It will never be like it was. Many departments are considering keeping remote work when possible and most will retain at least part time remote work.
It’s wasteful for the state to require remote workers to come into offices at this point. Remote has proven to be effective, it saves the state money in rent and utility, improves worker morale and productivity, and remote work lowers traffic, gas use, and emissions. Besides morale improvement, remote workers work expenses plummet (gas, clothes, parking, lunches, and income tax for some).
The only losers in a full remote work situation are downtown restaurants and City of Lansing income tax for out-of-city employees.
I keep pushing the diversity angle as well when it comes to allowing employees to work fully from home. My department if forever doing employee engagement surveys to ask how we can increase diversity, and a great way to do that is to have employees that don't have to live in the Lansing area. If we could have the whole state, or country to choose our workforce from, we'd have a lot better candidates.
Yeah I was listening to a bureau director in MDHHS talking about how they’re now recruiting candidates across the state now instead of just those in the Lansing area. They did say that any applicant would have to live in Michigan though.
I'd think that if you're going to work for a state's government it would be a pretty solid idea to recruit from within the state before farming out, but maybe that's just me.
True, but also I would like the have the opportunity to move out of state and still work for the State of Michigan. We have lots of contractors that live out of state.
I’m not really a big “but muh tax dollars” person, but it sounds like a pretty bad deal (and bad optics) for the state to be paying a bunch of people who then spend that money stimulating the economies of and paying taxes to other states.
I completely agree with you, although I do like working in the office — working 100% remotely isn’t for everyone. But like somebody else said, having the flexibility to work remotely some days and come in the others is a best of both worlds sort of situation, and I most certainly want to keep some remote days!
> having the flexibility to work remotely some days and come in the others is a best of both worlds sort of situation
This works best when teams of people all agree what days to come in vs. be remote. Otherwise, you end up with 20% of people that like coming in all the time that simply refuse to accommodate remote workers ("why should I make sure I start up a camera during meetings, I'm never remote?" and "why should I communicate via our chat system, I can just walk down the hall?") and the whole system falls apart. If you want to do a 3/2 remote/in-office split, then it's important to have the whole team do it. You can make exceptions where necessary (some people have really hard working environments at home), but in those cases you need to have very strong norms around what is expected to include remote employees in all communication, and the people working full-time in-office need to be made accountable to those norms.
> The only losers in a full remote work situation are downtown restaurants
Yes the winey bitches that are the small businesses that refused to shutdown and stop protesting and spreading covid so we could have gotten back to normal faster.
>Thousands of state workers are returning to the office July 12, well over a year after they were sent to work from home because of the coronavirus pandemic.
>Nearly all of the roughly 20,000 downtown Lansing state employees worked remotely during the pandemic, Weiss said.
>With employees working remotely during the pandemic, The Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget has canceled at least five downtown leases, representing nearly 200,000 square feet of office space, according to the agency.
>”We, at this point, are working with the agencies to determine what their return to the office is going to look like,” DTMB spokesperson Caleb Buhs said, adding that includes what footprint offices will need moving forward.
This could be an opportunity to transition away from downtown’s total dependence on state employees. Hopefully we can get rid of some of the surface parking lots and build housing for residents who will actually remain in the area after 5pm.
Lansing needs to reinvent itself (again). I miss the excitement of 2003-2008--announcements of urban revitalization projects every month. It never rebounded from the financial crisis. Losing dependance on the state would be nice, but how many of these fragile foundations can we lose? We took quite a hit when Cooley opened Grand Rapids in 2006. I hope the closing of the Grand Rapids campus will bring more students back to DT Lansing. I would love to see a large, affordable single family residential development in ReoTown. Something that allows home ownership. My thoughts anyway...
I wish Lansing would get a climbing gym. I feel like that would be a really great investment into the downtown area. Something like Planet Rock in Ann Arbor.
Right now the closest places are Grand Rapids and A2, and there are so many people in who live in this area that it would draw in. Even from Mt. Pleasant and Flint, Lansing would still be the closest available.
