office with any regularity, I'd have to find something else, I think. I just can't face 2+ hours a day in the car again.
I also see a lot of articles that feel like this. Also a lot of micro-managers who seem to find themselves with nothing to do once work is assigned and they don't have anyone's shoulder to look...
I see so many articles that feel like propaganda for RTO
I also see a lot of articles that feel like this. Also a lot of micro-managers who seem to find themselves with nothing to do once work is assigned and they don't have anyone's shoulder to look over.
However, I personally have not enjoyed 100% remote work. Not to say it's bad, or impossible, simply that it isn't for me. A few reasons
My home workspace is not good. Two adults and a dog working all day in 600sqft with one bedroom and taking calls is manageable, but not comfortable. I can imagine if one had a house with dedicated office rooms to work in and maybe a nice patio to sit on, then they'd have a different perspective on remote work.
Casual idea exchange with coworkers is nice. I know not everyone wants to go to the bar or dinner after work with coworkers, but doing so every once in a while or having lunch together stimulates and allows for a casual environment for ideas to cross-pollinate. Prior to remote work I've had a lot of issues solved that way and new opportunities and ideas opened up. Since remote work, it's never happened.
Personal social activity feels harder. Prior to remote work I might reach out or have a friend reach out about meeting up during the week. We'd have the entire roughly overlapping area in our trips home as easy areas to hang out even if we didn't live nearby. Now I'd need to go across the city or to the town to meet someone and it adds a lot of friction.
Maybe most important, I just can't seem to build relationships if I never meet someone in person. There are a bunch of logistical reasons but at the end of the day it turns out I'm not a robot and simply don't form connections with screens or text. Multiply this by a new jobs where no one has met each other ever and it's just not much fun.
I know those are all personal reasons and don't apply to everyone. But that's some of why I have to disagree when folks argue absolutely for one way or the other.
I just got an estimate on what it would take to add doors to my "office" area, and it came back to $8600. With toddlers, working from home is wildly distracting, and I cannot swing $8600 to add...
I just got an estimate on what it would take to add doors to my "office" area, and it came back to $8600. With toddlers, working from home is wildly distracting, and I cannot swing $8600 to add privacy! I like the flexibility of being able to go in or work remotely, but I fear a fully 100% remote job. I also do miss the collaboration meetings we had in person. The richness of the communication isn't there even with tools like Miro, video chat, etc.
Could not agree more — I was hired as a fully-remote employee for a company across the country from me. Recently, local employees within 40 miles of HQ were asked to return to the office (despite...
Could not agree more — I was hired as a fully-remote employee for a company across the country from me. Recently, local employees within 40 miles of HQ were asked to return to the office (despite doing exactly the same job as me) and guess what? They unanimously agree that they were more productive when left alone in their home office. Not one person has validated any of the reasons they gave for forcing people back into the office (face/face collaboration, increased camaraderie, etc.)
Part of me wonders, if it is indeed propaganda, if it’s fueled by fears of what will happen to business real estate as a whole if there’s not much RTO among companies that went remote.
Part of me wonders, if it is indeed propaganda, if it’s fueled by fears of what will happen to business real estate as a whole if there’s not much RTO among companies that went remote.
The only point I'll give credence to is that for new hires, particularly grads, I've anecdotally seen that they are more interested in going to an actual office space and interacting with their...
The only point I'll give credence to is that for new hires, particularly grads, I've anecdotally seen that they are more interested in going to an actual office space and interacting with their team in person. I'd be interested to see if anyone else has seen that, or felt that way themselves.
But the article is pretty much propaganda apart from that. I've had no issue onboarding people throughout the pandemic and after, most people are aware that if they're seeking a remote work position, they need to get used to tools like Teams and Zoom and other ways of remote pairing. Onboarding feels like a company by company issue, even without the one third to one third trick the article pulls.
The article just gets worse from then onwards, "sometimes" things are bad, we should all be working more than 3.5 hours a week anyway, and "anecdotally productivity plummets" feels like it was deliberately left below the fold.
It is absolutely just propaganda in my opinion. I have never had any problem working remotely. I also have not personally seen a single shred of evidence suggesting that remote work is less...
It is absolutely just propaganda in my opinion. I have never had any problem working remotely. I also have not personally seen a single shred of evidence suggesting that remote work is less productive in any way than working in person. If anything, my experience has been quite the opposite. I know a lot of people who have much more difficulty disconnecting from work when they do it from home than when they did it in an office. They hear a notification from their work phone or laptop or whatever and feel a sense of anxiety like they have to take a look at it immediately, even if it's like 10PM. Definitely something I've been trying to help them work on.
I've always felt that if you can't trust members of your staff to work productively without a watchdog constantly looking over their shoulder, you shouldn't be employing them. The kind of people that will weasel out of work in a remote scenario are the exact same kind of people that will do the same thing in person. Meanwhile the rest of us get to save as much as hours a day on our commute, work in a much more comfortable environment, eat healthier meals at home, take more useful breaks that better facilitate being refreshed and doing better work, etc etc etc.
It's so frustrating how COVID forced us into this new era of remote work really taking off only to have so many companies desperately try to claw it back.
I work in cybersecurity and also transitioned to WFH in March 2020. I stayed with that company until 2021 when they started rumblings of bringing folks back to the office. Their push was delayed...
I work in cybersecurity and also transitioned to WFH in March 2020. I stayed with that company until 2021 when they started rumblings of bringing folks back to the office. Their push was delayed until 2022 and is hybrid now (two days in, three days out). However, the vast majority of employees are in the office maybe once a week. Their workload is still massive and the work is still getting done. Folks were way more productive while at home.
My current job is 100% remote, though I live near my office (5-10 minutes away). I go in maybe once or twice a month. Yes, I absolutely slack off at home and take full advantage of being in my house. I use my bathroom, my kitchen, mess around with my dog, etc.
My position can be completely remote--for the most part. IT, in generally, can be completely remote--for the most part. There are hardware deployments, troubleshooting, and some instances where folks need to be in the office. That's a minority of their time though
To me it feels like remote workers who do not self manage, may be harder to manage. And the management doesn't want to work harder, or change any of their own management styles. They also want to...
To me it feels like remote workers who do not self manage, may be harder to manage. And the management doesn't want to work harder, or change any of their own management styles. They also want to work from home and are probably less productive themselves. A workers productivity can be measured, if you are managing people who aren't producing the right quality of work, then take steps to be a better boss and get the employee where they need to be, or fire them like you would anyone who is underperforming in the office. All this anti remote work bullshit is so frustrating.... we have the technology guys, come on.... give people measurable goals and measure them. It is not that hard. It's especially frustrating because the people complaining are probably also enjoying the flexibility, and just don't want to address any real reasons why their team is underperforming. Blaming it on remote work is just an excuse they can get away with using, because nobody can really prove them wrong, and it shifts the blame onto someone else.
My job is global, my team is global, we are working remotely with each other every day, no matter what, and literally always have been. Make it stop costing a bazillion dollars to live near the offices and then let's talk about coming back in full time...
In my opinion the big push for return to offices is coming from those losing their asses in commercial real estate. I guarantee that when my office’s 7 year lease is up in a couple of years they...
In my opinion the big push for return to offices is coming from those losing their asses in commercial real estate. I guarantee that when my office’s 7 year lease is up in a couple of years they are either going to downsize the shit out of the office space, or close it altogether.
The key points from the article: Remote work is bad for new hires and junior employees Workers admit that remote work (sometimes) causes more problems than in-person work Remote workers put in 3.5...
The key points from the article:
Remote work is bad for new hires and junior employees
Workers admit that remote work (sometimes) causes more problems than in-person work
Remote workers put in 3.5 hours less per week compared to in-person workers
Productivity plummets on days when everyone is working remotely (anecdotally)
For clarity: my point of view is as "the boss".
The experience I have had is that I agree with the first point - onboarding is weird when fully remote, and I don't really know how to make it work right. This is something that I think just stems from me; I don't know what I'm doing onboarding new people in this environment, so I have to figure it out. It's not the fault of remote work, I just have to learn.
The other three just seem like "old men yells at cloud" out of touch BS.
My biggest regret about working from home has been that we don't have foosball tournaments anymore.
I think the onboarding issue is not a remote-only phenomenon. Remote companies need to have things like checklists, scheduled 1:1s to check in, active slack/chat channels where new people are...
I think the onboarding issue is not a remote-only phenomenon. Remote companies need to have things like checklists, scheduled 1:1s to check in, active slack/chat channels where new people are encouraged to ask questions, and video shadowing. I've been abandoned when onboarding remotely, but I've also been abandoned when onboarding in person. The success or failure hinges on "did you forget that you hired this new person?"
If a company never thought about onboarding as a well defined process, and just said "Jim, show 'em the ropes," that's not going to translate to remote work. But I'd also argue that without a well thought out and clear onboarding document and checklist, that even onboarding in person, your knowledge and understanding is at the mercy of the person you got assigned to shadow. They might not be good at explaining, or resent taking time out of their day. Onboarding docs should be the standard.
All great points - I think the problem that I have is that we have a specific onboarding process that we followed every time and really enjoyed, and it just doesn't work as well remotely. But I...
All great points - I think the problem that I have is that we have a specific onboarding process that we followed every time and really enjoyed, and it just doesn't work as well remotely. But I feel that the onus is on me and the leadership crew here to figure that out, not try to force some stupid work-from-office mentality just for the sake of it.
I think that the mentality in the article stems from a really old model of being the boss where people do so because they want to be in charge and control people. I have no interest in controlling people; I want people to do the best work they can because they want to, not because I am micromanaging them or breathing down their neck. And I think that the primary thing that I need to do when managing people is support people, so I check in with their needs and wants regularly and try to meed / exceed them. And it turns out that this is a pretty effective way to get people to work; we have a pretty positive work environment, and we get stuff done and make money.
I think the old school way of bosses controlling people just fosters resentment, if not outright hatred. I think that everyone I work with likes me and respects me, so they tend to do good work.
This is such a great point. My boss at my last job was such a great boss and leader. I respected her so much and I did some of my best work at that job because I wanted to support her (I’m a...
I think that everyone I work with likes me and respects me, so they tend to do good work.
This is such a great point. My boss at my last job was such a great boss and leader. I respected her so much and I did some of my best work at that job because I wanted to support her (I’m a paralegal and she was the attorney I worked for) and not disappoint her. She always stood up for our team to the higher ups, and she was very liberal with her praise for good work.
Contrast that with my boss before her who had only criticisms but when I would try to get his input to avoid the issues he refused to communicate with me. I did not care about doing a good job for him at all. The only thing that really kept me in check was my sense of responsibility to my clients.
Yeah, and the numbers in the article support this, but they're presented in a really dishonest way. This bit: "Nearly one-third of employees told Paychex they found their onboarding experience...
Yeah, and the numbers in the article support this, but they're presented in a really dishonest way. This bit:
"Nearly one-third of employees told Paychex they found their onboarding experience confusing. That figure jumped to 36% for remote workers..."
So... about a third of workers, regardless of being in-office or remote, feel confused by their on-boarding.
They don't give us the exact number for in-person workers, but "nearly one third" would be around 30%. So a minor increase in this feeling for new remote workers, which I can accept as true, but a 5-6% difference is much less than what the article's wording is trying to make us come away with. Some serious RTO propaganda.
I think it could be best served by a buddy system where employees who have volunteered themselves as being able to help out new hires (Probably in exchange for a higher hourly rate or some other...
I think it could be best served by a buddy system where employees who have volunteered themselves as being able to help out new hires (Probably in exchange for a higher hourly rate or some other benefit) will work quite closely with a new-hire for their first week and still help the manager with onboarding them for the whole probation period, with the buddy employee's normal duties being taken over by others temporarily as if they were sick during that week if they have to spend that much time working with the new-hire.
That doesn't just go for WFH either, I mean in general. It's basically trying to turn "show 'em the ropes" into an official process with all the red tape involved with doing that.
Had the same experience. When I joined initially, it was weird. But I got a mentor/buddy assigned who introduced me into everything and we met every Friday (online, with webcam) to discuss how it...
Had the same experience. When I joined initially, it was weird. But I got a mentor/buddy assigned who introduced me into everything and we met every Friday (online, with webcam) to discuss how it was working for me. I could call him any time regardless if I wanted to.
