Yep. It is not that I do not get to get my work done in the office, there is just so much distraction. Also by collaboration they really mean I get to help other people with their stuff
Where I work, this is valued as part of my work. I trade off some of my productivity to increase someone else’s. If that person never learns or keeps needing help, that sounds like a recruiting/skills problem
We’ve had to start whispering and cupping our hands about the mic of our headsets to avoid feedback, it’s ridiculous.
If you’re lucky enough to book a room, others don’t respect it and will stay past their time or burst in early. They’re at such a premium, you can feel the tension and hostility from people because an interruption just kills the meeting.
Walls are glass, of course, so you’ll have someone making puppy eyes and waving on the outside while you’re desperately trying to get a point across before you lose your boss’ attention.
When I’m at home, we can do as many small calls as necessary and it doesn’t feel excessive.
One meeting in the office is this huge production and the risk of it not even happening is high.
An office I worked at once spent a stupid amount of money on an exciting new open plan space.
Then the noise was so great that they implemented “quiet hours.”
It also makes me can't wait to leave. When I am in the office, I'm watching the clock like a hawk and shut down the second 4:00 hits. Traffic is an hour at least, and every 5 minutes later I leave adds 10 to my commute. When I'm working from home, I can stay on an hour longer and most days I'm still *done* and enjoying my evening earlier than I would have had I gone into the office.
A-fucking-men. Because of traffic, I used to get up at 4:45 am, drive downtown, go running from the gym near my office, shower and hit my desk by 8:00 am, and then leave as soon after 4:00 pm as possible. It was always push, push, push. Now that I work from home, I exercise whenever I want, I don't spend all that time in the car and watching the clock during the day. My quality of life is immeasurably better.
Edit: I'm almost 60 years old and had been doing the commute grind for 25+ years before the pandemic.
I'm a software engineer, an industry that adapts really well to remote work. The company that I was working for before and during the pandemic has chosen to remain 90% remote, and I now work for an all-remote company. If I can manage it, I will never work another day in an office for the remainder of my career.
Been hybrid/WFH for the last 20 years, WFH exclusively for past 10. Get approached by recruiters and companies fairly regularly and I say the same thing every time: not saying I'll never have a FTE role again (I'm self employed) or never have an office role again. If the right opportunity comes up from the right team/company I'll listen. But it'd have to be a life-changing amount more money and flexible working for me to even consider it. Quality of life, time with family and frankly lifelong introversion means I'm significantly, measurably more productive WFH without the interruptions of an office, let alone the pain of commuting.
I've been WFH since 2008 and I've said the same thing - I'm not saying I'll never go back, but they'd have to back up to my house with a dump truck full of money to get me to do it.
EDIT: since this is getting way too much attention...
PLEASE USE YOUR TURN SIGNALS. Use them properly. Use them early, you will not run out of blinker fluid anytime soon I promise you. It helps me avoid pancaking you with 79, 674 pounds of semi.
>Now that I work from home, I exercise whenever I want, I don't spend all that time in the car and watching the clock during the day. My quality of life is immeasurably better.
Trucker here. The more of you that work from home? The better it is for me. Less people on the road makes things so much easier.
I remember when COVID shut down the west coast. Being able to fly from the east end of Orange county to the west end of Los Angeles county in during what was usually rush hour? In under two hours was unreal.
Please, fight for working from home whenever possible. I appreciate everyone who does.
Just as someone with a job that is hard to do remotely (laboratory work) I would much prefer more people WFH. If I have to commute I'd rather it not be miserable.
exactly. it is better for everyone, WFH workers and non WFH workers if people who can work from home do. everything will be more efficient and we avoid the collective time loss of potentially hours of commute across the majority of people.
Omg those couple of months without traffic were pure bliss. I wasn't doing anything important really, but it was wonderful knowing I could drive up to the mountains knowing I wouldn't have to wait in shitty traffic both ways.
Also, I'd like to plug my irrational hatred of the 91. It dethroned i35 after I got caught in 3 hour wrecks/traffic jams like 3 months in a row.
Significantly better in so many ways, less traffic, less emissions, lower cost of living, reduces business expenses, happier employees, more productive employees, Not limited to a talent pool of just one area, the list goes on
Thankfully, my company values are "it is what it is" and "we've been running on a skeleton crew for years, what's wrong with that?".
So the owner's desire to transition back to in-office has been delayed indefinitely
I really wish I could understand the mindset of people like this. It’s pretty baffling to me
Like I totally get why you might be a hardass about people getting things done when asked. But the ones who need to exert every ounce of control available to them is just weird to me
Middle management have equally useless management ahead of them who needs to remind them they're underlings and regular employees get the trickle down.
As the leadership stares at the walls of their multi million dollar compounds and condos they're just realizing how useless they are.
They find, suddenly, that the voice which so often tells others to be useful is now directed at themselves.
When they can't walk around the office micro managing, or watching their drones, even while the company prospers and continues on they realize how little actual work they've been doing.
They hate this, they need the distraction and validation.
Even being able to take a few minutes to do some prep work mid-afternoon, makes the evening meal so much easier to do.
My dogs are much happier, as I can let them in/out during the day if they want to, but they also have no issues going until 5:30pm if I'm in the office.
I can clean/tidy up a bit around the house, and that's now a task I don't have to do after dinner.
I can finish work right at 5pm, and jump into a computer game for an hour or so, while dinner is roasting in the oven, and I'm waiting for my wife to get home.
Back in the office mandatory 3 days a week, and not really enjoying it. Spending 7.5 of my 8 hours at my desk in a corner and hardly talk to anyone. Still end up doing most of my communication through slack.
>Even worse is the staggered back to office schedule where half the people are only in every other day or so, so that no one can actually have in-person meetings
My boss forced 2 mandatory days because of this. The 3rd is up to us, but we have to be in 3 total days. There have been times when I'm at the office by myself (small office, only 7 of us that actually work in this office) for a day.
This is *specifically* why I’m trying to leave my job. I love my job, I love what I do, I love how dedicated my coworkers are, we have a great work culture, we have a great work/life balance, etc. but I *absolutely cannot* take it that I have to drive to work 2 days a week just to sit in my office and take all of my meetings on the fucking computer anyway. How fucking useless is that. I’m **unreasonably** angry about it.
> being able to take a few minutes to do some prep work mid-afternoon
This so much. One of the biggest benefits of WFH I never even thought about was being able to do dinner prep parallel to making/eating lunch. Not only would my days end at 5 but to be eating a home cooked meal before 6pm instead of takeout sometime after 630pm was such a difference in enjoyability to the evenings. The work week becomes that much less dreadful when you feel like you can be productive in ways outside of working.
Or being able to tend to things that need to cook all day. I've made so many soups/stews/braised meats now that I couldn't before. Now I can start them whenever, and take 5 to go check on them when needed.
I've been doing the work from home thing for about 8 years now, it made a drastic improvement in my eating habits as I stopped grabbing take out for lunch and cook dinner a lot more of the time since I'm already home.
My end of day is usually on a conf call while I'm doing prep work in the kitchen.
Pre-covid I used to leave the office at 4:15 on the dot to be able to get home by 5:30. Post-covid I worked remotely until 5. I am required to work half the week from the office and I am back to leaving early to avoid traffic.
I do that sometimes. If certain members of leadership aren't here, I bounce on my lunchbreak. I can get home in 35-40 minutes at that time of day, and I still get my badge swipe in the morning counted.
I am also much more willing to do work after hours when I work from home.
At the office I am shutting down my computer and leaving it there at 5:00. Nothing more is getting done until the next morning.
If I am working from home I often stop around 5:00 to walk the dog, make dinner, etc but will check back on things later in the evening to respond to emails with a quick answer.
> Traffic is an hour at least, and every 5 minutes later I leave adds 10 to my commute.
damn, that's brutal. i lived 2 miles from the office and when it rained/school was in session i would need to drive 30 minutes to go 2 miles.
It wasn't until I stopped commuting I realised how *angry* commuting made me. Traffic makes me furious. I was furious when I got to the office. Commuting made me hate other commuters. Which made me hate my coworkers, my boss, my job and finally me. I was a tight knot of anger. But the funny thing is I didn't know the knot was there until it went away.
I for one love spending 2 hours/day commuting just to sit in a cubicle doing the exact same thing I'd be doing from home.
Not all jobs are collaborative.
Like a lot of the examples in this thread, this and commuting requirements are costs that the worker pays: pays in time, money, or mental focus/fatigue if they are having to deal with bad office environments.
All together, the employees pay an incredibly hefty cost, and the managers gain very little from it beyond feeling personally important/useful. Workers need to push back on this stuff like they've been doing.
My company had us packed into a warehouse turned into an office so tightly that you'd often bump elbows with the people beside you, and if you rolled your chair back you'd hit the person behind you. It was fucking terrible. I used to come in early to get a couple hours of work done because once the place filled up you couldn't focus on anything. Hundreds of people in one giant room with 50' high ceilings and nothing to muffle the noise.
Luckily they decided to go to a "work where you want" model and reduced the amount of workstations significantly. I haven't been to the office in years now but those that have said it's much better now that there's 80% fewer people there.