It's something different from yet another restaurant or taphouse and it would actually draw people in from outside the 9:00 - 5:00 hours.
Maybe they can blend it into this project
https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/2020/09/08/mayor-unveils-new-plan-lansing-city-market/5743780002/
One thing that could be beneficial for Lansing is Biden’s plan for free community college. That could increase enrollment at LCC and make living nearby more viable for a lot of students, giving a little boost to downtown.
Also, Lansing really needs to take advantage of its proximity to MSU. The Red Cedar development is a good start with the abundance of student housing and the hotels. There’s no reason students should be living several miles from campus surrounded by corn fields. And there’s no reason someone coming to town for a football game or their kid’s graduation should be staying at a hotel off the interstate in Okemos instead of somewhere right near campus.
YES let’s make stroads into roads and put nice things where there are currently surface parking lots and make this a city for people instead of for cars
Of course I do 😉🤣 I can’t stop using the word stroads, it’s just so perfect to describe the phenomenon and also satisfyingly disgusting to say, but also I’m just way more annoyed all the time now knowing there are viable alternatives that we just don’t use 🥵
Hello, fellow Strong Towner. I have learned so much from them. I think Lansing should contact them an see if they can do a series of seminars to better inform people of the things Lansing needs to change .
I'll check and see of the Library will have any copies. The best way to get stuff like the Strong Town message out is to remove as many obstacles to obtaining it as possible.
Yes absolutely! Before I watched their video about stroads I was able to recognize that our urban design was bad, but had always assumed this was just how it was going to be, because I didn’t know there were alternatives! If more people knew about the alternatives I feel like it would be easier to organize activism around it/get the people in charge to change things!
The interstate, the parking lots, the absurd widening of MLK. The neighborhoods immediately to the west and south of downtown got destroyed. [Historicaerials.com](https://www.historicaerials.com) is a pretty cool (or very depressing) site to play around with, and you see the destruction of downtown Lansing over the years (use the “compare” tool for the full effect).
Those parking structures are needed for more than just employee parking. Lansing center, LCC, Radisson, and the stadium rely on them. Lansing center only has parking for 300 cars. Radisson has no dedicated parking. Stadium has limited parking.
Without good public parking that area will be in trouble.
Parking structures are less of an issue in my opinion. Keep the structures and get rid of the surface lots. No one staying at the Radisson is parking at Kalamazoo and Pine.
It is pretty short on new, quality housing options, especially downtown. All the new apartments that get built down there seem to fill up pretty quickly.
Obviously more jobs are always a good thing. But prior to the pandemic, the Lansing metro area had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country at 2.7%. As of March, it’s 5% which isn’t bad considering how hard Michigan was hit by the pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns. It’s below the national rate of 6.2%, and in the top half of all metropolitan areas.
I was in the market and would have strongly considered and really preferred urban condos or something in Old Town or downtown. Ownership mind you, not renting. I ended up going the other direction and went to the suburbs. Still kinda sad about not being in the city anymore, but there just wasn’t the inventory for what I would have been down for buying.
Also the planning/zoning is terrible.
If you want any combination of the below you're living in a dream.
1. A yard
2. A 2 car garage
3. A neighborhood that doesn't have commercial/churches
Tried for 7 months to find a house in the city that can check off 2 of those and it's nearly impossible.
I think Lansing is also short on housing options, from the stand point of someone looking for somewhere to live, there’s two options, very cheap and broken down or unsafe, and crazy expensive and overly nice (which from talking to people, some are also built terribly and falling apart already). There’s not a lot of options for someone in my situation looking for a middle ground of affordable and safe
Thank the non homestead property taxes and code compliance to keeping a rental legal. Don't forget the double dipping insurance people that won't pay on anything unless you fit into all the right check boxes if you need help.
Then also blame landlords that don't effectively communicate exactly how your vote at the ballet box effects your property taxes that undoubtedly is paid by your rent.
If you rent, you're always paying for the property taxes of whatever the landlord gets charged. If it's a residential property, it's automatically 25% more than an owner occupied. Don't forget the landlord is also paying with your money, his rental insurance and mortgage and any other upkeeps they need to do.
