Boffins peg narcissistic leadership as the real driver behind 'return to office' demands

OPINION Bosses say working from the office is all about productivity, but the truth is it's just a power trip driven by fear and narcissism. Executives who insist on people working from the office like to say it's all about productivity, culture, collaboration, and mentoring. Pull the other one; it has bells on. When executives …

[stiine]

an Aussie perspective....

Watch YT short by Chris Kohler for a laugh or a short sob.

[Anonymous Coward]

Spontaneous Hallway Chats

In the 90s the company I worked for had a corridor where all the senior PMs had their offices and their boss (let's call him Mike) had a large corner office at the end of it. Mike's view that "you got more done by bumping into people in this corridor than in a year's worth of meetings" was a popular theme among his PMs.

The company got a new MD who was keen on open plan. The corridor of PMs would have its walls removed and the PMs would lose their offices and sit amongst their teams Mike was not happy about his PMs losing their offices, mainly because he knew the amount of whinging he'd have to deal with. In a meeting with the MD Mike made his case that the PMs needed to have meetings with their teams and having their own office was essential to this. When the head of Facilities reminded him of his view about bumping into people being better than meetings he nearly exploded but he knew it was checkmate.

[DS999]

Re: Spontaneous Hallway Chats

I agree with the value of spontaneous hallway chats, but there is also value in avoiding them when you're busy or in a flow state. If you have an office you can close the door. If you're open plan people feel it is fine to interrupt you whenever they happen to walk by regardless of how busy you seem. There's a lot more social norm/pressure preventing people from knocking on a closed door for a random chat about nothing versus walking by a cubicle.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Spontaneous Hallway Chats

Hallway chats, water cooler moments … a load of bollocks with little to no value where more time is wasted on football, House of the Dragon being shit or why Karen in accounts is a bitch/Ho.

The only remote work Narc bosses value is when they have offshored a team to fucking Bangalore or Manila and can get a free overseas holiday on the company and bag some airline miles and hotel loyalty.

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: Spontaneous Hallway Chats

Not true at all my experience, I regularly connect with users, managers and even our CEO in break areas, cafeteria, water cooler etc. and yes, there's the usual social pleasantries but there's also time spent discussing what's going on, What's being planned, how well stuff is working or not and I find out about issues which we can sort out in some way or another that users have been working around.

Putting aside your total lack of social skills, does Karen know what you think of her?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Spontaneous Hallway Chats

Karen was standing behind him, unnoticed, in line at the watercooler, when he loudly presented his opinions of her.

Sometime thereafter, his pay cheque Direct Deposits sometimes mysteriously ended up in some random person's bank account.

I think Karen is awesome, and has a wickedly-funny sense of humor.

[Caver_Dave]

Re: Spontaneous Hallway Chats

I had a notice board put in the kitchen in one place where I worked. People were encouraged to put up a Post-It with a problem on they were really struggling to fix. If you knew the answer you just grabbed the note and went to see them after your brew was ready. It seemed to go down well with everyone except the PHB who claimed it was a fire risk and had it removed.

[karlssberg]

Re: Spontaneous Hallway Chats

Pre-pandemic: "Stop wasting time gossiping in the hallway and get back to work"

Post-pandemic + remote-working staff: "Come chat in the office hallway - it's good for business"

Post-pandemic + return-to-office mandate: "Stop wasting time gossiping in the hallway and get back to work"

[Groo The Wanderer - A Canuck]

Bingo. This in every denomination you care to spend.

There are no shortage of '50s and '60s mentality managers in play even in the most modern of companies, who flat out don't trust what they cannot see and berate in person, off the record, away from video conference cameras and recording capabilities...

[BartyFartsLast]

There's also the dick wavers who need to be seen "managing", or in their corner office "doing important stuff" by their minions

[An_Old_Dog]

There is a Continuum

When I was a techie at a big company, we were in a noisy, large room, with electronics-style workbenches and stools. The project coordinators had their normal desks, in one corner. There were no internal walls.

That setup worked well for me, because I could do my work there while subconsciously listening with one ear to the chatter around me and picking up important info, which sometimes required an immediate response from me.

I imagine it was hell for the project coordinators.

