New Book Argues Hybrid Schedules 'Don't Work', Return-to-Office Brings Motivation and Learning (yahoo.com)
- Reference: 0178853290
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/08/25/0628205/new-book-argues-hybrid-schedules-dont-work-return-to-office-brings-motivation-and-learning
- Source link: https://finance.yahoo.com/news/author-getting-employees-back-to-the-office-is-at-an-inflection-point-201435253.html
> Yahoo Finance: What's wrong with a hybrid work arrangement?
>
> Cappelli: People just don't come in. That's maybe the single biggest factor. There is a growing awareness that people are really never there on their anchor days. If you want that for your company, you have to manage that attendance...
>
> Yahoo Finance: What's the compelling advantage of in-person work?
>
> Cappelli: There's value in human interaction, what we learn from each other, the cooperation that we can get in solving problems, and the motivation and commitment that comes from being around other people... When you first began your career, imagine what it would've been like if no one was in the office. You'd be completely lost.
>
> If you think about how we learn about office work, we learn by watching. You learn what the values of the organization are. You learn it from the conversations in the office. You can see how the boss reacts to different requests and different problems. As you advance, you've got your ear to the ground, and you've got the opportunity to raise your hand and pitch in and have some influence. You can catch the boss between meetings and pass along a little tidbit of information, and you develop relationships with people where you can solve problems... Those are the kind of things that we miss when we move to remote — in addition to the general fact that people are energized by working with people.
>
> With remote work, people also spend more time in meetings that are worthless. A lot of those things could be fixed, but the problem is they're not.
He argues remote work isn't as widespread as it seems. ("In Europe, for example, where employees have always had more power, I figured remote work would stay. It hasn't. Most everybody's gone back to the office.") Even in the U.S., 70% of employers are in-office, all the time. ("[M]ost employers are small. Remote work and hybrid work, in particular, is largely a big city, big company phenomenon... It's only white-collar jobs.")
And fewer jobs offered are being offered with remote-working options, he believes, now that the labor market has softened. "CEOs are now thinking we're losing something, and the employee resistance to return to the office has weakened.... The longer you wait, the harder it is to ever get people to come back without a big fight. "
> Cappelli: Right now, people might be saying, 'I will quit if I have to go back to the office,' but it turns out they don't mean it. The reason, of course, is it's one thing to say that you will quit; it's another to actually walk away from a paycheck...
>
> If you opt for remote or hybrid, good outcomes don't happen by themselves. You can make it work, but it requires more time and effort for management, more rules, more practices, more leadership.
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/author-getting-employees-back-to-the-office-is-at-an-inflection-point-201435253.html
[2] https://www.pennpress.org/9781613631935/in-praise-of-the-office/
Meetings (Score:5, Insightful)
> In the office , people also spend more time in meetings that are worthless.
FIFY
The only reason to be in an office is for meetings.....almost all of which are useless.
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At my previous job people often had in office meetings over Zoom...
Re:Meetings (Score:5, Informative)
One of the worst work environments I had was at PNC (a bank).
There were a few dev teams there, and they all used agile. They had meetings ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Most of the time, a few people would use speaker phones. But even if they didn't, they were all so fucking loud that it was hard to get anything done when those meetings were going on. The PM for the meeting was one cube over. People on his team were spread around. So what I would hear is him saying something, loudly, and then a microsecond or two later, I would hear the same thing via some asshole's speakerphone a few cubes away. Then I would hear everyone's responses. This shit went on for hours at a time. The fuckers would not shut up all god damned morning! It was, hands down, the most miserable fucking office environment you could imagine.
Fuck that going to the office crap.
Re:Meetings (Score:5, Funny)
Also, fuck agile, I guess.
Re: Meetings (Score:3)
Respect. Ex-PNC as well. I used to think all corporate was like this, but it wasnt until I got remote jobs in cities outside of PA that I realized that region of the country seems to make a huge difference.
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It was also the first place I worked where everyone took a laptop to the meeting....so they could work on other shit that had nothing to do with the meeting. I was like WTF IS THSI?!?
Re: Meetings (Score:2)
A lot of middle management jobs dont actually have much of a purpose other than to "manage", whatever that means at any given time. So to justify their non jobs they hold meetings in order to look like they're organisational wizards who have their finger on the pulse rather than the useless time wasters doing nothing that they actually are.
Yes, quit (Score:4, Insightful)
> Right now, people might be saying, 'I will quit if I have to go back to the office,' but it turns out they don't mean it. The reason, of course, is it's one thing to say that you will quit; it's another to actually walk away from a paycheck...
That is exactly what my wife did when her employer announced they would be calling people back to the office.
She only wanted remote work, but ended up with a 40% pay increase too.