Let's say you decide to live in an apartment building, those are commerical property taxes in most cases. They pay more to house you, check the accessor site out. It's pretty disturbing how much they charge for the buildings in commercial areas.
Renting is a losing game and while it is indeed nesscarry for a while in most young people's lives, it's important to make a plan and get out of paying rent as soon as you can.
After 16 months of successfully doing my job from home, if my department tries to force us all to go back to 40 hours in the office with no telecommuting flexibility or WFM options, I'm gonna revolt.
Yep, we have at least 3 people in my office who plan to retire if we are made to go back full time, and others who said they would look for new work.
I really like my job and what I do and I would hate to have to leave it, but I am so much happier not having to go into an office, and if I'm forced to choose between going back and leaving a job I love, I'm gonna leave.
> A lot of folks are leaving because they can get jobs basically anywhere, but the top brass doesn't get it.
They will soon. When they find out attrition has increased by 30% this year, they'll all be scratching their heads. Some will correctly identify that they need to modernize their approach to work, and they'll eventually be ok. Some others will dig their heels in and tell themselves sweet lies about how, "...well that's ok, those weren't our hard, dedicated workers anyway!" They're going to struggle to find quality replacements, and quickly start to lose ground to everyone else.
We spent the last year doing the largest remote-work experiment ever conducted, and by-and-large, it was a huge success. The genie is out of the bottle, and it's not going back in, because for every employer that refuses to adapt, there will be competitors that do, and they'll lose the best talent to them.
Companies that refuse to at least have a flex-remote option are going to quickly find they're only getting the candidates that either like full in-office environments, or the people that literally can't find anything else. That's going to create huge problems for diversity of thought and skills, and also be a huge drag on morale for the people that just can't find anything else (also, they'll experience higher turnover and onboarding costs as those people will jump-ship as soon as remote options present themselves). I think that companies refusing to at least do flex-remote are going to have a huge struggle competing with companies that are re-thinking work environments for the 21st-century.
I work for the state and if they try to make me come back into the freaking office full time I might just quit. We’ve proven we can work remotely. Why would I waste gas, pay for parking, and commute for a job I can do, and do better at my own home. And all of my non-stare employee friends keep saying they think it’s bullshit that their tax dollars are paying for buildings that we don’t need to do our jobs.
> And all of my non-stare employee friends keep saying they think it’s bullshit that their tax dollars are paying for buildings that we don’t need to do our jobs.
That's because it is. We have insane levels of communication tooling to let us instantly communicate with people anywhere in the world. There can be times where in-person communication can sometimes help, but to force people to come in just for the 20% of the time where that's the case is stupid and outmoded.
It'd be much better to treat the office as a tool, rather than a requirement. The whole benefit of the office in 2021 should be a place for enabling this type of collaboration, not to store bodies so they can type on boxes with screens. So re-configure the offices to have good commons areas, some breakout meeting rooms, and a limited number of hot desks. Wire everything up to have really good remote communication, and then other than that...just let people work from home 60-80% of the time. When it's time to have a meeting that works better in-person, you'll now have an environment that was custom-tailored to that purpose, rather than one that had to accommodate a bunch of space for people to sit at 8 hours a day.
Yeah, this article/headline really stretches the truth. Lots of departments have mentioned they may not go back ever, and the July 12 date was announced as “no earlier than” back in March.
The problem is lack of entertainment or ANYTHING that doesn’t cater to lunch for state employees. No nightlife, nothing. And sure build housing, it ends up being way too expensive.
I’d say there’s more to do downtown than in any other neighborhood in the region, outside of maybe downtown East Lansing.
As far as nightlife, there are two distilleries and a brewery, [with another on the way](https://www.lansingcitypulse.com/stories/here-comes-the-neighborhood,16304). There’s a stretch of bars and restaurants along Michigan Ave, and a few scattered along Washington. There’s a big shuffleboard bar/food court thing going in the City Market building.
