FORD - Fear Of Redundancies, Dearborn.

Those office staff who don't want to go to the office... Well, they're proving they don't need staff in the office. It won't be long before they are outsourced to India. Then they can complain some more. I look forward to reading their placards: "The bosses told us to RTO, we said NO".

When you work for a company, you follow the company rules. If you don't like the rules, you can leave. Nobody is forcing you to stay there.

>> Hacking the monitors requires knowledge of the network infrastructure - something far beyond what your average pen pusher could pull off.

Have you ever actually been in an office with lots of staff? Lots of staff usually means numerous people know how to connect to conference monitors. Such information may well be published somewhere for staff to use.

Most of the time I've spent in an office in the last 25 years has been spent looking busy while I surreptitiously watch the clock until the earliest minute I can slip out and get home where I can finally get some work done.

That's the truth regardless of how loud the executive voices are.

The only office job I've had involved me either stretching out the 3 hrs of actual work into 8 hrs, or doing the 3hrs of work in 3 hrs and spending the rest of the time playing minesweeper/solitaire

and dont get me started on the meetings.................. pre-meeting meeeting and post meeting meeting followed by e.mail to all present summerising said meetings.

And making bullshit bingo cards for the meetings......

Perhaps you should tell your manager and/or boss that you only pretend to work. That would be some honesty on your part, and I would salute you.

"If you don't like the rules, you can leave. Nobody is forcing you to stay there."

Exactly this. If more people were prepared to stand up for themselves at work, then work wouldn't be the shitbox it is now. That involves risking your current employment. But that means not stretching yourself so far that your life becomes critically dependent on a continuous income. It seems people would rather buy shiny things.

"Well, they're proving they don't need staff in the office."

It's quite odd really - big organisations often have multiple locations in their home country, and communicate almost entirely between them with shared networks, email and messaging, group video calls, even where teams are split across those sites. Apparently that is all possible without affecting productivity, UNLESS an employee is at home. Or, there's another explanation, that too many senior managers are arseholes who can't manage by results; as an entirely acceptable substitute, bums-on-office-seats becomes an important KPI.

I work for a UK government department, and they measure and record office attendance. They don't measure to any adequate standard what benefit the department delivers to the population we serve, there's no proper suite of departmental KPIs, but be assured, if the minister wants to know then his senior civil servants will be able to tell him with absolute accuracy how their oiks are doing against the BOS target. I'm hopeful of getting a suitable pictogram in our next annual report with a "% of target" figure in huge font next to it.

"It won't be long before they are outsourced to India."

Just because a job doesn't need a continuous physical presence in an in-country office, that doesn't mean that it can be effectively offshored. Lots of companies have discovered the hard way that just because offshore labour is cheap, the ability of offshore staff to understand all the home-country culture, terminology, regulation, expectations and to communicate etc is highly varied, and when offshoring on the cheap (as is normally the case) then those factors are a low priority. But maybe that's exactly what Ford should do. Close all their offices in the US (apart from the board, because it's simply not possible to offshore such important roles) and employ cheap offshore workers to do all white collar jobs, whilst they bring home those important and well paid manufacturing jobs that the fat orange one prizes.

>> UNLESS an employee is at home

Except... I have seen this personally... an employee "working at home" who could not be contacted for several hours. He had disappeared out "for a while". Yeah. But he expected to be paid for his disappearance.

>> They don't measure to any adequate standard what benefit the department delivers to the population we serve

They don''t need to. We all know it's crap.

It seems there are a lot of entitled people around. They expect to be paid, but don't want to go to the office. Too bad. You have a choice: walk away.

I'd guess your employee who "disappeared" for a while while based at home might be as adept at not working whilst in the office.

"It seems there are a lot of entitled people around. They expect to be paid, but don't want to go to the office."

Let's dispose of the first bit; I'm long retired . I retired before working from home became a regular possibility. Some of that work was in laboratories so working at home would have been a non-starter. I have no direct interest in this.

But I spent a good deal of my working life commuting. I know the time wasted. The time I spent commuting from High Wycombe into London was equivalent to two full working days a week - for which I was NOT paid. I was not alone. I was in trains crowded - overcrowded - with others in the same uncomfortable predicament. Looking out the the windows I could see roads crowded with cars also taking commuters into work. It was a gross and unnecessary waste of huge portions of human lives and of physical resources. A society which has got itself into that situation needs to stop and think very hard about how to get out of it; it has a responsibility to itself and to the rest of humanity and the planet to do that.

I grew up in an industrial Pennine village when the mills were still working. Most people worked in the mills and there was a mill within walking distance of most people's homes, the exceptions being those living in the remoter farms who were probably not working in the mills in any case. It was a more humane way of life than commuting. Now we have the double whammy of the mills having almost entirely closed, so less work within walking distance and they have been treated as brownfield sites for housing so more people than previously now having to commute. It would have been quite feasible to have converted those mills to alternative forms of working. Put offices in them or whatever.

