Corporate execs: Get back, get back, to the office where you once belonged Whether it's because they have vast real estate investments they can't shift without hemorrhaging cash, or genuinely think their workers perform better in that space, C-suite execs are working hard to convince staff to return to the workplace. Tech vendors, meanwhile, are positively salivating about their potential role …
i have a lot of product managers and engineering staff scattered all over England, Scotland, Netherlands, France, Poland, Germany, and Italy. our company did early terminations on a bunch of leases and kept a few locales where Sales folks gather. in our case, it was easier to offer our staff a small additional salary to cover more utilities at their home offices and a stipend for a home desk (etc..) than cover leases.
we do tend to try to encourage our staff to come to office once or twice a month where practical however we don't see going backwards as our flexibility makes us more attractive, and allows our staff to maintain a better work/home life balance. disrupting our staff's productivity in the name of making a real estate manager happy isn't really on.
Same here. Our "office" is merely an address for billing purposes. It is about 1600 miles away from me.
Our entire staff is scattered across the country. I have the freedom to move anywhere in the country I wish (even out of the country is possible). I would never even consider a job that requires ANY time in the office at this point.
I really don't miss the noise, the gossip, the office politics, etc. At my previous job, I had an hour long commute each way. I left that job because, after a year of working from home due to COVID, they called everyone back to the office full time (for no good reason). I had been there for 17 years, and built all of the IT infrastructure, including writing a bunch of business critical software. I'm never going back to that world.
Fortunately it's not. Companies like yours are what I'll point to to show that really, going back to the office is just arbitrary nonsense.
And the reasons we're getting aren't even consistent. One manager says that one unspecified project in an unspecified country was potentially not going to perform optimally. Another say it's all about the conviviality of spending time together at the coffee machine.
Yep. We've had remote team members for decades; I'm one of them. Statements like the one quoted in the article, "when you have new and difficult problems, putting people inside of rooms is absolutely critical", are manager bullshit. There's no evidence to support them; they're just straight-up lies.
I think "hybrid" as a term gets (ab)used in both directions.
There are jobs where "hybrid" legitimately means something like "work it out with your manager and team, come in as needed".
Others mean "sure, come onsite once a month or quarter or something for appearances' sake or whatever".
Then there are the many job adverts claiming "remote" or "hybrid", but when you read the fine print they're actually requiring onsite 4 days a week, or "hybrid" for 1st month then onsite forever, and similar shady bait-switch shenanigans.
Another variation is when they say "remote" but also require "must be within 5 miles of X". Uh, why would that be a stipulation, if not to eventually mandate onsite work?
I could see wanting people in the same timezone for some projects, though I think even that seems like a flimsy nitpick, as long as you can coordinate team meetings and similar things.
Similar experience here. Company says flexible and hybrid, but then drops the hammer with mandatory three days in the office, in the city center. We all know that HR is having problems filing positions with that sort of "flexibility", I've heard one position has had three candidates turn down their offers.
Company has been working on this since the spring. Many times people are in the office but connected to common meetings over zoom which is jarring. Meeting rooms are slowly coming back into use.
Our "flexible" working arrangements means you can apply to your manager for 1 day per week work from home and if you want more than that the next manager up has to approve it.
Any more than 2 days is not considered.
When one of the team I work in quit a few months ago he cited the "flexible working" as one of the reasons he was leaving.
No, nothing is going to change.
Suspect.it means managers discretion flexible working, that can be changed if circumstances change, without all the necessary changes to T&Cs, expense policy, etc. that formal WfH arrangements would mean.
I quite liked this arrangement as it permitted working location to be determined project-by-project and for companies to downsize and restructure offices to hot desks etc.
I think the important part of 'Hybrid' (as I'm sure it means lots of different things to different businesses) is choice. I can now go into offices should I choose to, or when the need arises. I can choose to WFH, and without any obligatory justification. This is ideal really.
The Catch-22 is that one of the main benefits to being in the office it to meet and catch-up with people that you wouldn't ordinarily need to meet online - but for this to work other people need to be in the office too! This is why corporately organised social or training events that can draw people together are now crucial. With staff churn levels at an ever increasing rate, hopefully most sensible businesses will realise the carrot is better than the stick.
Perspective of someone who's an IT Manager in the UK in a fairly large org.
Our company has officially been offering "flexible work arrangements" where staff pick what days they do at and in the office but from my view that has just been a de-facto state of "everyone is at home 5 days a week now" and woe betide anyone who asks for someone to come on site (you know, for a new machine, or to return kit when they leave".
Flexible is now a by-word for Employee's make their own rules, HR have no backbone as they are afraid of high turnover, and IT is stuck in the middle acting as a glorified courier service as HR and managers are feckless oafs who think it's OK for someone to hang on to their kit for weeks after they leave the business.
Flexibility should work both ways and companies should not be afraid to tell staff when they are needed at the office and make some of those mandatory (first and last day on the job at a bare minimum for collection and return of equipment).
Rant over.
-- It's looking like you'll have to assess staff based on their output rather than the warmth of their seat. --
I think its a little more than that. First decide what output might contribute to the company (financially, morally, ethically, climate changelly) then decide what an individuals output should be, then see if that output can be achieved elsewhere and cheaper.
It will take while but I think some of the non-contributing output will vanish, even though people have been very hard to produce it, and there'll also be some more outsourcing, after all if you don't need people in the office....
If there are some people showing up still and pretend they like to work in the office, you may want to give them some leaflets about domestic abuse.
Many, especially men, don't get access to any help and they consider coming to work as their "safe space" and that is not healthy in the long run. They are literally scared of WFH.
At one organisation, employer hired a therapist that any worker could make an appointment with during the office hours with full confidentiality.
I know one time, one worker was in serious pressure at home and eventually decided to make a move, with the help of the therapist, and leave their abusive partner.
Employer helped with the advance so they could get a deposit for a new place and then was easy regarding time off until things settled.
His crazy (now ex) partner came looking for him to the office, but receptionist was in the know and told her he doesn't work there any more.
Unfortunately not every workplace is so supportive.
I have worked little from home this year: the office is not far away.
In nearly all the couples I know--from work or otherwise--the man has at least a 20% advantage in weight, to say nothing of lean mass, and is visibly taller. I have worked with at least one woman that we sent to a shelter, but no men. I am aware that it happens, but I doubt it explains even one in a hundred cases of men going to the office.
Meanwhile, if you want to give the local cops a laugh, call in for a welfare check on me. Once they've seen me standing next to my wife, you can explain that there were no visible bruises, just my defensive habit of catching the bus downtown.
In nearly all the couples I know--from work or otherwise--the man has at least a 20% advantage in weight, to say nothing of lean mass, and is visibly taller. I have worked with at least one woman that we sent to a shelter, but no men.
This attitude is part of the problem. "Men are physically stronger, therefore can't be victims.". The issue is psychological violence, not who is stronger. Men who are in such abusive relationship know that resorting to physical violence against the abuser will get them arrested. Often women is such relationship do all they can to provoke it and the more unsuccessful they are, the more relentless they become in their pursuit.
I suggest you read about personality disorders, particularly Borderline in women.
This type of abuse is underreported and dismissed and then think why so many more men than women commit suicide.
Meanwhile, if you want to give the local cops a laugh, call in for a welfare check on me.
Again, men don't seek help out of fear of being ridiculed and not taken seriously.
But yeah, well done for showing how manly you are and how you can handle yourself /s
In addition to elsergiovolador's well-made point about abusive home settings there is also the case of people who live in small flats or shared houses (mainly younger staff I imagine). Or parents with small children in a flat with not much space.