Of course, when she turned in her resignation, her employer said they would let her continue working from home, if she would stay. Too late, dumbasses!
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Business owners tend to use whatever stick they can find as a threat to keep pay down, offshore/AI/etc. Now the job your wife left has to find the same skills for the current market rate, so the gamble won't have paid off for them.
"Wharton Professor of Management" (Score:5, Insightful)
Another paid "expert" who can go fuck himself. All safe and tenured and cocooned in his little cozy ivory tower. He's safe, no matter what damage his bleating and writing cause.
The only people who are being hurt by people working remote is office real-estate owners. Now, are we really supposed to feel sorry for them?
No, of course not. Fuck 'em. May they lose their shirts.
Only speaking for myself (Score:1, Interesting)
Only speaking for myself but I find being isolated all day at home, not going out but ordering door dash, ordering on Amazon, etc doesn’t seem healthy. I go into the office almost five days a week and not judging anyone else. I personally need work / life boundaries. I do find when people are in the office I can have some of the quick in-person meetings (when those people are in). Again, I am not value judging anyone else. I know there are a range of workplaces good and bad but I feel like some o
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Some people need the office social life (nothing wrong with that). Many others don't.
As for connectedness....people can feel plenty connected working from home. Their connections are simply not work connections.
For example....my wife often has a friend over for tea at lunch time or in the afternoon. She takes the dog for a walk a couple of times per day and says hello or chats briefly with neighbors on our street.
As for work/life balance....much easier to maintain when you're not wasting a couple of hours p
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I personally would rather have my social time during activities I enjoy. I have nothing in common with more of my co-workers except we are all there to make a paycheck. So I make my social time activities with people who enjoy the things I enjoy. I play sports, I join local clubs, I found a small hangout I can go to for drinks and make friends. Then we plan trips and activities.
I've found that office friendships are much more dangerous. They may try to use it to influence your decisions, they make take conf
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People were shocked when they randomly found out I had a 3 year old child. I had been working there 6 years at the time.
My boss was like, "I didn't know you had a 3 year old kid?! When did that happen??" I just responded, "three years ago."
A lot of people, upon learning this, stopped talking to me unless they had to, others got real cold.
I guess if you keep your private life private and don't make a big fucking song and dance about getting married, having a kid, getting a puppy or whatever else, makes you a
Re: Only speaking for myself (Score:4, Insightful)
"Only speaking for myself but I find being isolated all day at home, not going out but ordering door dash, ordering on Amazon, etc doesnâ(TM)t seem healthy"
You're right, that isn't healthy. Don't do that.
If you work from home you need a plan for how to end your workday. Get up, get out, remove yourself from your "workspace".
The transition from work to home is mostly eliminated when working from home, so you have to wilfully manage it. If you do though, you'd be fine. You can't let that push you to be the worst version of yourself.
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I don't see the value in going out for lunch, and I try to avoid this as much as possible. And no, I don't order door dash either. I happen to know how to prepare a meal. This was one of the problems when being in the office. Our branch office was so small we didn't have a cantina, so we had to go out for lunch, which I think is expensive and a waste of time.
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Around my way lunch is a box with a couple of sandwiches and an apple or banana, the sandwiches usually with ham, cheese and/or jam.
You can enjoy them while having a healthy half our walk with some colleagues around the block.
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I worked in a cube farm and when we went remote it really destroyed morale. Getting info or help for day-to-day stuff got harder. I was told “just call someone on Teams if you need help,” but when I tried calling a guy I often relied on, he said he didn’t even have his headset set up.
I’ve also seen friends in remote salaried jobs get so absorbed into work that they’re basically always on. They end up high-strung all the time and it wasnt pleasant to be around them.
Even if the
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> I was told “just call someone on Teams if you need help,” but when I tried calling a guy I often relied on, he said he didn’t even have his headset set up.
Thanks for highlighting another benefit of remote work: The ease with which annoying coworkers can be blown off. At least he was nice enough to invent an excuse. I generally haven't bothered.
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To add context, hes a good friend who often was willing to help and I was on a call with a customer trying to get a quick answer. He had recent moved to a job that wasnt customer facing and didnt setup his mic since the it always a pain to setup on our remote stations. Instead he was typing long messages over team. This could have a quick 2-3 minute talk but became a 10+ minute wait for the customer.
This really showed how "quick" and "solid" teamwork happens in remote work in a majo
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I'd take a 10 minute wait for an answer from a human over the AI that won't help at all. Just be happy there are still humans in the customer facing roles.
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Don't call him, send him a message and wait until it's convenient to reply.
I was that "often relied on" guy in an office environment, and i spent so much of my day helping other people that i often couldn't get my own work done. Also people would tend to come to me first without trying to solve the problem themselves first.