If companies want staff in offices disperse the offices into smaller units where people live. I return frequently to my daughter's experience - working for a company which is entirely based on remote working. It is feasible. We know from the experience of Covid that it is feasible for a good many jobs - not all but a good many. I repeat again, I have no personal sense of entitlement in this, just a sense from experience and observation that we have organised society very badly to have it depend on unnecessary commuting into huge conurbations to do work that could be dispersed. The entitled ones are those who demand that it be done this way.

According to these articles which were published earlier this year:

https://reporter.anu.edu.au/all-stories/is-working-from-home-better-than-being-at-the-office

https://theconversation.com/more-than-two-thirds-of-organisations-have-a-formal-work-from-home-policy-heres-how-the-benefits-stack-up-251598

A "tailored approach" is required that allows an employee to work from home or in the office as works "best" for the employee...

"... there was no notable difference in productivity between employees working from home versus in the office."

"32% of Australian employees would prefer to exclusively work from home, 41% prefer a hybrid option, while 27% prefer to work exclusively from the office."

There are no doubt other reports showing the opposite as well. Statistical reports in economics and social sciences can produce whatever outcome is desired. The big issue for me is that with large-scale commuting we have put ourselves into a situation which is unsustainable and morally and irresponsibly wrong.

A "tailored approach" is required that allows an employee to work from home or in the office as works "best" for the employee...

Yes and no.

Before I retired I, and many of my colleagues, followed a hybrid model, which was a good balance between close contact with local colleagues and easy work with colleagues in 8hr+ different timezones. By and large it worked for us, and our manager was happy with it.

On the other hand I've worked with people who were 100% WFH and thought they were doing a great job. They were the classic "on the spectrum" solitary workers who hated human contact. They loved being able to concentrate just on their project, with no interruptions or distractions like meetings. They were completely unaware of the frustration of their team members who could never get status updates, never knew where their project was going or whether it was on track. Ultimately the manager had to call them in, and force them to talk to their colleagues, for the good of the team & the project.

It depends totally on the work, the project, the people and the job, and it isn't always the employee who will be able to decide what's "best". A mandatory 100% RTO may not be the solution, but neither is leaving it entirely to the employee, and a competent manager will know that.

"bums-on-office-seats becomes an important KPI"

And, of course, measuring inputs rather than outputs is not really a KPI at all. It is SOP in government. Ministers will loudly declare how much they're spending on this or that matter of concern but seldom have anything to say about results.

"Have you ever actually been in an office with lots of staff?"

Yes, indeed. There was the desk reorganisation where a group with a very noisy dot-matrix printer was relocated right behind me.

And the time that some one very important in the business came on a visit say the portionless call centre and pronounced it good so all the desks in IT had their partitions and the shelves they supported removed over the weekend. My row of reference manuals which had been within arm's reach ended up permanently on a windowsill some distance away.

The people who come up with this garbage don't actually do any work in the sort of offices they want to see the people in. If they're in the building they have a private office and probably a good deal of time is spent meeting people away from the company's office. Not that there's anything wrong with either of those situations but it does mean that they don't have the experience of trying to work in the circumstances that they think are so productive.

I agree there are some very badly "designed" offices. While noisy, the ability to have a quick word with somebody in person is invaluable.

I doubt that the occasional quick word - and, yes, I understand that from experience - is sufficient to to compensate for the losses of a badly organised open plan office. And that's before the entirely unnecessary not very quick words from a PM who has nothing better to do than wander up to break one's concentration, entirely, of course, lacking the awareness of that concentration or of the damage done.

@VoiceOfTruth "I agree there are some very badly "designed" offices. While noisy, the ability to have a quick word with somebody in person is invaluable."

You know it is just really lucky that IT as a profession does not attract neurodivergent people.

Just imagine how hard it would be for someone with an Autistic Spectrum Personality (ASP) to work in a large open plan office with all of the noisy social activity going on.

Yeah, it's really lucky that there are no ASPs in the IT industry. It saves companies a lot of money that would otherwise be wasted on people friendly offices.

/s

"Lots of staff usually means numerous people know how to connect to conference monitors. Such information may well be published somewhere for staff to use."

So the hack is a consequence of the collaboration, communication and cross-pollination etc. of working in the Office.

Ford management should be pleased with this evidence that it's all going so well.

"And good luck sitting anywhere close to your team ... even though 'collaboration' was allegedly the goal. Nah, this is attrition to get people to quit on their own so they don't have to pay for layoffs."

Meanwhile in BMW's Munich office, the first member of any team to arrive places beach towels on the seats in the area that the team desires...

I guess when they find the culprit (s)he won't be RTO at Ford any time soon, if ever...