Employers will need to provide either an office for people to use by negotiation or a modest allowance for co-working space. In my city of one million in the UK there are now quite a few co-working spaces spanning a range of prices from super posh right in the city centre to a desk in an old warehouse a few miles out. Hiring can be by the hour, day or week or a regular pattern of days in a week/month.
Many of these places provide bookable meeting rooms that can be hired for one-off large coordination meetings.
Icon: I actually wonder how well I would do with full on wfh. Teaching is a highly structured activity both in time and space with a clear framework of deadlines and tasks. I quite like that structure and I admit to some drift now I'm mostly retired. Pint for those who can self-organise effectively.
One of my colleagues has recently moved into a newly-converted building somewhere around Manchester. It has a number of common areas like the perennial gym, but also spaces for people to WFH in so they don't have to sit in their own flat all day. I'm wondering if we'll see that sort of thing become more common in future?
As Damon Runyon, "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's the way they're betting it."
For what it's worth, the FBI homicide statistics for 2021 show dead girlfriends, 488; dead boyfriends, 223; dead wives, 308; dead husbands are not listed.
More men than women succeed at suicide because men are more practical in their choice of instruments: guns are very certain, pills are chancy. Women attempt suicide at somewhat higher rates, the last time I saw the numbers.
I think you should define "psychological violence". Is it what a less sophisticated age called "henpecking"?
"I think you should define "psychological violence". Is it what a less sophisticated age called "henpecking"?"
Maybe also define physical violence. Is it what a less sophisticated age called "giving someone a bit of a slap"?
Unfortunately abuse in relationships is an all too common issue. But that’s why it needs calling out whoever is the abuser. And support should be available for all. As a man, I am horrified by some of the stats, and stories of abuse carried out by my gender. But to pretend that men are not on the receiving end, or maybe just trivialize it a bit, is just plain wrong. Why not go the whole way and say “Man Up”.
Welcome to the 1970s
I was in that kind of relationship. It was like having a knife in your back. Stayed at it for years for the kids. When the kids became teens, she began doing the same to them. One day we all just loaded up the car and left. To this day I regret we did not leave sooner.
In this period of history, it was always the man’s fault and rarely would he be allowed to raise the children.
In nearly all the couples I know--from work or otherwise--the man has at least a 20% advantage in weight, to say nothing of lean mass, and is visibly taller. I have worked with at least one woman that we sent to a shelter, but no men. I am aware that it happens, but I doubt it explains even one in a hundred cases of men going to the office.
A knife, firearm, or other weapon evens that out rather quickly. And you must know mostly gorilla couples, my partner and I are very close to same height and under 5 kilos difference, as are most of our friends, except one where a female outweighs the male. You also know no same sex couples?
Anecdotal evidence, but...
So of the three people who used to regularly come into our office, two (including me) had/have immensely stressful living conditions and one had health problems which meant that the office was his only regular social contact.
Personally, I've just started to clue in to how my housemate semi-regularly verges into the emotionally abusive, and getting out of that is going to be a trial. I imagine it going down "You've given me an entire year to find a new flatmate or a new flat? Oh woe is me! Let me cement my victimhood while twisting your words to make you a monster!". Dude is a master of taking a grain of truth (he does have legitimate mental health issue) and twisting that into something that makes you sound like a truly awful person for pushing back on anything he says. But despite all that I still don't have the heart to just give him two months and then eff off.
It's going to be a tough Christmas, and right now the office really is my only safe space.
With a side order of "execs don't realise just how dire the housing situation really is and how much WFH can change that". Coming into the office for certain meetings is super useful, but not super useful enough to feel like it justifies me having to live in a shoe box with five other random people when I'm supposedly paid a prestige salary.
Fortunately our office has a big focus on mental health, but it's at least one anecdotal situation where what you've said hits the nail on the head completely.
Posting anonymously, because, you know.
Personally, I've not been into the office for well over 2 years now, and am also the most productive I've ever been, but that's because remote working and a flexible employer works well for me.
I don't intend to ever take a job where I have to go to an office more than once or twice a month as for me the quality of life improvement is huge, and the enjoyment for my job has increased as it's not now timeboxed, so work get a more productive staff memeber and I'm happier. Win all round.
Companies really need to accept that everyone's different. The flexible companies are the ones that will retain the employees. But also, employees need to take responsibility too. Treat their increased freedoms with respect.
(first and last day on the job at a bare minimum for collection and return of equipment).
I've just had a new works laptop, it arrived via courrier. The old one went back by courrier too, when I leave they'll arrange for another courrier to collect it. Doesn't seem that difficult?
As long as you return the equipment I see no reason why an in person visit should be required at employment termination.
That said, I have on one occasion had to recover equipment from someone who refused to return their equipment and stopped answering the phone when we called. This resulted in my visiting her home with a police escort to recover said equipment. She was swearing at the officer the whe time and almost got herself arrested.
What do you mean?
I was trying to say ‘don’t take the piss’.
Eg, my current employer won’t bat an eyelid if I go and do my shopping mid afternoon, as I’m trusted to know when that’s appropriate to do. This means I was happy to work till midnight in my last day this year to get something finished before I went on leave. I do this as I like and respect my employer as I feel they respect me.
However I had a previous boss who would make snide comments when I arrived a few minutes late for work, but would weirdly never say a thing when I was there 10 - 15 minutes after leaving time. So to solve that I arrived on time every day, took my full lunch and left on time. Boss was happy, I did much less work over all.
Maybe a better phrase would be ‘respect goes both ways’
I think this is fair - I work in an engineering biz and we've had many refuse to come on site when needed to get stuff done. I'm happy to have 4-5 days a week at home, leaning more heavily on the 5 days a week, but it comes with the proviso that if you're needed you can come in barring normal headaches like industrial action.
My own view, purely based on personal preference and experience, is that there does need to be a fixed anchor - maybe once a week, maybe only for a half day ymmv when everyone needs to be in. Maybe a formal team meeting even. My preference would be one and 1 half days in the office each week. partly so that everyone is working close and meeting each other informally. The half day for more formal stuff,
I, in my own view, disagree. I have no issue potentially going into office for a meeting if there truly is a need to do it in person. It is not rocket science to schedule it so that people are present. As for team meetings, that depends on your team, ours is geographically diverse so that would be the most ridiculous reason to traipse into the office.
partly so that everyone is working close and meeting each other informally
I'm not convinced that WFH and working close are mutually exclusive.
One method that I found works was using something like Discord.
I was part of a small team, all WFH, at a company who used Teams as their communication platform.
This works well, we had group chats for the devs and the wider project that acted as informal chat for the team.
Then one day one of the devs set up a Discord server which just the team members joined. We then had a group voice chat.
This was treated much like 'our little bit of the office', if everyone was busy we'd all be sat muted saying nothing, but otherwise people would sit and chat, sometimes about random stuff, but also about work too.
As someone who starts later in the day I would often join the room to find a couple of the devs mid 'working something out', one would be sharing their screen and they'd be working on the problem much like in an office. (except everyone gets a good view of the screen).
This worked really well for us, it provided a seperate area for us to get together and chat, without worrying it was being monitored or treat it like the more formal Teams environment.
Also, as someone who finds 'pair programming' really uncomfortable, because I don't like someone looking over my shoulder all the time, this method works well, you can chip in with ease, but mute and deafen if you're working on something else.
This is rather well-said. There have been many debates (arguments, sometimes) about what amount/ratio of onsite vs. wfh constitutes "hybrid", and they often turn contentious because there really is no One True Answer. At least, no one-size-fits-all.
Choice + flexibility + cooperation seems like a good answer.