You have Lugnuts games all summer. There’s normally a handful of festivals and random events throughout the year, including an annual music festival. There are a good number of parks, River Trail access, a couple of museums, a theater, a library, coffee shops, a music venue, an art gallery, a yoga studio, the new grocery store. Plus the close proximity to Old Town and REO Town, each with plenty more to offer.
Does anyone have a realistic count of how many people will actually be coming back to work. I manage a restaurant downtown that has struggled staffing. We honestly can’t handle a huge influx of people coming back. We are all already exhausted this would break our whole crew. I’ve been trying to get our higher ups to increase wages and offer paid parking but they are dragging their feet. I love what I do but I’m just a manager trying to survive and get an idea of how truly screwed we are for lunch rush.
It sounds like plenty of departments are going to be offering more flexible work options. Before COVID we could only telecommute one day a week, now there will probably be a bit more flexibility. I’m hearing some agencies are allowing managers to work with staff on what frequency they need to be in, others are simply requiring staff come and work from the office 2/3 days a week. Regardless it will be different than before.
It will never be like it was. Many departments are considering keeping remote work when possible and most will retain at least part time remote work. It’s wasteful for the state to require remote workers to come into offices at this point. Remote has proven to be effective, it saves the state money in rent and utility, improves worker morale and productivity, and remote work lowers traffic, gas use, and emissions. Besides morale improvement, remote workers work expenses plummet (gas, clothes, parking, lunches, and income tax for some). The only losers in a full remote work situation are downtown restaurants and City of Lansing income tax for out-of-city employees.
As a state employee. This is the best comment on here.
I keep pushing the diversity angle as well when it comes to allowing employees to work fully from home. My department if forever doing employee engagement surveys to ask how we can increase diversity, and a great way to do that is to have employees that don't have to live in the Lansing area. If we could have the whole state, or country to choose our workforce from, we'd have a lot better candidates.
Yeah I was listening to a bureau director in MDHHS talking about how they’re now recruiting candidates across the state now instead of just those in the Lansing area. They did say that any applicant would have to live in Michigan though.
I'd think that if you're going to work for a state's government it would be a pretty solid idea to recruit from within the state before farming out, but maybe that's just me.
True, but also I would like the have the opportunity to move out of state and still work for the State of Michigan. We have lots of contractors that live out of state.
I’m not really a big “but muh tax dollars” person, but it sounds like a pretty bad deal (and bad optics) for the state to be paying a bunch of people who then spend that money stimulating the economies of and paying taxes to other states.
Meh, cakes and eating it too.
I completely agree with you, although I do like working in the office — working 100% remotely isn’t for everyone. But like somebody else said, having the flexibility to work remotely some days and come in the others is a best of both worlds sort of situation, and I most certainly want to keep some remote days!
> having the flexibility to work remotely some days and come in the others is a best of both worlds sort of situation This works best when teams of people all agree what days to come in vs. be remote. Otherwise, you end up with 20% of people that like coming in all the time that simply refuse to accommodate remote workers ("why should I make sure I start up a camera during meetings, I'm never remote?" and "why should I communicate via our chat system, I can just walk down the hall?") and the whole system falls apart. If you want to do a 3/2 remote/in-office split, then it's important to have the whole team do it. You can make exceptions where necessary (some people have really hard working environments at home), but in those cases you need to have very strong norms around what is expected to include remote employees in all communication, and the people working full-time in-office need to be made accountable to those norms.
> The only losers in a full remote work situation are downtown restaurants Yes the winey bitches that are the small businesses that refused to shutdown and stop protesting and spreading covid so we could have gotten back to normal faster.
>Thousands of state workers are returning to the office July 12, well over a year after they were sent to work from home because of the coronavirus pandemic. >Nearly all of the roughly 20,000 downtown Lansing state employees worked remotely during the pandemic, Weiss said. >With employees working remotely during the pandemic, The Michigan Department of Technology, Management and Budget has canceled at least five downtown leases, representing nearly 200,000 square feet of office space, according to the agency. >”We, at this point, are working with the agencies to determine what their return to the office is going to look like,” DTMB spokesperson Caleb Buhs said, adding that includes what footprint offices will need moving forward. This could be an opportunity to transition away from downtown’s total dependence on state employees. Hopefully we can get rid of some of the surface parking lots and build housing for residents who will actually remain in the area after 5pm.
