The office is pure risk. Cost of gas, clothes, wear and tear on car, opportunity cost of time spent in commute.
Not to mention HR traps like women accusing men of inappropriate behavior in the office.
I’m a system architect. The talent I need is not going to be regionally based. It would be madness to force our team back into the office. In fact, in my team of ten people, I’m the only one you could force back to the office. The rest live and work more than 500 miles from the office.
They went along with this Covid theft of personal freedom including making the clot shot a condition of employment.
Now they want people back?
You can’t make any economic, ethical, or cultural case that would actually allow a company to meet it’s business goals.
They reap what they showed.
“Not to mention HR traps like women accusing men of inappropriate behavior in the office.”
Had a similar experience this spring. Hired a female contractor for a new dual admin/warehouse position. Everything was going well for about a month.
Then an incident occurred in our warehouse with some male colleagues that she twisted completely out of context (it was strictly related to her creating a “solution” to a warehouse issue that was impossible to maintain and made things harder for the guys). She put words in their mouths. We all tried to sort it out with her in the following days, but she turned completely disrespectful and beligerent.
A week goes by and I’m up to my eyes dealing with real problems. Checking email at night and BOOM a calendar invite for the next morning with our HR business partner and a corporate security representative. The contractor had initiated a discrimination and harassment report against my colleague and I through our company compliance hotline.
What is more, we found out she was coached by the other female in our team. My colleague and I were livid. Long story short, the investigation came to nothing (as we did nothing wrong, let alone discriminated or harassed this woman), but it was a highly unpleasant experience.
The contractor quit and sent multiple melodramatic, defamatory emails on her way out, and the other female who coached her is now in a different group. My colleauge and I have an unspoken understanding of how to avoid this occuring again :).