I live fairly close to the Birmingham end of HS2 phase 1.
It is possibly the most relaxed construction project I have ever seen. Never more than 20 orange jackets on at any time. No hurry. Zen like calm.
I'm neutral on the actual project itself (new high speed rail trunk versus upgrade to West Coast route) but I can't help noticing this contrast with other projects in the city centre (45 story towers going up left right and centre, shadow patterns and wind profiles to match).
Icon: can remember corridor trains like on A Hard Day's Night
"Icon: can remember corridor trains like on A Hard Day's Night"
Corridor trains! You posh so-and-so.
I had to put up with the non-corridor slam door class 312 for many years when working in banking IT in central Londinium.
http://www.geocities.ws/jamesstearn/trainstoday/312gallery_A_.html
I swear the seats were stuffed with horse hair and coiled steel springs.
One trip took over 3.5 hours to get home from Liverpool St (normally takes 35 minutes) after the one I was on brought down the overhead wires with a BANG!
Sigh.
It's not mainly for office bees and C-suits to get around. It's about increasing capacity, which at this time requires a whole new line. We might as well make it high speed at that point as it barely adds to the cost in the grand scheme of things.
The best bit is when you traipse in for 09:00 on a Monday, only to see a last minute "lolsorry had to cancel will reschedule" and your trip was a total waste of time. The meeting is later rearranged for 14:30 next Thursday.
Happy days.
In my experience and chatting to friends in other companies the ones who are remote tend to be left out. People in the room have side conversations which are hard to pick up on, you can't see some of what's going on in the room... it's just harder to be involved. Of course some meetings work fine even with some people in the office but a lot don't.
Which means that a lot of people, in my circle at least, are going in three days a week partly driven by a desire to feel part of a team.
I'm not saying that everyone has to feel the same, or that all companies will be the same but I can understand why coming to the office can seem an attractive proposition... plus I've saved a lot in heating... but that's another story....
The problem there is as you say, most people being in one room and some people calling in. For that stuff we try to do it so that either ALL attendees are physically there, or ALL attendees are calling in, even if half the people in the meeting are sitting at their desks on their own machines near each other.
People in the room have side conversations which are hard to pick up on, you can't see some of what's going on in the room...
And thank gawd for that. Usually these side conversations are an example of boring. In the beginning I admit I was bit worried that things are happening "behind my back", that maybe I'll miss out on something or not be considered because I didn't have that small talk with the boss.
But reality is that, these things are irrelevant. If they are not worthy of communicating to the team, then they are not worthy of listening to.
It's refreshing that at home you don't have to listen to any of it and you can focus on what you have to do.
On the other hand, there can be a social side to some team meetings that doesn't/can't happen online when only one person at a time can speak. People who don't "do" social", which I know are some of the people reading/posting here, clearly don't miss that. But most people do have a social element to them and may well have actual friends they work with and may have worked with for years, so a face to face meeting can be a lot more than just a business meeting for them.
Because of the remote nature of my work, there are people I've "worked with" for many years, but have only ever very rarely, or even never, met in person. I'm ok with that, but on those rare occasions we do meet face to face in two's or three's, we usually end up chatting about anything and everything other than the job :-)
But inevitably one person can’t make it so there is a Zoom/Teams inclusion
Why? If Zoom/Teams wasn't an option would you still expect someone who can't make a critical business meeting during the working day to be allowed to just skip it? If not, why should that one special person be allowed to insist on remote attendance? If they can't do their job, maybe they should be encouraged to look at new opportunities elsewhere?
Which is, just about, justifiable. However ...
How many 'business critical' meetings are just about some asshat middle manager exerting his/her ego or wanting to justify their existence?
Why does that 'business critical' meeting need to be in person anyway? Because you have a luddite who can't deal with simple tech?
The point is that zoom/teams *are* available - at least they are to the vast majority of businesses.
If your management knows what you are doing and are measuring output, not input, location is largely irrelevant for most office workers. Unfortunately most middle managers have no freaking idea and just want to measure input as a function of bums on seats. Upper manglement seem to just think in terms of ego and viewing their empire.
"would you still expect someone who can't make a critical business meeting during the working day to be allowed to just skip it? "
I've removed my business from a company or made purchases elsewhere due to the sales team being in a meeting and unavailable. I let the receptionist know that I'll be buying from a competitor and to please relay that to the "sales team" when they knocked off all of the pizza.
There are myriads of reasons for somebody to skip a meeting. To talk with a customer is a big one. To work with a vendor to sort out some issue on an order can be another. If you have a load of new desktops on order and some option can't be fitted before shipment, would you be open to getting the computers anyway and installing some delayed hardware later? If it's important to get the computers in so software can get installed and VPN's configured, you may not want to wait another week until the specified video cards arrive.
So many meetings are a waste of time to begin with is a major problem. If there is a good reason to skip one or duck out as needed, that shouldn't be looked at negatively.
But inevitably one person can’t make it so there is a Zoom/Teams inclusion, and who misses out on drinks, during the meeting (at a hotel, because we don’t have an office) and pub (usually more than one of those) after the meeting ends.
In my team there has been widespread acceptance that one day a week in the office has been of benefit for team relations, but when management try to push this up to more days in the office the whole team turns into Brett and Parker from the USCSS Nostromo.
I personally can live with a 90 mile round trip once a week, while my colleagues on the South Coast and in Chennai are unlikely to put in an appearance any time soon.
I have a sort of C-suite. I mean, a separate office (glass walls, better than nothing...) where I could work without being annoyed, and where I can have local or remote meetings without annoying others. With enough desk space to lay out my monitors comfortably. Of course some higher level exec wants my office now, and HR tried to send me in a basement (literally) space that was built as a meeting/teaching room and thereby very badly lit for long hours of working, plus fitted with small desks good for a call centre only. I told my upper manager I'm not going to go work there - or they give me another equivalent office or they let me work from my home studio which is better than my actual office. At least I obtained a stalemate... still in the actual office until they remodel and refurbish new spaces....
I suspect part of the problem is that typical C-suit office - they can't replicate it at home and thus to get the full C-suit experience they have attendance their office, thus if they have to attend so does everyone else...
Furthermore, if your home office is a step up from the cubicle and probably better than the C-suit's home office, well we do need to take into consideration differentials and the need to keep underlings in their place...
Exec's at my place cant even show up for the Christmas Dinner that were all encouraged to drag our husks in for. The MD literally Dialed in over Zoom to a TV in the rest area to tell the worker drones how great it was to see so many people in the office...
It was perverse....
Well, glass walls are well suited to a C-suit. In general, there is a need to be seen, but many feel that they are performing a community service by allowing underlings to physically see their betters. Hence the need to force workers back into the office. What good is a c-suite office if nobody sees you in it?
"I have a sort of C-suite."
If I wasn't working for myself, I don't see that many employers would outfit me with what I currently have at home. Not only do I have an office with wrap around work surfaces and multiple computers, plus my 3D printer, I also have an electronics work center that I keep optimizing and I'm steps away from an ever improving shop in the garage. I can get far more done at home than I ever have at a 9-5. Not having to share or constantly get bugged with annoying questions is a big bonus.
This is a 25 year old problem, covid just widened the pool for WfH providing a space for people to confirm their views on 21stC working environments.
Perhaps staff simply want:
* an end to unbelievably noisy, smelly, cold open plan offices ( warehouse style ) where no actual work gets done.
Create cheap, miserable, unproductive working spaces, designed by people who won't ever have to work there? Guess what?
There was a time when managers had offices, with teams in larger offices where people actually got along with other and could walk to another team's office to talk. Or went down the pub/cafe ( lunch or after work ).