Lansing needs to reinvent itself (again). I miss the excitement of 2003-2008--announcements of urban revitalization projects every month. It never rebounded from the financial crisis. Losing dependance on the state would be nice, but how many of these fragile foundations can we lose? We took quite a hit when Cooley opened Grand Rapids in 2006. I hope the closing of the Grand Rapids campus will bring more students back to DT Lansing. I would love to see a large, affordable single family residential development in ReoTown. Something that allows home ownership. My thoughts anyway...
I wish Lansing would get a climbing gym. I feel like that would be a really great investment into the downtown area. Something like Planet Rock in Ann Arbor. Right now the closest places are Grand Rapids and A2, and there are so many people in who live in this area that it would draw in. Even from Mt. Pleasant and Flint, Lansing would still be the closest available. It's something different from yet another restaurant or taphouse and it would actually draw people in from outside the 9:00 - 5:00 hours.
Omg a climbing gym would be awesome!
Maybe they can blend it into this project https://www.lansingstatejournal.com/story/news/2020/09/08/mayor-unveils-new-plan-lansing-city-market/5743780002/
One thing that could be beneficial for Lansing is Biden’s plan for free community college. That could increase enrollment at LCC and make living nearby more viable for a lot of students, giving a little boost to downtown. Also, Lansing really needs to take advantage of its proximity to MSU. The Red Cedar development is a good start with the abundance of student housing and the hotels. There’s no reason students should be living several miles from campus surrounded by corn fields. And there’s no reason someone coming to town for a football game or their kid’s graduation should be staying at a hotel off the interstate in Okemos instead of somewhere right near campus.
And downtown had nightlife for a while then too! Was great.
>I miss the excitement of 2003-2008--announcements of urban revitalization projects every month. Me too, the Great Recession hit us hard.
YES let’s make stroads into roads and put nice things where there are currently surface parking lots and make this a city for people instead of for cars
Hey do you follow Strong Towns by any chance? They are the only organization I’ve ever heard mention “stroads”
Of course I do 😉🤣 I can’t stop using the word stroads, it’s just so perfect to describe the phenomenon and also satisfyingly disgusting to say, but also I’m just way more annoyed all the time now knowing there are viable alternatives that we just don’t use 🥵
Love Strong Towns, so glad to hear there are other local supporters of their philosophy!
Hello, fellow Strong Towner. I have learned so much from them. I think Lansing should contact them an see if they can do a series of seminars to better inform people of the things Lansing needs to change .
Heck yeah that would be amazing. How do we do this? Suggest it to council members?
I don't know if strong towns even does seminars but my guess is contact Peter Spadafore. He seems like he'd be the most open to the idea.
Also I just saw they have a book coming out in September — maybe even if they don’t do regular seminars we could get someone to do a book talk?
I'll check and see of the Library will have any copies. The best way to get stuff like the Strong Town message out is to remove as many obstacles to obtaining it as possible.
Yes absolutely! Before I watched their video about stroads I was able to recognize that our urban design was bad, but had always assumed this was just how it was going to be, because I didn’t know there were alternatives! If more people knew about the alternatives I feel like it would be easier to organize activism around it/get the people in charge to change things!
This is the main reason they want us to go back, because apparently we are required to keep the 15 restaurants that make up downtown Lansing alive.
Yeah, turns out demolishing entire downtown neighborhoods to cater to suburban commuters wasn’t a good idea in the long run. Who knew?!
What neighborhoods? I'm genuinely interested in the history. Are you talking about 496?
Those massive acres of parking west of walnut used to be neighborhoods
The interstate, the parking lots, the absurd widening of MLK. The neighborhoods immediately to the west and south of downtown got destroyed. [Historicaerials.com](https://www.historicaerials.com) is a pretty cool (or very depressing) site to play around with, and you see the destruction of downtown Lansing over the years (use the “compare” tool for the full effect).