Now people email or send me a message when they need help, and i reply to them when i take a break from my other work. It's a much better balance, and the wait time prompts people to try
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Back in 2000 (in a cube farm) when I wanted help I would text someone on IM instead of going in person.
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Do you live on a remote farm in the countryside?
If not, try meeting your neighbors. Go to local small businesses where you can chat to the staff, go to the local public house and family restaurants etc, assuming they still exist, go to church or other place of worship if you're into that. It's these long commutes where people only come home tired to sleep that destroyed local communities.
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I take a solid hour lunch break where I walk the dogs at the park, make lunch and do things around the house.
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> Only speaking for myself but I find being isolated all day at home, not going out but ordering door dash, ordering on Amazon, etc doesn’t seem healthy. I go into the office almost five days a week and not judging anyone else. I personally need work / life boundaries. I do find when people are in the office I can have some of the quick in-person meetings (when those people are in). Again, I am not value judging anyone else. I know there are a range of workplaces good and bad but I feel like some of that is on us for what we try to create, cultivate, etc.
> In general I do worry that we lose part of what gives us some basic connections.
> I think this is tangentially related: The movie Bowling alone is a great film about some of the connectedness we could have.
> [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Isn't the whole point of telecommuting that you can enjoy the benefits of being at home, including not having to eat food prepared by someone else at exorbitant prices?
Unlike most of the people that have replied in this general discussion topic, I actually do have a hybrid schedule. It's been my experience with one telecommute-day per week that I usually just prepare lunch at home myself. Sometimes I'll go to lunch with my wife if we're feeling like it.
I've found having ad-hoc meetings is no worse remote
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone
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I slam my laptop shut at 6pm sharp every day. My work apps are compartmentalized on my phone as well and shutdown and stop sending me notifications as well. I'm reachable via PagerDuty if I happen to be on call that week, but that's it. I get 2+ hours back that I would have otherwise spent commuting to spend with my kids or do housework, relax, or hang out with friends. There is an iron curtain between my social/personal life and my work life. I've definitely made friends through work (you can make fri
Objective view (Score:3)
I retired last year and was back visiting my old partners recently; the company was recently acquired but there is minimal change so far.
The office has half the people working on-site on the "anchor" days. One project manager has his personal laptop on the desk in addition to the company laptop and is clearly doing "other things" during the day. Most of the people in the office are more junior, mainly there for the social aspect. Turnover is slowly increasing, but it is hard to see the trend from the cycles. Hybrid work is eating away at training since senior engineers spend the least time in the office.
All that said, profitability is up for now. Long term is where the big question marks are.
Same Teams calls either way (Score:3)
In office or remote I'm in the same Teams meetings with a distributed team. Nobody goes to a conference room for these calls. Heck I've been in Teams calls where some of the other participants are sitting right next to me but we are all on Teams anyway with the other team members.
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I've been in those environments (see my rant above). I cannot understand why motherfuckers don't get a damned room!!
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99.99999% repeating of meetings have no purpose. So at least when I'm attending "remotely" I can work on the stuff I need to get done without looking rude. If I ignore you on teams you really can't tell. If I ignore you in the meeting room you damn sure will notice.
Maybe things have changed (Score:5, Insightful)
Where is the data for these conclusions? Apparently he thinks people can't learn remotely which actually is a great way to learn. One thing iI have found about professors is that they may have authority, but their expertise diminishes quickly over time these these days.
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As a software engineer 100% of my learning the last 20+ years is remote. If you can't do that you are in big trouble.
Idiot. (Score:3)
My team is fully remote... people from at least 4 countries and 8 different cities...
I am the only one from my city...
How me being in the office would help the team?
Going to office means for me 10h lost per week + higher cost.
I understand the job market is hard but I am willing to try...
For sure I will spend hours in the office looking for another job...
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Easy...
Pick a 9th city where none of you are, and open an expensive office there in the middle of the business district where there is no residential housing for miles around.
Then force everyone to move to the area surrounding that city, and spend 2 hours a day commuting into that city.
Employees lose, company loses, but at least the owner of that expensive office complex gets an extra tenant full of unhappy people.
Farton business school? (Score:1)
The place that awarded Donald a degree?
No, thank you.
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You know Donald paid somebody to take his exams for him. [1]Cheating is a sport for him. [youtube.com]
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AH8CFPXCz90
Where did he write his book? (Score:3)
I will assume he wrote the book while in his college office, so that he could collaborate with his fellow workers and attend meetings.
Hybrid schedules are way too rigid (Score:2)
At least if it follows some model of "Mondays and Thursdays at the office". Well, what if I need to visit the lab at office on Tuesday - Might as well spend the rest of the day there too.