Add to that the air con issues. So many people crammed in an open plan, you most of the time feel like you are going to suffocate and then battle headaches. Then if building manager feels generous and cranks up temps, half of the office is in a coma by lunch.
You get situation where people come to office, but they do work when they come back home. Worst of both worlds.
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I've worked in an open plan office. If everyone came in, the noise and chaos were disruptive and I wanted to work from home. If nobody came in, there was no point being there so I wanted to work from home. If a few people came in and they were people I worked with, things worked, although there was still some potential of disruption. If a few people came in but weren't the people I worked with, it was pointless again.
I've also worked where there are offices, and if everyone came in then it helped with working together and didn't create a disruptive environment. Walls kept the noise from a million conversations from drowning out my thoughts and permitted me to have a meeting without necessarily disrupting everyone who worked in the area. More people chose to come in when there were separate offices. Imagine that.
If you're a manager who wants people in the offices, consider whether people actually work well in the offices. In both cases, there will be some people who just don't want to come in, but there will be a lot more take-up of the idea if the offices aren't unpleasant by their design.
"More people chose to come in when there were separate offices. Imagine that."
I remember a show where they visited an architectural firm where people not only had their own office, it was a miniature building they designed or influenced contained within a large warehouse space. Pure swank, but each "office" was fit to the person in it. The company had applications this high to work at the firm, but only the very best were invited in. Apparently, they had to shoo people out so they'd go home every so often.
Thin end of the wedge. Today, customized offices built of swank sheathing over IKEA's worst in exchange for the proles agreeing to end WFH. Next year, when it comes apart, well, we can't afford to replace it every year, not to mention you obviously won't take proper care of it, and besides, we found all this open plan stuff in the basement, and since WFO is no longer an option, you're back in the gimp suit again.
As for me, the day they say WFH is over, on the first day of reporting will be my last day.
You didn't align my remuneration to caring, therefore, I don't care. My only concern is getting paid, as comfortably and conveniently as possible. Business problems are not my problem.
On the "but its your responsibility!" scale, I am at the stage marked: 'its my job to do as little as possible, and my managers job to get me to do as much as possible, hopefully there is a middle ground'
this approach tends to upset people who take their work seriously
AIUI employees (after 6 months in) have the right to request a change of location (ie to home) and the employer cannot refuse without good reasons (the acceptable reasons are stipulated in the legislation); claiming to fire people who refuse to come in sounds like dodgy territory given the rights workers already have around this - is it largely bluster?
I'm a contractor inside IR35 at the mo. My client is nice but if they had a head fit and demanded I work in the office I would be there for one day to deliver the laptop back. Actually, I'd probably refuse and play for time while I got another remote contract sorted.
I was spoiled, for 22 years, I had a 10-15 minute commute depending on the weather. I didn't mind being called back after the initial lockdown(s). I have since moved way out any metropolitan area, quit working temporarily, and now face commutes of an hour each way should I take employment on premises. Now that I'm looking for work again, remote is looking sweeter and sweeter...
I was also very lucky. My commute was 15-20 minutes (traffic dependent) in the car and my journey took me near the likes of supermarkets, so I could run these errands on the way home or even a little later in the evening.
The idea of being on a train at 7am, having no evening because you're zonked and getting back late, then being able to run basic errands only at the weekend is alien to me. it also sounds utterly hellish and I have real sypmathy for people who have to do that.
I never did the whole London thing and to be honest at 35 years old I think I'm already well past it. Too old now.
"How do we get them working on things together? I mean, remote is great, but when you have new and difficult problems, putting people inside of rooms is absolutely critical," he added.
I call BS on this
I work as part of a team of various functions and we have found that a remote virtual meeting for problem solving is every bit as effective as a physical meeting and without the commute.
All the 'offices' have been converted to (bookable) hot desk collaboration areas and although we are 'encouraged' to go on site regularly what matters more is getting the issues sorted. There are times when it makes sense to go onsite (commissioning new hardware for example) but I can do design work far more effectively here.
If I need someone's opinion on a part of the design I can just call them.
Some people need to be onsite (production teams for example) but those who can work more effectively from home are encouraged to do so.
I think part of the problem is all the little things that happen but largely don't get noticed when you have people together in an office.
Recently had to deal with two disciplinaries, in both cases the issue was "quality of work" ie. your work contains errors, which we didn't catch before submitting the work to the client. Basically, in both cases the companies assumed the employee could work from home and produce perfect (ie. error free) technical design work fit for customer submission without peer group review.
In the office, I discovered this happened all the time in an ad-hoc over-the-shoulder fashion as the work progressed. With WFH this review process has to be more explicit and allowed for.
I completely agree that the review process has to be more explicit. I do quite a lot of electronics for interfacing which can be 'interesting' on occasion.
Because of that we (the team) always ensure we have real requirements (which may include software) and there is an 'originator - checker - approver process.
When onsite everybody is spread out over a large area so the remote method is not much different from what happened prior to the mass WFH.
That can equally happen in an on site role.
I briefly worked as developer in a software house where management wanted us onsite to share knowledge - trouble was those with the knowledge either were too busy or not keen on sharing whether in the office with them or not.
To me, it’s not about in person or remote, the team work and peer review can be as good or bad regardless depending on the team.
I agree that it's demonstrably BS. After all, it was a "new and difficult problem" that pushed many of us into the WFH sea-change in the first place.
So, all the people now being encouraged / forced back to the office have already proved that they can deal with pretty much any problem remotely.
I still perceive this as a two lane issue - One, buildings are expensive and break clauses are too far in the future. Two, some "leaders" don't trust their people. Personally, an empty building costs more or less the same as a used one (more electric, more frequent cleaning notwithstanding), so why sweat it? Can only be that lane two is more embedded than was thought.
We need a survey that says "x% of workers perceive managers who insist on office attendance as mistrusting inadequates" as the next step in the propaganda war...
I easily get more done at home. It's actually unhealthy how much more I'll get done at home, because I don't mind hanging on a while longer to keep working.
In the office, I'm gone when I'm off, family to collect and so on, and then I'm not turning my work laptop on at home without a damn good reason.
because I don't mind hanging on a while longer to keep working.
Don't do that. You are not a charity and the business you work for does not care about you. If you dropped dead today, most likely tomorrow someone would have taken over all your tasks and a couple of weeks later you may not even get mentioned as someone who worked there.
If you are still feeling generous with your time, work out your hourly rate you are currently being paid and the keep track of your extra work you do. Then when you want to buy something and think that you are bit short, go look into that spreadsheet.
"Don't do that. You are not a charity and the business you work for does not care about you."
I don't know about that. I like to work to the job, not the clock. I also find that I hit natural stopping points where it's good to knock off for the day. If that's 30 minutes past one day and 15 minutes off early the next two, so be it. Balance is good and being compensated for the time you are working is appropriate, but more importantly, as you get better it takes less time for a task and it's the task getting done that the company gets value from. They don't get any value just from the time you put in. Some managers don't know how to deal with that so they want to see the backs of people's necks for a specified number of hours per day/week.
"... in a hybrid model. That means more notebooks with a faster refresh cycle."
How on Earth does a "faster refresh cycle" contribute to any effective business working model (including hybrid)? All it contributes to is the revenue streams of technology vendors. In the IT world, the tail no longer just wags the dog -- the dog is rapidly disappearing as the tail increasingly wags itself regardless.
IME the "notebook refresh cycle" is strictly a function of whether parts and support are still available from the notebook vendor. 3 years seems to be typical, though the notebooks themselves will last much longer.
