Regarding return to office policy, I hear many speculations and reasons hypothesized. Mostly by employees who don’t really know and who had no choice in it.
I would like to know is if there are any lemmings out there who have been involved in these talks.
What was discussed?
How is something like this coordinated amongst others businesses even rivals.
What are the high level factors that have gone into the decision?
Bonus points: is it even possible for employees to prevent or reverse these policies at this point?
Mine consisted of me countering every single one of my manager’s lame objections to remote work, including pointing out that we used contractors in fucking India and offering to change my name to Rajesh, and him simply ending the discussion with, “I can see we’re poles apart on this.”
Haha this came up a lot at my place. They offshore all these teams and then champion back to office as a very important reason for it.
Never worked in banking or finance. That job was at a company that made ultrasound machines.
Funny story I like to tell: one April Fools day I started a rumor that the company was getting bought by Toshiba. I created a fake Wall St. Journal article written in their bland style and left a couple printed copies on random manager’s desks with illegible initials scrawled on them. Within 2 hours our dept (IT) had an emergency meeting to reassure us that it wasn’t true. They said upper management was VERY upset and wanted the perp to come forward (no recriminations - yeah right!) and explain the reason for it. I’ll never forget my manager, who was British and generally looked like actor Bob Hoskins, dressed as a pirate because it was April Fools Day. The jam-packed conference room was utter chaos and he was standing on a chair in his pirate costume waving his arms trying to get everybody to shut up.
I kept my mouth shut. A friend of mine who worked around a lot of managers said the tone of their conversation that week was like… why now? why Toshiba? As if there might be a grain of truth to it. Months later it turned out our company had a very secret project going with Hitachi to develop a miniaturized combat ultrasound machine for the army, because they were encountering landmines etc that threw out plastic shrapnel, which was really hard to see with x-rays. So apparently the big shots thought somebody might be teasing them about the Hitachi deal, and they were worried about the army getting wind of it and doubting their ability to keep the whole thing secret. Bonus: the device was codenamed the Tricorder, and physically modeled after the shoulder-strap tricorder on Star Trek TOS.
In my corporate experiences, these decisions were made unilaterally by the C suite without discussion.
Our CEO literally woke up one Monday and demanded RTO by Friday. Fucking asshole works from home in Hawaii
I can’t speak to what’s said in the meetings, but in a similar vein, we were told we needed to come back to the office 2-days a month because other people had to work from the office, and it wasn’t fair to them.
That’s it. That’s the rationale. Because it wasn’t fair to the people who had to be here. Mind you, my team has been successfully working remote since COVID.
🤦♂️ fml
It’s funny to me because of the return to office policy, the price of parking is going up, a lot. Like now I have to fight for an extra $2000 for parking + $1000 for meals + whatever day care will be.
Yep. I suspect that where I work, parking has some role to play in the RTO. I can imagine the department in charge of collecting parking fees saw a dramatic decrease in revenue.
Not that what I think matters to anyone (where I work), but any company that owns and manages their own parking facilities should not make employees pay for parking. It’s just bad form. But what do I know?
Yep it’s just a stealth paycut
Yep. Not counting the time I spent in traffic, nor the gas it took to drive, today I spent $59 just for the privilege to do the same job I could’ve done at home. Tomorrow I don’t plan on forgetting my lunch, so that’ll save me $13.
Make a sandwich. You don’t have to buy meals.
The rest sucks, though.
That’s what I do.
Sandwiches don’t grow on trees. Peanut butter is banned in the office. Deli meat is expensive.
Well then explain this one smarty pants!
Hole in one, checkmate! Pshh.
:P
I just make a bit extra for supper every night, and put it in a fridge, the leftovers are then my meal a couple days latter (never the next day - that gets boring!)
At the beginning of COVID, when our CEO decided all non-essential staff should immediately begin working from home wherever possible, our CIO declared all of IT to be essential on-site. Shortly after the meeting when the CIO made that announcement, people at my level (bottom-level manager) essentially all announced to our supervisors that we were going to refuse to abide by that directive.
My direct supervisor told us to relax and essentially said that the entire management team was going to sit the CIO down and have a come to Jesus meeting. Shortly after that the directive was reversed, and it was left up to managers to decide if their team could be WFH, hybrid, or fully on-site. It’s hard to stay CIO if the entire IT group is in revolt.
For many months after that, in the regular management meetings, the CIO would talk about how difficult it was and how everyone was suffering due to the requirement to work from home. He would talk about how many people told him they were longing for the day when we could all be on-site again. I have no idea who those people were, because everyone I spoke to thought WFH was fantastic.
I have heard that when productivity didn’t drop, the CEO asked, “Why are we paying all these high rents for office space if everyone is just as productive and happier working from home?” It was around that time that the CIO started to talk about WFH like it was a good thing.
At this point, there’s no sign it will ever end. We are allowed to hire people from out-of-state and most people are WFH full time. They’ve reduced office space to the point where we all couldn’t work on-site even if we wanted to.
CIO been spending their money on REIT shares…
If you accepted a remote job, you should have it in writing that the job is ‘remote’ work.
If your job wasn’t remote initially, but assumed it would be remote going forward, you should have demanded that the job has changed to ‘remote’ in writing.
If your job wasn’t initially remote, was temporarily made remote, and they are now changing back. Be prepared to walk.
I hate this line of reasoning. It’s not something I subscribe to. We’re not robots. We’re not blindly following some set of logic rules. There’s no humanity in that.