If it's some sort of general goal ("spend at least two days a week in office"), I have not so far heard of any org that actually plans (even on team level) what you are supposed to do during those office days. Do you schedule lunch together? Have your standups? If everyone just shows up, gets to their desk and has a bunch o
European view (Score:2)
The rules here where I work (IT, but it's the same for other office workers): you have a maximum of 2 days / week of remote work. The rest of the time, you come into the office. Also, remote work needs to be requested in advance and needs to be approved by the team leader (pure formality). When at the office, you badge in and out using your personal badge, so it's very easy to track who's in and who's not. If the rules are not followed, you'll get a ruffle from HR.
The reasons for mandating time at the offic
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My wife's current and last job, she was hired as fully remote. She has never met another employee in person. Worked out great, no complaints with respect to working remote.
It's worth pointing out that for both jobs, they started out looking for a local (Boston and NYC, respectively) candidate, but couldn't find one, so they went looking for remote employees. So that's one thing remote workers get you a much wider recruitment pool.
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I just noticed you named your thread "European view".
On one hand, for a place with such a "progressive, worker friendly" reputation, I'm surprised at this rather backward view of remote work.
On the other hand, it does fit right in with the control-oriented culture (as I see it).
Either way......not something I would be interested in, but glad it works for you.
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A hybrid setup loses most of the benefits of remote.
You still have to live within proximity of the office, where housing costs tend to be higher.
You still need to maintain a car if you drive, you only save 2 days worth of gas but all the other maintenance costs remain.
If you take the train 3 single day tickets tends to be only marginally cheaper than a 5 day/weekly ticket.
Really fully remote is the way to go for any compatible job. It's good for employees, good for employers and good for the environment. Th
Modern office environments are toxic (Score:1)
I used to work in the office 100% of the time. Back then we had our own desks, our own cubbies for storage, our own office chairs, desktop computers and even fixed cisco phones. In the space our team occupied we had about 20 desk spaces (no cubicles, this is Europe, not a forsaken hell scape across a large body of water) in a semi open office landscape. Then came covid and remote work was mandated for over two years. The company decided to "renovate" and "optimize" (i.e. sell off a large portion of the bui
I often ask the price employers put on (Score:1)
all-in-office work, but get no clean answer. If it has a value, then pay employees more for coming in. Price it in rather than make it all or nothing. I generally agree it makes sense to have 2 in-office days, but not all focking week.
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The problem with requiring even a single day/week in the office is that it creates a real limitation on where employees can live. All of the sudden, they can't live in, say, Florida, for example, if they have to be in an office in Pennsylvania, once per week, without incurring a big time and money expense. So you limit your worker pool. Which, I guess is fine, if getting workers is no problem, or if you don't want the best workers you can get, regardless of where they live.
It just seems to backward to me a
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When guys like the Starbucks and Boeing CEO's can commute by company plane, why not you?
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People have completely different jobs. Some are able to be done remotely, some not. Some can commute by plane, some can't.
Proof we need unions (Score:3)
"Right now, people might be saying, 'I will quit if I have to go back to the office,' but it turns out they don't mean it. The reason, of course, is it's one thing to say that you will quit; it's another to actually walk away from a paycheck..."
He's saying out loud that you can make workers do anything because they're afraid of losing their jobs.
We need unions if we ever want remote work back.
Pundit picks sides in issue to aggrandize self (Score:3)
This is just grandstanding, seeking influencer status by opining on a current controversy (of sorts). Sure, there are companies implementing RTO policies to go with the TPS reports, corporate "rah" events and other drivel of a bygone era. And there _are_ people who are either more comfortable being a honeybee in a cell, or are in some other kind of position that makes them put up with it even if they're not comfortable. But the genie is permanently out of the bottle on this; companies that do not offer remote work will not attract first-tier talent. In 2025, that isn't even up for debate (unless you're trying to extend the length of a YouTube video to get more ad impressions).
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He was probably touting AI last week
The value of being lost (Score:3)
> When you first began your career, imagine what it would've been like if no one was in the office. You'd be completely lost.
Being "lost" isn't a problem in and of itself, I'd say it's actually a good thing because the best outcome is you figure out how to get yourself un-lost, which is something everyone needs to be able to do at some point. I didn't have coworkers or Stack Overflow or Youtube or Copilot when I started as a dev. I had to go to Borders, buy a book, and then actually read the book, just to get to the point where I could start writing code and cultivating the feedback loop of making mistakes and learning to fix those mistakes.
Later on there was a funny thing with Experts Exchange where they'd want you to pay to see the answers to questions, but the accepted answer was always in the DOM anyway so you just had to view page source to step over the paywall.
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[DISCLAIMER: I think the professor in question is an idiot].
