Workday bets big on staff coming back to the office by splurging $172.5m on HQ and five more Bay Area buildings SaaSy HR and finance software biz Workday is backing its return-to-office plan with a $172.5m property investment on the eastern side of San Francisco Bay - at a time when flexible working seems here to stay. According to the Mercury News, the application vendor has bought six buildings in Pleasanton, in the East Bay, …
No problems here with collaboration, onboarding, ideas exchange when WFH. I'm struggling to think of any activity that we used do in person that can't be replaced with some combination of miro, chat and video conferencing. Even pre-lockdown, "in person brainstorming" was a bunch of people working on Miro on their own laptop in one small poorly ventilated room.
You clearly don't have network connectivity issues.
This is true; synchronous gigabit FTTP at home. However, I did get locked down at my parents when we visited at Christmas* for a 3 week visit that turned into 3 months, and manged fine on a very long line FTTC connection too - 20Mbps down, 1MBps up.
* We got Covid tests** and then isolated for 2 weeks before travelling by car, and left before London was locked down
** Offered to us by the local council
An international conference today on Zoom with around 40 participants (without video but with desktop presentations) took a lot less than 900 kb/s. So it can be done, although I do sympathise with your predicament. It has been suggested that getting your MP involved can increase your broadband performance.
At Stryker HQ, meetings that had more than local people -- quite often -- used one platform or another (no telling what they use now; I left 3 years ago) with all the local people huddled in one room since the desk phones were old (speaker but no mic), rarely anyone had headsets, etc. Sometimes it was phone-call-only, sometimes desktop share actually worked.
In current role, we often started projects that way using Webex, mostly for the desktop sharing. Everyone had laptops and often brought them. Then everyone slowly migrated back to their own desks and still used the Webex, especially once the computer-phone audio got bridged. During pandemic, we all converted to a competitor (no, I'm not telling) but the meetings haven't changed one bit. A month ago they also cancelled the former phone/voicemail service so my office desk phone is dead and my line routes to my laptop as a softphone.
Force me back to the office; I still won't leave my desk just like I don't leave my "home office" now. Same laptop, same headset, same El Reg to read.
The staff certainly need inspiration because Workday is one of the worst, inherently unusable applications I have come across in recent years. Weird interaction patterns, illogical or non-existent navigation, crappy accessibility, unhelpful error messages - the list goes on and on.
You can tell it is hard to use because of the number of 'victim' guides our company has had to produce to tell people how to use it for almost every task.
People only went into the office cum workshop when they needed to get spares, do some mechanical work or discuss intractable machine/software problems. At the same time the boss organised 2 monthly update breakfasts at a hotel. This was a slap up breakfast followed by adjourning to a conference room for company report and Q/A session. I understand they really miss those!
P.S. I was the only one there full time apart from the boss. I might have been an oldie but I still had the steadiest hands for delicate bench work. I also did most of the PLC software development.
I don't find it surprising that they feel people have to be on premises. I would rather do everything by hand, in triplicate, topped with a 27b stroke 6 than drudge through that menace again.
Why do we have to re-create html5, js, flash, html-forms, 3270 display applications as each generation lights upon the same terrible idea, rolls out gobs of barely usable crap only to re-invigorate having real apps again?
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