The other points are laughable at best.
All the discussion about if we should abolish the 40h per week is always made under the principle that workers are actually working 8 hours a day. I have yet to see a company where people are really working 8 hours a day for months straight.
Same applies to this weird 3.5h argument. Personally I am more productive working remotely. I can turn my speakers up and stay in the zone without a colleague interrupting me for nonsense. I find myself working more sometimes, because I don't have to catch a train at a certain time.
Working remotely has it's problems, especially in terms of syncing with team mates, but so does working in an office.
I hope I never have to get back into one. I'm now completely spoiled, honestly. :D
Ah, mentor/buddy seems like a great idea honestly. I'm part of a leadership mentor program at work that has been good. Doing that for new hires seems like a great idea.
Ah, mentor/buddy seems like a great idea honestly. I'm part of a leadership mentor program at work that has been good. Doing that for new hires seems like a great idea.
My job is strange, but the mentor program really did help me understand my job. I shadowed people then for months had a weekly meeting with a mentor that started at an hour but shortened to half...
My job is strange, but the mentor program really did help me understand my job. I shadowed people then for months had a weekly meeting with a mentor that started at an hour but shortened to half an hour. It gave me a chance to ask questions or discuss issues that seemed to small to buy my boss with but were confusing as well as allow me to check in with my own solutions. "I tried this, was that good?" kinda thing.
That, as needed questions answered via text and email, weekly full department meetings, and monthly meetings with my boss have helped me feel like I know what I'm doing without ever going near an office.
I can certainly tell you I never did 36.5 hours of work a week when I was working in the office. So if they're getting that much out of remote workers they should be ecstatic.
I can certainly tell you I never did 36.5 hours of work a week when I was working in the office. So if they're getting that much out of remote workers they should be ecstatic.
For context, I work in an office, but my team and supervision are remote. A large portion of my organization does work from home though. I think that overall a lot of contemporary bosses' issues...
For context, I work in an office, but my team and supervision are remote. A large portion of my organization does work from home though.
I think that overall a lot of contemporary bosses' issues with WFH are related to a failure to adapt on the part of upper management, and a fundamental distrust of, and disrespect for, their subordinates.
Remote work is only bad for new hires and junior employees if the organization is still treating onboarding like they're in-office. If the workplace is still trying to conduct training like it's in-person, just via Zoom, they're going to give new hires a bad time and they're going to fail to integrate in the way they would have in-person. Remote training needs to come with remote socialization and teambuilding, like scheduled 'water cooler' moments with team members and management at an informal and non-professional tone. It is best formatted in much shorter blocks of content interspersed with demonstration and practice; remote trainees tend to be harder to hold attention for and trainer doesn't have in-person cueing to recognize it's break time or similar. It really works for some personalities and really doesn't for some others - similar to in-person, except that we're used to it in the latter. I was trained completely remotely and it was the absolute best onboarding experience I've had.
I love how point two really boils down to "when you do it badly, it feels like you're doing it badly" which I can assure the room is definitely the case for in-office work as well. I think it requires a certain measure of ignorance to pretend that issues like workplace hostility, harassment, or other work-culture issues are somehow minimized in offices - instead, I'd be inclined to suggest a combination of two things: people who were not traditionally targets have found themselves on the receiving end, and staff are more likely to report issues when it leaves a paper trail (ie slack messages) and when they're likely to be confronted in-person by the individual they reported. It's absolutely a thing that text over slack, or even bodies over zoom, are not as expressive and can lead to missed cues and miscommunications - but I do find that's easy to recover from and account for if you're accustomed to, or trained for, the issue. The remarks about bosses would "fire the remote workers first" in the event of cutbacks really is old-world quiet thoughts, said out loud - they're going to set their firing hierarchy on the basis of their relationship with the workers, and haven't invested in building relationships with their remote staff. Staff level already knew management often played favourites, rather than performance, when cutbacks came rolling around - but we all know they're not supposed to admit that like this.
I think there's a whole lot of jumping to conclusions here - I think that the survey they're based on and the conclusions they've drawn from are both not factoring in time "wasted" in an office - but are factoring it out from WFH. I'd guess that's happening on a self-reporting level as well, that instead of burning half an hour a day reading the news, scrolling the net, and watching youtube, WFH are getting laundry done - and are reporting that time to the survey. Measuring "time worked" for salaried workers is already missing the point, though, and it's rather telling that this article wasn't able to point data at a loss of productivity - because we all know they would if they could've. Hourly are either showing up for the time they're contracted, or they're not - time worked shows on the clock. Hourly can still slack on the clock, and have been doing so in-office or on-site for generations now.
A purely anecdotal loss of productivity from, effectively, a single firm - using an already-nebulous data point. I'm sure there are firms that have seen a loss in productivity, especially in cases where work is collaboration-heavy and the firm hasn't done a great job of adjusting to remote. I've seen it happen. But I think that's like the (very old now) argument that having internet on employees computers causes a reduction in productivity - sure, it's a thing. It also doesn't need to be in a work environment that holds staff adequately accountable while providing tools to succeed. The productivity issues need to be examined more closely than just "number down. bad!" because when you have that consistent a trend at one firm and we're not seeing consistent and controlled data showing that's the case across the board and universal to WFH conditions, it's really important for the firm to look inwards: what about their work, or their team environment, is failing to support WFH? Are team members working from home on different days, so one or two staff members are getting left out while they're home? Is the sales team competitive-motivated and don't have a clear way to compete while they're not in-person? Does the company employ a bunch of slackers who'd also have poor sales numbers on days that supervision was out of office all day.
Work from home is not perfect and cannot be perfect, no more than in-office is. But it's also absolutely fantastic for some folks, allows others to participate in the workforce in ways not previously available to them, and can be done as well, and as poorly, as in-office has been prior. I think that much of the handwringing around it right now is rooted in it being different in ways that require adaptation - and much of the adaptation required is social skills and not business practices.
The graph doesn't have a separation of work vs commute, so commute time is probably lumped in with the hours worked for the in-person cohort. If that's the case, then an in-person worker is bound...
Remote workers put in 3.5 hours less per week compared to in-person workers
The graph doesn't have a separation of work vs commute, so commute time is probably lumped in with the hours worked for the in-person cohort. If that's the case, then an in-person worker is bound to do more hours, but those extra hours are wasted on their commute.
I go 2 days each week to the office, and I waste 1.5 hours each way both days, 6 hours total, just traveling around to sit in a different place and have Teams meetings or ssh in to remote machines (like I could do from home...). I have to get up before 6am, and don't get home until after 6pm. Back in the good old days of the pandemic when it was 5 days-per-week WFH, those extra hours I would spent on my hobbies, or sleeping in.
This is the one which frustrates me the most. The commute time is wasted time. Period. When companies are saying that they want employees to have a work-life balance, remote work is key to...
This is the one which frustrates me the most. The commute time is wasted time. Period. When companies are saying that they want employees to have a work-life balance, remote work is key to unlocking that additional productivity. Happy employees provide. Hybrid is the worst, because it means that to come into the office part time, you still can't move away and find more affordable housing. So not only are you losing valuable productivity time, but employees need to be compensated more than if they were working remote, just so that they aren't looking for another job which will pay them more. It's going to drive attrition and you will lose talent. Lastly, if the role he employee fills is usually going to meetings, what sense does it make to bring those employees back to an office to attend conference calls? Office real estate is going to be squeezed for meeting room space and you can't just make an assumption that 3 times a week means that you can over book desk spaces assuming 3/5ths of the space will be available. Not only will some days be overpopulated, but there will be other days where fewer people will be in the office. So you have to maintain space for 100% attendance and on some days the office will be barren. The smart move would be to break leases and scale down to skeleton office staff to support those who need to be present to flip switches, and then figure out how to give those workers the tools to work remote.
Thanks! When we pivoted to WFH, it felt like we talked more as team through Teams than we ever had in office. Yeah, I can see if they don't have a good training plan in place how it would not be a...
Thanks!
When we pivoted to WFH, it felt like we talked more as team through Teams than we ever had in office.
Yeah, I can see if they don't have a good training plan in place how it would not be a great experience.
Though I didn't technically work in an office, during my conscription I did do a lot that mimicked an office environment (medical). We technically didn't have work from home (obviously), but a lot...
Though I didn't technically work in an office, during my conscription I did do a lot that mimicked an office environment (medical). We technically didn't have work from home (obviously), but a lot of our problems and questions could be solved by just messaging someone.
But that didn't mean that's all we did. We still had a medical center where new medics would get their training done, and the junior usually shadowed the senior for a good while. But, after a month or so, this wasn't necessary anymore so working together was a waste of time.
I think the most logical thing to do in an office is to keep a small, comfortable office where people can come in if they want. Maybe require them to come in once a week for a report or something - we did daily reports, but the army is a bit more stringent than business.
My main point is that the new worker issue is solved by having a temporary office period where they learn the job and only once they can handle the responsibility they switch to mostly WFM. The obvious "problem" with this is that managers and seniors would need to spend more time at the office, but they have more responsibility than the average worker and are usually paid more as compensation.
Onboarding just can't look the same as it used to and a lot of people/companies are not adapting to this new challenge. To approach onboarding digitally in the same way as in person is bound to...
Onboarding just can't look the same as it used to and a lot of people/companies are not adapting to this new challenge. To approach onboarding digitally in the same way as in person is bound to fail.
Imo there needs to be time to be "near" someone digitally to help the team/onboarding team member understand personalities and relationships. That could mean everyone works on video for 1 hour a day. So there is a time where there is easy access to speak up and ask questions without feeling like you are really bothering someone. Or, if the team is too big assign a partner (or rotating partners) to the onboardee so they have someone to work with and ask questions. I'm just throwing out ideas, but it feels like the old guard is so reluctant to try new things and then they go "See! Trying nothing didn't work, back to the office."
I also like AirBNBs approach to remote work. Build connections in person and maintain them online. While this may not help in your first week, but it's a point in time to look forward to in meeting face to face with people to help grow connections. https://news.airbnb.com/airbnbs-design-to-live-and-work-anywhere/
I feel like this could be overcome by organising a monthly meet up at a decent bar or something with a foosball table you could book for the night. Just to go on a related tangent, regular...
My biggest regret about working from home has been that we don't have foosball tournaments anymore.
I feel like this could be overcome by organising a monthly meet up at a decent bar or something with a foosball table you could book for the night.
Just to go on a related tangent, regular meet-ups like this would go a long way to providing the camaraderie seen in workplaces that apparently is missing from WFH. Here in Australia it's common for workplaces to do a Christmas breakup where the workplace will figure out how many employees are interested in going, then book out that many seats at a nearby restaurant or bar or similar and foot the bill even in workplaces that don't close over the Christmas period, normally at these events you'll have a mixture of talking about work and just shooting the shit with my favourites being one workplace that'd regularly go to a local bar that'd basically give us a pool table for the night so we'd run a pseudo tournament. This concept could be extended to a monthly optional meetup between employees where the idea is just socialisation and the like, whether the workplace pays or the employees pay for themselves I'd wager it'd probably work better than going into the office does for camaraderie.
We do have quarterly get togethers, and enjoy them a lot. We often play foosball, but we no longer have elaborate in-office tournaments that span days or weeks; we spend more time talking, eating,...
We do have quarterly get togethers, and enjoy them a lot. We often play foosball, but we no longer have elaborate in-office tournaments that span days or weeks; we spend more time talking, eating, and playing board games when we get together now. I do think that in person get togethers are very important, as you've pointed out, and we do focus on interpersonal connection and not work related things when we do get together.
Have the new hires document step by step of what they are doing to set up at the very beginning and keep sharing and improving this documentation organically by the new hires for the new hires....
Have the new hires document step by step of what they are doing to set up at the very beginning and keep sharing and improving this documentation organically by the new hires for the new hires.
Yes, but have you ever thought about the poor folks in the C-Suite that are heavily invested in office real estate? Seriously: I would love to know how much posted collateral in business finance...
Yes, but have you ever thought about the poor folks in the C-Suite that are heavily invested in office real estate?