Given that disclaimer, I think you're wrong here. What you're doing is conflating "new to working" with "new to working HERE".
There's a difference between learning to program and learning to build your company's product. There's a shit ton of institutional knowledge about your product that you're not going to be able to go to Amazon or B&N and buy a book about.
That's where in-office time matters. When I started my current job, they told me
Yeah, well. Author worked at shit companies, then (Score:5, Insightful)
He's misdirected your attention from poor management onto the worker.
Most meetings are a waste of time even if everyone is in the office.
He's just enamored with full cube farms as a symbol of his importance.
Half-wits (Score:3, Insightful)
Wow! These are that same imbeciles who are mass firing people and claiming that AI can do all those jobs.
Slack, anybody? (Score:2)
> You can catch the boss between meetings and pass along a little tidbit of information
Wait until the author hears about this thing called asynchronous communication!
He'll lose his top when he hears that I can pass along a little tidbit of information to my boss in the very same meeting in which we are both attending, with all the other meeting participants being none the wiser .
I can even schedule my messages so that they'll be delivered right when my boss wakes up .
I guess Wharton hasn't heard of these new-fa
Bullshit (Score:2)
> If you think about how we learn about office work, we learn by watching. You learn what the values of the organization are. You learn it from the conversations in the office. You can see how the boss reacts to different requests and different problems.
In my 25+ year career, I spent maybe 5 or 6 working in the same physical office as my boss, and by then I was senior enough that I was managing people myself. The only time I worked on a team that wasn't split over at least two locations was during my time spent working at a defense contractor, and even then they were pretty flexible about WFH if you weren't working on something too sensitive.
When I started out I was one of two people on my team in my location and I was stuffed in a corner cube in the lega
I'd Fire You All (Score:3)
What a toxic bunch or lunatics.
Do you really think that management cares enough about you to intentionally want to keep you down and miserable? Happy employees is management 101.
For a large percentage of jobs, this guy says 70% I don't know, in-office works better. It gets more things done. Institutional knowledge gets shared. Ad hoc meetings, i prefer engagements or encounters, happen more frequently and more information and ideas get exchanged. Learning the processes, procedures, culture and politics happens better and quicker in-office.
This doesn't hold true for all jobs. There are absolutely no absolutes. And apparently as many as 30% of jobs can be WFH. But, that's a minority. Not the majority as this threads complainers and ragers are espousing.
But, the brain rot in this thread really leaves me thinking that I'd fire you all. Not because I want you to be miserable or not get ahead. Rather, I'd fire you because i would not want a bunch of cocksure and clueless idiots working for me.
Re: (Score:2)
> i prefer
was meant to be "in person"
You can't fire me, I quit (Score:2)
If I was so unlucky as to end up with a boss as toxic as you, I'd be outta there so fast you'd only see a blur
Le'me guess: tested the theory on college students (Score:3)
Decades ago, the move to 'open offices' was driven by bad research. That is, the research on productivity was done with college students; they found that college students in a collaborative environment do better than college students trying to study in isolation. Which--well, that makes sense, given that college students are still learning, and it helps to have some collaboration while in a learning environment.
But that research was used to justify the whole 'open office' movement--forgetting that people like software developers are not college students, and need a way to drown out the 'forced collaboration' in order to find a modicum of peace so they could focus.
Of course, open offices aligned with managers who wanted to be able to see all the veal in the cattle pens workers working for them, and it aligned with the penny pinchers who didn't want to build enclosed offices.
And it was only decades later that we "learned" the painfully obvious: that open office floor plans [1]are a failure. [entrepreneur.com]
And now we're doing the same damned thing with "hybrid work" and forcing people back to the office.
Both civic leaders who want to bring workers back into the downtown corridor so they have the captive audiences for commerce in a downtown corridor, commercial real estate owners who want full buildings so they can guarantee returns on their investments, and managers who want to see full veal pens their workers so they can 'manage' them, have all aligned with this idea that "returning to the office" is better, somehow.
And now comes the research--undoubtedly being done on college students, who in fact do benefit from collaboration. And not on workers who benefit from quiet space so they can concentrate on their work.
Worse, because of the absolute mess done by the pandemic shutdown requirements--and how people moved across the country (because they could), the push to get people back into the office is often accompanied by confusion and worse: [2]a lack of desks for workers to work at. [kornferry.com] But we're ploughing ahead anyways, regardless of the loss of productivity or the loss of good workers--and I'm sure research will be "discovered" which support all of this.
And a decade or two from now, after the wreckage is done, someone will point out that maybe all of this wasn't a good idea: that the increased carbon footprint of daily commuters to fulfill some sort of financial and political obligation to large commercial real estate owners, as well as satisfying the need to fill veal pens, may not have been the wonderful idea prior "research" suggested.