I fail to grasp any connection between hybrid work and the notebook refresh cycle time. One would think the notebooks would last longer if they remain in one place, either office or home. Any damage probably occurs as they are being transported from one place to another.
Most cheap notebooks are designed for 'careful' movement eg. from room-to-room within an office, not having their lid closed, thrown into a backpack and jiggled as you rush to exit the building to catch a bus/train etc.
There is a reason the Thinkpad T-series (and the cheaper L-series) to exist.
Cheap Notebooks less likely to cope with all day running - cooling problems etc. They are best suited to C-Suit types taking to meetings and barely using them?
Surely better with a PC (NUC) at home and similar at work - Students used to "hot desk" in Labs etc for years before they all switched to BOYD...
"IME the "notebook refresh cycle" is strictly a function of whether parts and support are still available from the notebook vendor. 3 years seems to be typical, though the notebooks themselves will last much longer."
IME, the number of laptops failing during warranty has risen. Not all are in warranty in terms of the repairs, ie "user damage". Broken screens seems to be on the decline now after a sharp peak during and immediately post-lockdown. Damaged charging ports, whether barrel or USB are steady at the new plateau reached with WFH. Spillages on keyboards and into the gubbins have dropped too from an early WFH peak. The hazards and working environment is very different at home than in the office and many of those people suddenly dropped into WFH had never done so before and may not have even used a laptop before then so didn't understand how to take care of it properly. Most people never plug anything into an office based PC. A home based laptop probably gets the PSU plugged in/out at least daily and was something people had to learn to do properly and carefully.
Now, none of that that indicates a shorter refresh cycle. It just indicates that some of the laptop estate will need replacing a little more often than than the lengthening desktop PC refresh rate, which is currently about 5 years for most of our customers, not accounting for the lack of use during covid. Although it seems most customers are buying with 3 year on-site warranty and just scrapping anything that comes back "broken" outside of the warranty period.
I'd say if any business has been hit hard by WFH, it's the office printer business. I see a number of customers with entire sections or even floors of their offices effectively abandoned but with big heavy duty office printers on lease agreements that may not have even been switched on in 2+ plus years and likely never will be right up until the lessor comes to take them away.
> Now, none of that that indicates a shorter refresh cycle. It just indicates that some of the laptop estate will need replacing a little more often than than the lengthening desktop PC refresh rate,
I also took shorter to be relative to desktops (where we have seen extended refresh cycles) rather than laptops are now being built with an intentional shorter design life.
It seems to me the biggest factor with respect to laptop design life is the time taken for the letters on the key caps to wear away.
I'm 100% WFH with the exception of the odd client visit. As it did when I was in the office, my laptop spends 95% of its time, lid closed and tucked under my monitor stand, with power cord, monitor HDMI, annd USB3 expander (with Ethernet jack) plugged in. I despise laptop keyboards and prefer the IBM model M type sloped ones. Wireless mouse over trackpad , any day of the week. A single 4k monitor is now my preference. The laptop is hardly ever used as a laptop!
>All it contributes to is the revenue streams of technology vendors.
Which is what Chuck Whitten - Chief Technology Officer Dell Technologies - was alluding to...
Obviously, the shorter life/faster refresh cycle, means more work for IT support as they have to more frequently replace equipment...
I struggled, over the decades pre-Covid, to see the point of most of the meetings I and people I spoke to had to attend. Beyond making certain individuals feel important ("I have an urgent meeting to attend" etc) Most of it could have been dealt with by memo. In more recent years the main point had been to communicate with the people who don't read emails ( and much of the blame for that is the idiots who send emails about every little thing to everyone).
And except for meetings and chat there's no point being in an office for most roles. When I was working we only all met in the office once or twice a week - being out doing our jobs in schools most days. And that was enough for the chat., there were lots of other times when we'd be in the base and see one another. It makes perfect sense to have staff in an office base, say, once a week together,ideally not starting or ending around rush hour, because there's no point unless you're actually public facing during office hours. and maybe popping in to meet a colleague or collect stuff from time to time. So that you can meet, catch-up, share experiences etc. But otherwise, what's the point unless it's actually better for them to be away from home?
The office should be a resource, not a cell.
Even once a month office meetings in some orgs are such a drag. Managers plan to set up meetings when everyone is together face to face (still someone won't be able to make it, so they are really on Hangouts anyway) and you end up with a day full of meetings back to back.
It's a complete waste. People are zoning out after two hours and those who want to stay awake resort to browsing on their phones. Manager gets annoyed and tensions start.
Then someone comes up with a brilliant idea "Hey let's go grab a lunch together!" - at the same time when everyone in the offices have the same idea. You end up crammed in some ugly noisy restaurant and barely can hear anything. You end up eating something you don't like, with your ears and personal space violated and paying fortune for it.
He's "only" a backbencher these days. But sadly he still has influence.
On the other hand, the number of government departments still buying in large numbers of laptops and tablets, I suspect those departments at least are not panning a mass return to the office any time soon. Local councils too. Many are selling off or mothballing office space as fast as they can, and not just for budgetary and running costs reasons.
Some Local Councils were already implementing partial WFH and closing offices before covid because it was cheaper and better for them. At least one I know of commissioned a study back in 2018 and a tried a pilot scheme in 2019 which showed increased productivity and fewer sick days, putting them in the perfect position to go fully WFH when the pandemic hit. They had to scramble a bit to beef up the servers for full remote working and get PCs and laptops into peoples homes quickly, but did it far quicker than most others managed.
Think that also nobody is raising the fact that we don't have infrastructure to sustain 9-5 working.
We simply don't have a capacity to move that many people at once. Then after the peak many services run empty.
There were some clever planners that were also scheduling short trains during peak and then running long empty trains after the peak.
Some businesses to stagger hours, but still that should probably be coming from the government. People should be allowed to choose different time than 9 to 5 if they are required to come to office.
I think that every company I've worked with in the last forty-five years has had the concept of 'core hours' where you had to be available but let you move your actual time around that base. I prefer to work early and leave early, so core hours of ten till three - when everyone is working - work fine, even though I'm currently not in the same time zone as my employer.
This applies obviously whether one is required to come into the office or not. I've been in the office once in the last year - I was visiting the country so it made sense to meet some new employees in person.
"With that combination of clients, it's a complete mystery why the government is insisting we cram back into trains and waste hours of our time travelling to large office buildings."
I'm seeing estate agents talking about rising property values along train lines once again. Anything around an hour or less into London or another big city by train is premium. I don't see why it also couldn't be good to locate offices that are an hour or so FROM a big city. A working group in Ely means a better quality of life for employees that can still migrate into London as needed for bigger powwows. Or, some mid-level functionary can make the trip up to "check on things" from time to time.
"I don't see why it also couldn't be good to locate offices that are an hour or so FROM a big city."
Because it can take an hour to get across London to reach the station from which the hour-long journey to Ely commences, and because there is a network effect of being in the big city, even today.
"because there is a network effect of being in the big city"
That will depend a lot on the sort of job and if you are one that socializes after hours. Most of my networking has been through people I've met online over the years or at conferences that have good opportunities for socializing. When I was working for outside companies, I made connections with my colleagues that have lasted beyond my leaving those jobs, but I would have anyway if I needed to interact with them for work. I didn't need to see them in an office/shop 5 days a week. I can't think of anybody I've networked with that was outside of my department/group. I've never maintained any sort of relationship with anybody from accounting and I would go a long way out of my way to avoid anybody from the legal departments.
""Network effect" (gaining efficiency and use from being near others in your market) is nothing to do with "networking"."