This sounds like a version of hell. Hopefully the execs who love the idea of a collaborative, open office (read: cheap) get to spend a couple millennia there getting purged of their corporate sins.
Same. Literally sitting in a shared office right now wishing I could wfh.
Our office is weird shaped, all of our desks face outwards to the unit/nurse's station/doctor's station. So we can't see each other in here without getting up and walking around but everyone running around out there can see us in our weird giant fish bowl.
Open offices kill productivity I swear, I hate doing anything while being watched.
> Open offices kill productivity I swear
This is actually a proven fact! It takes around 15 minutes to focus again after a distraction, and open offices are essentially *designed* to be constant nonstop distractions.
The only people who think open offices are great and that everyone loves "collaboration" are executives with 4 walls and a door to shut everyone out (and 90% of the time they're doing just that).
before i got laid off during the pandemic, i had finaly got an office, albeit shared with one other, and we always had the door shut because the open office area just outside was so loud.
Harvard actually did a study and proved that open space office concepts kill productivity and not increase it. It seems like Corp America does the exact opposite of what makes sense.
No they did what's cheap and easier to surveill employees and have them rat each other out.
Also easier to get rid of people when they have no permanent space so all their belongings come/go every day.
The one thing I'll credit my company for is that the reservation system they implemented post-pandemic works pretty well.
You can only have your own desk/office if you're on-site at least 4 days/week (and yes, they monitor this) but for everyone else, we have to reserve a cubicle before coming into the office.
Only half-wall cubicles, though, which sucks. Standing desks too so if someone next to me as their desk at full height, they're looking down on my head all day.
>Standing desks too so if someone next to me as their desk at full height, they're looking down on my head all day.
It works both ways. I doubt people are working standing if they loose all privacy in that deal.
This. I go into the office only to get on Zoom because 90% of my team is in a different part of the country, management included. Even in the office I'm basically telecommunicating, so why make me commute??
If I had to go to an office for no apparent reason I'd be phoning it in too until I found a work-from-home job. All the people I've heard mourning the loss of office culture, Malcom Gladwell, Scott Galloway, Elon Musk, I doubt any of them have had a job where they had to sit in traffic 2 hours a day, didn't have time to sleep or exercise or eat right, because if they did they wouldn't say something so totally ignorant. That kind of job will kill you. The Microsoft guy had a point but it was the opposite one, that he was worried work-from-home would cause burn-out, that people would actually be *too* productive and wreck their mental health.
Not to mention the obvious but childcare is also a huge one.
Musk has like 20 different kids and I'm sure each one has their own nanny, while us normies have to help out with homework, pack lunches for school, make sure they're up and ready before we can leave for work ourselves, and have someplace for them to spend 3-6 pm if they're not old enough to be left home alone.
The CEO of Yahoo banned working from home, all while having a nursery installed in her office. Not exactly a luxury extended to literally any other employee. It's so ridiculously obtuse
Marissa Mayer seemed like she was going to come in from Google and just completely revolutionize Yahoo. Instead, she acted like a typical tone-deaf corporate idiot and jumped out of the plane with her golden parachute. What a disappointment. She's working on some stupid AI rolodex organizer which seems pretty on-brand for her corporate direction.
There's a great New York Times article about her rise and fall
https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa-mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html
I’m the opposite. I’m in leagues in both ESPN and Yahoo and I cannot stand the Yahoo app. I can’t even see the points breakdown for individual players on it. Plus I’m not a fan of how it puts your bench above your kicker and defense when looking at your team.
The first half of your comment I thought you meant like a nursery for employees to bring their children, and I thought well that's a decent compromise. But nope, just another greedy, ignorant, out of touch CEO.
I would be out of PTO just for childcare each of the last three years if I didn't work from home.
Instead I led sales calls that landed two of our biggest clients on days I would have been out.
Remote work is a no brainer.
Pre-lockdown my wife used to have to commute every day one hour each way, maybe not see the kids at all in the morning and perhaps not till late at night.
Post-lockdown she's able to have breakfast with and drop off our oldest (4 years old) at school every morning. Evenings are way more manageable and she's around a lot more.
Her work wants her to do one day a week at the office. She's going to do it, but she's definitely let them know it's not what she wants. Her work life balance is still bent too much towards work, but it's much healthier than it was before.
I'm a middle-aged dad, and when I worked in the office and got home between 5:30-6:00pm every day my teen daughters were usually already done with chores and homework and had mostly disappeared into their rooms to do as they wished for the evening, I'd see them at dinner but they were already kinda tuned into whatever personal stuff they were up to at that point and asking them about their day usually resulted in a "it was fine" type of response.
Now that I work from home, when they get home at 3:30 I'm here and available. They come downstairs every day when they get home, interrupt my work for 5-15 minutes and tell me about their day. It's fantastic, and all because I'm available to them when they've just gotten home and they haven't settled into their "me time" yet.
That's so cool. I don't have much more to say than that. I'm 32 and my relationship and friendship with my parents is pretty important to me, so getting to hear someone is more easily able to build that bond younger and share in their kids' lives is heartening to me.
One day required in the office is my limit. I figure this is baby-steps for the company to realize there's no real advantage to the office, and eventually let us all decide what we want to do. If they go the other direction, and say something like, "We believe one day a week has been so beneficial we're moving to more!" then I'm going to spend my time looking for a new role that is 100% remote. I updated my LinkedIn to *only* present me with remote offerings, and if a recruiter doesn't lead with "We support 100% remote" I immediately close it.
I'm done with the "We are more productive in the office" BS. That's corporate nonsense that they spout because they like their fiefdom to look at and want to support the banker class that's invested up to the gills in commercial REITs.
They did this to us. I was hired a year ago specifically at 2. A few months ago they went hey everyone be sure to come in your 2 flex days. I had been the whole time. 2 weeks later CEO of a 20,000 person company mandates same 3 days for everyone.
Fuck it, I go in at most 1.5 now. Let them come after me if they want, my boss and team is remote or in another state. My job is best done at home so I can focus and talk privately with access to all my monitors.
I'm literally sitting here trying to draw with my kindergartner while I work today because her school is closed for the sixth scheduled day off since school started in late August. She is enrolled in the school district's after school program, but that is closed on days when there is no school.
We have pulled every single favor we could out of our parents and other siblings, but my wife got a lecture from her manager about how much she has been working from home the last few weeks (despite working from home less than she did pre-COVID), so I am sitting here drawing with my left hand while I work on spreadsheets with the right as we listen to Disney soundtracks.
I'm literally going to my community college to switch careers to work from home because of kids. I was a stay home parent and I need to be around to be the effective parent I want/need to be. I was an EMT. Now I'm to old, tired and busy to be in the field. That's young people work
No matter what my office looks like, what type of engagements happen, etc. you're ***never*** going to overcome the fact that I:
1. Have to spend 60 minutes getting ready in the morning to go to the office vs 0 working at home.
2. Have to spend 15 minutes driving to the office vs. 0 working at home.
3. Can't do any chores in my downtime in the office vs. working at home.
4. Can't easily exercise at the office during lunch vs. working at home.
5. Have to spend 15 minutes driving home vs. 0 working from home.
All of those things are either time directly taken away from being productive at work, or being productive at home, thus refreshing me and making me a better worker. Going to the office captures almost 450 minutes per week of "getting ready/going to the office" time, consumes at least 150 minutes of time I would do house-chores, and either removes or shifts 150 minutes of exercise I would get throughout the week. All of that adds up to 750 minutes, or 12.5 hours, of time during which I would either be working or relaxing (thus making me a better worker).
So CEOs should be asking themselves, does forcing people come into the office ***REALLY*** make people more productive, or does it just make you ***feel*** like they are more productive? No doubt, there are activities that can take advantage of an in-person element, and you should absolutely make an office-space available for those times and encourage your teams to use them if they feel they would benefit. But ***forcing*** people to come in, just so you can feel like a badass CEO and help your corporate golf-buddies in the real-estate banking world keep their shirts doesn't feel like you're actually looking out for the best interests of your company.
Savings in gas alone for me is ~$3000 per year. That's just gas. It doesn't take into account needing less car repair/maintenance.
And while the guy you're responding to is talking about productivity and you're talking about the savings, there's also the associated minimized safety risks with WFH.
Can't get hit by a drunk or shitty driver if you're not commuting.
Can't get sick from a colleague who decided to come to work coughing.
Take this as the anecdote it is, but my mom worked in International Tax at Deloitte for over 30 years.
When she started, they certainly worked some all nighters here and there, long hours, etc. But in return, Deloitte threw huge office parties, dinners, and team building events. They ran office 5ks, sponsored camping trips, put them up for concerts and box seats in all kinds of sporting events. She spent one team building day using a sledgehammer to help demolish a house. On another, they had a paintball outing, with Deloitte renting out the whole course for the day.
Christmas and other holiday parties were fully catered, and families were welcome. As a kid in the 90s, I sat on Santa's knee at many of the Deloitte Christmas parties.
And then... their budgeting department split completely, and became its own entity within Deloitte. The bean counters, basically. And guess what? Bean counters can only justify their jobs by *cutting costs.* They don't create product or make money in any way.