[1] https://www.entrepreneur.com/science-technology/why-its-time-to-ditch-open-office-plans/327142
[2] https://www.kornferry.com/insights/this-week-in-leadership/returning-to-work-but-no-space-to-work
metrics I've seen say otherwise (Score:2)
We've looked very closely at our bug close metrics for the last 25 years (we use the bug database to track features and some tasks too). And the pandemic and shift to remote work did not slow down either or creation of tickets nor slowed down our closing them.
Now some companies may operate differently. And I could see how some smaller companies would have difficultly without face-to-face meetings. But in my case, my company has offices all over the world, and the campus itself is big enough that taking 15 m
Re: (Score:2)
What is it you do?
Re: It was always BS (Score:5, Insightful)
The part you are missing is that when they were in the office they were no more productive, because in the time they are currently running errands, they used to be sitting in meetings that could have been (and now are) an email.
I worked in an office for 7 years. My job did not need me to be there. Email or phone calls were more than sufficient for the times others needed to ask me questions. Then Covid hit, and my productivity roughly doubled. I could keep working during that 2hr meeting every week in which I never contributed anything. I spent 5-6 fewer hours a week in the car in NJ traffic (which is fucking insane during rush hour).
before covid ended I left for a permanent wfh position, and I have been insanely successful for my new company only being in the office once a quarter. Yes, I run errands during work hours on occasion. But the work gets done, on time, and it delivers profit, which is how salaried positions are SUPPOSED to work. We get paid for the outcome, not our time. If I can deliver the work from home, then the office is just an unnecessary expense, and I should not need to be forced into it so that a manager who cannot do my job can feel useful by seeing me at my desk on occasion.
I just was offered a new job and turned it down because it would have required 3 days per week in an office an hour from my home, despite none of the team I would be managing being in that office (or even in that state) because it was âoepolicyâ. It is not ultimately about productivity, it is about control. If they can force you back into the office, they force you into other unfavorable (to you) conditions, and increase shareholder returns at YOUR expense.
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I remember before COVID, I had this manager that would for whatever reason or another hold an hour long meeting most days.
Now it was pretty much universally a waste of time like many meetings, but at least usually I sit on my laptop doing real work even as I'm in the conference room. Not ideal, but workable. However with this manager, the first sentence in every meeting was "ok everyone, laptops closed, phones in pockets". The manager felt it a sign of unforgivable disrespect to look at any screen while t
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Pretty sure most people find it's disrespectful for someone to be looking at a screen when they are supposed to be listening.
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That's fine if it's something actually important, or even 'officially' important. However the vast majority of the time was just the manager wanting to ramble about whatever they were thinking on such important subjects as the new boat they got.
Re:It was always BS (Score:4, Interesting)
Some people abuse, sure.
Some people are simply way more productive, and their activity isn't really any different from what it would be if they worked in an office.
You know what I did all day when I was in an office? Have meetings via Skype.
You know what I did all day when I worked from home? Have meetings via Skype.
Why were meetings via Skype? Because everyone worked in different buildings and offices around the state. Except our contractors. They were in other states.
My wife was in the same situation. Even if she were in an office somewhere, everyone she meets with are scattered around different offices.
The main difference between working by yourself from some shitty office and working from home is that at home, you have nicer equipment, faster internet, and a better working environment. You also don't have a share a nasty bathroom and break area. Two rooms in our house are dedicated offices. Mine is one of the bedrooms. My wife's is the dining room (that's what it is "supposed" to be anyway). We have real offices. With doors that close. Not some shitty cubical where you have to listen to every single other fucking thing that is going on that day in the entire office. My wife's office is very cozy, very nice. Warm and pleasant. Mine is a lot more utilitarian, but also way more functional for my needs.
Neither one of us would ever return to an office building, unless there was no other choice, and even then, it would only be long enough to find a new job. My wife couldn't anyway, given that her company's offices are in NYC and we live in western PA.
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Before they closed our office in 2017 the majority of the meetings were on calls with offshore teams
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> You can only be caught red handed so many times.
If I were caught not working when I'm supposed to be at work, I would lose my job, yes. Not the first time, no doubt, but subsequently. I don't see anyone arguing that should not be the case.
I do about as much work at home as I do at work. It's pretty easy to determine whether I'm "at work" from records of my presence in IT systems, though you'd have to look at the work itself to determine whether I'm doing my job. But then, it's part of my manager's job to know whether I'm doing mine. Going to meetings is
Re:It was always BS (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm also taking less sick days because being sick at my home office is a lot easier to get work done than being sick in the real office knowingly taking PTO away from my co-workers when they get my illness.