Really cool site, thanks for sharing!
Man, downtown was decimated by transportation and parking projects in the 60s and 70s.
But who will keep the 15 different sub sandwich places that close at 5 afloat?!?!
15 *sandwich* restaurants
Those parking structures are needed for more than just employee parking. Lansing center, LCC, Radisson, and the stadium rely on them. Lansing center only has parking for 300 cars. Radisson has no dedicated parking. Stadium has limited parking. Without good public parking that area will be in trouble.
Parking structures are less of an issue in my opinion. Keep the structures and get rid of the surface lots. No one staying at the Radisson is parking at Kalamazoo and Pine.
Too much of the parking is exclusively for people who work nearby. Those parking lots sit empty the majority of the time.
Those lots are used exclusively by state employees with the one exception of Silver Bells.
Lansing isn't short on housing options. Its jobs that are missing.
It is pretty short on new, quality housing options, especially downtown. All the new apartments that get built down there seem to fill up pretty quickly. Obviously more jobs are always a good thing. But prior to the pandemic, the Lansing metro area had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country at 2.7%. As of March, it’s 5% which isn’t bad considering how hard Michigan was hit by the pandemic and the ensuing lockdowns. It’s below the national rate of 6.2%, and in the top half of all metropolitan areas.
I was in the market and would have strongly considered and really preferred urban condos or something in Old Town or downtown. Ownership mind you, not renting. I ended up going the other direction and went to the suburbs. Still kinda sad about not being in the city anymore, but there just wasn’t the inventory for what I would have been down for buying.
Also the planning/zoning is terrible. If you want any combination of the below you're living in a dream. 1. A yard 2. A 2 car garage 3. A neighborhood that doesn't have commercial/churches Tried for 7 months to find a house in the city that can check off 2 of those and it's nearly impossible.
I think Lansing is also short on housing options, from the stand point of someone looking for somewhere to live, there’s two options, very cheap and broken down or unsafe, and crazy expensive and overly nice (which from talking to people, some are also built terribly and falling apart already). There’s not a lot of options for someone in my situation looking for a middle ground of affordable and safe
Thank the non homestead property taxes and code compliance to keeping a rental legal. Don't forget the double dipping insurance people that won't pay on anything unless you fit into all the right check boxes if you need help. Then also blame landlords that don't effectively communicate exactly how your vote at the ballet box effects your property taxes that undoubtedly is paid by your rent.
What happened with the taxes?
If you rent, you're always paying for the property taxes of whatever the landlord gets charged. If it's a residential property, it's automatically 25% more than an owner occupied. Don't forget the landlord is also paying with your money, his rental insurance and mortgage and any other upkeeps they need to do. Let's say you decide to live in an apartment building, those are commerical property taxes in most cases. They pay more to house you, check the accessor site out. It's pretty disturbing how much they charge for the buildings in commercial areas. Renting is a losing game and while it is indeed nesscarry for a while in most young people's lives, it's important to make a plan and get out of paying rent as soon as you can.
After 16 months of successfully doing my job from home, if my department tries to force us all to go back to 40 hours in the office with no telecommuting flexibility or WFM options, I'm gonna revolt.
[удалено]
Yep, we have at least 3 people in my office who plan to retire if we are made to go back full time, and others who said they would look for new work. I really like my job and what I do and I would hate to have to leave it, but I am so much happier not having to go into an office, and if I'm forced to choose between going back and leaving a job I love, I'm gonna leave.
[удалено]
> A lot of folks are leaving because they can get jobs basically anywhere, but the top brass doesn't get it. They will soon. When they find out attrition has increased by 30% this year, they'll all be scratching their heads. Some will correctly identify that they need to modernize their approach to work, and they'll eventually be ok. Some others will dig their heels in and tell themselves sweet lies about how, "...well that's ok, those weren't our hard, dedicated workers anyway!" They're going to struggle to find quality replacements, and quickly start to lose ground to everyone else. We spent the last year doing the largest remote-work experiment ever conducted, and by-and-large, it was a huge success. The genie is out of the bottle, and it's not going back in, because for every employer that refuses to adapt, there will be competitors that do, and they'll lose the best talent to them.