Seriously: I would love to know how much posted collateral in business finance is office space and how many companies wouldn't survive a long-term devaluation of those assets. I suspect thats undeniably one important driver for all those articles that demonize remote work.
AND, they seem remarkably naive about people's ability to appear busy at the office while not actually doing anything. Someone said it above: people who slack off at home are going to do the same...
AND, they seem remarkably naive about people's ability to appear busy at the office while not actually doing anything. Someone said it above: people who slack off at home are going to do the same thing in the office.
I slacked off a lot more when at the office. I spend about the same amount of time on reddit either way, but when in the office I spend a lot more time socializing with people compared to what I...
I slacked off a lot more when at the office. I spend about the same amount of time on reddit either way, but when in the office I spend a lot more time socializing with people compared to what I do now.
Plus working from home I can control my noise environment far better than I could in any other workplace. I work much better with a very specific type of music, and being able to drown myself in it compared to an office where I have to deal with every distracting noise that could ever be thought up.
He has it backwards. Workers put up with spending a large (unpaid) chunk of time commuting every day. They’re sick and tired of it. Most people I know who switched to remote work would simply...
“Companies that put up with [remote work] for a long time are finally getting sick and tired of [it],” Drum wrote on Sunday.
He has it backwards. Workers put up with spending a large (unpaid) chunk of time commuting every day. They’re sick and tired of it. Most people I know who switched to remote work would simply leave and find another job if they were forced back to the office.
I realize that’s a privilege many people don’t have, but those who have the option are exercising it.
Agree that this is my experience, too. Most tech jobs are paying in the range of 90k - 180k, and people in that range absolutely do not need to go back to an office. There is a minority of tech...
Agree that this is my experience, too.
Most tech jobs are paying in the range of 90k - 180k, and people in that range absolutely do not need to go back to an office.
There is a minority of tech workers who were earning over 200k who are feeling really fucked right now because the 20 or so companies that pay that much are dragging people back into the office, and they have no recourse because there is a collusion happening.
Regular devs and techies making under 200k have access to more job listings than ever with full remote
It's so pathetic watching the continuing complaint articles about the workforce. I do not work remote, but at my desk I may as well be. Meetings in person are rare. Most are via phone or app...
It's so pathetic watching the continuing complaint articles about the workforce. I do not work remote, but at my desk I may as well be. Meetings in person are rare. Most are via phone or app conferences. No need to be in office for those. Most outreach I perform is via chat, email, or call. No need to be physically present for those. I loved the part where the article quotes a blogger who works from home, possibly written by a journalist who works from home, forwarded to an editor who...
How can they not see a cost savings on overhead? Even if they were locked in a lease, the deduction on the power bills, cleaning, and other admin costs for the office still lower the ops expenditures.
Now the cries switch from "nObOdY wAnTs tO wOrK aNyMoAr" to "nObOdY wAnTs tO wOrK iN aN oFfIcE aNyMoAr"
I had the exact same thought. They’re saying this guy is an independent journalist. Doesn’t that mean he works remotely or from home?? And he’s sitting there talking about how people only slack at...
I loved the part where the article quotes a blogger who works from home, possibly written by a journalist who works from home, forwarded to an editor who...
I had the exact same thought. They’re saying this guy is an independent journalist. Doesn’t that mean he works remotely or from home?? And he’s sitting there talking about how people only slack at home but he writes an article a day, or whatever it said? Makes no sense.
Drum, who since leaving Mother Jones in 2021 has been blogging semi-daily from his home in Orange County, Calif., (from the article)
The savings are hurting the office building rent seekers, thats what it boils down to for me, and the people that have stock in companies that own the buildings that are staying empty.
The savings are hurting the office building rent seekers, thats what it boils down to for me, and the people that have stock in companies that own the buildings that are staying empty.
An aspect that I don't ever see discussed in these articles is how remote work can increase access to good jobs for disabled people. People with pain or mobility issues can work from home much...
An aspect that I don't ever see discussed in these articles is how remote work can increase access to good jobs for disabled people. People with pain or mobility issues can work from home much more easily. I'm autistic, and being able to control my environment (noise/visual stimulation/unexpected interruption) is very important to my productivity and overall work satisfaction. Without remote work (which I've done well before the pandemic started), I would be unable to keep most jobs, but working from home, I'm often the most productive member of my team.
Yes exactly! I do not have a disability or autism, I just can't stand people. But I'm still a very hard worker and having worked from home for the better part of 15 years, no one has ever...
Yes exactly! I do not have a disability or autism, I just can't stand people. But I'm still a very hard worker and having worked from home for the better part of 15 years, no one has ever complained about my productivity.
Absolutely great point! I have no disability but love the natural light, plants and quiet environment to work in. No more coworkers distracting conversations, flickering lights, no natural light,...
Absolutely great point!
I have no disability but love the natural light, plants and quiet environment to work in. No more coworkers distracting conversations, flickering lights, no natural light, listening to my coworkers chew, cough, sneeze etc getting in my way.
Also having my own private bathroom is huge. Was my dream that I never thought would happen.
My workplace as a policy where new hires needs to come on-site for the first six months just so they get used to the team's dynamics, which is easier to communicate in-person IMO. True, some...
Remote work is bad for new hires and junior employees
My workplace as a policy where new hires needs to come on-site for the first six months just so they get used to the team's dynamics, which is easier to communicate in-person IMO.
Workers admit that remote work (sometimes) causes more problems than in-person work
True, some issues are harder to solve remotely, but what needs to be done if there is an employee encounters an issue while working remotely is to be clarify which remediations steps to take in the remote work policy.
Remote workers put in 3.5 hours less per week compared to in-person workers
What is the problem if that employee's objectives are met? Instead of relaxing at home, they'll slack at the office in a more sneaky manner. This doesn't solve anything, and it's up to the manager to set proper KPIs to evaluate their subordinates. Time is only one metric.
Productivity plummets on days when everyone is working remotely (anecdotally)
Everyone has ups and downs in productivity, we aren't machines. Again, set up proper KPIs, and stop micromanaging. Nobody likes a nosy boss.
I'm very much a senior and self motivated. I work more hours when I'm at home (4 days home, 1 day in) just due to how I work. When I wake at 6am, first check is phone for email and alerts before...
I'm very much a senior and self motivated.
I work more hours when I'm at home (4 days home, 1 day in) just due to how I work. When I wake at 6am, first check is phone for email and alerts before I'm out of bed. Technically that's working. Then I solid the first 4 hours from 8:30am-1pm. At that point, I'm gonna lunch and start the work/life mix. School runs, spending some time with my toddler as he's home, etc.
I'm still doing email and Teams. I'm still making sure my team are looked after and work is getting checked and done. Everyone signs off about 5:30pm but my NYC team need attention and I'm in the UK. I check in, have a call, make sure works going well and whatever is being worked on is aligned globally.
LA wakes up for 7:30pm so I'll drop in on them too. My work life is entwined so the company get me and I get some life when I need it.
However, the days I am forced in you get half of me. I travel IN WORK TIME. Including returning home. I'll be less available on purpose on those evenings because I've already done a day that they wanted but it's inefficient and I am quite verbal about it to my boss and CEO. They still want the presence so we will have 4 days of effective strategy and one day of real life face time that I think's a waste, but they believe in me showing up means others feel better. I work in IT so I suppose that means they feel better supported.
These lovely blanketed blogs and news posts saying that all the bosses are finding slack employees are just looking at some companies and some folks. Don't tarnish us all with that brush, we're certainly not all the same.
I've seen both. For processes where I need to concentrate and work alone, productivity is up. For tasks that are inherently collaborative, the opposite is true. I find things like code reviews and...
I've seen both. For processes where I need to concentrate and work alone, productivity is up. For tasks that are inherently collaborative, the opposite is true. I find things like code reviews and pair programming absolutely miserable over slack/zoom/whatever.
This is a bloviated, propaganda piece, made to help it sound like remote workers are lazy and unproductive Several times in the article, it contradicts itself. God forbid people get 3.5 hours a...
This is a bloviated, propaganda piece, made to help it sound like remote workers are lazy and unproductive
Several times in the article, it contradicts itself.
God forbid people get 3.5 hours a WEEK back in their life.
God for id saving a 2 hour commute allows them to sleep in a bit longer.
And as far as "Yelling into zoom meetings", I'm hybrid, and ALL of our meetings are still over video calls.
This just in!: Changes in the workplace that reduce convenience and hurt work/life balance for employees results in squeezing a few more hours of work out of them every week, and therefore is a...
This just in!: Changes in the workplace that reduce convenience and hurt work/life balance for employees results in squeezing a few more hours of work out of them every week, and therefore is a good thing!
My work decided to go hybrid (2 days office work a week from fully remote) and I sort of get it. There's some pros you get out of those moments in the office where you can overhear a problem and...
My work decided to go hybrid (2 days office work a week from fully remote) and I sort of get it. There's some pros you get out of those moments in the office where you can overhear a problem and help someone fix it. Or just decompress with some watercooler chat and it's good for everyone.
But honestly we've not really gained or lost any momentum since we were fully remote.
The only requirement for us is some physical hardware, but some people have either share it remotely or have it shipped home and it's not really an issue.
I agree on boarding can be tricky, we don't find it easy either. We've got a very web cam on, no question is a dumb question, relaxed atmosphere. It's very social and inclusive, so I've found people on slack or just a quick call get all their issues out the way remotely just as much as they would in the office.
That said, in a previous job it was very much the opposite and we struggled to get any work done as a team because of terrible communication via slack. So it's really down to culture in my opinion.
That was a bit of word vomit, but it's my two cents.
reads like C-suite cope to me, not gonna lie. so much desire for "butts in seats" for the sake of "butts in seats". is it a control thing? an ego thing? I dunno. but it reeks of cope and...
reads like C-suite cope to me, not gonna lie. so much desire for "butts in seats" for the sake of "butts in seats". is it a control thing? an ego thing? I dunno. but it reeks of cope and propaganda to me.
god. i live far away from the downtown where most jobs are. and when i worked, i had a 2-hour commute each way (4 hours total). and this was just, horrible for my mental and physical health—i took...
god. i live far away from the downtown where most jobs are. and when i worked, i had a 2-hour commute each way (4 hours total). and this was just, horrible for my mental and physical health—i took the bus and the metro, but i have a lot of anxiety and they were always packed, so it really really sucked. with the pandemic i could finally work without having to deal with all of that crap and it was great, but now it seems like it’s all fading away and it honestly makes me feel like crying. i do not want to have to commute for 4 hours every day ever again, or really even commute at all ever again
This was me too. Coach plus tube plus bus to get to work or I could go coach plus bus plus walk two miles. Up at 5:30am to get the 6am to get to work for 8:30am, then leave at 4pm in to rush out...
This was me too.
Coach plus tube plus bus to get to work or I could go coach plus bus plus walk two miles. Up at 5:30am to get the 6am to get to work for 8:30am, then leave at 4pm in to rush out of London and might not get home until 7pm.
I could have negated that by catching a train and a bus, shaving off 45 mins of travel but it would have been twice the price.
Yeesh, this reads like more corporate America trying to flood the business media with hit pieces that validate micro-managers feelings. Each of the points brought up can be countered with "did the...
Yeesh, this reads like more corporate America trying to flood the business media with hit pieces that validate micro-managers feelings. Each of the points brought up can be countered with "did the company actually make an effort to adapt?" If a company is still struggling with remote work 3 years later after its upswing, then they never had the desire to accept it in the first place and failed to take on a growth mindset when it became a popular trend. Instead they started the process begrudgingly and dragged their feet like an unwilling toddler to accept it, while also continually trying to spot areas to claw back in the time since.
#1: Remote work is bad for new hires and junior employees
I graduated in the midst of the pandemic and have been on boarded by two different companies in that time. The first was resistant to WFH and regularly made attempts to bring people back in office even with the pandemic still in full swing. They very much would be the type to identify with this hit piece article and as my first true job after college, their new hire process sucked. I had to do all the paperwork and grab my laptop in person, all while dealing with an immediate manager who had terrible masking habits. Training was non-existent and I struggled due to being expected to develop in a language I had no experience with. They had a bad company culture overall and this probably fuelled their anti-wfh position. They expected excessive crunch with abysmal pay, and butts in seats was their way of holding that.