When I became a system software analyst at the same company, our group had offices with two analysts in each one. With my new job duties, I wanted SILENCE, which I obtained via a pair of Bose noise-cancelling headphones.

My colleagues were close enough for a quick question or micro-conference, but far-enough removed that they did not impinge on me.

I could never have been an effective SSA in the techie bullpen, even with the headphones, due to noise level and distracting motion in my peripheral vision.

One size does not fit all.

[BartyFartsLast]

Re: There is a Continuum

I learned more real world skills and electronics knowledge by being able to go and chat to or just watch (willing) colleagues than I ever did at college.

It was absolutely invaluable and there was often knowledge sharing across the workbenches as well as in break rooms, colleagues throwing out a problem they were stuck on over a cuppa was almost always valuable even if just to help order it the mind.

[Sproggit]

Self-Selecting Incompetence

I've spent the last 28 years working for [different] global organizations. In total, I've probably worked in the same country as my Manager for 6 of those 28 years and the same building as my Manager for 2.

In particular, I have spent some of that time in working conditions where the companies concerned actively didn't want people to work in the office. The most obvious was during the global Covid crisis, where numerous countries had "stay at home" orders in place... but I've also experienced the same thing when real estate work or changes like mergers meant that an employer simply didn't have enough desks to go round.

I tend to like having metrics to understand the nature and volume of work my Teams do [with the caveat that I will never ask a subordinate to track that sort of stuff by hand - as I tell my fellow managers, "If it's important enough for us to use to govern the business, it's important enough for us to automate..." [which tends to kill off a lot of objection]. I have had multiple [angry] debates during year-end performance reviews where a more senior manager has told me that I can't award a top performance review to anyone in my Team this year because they all spent "X" weeks working from home and therefore it was implicit that performance must have dipped. Fortunately, I have always had cold, hard metrics to back up my assertions.

On one occasion we had such a desk shortage in our UK office that staff were asked to WFH 5 days per week. Two of my subordinates approached me in that time with special requests: one asked if they could relocate to Scotland to live near an aging parent; the other asked if they could relocate to Thailand. I put safeguards in place - clearly documented annual objectives, rigorous peer reviews [covering responsiveness, helpfulness, availability, etc.] and agreed. That year, the colleague who relocated to Thailand was peer-voted a "Team Superstar" and the colleague who worked in Scotland was awarded a patent by USPTO.

I've made the observation [here, at El Reg] multiple times before, but it bears repeating: any manager who tells you that "remote working doesn't work" is in fact declaring themselves to be unfit to manage people. If more senior managers were to ruthlessly enforce that principle and "manage out" any middle manager who pushed back, they would see productivity and job satisfaction improve across the board.

None of which is to say that there won't of course be employees who will try to "swing the lead" ... but that's why you need clear objectives, good [automated] metrics and a quality manager.

I'm not sure why I make this connection, but I tend to frame "you can't be productive when working remotely" in the same bucket [of bull####] as "closing tax loopholes and taxing multi-millionaires won't work" - it's a useful fiction those individuals try and tell themselves, almost as though they believe that if they repeat the lie often enough, it will suddenly become true.

[eldel]

Re: Self-Selecting Incompetence

Essentially, measure output not input. Any incompetent can count bums on seats and call it managing. I've worked for a couple. To effectively measure output takes an understanding of what your minions are actually supposed to be doing and having the capability to discern where that deviates from what they are actually producing. That takes effort and brains. Which is why the vast majority of managers don't do it.

[LybsterRoy]

Re: Self-Selecting Incompetence

I was on your side until I encountered "awarded a patent by USPTO" - I thought anyone with a sheet of paper and a box of crayons could do that.

[Eclectic Man]

Narcissism or Sadism?

Narcissism is a self-centered personality style characterized as having an excessive preoccupation with oneself and one's own needs, often at the expense of others

Everyday sadism, the derivation of gratification from the physical pain or humiliation of another person

I am not convinced that the only motivation of senior managers implementing a return to the office mode of working is self aggrandisement.

[ecofeco]

Re: Narcissism or Sadism?

Both.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Narcissism or Sadism?