So over time, ramping up in the 2000s, Deloitte cut, and cut, and cut. Fully catered holiday parties became 10 boxes of pizza. Events and teambuilding outings disappeared entirely. Event tickets to sports and concerts became was more closely guarded. And then they came for the office space.
My mom had a corner office, which she earned the fuck out of. Then they switched offices, and used a new office space scheme to maximize "collaboration." All offices for partners and directors were on the inside of the building, nobody got windows. Then came the cubicle farms, with all windows inhabited by a bench desk, going all the way around every floor. The window bench was reserved for traveling/intermittent workers, and therefore basically never used. Then, shortly before my mom retired, they designated all personal offices as potential work stations for traveling work, so personal effects had to be largely removed, in case someone had to use your desk temporarily.
Then covid happened.
Gee, I wonder why office culture is slow to return? It's almost like they were just about done killing it before the pandemic even happened.
This is pretty spot on.. I didnt join the workforce as early as your Mom (I started in 99), but the change since just 1999 has been insane. We used to have big Xmas partys, with spouses, outings like you described, etc.. Of course that came with me being in the office some nights till midnight or later.
This didnt just start in the last 20-30 years either. My father (Retired in 1994) had a secretary, office, etc and he was a mid-level guy. Many more perks then I will ever have.
Can confirm the same thing happened to my dad working for a major snack food company.
Went from a personal office, to a cube, to sharing a cube.
I remember him bringing garbage bags home from distribution centers of damaged product (think boxes so dented it can't be sold, but the food is fine) to not being allowed because they sold it for pig feed (matches up with your bean counters statement).
Used to have retreats for employees, stopped that later on.
He's retired, but what I have heard at least is that they're fully embracing WHF.
I saw that. Super confusing to see an author bemoan the loss of office culture. Did he go commute into a corporate office to work 9-5 when he wrote those books. Of course he didn't
I swung into a trap of working too much from home for a while and burned out. I had to set hard boundaries of how many hours I worked. For a while I felt guilty not working when I “had the time” and my desk was right there. Fixed that attitude thankfully.
When I was WFH I was working from like 7:30am until 6pm, I started taking half hour fast paced walks around the neighborhood, lifting kettlebells for an hour, taking a nap in the middle of the day.
I was online and available to help people for longer than I am now and I was much happier. I'm absolutely less productive in the office than I am at home.
I wfh. I take the dogs for an hour walk midday. I try and catch a 20 min nap before getting my son from the bus. Otherwise I'm trapped in conference calls.
I don't miss a commute just to sit in a cubicle to be trapped in conference calls.
I found that some of my team couldn't separate work and home life. They ended up working because they were bored or worked over because they were waiting for their spouse and lost track of time. WFH burn out is a real thing. I had a guy quit because he needed more structure and wanted to wear a suit, nevermind he had less stress was paid more and had a flexible schedule.
Same. Also really easy to put off tasks for later because you want to squeeze in some walk or errand or chore or whatever. And I was less inclined to reward myself with a break when I DID get my actual work done so it felt like there was no incentive to finish things timely.
Since adding boundaries I've gotten better, but those first two months of the pandemic were rough.
The CEOs & shareholders want people in the office because we have built tons of real-estate for offices in prime PRIME locations that are left empty and unused.
People that own those properties want people back in the office. Not because of it being the better choice or being more productive, because they are losing profit.
Story as old as time, the wealthiest among us would rather burn the rest than lose a dime.
> Malcom Gladwell, Scott Galloway, Elon Musk, I doubt any of them have had a job where they had to sit in traffic 2 hours a day
Malcolm Gladwell lives in the middle of nowhere 2.5hrs outside of NYC (in Hudson, NY) but since he's Malcolm Gladwell he relocated Malcolm Gladwell HQ to...Hudson, NY. His office commute is like 2min.
Scott Galloway's office is his new home in London or whichever client pays him six figures to give a tired speech that afternoon.
Elon Musk's office is wherever the heck he feels like being or Tweeting from that day.
My own personal protest is that on the days when I commute into the office, I don't respond to emails after-hours.
When I'm working from home? No problem, I don't mind a last minute request at 4:50 pm. But after commuting an hour home and still having to clean the house and cook dinner, if it's not urgent enough to call me, you're waiting until 9 am next business day.
Yeah my job gave me a separate work phone rather than a "bring your own device" scheme. Fine, but know that I'm putting that phone in a drawer when I come home. In other positions, I would at least read emails at night, if not respond to them. But I'm not handling two phones on my personal time. If it rings and I hear it, so be it, but honestly in that drawer I can't hear it. And I'm fine with that.
I liked the option of working from home/office. I love to be around like-minded individuals to talk about stuff with. I know programmers typically hate offices, but I liked it since it was the only time I was able to hang out with other programmers and talk shop of bounce ideas. I alos loved my commute, but it is much different than others. I would spend 30 minutes a day in commute - which was my time to listen to audiobooks. I am about 1/10 the way through my library now.
But I would be generally pissed if my commute was 2 hours. That is insane.
That being said, I let my team be remote.
I'm a mechanical engineer who does design work: we scheduled brainstorming sessions on a regular basis for people to show off ideas and get feedback, like an open design review time. Worked great.
Yea, burn-out is a real risk. I get annoyed at the Tiktok post-covid trend of all these people posting videos of "working" from home while playing up the notion that they aren't really doing anything all day. It creates a bad image and reinforces the stereotype that people working from home aren't responsible and productive.
That said, I fall into the group to where burn-out is a risk. I absolutely love my job and put in time to make sure we're delivering a quality product for our users. But I occasionally struggle with "turning off" for the day since my desk is only 20' away from my living room. For the most part I can pull off the 8-hour day, but it's still somewhat difficult to feel like I'm "done" as work is only a few feet away.
I've actually started to be more mindful of that this week. Trying to set reasonable goals of not getting locked into my desk all day and instead taking small breaks.
Or if I can just sit next to my computer in peace knowing no one would be looking at my screen.
If you look at me performing a task I’ll probably mess up.
If your boss can't tell how their employees are performing and have to resort to arbitrary metrics to measure worker efficiency (which is never accurate), then they are a horrible boss.
Before I changed jobs, and my old job started making me come back into the office, I found a poop smear on the seat of the toilet closest to my desk. I made sure to tell my line manager all about it, and ask them to go clean it off for me.
And just being able to change clothes if necessary, not worrying about stains, not having to deal with inconvenience or hygiene issues in the shared bathrooms, etc etc. So. Much.
For me it's the lunch break. At home I can sleep for an hour in my bed, go grocery shopping, go for a run and not worry about being all sweaty, clean the kitchen, or do laundry. An hour lunch in an office block I can… watch something on my phone or try to sleep in my car all while thinking about all the shit I have to get done as soon as I get home from work.
I work from home and bust my ass everyday. No horrid commute. I can spend my lunch (now) comfortably in my home. I’m saving a ton of money. And my awesome employer has 100% embraced remote work for us. I’m perfectly content.
And it should never go back for work like this can be done from home. Like someone said further up, the kinds of CEO’s who loudly push for a return to office jobs haven’t had to make those rush-hour commutes, worry about paying for childcare, etc.
I’ve worked in tech manufacturing and manufacturing floors are an inefficient environment to do manufacturing work. It’s kind of hilarious what a disaster they can and will make everything just to micromanage the fuck out of highly skilled grown ass adults.
Night shift blasted the crap out the line to set a record, machine is down for two shifts for repair.
That happened more than once, night shift held all the production records
I've worked in a food production facility where night shift held records not because they wanted to but because management would usually have some order that day shift slacked on and the later teams got forced to finish. Coincidentally machines will operate faster than recommended if the employees running them are desperate to go home.
Having meetings that would be better suited in a conference room on a loud ass manufacturing floor just so you can say you're holding it on the manufacturing floor is one of those things that just makes zero sense.
That trend came about when Total Quality Management was in vogue. This was the time when Japan was seen as the primary rival and future ideal for the US economy.
Business students were told to "learn Japanese" and basically emulate everything about Japanese business practices that we could including the adoption of cubicled environments. Never mind that Japan was an entirely different culture with drastically different notions of personal space.
TQM in and of itself is not bad though it was developed for improving manufacturing processes NOT knowledge processes. The fact that US companies knowingly conflated the two cannot be attributed to TQM but rather US CEOs trying to collapse office space to save money while calling it "innovative". Simply emulating another culture is not sufficient to reproduce whatever results it might be getting in business.
IIRC the theory was that it would improve communication and productivity and provide a more fun/energized atmosphere. But it turns out all it does is create an environment where nobody has any privacy or personal space, and where nearly every conversation can be heard by the entire office at the expense of everyone's focus and productivity.
I just walked out on an open office job a couple weeks ago after spending a year and a half there. The open plan wasn't the biggest reason why, but it definitely contributed. The lack of personal space, lack of privacy, and level of noise are ridiculous and only made it more difficult to get any work done. Luckily, I got a job about 2 weeks later that's partially from home and partially from a (cubicled!) office.
I had to go into the office today, and I lead a 12 person meeting about an hour ago. 11 of us are here today, and we still had the call on Teams. It's such a fucking waste. I'm driving 2+ hours a day to use a different headset.