The second company I joined was the complete opposite with WFH and embraced it. All on boarding was done remotely and my laptop was shipped to me. My start date was a specific Monday where multiple others were being on boarded at the same time. Multiple group Teams meetings were had to discuss company policies and work expectations over a week, with multiple gaps for independent work and troubleshooting. I had no issues finding my footing and was supported the entire way with a mentor and buddy system to help assist. The difference of embracing WFH and specifically making corporate programming that catered to that is what made my time easier as someone who was early in my career.
#2: Workers admit that remote work (sometimes) causes more problems than in-person work
This certainly varies from industry to industry, but again I am going to harp on the embracing concept that I mentioned for part 1. If you are surrounded by management and coworkers who refuse to embrace remote work, then that mindset is going to carry over into their working habits and add to the very hinderences they complain about. If you have the viewpoint that WFH is inefficient, it will be a persistent bias that affects your day-to-day work and create a self-fulfilling prophecy fitting that view. Having worked with a company that consisted of upper management that thought this way, they purposefully ignored productivity numbers increasing amongst individual teams. Instead they bemoaned what couldn't be done under unrealistic expectations and used that as proof to validate their frustrations with remote work.
I want to draw attention to this one quote:
"remote workers are much more likely to report mental and physical health issues and hostile work environments"
By having butts in seats and under their watch it gives the impression that upper management could throw their weight to make workers diminish their legitimate feelings. Without their immediate presence of intimidation they are no longer able to ask for unrealistic standards and this is viewed as a failure of WFH.
#3: Remote workers put in 3.5 hours less per week compared to in-person workers
And here it is folks, this is why they're trying so bad to demonize work from home. The lack of upper management's immediate presence in your day-to-day work limits their ability to pressure you. It's no surprise that the great resignation, working your wage, and other realizations for workers rights arose during the growth of WFH because that in-person pressure was gone. Corporate interests thrived on their ability to abuse workers time and those willing to submit produced favorable results at the harm of the worker.
Just look at this other qoute from the article:
"In a damning chart, they found that remote workers “decreased time spent working” and instead increased their time spent on “leisure and sleeping.”"
YIKES! Why is such a thing damning? There's so many studies on how this damning leisure and sleeping is beneficial for worker moral, but apparently the greater sin to these corporate interests is not working. Oh the humanity?! How will the shareholders survive?!
Companies that embrace supporting their employees are going to be the ones who keep WFH. It's those who are more likely to abuse their workers that are the ones fighting this change to remote work so hard, and quite frankly aren't the ones I want to work for. While the pool of offerings are drying up, it is helping to serve as a modern day litmus test of who I would consider applying for.
My son is a teacher who had to teach remotely for 2 years. He was tasked with setting up all the remote learning for students in his division and busted his a** to get it all done and ready before...
My son is a teacher who had to teach remotely for 2 years. He was tasked with setting up all the remote learning for students in his division and busted his a** to get it all done and ready before the school year started when covid hit (they literally gave him less than a week to set up a virtual school for dozens of teachers and hundreds of students across 9 grades). It worked and he actually won a national award for it, but the stress of trying to onboard a lot of teachers who didnt have a tech background was immense. And I dont think ANY of those teachers would say the student's experience was better than in the classroom. To say nothing of the parents who now had to help their kids with school work when they were used to leaving it all up to the teachers. There were some perks but the loss of the social aspect of school was huge for the teachers and the students. They're all pretty happy to be back in the 'office'
Work from home doesn't work for all jobs. Teaching is definitely one of them. Even for adults, there's a huge difference in engagement when you get a group of people together in person vs...
Work from home doesn't work for all jobs. Teaching is definitely one of them. Even for adults, there's a huge difference in engagement when you get a group of people together in person vs remotely. That engagement is critical for teaching, especially for children. It's important for them to socialize. Students who entered college during COVID were are at huge social disadvantage, having missed 1-2 years during an critical time for personal growth.
There are obviously outliers - not every job can adapt well to WFH, and nobody's arguing that point. The issue is that companies are dragging back people and roles that do function well WFH, and...
There are obviously outliers - not every job can adapt well to WFH, and nobody's arguing that point. The issue is that companies are dragging back people and roles that do function well WFH, and people are not happy about it.
The worker might well have this vested interest. However, capitalists and bosses have the opposite vested interest: to enrich themselves at the expense of the worker. I know which side I land on!...
From people who have a vested interest in claiming they are uber productive
The worker might well have this vested interest. However, capitalists and bosses have the opposite vested interest: to enrich themselves at the expense of the worker. I know which side I land on! I honestly don't give a crap about "productivity"; I care that humans have the best possible opportunity to be their happiest selves. Even if there were 1000 pages of peer-reviewed science supporting return to office as the more productive scenario, I would still support the workers' right to choose, and fight for them to have that outcome. This positon doesn't even require a study; you just need to provide an office and allow every individual to choose whether they want to be there.
Edit: If you have any studies that show it's better for me to be back in the office, then I'm all ears. For example, I can certainly acknowledge that my physical health has suffered from giving up cycling 10 miles a day. And I may well be experiencing a reduced level mental health from the reduced contact with other people. But am I better at home overall? Anecdotally I think so, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong by science.
Maybe I'm alone in this, but I find it quite disingenuous to link an article from 2014. Technology, particularly wide-scale communication and coordination tools, has advanced massively. Any...
Maybe I'm alone in this, but I find it quite disingenuous to link an article from 2014. Technology, particularly wide-scale communication and coordination tools, has advanced massively. Any company, no matter how small, can have calls, video, and instant messages available to their workers for very little cost without the need of “high-end technology” or being particularly skilled in tech. Sure, I can concede that if you had to work only with electronic mails and voice calls (or at best buggy video calls), working-from-home would have been significantly more of a risk for companies.
The only article I could find about that IBM claim is their CEO saying this:
"In the short term, you probably can be equally productive, but your career does suffer. Moving from there to another role is probably less likely because nobody's observing them in another context," Krishna said in an interview with Bloomberg. "It will be tougher. Not impossible, but probably a lot tougher."
Outright telling employees "we will not be promoting you if you work from home" with utter disregard for A. people with disabilities whose lives have improved massively from WFH policies, and B. deserving workers who happen to function better remotely. For me, the proof that these kinds of takes are capitalistic greed is that their excuses break down when you start asking why they need to be in the office every day rather than when needed. These CEOs and upper managers want their employees back because you can get away with a bare bone, under trained management team that spends its time walking down hallways rather than actually communicating to their employees. The insinuation that workers are demanding to leave the office and never return under any circumstance is part of what makes this propaganda - the main point of the WFH "movement" is that people don't need to be in offices every day, not that offices shouldn't exist.
And like another commenter mentioned, this focus on "productivity" is just another way of blaming the workers for bad or absent leaders. Daily e-mail reports at the end of every work-day with a weekly, possibly in-person meeting at the end of the work-week is all the productivity data a non-predatory company needs. A manager cannot somehow glean someone's "productivity" by looking at them, but by talking to them, which you do not need to be next to someone to do in 2023.
Not at all, but collaboration is not an indicator of productivity and it really depends on the type of work being done as well. It can't be generalized that easily.
Not at all, but collaboration is not an indicator of productivity and it really depends on the type of work being done as well. It can't be generalized that easily.
I fit the mold of a highly productive work from home employee. I started working on site, but shifted to remote work three years ago. I, personally, get far more done daily than I did working in...
I fit the mold of a highly productive work from home employee. I started working on site, but shifted to remote work three years ago. I, personally, get far more done daily than I did working in the office because I don't get pulled into pointless small talk. I'm also exempted from certain trainings because they're not relevant to my position. Instead of taking that time off, I use those hours to work.
The downside to this is that I've been passed over for big promotions because those positions require staff to be on site and I work from 2,000 miles away. All in all, I'm very happy with where I am, but I would love to have the ability to be promoted outside of building my department which is really grueling work.
I think all of these points are BS, but in particular I would like to address: I have both 1) onboarded new members of staff remotely during lockdown, and 2) recently changed jobs to a fully...
I think all of these points are BS, but in particular I would like to address:
Remote work is bad for new hires and junior employees
I have both 1) onboarded new members of staff remotely during lockdown, and 2) recently changed jobs to a fully remote job and required onboarding myself. In both cases, the transition from Absolute Zero -> Working Effectively took less than 6 weeks. And that's including 2 weeks solid doing all the BS "mandatory training" from HR!
Anyone who can't see through this "RTO" propaganda from the property-owning class (and - in some cases - middle-class bosses who have signed long, expensive leases for empty offices, and now have buyer's remorse) needs to wake the heck up.
Is there anything you did or that you saw your new employer doing that you thought was helpful for on-boarding? I've both hired people and changed jobs during COVID/office shutdown and it's been...
Is there anything you did or that you saw your new employer doing that you thought was helpful for on-boarding? I've both hired people and changed jobs during COVID/office shutdown and it's been rough on both sides. I just don't know how to get around the human aspect of needing to meet in person to build working relationships and become comfortable in a team.
Those things sound helpful. I think the issues I've seen are more people-centric. Not so much a problem of being able to get someone ready to do labor, but also being motivated and happy with it.
Those things sound helpful. I think the issues I've seen are more people-centric. Not so much a problem of being able to get someone ready to do labor, but also being motivated and happy with it.
The only thing that I can say was better with working in the office is it was much easier to make friends. I currently work in a hybrid positions and am free to kinda work where ever I feel I need...
The only thing that I can say was better with working in the office is it was much easier to make friends. I currently work in a hybrid positions and am free to kinda work where ever I feel I need to (home/office). I feel like the setup im currently am in is great and allows for so much flexibility
I'm always curious about what kinds of investments the people that are trying to push RTO have. Time after time it turns out that they've made some big bets on commercial real estate and are...
I'm always curious about what kinds of investments the people that are trying to push RTO have. Time after time it turns out that they've made some big bets on commercial real estate and are feeling the squeeze as every company with competent leadership realizes how much money they could save by not having a physical office, or by reducing their rental spend.
I've been remote in an office support job for the past three years, and just prior to us going remote our team was downsized. I'd say with remote work our team has actually become more productive...
I've been remote in an office support job for the past three years, and just prior to us going remote our team was downsized. I'd say with remote work our team has actually become more productive with less workers, and several members of the team probably work longer hours. I really enjoy not wasting so much time commuting to the office, and I've definitely felt a reduction of stress and resentment towards working. Currently we go to the office about once a month, and while I do miss the interaction and would prefer if we went in 2-4 times a month, I feel that the benefits of working from home greatly outweigh that.
There are definitely jobs that are worse from home, and some people that are more productive in the office but I don't understand this parade of articles against it.
The other disadvantage I feel is for recent college graduates. I definitely benefited from starting with a group of people around my age, and it made things easier to quickly just get up and ask someone a question or discuss things together during lunch. Networking is still an important tool to job advancement, and if you haven't established that already it's not as easy to make friends and connections across departments when you are working online only.
I work from home and the company I work for has pretty much said most of everyone will be permanently remote. I really do miss working in an office for the social aspect. Being at home is nice for...
I work from home and the company I work for has pretty much said most of everyone will be permanently remote. I really do miss working in an office for the social aspect.
Being at home is nice for easy access to food, bathroom is not far away and I have a cat that loves to hang out with me when I’m working. I can roll out of bed and be ready to work in 20 minutes.
But I don’t like it for the distractions I have in my apartment building, easily distracted by my phone (I’m trying to be better at it) and I miss the social aspect of talking to my coworkers and supervisors face to face.
"Nearly one-third of employees told Paychex they found their onboarding experience confusing. That figure jumped to 36% for remote workers, who were most likely to feel undertrained, disoriented,...
"Nearly one-third of employees told Paychex they found their onboarding experience confusing. That figure jumped to 36% for remote workers, who were most likely to feel undertrained, disoriented, and devalued after onboarding, compared to their in-person counterparts."
So... like 4%?
EDIT: "In a damning chart, they found that remote workers “decreased time spent working” and instead increased their time spent on “leisure and sleeping.” The chart clearly showed an increase roughly between three and hours in time spent on things that are, well, not work."
I see so many articles that feel like propaganda for RTO and why remote work is terrible.