Considering how many bosses apparently enjoy being dom'ed outside of the office, it's not surprising really that the kink also goes the other way.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Narcissism or Sadism?

I've met several and enjoyed humiliating a few.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Narcissism or Sadism?

Narcissists aren't necessarily after self aggrandisement; in their minds they are already the only person who matters, and the opinions of others don't count.

As anyone who has been unfortunate enough to be in the orbit of a real narcissist will tell you, the thing they actually want is absolute control, and unquestioning obedience. The narcissist can't cope with anything being outside of their control, even if they are not qualified or able to properly control it. This especially includes other people. It should come as no surprise that narcissism and domestic abuse, whether it be physical, financial, or coercive, almost always go hand-in-hand.

When such people are put into positions where they have power over other people in a work environment, it serves nobody other than themselves, both their subordinates and the organisation will suffer.

[AndrueC]

Re: Narcissism or Sadism?

Did someone mention Donald Trump, yet?

[Scene it all]

Re: Narcissism or Sadism?

I have often thought that even the threat of physical violence is part of these managers thinking. Since top corporate officials are often recruited for being sociopaths, this is not surprising.

[Anonymous Coward]

Or ???

Many of us have experienced working with one person who is both narcissistic AND Sadistic......

..... or been married to one

(anonymouse because)

[Jason Bloomberg]

"Fear and narcissism"

I believe a lot of it comes down to flawed metrics, trying to measure things thought to show staff are doing their jobs and aren't taking the piss - When taking the piss really doesn't matter so long as they are doing their jobs and getting things done on time.

I have found the more you let staff choose for themselves how they do their jobs the greater the rewards in terms of 'best boss ever' and in willingness to go the extra mile when that is needed.

One of the reasons that is not popular is probably because it means those managing staff have to be good at managing, can't just point to a full office and say everything is hunky dory.

[LybsterRoy]

Re: "Fear and narcissism"

My favourite is not a metric but the old "working" late to impress the boss showing you are still there at 6pm or whatever. I always found the overtime hours to be under productive si I invented undertime and started work a couple of hours earlier - very productive.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Working" Late

/me, after 5PM, intently editing a screenful of code ...

Boss: What are you working on there?

Me: Some modifications to a network stress-testing suite.

Boss: Hmm ... well, carry on. (Boss walks off.)

/me, continues work on a first-person shooter network game mod.

[vtcodger]

Doomed?

Interesting. Return To Office (RTO) seems peculiar to me. The per employee cost of office space is quite substantial. Much more than the cost of some servers and IT support to manage them. So even if Work From Home (WFH) was a bit less productive -- which apparently it is not -- a company would be money ahead to cut office space to a minimum. .. Or eliminate it entirely.

FWIW, my kids, both in or near their fourth decade both work for companies without a local office. In one case, they gave up their office space when the lease expired and are now entirely Work from Homes scattered about the US. In the other, their company has a home office (on a different continent), and a training facility(a 14 hour drive from here), but locally there's just a small warehouse for equipment and spare parts. The half dozen "local" employees scattered around an area roughly the size of Belgium communicate by cell phone, SMS, email, and occasional face-to-face encounters.

Of course, it varies with the nature of the business.

So I think that perhaps our business leaders are not humanity's finest minds. Or (worse) maybe they are. In which case humanity is probably doomed.

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: Doomed?

The question then has to be, why would people so determinedly decide that offices must be in use, and must be occupied. This question can be answered by observing those who are issuing these mandates.

In addition to the question of whether they are simply common-or-garden narcissists, do they have an interest in commercial property letting, or in privatised public transport? Are they putting their own financial interests ahead of the business? Quite often, it becomes immediate apparent what their real interests are; case in point: Why is Alan Sugar so vehemently against WFH? Because Sralan has a whole load of investments in commercial property.

[M.V. Lipvig]

Re: Doomed?

This, exactly. The CEO of the company I work for dumps money into buying company stock. When leases came up, they were cancelled. Since our CEO isn't invested in commercial real estate, our company reports that WFH was a net productivity boost with zero downsides.