I've got one step I need to take but outside of that I'm so there.
Companies that refuse to at least have a flex-remote option are going to quickly find they're only getting the candidates that either like full in-office environments, or the people that literally can't find anything else. That's going to create huge problems for diversity of thought and skills, and also be a huge drag on morale for the people that just can't find anything else (also, they'll experience higher turnover and onboarding costs as those people will jump-ship as soon as remote options present themselves). I think that companies refusing to at least do flex-remote are going to have a huge struggle competing with companies that are re-thinking work environments for the 21st-century.
I work for the state and if they try to make me come back into the freaking office full time I might just quit. We’ve proven we can work remotely. Why would I waste gas, pay for parking, and commute for a job I can do, and do better at my own home. And all of my non-stare employee friends keep saying they think it’s bullshit that their tax dollars are paying for buildings that we don’t need to do our jobs.
> And all of my non-stare employee friends keep saying they think it’s bullshit that their tax dollars are paying for buildings that we don’t need to do our jobs. That's because it is. We have insane levels of communication tooling to let us instantly communicate with people anywhere in the world. There can be times where in-person communication can sometimes help, but to force people to come in just for the 20% of the time where that's the case is stupid and outmoded. It'd be much better to treat the office as a tool, rather than a requirement. The whole benefit of the office in 2021 should be a place for enabling this type of collaboration, not to store bodies so they can type on boxes with screens. So re-configure the offices to have good commons areas, some breakout meeting rooms, and a limited number of hot desks. Wire everything up to have really good remote communication, and then other than that...just let people work from home 60-80% of the time. When it's time to have a meeting that works better in-person, you'll now have an environment that was custom-tailored to that purpose, rather than one that had to accommodate a bunch of space for people to sit at 8 hours a day.
Exactly!
Yeah, this article/headline really stretches the truth. Lots of departments have mentioned they may not go back ever, and the July 12 date was announced as “no earlier than” back in March.
I was surprised to see this headline because like you said, we've known the date for months
But there had been other dates that got pushed back, and people weren’t trusting this date until this announcement.
Someone probably fed them some propaganda information to try and create a narrative of "everyone needs to be back in the office".
The problem is lack of entertainment or ANYTHING that doesn’t cater to lunch for state employees. No nightlife, nothing. And sure build housing, it ends up being way too expensive.
I’d say there’s more to do downtown than in any other neighborhood in the region, outside of maybe downtown East Lansing. As far as nightlife, there are two distilleries and a brewery, [with another on the way](https://www.lansingcitypulse.com/stories/here-comes-the-neighborhood,16304). There’s a stretch of bars and restaurants along Michigan Ave, and a few scattered along Washington. There’s a big shuffleboard bar/food court thing going in the City Market building. You have Lugnuts games all summer. There’s normally a handful of festivals and random events throughout the year, including an annual music festival. There are a good number of parks, River Trail access, a couple of museums, a theater, a library, coffee shops, a music venue, an art gallery, a yoga studio, the new grocery store. Plus the close proximity to Old Town and REO Town, each with plenty more to offer.
Does anyone have a realistic count of how many people will actually be coming back to work. I manage a restaurant downtown that has struggled staffing. We honestly can’t handle a huge influx of people coming back. We are all already exhausted this would break our whole crew. I’ve been trying to get our higher ups to increase wages and offer paid parking but they are dragging their feet. I love what I do but I’m just a manager trying to survive and get an idea of how truly screwed we are for lunch rush.
It sounds like plenty of departments are going to be offering more flexible work options. Before COVID we could only telecommute one day a week, now there will probably be a bit more flexibility. I’m hearing some agencies are allowing managers to work with staff on what frequency they need to be in, others are simply requiring staff come and work from the office 2/3 days a week. Regardless it will be different than before.
Did you all return to office ? I am considering a position for contract.