It feels like propaganda because my work pivoted to 100% remote in March 2020 and has stayed that way. I never had a decrease in the amount of work and we onboarded new hires fine.
As expected, some were fantastic, some were mediocre and some just awful. Follows my exact experience in office.
Yes, I know some slack remotely, but they also slacked in office and so I don't see much difference.
I want to hear others on their actual remote experiences since every news piece feels too much like propaganda.
Please, discuss. Maybe I am in a unicorn position where it really doesn't matter if it's remote or not. I completely understand not all roles or work can ever be WFH.
Not just that, if you actually read a lot of their sources (if they even bother providing one - usually they provide a source to a completely different point and use it to make wild conjectures about the workers), a lot of them are either bent or straight up contradicted to make it seem like these big shot companies like Microsoft are reporting remote work isn't viable, when the reality is that it's much more nuanced and - shocker - how productive a worker is has far less to do with where they work and a lot more to do with good management. Bad management requires workers in the office as a crutch, while good management can work with their team and find the best solution in a company-specific manner.
The biggest thing in there that made it obvious that the whole article is propaganda.
By writing out "one-third" and then saying it "jumped" to 36%. That's a difference in 3%. That's a less than 10% difference to the prior method, and I think it's Paychex that has an onboarding problem, not remote work. But they try to hide it by obfuscating the numbers and using action words.
These numbers, statistically speaking, should be viewed as interchangeable. 3% is within whatever margin of error they have.
That bit of scummy writing also served as a red flag to me. My brain kinda skipped a beat when I read the 36% and then went back to re-read the sentence and thought: that's not significant at all.. And clearly they're trying to make it sound like a 36% increase.
Whole article felt contrived, but that part especially. That said, my job went remote back in 2020, but I jumped at the chance to return to office because I really am more productive in a dedicated work space where my wife and son can't ask me to do stuff all day... I have a very hard time saying "no" to them and need the physical separation to be maximally productive/efficient. At least for now.
Slightly unrelated, but I believe the world would be so much better if a new legal writing form of “news article” would be created, where these deliberately misleading expressions/techniques were banned and claims must provide their appropriate level of credibility, like a questionable witness reported X also, vs just X.
A news organization could only market themselves as such if they have well-distinguished blocks containing only ‘news articles’, and the title could be revoked.
I guess having a general media parent company that can’t legally call themselves a news outlet, and having a smaller sister company/division that is a news outlet might work. Also, frankly I wouldn’t mind if half of these “news sites” would go bankrupt.
But it might help a bit with everyone claiming everything because they found it on the internet. Surely not much would change, but might be a good start.
What you’re asking for does exist. Check out the Associated Press.
There’s also things such as PR News Wire which aggregate press releases.
It’s as dry as it goes. The format is pretty standard. They aren’t ad driven, so the incentives are aligned.
There used to be laws in the US around truth in media, but I think they expired in my childhood. All I could find quickly was the Fairness Doctrine, which required (from 1949-1987) news media to dedicate some time to controversial public interest pieces, and to present opposiving viewpoints. I didn't see anything on the wiki page about requiring truth in those presentations, but I imagine it was probably in the language of the law.
Either way, something that made it illegal for news-marketed entertainiment to knowingly lie to their audience would be nice...
Paychex is also kinda garbage. Started a job a few months ago that uses Paychex and it definitely sucks compared to ADP, which I've used in other jobs.
Yup. I work for a remote-first game studio and it turns out that competent management and production practices make remote just... not a problem. I'm literally on the opposite side of the world to the vast majority of my colleagues but our organizational practices make everything extremely painless. We sync once a day, maximum - turns out calls can just be emails or instant messages instead. And it means I'm not bothering my coworkers during their work day and they're not bothering me during mine. Perfection.
IMHO that's actually part of the problem. It appears that in many corporations people are promoted to management with little to no training and are appropriately terrible at their job function. In others, managers are useless figureheads who have the power to compel people to do things but don't understand the reason why they do things and often have too many restrictions on their powers to actually run things; they essentially exist only to be another layer of hierarchy. This seems to be especially common in service industries to give customers people to yell at. And of course there are some businesses that aren't run with a hierarchy, rare as they are, and they simply fall apart when they can't work together properly.
In my experience, that buffer is the, "Don't let the junk below you get to me because I'm actually busy" layer.
I dream of those easy ass paychecks.
Agree that this all comes across as propaganda. I tend to see more and more of these especially as large buildings have low occupancy rates. It feels entirely wrapped around commerical real estate. People who slack at home will slack in the office.
The only reason I don't work from home all the time is I have to work on networks that can't be accessed remotely. Other than that my team and customers are all over the world. I don't even see my team members when I'm in office.
%100 this is old school business conglomerates that are basically screwed with the WFH which has destroyed their real estate. They're just way to stupid to adapt, so they produce propaganda like this to make it seem like WFH isn't working.
It's absolutely propaganda. Even when they try to back it up with data, it's the most cherry-picked, choose-your-own-narrative crap I've ever seen. That American Time Use survey even comes with the caveat that "Working at home includes any time persons did work at home and is not restricted to persons whose usual workplace is their home." So we can go ahead and throw out that entire "Remote workers put in 3.5 hours less per week compared to in-person workers" lie.
I've worked from a home office for 7 years now on a team that's about half remote, half in-office. All our days start and end at the same time. I take my lunch break when most people in my time zone are still having breakfast, because it's literally the same schedule. I was in office for a few years before I went remote, and my job, responsibilities, deliverables, you name it, haven't changed at all--I just do the same thing in a nicer, quieter space with bigger screens and cats.
Maybe it's different in other industries where the work products aren't all digital to begin with, but it seems like a lot of this propaganda is even trying to target the tech workforce and positions where it genuinely doesn't make a difference where the person pressing the buttons is physically located, and where the kinds of people collaborating prefer doing so in chat rooms instead of meeting rooms in the first place.
Either way I've lived 2000 miles from my workplace for the better part of a decade so if there's an RTO push... bye! Not selling my house to warm a cubicle, thanks.
Smallish software dev company (35ish employees). We went remote in 2020 and have had some of the most productive years ever since then. We do hardware as well for some of our customers, so there will always be a need for some of our people to be in office to lay hands on equipment/ship/setup/ect.
However our dev team has been fully remote for the whole time now and it has let us increase the quality of our team by quite a bit. I feel like its for three reasons.
The pool of candidates is just larger. We don't care where they are in the country. A wider pool will naturally have a better available quality.
People want to be fully remote, so that lets us attract better employees, even as a small company who may not be able to match the pay of larger corporations.
Work from home is just more productive in general. Yeah I'm typing this up during my work day. Yeah I am not productive for a full 8 hours. But I wasn't when I was in house either. This lets me work in spurts that are good for me, my productivity is higher than it would be if I were in office, and my happiness is way higher than if I had to go into the office every day.
I'm not a software dev, and there are some things I have to do hands on. Because of that I work 4 days remote per week, and I could never go back to a 5 day in office job.
I watched this video the other day that I thought explained the reasons for the propaganda aspects of the RTO discussion:
https://youtu.be/jrsRvozsUQ8
When I work remote, I get far more done in a day than I do in the office with all the constant distractions. I truly feel like this whole narrative is being pushed and held up by desperate and frightened management people who are:
Lazy as fuck. They know that when they are at home, they goof off on Netflix, Reddit, etc. when they should be doing something, and they project that laziness onto everyone else because they think everyone must be lazy, just like them. The fact is, more than half these people goof off in their offices, where they make sure to have their computers facing away to where no one can see what they are doing. I spent too much time in IT with the ability to see their activity to believe anything different. Even the rare middle manager that doesn't spend all their time online typically spends it micromanaging everyone around them, wasting time, energy and good will. 35 years in the workplace has taught me that focused, hard working middle managers who stay busy doing something productive are few and far between.
These are the people most threatened by the WFH paradigm, because even if you give them the benefit of the doubt, their job is to manage interactions between people. When they don't have a physical room filled with people around them to micromanage and hold endless, pointless meetings with, it's glaringly obvious how increasingly unnecessary their efforts are becoming. At best, the middle manager should be facilitating and supporting information sharing and collaboration between and within teams, departments, and projects. Increasingly and rapidly, digital tools and enterprise applications are simplifying or even eliminating processes and procedures that were once arguably necessary.
Remote work is shining a bright light on increasingly worthless roles, and the people in those roles are gonna go down kicking and screaming the entire way, because it means they'll have to get a real job. These are also the people who have the ears of upper management, and it's difficult for regular workers and project managers to speak over them.
</rant>You could literally write what you wrote about middle managers about any group of workers.
I work for a large Fortune 100 tech company. Remote work has not been a problem for us. Even prior to COVID, remote work was pretty common here. Of course it increased during and after COVID. Yeah, some people abuse it, but it's pretty easy to tell who they are. Our company is not immune to layoffs, and when they happen, those are the first people to go.
Our company and teams are global. We spend most of our time on conference calls. My boss is across the country. I and some of my team come in a couple days a week just for some in-person collaboration and a change in scenery (we have a nice office), but people make that choice for themselves.
Nobody likes mandates, especially when there's no one size fits all for the effectiveness of remote vs in-person work. That's why I agree that these articles are propaganda.
My company is committed to hybrid work because some teams do benefit from being in-office together. Others simply can't because they're dispersed across the country, so we would all be in Teams from our office desks.
We just had an all-hands meeting in which they directly talked about RTO and they said that there are weaknesses we are experiencing, but the goal is to address them, not force a return to office.
I think it comes down to a company's commitment to its employees. My company claims to be committed to work/life balance and doesn't care too much if we take some time for personal stuff as long as we put it back for work. Maybe it's a 10 hour day, but you spent two hours on laundry or picking up your kids.
I’m at a Fortune 1000 company. We had an all hands meeting last week. Topic was <location> Office Update. We have the main HQ on the east coast and another HQ on the west coast from a major acquisition a few years back.
I knew they had constantly said they had a commitment to work from anywhere, as they call it. Figured it would either be closing then office or asking people to come back.
Lease was up later this year, so they wanted to let the employees know they were closing down the office. Didn’t want people in the area seeing the available signs and thinking they were in trouble. And wanted to set up a way to get all the historical stuff out of the office and preserved.
I think my company might end up going that way. When I was an intern I went to the new office that they used to downsize, and we're already doing hotelling for the desks, since most people don't come in, nobody needs one.
I work remotely and there would be no reason for my department to come back. Our productivity is tracked by the software we use. Anyone who is slacking is seen quite easily. Not only this, but my department has employees in every state, most were hired in the past three years. They'd be shooting themselves in the foot trying to bring everyone to a central office. There's just no way.
I get some professions cannot be done remotely and that's understandable, but my last job was done remotely by my team for an entire year. They were forced to come back because we had a few boomers who wanted to socialize and just could not handle the work from home aspect. They could have easily done hybrid work, but just could not be bothered to work it out. Listening to the boomers in the hallways say how happy they were to have everyone back in the office was the most insane feeling.
I work for a major corporation (70k+ employees, worldwide). We went 100% remote in March of 2020, and last year, totally converted to a hybrid. Basically, they polled everyone about what they wanted, saying, "if you want an office, you can have one. If you don't, work where you want". I've been to my (now former) office only once in three years, and that was to bring all my stuff home last June. My company never owns real estate, they always lease, so we don't have the pressure of expensive properties sitting vacant that a lot of companies have. And we mostly have people in leadership who can adapt, and don't need to see butts in cubicles to know that work is getting done.
I had already been 80% remote before 2020, and at this point, if they ever tried to force me back into an office with any regularity, I'd have to find something else, I think. I just can't face 2+ hours a day in the car again.
I also see a lot of articles that feel like this. Also a lot of micro-managers who seem to find themselves with nothing to do once work is assigned and they don't have anyone's shoulder to look over.
However, I personally have not enjoyed 100% remote work. Not to say it's bad, or impossible, simply that it isn't for me. A few reasons
I know those are all personal reasons and don't apply to everyone. But that's some of why I have to disagree when folks argue absolutely for one way or the other.
I just got an estimate on what it would take to add doors to my "office" area, and it came back to $8600. With toddlers, working from home is wildly distracting, and I cannot swing $8600 to add privacy! I like the flexibility of being able to go in or work remotely, but I fear a fully 100% remote job. I also do miss the collaboration meetings we had in person. The richness of the communication isn't there even with tools like Miro, video chat, etc.