Rumor has it I still have a desk downtown but I've not laid eyes on it even once. Now that it's July 1, 2026 and I consider myself retired, I never will see it. Yes, I am still working but now it's just until they lay me off - and I no longer give a shit about meeting metrics. Sadly, my don't give a fuck performance still puts me top 10 percent in my department. I'll have to put serious effort to stand out as a low performer.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Doomed?

As I've said before, my daughter's current company is almost entirely work from home. They're specialists (clinical trials). They can and do recruit world-wide so as to get the best talent.

[David Hicklin]

Re: Doomed?

Company my offspring works for were scheduled for relocating offices just after Covid, decided on a permanent WFH policy and cut out 2 floors from the original plan, teams only go into the office for team events otherwise it is WFH from wherever as long as the work gets done. Of course there is the option for those whose circumstances make using the office space a requirement.

[Caver_Dave]

Re: Doomed?

My team on my current project contains 9 people from 7 countries, and 3 sub-contractor companies in 2 additional countries.

We just employ the best of the best, and after that I only need to know what time zone they work in and what days of the week they work.

There is absolutely no point in having an office, except to send and receive packages.

[ecofeco]

Water still wet?

WHOCOULDAKNOWED?

[User McUser]

FWIW, I am a million times more likely to work late if I'm WFH.

Because unlike working late from the office, when I'm done I'm already at home. Nothing is worse to me than working late and then having to commute back home.

(I also sometimes take a nap during my break/lunch which is very nice.)

[tiggity]

@User McUser

Indeed, when commute is horrendous in terms of duration (& if public transport then only certain leave times are viable) then office based overtime can be a huge problem. In one job I even got my official work day start & end times tweaked to fit in with public transport (train) timetables!

WFH I generally do quite a lot work time compared to when I was in an office as an extra 15 min - half an hour to get something finished off (instead of it needing completion next morning) is not much hassle when you are already home

[Cheshire Cat]

other benefits of WFH

Another benefit of WFH is that my local coworker is much more smoochable. I might get into trouble with HR if I tried that in the office, though given the choice of targets there I have never once felt the urge to do so.

[Ken G]

@author > error?

Multiple billion-dollar companies are promising today's workers a shot at making millions from an IPO.

should read "are not offering..."

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: @author > error?

I believe that's the point the writer is making. "Promising" isn't "delivering".

[doublelayer]

Re: @author > error?

I think Ken's suggestion is more likely, because most of the companies are not just not delivering, they can't. Google doesn't have startup-style workers because they don't provide startup-style rewards because they're not a startup. Most of those who join startups do so because they're willing to take a lot more work in return for a chance at a high reward from the success of that startup. If the startup goes from a tiny company nobody's heard of to a household name, and I own 0.5% of it, that will suddenly become very lucrative. Google is not going to have that kind of stock movement no matter how successful the product I've been assigned to is, so that kind of reward will never show up.

Can't is not exactly correct. Google could simulate that if they thought it was important enough. They could, for example, announce that, if the new AI product got X million weekly active users by Y date, the workers would get bonuses of Z thousand shares of Google. However, they won't do that because this is generally a bad idea, being potentially very expensive whether or not the product had commercial success. Working like the stereotypical startup is stressful, can only be done for so long, and only works on projects with specific features. It causes enough problems for workers and companies when they have those things. It only works when managers, sales, etc are doing it as well; startup-style engineering and big company-style everything else will not work. When someone tries that without the reasons people accept the pain, it works even less well.

[John Stirling]

As a non boffin (here under threat of expulsion if I say something stupid)....

I'd say there are many areas where work from home makes loads of sense, and it is absolutely possible to manage via output measurement, to confirm that employees are doing the right thing.

Where there is some merit in dragging our arses back to work is roles that rely heavily on osmosis - where slack isn't the standard communication tool but instead the old fahioned 'words' and 'conversation'. I am not overly technical in my post - almost salesy in fact - and my fellow sales droids definitely function better when we are all able to bounce ideas off one another - and when we recruit, we have people in the office while they're learning, and it makes a difference - a bloody great big difference in fact.

But for experienced technical people - unless you're hardware guys (in which case, sorry, but someone has to do the actual plugging some things in) then yeah - your home office is where it's at - or your beach office, or your boat office, or the wherever the hell you happen to be, office.