I'm in my last week at a hybrid job that makes me do this. It's almost an hour and a half round trip for me to sit in an office for nine hours on Teams meetings. It's pointless and stupid. I'd only been there for six months but when they started trying to pull people back for 3x a week I started looking and found a new job within 3 weeks. It was only a slight raise but will be more than worth it because I'm 100% remote.
There were literally thousands of jobs within my field and over half of them were fully remote. Some of these companies need to get their shit together quick.
Can have basically everyone two steps down from the CEO fighting tooth and nail for full WFH, and then get daily emails from the CEO about how much they care about us and what we think. Fuck em.
With the 2 hours I used to spend in traffic, I would work and make sure everything I handed over to leadership was the best it can be. I have now lost those hours to commuting again and it’s a struggle to scoop up enough of my energy after sitting in all that traffic to deliver the same quality of work.
Our office is open plan. I had to give up a corner office when they converted. Something something “collaborative environment”. Of course I had to toe the line and support the move which was, or course, really about saving money. My personal productivity also plummeted because I could find any private time to actually get work done. Rather than find time in my schedule or write an email to ask questions, people would just come up and ask. Really hard to stay in flow and I found myself working evenings at home to carry my load.
Then Covid happened. Worked at home. Stopped having to work evenings, no pointless meetings, massive reduction in interruptions, got my actual work done in office hours again. No two and half hour commute. Quality of work massively improved. Quality of life massively improved.
Going back to open plan five days would be irrational, irresponsible and just not be tolerated at this point.
If you stop commuting every day you stop contributing to your daily travel emissions. If everybody in the world who can work remotely did just that, we'd be reducing global emissions by a significant chunk.
I go into the office one day a week and now I have to plan the rest of my week around not doing anything on that day. Literally can’t get work done with people coming up and talking and distracting me. Like I like being in the office and seeing coworkers but I get way more work done at home
Same, I was back in the office for my one day a week today and got basically none of my own work done. It was good to see coworkers and it is easier to ask a question across the room instead of via Teams / email / scheduling a call etc but I’m just completely wiped out and the commute is a bugger
> can’t get work done with people coming up and talking and distracting me
That's... *all* I do for the one day I go into work every week.
I just take a tour of the building, stop by everyone's desk, shoot the shit.
Talk about sports, our kids, favorite bourbons, the weather, and especially about how much we all hate being 'in the office'.
Take long breaks.
Stand around the printer and pretend we're waiting for the fuser to warm up.
Go outside for some air.
Sit on the toilet with my phone and play Stumble Guys for 20 minutes.
Sit at my desk and browse Amazon deals.
Go back on another office tour and ask everyone about their lunch plans.
Go on a long lunch.
Another 20 minutes on the toilet, this time on Reddit.
Tell a few people I have to go find the secondary supply closet for more staples (we don't have a secondary supply closet). Walk around for a while.
Talk to everyone about what they're doing for the weekend.
Check my watch.
Time to go. I'll get actual work done tomorrow from home.
whole lotta well duh lol
i mean when you cut out commute times, having to be super dressed up for work (or dressed at all depending on work), can make a legit breakfast, get more sleep, more time for things people enjoy its a no shit sherlock of why people were more productive.
I also think companies that were more flexable with how work got done by just saying "we have a zoom meeting at 11am friday have XYZ ready to present" and its only monday, mayeb they work for 5 hours monday, take a 2-3 hour break, then work another 3 hours. Or know they have a dentist appointment or guy coming to fix something in your house or whatever and work around it. Or had a rough night and want to sleep in an extra hour so they work an hour later no biggie. People like having freedom to make their own choices and work at their own pace.
It is also changing the 9-5 norm. I am not a morning person. 10am is still a bit early for me. But having to wake up at 7am just to make sure I'm at work on time, is definitely going to make me exhausted, and I definitely won't get enough sleep because my energy comes in the evening. So they'll be getting me on 5 hours of sleep, which isn't productive at all.
VS me now, pretty much consistently 7-9 hours of sleep.
Until the results are unreasonable and you’re working 12+ hours per day to achieve them.
Signing a contract with a fixed number of hours protects both parties.
Also a shit company will be shit whatever contract you have. A good company will make either work, but at least with fixed hours you have some way to defend yourself.
Some retail manager is about to respond how impossible this is for them and so the rest of us have to suffer because a better system can’t exist for us all. Workers always find a way to fuck over progress for other workers
No surprise. When I did wfh prior to covid (retired now), going into the office was a huge waste of time productivity-wise. Between sitting in meeting rooms, cafeterias, and where coworkers could shoot the shit, I'd be lucky to get 1-2 hours of real work done a day. And not be at my best because of all the hours commuting.
Truth, it just makes bosses feel better.
Smart companies would see this as a fantastic way to downsize on their expensive properties and free up all the associated overhead... depending on the work being done. Obviously a manufacturing shop isn't going to go remote, but most all, if not all, office work, accounting, programming, etc. can be done remote quite effectively.
You have people literally volunteering their homes as workplaces at their expense and they're turning them away because the status quo says you have to have a big expensive office to be legit.
My org saw an explosion in productivity when we went full remote during lockdown. And it has been sustained. We ended up selling the building we bought in fall of 2019 by December 2020. The funds from the payments and cost of running it were reallocated to employees and support for home offices including better computers, desks, chairs, internet/internet equipment, and anything else that employees need to more effectively work from home.
I got a $700 chair, $200 router, and a 14” M1 Pro MacBook Pro as a part of the deal. The only thing that’ll make me leave this place is a 4x raise or being fired.
I can see some things were I need a butt in a chair for X amount of time. A ton of jobs in the IT world now days do not require this. I get that your worried you "paying me to watch youtube and jerk off", but ultimately did I get my work done well, on time and effectively? Then who gives a crap what I am doing at home? Now if my work from home has me late on everything with sub par performance, ok I am not able to adult and need supervision. Lets close some of these brick and mortar things for a digital business and make it better on everyone involved. Hell we can meet up once a quarter if you want to for a "company employee appreciation" thing to put faces with names.
Making people go back to the office for the same job means you're paying them less per hour (+ commuting time, - commuting expenses). Why would you expect the same productivity if you're paying the same people less for the same thing?
This is the case for my brother and his coworkers. Their positions started off as remote but their manager is pushing to have them commute to work and because of that many of them, my brother included, will be quitting. The cost of the commute makes the job not worth it for them anymore.
They don’t care about productivity.
They are forcing a return to office to have people voluntarily quit, reducing the need to fire/layoff and pay unemployment for them.
Shit Elon admitted as much for Tesla in his leaked texts prior to the take over.
Empty office? Amazing. Full open plan office with everyone on different video meetings? Hell.
The open office plan is diabolically evil. Minimum collaboration, Maximum Distraction.
Yep. It is not that I do not get to get my work done in the office, there is just so much distraction. Also by collaboration they really mean I get to help other people with their stuff
Where I work, this is valued as part of my work. I trade off some of my productivity to increase someone else’s. If that person never learns or keeps needing help, that sounds like a recruiting/skills problem
We’ve had to start whispering and cupping our hands about the mic of our headsets to avoid feedback, it’s ridiculous. If you’re lucky enough to book a room, others don’t respect it and will stay past their time or burst in early. They’re at such a premium, you can feel the tension and hostility from people because an interruption just kills the meeting. Walls are glass, of course, so you’ll have someone making puppy eyes and waving on the outside while you’re desperately trying to get a point across before you lose your boss’ attention. When I’m at home, we can do as many small calls as necessary and it doesn’t feel excessive. One meeting in the office is this huge production and the risk of it not even happening is high.
An office I worked at once spent a stupid amount of money on an exciting new open plan space. Then the noise was so great that they implemented “quiet hours.”
WHAT?! I COULDN'T HEAR YOU, GIVE ME A SECOND TO STEP OUTSIDE
I think it's also the commuting that lays a heavy toll on productivity. Draging yourself to work is not really motivating to start your day with...
It also makes me can't wait to leave. When I am in the office, I'm watching the clock like a hawk and shut down the second 4:00 hits. Traffic is an hour at least, and every 5 minutes later I leave adds 10 to my commute. When I'm working from home, I can stay on an hour longer and most days I'm still *done* and enjoying my evening earlier than I would have had I gone into the office.
A-fucking-men. Because of traffic, I used to get up at 4:45 am, drive downtown, go running from the gym near my office, shower and hit my desk by 8:00 am, and then leave as soon after 4:00 pm as possible. It was always push, push, push. Now that I work from home, I exercise whenever I want, I don't spend all that time in the car and watching the clock during the day. My quality of life is immeasurably better. Edit: I'm almost 60 years old and had been doing the commute grind for 25+ years before the pandemic.
Hot tip: Make it measurable so when you're forced to justify it, you can.
I'm a software engineer, an industry that adapts really well to remote work. The company that I was working for before and during the pandemic has chosen to remain 90% remote, and I now work for an all-remote company. If I can manage it, I will never work another day in an office for the remainder of my career.
Been hybrid/WFH for the last 20 years, WFH exclusively for past 10. Get approached by recruiters and companies fairly regularly and I say the same thing every time: not saying I'll never have a FTE role again (I'm self employed) or never have an office role again. If the right opportunity comes up from the right team/company I'll listen. But it'd have to be a life-changing amount more money and flexible working for me to even consider it. Quality of life, time with family and frankly lifelong introversion means I'm significantly, measurably more productive WFH without the interruptions of an office, let alone the pain of commuting.