My job was remote to start. Even if it wasn’t, this line of reasoning isn’t something I would ever use. Just because it was or was not a thing does not mean we’re forced to just accept things and not want life to be better. Especially if it’s a business decision based on things that do not make sense. Squeaky wheels get the grease. C suite makes decisions on information and if all people never spoke up just because things were a certain way when they arrived then nothing would change.
I’m grateful for being hired on during COVID for this. My job description specifically says remote.
Bonus is that I work for a union and they have our backs. Even as the company tightens down on cyber security and starts forcing people to use the Ethernet or else apps on their personal phones (big no from me) to log into certain things - even with that, the union has our back and is making the company give us options to remain fully remote.
Having that in writing won’t help a great deal. Even if somehow you make it binding, you’re still employed at-will. Unless you’re saying to make sure you have a full employment contract in place. Which, yeah, wouldn’t that be nice?
- finding and hiring staff will be harder
- attracting top tier talent will be harder
- rent will be more expensive
- childcare will require more sick leave
- illness will require more sick leave
- expanding to new territories will be harder
The c-suite evaluated the cost of rent pretty good and had an existing problem of not being able to hire above average younger talent because the work they were doing was pretty boring. Advertising a good hybrid wfh policy (once a week or once a month in-office depending on different factors) has brought in good people.
Basically, they saw that it was bringing in cash.
The biggest challenge has been getting new hires integrated well with existing team leaders.
There’s also team leaders that refuse to use Teams/zoom, but also don’t answer their phone. In the past you could corner them in their office but now they sort of anchor their team. It’s mostly self-repairing as they stagnate and other teams flourish.
My company required everyone come back to the office. My team works in a terminal, we can do our work from anywhere. Everyone of my department went back in. I said no.
They said I could be terminated
I said go ahead and fire me, I’m the lead tech, 40 experience, I built and maintain more then half of the automation, I’m the only one who understands networking onprem and I cloud and has a security background.
I dare you.
They said they would make a special exemption for me.
The moral of the story… You can demand stuff from your company if your company can’t function without you.
Can you hire me and teach me the way 😆
You’re what I want to be when I grow up. I’m middle aged.
Bonus points: is it even possible for employees to prevent or reverse these policies at this point?
UNIONIZE
I happened to be involved in such a meeting this morning.
The conversation around the general policy was mostly supportive. The main concern is that we do not have an official policy in place and various teams are setting their own rules, which is occaisionally resulting in collaboration issues.
The other main issue, unsurprisingly, regards what we can do to make sure that people are actually working when they are at home. For the most part, people are getting their work done, but there are always going to be people trying to take advantage and we discussed ways to track that without getting too “big brother” across the board.
Sounds like we are going to implement a 2 day wfh allowance coordinated within teams, based on their schedules so that we have at least half of each team in the office each day, with exceptions for people with extenuating circumstances.
We are not going to put any kind of tracking software on their machines, but we are going to monitor overall output.
I gotta be honest- sounds weird you weren’t already tracking output already.
Like was output before wfh just “theyre in the office today”?
We are. Just not with software that checks keystrokes, mouse movements, etc.
I never understand places that dont have some sort of work management methodology.
In technology, we often use agile. Its complicated, but one key part is that the individuals determine what needs to be done to get an overall effort completed, creates the individual tasks in an application, schedules them for completion and makes notes about status as they go.
Its a little micro, but it ends all questions of “is this person working”. Either theyre getting stuff done or they aren’t. We have regular sessions to check progress and reports are generated on an ongoing basis. If someone is dicking around it shows up real fast.
I can’t imagine that places still just raw-dog all the work. What is Joe doing. No clue. When is he going to finish? Dunno. How is the project going? Beats me. Are we staffed appropriately? Good question.
My wife’s employment (a national company providing services to homes) not only embraced the remote work that COVID forced her into, they closed down their central customer service call center to save that money.
This year they’re talking about taking all the administrative people out of the local offices and only needing the service people pick up supplies and having the remote workers pick up the volume.
Boiled down to “Me in charge. Come in” as a response to leadership.The reality is they rented out an office to hold 200 people, laid off half of them, and then were upset the place always looked empty when they brought clients around. It went from “You all need to be in office on Wednesdays, so we look like a big company”, to wanting everyone to return.
The problem is a good majority of people had moved away during covid. Those were the first people to be laid off unless they were superstars. They had a lease agreement until 2026 and were already subletting the previous offices (They kept moving into new spaces as they grew before other leases were up) that also had long contracts. I am no longer there, but rumor is they are trying to sublet the 200 person office and find yet another small space. They are slowly turning into a real estate company.
The only similar meeting I’ve been in was how to handle the aspect of of the job that could not be done remotely.
While Wfh was common, even before covid, there was workshop jobs that could not be done remotely.
The conclusion was to rotate who went in so as to limit infection risk. One at a time.
They let us know their thinking here. I don’t personally have a dog in this fight, live a few blocks from the office so either way is fine with me. They landed on “hybrid” but now I just work at the office and do not bring my laptop home.
Their thinking:
Collaboration really is better in the office, zoom does not replace the experience of just being here and aware of conversations around you (fair enough) we are already paying for the office (not a real reason, could sublease, we already did with half of it).
My thinking (they don’t care but) working from home benefits the rest of my family more than it does me. I can bike to work and do. Reclaimed the space in my house that was office, and absolutely ignore work when I’m home. Certainly would not force anyone else to, like my job did, but glad to have a space to work outside my house.
My company (small, < 50 people) basically did an informal survey and then CEO said that working from home is here to stay, with the option to work in the office whenever we want (and some do).
The meeting was pretty much, we are going back to work in the office. I went back for the time it took me to find a remote job