And I might be a little bit jealous, but I am genuinely rubbish at working from home, so it is what it is.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Re: As a non boffin (here under threat of expulsion if I say something stupid)....

I'm somewhat ambivalent about work from home vs work in the office and I suspect the advantages and disadvantages may be a bit more nuanced than some seem to think.

A few years ago, while working at a university job, I had to move my office from the main lab of our research group over to a building a few hundred yards (meters) away that had only a few people working in it, with none of whom I had any interaction. I'd only rarely see or speak to any of my colleagues or the head of the lab.

While the quiet was certainly conducive to my getting things done, I soon found myself missing out on new and interesting projects, simply because I wasn't around to get involved in the discussion.

Out of sight, out of mind.

On the other hand, now that I'm retired from that job, I still consult on interesting projects with a different group there, while working almost exclusively from home, even though I still retain a "courtesy office" on campus.

I suppose it depends on the job and the amount and sort of engagement it requires.

[doublelayer]

Re: As a non boffin (here under threat of expulsion if I say something stupid)....

Most of the arguments I've seen for work location quality have been mostly or entirely without evidence and take the form of deciding what their preferred work location is then stating that it is better and there's no questioning it. When managers do this, they generally have more power to force people to follow them, but I've seen plenty of that from the remote work supporters as well. Unfortunately, most of the attempts to study productivity have a hard time measuring it, not a surprise if jobs like ours are included where it's almost impossible to decide whether I, writing code, am more or less productive than you, writing code for a completely different kind of thing in a different environment.

Anecdotally, I think there are advantages to being in an office, and people who don't consciously act to facilitate them can easily destroy them and make the office much worse than working remotely. Some of the simple ways that this has been done is to put people in an office where the people they work with are in a different one, thus obtaining the same separation as remote working with the downsides of a different working environment. Another one is designing the office to make things needed for productivity difficult, for instance having no control of noise and not having enough space or equipment. If they're not going to have an office properly, I think it's better not to have one at all, and I expect many who prefer remote work all the time are comparing it to that kind of environment.

[Ken G]

small world?

I just spotted your username and wondered, might you have worked in Scotland and do the initials FRO mean anything to you (in the context of narcissistic managers?)

[Elongated Muskrat]

Re: As a non boffin (here under threat of expulsion if I say something stupid)....

Even for "hardware guys", that "plugging things in" is more and more writing Terraform scripts, rather than physically touching any hardware. The actual hardware is in a massive shed owned by Amazon or Microsoft.

[Robert Halloran]

some incentives..

I've worked for a Large Financial Firm in the US for some years now (retiring this month...). Post-pandemic they tried to hire on the proviso of five days in-office, and strangely enough had few takers. They backed off to three onsite/two WFH and had far better success. My existing team is spread out across three time zones in the US and an offshore group in South Asia to handle the overnight hours.

I suspect at least in the case of banks/brokers/etc with a large stake of real-estate holdings they're seeing the falloff in core-city leases and getting nervous about longer-term trends. With good-enough connectivity available most places, you don't need to lease space for bums in seats, and a competent management chain can handle a distributed staff. Welcome to the new reality...

[Blackjack]

Unfortunately constantly rising AI prices means that unless a company uses local FOSS AI that can work fine offline, middle managers wil come back at least in big companies. Bosses cannot yell at a thousand people without fear of getting lynched but they can yell to a few middle management people with no fear for their lives.

Current Tech CEOs tend to be too much inside their own ass to remember this, but the more layers of people is between them and the employees the better for ass covering.

[Neil Barnes]

Perhaps they could get a local AI that they could shout at?

[Elongated Muskrat]

Where can I apply for this funding into researching the blindingly obvious?

I've yet to hear a real, tangible benefit to any business, where physical presence isn't a prerequisite, such as hospitality or factory work, for a RTO mandate.

To observe that management, especially of the senior variety has an over-representation of narcissists is like observing that the sun is hot.

It's hardly a great leap to observe that narcissistic supply is dependent on the ability to coerce people, which is so much easier to do in person.

[Wang Cores]

No what it is is bosses have bought up real estate and need RoI.