Could not agree more — I was hired as a fully-remote employee for a company across the country from me. Recently, local employees within 40 miles of HQ were asked to return to the office (despite doing exactly the same job as me) and guess what? They unanimously agree that they were more productive when left alone in their home office. Not one person has validated any of the reasons they gave for forcing people back into the office (face/face collaboration, increased camaraderie, etc.)
Part of me wonders, if it is indeed propaganda, if it’s fueled by fears of what will happen to business real estate as a whole if there’s not much RTO among companies that went remote.
The only point I'll give credence to is that for new hires, particularly grads, I've anecdotally seen that they are more interested in going to an actual office space and interacting with their team in person. I'd be interested to see if anyone else has seen that, or felt that way themselves.
But the article is pretty much propaganda apart from that. I've had no issue onboarding people throughout the pandemic and after, most people are aware that if they're seeking a remote work position, they need to get used to tools like Teams and Zoom and other ways of remote pairing. Onboarding feels like a company by company issue, even without the one third to one third trick the article pulls.
The article just gets worse from then onwards, "sometimes" things are bad, we should all be working more than 3.5 hours a week anyway, and "anecdotally productivity plummets" feels like it was deliberately left below the fold.
It is absolutely just propaganda in my opinion. I have never had any problem working remotely. I also have not personally seen a single shred of evidence suggesting that remote work is less productive in any way than working in person. If anything, my experience has been quite the opposite. I know a lot of people who have much more difficulty disconnecting from work when they do it from home than when they did it in an office. They hear a notification from their work phone or laptop or whatever and feel a sense of anxiety like they have to take a look at it immediately, even if it's like 10PM. Definitely something I've been trying to help them work on.
I've always felt that if you can't trust members of your staff to work productively without a watchdog constantly looking over their shoulder, you shouldn't be employing them. The kind of people that will weasel out of work in a remote scenario are the exact same kind of people that will do the same thing in person. Meanwhile the rest of us get to save as much as hours a day on our commute, work in a much more comfortable environment, eat healthier meals at home, take more useful breaks that better facilitate being refreshed and doing better work, etc etc etc.
It's so frustrating how COVID forced us into this new era of remote work really taking off only to have so many companies desperately try to claw it back.
I work in cybersecurity and also transitioned to WFH in March 2020. I stayed with that company until 2021 when they started rumblings of bringing folks back to the office. Their push was delayed until 2022 and is hybrid now (two days in, three days out). However, the vast majority of employees are in the office maybe once a week. Their workload is still massive and the work is still getting done. Folks were way more productive while at home.
My current job is 100% remote, though I live near my office (5-10 minutes away). I go in maybe once or twice a month. Yes, I absolutely slack off at home and take full advantage of being in my house. I use my bathroom, my kitchen, mess around with my dog, etc.
My position can be completely remote--for the most part. IT, in generally, can be completely remote--for the most part. There are hardware deployments, troubleshooting, and some instances where folks need to be in the office. That's a minority of their time though
To me it feels like remote workers who do not self manage, may be harder to manage. And the management doesn't want to work harder, or change any of their own management styles. They also want to work from home and are probably less productive themselves. A workers productivity can be measured, if you are managing people who aren't producing the right quality of work, then take steps to be a better boss and get the employee where they need to be, or fire them like you would anyone who is underperforming in the office. All this anti remote work bullshit is so frustrating.... we have the technology guys, come on.... give people measurable goals and measure them. It is not that hard. It's especially frustrating because the people complaining are probably also enjoying the flexibility, and just don't want to address any real reasons why their team is underperforming. Blaming it on remote work is just an excuse they can get away with using, because nobody can really prove them wrong, and it shifts the blame onto someone else.
My job is global, my team is global, we are working remotely with each other every day, no matter what, and literally always have been. Make it stop costing a bazillion dollars to live near the offices and then let's talk about coming back in full time...
In my opinion the big push for return to offices is coming from those losing their asses in commercial real estate. I guarantee that when my office’s 7 year lease is up in a couple of years they are either going to downsize the shit out of the office space, or close it altogether.
The key points from the article:
For clarity: my point of view is as "the boss".
The experience I have had is that I agree with the first point - onboarding is weird when fully remote, and I don't really know how to make it work right. This is something that I think just stems from me; I don't know what I'm doing onboarding new people in this environment, so I have to figure it out. It's not the fault of remote work, I just have to learn.
The other three just seem like "old men yells at cloud" out of touch BS.
My biggest regret about working from home has been that we don't have foosball tournaments anymore.
I think the onboarding issue is not a remote-only phenomenon. Remote companies need to have things like checklists, scheduled 1:1s to check in, active slack/chat channels where new people are encouraged to ask questions, and video shadowing. I've been abandoned when onboarding remotely, but I've also been abandoned when onboarding in person. The success or failure hinges on "did you forget that you hired this new person?"
If a company never thought about onboarding as a well defined process, and just said "Jim, show 'em the ropes," that's not going to translate to remote work. But I'd also argue that without a well thought out and clear onboarding document and checklist, that even onboarding in person, your knowledge and understanding is at the mercy of the person you got assigned to shadow. They might not be good at explaining, or resent taking time out of their day. Onboarding docs should be the standard.
All great points - I think the problem that I have is that we have a specific onboarding process that we followed every time and really enjoyed, and it just doesn't work as well remotely. But I feel that the onus is on me and the leadership crew here to figure that out, not try to force some stupid work-from-office mentality just for the sake of it.
I think that the mentality in the article stems from a really old model of being the boss where people do so because they want to be in charge and control people. I have no interest in controlling people; I want people to do the best work they can because they want to, not because I am micromanaging them or breathing down their neck. And I think that the primary thing that I need to do when managing people is support people, so I check in with their needs and wants regularly and try to meed / exceed them. And it turns out that this is a pretty effective way to get people to work; we have a pretty positive work environment, and we get stuff done and make money.
I think the old school way of bosses controlling people just fosters resentment, if not outright hatred. I think that everyone I work with likes me and respects me, so they tend to do good work.
This is such a great point. My boss at my last job was such a great boss and leader. I respected her so much and I did some of my best work at that job because I wanted to support her (I’m a paralegal and she was the attorney I worked for) and not disappoint her. She always stood up for our team to the higher ups, and she was very liberal with her praise for good work.
Contrast that with my boss before her who had only criticisms but when I would try to get his input to avoid the issues he refused to communicate with me. I did not care about doing a good job for him at all. The only thing that really kept me in check was my sense of responsibility to my clients.
Yeah, and the numbers in the article support this, but they're presented in a really dishonest way. This bit:
"Nearly one-third of employees told Paychex they found their onboarding experience confusing. That figure jumped to 36% for remote workers..."
So... about a third of workers, regardless of being in-office or remote, feel confused by their on-boarding.
They don't give us the exact number for in-person workers, but "nearly one third" would be around 30%. So a minor increase in this feeling for new remote workers, which I can accept as true, but a 5-6% difference is much less than what the article's wording is trying to make us come away with. Some serious RTO propaganda.
I think it could be best served by a buddy system where employees who have volunteered themselves as being able to help out new hires (Probably in exchange for a higher hourly rate or some other benefit) will work quite closely with a new-hire for their first week and still help the manager with onboarding them for the whole probation period, with the buddy employee's normal duties being taken over by others temporarily as if they were sick during that week if they have to spend that much time working with the new-hire.
That doesn't just go for WFH either, I mean in general. It's basically trying to turn "show 'em the ropes" into an official process with all the red tape involved with doing that.
Had the same experience. When I joined initially, it was weird. But I got a mentor/buddy assigned who introduced me into everything and we met every Friday (online, with webcam) to discuss how it was working for me. I could call him any time regardless if I wanted to.
The other points are laughable at best.
All the discussion about if we should abolish the 40h per week is always made under the principle that workers are actually working 8 hours a day. I have yet to see a company where people are really working 8 hours a day for months straight.
Same applies to this weird 3.5h argument. Personally I am more productive working remotely. I can turn my speakers up and stay in the zone without a colleague interrupting me for nonsense. I find myself working more sometimes, because I don't have to catch a train at a certain time.
Working remotely has it's problems, especially in terms of syncing with team mates, but so does working in an office.
I hope I never have to get back into one. I'm now completely spoiled, honestly. :D
Ah, mentor/buddy seems like a great idea honestly. I'm part of a leadership mentor program at work that has been good. Doing that for new hires seems like a great idea.
My job is strange, but the mentor program really did help me understand my job. I shadowed people then for months had a weekly meeting with a mentor that started at an hour but shortened to half an hour. It gave me a chance to ask questions or discuss issues that seemed to small to buy my boss with but were confusing as well as allow me to check in with my own solutions. "I tried this, was that good?" kinda thing.
That, as needed questions answered via text and email, weekly full department meetings, and monthly meetings with my boss have helped me feel like I know what I'm doing without ever going near an office.
I can certainly tell you I never did 36.5 hours of work a week when I was working in the office. So if they're getting that much out of remote workers they should be ecstatic.
For context, I work in an office, but my team and supervision are remote. A large portion of my organization does work from home though.
I think that overall a lot of contemporary bosses' issues with WFH are related to a failure to adapt on the part of upper management, and a fundamental distrust of, and disrespect for, their subordinates.
Remote work is only bad for new hires and junior employees if the organization is still treating onboarding like they're in-office. If the workplace is still trying to conduct training like it's in-person, just via Zoom, they're going to give new hires a bad time and they're going to fail to integrate in the way they would have in-person. Remote training needs to come with remote socialization and teambuilding, like scheduled 'water cooler' moments with team members and management at an informal and non-professional tone. It is best formatted in much shorter blocks of content interspersed with demonstration and practice; remote trainees tend to be harder to hold attention for and trainer doesn't have in-person cueing to recognize it's break time or similar. It really works for some personalities and really doesn't for some others - similar to in-person, except that we're used to it in the latter. I was trained completely remotely and it was the absolute best onboarding experience I've had.
I love how point two really boils down to "when you do it badly, it feels like you're doing it badly" which I can assure the room is definitely the case for in-office work as well. I think it requires a certain measure of ignorance to pretend that issues like workplace hostility, harassment, or other work-culture issues are somehow minimized in offices - instead, I'd be inclined to suggest a combination of two things: people who were not traditionally targets have found themselves on the receiving end, and staff are more likely to report issues when it leaves a paper trail (ie slack messages) and when they're likely to be confronted in-person by the individual they reported. It's absolutely a thing that text over slack, or even bodies over zoom, are not as expressive and can lead to missed cues and miscommunications - but I do find that's easy to recover from and account for if you're accustomed to, or trained for, the issue. The remarks about bosses would "fire the remote workers first" in the event of cutbacks really is old-world quiet thoughts, said out loud - they're going to set their firing hierarchy on the basis of their relationship with the workers, and haven't invested in building relationships with their remote staff. Staff level already knew management often played favourites, rather than performance, when cutbacks came rolling around - but we all know they're not supposed to admit that like this.
I think there's a whole lot of jumping to conclusions here - I think that the survey they're based on and the conclusions they've drawn from are both not factoring in time "wasted" in an office - but are factoring it out from WFH. I'd guess that's happening on a self-reporting level as well, that instead of burning half an hour a day reading the news, scrolling the net, and watching youtube, WFH are getting laundry done - and are reporting that time to the survey. Measuring "time worked" for salaried workers is already missing the point, though, and it's rather telling that this article wasn't able to point data at a loss of productivity - because we all know they would if they could've. Hourly are either showing up for the time they're contracted, or they're not - time worked shows on the clock. Hourly can still slack on the clock, and have been doing so in-office or on-site for generations now.