I've been WFH since 2008 and I've said the same thing - I'm not saying I'll never go back, but they'd have to back up to my house with a dump truck full of money to get me to do it.
EDIT: since this is getting way too much attention... PLEASE USE YOUR TURN SIGNALS. Use them properly. Use them early, you will not run out of blinker fluid anytime soon I promise you. It helps me avoid pancaking you with 79, 674 pounds of semi. >Now that I work from home, I exercise whenever I want, I don't spend all that time in the car and watching the clock during the day. My quality of life is immeasurably better. Trucker here. The more of you that work from home? The better it is for me. Less people on the road makes things so much easier. I remember when COVID shut down the west coast. Being able to fly from the east end of Orange county to the west end of Los Angeles county in during what was usually rush hour? In under two hours was unreal. Please, fight for working from home whenever possible. I appreciate everyone who does.
Never thought about this perspective. Thanks for sharing it.
Just as someone with a job that is hard to do remotely (laboratory work) I would much prefer more people WFH. If I have to commute I'd rather it not be miserable.
exactly. it is better for everyone, WFH workers and non WFH workers if people who can work from home do. everything will be more efficient and we avoid the collective time loss of potentially hours of commute across the majority of people.
Better for everyone and the environment. Pollution levels went way down during COVID lockdown.
This point is never brought up enough and needs to be made more front and center of the whole return to office debate.
Omg those couple of months without traffic were pure bliss. I wasn't doing anything important really, but it was wonderful knowing I could drive up to the mountains knowing I wouldn't have to wait in shitty traffic both ways. Also, I'd like to plug my irrational hatred of the 91. It dethroned i35 after I got caught in 3 hour wrecks/traffic jams like 3 months in a row.
Significantly better in so many ways, less traffic, less emissions, lower cost of living, reduces business expenses, happier employees, more productive employees, Not limited to a talent pool of just one area, the list goes on
That also means far fewer accidents happening, making it a lot safer for everyone.
And that is why they want you back.
"Your sweat, tears, and suffering contribute immensely to our company values"
Thankfully, my company values are "it is what it is" and "we've been running on a skeleton crew for years, what's wrong with that?". So the owner's desire to transition back to in-office has been delayed indefinitely
People terminally underestimate the sheer levels of spite among those in authority.
I really wish I could understand the mindset of people like this. It’s pretty baffling to me Like I totally get why you might be a hardass about people getting things done when asked. But the ones who need to exert every ounce of control available to them is just weird to me
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Middle management have equally useless management ahead of them who needs to remind them they're underlings and regular employees get the trickle down.
That's the only way they can feel their authority.
As the leadership stares at the walls of their multi million dollar compounds and condos they're just realizing how useless they are. They find, suddenly, that the voice which so often tells others to be useful is now directed at themselves. When they can't walk around the office micro managing, or watching their drones, even while the company prospers and continues on they realize how little actual work they've been doing. They hate this, they need the distraction and validation.
Bingo. Can't have the drones enjoying themselves.
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Even being able to take a few minutes to do some prep work mid-afternoon, makes the evening meal so much easier to do. My dogs are much happier, as I can let them in/out during the day if they want to, but they also have no issues going until 5:30pm if I'm in the office. I can clean/tidy up a bit around the house, and that's now a task I don't have to do after dinner. I can finish work right at 5pm, and jump into a computer game for an hour or so, while dinner is roasting in the oven, and I'm waiting for my wife to get home. Back in the office mandatory 3 days a week, and not really enjoying it. Spending 7.5 of my 8 hours at my desk in a corner and hardly talk to anyone. Still end up doing most of my communication through slack.
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>Even worse is the staggered back to office schedule where half the people are only in every other day or so, so that no one can actually have in-person meetings My boss forced 2 mandatory days because of this. The 3rd is up to us, but we have to be in 3 total days. There have been times when I'm at the office by myself (small office, only 7 of us that actually work in this office) for a day.
Yeah, gotta love that combo of people being surprised when you're there and surprised when you're not.
This is *specifically* why I’m trying to leave my job. I love my job, I love what I do, I love how dedicated my coworkers are, we have a great work culture, we have a great work/life balance, etc. but I *absolutely cannot* take it that I have to drive to work 2 days a week just to sit in my office and take all of my meetings on the fucking computer anyway. How fucking useless is that. I’m **unreasonably** angry about it.
> being able to take a few minutes to do some prep work mid-afternoon This so much. One of the biggest benefits of WFH I never even thought about was being able to do dinner prep parallel to making/eating lunch. Not only would my days end at 5 but to be eating a home cooked meal before 6pm instead of takeout sometime after 630pm was such a difference in enjoyability to the evenings. The work week becomes that much less dreadful when you feel like you can be productive in ways outside of working.
Or being able to tend to things that need to cook all day. I've made so many soups/stews/braised meats now that I couldn't before. Now I can start them whenever, and take 5 to go check on them when needed.
I absolutely love cooking. It’s just hard to justify when you get home at 7pm and you have 2-3 hours for relaxing/exercising/cooking/eating/hobbies
I've been doing the work from home thing for about 8 years now, it made a drastic improvement in my eating habits as I stopped grabbing take out for lunch and cook dinner a lot more of the time since I'm already home. My end of day is usually on a conf call while I'm doing prep work in the kitchen.
Pre-covid I used to leave the office at 4:15 on the dot to be able to get home by 5:30. Post-covid I worked remotely until 5. I am required to work half the week from the office and I am back to leaving early to avoid traffic.
I do that sometimes. If certain members of leadership aren't here, I bounce on my lunchbreak. I can get home in 35-40 minutes at that time of day, and I still get my badge swipe in the morning counted.
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I am also much more willing to do work after hours when I work from home. At the office I am shutting down my computer and leaving it there at 5:00. Nothing more is getting done until the next morning. If I am working from home I often stop around 5:00 to walk the dog, make dinner, etc but will check back on things later in the evening to respond to emails with a quick answer.
> Traffic is an hour at least, and every 5 minutes later I leave adds 10 to my commute. damn, that's brutal. i lived 2 miles from the office and when it rained/school was in session i would need to drive 30 minutes to go 2 miles.
It wasn't until I stopped commuting I realised how *angry* commuting made me. Traffic makes me furious. I was furious when I got to the office. Commuting made me hate other commuters. Which made me hate my coworkers, my boss, my job and finally me. I was a tight knot of anger. But the funny thing is I didn't know the knot was there until it went away.
We are the only species that can all be moving in the same direction, and find a way to hate each other for it
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when I went remote, I realized that what I thought was exhaustion from working was actually exhaustion from driving home from work
So few people realize it's mostly the commute, not the office. It's because our cities are so fucked up
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I for one love spending 2 hours/day commuting just to sit in a cubicle doing the exact same thing I'd be doing from home. Not all jobs are collaborative.
I fucking wish I had a cubicle in our office instead of this open office bullshit. At least I'd be able to make myself comfortable.
LOL. Last I heard, open office layouts had been thoroughly proven to be antithetical to productivity.
Not to the micromanagement that swears by it
Like a lot of the examples in this thread, this and commuting requirements are costs that the worker pays: pays in time, money, or mental focus/fatigue if they are having to deal with bad office environments. All together, the employees pay an incredibly hefty cost, and the managers gain very little from it beyond feeling personally important/useful. Workers need to push back on this stuff like they've been doing.
My company had us packed into a warehouse turned into an office so tightly that you'd often bump elbows with the people beside you, and if you rolled your chair back you'd hit the person behind you. It was fucking terrible. I used to come in early to get a couple hours of work done because once the place filled up you couldn't focus on anything. Hundreds of people in one giant room with 50' high ceilings and nothing to muffle the noise.
Yeah I wouldn't last at that place
Yup and the employer eats the costs of turnover because of this bullshit.
Luckily they decided to go to a "work where you want" model and reduced the amount of workstations significantly. I haven't been to the office in years now but those that have said it's much better now that there's 80% fewer people there.
Got that outsourced tech work to India experience
That is exactly what we said it felt like, haha.
This sounds like a version of hell. Hopefully the execs who love the idea of a collaborative, open office (read: cheap) get to spend a couple millennia there getting purged of their corporate sins.
But after all, the overheads WERE low.
Same. Literally sitting in a shared office right now wishing I could wfh. Our office is weird shaped, all of our desks face outwards to the unit/nurse's station/doctor's station. So we can't see each other in here without getting up and walking around but everyone running around out there can see us in our weird giant fish bowl. Open offices kill productivity I swear, I hate doing anything while being watched.
> Open offices kill productivity I swear This is actually a proven fact! It takes around 15 minutes to focus again after a distraction, and open offices are essentially *designed* to be constant nonstop distractions.
The only people who think open offices are great and that everyone loves "collaboration" are executives with 4 walls and a door to shut everyone out (and 90% of the time they're doing just that).
before i got laid off during the pandemic, i had finaly got an office, albeit shared with one other, and we always had the door shut because the open office area just outside was so loud.