[Brand New Stooriefit]

I came here to say this

Absolutely - this all started with think pieces in the right wing press & right wing periodicals (the Mail, Express and Spectator have been banging on about this for ages). The Haunted Pencil himself Jacob Rees-Mogg would expound plummily on the subject at every opportunity before he was ejected to the shadow realm.

What the people connected with these organs have in common is they are all rent-seeking for their city centre commercial properties, the poor tenants of which had a torrid time of it during Covid. Without the office drones, too knackered to make a sandwich for lunch in the morning, and forced to go out to Pret-a-Nero for some polyunsaturated slop on cardboard to fill the gnawing hole for lunch, city centres were shown up for what they always were. Over priced, soulless, polluted, nasty deserts; garlanded with indifferent neo-classical sculptures of reprehensible chancers and dick swinging architecture.

Or is it just me?

[Anonymous Coward]

I am a personal victim of this one.

Personal experience here. Cue rant below. TLDR.

My entire workflow is tucked in a Teams sharepoint for "excel database files" (cringe), and an ERP (that doesn´t do all the stuff it needs, so we need the Excel sheets). So far so good. The kind of pc required to access these files doesn't need to be anywhere specific.

Despite the fact I work with Inventory, as in, couting stuff physically on a warehouse, with somebody using a forklift to help me to inspect the pallets of random items, the aftermath (quite literally, math of adding stuff up) does NOT require physical presence at the warehouse itself, since it is all computers. Feeding the ERP, extracting the data from the ERP to chew it on excel for the stuff it doesn't do, it is all online. The erp itself is also online to reinforce. I got my own company-supplied PC there for this job with 2 monitors. Ok. good.

But they force me to travel downtown, a 1-hour train commute back and forth away from the warehouse, for the monthly reports, regardless. To add the cherry on the cake, on the downtown facility there seems to be a veritable lack of maintenance on PCs that usually end up with a single monitor, or don't work at all.

The supervisor, despite the lack of decent working pcs, the hour long commute, still demands physical presence, 3 days per month, for no reason at all. I could get the same reports done at the warehouse, or at home, without the power ego trip. "But the nature of your job negates the home office" they say. It is a freaking Sharepoint share, accessible over Teams, with Excel files and a ERP, for Reg's sake, it is ironically the most "home-officy" a job can get!

2 hours wasted daily, a shitty pc, for naught. They had the gall to supply a 1366 x 768 monitor once. I rummaged through the monitors myself to find one at least 1080p.

That has to be a power trip, some miserable human being that thinks that can improve productivity, or anything at all, when it makes my life objectively worse, 3 days per month.

Anon for obvious reasons.

[Anonymous Coward]

civil service too

Civil service requires me to be in the office two days a week. The majority of my teams are in India. There is no guarantee anyone in my team's will be physically in the building and even if there are there will almost certainly not be a meeting room available.

So I travel in to sit in an open plan office with monitors that are crap compared to my home office and a setup worse than my home office because former government ministers couldn't handle the idea that we won't be in a building they let. A building which isn't big enough for everyone to attend.

[tl3]

I work a hybrid model due to disability and flexibility where I work - and I am MEASURABLY more productive than I am in a noisy, open plan office filled with the loveliest, friendliest, people who drain this autistic woman's social battery down to zero by lunchtime (geek chats do not seem to have the same effect oddly). The hybrid nature allows me to plan the majority of meetings on my two days in the office. I am also deeply appreciative of management that is sensible about it, and that spurs me to extra (as in work not scheduled but appreciated) efforts I may not otherwise consider. At home I can get technical work done with my music blaring (yes, one of those types), and not constantly having to take headphones off to answer queries (this could have been a teams message joins the maxim of meetings being emails). It means I do not begrudge it occurring when in the office as I can plan my time around tasks that can easily be interrupted and not do the things that require focus, like spinning up a database server, for example. That stuff is now all done at home, where I can happily deep dive. TL;DR happy employees produce more, water is wet.

[Anonymous Coward]

BC and PC

Before Covid, WFH was seen as a strictly female entitlement where I worked. If you had kids, were female, you were good to go. Otherwise no exceptions.

A male colleague applied for one day WFH to mind his child, denied. He fought, got it and probably went on a company list somewhere.

Post Covid: It’s a whole new world. Which is good.