I don't see it. I've hung out with some famous musicians and it made zero improvements to my own playing and I've been 'near' many more. The same goes for many other situations. Just being near something doesn't transfer anything.
"According to Advanced Workplace Associates, British workers are going into the office on average 1.5 days a week, according to a survey of 50,000 workers in June and July. "
1.5 days? Luxury! At least they have an office to go to in the first place. If I must get out of the house to be productive*, I need to find a pub or coffee shop. Still, I suppose money spent on coffee and a cake is better than money spent on a commute to the arse end of nowhere**.
I don't see us going back to anything like the before times. Management wants for nothing and is saving a small fortune in rent. Somewhere small to meet up, once or twice a month, would be nice though.
* Various construction projects, local to me, get a tad noisy at times.
** Or Warrington, as we used call it when we moved there in 1BP.
After almost 3 years of "we're not reopening offices yet" I'd had enough. Sure, I had a comfortable home office that I used a lot for early evening meetings with the US, or on snow days, but I missed the regular interactions with my colleagues. I also missed the international trips to meet other teams, brainstorm with them, get to know new members.
When it became clear that WFH was the long term plan, I quit.
Where did I say any of that? My home and private life is fine, it was actually nice to have my wife pop into a zoom meeting with a cup of tea, or (occasionally) a glass of wine for those evening calls.
That has nothing to do with being able to work efficiently with my teams, and enjoy my work.
"That has nothing to do with being able to work efficiently with my teams, and enjoy my work."
Just had a team lose two weeks of work because of a miscommunication that would never have happened had the team been interacting continuously and spontaneously. Such a simple little thing that got missed, but because nobody was talking beyond the scheduled or focused discussion between specific people in the team, it got missed.
On the flip side, being able to work from home fully has meant that some personal issues I've been facing over the last few months have had minimal impact on my work. But by the same token, when I hit the end of the working day, I don't feel like I've actually unplugged...
"The first one should be "why do we need to have people back into offices?"
The second question might be whether it's everybody they need back of just a couple of departments. A third question could be if they are needed back full time in the office. There could be a need for an office staff to send and receive documents, parcels, plans and so forth. While digital signatures are accepted for many things, a 'wet' signature can still be required or preferable. A sales staff can work remotely, but there would still be a need for warehousing, shipping and receiving products if the company sells tangible things. Marketing doesn't need to be in the same building as the product and neither do the people in purchasing.
Flawed survey.
Use the mean or median, not the average.
Certain subservient workers or those that need to be physically present in a location will be 4 or 5 days per working week in an office or remote physical location that isn't their home.
Half or more people are 4 or even full time 5 days WFH. The average will then appear to be most people working in an office 3 days per week, when in fact most people are at home full time and never in. This is why surveys shouldn't be trusted until the break down of figures is inspected first.
What I found is that the C-suite has little or no connection with what workers do. They don't get any feedback, because middle management in larger companies in general only report back success stories. In the past, the C-suite sometimes walked by to see rooms full of underlings behind keyboards, and they then saw that work was being done. There was a correlation between what hey saw and what was being reported. Also, they could shout orders to their underlings.
Now, they don't see work being done. They do not understand it anymore. Also, their underlings are not always there to be commanded at will. Furthermore, workers seem less and less impressed by the orders that come down the chain of command. This is partly, because, at home, workers can spend some time working on/solving a problem without all sorts of meetings or ceremonies. And partly because, at the moment, the labour market is in their favour. And, to be honest, also because workers realise how little the C-suite actually does.
So the C-suite longs back to the good old days, when they were respected, when workers slavishly battered they keyboards.
Or am I too cynical here?
C-suite logic: The seat of the chair is warm. Therefore there is a butt in it. Therefore work must be happening. And all is good in the world.
While I make that comment tongue in cheek, that really is the fundamental problem. Management cannot adapt to alternative measures of productivity. Some of them because they are entrenched in roll-call style management. However, I think the majority of them secretly fear their services will no longer be needed if they are not able to count the butts every day.
We have now the problem that manglement switched to rely on QA to assess the outcome of projects - just our QA is a bunch of old man and women that do not understand anything but the Word/Excel documents for which they spend most of their times designing "templates" (nor real templates that would be marginally more useful, just documents design that you would need to fill with a lot of work).
The problem is we have all of our data in Polarion or Azure DevOps - and manuals are written with Help&Manual. So now I'm in an arm wrestling with them because if they want the date they will come out as reports from the tools - I'm not going to copy data manually - and if they wish a different formatting is up to them to create the reports the way they wish.
"What I found is that the C-suite has little or no connection with what workers do. They don't get any feedback, because middle management in larger companies in general only report back success stories."
We did a company wide anonymous survey because some of the actual feelings of the staff was breaching the management firewall between the workers and the C-Suite. Primarily staff turnover rates. The staff treated the anonymous survey as truly anonymous. Things have changed for the better. No one got fired, at least not in relation to the survey[*]. :-)
* Yeah, I know a few people who said things in the survey that could have potentially lead to repercussions, and nothing happened to them which I take as a great positive improvement in the company.
I have never trusted "anonymous" surveys. Especially when they arrive by email with a customised URL, and results are broken down by work group. I have decided that keeping one's opinions to oneself is a safer course of action.
I've gotten a bit less trusting and more paranoid re management as I have gotten older.
Of course, this is a large multinational with a fondness for metrics and AI, and very rigid business process, so YMMV, as they say.
> There was a correlation between what hey saw and what was being reported.
Perceived correlation, really. And at least somewhat mistaken/misguided. Granted the superfluous layers of middle management filtering the messaging and status (both directions) don't help, and often make it worse.
> Now, they don't see work being done. They do not understand it anymore.
Arguably a lot of them didn't understand it in the first place.
> workers seem less and less impressed by the orders that come down the chain of command. ... because workers realise how little the C-suite actually does.
Got it in one. Many big wheel execs were/are not so much respected, as feared. When the job market is plentiful, some of that fear evaporates. And fear-based managers usually aren't able to lead people in more productive ways. Some are hardly "leaders" at all.
> Or am I too cynical here?
I'd say you're spot-on.
"What I found is that the C-suite has little or no connection with what workers do."
Oh goodness, how true that is. They get their business degree and the profs and colleges have told them with that degree they can competently work at any company. Every industry is different and some knowledge about the products and services the company provides is extremely important.
I did some independent contract work for a medical devices company that was have problems with a new product where the C-level drones didn't understand how the product was used nor exactly the types of procedures it was for. The job came through a roommate that had been a nurse for a number of years and picked up an MBA while she was shacked up with a BF overseas and wasn't allowed to work. She called me since she knew I have lots of experience with adhesives and that was where they were having problems. It took time to get approval for me to do the work, but we solved the problems and I went on to work on a few more products with them.
I started with my current company early into lockdown, so literally spent about two days in the office before starting back on WFH. they were ending the lease on that place and looking for a new one back then. four failed attempts to find appropriate office space later, they decided we were fully remote.
In theory they can ask us to change our contracts to go back to the office, but they are currently saving office and energy costs, so I don't see that changing anytime soon.
That ship has sailed, and the sooner the deniers adapt to the new work environment the better. I used to be a smoker and I got most of the best company gossip/news from other smokers, so are we going to make smoking shelter attendance compulsory too <LOL>?
In the office I was constantly interrupted by people too selfish/rude to understand that I might be concentrating on something and that they were disturbing my work. I was surrounded by constant noise, people walking past, people holding shouted conversations across the office, and of course the stench of 10 different people's microwaved dinner all mixed together with the stink of stale coffee and body odour in an office that was way too warm for me and too cold for the person sat next to me. No thanks, at home my only hassles are attention seeking cats and deliveries for my better half & neighbours. If someone wants to talk to me, they email/message asking me for assistance which I can ignore until I reach a natural break in my work. If it's urgent then they can still call me but they have learned that they'd better have a damned good reason for calling. They still get the help they need, but on my terms and when I am ready.