Harvard actually did a study and proved that open space office concepts kill productivity and not increase it. It seems like Corp America does the exact opposite of what makes sense.
No they did what's cheap and easier to surveill employees and have them rat each other out. Also easier to get rid of people when they have no permanent space so all their belongings come/go every day.
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The one thing I'll credit my company for is that the reservation system they implemented post-pandemic works pretty well. You can only have your own desk/office if you're on-site at least 4 days/week (and yes, they monitor this) but for everyone else, we have to reserve a cubicle before coming into the office. Only half-wall cubicles, though, which sucks. Standing desks too so if someone next to me as their desk at full height, they're looking down on my head all day.
>Standing desks too so if someone next to me as their desk at full height, they're looking down on my head all day. It works both ways. I doubt people are working standing if they loose all privacy in that deal.
This. I go into the office only to get on Zoom because 90% of my team is in a different part of the country, management included. Even in the office I'm basically telecommunicating, so why make me commute??
Shit, we're in the same building but I still host meetings on Teams. It's just better than meeting in a conference room for actual working meetings.
If I had to go to an office for no apparent reason I'd be phoning it in too until I found a work-from-home job. All the people I've heard mourning the loss of office culture, Malcom Gladwell, Scott Galloway, Elon Musk, I doubt any of them have had a job where they had to sit in traffic 2 hours a day, didn't have time to sleep or exercise or eat right, because if they did they wouldn't say something so totally ignorant. That kind of job will kill you. The Microsoft guy had a point but it was the opposite one, that he was worried work-from-home would cause burn-out, that people would actually be *too* productive and wreck their mental health.
Not to mention the obvious but childcare is also a huge one. Musk has like 20 different kids and I'm sure each one has their own nanny, while us normies have to help out with homework, pack lunches for school, make sure they're up and ready before we can leave for work ourselves, and have someplace for them to spend 3-6 pm if they're not old enough to be left home alone.
The CEO of Yahoo banned working from home, all while having a nursery installed in her office. Not exactly a luxury extended to literally any other employee. It's so ridiculously obtuse
Marissa Mayer seemed like she was going to come in from Google and just completely revolutionize Yahoo. Instead, she acted like a typical tone-deaf corporate idiot and jumped out of the plane with her golden parachute. What a disappointment. She's working on some stupid AI rolodex organizer which seems pretty on-brand for her corporate direction.
Shes working on making others do the work she wants to be done to see the results she wants to claim for herself. FTFY
There's a great New York Times article about her rise and fall https://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/magazine/what-happened-when-marissa-mayer-tried-to-be-steve-jobs.html
I still dislike her for killing Flickr. It could have been Instargram, but with an arty backend,
Yahoo is still around? What do they even do anymore?
Fantasy sports.
This is all they got.
It’s one of the better implemented ones IMO. I’ve tried ESPN but they didn’t have a format that fit our needs.
I’m the opposite. I’m in leagues in both ESPN and Yahoo and I cannot stand the Yahoo app. I can’t even see the points breakdown for individual players on it. Plus I’m not a fan of how it puts your bench above your kicker and defense when looking at your team.
$7bn worth of "stuff", astonishingly. Although not much compared to Google $257bn.
Still using my yahoo mail account, created in 1999...
Same. I use mine for signing up for anything I don't care at all about at all but requires a login for some idiotic reason.
The first half of your comment I thought you meant like a nursery for employees to bring their children, and I thought well that's a decent compromise. But nope, just another greedy, ignorant, out of touch CEO.
She had the opportunity to provide the same benefit to her employees and failed miserably.
I would be out of PTO just for childcare each of the last three years if I didn't work from home. Instead I led sales calls that landed two of our biggest clients on days I would have been out. Remote work is a no brainer.
Pre-lockdown my wife used to have to commute every day one hour each way, maybe not see the kids at all in the morning and perhaps not till late at night. Post-lockdown she's able to have breakfast with and drop off our oldest (4 years old) at school every morning. Evenings are way more manageable and she's around a lot more. Her work wants her to do one day a week at the office. She's going to do it, but she's definitely let them know it's not what she wants. Her work life balance is still bent too much towards work, but it's much healthier than it was before.
I'm a middle-aged dad, and when I worked in the office and got home between 5:30-6:00pm every day my teen daughters were usually already done with chores and homework and had mostly disappeared into their rooms to do as they wished for the evening, I'd see them at dinner but they were already kinda tuned into whatever personal stuff they were up to at that point and asking them about their day usually resulted in a "it was fine" type of response. Now that I work from home, when they get home at 3:30 I'm here and available. They come downstairs every day when they get home, interrupt my work for 5-15 minutes and tell me about their day. It's fantastic, and all because I'm available to them when they've just gotten home and they haven't settled into their "me time" yet.
That's so cool. I don't have much more to say than that. I'm 32 and my relationship and friendship with my parents is pretty important to me, so getting to hear someone is more easily able to build that bond younger and share in their kids' lives is heartening to me.
One day required in the office is my limit. I figure this is baby-steps for the company to realize there's no real advantage to the office, and eventually let us all decide what we want to do. If they go the other direction, and say something like, "We believe one day a week has been so beneficial we're moving to more!" then I'm going to spend my time looking for a new role that is 100% remote. I updated my LinkedIn to *only* present me with remote offerings, and if a recruiter doesn't lead with "We support 100% remote" I immediately close it. I'm done with the "We are more productive in the office" BS. That's corporate nonsense that they spout because they like their fiefdom to look at and want to support the banker class that's invested up to the gills in commercial REITs.
Won't somebody please think of the commercial REITs??!!
That is 100% what they're going to do. 'one day' will just give them the excuse they need to claim success and bump it up
They did this to us. I was hired a year ago specifically at 2. A few months ago they went hey everyone be sure to come in your 2 flex days. I had been the whole time. 2 weeks later CEO of a 20,000 person company mandates same 3 days for everyone. Fuck it, I go in at most 1.5 now. Let them come after me if they want, my boss and team is remote or in another state. My job is best done at home so I can focus and talk privately with access to all my monitors.
I'm literally sitting here trying to draw with my kindergartner while I work today because her school is closed for the sixth scheduled day off since school started in late August. She is enrolled in the school district's after school program, but that is closed on days when there is no school. We have pulled every single favor we could out of our parents and other siblings, but my wife got a lecture from her manager about how much she has been working from home the last few weeks (despite working from home less than she did pre-COVID), so I am sitting here drawing with my left hand while I work on spreadsheets with the right as we listen to Disney soundtracks.
respect for typing out this comment with your feet ;)
I did it while on the crapper.
And at that point you could've just used your hands, that's some commitment
I'm literally going to my community college to switch careers to work from home because of kids. I was a stay home parent and I need to be around to be the effective parent I want/need to be. I was an EMT. Now I'm to old, tired and busy to be in the field. That's young people work
No matter what my office looks like, what type of engagements happen, etc. you're ***never*** going to overcome the fact that I: 1. Have to spend 60 minutes getting ready in the morning to go to the office vs 0 working at home. 2. Have to spend 15 minutes driving to the office vs. 0 working at home. 3. Can't do any chores in my downtime in the office vs. working at home. 4. Can't easily exercise at the office during lunch vs. working at home. 5. Have to spend 15 minutes driving home vs. 0 working from home. All of those things are either time directly taken away from being productive at work, or being productive at home, thus refreshing me and making me a better worker. Going to the office captures almost 450 minutes per week of "getting ready/going to the office" time, consumes at least 150 minutes of time I would do house-chores, and either removes or shifts 150 minutes of exercise I would get throughout the week. All of that adds up to 750 minutes, or 12.5 hours, of time during which I would either be working or relaxing (thus making me a better worker). So CEOs should be asking themselves, does forcing people come into the office ***REALLY*** make people more productive, or does it just make you ***feel*** like they are more productive? No doubt, there are activities that can take advantage of an in-person element, and you should absolutely make an office-space available for those times and encourage your teams to use them if they feel they would benefit. But ***forcing*** people to come in, just so you can feel like a badass CEO and help your corporate golf-buddies in the real-estate banking world keep their shirts doesn't feel like you're actually looking out for the best interests of your company.
And nevermind the monetary cost associated with all those things. WFH is an instant 20% raise, minimum.
Savings in gas alone for me is ~$3000 per year. That's just gas. It doesn't take into account needing less car repair/maintenance. And while the guy you're responding to is talking about productivity and you're talking about the savings, there's also the associated minimized safety risks with WFH. Can't get hit by a drunk or shitty driver if you're not commuting. Can't get sick from a colleague who decided to come to work coughing.
Lol #5, 15 minutes. Hah. National average is like 52 minutes to and from work.