[Diogenes]

How productive if everybody does it?

During kung flu I had to teach from home. It was fantastic for me, and I was so productive. I had plenty of time to plan and generate resources for 3 new syllabus we were handed to start the next year. Reports were done early. Marking turnaround was within 24 hours , for the first time in 10 years I felt on top of everything. I'm now retired for health reasons ( I have a die with, not of cancer) had I been able to WFH I would still be working.

The parents whose kids I taught were complaining they couldn't get anything done because they had to do the classroom management stuff that was time wasting and draining. ( Johnny get off your phone. Have you done these exercises etc etc)

[blu3b3rry]

Only done WFH on odd days

Then again my job is mostly hardware repair, and I can hardly bundle a ~150KG robot into my car and take it home to work on. The occasional days full of paperwork or training I am allowed to do from home. Longest stint was 3 days and after that I found I preferred the separation between my home and workplace. It's nice on a Friday though and thankfully I've not (yet) had a boss since the covid times who was an arsehole about it.

However I really don't get the ones who piss and whinge about others not being in.

Tends to mean a quieter day with less distractions for me, and a far, far quicker and easier commute due to way fewer people on the road. What's not to like?

[steviebuk]

Bag full of Sugar

Its was also Alan Sugar touting for it. He was panicking because, as he's said before (despite the Apprentice) "There is no money in running your own company anymore selling a product. Instead, just invest in real estate", I'm para-phasing as I can't find the article or vid where he said it. Anyway, the point is, he's done just that. His billions, from what I can see, are from his real estate interests. Most of his gadgets, electronics, phones and mobile ventures were a failure. So he was panicking because people were realising "We don't need Alan's offices anymore". But, sadly, he's gotten he's own way and people have been forced back to offices in London, so much so there is a shortage again.

I still liked the news segment when he was on moaning about working from home and that people need to get back in the office. To which the reported asked him "And where are you currently?" He was working from home in Florida.

What a cunt.

[Anonymous Coward]

The more successful a dispersed work at home organization is, the better it is at defining it's methods, goals and objectives. When those are clear, there is less need for managers. Managers hate working from home, where your performance counts more than who you schmooze and how much status you can flaunt.

[Dagg]

For me WFH had one major advantage. In the office my team leader's style of "management" was to walk around talking to you when you were trying to solve problems/work/do things etc. He was a bloody nuisance! Just as you had managed to get into the groove and get you head around the problem the idiot would come up and want to talk with you?! Thus destroying a good 30m of thinking.

WFH mean he had no access!

[Evil Scot]

The solution is in the headline

See icon

[MJI]

Office what's the point

We had a dev who liked an ofice full of staff.

Start chatting and he would moan about the chatting. I said then what is the point of us being in the office?

I was lucky, now permanent WFH due to the after effects of Covid, not being able to handle heavy traffic without a PEM, is less of a problem, than a 40 minute commute in a 20mpg car (offices moved fuirther from home).

They are moving again, to the next county East, I am roughly 1 mile from the border with the next county West.

[Anonymous Coward]

no shit Sherlock?

We all know this and have always known this.

Managers, expecially very senior ones, like to gaze upon offices filled with the little people they command.

Productivity is a long way behind that in priority.

Workers like to work from home because they save huge sums of money on commuting and gain back time and flexibility.

Workers without space to WFH comfortably understandably often want to some in, and these are often juniors

Is there an argument that mentoring etc works better face to face, yes I think that probably is true.

Is there an argument that everyone works better face to face, no, that's bullshit.

My own employer is trying to force everyone to a 3 day RTO and 5 day for higher level employees. So far I've simply refused.

I was employed full WFH during the pandemic, I cover geographies which are 95% far away from my base office so face to face interactions would be minimal anyway.

They closed offices during and after the pandemic and now there are no enough seats to support 3 days RTO, management don't care.

We've been told that non-RTO workers will not be in line for promotions - I don't care, promotion is punishment duty in this company anyway

We've been told that non-RTO workers will not get bonuses - bonuses are now so small that they wouldn't cover 10% of the commuting costs, so I don't care

All workplace feedback for me is postive. I tick every box for them except RTO.