I also take less PTO for things that only require me to be home. My shower has a leak, normally I'd have to call a plumber and take a whole day off work to sit watching TV while he fixes it. Now I take 2 minutes off work to answer the door, point them at the bathroom, and go back to work. I save money because I can eat at home and better meal plan, so I've lost weight and I'm healthier. That saves the employer on healthcare costs. I drive less so I have to take less days off for car maintenance. My breaks are more productive because I'm at home. I can use my breaks to work out, to clean, to prep meals, etc. This gives me more free time after work so I have lower stress and I need less mental health PTO days.
I'm more comfortable at home. I have a private office with 2 34" displays, a very comfortable chair, and a sit/stand desk. None of which my employer provided. I can close the door and work and often need to be reminded by my wife it's well after 5pm and I should stop. This is a far cry from clock watching so I can leave as soon as possible to ensure I'm home before dark and can cook dinner. Again, a net gain for my employer. Finally, I accept lower compensation to be fully remote. I end up with a net gain of income due to lower expenses. If I was to move to the city and work in the office I'd expect 15-20k more a year to accomidate my cost of living. That must be a good thing for them as well.
I'm in a knowledge worker role so I'm either in meetings assisting other engineers all over the world, or I'm head down building shit. Either way there is nothing to gain from the office.
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Vast majority of corprate roles I have been in for 30+ years, I have been in a cube, programing, configuring, building a BOM, reporting, training team members, emailing, or meeting my limited time on this rock away for return management feels is stealing, When called to do something in person I am the stand up person who drives a vision, a PowerPoint or a document, I know of the 80% of the office occupants who do not do this....they instead of doing thing... talk and talk and talk about perhaps accomplis
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You're post kind of made sense until you took that bizarre swipe at DEI. I suggest that you actually learn what the term actually means and not from your moronic right-wing echo chambers. Because it's not what you think it is. And frnakly, I strongly suspect that you're one of these people who *thinks* they're the productive one when in fact they're a millstone around the team's neck. I've run into people like you far too often.
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You attacked him for having the wrong idea about DEI but then completely fail to describe what it means to you. You made his point for him on that one. Good job!
Your "you're a right wing nut job racist if you don't support DEI!" philosophy is dead. Companies across the board are killing their DEI departments, firing their execs and managers who only exist to create and hire DEI people, companies pushing woke marketing campaigns are getting demolished in the marketplace, and DEI candidates are getting pus
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You don't run errands, duck out to the store close to the office, or get drive through during in-office days, also? That's pretty unusual around here. Might shoot the team a heads up you won't be available on Teams if it is something like taking the dog to the vet, I guess.
Re: It was always BS (Score:2)
Yeah, doing shit "during work hours" is something adults know how to do responsibly and nobody cares what you think. Get back to making those Arby's roast beef sandwiches, peasant.
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> We had enough stories of what these people were really doing while at home... running errands, shopping, going through the drive thru, etc.
And? Was the work getting done? What were you doing at the office? Complaining about people working from home at the water cooler to your colleagues?
The idea that an errand is some kind of a gotchya is just asinine. Just people on the output of their work rather than trying to micromanage the hours of their day. I'm reminded of the time my boss complained that my lunch took 10 minutes longer than normal, I made a point of it of working on time from that point onwards to the point where I interrupted him mid
Motivation (Score:5, Interesting)
The only "motivation" that a return to office policy provides is motivation to find a new job.
Re:Motivation (Score:5, Insightful)
Well... I'm sure that the office building owners feel motivated to keep getting their lease checks. That's what this return to the office plan is really about.
Re:Motivation (Score:4, Insightful)
Totally agree. I've been working remote on and off for 20+ years now. Everytime I end up back in the office for some reason, my productivity goes DOWN. Wasted time in meetings, not to mention the commute. I fully agree that face-to-face time with colleagues outside of work is important, but instead of a company spending all of the corporate cash on office space, make quarterly in-person retreats a real thing. Spending a week together as a corporate team, and not just focusing on "work" stuff, builds better relationships than just hanging around the office.
Re:Motivation (Score:5, Insightful)
Exactly this. Periodic meetups so you can get to know people in a social setting works a LOT better.
Forced daily commuting is draining and soul destroying, and most offices are not located where people can live nearby and walk to work.
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Socializing with colleagues is an extremely important part of the job when you are in a company.
In that regard, being on-site has an edge.
But it doesn't have to be this way. What matters in the end is the amount of daily interactions you have with your colleagues.
Sure, if you are using MS Teams all day when working remotely, you will loose in interactions quality. Because sending a message to someone to ask to scedule a video meeting to ask a simple question will be less efficient than simply asking at your
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Why do you need to send a message to schedule a video call to ask a question?