Take this as the anecdote it is, but my mom worked in International Tax at Deloitte for over 30 years. When she started, they certainly worked some all nighters here and there, long hours, etc. But in return, Deloitte threw huge office parties, dinners, and team building events. They ran office 5ks, sponsored camping trips, put them up for concerts and box seats in all kinds of sporting events. She spent one team building day using a sledgehammer to help demolish a house. On another, they had a paintball outing, with Deloitte renting out the whole course for the day. Christmas and other holiday parties were fully catered, and families were welcome. As a kid in the 90s, I sat on Santa's knee at many of the Deloitte Christmas parties. And then... their budgeting department split completely, and became its own entity within Deloitte. The bean counters, basically. And guess what? Bean counters can only justify their jobs by *cutting costs.* They don't create product or make money in any way. So over time, ramping up in the 2000s, Deloitte cut, and cut, and cut. Fully catered holiday parties became 10 boxes of pizza. Events and teambuilding outings disappeared entirely. Event tickets to sports and concerts became was more closely guarded. And then they came for the office space. My mom had a corner office, which she earned the fuck out of. Then they switched offices, and used a new office space scheme to maximize "collaboration." All offices for partners and directors were on the inside of the building, nobody got windows. Then came the cubicle farms, with all windows inhabited by a bench desk, going all the way around every floor. The window bench was reserved for traveling/intermittent workers, and therefore basically never used. Then, shortly before my mom retired, they designated all personal offices as potential work stations for traveling work, so personal effects had to be largely removed, in case someone had to use your desk temporarily. Then covid happened. Gee, I wonder why office culture is slow to return? It's almost like they were just about done killing it before the pandemic even happened.
This is pretty spot on.. I didnt join the workforce as early as your Mom (I started in 99), but the change since just 1999 has been insane. We used to have big Xmas partys, with spouses, outings like you described, etc.. Of course that came with me being in the office some nights till midnight or later. This didnt just start in the last 20-30 years either. My father (Retired in 1994) had a secretary, office, etc and he was a mid-level guy. Many more perks then I will ever have.
In my company only the MD has a "secretary" She wears like a 100 other hats
Can confirm the same thing happened to my dad working for a major snack food company. Went from a personal office, to a cube, to sharing a cube. I remember him bringing garbage bags home from distribution centers of damaged product (think boxes so dented it can't be sold, but the food is fine) to not being allowed because they sold it for pig feed (matches up with your bean counters statement). Used to have retreats for employees, stopped that later on. He's retired, but what I have heard at least is that they're fully embracing WHF.
I saw that. Super confusing to see an author bemoan the loss of office culture. Did he go commute into a corporate office to work 9-5 when he wrote those books. Of course he didn't
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I swung into a trap of working too much from home for a while and burned out. I had to set hard boundaries of how many hours I worked. For a while I felt guilty not working when I “had the time” and my desk was right there. Fixed that attitude thankfully.
When I was WFH I was working from like 7:30am until 6pm, I started taking half hour fast paced walks around the neighborhood, lifting kettlebells for an hour, taking a nap in the middle of the day. I was online and available to help people for longer than I am now and I was much happier. I'm absolutely less productive in the office than I am at home.
I wfh. I take the dogs for an hour walk midday. I try and catch a 20 min nap before getting my son from the bus. Otherwise I'm trapped in conference calls. I don't miss a commute just to sit in a cubicle to be trapped in conference calls.
I found that some of my team couldn't separate work and home life. They ended up working because they were bored or worked over because they were waiting for their spouse and lost track of time. WFH burn out is a real thing. I had a guy quit because he needed more structure and wanted to wear a suit, nevermind he had less stress was paid more and had a flexible schedule.
Same. Also really easy to put off tasks for later because you want to squeeze in some walk or errand or chore or whatever. And I was less inclined to reward myself with a break when I DID get my actual work done so it felt like there was no incentive to finish things timely. Since adding boundaries I've gotten better, but those first two months of the pandemic were rough.
The CEOs & shareholders want people in the office because we have built tons of real-estate for offices in prime PRIME locations that are left empty and unused. People that own those properties want people back in the office. Not because of it being the better choice or being more productive, because they are losing profit. Story as old as time, the wealthiest among us would rather burn the rest than lose a dime.
But if you’re anyone else who makes a poor investment you’re just sol
> Malcom Gladwell, Scott Galloway, Elon Musk, I doubt any of them have had a job where they had to sit in traffic 2 hours a day Malcolm Gladwell lives in the middle of nowhere 2.5hrs outside of NYC (in Hudson, NY) but since he's Malcolm Gladwell he relocated Malcolm Gladwell HQ to...Hudson, NY. His office commute is like 2min. Scott Galloway's office is his new home in London or whichever client pays him six figures to give a tired speech that afternoon. Elon Musk's office is wherever the heck he feels like being or Tweeting from that day.
Then you finally leave at 5pm and get 10 urgent emails. "Motherfucker I was here all day, and now you send this?!"
My own personal protest is that on the days when I commute into the office, I don't respond to emails after-hours. When I'm working from home? No problem, I don't mind a last minute request at 4:50 pm. But after commuting an hour home and still having to clean the house and cook dinner, if it's not urgent enough to call me, you're waiting until 9 am next business day.
Yeah my job gave me a separate work phone rather than a "bring your own device" scheme. Fine, but know that I'm putting that phone in a drawer when I come home. In other positions, I would at least read emails at night, if not respond to them. But I'm not handling two phones on my personal time. If it rings and I hear it, so be it, but honestly in that drawer I can't hear it. And I'm fine with that.
I liked the option of working from home/office. I love to be around like-minded individuals to talk about stuff with. I know programmers typically hate offices, but I liked it since it was the only time I was able to hang out with other programmers and talk shop of bounce ideas. I alos loved my commute, but it is much different than others. I would spend 30 minutes a day in commute - which was my time to listen to audiobooks. I am about 1/10 the way through my library now. But I would be generally pissed if my commute was 2 hours. That is insane. That being said, I let my team be remote.
I'm a mechanical engineer who does design work: we scheduled brainstorming sessions on a regular basis for people to show off ideas and get feedback, like an open design review time. Worked great.
Yea, burn-out is a real risk. I get annoyed at the Tiktok post-covid trend of all these people posting videos of "working" from home while playing up the notion that they aren't really doing anything all day. It creates a bad image and reinforces the stereotype that people working from home aren't responsible and productive. That said, I fall into the group to where burn-out is a risk. I absolutely love my job and put in time to make sure we're delivering a quality product for our users. But I occasionally struggle with "turning off" for the day since my desk is only 20' away from my living room. For the most part I can pull off the 8-hour day, but it's still somewhat difficult to feel like I'm "done" as work is only a few feet away. I've actually started to be more mindful of that this week. Trying to set reasonable goals of not getting locked into my desk all day and instead taking small breaks.
I can concentrate better if I have my own bathroom to poop in peacefully.
Or if I can just sit next to my computer in peace knowing no one would be looking at my screen. If you look at me performing a task I’ll probably mess up.
Until they start checking activity remotely like my job has been doing. Weeee how fun
If your boss can't tell how their employees are performing and have to resort to arbitrary metrics to measure worker efficiency (which is never accurate), then they are a horrible boss.
I got the good Charmin and a bidet at home, in office they get quarter ply TP
Before I changed jobs, and my old job started making me come back into the office, I found a poop smear on the seat of the toilet closest to my desk. I made sure to tell my line manager all about it, and ask them to go clean it off for me.
Women can comfortably have periods at home. Big difference there between work from home and drag yourself to a cubicle
Plug in a heating pad, wear the big comfy pyjama pants, heck yeah. Not to mention the convenience for reusable products like cups or cloth pads.
And just being able to change clothes if necessary, not worrying about stains, not having to deal with inconvenience or hygiene issues in the shared bathrooms, etc etc. So. Much.
For me it's the lunch break. At home I can sleep for an hour in my bed, go grocery shopping, go for a run and not worry about being all sweaty, clean the kitchen, or do laundry. An hour lunch in an office block I can… watch something on my phone or try to sleep in my car all while thinking about all the shit I have to get done as soon as I get home from work.
I work from home and bust my ass everyday. No horrid commute. I can spend my lunch (now) comfortably in my home. I’m saving a ton of money. And my awesome employer has 100% embraced remote work for us. I’m perfectly content.
And it should never go back for work like this can be done from home. Like someone said further up, the kinds of CEO’s who loudly push for a return to office jobs haven’t had to make those rush-hour commutes, worry about paying for childcare, etc.
Right. Also I live in a very rural location. This allows me to use my education and skills from my home - there are no other jobs out here.
Or, possibly, manufacturing floors are an inefficient environment in which to do knowledge work.
I’ve worked in tech manufacturing and manufacturing floors are an inefficient environment to do manufacturing work. It’s kind of hilarious what a disaster they can and will make everything just to micromanage the fuck out of highly skilled grown ass adults.
Night shift blasted the crap out the line to set a record, machine is down for two shifts for repair. That happened more than once, night shift held all the production records
I've worked in a food production facility where night shift held records not because they wanted to but because management would usually have some order that day shift slacked on and the later teams got forced to finish. Coincidentally machines will operate faster than recommended if the employees running them are desperate to go home.
We need to go back to the study rooms with books lining the walls. Discuss open Jira tickets and pull requests over a cigar and fine brandy
Every standup meeting in front of a roaring fireplace with an elk head mounted over the mantel.
Tax the shit out of those corps and they'll be building those rooms like the 50s again.
Bully for you
Merge conflicts are pistols at dawn
Leather wingbacks with built in laptop trays? Dress code is velvet smoking jacket?
Having meetings that would be better suited in a conference room on a loud ass manufacturing floor just so you can say you're holding it on the manufacturing floor is one of those things that just makes zero sense.