So far the managment have not pushed anyone hard via HR to get them back in.

[Sir Jon]

Where I used to work has recently stopped all working from home.

Got to admit though a few in the team I worked in showed no evidence of doing any work at all and one of them was a line manager. However the line manager didn't do very much while in the office either. So basically those that are willing to work and those that are willing to let them are the same whether they were in the office or not.

For myself I found one day WFH quite revitalising and came in the next day much fresher.

Impromptu meetings in the hallway or canteen were actually more productive than actual meetings.

Talking of meetings when your department gets meeting-itus where you end up having meetings every week and discuss the same thing that you discussed the week before and the week before that because manglement haven't bothered doing the changes needed.

The other favourite is asking for reports when they never do anything with the data presented. Oh yes there's problem and the service needs improving but the work to do this is never done. So why have a reporting tool?

[Filippo]

And unnecessary RTO mandates aren't even the only, or largest, damage from narcissistic bosses. At some point, we're all going to have to stare the productivity paradox in the face, and start asking hard questions about what the point of monitoring everything all the time really is.

[arachnoid2]

Work From Roaming

I actually met a "clinical nurse" who does remote support from her frequently moving camper van , says the job pays slightly less than office work but 100% better for her.

[Anonymous Coward]

My Bit

I'm in about 2 days/w. Do the exact some thing as I do in office - Jack and shit. Maybe in office I'll talk with some buddies ect about what issues have cropped up, trips we've been on, or things that cause us pain (AKA Xerox printers). Then again I'm traveling for work 70% of the time and the "Remote Support" is an exercise in advanced suffering (1220+ m/s ping! With every click you can feel the lag starting!). So there's really not much of a reason to be in office (except for a corporate decision to subcontract our IT service... An IT company contracting an IT company. Ironic) barring pre-travel meetings.

Management is largely understanding of this and shows up on the same schedule as we do. Then again 80% of my managers were previously where I'm at.

[Anonymous Coward]

Finding a company that trusts you is key

I have to say my current employers, I was lucky to find, after my prior ones decided that they didn't need my division - as a smal 4 person unit and go a different way, funny a few years later they are struggling to get anyone to do the same job.

The prior was full of narcist from top to bottom - the McKinsey gang who seems to bread an air of somehow adding value, but also being the human equivalent of a turd.

They say CEO of most companies added 2 to 3 % before getting awards and then fall to negatives soon after and thats the good ones, the issue is the whole c suite level are never fired they receive remunerations for golfing and sitting in meetings, but do mostly do very little.

This is clear why no one deserve a million or multi million salary at that level, really if anything a boss may hit something like 50 to 70k, if they really did take the hit for failure, but 90 % don't and neither deliver anything for the bottom line, so like MPs really most manager should be on 30 to 40 max for the c suite, I know team leads actually in a lot of cases still keep the wolves from the door and lucky my own management line is good at that and let me get on, but prior have been felt as just an unnecessary item they couldn't get rid of and you knew it urked them too.

Great example for a classic PHB and the classic Landy and his complete lack of ability to make decisions, but would reward his mates and stable anyone in the back, he was moved out during the pandemic and not seen, the business did fine, they brought him back and started to furlow people to in his word 'prove their importance' just a bloody power play and it was obvious even shareholders saw through him and couldn't remember his name when he went to these events and of course started out life at one of the meet machine outsources as middle management from uni, so says it all.

He was demanding back to work during the pandemic when the virus was rampant in areas and our own firm caused break outs of virus with demands for better collaboration, team spirit , building shareholder value, all the usual crap. Why did he want it for his ego, as like a lot of them sat in meeting - mba his heart off and delivering the grand square of zero.

Thankfully, I got out of my last employers in time as they introduced a whole new management team who had failed so badly on the internation scale it caused flight issues and called Bs merchants by the prior owners of other business they had the misfortune to be hired by and all to improve shareholder value, irony is it was the product produced that kept and improved the business none of the brain farts of c suites and middle management with millions wasted on their ideas.

Just proving like Spain - management and c suites should be on yearly contracts and appraised on the actual delivery they make, if they don't then let the unemployment que decide and not golden handshakes and spending more time with the family before moving on to the next business to crap on.