Posted on 04/24/2023 6:10:47 PM PDT by DoodleBob
...Ask these executives why they're pushing the office so hard and you'll get some HR-concocted jumble of "productivity" and "creativity" and "culture." But their less-filtered peers will tell you what they really think. Jamie Dimon declared that working from home "doesn't work for those who want to hustle." Elon Musk demanded that employees commit to an "extremely hardcore" schedule consisting of "long hours at high intensity." And in a recent op-ed article in The New York Times, the finance executive and professional blowhard Steven Rattner railed against working from home as evidence that America has "gone soft."
I mean, they might as well just say it: They think working from home is for sissies. Even after their employees proved they could work just fine away from the office, the country's old, white, male CEOs want to go back to the way things were. And the old way was clear: The office is for work, and the home is for — well, for whatever unpaid stuff it is that women do while their men are at work. In the minds of many bosses, work from home is an oxymoron.
"These are men with very traditional views, who see the home as their wife's domain and work as men's domain," says Joan Williams...at the University of California College of the Law. "...This is not about workplace productivity. It's about masculinity."
...
So women who started families ...couldn't stay late at the office or fly to Hong Kong every other month or be reachable 24/7 — the price of admission for what Claudia Goldin, an economic historian at Harvard, calls "greedy jobs," the ones that pay more and get you on the management track. .. Working from home became, in the words of Williams, a "feminized ghetto" that trapped women in dead-end jobs.
(Excerpt) Read more at businessinsider.com ...
My boss said the exact opposite just last week.
Remote work is good for certain types of work, particularly if you have a mature group of employees who already work together well, work well within an existing hierarchy, or can work well independently.
A company in a state of flux, bloated with entitled do-nothings, insider threats, and new management that wants to streamline the entire codebase yesterday... bad fit for remote work.
Musk needed to establish control over a company that was in a state of mutiny, and he needed to do it quickly. It came at a cost, but the cost of not squashing the mutiny was going to be much greater.
Twitter after that massive personnel upheaval and codebase refactoring might be a good candidate for remote work again, and with the layoffs, it would certainly save money by renegotiating or leaving its real estate agreements, but in those first months, it was a necessary call to pull people back into offices, even if some really good talent left because of it.
YOUR full of BS friend ...
My coworkers and I have defnintely generated a lot more work since the “Work from Home” stuff started.
This is because the idea of “Work from Home” has turned into “they are available 24/5 or 6”.
With my customers around the world, my 6am is Euorpe’s noon (or 11am with Day Light Savings) and I’m on the computer at 6am. Then I have my customers in Australia which leads to meetings and training at 7pm to 8pm or so.
So our time at work has expanded quite a lot ... but it is not really a big deal when I don’t have to spend 3 to 3 1/2 hours in the car back and forth to the office. In fact our company downsized considerably in late 2021 to a small office for client meetings and housing for our servers.
If your job is not on the manufacturing line or in-person service having your office workers work from home is ideal.
Plus we are “saving the planet” by not burning all that “fossil fuel” /s.
I know that’s wrong but I think it may be highly dependent on what your job/industry is
I’ve been working remote for over 20 years (I do travel frequently and am in a very public/customer facing position) but all going to an office does is waste my time commuting
As far as productivity-in my industry there are clear goals, metrics, projects, and pure revenue generation targets that can’t be faked
In many industries /roles there may still be need for an office environment but for experienced professionals no-those of us who can do this also know when we need to gather
It’s easy-are your projects being completed? Your customers happy? Have you created or improved something that brings quantifiable value?
I know hundreds people in my industry who never report to an office and they do well-most of my peers make than doctors (including specialists) and it’s not for nothing, we have specialised skills and work hard
There are days I don’t have much going on and might go to the store, take kids to the park, sit in the pool or take nap. The next day might start at 6 am and require travel and hours upon hours of difficult meetings until late night and repeat again and again
Might work well for small companies. Or if you are a talented employee with an impressive track record. So that's not going to apply for most peons (90% of us).
Your projects are completed but this is not a set of math problems. How were they completed? Did you get advice and input from other people? How many ways could your project fall apart under stress?
And I have known sales men who had very happy customers, until about six months down the line.
Have you created or improved something that brings quantifiable value?
Defined as......?
And how many people actually do "created or improved something" even once in their work life? Most people spend their time making sure all the little things happen that results in something coming out the other end that works.
They don't invent anything new but they keep the wheels spinning.
Tucker Carlson was fired as he worked from home and did not want to come into the office.... : )
Somebody at BI opining about petty reasons why he and his like-minded ilk want to ‘remote work.’ I was a manager of 35 people and my fear was that some of them were just putting in the minimum effort to avoid attention and that the work output was similar. I never once thought about being home was a “sissy’s domain.”
This is because the idea of “Work from Home” has turned into “they are available 24/5 or 6”."
Concur with your assessment. I teleworked for 15 years. For the last ten years I supervised a team that lived in 11 different time zones.
I told my people that I did not care what their hours were, but I wanted success. I did not track hours but I know for a fact that the work load for most of us varied from 30 to 60 hours a week depending upon the task at hand. I never got a request for overtime pay. We used to change the times of our weekly meeting so everyone got the fun of a 2AM or 11PM meeting.
I used to tell people that under telework the commute to work was less than 30 seconds, but you never leave the office.
No workee-from-office here ever again. Especially since I moved as far away from America’s sh&thole cities as I could. My skyline now consists of grain silos.
“you could pretend to work at 2 or 3 different jobs and all you would have to do is produce something meaningful every once in a while.”
You could—if middle management are blithering idiots.
That tells us more about management than it does about workers.
My office had Laquishas on the phone all day with their friends discussing their “good” sons latest run-ins with the law.
Meanwhile the managers had endless useless “mandatory” meetings that killed productivity.
Once we started working at home Laquisha had to produce or she went away—same for the managers.
Work from home = you work from your house
Remote Work = you work away from the office
We’ve been kicking around the idea of renting some space in town to create a remote office for some of us home workers. That way, I’m not at home where my wife gets tired of me being home but not available. Plus there is all the noise associated with it. I miss the office environment. I could go back into the office but no one is there and it is 35 minutes away.
I'm an engineer, and work harder now on the 3 days a week I'm in my home office (physically different building than my house) than I ever did before 2019. Constant stream of text/Teams messages, emails, meeting requests, all of which prevent ACTUAL engineering work.
Some of us do invent. 8 patents and counting.
Vast majority don't.
Perhaps I can explain it this way, about 20% of people have careers. 80% of people have jobs.
They might even be important jobs. Certainly the guy who makes sure the gas main is properly sealed has an important job. But it is still just a job.
He is not creating anything new. Just making sure the old stuff does not vanish in a cloud of smoke.
Good thing he does not want to just work from home.
Or we would be seeing a lot more smoke and a lot less gas.
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