Why not just use the message to ask the question?
I have several colleagues who want to schedule meetings to ask questions, and 99% of the time the answer is "i dont have that information to hand, i will have to look it up and get back to you". If they had asked the question at the start i probably would have been able to look up the answer before the video call was even scheduled.
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> Socializing with colleagues is an extremely important part of the job when you are in a company.
> In that regard, being on-site has an edge.
But it doesn't have to be a full "return to office" to achieve this. You could make it that there's an in-person meeting that people show up for periodically. Like you could designate say, a meeting at 2pm on Wednesday. For that you don't need people to show up at 8AM and work to 5PM in the office, you just need people to gather. Chances are most people will start showing
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We have a pretty simple way of working - our work is split into projects for clients, and each project runs for a fixed number of days and has a deadline, a report must be submitted by the last day, and the report is done using an online reporting system that i helped write so i can see exactly when a report was submitted.
Cross referencing the report submission dates, the report deadline dates and the in-office schedule showed that 3% of reports were submitted late when the staff worked from home, and 74% w
Re:Motivation (Score:4, Informative)
You really need to do something about your obsession with rsilvergun. Being that fixated on someone is not healthy.
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What I want to know is why hasn't this user been banned given that AC posting has required an account for years now. They'd ban a user for spamming ads for penis pills but apparently won't for spamming harassment against a user.
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I worked at an organization that, when we went remote, created Teams channels for things like telling people what music you were listening to, and Netflix recommendations. It both contributed to getting to know your colleagues & allowed management to measure exactly how much time you spent socializing (at least through official channels.)
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That seems like an HR trap of the worst kind.
No WAY would I "contribute" to such channels. Which of course, no doubt, would be "counted against" me.
Quarterly retreats?? Fuck that! (Score:2)
Some of us have a life and family outside of work and have better things to do than spend a few days doing motivational BS in a cheap motel with people who are not our friends and often we dont even like. You go play moronic "bonding" games if that's what you like but leave the rest of us out of it.
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Right.
Some people love rubbing elbows with others, some don't. Let those who do go do it, and let those who don't skip it.
It is just that simple.
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> I fully agree that face-to-face time with colleagues outside of work is important
Yeah, no thanks. "Outside of work" time is my time. If the company wants to have us meet face to face to play silly games, they can schedule it during work hours.
> make quarterly in-person retreats a real thing. Spending a week together as a corporate team, and not just focusing on "work" stuff, builds better relationships than just hanging around the office.
Again, no thanks. I abhor forced socialization with coworkers and doi
Re:Motivation (Score:4, Insightful)
I was hired remotely no where near an office. So sure let me pack up my family, move 300 miles and then sit on zoom calls with people in office B, C, D, and E when I'm office A all day. It's fun to sit next to people with noise canceling headphones on.
LOL.
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Having someone office based join online meetings is the worst... Constant background noise disturbing all the other participants.
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Not sure what outdated version of Lync for Business you are using, but virtually all modern groupware communications software has phenomenal noise cancelling. It's been a long time since I've heard any background noise. The other day we even had a guy who stuck his fingers in his ears on camera to stop the noise, and we couldn't even hear on the call that his fire alarm was going off (that said his voice volume dropped drastically so while the background noise cancelling was working it couldn't compensate f
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> Constant background noise disturbing all the other participants.
That's how working in an office is. Our IT department is in an old part of the warehouse. High ceilings, basically a big box that echoes everything. The meeting rooms are just walls with no ceiling on them (They said this was for air filtration after covid - It's more likely due to fire regulations with sprinklers if the room had a ceiling on it). Because of this, the entire department hears everything from every meeting. And one of the older guys is fucking deaf, so anytime he's in a meeting, the phone vol
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> It's fun to sit next to people with noise canceling headphones on.
You touched on something TFS missed. The office of today is nothing like the office of 15 years ago. People don't communicate anymore. Even in the office people sit at their desks with a headset on and get visibly annoyed at any distraction. That's not energizing.
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When I was new to a team (I transferred in from another dept), it wasn't very long before my new boss chastised me for wearing headphones. "This isn't that kind of environment." I wasn't allowed to wear headphones. I didn't stay there very long.
Re:Motivation (Score:4, Interesting)
> The only "motivation" that a return to office policy provides is motivation to find a new job.
Management types tend to confuse "beating the morale out of the employee" with "motivation." In all honesty, that's all they want. To get you feeling so defeated that you feel completely beholden to the company. Anything that lowers that feeling of utter despair is frowned upon for the simple fact that a mentally healthy employee doesn't tolerate ever escalating goals with never escalating salary. The adversarial employer / employee relationship is considered a positive in the business world.
Re: (Score:2)
AKA quiet firing