A purely anecdotal loss of productivity from, effectively, a single firm - using an already-nebulous data point. I'm sure there are firms that have seen a loss in productivity, especially in cases where work is collaboration-heavy and the firm hasn't done a great job of adjusting to remote. I've seen it happen. But I think that's like the (very old now) argument that having internet on employees computers causes a reduction in productivity - sure, it's a thing. It also doesn't need to be in a work environment that holds staff adequately accountable while providing tools to succeed. The productivity issues need to be examined more closely than just "number down. bad!" because when you have that consistent a trend at one firm and we're not seeing consistent and controlled data showing that's the case across the board and universal to WFH conditions, it's really important for the firm to look inwards: what about their work, or their team environment, is failing to support WFH? Are team members working from home on different days, so one or two staff members are getting left out while they're home? Is the sales team competitive-motivated and don't have a clear way to compete while they're not in-person? Does the company employ a bunch of slackers who'd also have poor sales numbers on days that supervision was out of office all day.
Work from home is not perfect and cannot be perfect, no more than in-office is. But it's also absolutely fantastic for some folks, allows others to participate in the workforce in ways not previously available to them, and can be done as well, and as poorly, as in-office has been prior. I think that much of the handwringing around it right now is rooted in it being different in ways that require adaptation - and much of the adaptation required is social skills and not business practices.
The graph doesn't have a separation of work vs commute, so commute time is probably lumped in with the hours worked for the in-person cohort. If that's the case, then an in-person worker is bound to do more hours, but those extra hours are wasted on their commute.
I go 2 days each week to the office, and I waste 1.5 hours each way both days, 6 hours total, just traveling around to sit in a different place and have Teams meetings or ssh in to remote machines (like I could do from home...). I have to get up before 6am, and don't get home until after 6pm. Back in the good old days of the pandemic when it was 5 days-per-week WFH, those extra hours I would spent on my hobbies, or sleeping in.
This is the one which frustrates me the most. The commute time is wasted time. Period. When companies are saying that they want employees to have a work-life balance, remote work is key to unlocking that additional productivity. Happy employees provide. Hybrid is the worst, because it means that to come into the office part time, you still can't move away and find more affordable housing. So not only are you losing valuable productivity time, but employees need to be compensated more than if they were working remote, just so that they aren't looking for another job which will pay them more. It's going to drive attrition and you will lose talent. Lastly, if the role he employee fills is usually going to meetings, what sense does it make to bring those employees back to an office to attend conference calls? Office real estate is going to be squeezed for meeting room space and you can't just make an assumption that 3 times a week means that you can over book desk spaces assuming 3/5ths of the space will be available. Not only will some days be overpopulated, but there will be other days where fewer people will be in the office. So you have to maintain space for 100% attendance and on some days the office will be barren. The smart move would be to break leases and scale down to skeleton office staff to support those who need to be present to flip switches, and then figure out how to give those workers the tools to work remote.
Thanks!
When we pivoted to WFH, it felt like we talked more as team through Teams than we ever had in office.
Yeah, I can see if they don't have a good training plan in place how it would not be a great experience.
Though I didn't technically work in an office, during my conscription I did do a lot that mimicked an office environment (medical). We technically didn't have work from home (obviously), but a lot of our problems and questions could be solved by just messaging someone.
But that didn't mean that's all we did. We still had a medical center where new medics would get their training done, and the junior usually shadowed the senior for a good while. But, after a month or so, this wasn't necessary anymore so working together was a waste of time.
I think the most logical thing to do in an office is to keep a small, comfortable office where people can come in if they want. Maybe require them to come in once a week for a report or something - we did daily reports, but the army is a bit more stringent than business.
My main point is that the new worker issue is solved by having a temporary office period where they learn the job and only once they can handle the responsibility they switch to mostly WFM. The obvious "problem" with this is that managers and seniors would need to spend more time at the office, but they have more responsibility than the average worker and are usually paid more as compensation.
Onboarding just can't look the same as it used to and a lot of people/companies are not adapting to this new challenge. To approach onboarding digitally in the same way as in person is bound to fail.
Imo there needs to be time to be "near" someone digitally to help the team/onboarding team member understand personalities and relationships. That could mean everyone works on video for 1 hour a day. So there is a time where there is easy access to speak up and ask questions without feeling like you are really bothering someone. Or, if the team is too big assign a partner (or rotating partners) to the onboardee so they have someone to work with and ask questions. I'm just throwing out ideas, but it feels like the old guard is so reluctant to try new things and then they go "See! Trying nothing didn't work, back to the office."
I also like AirBNBs approach to remote work. Build connections in person and maintain them online. While this may not help in your first week, but it's a point in time to look forward to in meeting face to face with people to help grow connections. https://news.airbnb.com/airbnbs-design-to-live-and-work-anywhere/
Even the first point goes on to say,
One-third aka 33.3% compared to the JUMP of 36%. Sure it's worse, but maybe remote isn't really the issue.
I feel like this could be overcome by organising a monthly meet up at a decent bar or something with a foosball table you could book for the night.
Just to go on a related tangent, regular meet-ups like this would go a long way to providing the camaraderie seen in workplaces that apparently is missing from WFH. Here in Australia it's common for workplaces to do a Christmas breakup where the workplace will figure out how many employees are interested in going, then book out that many seats at a nearby restaurant or bar or similar and foot the bill even in workplaces that don't close over the Christmas period, normally at these events you'll have a mixture of talking about work and just shooting the shit with my favourites being one workplace that'd regularly go to a local bar that'd basically give us a pool table for the night so we'd run a pseudo tournament. This concept could be extended to a monthly optional meetup between employees where the idea is just socialisation and the like, whether the workplace pays or the employees pay for themselves I'd wager it'd probably work better than going into the office does for camaraderie.
We do have quarterly get togethers, and enjoy them a lot. We often play foosball, but we no longer have elaborate in-office tournaments that span days or weeks; we spend more time talking, eating, and playing board games when we get together now. I do think that in person get togethers are very important, as you've pointed out, and we do focus on interpersonal connection and not work related things when we do get together.
Have the new hires document step by step of what they are doing to set up at the very beginning and keep sharing and improving this documentation organically by the new hires for the new hires.
I've seen it work very well
Yes, but have you ever thought about the poor folks in the C-Suite that are heavily invested in office real estate?
Seriously: I would love to know how much posted collateral in business finance is office space and how many companies wouldn't survive a long-term devaluation of those assets. I suspect thats undeniably one important driver for all those articles that demonize remote work.
That is why I feel it's all propaganda. It's affecting the "rich" while giving actual financial relief to the workforce.
AND, they seem remarkably naive about people's ability to appear busy at the office while not actually doing anything. Someone said it above: people who slack off at home are going to do the same thing in the office.
I slacked off a lot more when at the office. I spend about the same amount of time on reddit either way, but when in the office I spend a lot more time socializing with people compared to what I do now.
Plus working from home I can control my noise environment far better than I could in any other workplace. I work much better with a very specific type of music, and being able to drown myself in it compared to an office where I have to deal with every distracting noise that could ever be thought up.
He has it backwards. Workers put up with spending a large (unpaid) chunk of time commuting every day. They’re sick and tired of it. Most people I know who switched to remote work would simply leave and find another job if they were forced back to the office.
I realize that’s a privilege many people don’t have, but those who have the option are exercising it.
Agree that this is my experience, too.
Most tech jobs are paying in the range of 90k - 180k, and people in that range absolutely do not need to go back to an office.
There is a minority of tech workers who were earning over 200k who are feeling really fucked right now because the 20 or so companies that pay that much are dragging people back into the office, and they have no recourse because there is a collusion happening.
Regular devs and techies making under 200k have access to more job listings than ever with full remote
It's so pathetic watching the continuing complaint articles about the workforce. I do not work remote, but at my desk I may as well be. Meetings in person are rare. Most are via phone or app conferences. No need to be in office for those. Most outreach I perform is via chat, email, or call. No need to be physically present for those. I loved the part where the article quotes a blogger who works from home, possibly written by a journalist who works from home, forwarded to an editor who...
How can they not see a cost savings on overhead? Even if they were locked in a lease, the deduction on the power bills, cleaning, and other admin costs for the office still lower the ops expenditures.
Now the cries switch from "nObOdY wAnTs tO wOrK aNyMoAr" to "nObOdY wAnTs tO wOrK iN aN oFfIcE aNyMoAr"
Power to the workers.
I had the exact same thought. They’re saying this guy is an independent journalist. Doesn’t that mean he works remotely or from home?? And he’s sitting there talking about how people only slack at home but he writes an article a day, or whatever it said? Makes no sense.
Hmmmm interesting…
The savings are hurting the office building rent seekers, thats what it boils down to for me, and the people that have stock in companies that own the buildings that are staying empty.
An aspect that I don't ever see discussed in these articles is how remote work can increase access to good jobs for disabled people. People with pain or mobility issues can work from home much more easily. I'm autistic, and being able to control my environment (noise/visual stimulation/unexpected interruption) is very important to my productivity and overall work satisfaction. Without remote work (which I've done well before the pandemic started), I would be unable to keep most jobs, but working from home, I'm often the most productive member of my team.
Yes exactly! I do not have a disability or autism, I just can't stand people. But I'm still a very hard worker and having worked from home for the better part of 15 years, no one has ever complained about my productivity.
Absolutely great point!
I have no disability but love the natural light, plants and quiet environment to work in. No more coworkers distracting conversations, flickering lights, no natural light, listening to my coworkers chew, cough, sneeze etc getting in my way.
Also having my own private bathroom is huge. Was my dream that I never thought would happen.
My workplace as a policy where new hires needs to come on-site for the first six months just so they get used to the team's dynamics, which is easier to communicate in-person IMO.
True, some issues are harder to solve remotely, but what needs to be done if there is an employee encounters an issue while working remotely is to be clarify which remediations steps to take in the remote work policy.
What is the problem if that employee's objectives are met? Instead of relaxing at home, they'll slack at the office in a more sneaky manner. This doesn't solve anything, and it's up to the manager to set proper KPIs to evaluate their subordinates. Time is only one metric.
Everyone has ups and downs in productivity, we aren't machines. Again, set up proper KPIs, and stop micromanaging. Nobody likes a nosy boss.
I would like to see facts with those points, I have seen productiveity go up from remote work.
I'm very much a senior and self motivated.
I work more hours when I'm at home (4 days home, 1 day in) just due to how I work. When I wake at 6am, first check is phone for email and alerts before I'm out of bed. Technically that's working. Then I solid the first 4 hours from 8:30am-1pm. At that point, I'm gonna lunch and start the work/life mix. School runs, spending some time with my toddler as he's home, etc.
I'm still doing email and Teams. I'm still making sure my team are looked after and work is getting checked and done. Everyone signs off about 5:30pm but my NYC team need attention and I'm in the UK. I check in, have a call, make sure works going well and whatever is being worked on is aligned globally.
LA wakes up for 7:30pm so I'll drop in on them too. My work life is entwined so the company get me and I get some life when I need it.
However, the days I am forced in you get half of me. I travel IN WORK TIME. Including returning home. I'll be less available on purpose on those evenings because I've already done a day that they wanted but it's inefficient and I am quite verbal about it to my boss and CEO. They still want the presence so we will have 4 days of effective strategy and one day of real life face time that I think's a waste, but they believe in me showing up means others feel better. I work in IT so I suppose that means they feel better supported.
These lovely blanketed blogs and news posts saying that all the bosses are finding slack employees are just looking at some companies and some folks. Don't tarnish us all with that brush, we're certainly not all the same.
I've seen both. For processes where I need to concentrate and work alone, productivity is up. For tasks that are inherently collaborative, the opposite is true. I find things like code reviews and pair programming absolutely miserable over slack/zoom/whatever.
I'm just so used to distributed work environment working the DoD side. I have never done in person code review. All over screenshare meeting.
This is a bloviated, propaganda piece, made to help it sound like remote workers are lazy and unproductive
Several times in the article, it contradicts itself.
God forbid people get 3.5 hours a WEEK back in their life.
God for id saving a 2 hour commute allows them to sleep in a bit longer.
And as far as "Yelling into zoom meetings", I'm hybrid, and ALL of our meetings are still over video calls.
This is a paid for article by some blowhard.
This just in!: Changes in the workplace that reduce convenience and hurt work/life balance for employees results in squeezing a few more hours of work out of them every week, and therefore is a good thing!
My work decided to go hybrid (2 days office work a week from fully remote) and I sort of get it. There's some pros you get out of those moments in the office where you can overhear a problem and help someone fix it. Or just decompress with some watercooler chat and it's good for everyone.
