Posted on 12/18/2023 4:45:08 AM PST by bert
My office is in the house where I live. I manage a small corporation and work with remote clients, and make visits to the facilities of their clients. I have been since 1995.
Working from home is actually working in an office that is located in your home. When you go to the office, home is somewhere else. When you go to the office, you are no longer at home.
America was founded and then built by people who worked at home.
I would advocate full keystroke logging and efficiency metrics, enforced rigorously.
Because if you are being just as effective and productive working from home vs the workplace, what is there to be concerned about?
Right?
I had to wfh the last few years of my career. I found I was more productive than when I worked in the office. I tended to work much longer hours because I didn’t have to commute. After supper I would get back on my computer and continue what I had been working on.
For the odd employee that actually shows up at work and takes advantage of the availability and exposure he/she offers it’s a wonderful opportunity to become indispensable to management. Take on those little jobs and efforts management would like addressed as quick as possible, offer to take on increased responsibilities, etc. Those others? Out of sight, out of mind.
Have you ever worked with team?
Associating with a colleague on team is as easy and quicker than face to face down the hall or upstairs.
as a matter of fact, the Team contact can be in a different building or city or country
For me anyway, productivity is probably equal from home or at the office. There are still distractions—just different ones.
But for years I put up with a crappy paying job precisely because they allowed me to work from home full time. It was an instant raise that let me spend time with my young children and hold down the fort if the Mrs. needed to run errands or take one of them to the doctor. In turn, the company got much more bang for the buck with their low salary.
Of course people abuse it. I have heard the horror stories. In those cases, managers shouldn’t allow it or the employees who egregiously violate (mysteriously unavailable for the entire day, etc.) should be immediately fired.
Like anything else, it has to be worked out between employer and employee. I have run my own business from home for 3 decades so I have no problem with a results-based environment that depends on me getting stuff done on my own.
But I am never going back to 5 days a week at the office. Never. For many jobs it’s an idiotic waste of time, required only because the people who *can’t* successfully work from home are utterly unable to imagine that someone else can pull it off.
No one works from home.
I spent the last ten years of my working life “working at home”. This was before it became a thing. I had a home office (which I did NOT take any tax breaks for) that had an extension of the office’s PBX, as well as a fax machine.
For all practical purpose I could have been in a cubicle in the office, and if it was not a 90 minute drive one way, I would have been in the cubicle.
The company I worked for needed the skills I had and so one of the condition for going to work for them was I worked from home.
Since my time was billable to the customer I sent in a completed work order (by fax and later by email) as they were done. It was easy to see the work I was doing.
Working at home is not for everyone. They need the self discipline to actually do the work. Perhaps what is missing in today’s try working at home is the means to document the work being done. In my case it was easy, but others it may take some study.
“Some bad managers want to stand over your shoulder and order you around “
I hate those guys!
We’ve got a lot of people that do that. Including the bosses. Some of like being in the office. I never left, some are back on the mandatory days all day. Some badge, scrum and out. Whatever. The work gets done.
“Many men have refrained from having any personal interactions with female co-workers”
That’s too bad. Before wokeism, innocent flirting in the workplace was fun and broke the monotony.
“A systems engineer in a major software company said they use agile to get something in the hands of their users, but then they turn around and build it the right way to have a well designed product.”
The company I work for just skips the second step there. Sigh.
Then why stop at work from home? Why not full keystroke logging for everyone at the office then? Including the manager?
Agile sucks. It’s a fad which tries to keep dots honest about how much work they really do.
And it can be easily gamed.
It’s also how many of us met our wives. I really feel sorry for my son in todays toxic environment.
You’d think that after Covid people would be happy to get back to their once normal routines - like going to work.
“...and full of interruptions.”
I agree. WFH is like many things...it works under the right conditions. Not for all types of work, not for all personality types, etc.
I think it accentuates the productivity of those who like/hate interruptions. Those who just want to produce and accomplish things are largely set free in the WFH environment. Those who spend their days in the office being interrupted or interrupting others (a work avoidance behavior) are even less productive at home.
When I was allowed to WFH during Covid, it gave me 5 hours a week back from commutes, saved gas money, and gave a constant sense of accomplishment because I was actually enabled to achieve things without the constant interruptions from work-avoiding colleagues.
As a longtime project manager, I worked with several PM methodologies over the last 30 years and actually teach a 400 level college course on Adaptive Project Management. My answer to the age old question on which PM Framework is better is always, “It depends.”
I think where companies are going wrong with this is they are trying to adapt how major project efforts are transitioned into a day-to-day activities. That’s the wrong way to look at it. Business as Usual is just that. Projects are temporary endeavors with a fixed beginning and end date.
As to your statement about quantity of work actually being done and gaming the system, I just fired a client for trying to do exactly that. However, a lot of this is due to poor training, no culture to support the transition and there is no vision from leadership.
Agile as a methodology is great however, unless there is buy-in from the workers, and experienced project managers and leaders who can successfully convey what Agile is supposed to be, it will always be a mess. How to get around this conundrum? Too late, companies already fired the most experienced project managers and replaced them with DEI picks who think having a meeting for 15 minutes a day is going to fix the problems the PMO are having. How do I know this? I was one of those project managers purged and replaced with a 25 year old DEI employee with no major project experience. The company is bleeding money now and leadership cannot seem to find what the problem is.
You have precisely described the attributes of working in an office that is in the place where you dwell.
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