I can see where for some roles being in the office is a good thing, but that doesn't mean that everyone should have to go back to the office. In ye olde days you could build relationships by being in the office and use those to get ahead in a company, but these days even that is mostly useless as you are far more likely to get ahead by moving to a different company.
Because of the work I'm involved in, everyone is in the office every day all day, bar one person who WfH, which is an option, but the rest of us found it didn't work for our work purposes.
It's actually got to the stage where she no longer exists as a person to us. Routinely gets missed out on emails, status updates, tasks, etc or just general office stuff. Not through anyone being malicious, as she is very well liked, but after, what, two years? It just feels like she's not part of the team anymore and people keep forgetting she's there.
Big HR failure but I can't see it changing. She gets her work done but feels very isolated. We've suggested she comes in but she doesn't want to.
HR failure? I think there's an element of responsibility on the team members here too.
Exactly the same thing happened in our office long before pandemic, when a team member moved far, far away from civilisation.
I felt it was worthwhile taking extra effort to make sure she was still included in stuff and was getting some form of human contact with those of us who were still in the office. Little things - a phone call rather than an email sometimes, or turning the camera on in Teams to marginally increase the personal connection.
Our team leader did the same, but I just don't think it occurred to other members of the team. In the end she found a better job, much closer to her new home. She did call out specifically when she left that she appreciated the small efforts the boss and I made to include her.
While I value actual face-to-face meetings with whiteboards and sitting next to someone while we run through code, the globalized workforce was a royal pain when working from the office was required. I have no fond memories of the early 2000s, sitting in a conference room with a half-dozen of my California colleagues at 9 pm while we met with our counterparts in India. Likewise those thrilling 3 am meetings when I was orchestrating efforts with a team in both Dublin and Bangalore.
At my recent previous job, I felt fortunate to be able to log in from home for my 9:30 pm meetings with India. Once the pandemic hit, while I worked from home during the day, those meetings at odd hours of the evening were still on my calendar. Often, my remote day started at 7 am and finished around 11-12 pm, with a few breaks between. It's the way things work, nowadays.
In my current position, I am fortunate to be working with a team in Sydney, Australia, so the meeting schedule is so much better, being daytime for both of us.
I know this sounds rather like "when I had to walk 10 miles to school, uphill both ways" but that was the reality. As recently as 1017, I was sitting in a conference room, with one group of us in California and another in Beijing, at times outside standard working hours. There is a lot to be said for hybrid work.
Entire layers of expensive and redundant "middle management," and therefore "upper management," are not needed when workers are at home. I spent 42 years at a global company and my observation was that "middle management" spent more of it's time justifying it's existence than actually adding any value to our products. And "justifying it's existence" almost always meant useless, unnecessary, and unproductive work for the real workers, and calling meetings and preparing reports so their uppers could justify --their-- existence. The axiom of 'management by walking around' goes out the window when 'walking around' isn't possible. It is these unnecessary layers of management that are really opposed to this remote trend. Coming back into the office adds very little or no value. It costs money, inflates egos, and, IMO, lowers innovation and productivity. So, IMO, C-Level execs should absolutely resist, and demand justification for, suggestions by their underlings to get 'em back into the office. The workers who can't write and can't Zoom need to go back to the welding shop.
I work for a fairly large company that detests the idea of a pure manager, at least at the middle and upper middle levels. I think this is the reason for the organisation’s very relaxed stance on hybrid and remote. It also means the higher ups have actual work of their own to do :-) (and mostly come from technical backgrounds).
Man, I really hate absolutist takes on this question. Like this one from the article: ""How do we get them working on things together? I mean, remote is great, but when you have new and difficult problems, putting people inside of rooms is absolutely critical," he added."
Well, no. No it isn't. I work on Fedora, which is just the underpinning of an OS that runs half the world, no biggy. We've built *that* thing - and mostly built RHEL, even! - with distributed approaches for decades. Works fine. We solve "new and difficult problems" all the time. Lots of the key people working on both Fedora and RHEL are full time remote (including me) and have been since long before the pandemic.
Does this mean everyone should be remote all the time? No. That'd be a stupid thing to say. Some people like working in the office. Some companies have a working style which does work better with people in offices; it's up to those companies and the people who work in them whether this should be considered a problem or not. But it's equally stupid to imagine that nobody can possibly come up with a way to work on "new and difficult problems" that doesn't involve trying to get everyone physically in the same room at the same time.
If your company doesn't have an effective way for people to work on "new and difficult problems" remotely, you need to recognize that, and then you have some decisions to make. Are all your workers OK with working in the office forever? If so, great. If not, more choices. Do you try and get rid of the workers who don't want to come back to the office and only hire people who will? Or do you change your company's processes so you can work efficiently on "new and difficult problems" without making everyone come into the office? You're the manager. Those are your choices. But if your framing is "the only possible way to do this is to make everyone go to an office", you're wrong, and you're a bad manager.
I agree a lot with this. The arguments over WFH appear to break into two categories: the people who like working in the office (or the managers who like to have their managees there) insisting that remote work just doesn't work, and the people who like WFH and insist that there are never any downsides to it or advantages of an office. I've seen nobody even try to analyze the possible benefits to the one they don't like as much, just a bunch of insinuations of how stupid and lazy the people who take the other side must be. Then again, it's definitely not the first time when it would make sense to analyze how things really worked and people found a reason not to bother with anything that could be objective.
"I mean, remote is great, but when you have new and difficult problems, putting people inside of rooms is absolutely critical,"
Goal: build a new rocket lander in 6 months to win a pallet of money from NASA
Room time: about 2 hours and two really big white boards.
It was down to making lists of what was needed to get done which each department head (we were mostly one person departments) figured out and submitted to the project manager asap. Fortunately, this wasn't a blank slate project for us so most of the framework was in place and we just needed to flesh out the details and make sure we were getting the longer lead time parts on order as fast as possible. The team met in one group on Monday mornings for about an hour so we all knew where things sat thus far and what problems needed to be addressed. The rest of the time we could have been anywhere in the world and still been able to get things accomplished. We won, BTW and got some nice bonuses.
remains my dream
100% of the time I'm paid, I'm in the office... or shop floor or ranting about how stuffs gone wrong (see the interlock comments)
I cant do my job from home... sure the programming, and complaining at tool suppliers that their prices are too high I could.... but then disaster can strike at any moment and my body is required at work not 45 mins away.
But as other people have mentioned, if your metric for 'getting work done' is a full office with 100% of seats that have bums on them....... then you're a pretty crummy manager.
Our metric is simple....."Have we made money this month?" and if that means one of the programmers sits at home all day on his laptop doing programming, then brings in the finished product the next day for testing, then as far as we're concerned, hes done a good days work. we dont need to see him in the chair opposite me. we dont need to know hes done 'X' amount of code (lets face it, lines of code/day is a lousy way of measuring productivity too).
plus he's taken the kids to school, and had an hour for lunch with his other 1/2 which makes him a happy employee.... which is quite valuable.
if that means one of the programmers sits at home all day on his laptop doing programming
That's one assumption not necessarily correct that if you do programming, you need to sit by your laptop whole day. Often, the laptop is used as a last stop in the process of programming, where programmer inputs their code. But when they create code in their head, they don't need a laptop for that. Sometimes it is useful to look something up or write something to test the idea, but 80% of time one does not need to be at their computer when programming.