But honestly we've not really gained or lost any momentum since we were fully remote.
The only requirement for us is some physical hardware, but some people have either share it remotely or have it shipped home and it's not really an issue.
I agree on boarding can be tricky, we don't find it easy either. We've got a very web cam on, no question is a dumb question, relaxed atmosphere. It's very social and inclusive, so I've found people on slack or just a quick call get all their issues out the way remotely just as much as they would in the office.
That said, in a previous job it was very much the opposite and we struggled to get any work done as a team because of terrible communication via slack. So it's really down to culture in my opinion.
That was a bit of word vomit, but it's my two cents.
reads like C-suite cope to me, not gonna lie. so much desire for "butts in seats" for the sake of "butts in seats". is it a control thing? an ego thing? I dunno. but it reeks of cope and propaganda to me.
god. i live far away from the downtown where most jobs are. and when i worked, i had a 2-hour commute each way (4 hours total). and this was just, horrible for my mental and physical health—i took the bus and the metro, but i have a lot of anxiety and they were always packed, so it really really sucked. with the pandemic i could finally work without having to deal with all of that crap and it was great, but now it seems like it’s all fading away and it honestly makes me feel like crying. i do not want to have to commute for 4 hours every day ever again, or really even commute at all ever again
This was me too.
Coach plus tube plus bus to get to work or I could go coach plus bus plus walk two miles. Up at 5:30am to get the 6am to get to work for 8:30am, then leave at 4pm in to rush out of London and might not get home until 7pm.
I could have negated that by catching a train and a bus, shaving off 45 mins of travel but it would have been twice the price.
Me, three.
Being able to work from home has been a lifesaver. It really upsets me that they're trying to reverse this trend.
Yeesh, this reads like more corporate America trying to flood the business media with hit pieces that validate micro-managers feelings. Each of the points brought up can be countered with "did the company actually make an effort to adapt?" If a company is still struggling with remote work 3 years later after its upswing, then they never had the desire to accept it in the first place and failed to take on a growth mindset when it became a popular trend. Instead they started the process begrudgingly and dragged their feet like an unwilling toddler to accept it, while also continually trying to spot areas to claw back in the time since.
I graduated in the midst of the pandemic and have been on boarded by two different companies in that time. The first was resistant to WFH and regularly made attempts to bring people back in office even with the pandemic still in full swing. They very much would be the type to identify with this hit piece article and as my first true job after college, their new hire process sucked. I had to do all the paperwork and grab my laptop in person, all while dealing with an immediate manager who had terrible masking habits. Training was non-existent and I struggled due to being expected to develop in a language I had no experience with. They had a bad company culture overall and this probably fuelled their anti-wfh position. They expected excessive crunch with abysmal pay, and butts in seats was their way of holding that.
The second company I joined was the complete opposite with WFH and embraced it. All on boarding was done remotely and my laptop was shipped to me. My start date was a specific Monday where multiple others were being on boarded at the same time. Multiple group Teams meetings were had to discuss company policies and work expectations over a week, with multiple gaps for independent work and troubleshooting. I had no issues finding my footing and was supported the entire way with a mentor and buddy system to help assist. The difference of embracing WFH and specifically making corporate programming that catered to that is what made my time easier as someone who was early in my career.
This certainly varies from industry to industry, but again I am going to harp on the embracing concept that I mentioned for part 1. If you are surrounded by management and coworkers who refuse to embrace remote work, then that mindset is going to carry over into their working habits and add to the very hinderences they complain about. If you have the viewpoint that WFH is inefficient, it will be a persistent bias that affects your day-to-day work and create a self-fulfilling prophecy fitting that view. Having worked with a company that consisted of upper management that thought this way, they purposefully ignored productivity numbers increasing amongst individual teams. Instead they bemoaned what couldn't be done under unrealistic expectations and used that as proof to validate their frustrations with remote work.
I want to draw attention to this one quote:
By having butts in seats and under their watch it gives the impression that upper management could throw their weight to make workers diminish their legitimate feelings. Without their immediate presence of intimidation they are no longer able to ask for unrealistic standards and this is viewed as a failure of WFH.
And here it is folks, this is why they're trying so bad to demonize work from home. The lack of upper management's immediate presence in your day-to-day work limits their ability to pressure you. It's no surprise that the great resignation, working your wage, and other realizations for workers rights arose during the growth of WFH because that in-person pressure was gone. Corporate interests thrived on their ability to abuse workers time and those willing to submit produced favorable results at the harm of the worker.
Just look at this other qoute from the article:
YIKES! Why is such a thing damning? There's so many studies on how this damning leisure and sleeping is beneficial for worker moral, but apparently the greater sin to these corporate interests is not working. Oh the humanity?! How will the shareholders survive?!
Companies that embrace supporting their employees are going to be the ones who keep WFH. It's those who are more likely to abuse their workers that are the ones fighting this change to remote work so hard, and quite frankly aren't the ones I want to work for. While the pool of offerings are drying up, it is helping to serve as a modern day litmus test of who I would consider applying for.
My son is a teacher who had to teach remotely for 2 years. He was tasked with setting up all the remote learning for students in his division and busted his a** to get it all done and ready before the school year started when covid hit (they literally gave him less than a week to set up a virtual school for dozens of teachers and hundreds of students across 9 grades). It worked and he actually won a national award for it, but the stress of trying to onboard a lot of teachers who didnt have a tech background was immense. And I dont think ANY of those teachers would say the student's experience was better than in the classroom. To say nothing of the parents who now had to help their kids with school work when they were used to leaving it all up to the teachers. There were some perks but the loss of the social aspect of school was huge for the teachers and the students. They're all pretty happy to be back in the 'office'
Work from home doesn't work for all jobs. Teaching is definitely one of them. Even for adults, there's a huge difference in engagement when you get a group of people together in person vs remotely. That engagement is critical for teaching, especially for children. It's important for them to socialize. Students who entered college during COVID were are at huge social disadvantage, having missed 1-2 years during an critical time for personal growth.
There are obviously outliers - not every job can adapt well to WFH, and nobody's arguing that point. The issue is that companies are dragging back people and roles that do function well WFH, and people are not happy about it.
The worker might well have this vested interest. However, capitalists and bosses have the opposite vested interest: to enrich themselves at the expense of the worker. I know which side I land on! I honestly don't give a crap about "productivity"; I care that humans have the best possible opportunity to be their happiest selves. Even if there were 1000 pages of peer-reviewed science supporting return to office as the more productive scenario, I would still support the workers' right to choose, and fight for them to have that outcome. This positon doesn't even require a study; you just need to provide an office and allow every individual to choose whether they want to be there.
Edit: If you have any studies that show it's better for me to be back in the office, then I'm all ears. For example, I can certainly acknowledge that my physical health has suffered from giving up cycling 10 miles a day. And I may well be experiencing a reduced level mental health from the reduced contact with other people. But am I better at home overall? Anecdotally I think so, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong by science.
Maybe I'm alone in this, but I find it quite disingenuous to link an article from 2014. Technology, particularly wide-scale communication and coordination tools, has advanced massively. Any company, no matter how small, can have calls, video, and instant messages available to their workers for very little cost without the need of “high-end technology” or being particularly skilled in tech. Sure, I can concede that if you had to work only with electronic mails and voice calls (or at best buggy video calls), working-from-home would have been significantly more of a risk for companies.
The only article I could find about that IBM claim is their CEO saying this:
Outright telling employees "we will not be promoting you if you work from home" with utter disregard for A. people with disabilities whose lives have improved massively from WFH policies, and B. deserving workers who happen to function better remotely. For me, the proof that these kinds of takes are capitalistic greed is that their excuses break down when you start asking why they need to be in the office every day rather than when needed. These CEOs and upper managers want their employees back because you can get away with a bare bone, under trained management team that spends its time walking down hallways rather than actually communicating to their employees. The insinuation that workers are demanding to leave the office and never return under any circumstance is part of what makes this propaganda - the main point of the WFH "movement" is that people don't need to be in offices every day, not that offices shouldn't exist.
And like another commenter mentioned, this focus on "productivity" is just another way of blaming the workers for bad or absent leaders. Daily e-mail reports at the end of every work-day with a weekly, possibly in-person meeting at the end of the work-week is all the productivity data a non-predatory company needs. A manager cannot somehow glean someone's "productivity" by looking at them, but by talking to them, which you do not need to be next to someone to do in 2023.
Collaboration != Productivity
Not at all, but collaboration is not an indicator of productivity and it really depends on the type of work being done as well. It can't be generalized that easily.
I fit the mold of a highly productive work from home employee. I started working on site, but shifted to remote work three years ago. I, personally, get far more done daily than I did working in the office because I don't get pulled into pointless small talk. I'm also exempted from certain trainings because they're not relevant to my position. Instead of taking that time off, I use those hours to work.
The downside to this is that I've been passed over for big promotions because those positions require staff to be on site and I work from 2,000 miles away. All in all, I'm very happy with where I am, but I would love to have the ability to be promoted outside of building my department which is really grueling work.
I think all of these points are BS, but in particular I would like to address:
I have both 1) onboarded new members of staff remotely during lockdown, and 2) recently changed jobs to a fully remote job and required onboarding myself. In both cases, the transition from Absolute Zero -> Working Effectively took less than 6 weeks. And that's including 2 weeks solid doing all the BS "mandatory training" from HR!
Anyone who can't see through this "RTO" propaganda from the property-owning class (and - in some cases - middle-class bosses who have signed long, expensive leases for empty offices, and now have buyer's remorse) needs to wake the heck up.
Is there anything you did or that you saw your new employer doing that you thought was helpful for on-boarding? I've both hired people and changed jobs during COVID/office shutdown and it's been rough on both sides. I just don't know how to get around the human aspect of needing to meet in person to build working relationships and become comfortable in a team.
Those things sound helpful. I think the issues I've seen are more people-centric. Not so much a problem of being able to get someone ready to do labor, but also being motivated and happy with it.
The only thing that I can say was better with working in the office is it was much easier to make friends. I currently work in a hybrid positions and am free to kinda work where ever I feel I need to (home/office). I feel like the setup im currently am in is great and allows for so much flexibility
I'm always curious about what kinds of investments the people that are trying to push RTO have. Time after time it turns out that they've made some big bets on commercial real estate and are feeling the squeeze as every company with competent leadership realizes how much money they could save by not having a physical office, or by reducing their rental spend.
I've been remote in an office support job for the past three years, and just prior to us going remote our team was downsized. I'd say with remote work our team has actually become more productive with less workers, and several members of the team probably work longer hours. I really enjoy not wasting so much time commuting to the office, and I've definitely felt a reduction of stress and resentment towards working. Currently we go to the office about once a month, and while I do miss the interaction and would prefer if we went in 2-4 times a month, I feel that the benefits of working from home greatly outweigh that.
There are definitely jobs that are worse from home, and some people that are more productive in the office but I don't understand this parade of articles against it.
The other disadvantage I feel is for recent college graduates. I definitely benefited from starting with a group of people around my age, and it made things easier to quickly just get up and ask someone a question or discuss things together during lunch. Networking is still an important tool to job advancement, and if you haven't established that already it's not as easy to make friends and connections across departments when you are working online only.
I work from home and the company I work for has pretty much said most of everyone will be permanently remote. I really do miss working in an office for the social aspect.
Being at home is nice for easy access to food, bathroom is not far away and I have a cat that loves to hang out with me when I’m working. I can roll out of bed and be ready to work in 20 minutes.
But I don’t like it for the distractions I have in my apartment building, easily distracted by my phone (I’m trying to be better at it) and I miss the social aspect of talking to my coworkers and supervisors face to face.
I enjoy what I do, so I stick with it.
"Nearly one-third of employees told Paychex they found their onboarding experience confusing. That figure jumped to 36% for remote workers, who were most likely to feel undertrained, disoriented, and devalued after onboarding, compared to their in-person counterparts."
So... like 4%?
EDIT: "In a damning chart, they found that remote workers “decreased time spent working” and instead increased their time spent on “leisure and sleeping.” The chart clearly showed an increase roughly between three and hours in time spent on things that are, well, not work."
your boss is not a human being
So... Situation normal. Does anyone working in an office really work for the full number of hours they're paid for? Nobody I know does.