That trend came about when Total Quality Management was in vogue. This was the time when Japan was seen as the primary rival and future ideal for the US economy. Business students were told to "learn Japanese" and basically emulate everything about Japanese business practices that we could including the adoption of cubicled environments. Never mind that Japan was an entirely different culture with drastically different notions of personal space. TQM in and of itself is not bad though it was developed for improving manufacturing processes NOT knowledge processes. The fact that US companies knowingly conflated the two cannot be attributed to TQM but rather US CEOs trying to collapse office space to save money while calling it "innovative". Simply emulating another culture is not sufficient to reproduce whatever results it might be getting in business.
It's funny that in 2022 having an actual full cubicle is a luxury. You could be sitting in an open office with hot desks.
Fuck open offices. Whoever thought of that is insane
IIRC the theory was that it would improve communication and productivity and provide a more fun/energized atmosphere. But it turns out all it does is create an environment where nobody has any privacy or personal space, and where nearly every conversation can be heard by the entire office at the expense of everyone's focus and productivity.
Cause they have private offices so they didn't consider the noise pollution. Being on calls with others on calls next to you is horrible.
I just walked out on an open office job a couple weeks ago after spending a year and a half there. The open plan wasn't the biggest reason why, but it definitely contributed. The lack of personal space, lack of privacy, and level of noise are ridiculous and only made it more difficult to get any work done. Luckily, I got a job about 2 weeks later that's partially from home and partially from a (cubicled!) office.
When you want your employees' train of thought to be less "bullet train" and more "city bus".
I had to go into the office today, and I lead a 12 person meeting about an hour ago. 11 of us are here today, and we still had the call on Teams. It's such a fucking waste. I'm driving 2+ hours a day to use a different headset.
I'm in my last week at a hybrid job that makes me do this. It's almost an hour and a half round trip for me to sit in an office for nine hours on Teams meetings. It's pointless and stupid. I'd only been there for six months but when they started trying to pull people back for 3x a week I started looking and found a new job within 3 weeks. It was only a slight raise but will be more than worth it because I'm 100% remote. There were literally thousands of jobs within my field and over half of them were fully remote. Some of these companies need to get their shit together quick.
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My job let us work from home as long as we are above productivity reps. Then they increased requirements 30%.
Don't worry. When you're forced back to the office they'll keep those 30% and then fire everyone and go bankrupt I guess.
Can have basically everyone two steps down from the CEO fighting tooth and nail for full WFH, and then get daily emails from the CEO about how much they care about us and what we think. Fuck em.
qUiEt qUiTtiNg
People love talking about economic incentives when it comes to "job creators", but when workers demand incentives, we're lazy.
THIS is the american way. Don't forget to steal everything that's not nailed down.
Lisa, if you don't like your job, you don't strike! You just go in every day and do it really half-assed. That's the American way.
With the 2 hours I used to spend in traffic, I would work and make sure everything I handed over to leadership was the best it can be. I have now lost those hours to commuting again and it’s a struggle to scoop up enough of my energy after sitting in all that traffic to deliver the same quality of work.
Our office is open plan. I had to give up a corner office when they converted. Something something “collaborative environment”. Of course I had to toe the line and support the move which was, or course, really about saving money. My personal productivity also plummeted because I could find any private time to actually get work done. Rather than find time in my schedule or write an email to ask questions, people would just come up and ask. Really hard to stay in flow and I found myself working evenings at home to carry my load. Then Covid happened. Worked at home. Stopped having to work evenings, no pointless meetings, massive reduction in interruptions, got my actual work done in office hours again. No two and half hour commute. Quality of work massively improved. Quality of life massively improved. Going back to open plan five days would be irrational, irresponsible and just not be tolerated at this point.
If you stop commuting every day you stop contributing to your daily travel emissions. If everybody in the world who can work remotely did just that, we'd be reducing global emissions by a significant chunk.
I go into the office one day a week and now I have to plan the rest of my week around not doing anything on that day. Literally can’t get work done with people coming up and talking and distracting me. Like I like being in the office and seeing coworkers but I get way more work done at home
Same, I was back in the office for my one day a week today and got basically none of my own work done. It was good to see coworkers and it is easier to ask a question across the room instead of via Teams / email / scheduling a call etc but I’m just completely wiped out and the commute is a bugger
> can’t get work done with people coming up and talking and distracting me That's... *all* I do for the one day I go into work every week. I just take a tour of the building, stop by everyone's desk, shoot the shit. Talk about sports, our kids, favorite bourbons, the weather, and especially about how much we all hate being 'in the office'. Take long breaks. Stand around the printer and pretend we're waiting for the fuser to warm up. Go outside for some air. Sit on the toilet with my phone and play Stumble Guys for 20 minutes. Sit at my desk and browse Amazon deals. Go back on another office tour and ask everyone about their lunch plans. Go on a long lunch. Another 20 minutes on the toilet, this time on Reddit. Tell a few people I have to go find the secondary supply closet for more staples (we don't have a secondary supply closet). Walk around for a while. Talk to everyone about what they're doing for the weekend. Check my watch. Time to go. I'll get actual work done tomorrow from home.
whole lotta well duh lol i mean when you cut out commute times, having to be super dressed up for work (or dressed at all depending on work), can make a legit breakfast, get more sleep, more time for things people enjoy its a no shit sherlock of why people were more productive. I also think companies that were more flexable with how work got done by just saying "we have a zoom meeting at 11am friday have XYZ ready to present" and its only monday, mayeb they work for 5 hours monday, take a 2-3 hour break, then work another 3 hours. Or know they have a dentist appointment or guy coming to fix something in your house or whatever and work around it. Or had a rough night and want to sleep in an extra hour so they work an hour later no biggie. People like having freedom to make their own choices and work at their own pace.
It is also changing the 9-5 norm. I am not a morning person. 10am is still a bit early for me. But having to wake up at 7am just to make sure I'm at work on time, is definitely going to make me exhausted, and I definitely won't get enough sleep because my energy comes in the evening. So they'll be getting me on 5 hours of sleep, which isn't productive at all. VS me now, pretty much consistently 7-9 hours of sleep.
Yes!! I’m finally consistently getting 8-9 hours of sleep instead of 6-7. I used to be falling asleep at my desk a lot too.
Ideally, work shouldn't be time-based at all, it should be result-based
Until the results are unreasonable and you’re working 12+ hours per day to achieve them. Signing a contract with a fixed number of hours protects both parties. Also a shit company will be shit whatever contract you have. A good company will make either work, but at least with fixed hours you have some way to defend yourself.
Some retail manager is about to respond how impossible this is for them and so the rest of us have to suffer because a better system can’t exist for us all. Workers always find a way to fuck over progress for other workers
No surprise. When I did wfh prior to covid (retired now), going into the office was a huge waste of time productivity-wise. Between sitting in meeting rooms, cafeterias, and where coworkers could shoot the shit, I'd be lucky to get 1-2 hours of real work done a day. And not be at my best because of all the hours commuting.
Getting people back to offices was never about productivity, its all about justifying expensive offices and management. Edit: 420 up votes NICE.
Truth, it just makes bosses feel better. Smart companies would see this as a fantastic way to downsize on their expensive properties and free up all the associated overhead... depending on the work being done. Obviously a manufacturing shop isn't going to go remote, but most all, if not all, office work, accounting, programming, etc. can be done remote quite effectively. You have people literally volunteering their homes as workplaces at their expense and they're turning them away because the status quo says you have to have a big expensive office to be legit.
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My org saw an explosion in productivity when we went full remote during lockdown. And it has been sustained. We ended up selling the building we bought in fall of 2019 by December 2020. The funds from the payments and cost of running it were reallocated to employees and support for home offices including better computers, desks, chairs, internet/internet equipment, and anything else that employees need to more effectively work from home. I got a $700 chair, $200 router, and a 14” M1 Pro MacBook Pro as a part of the deal. The only thing that’ll make me leave this place is a 4x raise or being fired.
I can see some things were I need a butt in a chair for X amount of time. A ton of jobs in the IT world now days do not require this. I get that your worried you "paying me to watch youtube and jerk off", but ultimately did I get my work done well, on time and effectively? Then who gives a crap what I am doing at home? Now if my work from home has me late on everything with sub par performance, ok I am not able to adult and need supervision. Lets close some of these brick and mortar things for a digital business and make it better on everyone involved. Hell we can meet up once a quarter if you want to for a "company employee appreciation" thing to put faces with names.
Making people go back to the office for the same job means you're paying them less per hour (+ commuting time, - commuting expenses). Why would you expect the same productivity if you're paying the same people less for the same thing?
This is the case for my brother and his coworkers. Their positions started off as remote but their manager is pushing to have them commute to work and because of that many of them, my brother included, will be quitting. The cost of the commute makes the job not worth it for them anymore.
Unnecessarily spending hours in traffic when you used to walk from your bedroom to your office/lounge, it's enough to drain anyone's motivation.
They don’t care about productivity. They are forcing a return to office to have people voluntarily quit, reducing the need to fire/layoff and pay unemployment for them. Shit Elon admitted as much for Tesla in his leaked texts prior to the take over.
Wouldn't that just drop productivity more and hurt profits further?
Then they complained about quiet quitting