Can imagine the future of programming, where the AI takes care of the most boring part - typing the code in and all programmer would have to do would be to write prompts and perhaps test conditions and let AI do its work until they pass.
I wish that happened to us.
At the previous gig, after they sent us all home for pandemic the frequency of meetings went up -- sometimes a lot.
More "all hands" meetings, more 1:1 with direct managers, more staff meetings in general. Plus more "HR inspired" meetings, presumably they were trying to help us cope with burnout (since that was a frequent question on employee surveys), but apparently "have fewer managers and meetings" was not considered as a solution.
Most of the additional meetings were even less necessary than the onsite in-person meetings we had before pandemic, there was just more of them; ironically, I think sometimes the meetings were cancelled more often before wfh "because so-and-so isn't available", but after everyone became just a zoom/teams call away, that excuse for cancelling a meeting didn't work as much.
It apparently never occurred to them that being superfluous was an entirely sufficient reason for cancellation.
OMFG so much this ^
At the same time the pandemic hit a lot of the infrastructure teams (including my lot of sys admins) were being told to start being "global". eg I no longer could I just concentrate on my little EMEA empire, but I now had to concern myself with how things get done the same way over AMRS/EMEA/APAC. The result being I now get dragged into more Zoom calls than I know what to do with. Most afternoons are taken up with calls once the US get in. In some cases I've been triple booked.
So more often than not, I'm not concentrating on the meeting at hand but am tapping away at several SSH sessions or poking around at web-based front ends. I have no idea how people think I get things done (or when). Must be those magic computer pixies that do it all...
Meanwhile my place has been sort-of OK at letting people get on with what they want to do (though they are trying to get a few more people to come at least once a week). I usually do 3 days in the office a week, which is enough to obtain a permanent desk. As during the pandemic management decided to move to a smaller office and with no consultation decided all of IT would be WFH ot hot desk. Of course all the business people were sorted out with offices and permanent desks and pretty much every question regarding how hot desking would work and various facilities was met with the answer "don't know". In short they didn't give a flying fuck about IT and we had to deal with the consequences. This in turn has led to problems as people who prefer to WFH do as much as possible not to come into the office.
No-one really likes hot desking and it's become a faff to try and get several desks together when teams come in. In some cases micromanaging/presenteism managers insist that their team have permanent desks (which then lessens the amount of desks availble for the hot desk pool), but their staff mostly decide to WFH. Meanwhile there are veiled threats from management around why there are so many empty desks, which then gets interpreted lower down as we must have at least one person from the team in the office each day. Though this may be a bit of front-running to head off some stupid ruling from people who either have their own offices or permanent desks
It's as if they can't make up their minds at what they want...
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Nope, gonna keep being a knob about it. I was forced to work in an office for 35 years now I'm not about to let some lifeless hack who uses work for a substitute social life steal WFH from me. I'm gonna fight it hard and push for mandatory WFH for the next 5 years, after which I will retire, sell my house and spend what's left of my life caravanning around the US.
Quite frankly, the only reason I'm not retiring now is I don't like any of the available caravans, and will be building what I want instead. You wouldn't believe how shoddily they're put together. I looked at new 2023 models on the lot this summer and the plastic bits inside were already melted and distorted, and they have the gall to ask 50K or better for them.
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30 years ago ... when a work group was located in the same room of the same building ... getting everyone back in the office made sense and did provide that elusive "synergy" the c-suite crowd is so fond of.
But now? After 20 years of bean-counters requiring new hires and backfills to come from "low cost geographies"? There is no "productivity multiplier" in taking conference calls in a corporate cubicle instead of taking them from home.
My boss is over 950 miles away from me. His boss is over 850 miles away from him. If we need to talk, then each of us being in our own local office does absolutely nothing to enhance that conversation.
Is management willing to relocate work groups to a consolidated location so that meeting in person will be 'in person'? No. That costs too much.
Going back to the office is meaningless.
> Is management willing to relocate work groups to a consolidated location so that meeting in person will be 'in person'?
Vodafone make a good case study. They move out of Dozens of buildings in central Newbury to a new consolidated campus 20 years back, now they are heavily into smaller groups and hybrid and earlier this year did a sale and lease back of only 4 of the buildings on that campus…
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My colleague and I both went into the office a few days ago and we had a quick chat the next morning when we were both WFH. He said that he go one thing done all day in the office 'cos people wouldn't leave him alone, he ended up staying from 9am until 8.30pm, then a 2 hour journey home! He's vowed to only ever go back in the office again just the mandatory once a month, he said the commute is a waste of time, the day is written off if you get caught by people 'cos you happen to be there, said he was able to do 2-3 times more on most days inside the standard 8 hour day when WfH.
I go in to the office once every 10-14 days or so just get a change of scenery but I usually get very little done. It might be my office skills are completely shot but I know for sure the 2 hours a day commute are wasted time, I usually use that to do some work place training done. I don't mind "staying late" when WFH as you're 20 paces from the dinner table, worst case east dinner while working on a problem if you're really on the hop. I don't even mind working the commute time for free, I often do as it's just time that would be wasted. No one suggest using a laptop on the train, you try it on a packed train at 5pm in or out of London and see what happens!
However I can understand some people need to get out of bad situations, just get a break from domestic abuse and the office is a safe place, especially is they know the abuser will have calmed down by the time they get back home.
The more companies encourage hybrid, the more most of them increase their profits.
Being partly retired now, I have money invested for pension and this will make more for company profits etc. That means more to pension funds.
I just don't invest in property firms, in the same way, I don't invest in weapons sales, tobacco and the oil industry. Yes, this may have a negative effect on my income but I sleep fine and Tory donors may not!
If working in teams face to face is really so critical for productivity, why have the finance, IT and other critical support services I work with daily been offshored to India and eastern Europe?
I have a gut feeling that teams do work better when everyone is face to face, but execs need to show a bit more evidence for their thinking because it seems a bit cart before the horse - I suspect they mostly don't like coming in and not being able to survey their empire of workers (and it is the execs coming in). Or they could just wait it out for a recession and people will get less picky - but I think there has been a bit of a lasting shift towards increased flexibility, which can only be a good thing.
Exposed by social media. Most junior staff keep their mobile phone display open next to their keyboards so they can check it every few seconds.
As for more senior staff - you do not need me to say. You know who you are. And you can also recognise the former Miss Croatia from the far side of the stadium.
I enjoy working from home, but like eating tasty food, it is possible to have too much of a good thing, so I do make an effort to go to the office about once a week.
If companies really wanted to make offices desirable, then allowing individuals to have a private office, with a door might help (in knowledge working sectors at least).
I find the office to be a complete waste of time, distracting and I get so little done. It's best skive going, is going into the office!!
You're book yourself in and then you don't have to get sod all done, the fact that you're in the office is enough to keep management happy your working even when you're not. Last few times in the office I must have got about 30 mins work done the whole day! Back WFH the next day and actually had to get some work done. Still nice to see a few people and free coffee and biscuits instead of using my own!
This. Totally this. A sales office is a really noisy place to try and work, and as all of my calls are on Teams/Zoom, I try to just schedule them for the days I'm not in the office and can hear myself talk, as I'm fed up of complaints from customers about the background noise.
Avoid Tue and Thu, I found those to the be worst, next Wed is not great. Mon is OK but people will try to get their once-a-week visit out of the way. Fri is OK but it's getting home late on a Fri evening that's the killer but the pubs in the city are half empty Fri lunchtimes if you get to meet up with a few people and waste Fri afternoon doing nothing useful but clock watching.
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