Posted on 07/04/2024 6:27:42 AM PDT by ChicagoConservative27
It seems to be the controversial topic of the ages...only it has worsened since post-pandemic.
It's the great remote work divide...also dubbed "The Great Return" and "The Great Office Return" by others.
Although in theory, remote work has essentially been in existence for decades, it has only become a hot topic of late, and become aggravated even more, with the recent headline-grabbing strides of big-name employers who dared to mandate employees to return to office-based work (affectionately known as RTO)—or risk losing their jobs.
(Excerpt) Read more at forbes.com ...
Exactly, I work more hours from home simply because I’m not spending 2 and a half hours commuting back and forth every day.
Personally-—I want crimes solved & criminals stopped.
I do not care if investigators are white—black—yellow or green-—young or old.
I want DELIBERATE attention to details which can make or break a case & get a criminal behind BARNS-—OR DEAD.
It's the other way around. Work has been outsourced, including overseas, for decades because the locals couldn't do it. (usually not enough of them, requiring paying enough to get people to relocate).
I know of very few people who work in a company or industry that isn't regional, if not global, and regularly work with others who could never meet face to face due to geography. Our remote staff is far better than the locals. It's not even close.
We also have individuals working on several projects and assigning them one desk wouldn't help them serve the multiple teams they're on.
Prior to the Scamdemic, the company was converting desks to ridiculous hoteling "work benches" (elbow-to-elbow seating along a desk-height countertop). Conversations were impossible so they created some meeting spaces. Now they're converting the meeting areas back to desks because they're ending the leases on entire floors and are going to consolidate space for those who do go into the office.
True, and they often drag others into it to make it look legitimate.
I can't go back to the office where I'd have to deal with the "drive-bys" from staff who were intent on filling their day with seemingly important conversations instead of writing a two-minute email.
When I used to work in an office a co-worker was my designated kicker.
Her job was to sit next to me in meetings and kick me when I started to fall asleep.
:-)
I worked in an office were my office was on the far side of an open space area full of cubicles. I was in payroll and hence for confidentiality had an office with a door and cubicle land was occupied by the accounts payable staff. On the other side of cubicle land was the suite of HR offices.
Anyway, one of woman in AP, I’ll call her “Lisa”, was a white woman in her mid to late 30’s BTW, who talked constantly, and I mean constantly and very loudly and most times not even to anyone but to herself, to anyone in earshot but to no one in particular.
It was as if every random thought that came into her head, she had to verbalize, it could be work related, but most wasn’t and most of it didn’t even many any sense. And it was obvious she spent a lot of her time surfing the Web as she’d read news articles from Google News and other sources and FB posts she came across out loud. She was so G-D annoying.
Then around Christmas Lisa started playing Christmas music on her phone or on her computer in her cubicle and very loudly. Don’t get me wrong, I like Christmas music for the most part but if you can think of all the most annoying Christmas songs ever recorded, this is what she was playing.
Then she started singing along, very loudly AND OFF KEY. I had been playing my own Christmas music on my phone, mostly traditional, classical and jazz Christmas music, but at a very low volume, so low that I was the only one that could hear it unless you were in my office standing right next to my desk and even then it was still not so loud that you couldn’t carry on a conversation with me or if I was on a phone call, that the person on the other side of the call could hear it.
One afternoon when Lisa was singing/screeching, I got up from my desk and shut my office door. I didn’t say anything, didn’t even look at her or slam the door, I just quietly got up and shut my door to try to get some peace to get my work done as I was working on a report and very complex spreadsheet analysis with an urgent deadline that required my complete attention and not listening to Lisa singing her off key versions of “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” or “The Christmas Shoes”.
The next morning when I went to the coffee station located on the other side of cubicle land that necessitated me to walk by Lisa’s cube, and Lisa started to talk (loudly of course) to her cubicle neighbor, (I’ll call her Karen) about how much she absolutely hated people who didn’t like Christmas music, that they were probably Communists and Atheists and it was obvious from other things she said that she was talking about me. And she egged Karen on to join in about how much she also hated people who hated Christmas music and who also drank too much coffee. It was like I was back in HS with the Mean Girl’s Club.
There was another time our PR processor Ceridan had an issue were suddenly a few people like Lisa who lived in MD but worked in PA were not having the right amount of MD tax withheld (Ceridian suddenly stopped withholding the county portion of the MD withholding).
I sat down with her in person to explain the problem to her and what I was doing to resolve the issue with Ceridian and what I was doing to make her whole as far as the one PR were she was under withheld and ensured her it would be corrected. And she seemed good with this.
Then the next day, my boss at the time, the Finance Manager sent me a scathing email about how Lisa came to him in tears at the end of the workday the day before about this tax issue and how I wasn’t doing anything about it or to help her or explain it (and this conversation she had with him happened AFTER I had spoken with her).
I was livid and set up a meeting with him to explain. But to be honest, he was a bit of an idiot himself, and FWIW not a Diversity hire but a white guy so white you had to wear sunglasses to be in the same room as him. (I’m joking a bit of course but TBH, I don’t know how this guy ever got this job except for the fact he was “friends” with one of the executives of the private equity firm that acquired the company just after I started).
He knew nothing about PR or PR taxes and didn’t even know how the system we used for posting journal entries worked as was obvious when I had a problem one time posting the PR to the GL and he was no help at all and didn’t even seem to understand how PR entries hit the GL.
I’d had enough from Lisa by then and went to our HR manager to complain about the verbal abuse and the petty things Lisa and Karen started doing like moving the office Keurig to Lisa’s cubicle so I couldn’t use it. But she was of no help.
Just before COVID hit, the company via the private equity firm acquired two more companies. I was already working over 60 hours a week and when I questioned the new PR manager (who was hired over me despite my having filled the role for almost a year and having more experience than her and who took credit for work I did and pushed blame about one of her major screw ups on me) about work load and needing additional staff, and my concerns, I was then fired, told I was no longer a good fit”.
I was never so happy to be fired from a job.
I’m coming at this discussion as a remote worker myself, and there is some merit to being in the office. For example, Wells Fargo just fired a bunch of remote employees. It seems the employees weren’t actually working from home. They were loafing off from home while utilizing a program that logged in phony keystrokes and mouse motions to make it look like they were working. Fortunately, those big, bad, meanie executives caught onto it and made short work of these idiots.
In another example, some remote workers are engaging in communications with our putative enemies, such as Red China, if I remember correctly. I’m certainly not, but such behavior puts the hiring companies and the entire country in danger. So it’s better in some cases to do office stuff, especially if the jobs are related to national security or sensitive matters.
It’s not just office-mongering bosses posing a problem here.
Remote jerk-ers are reason #301,456,289 why we can’t have nice things.
Your post makes the point—good managers can catch the work at home bad actors.
Bad employees should be fired—whether at the office or at home.
I'm doing my job from my house in Pensacola, across nearly 1000 miles and 1 time zone boundary, for a department centrally located in Silver Spring, MD. However, for each one of me, there is probably at least one remote jerk-er playing pocket pool while pretending to work. Some people just need to be dragged by the hair back into an office building, even though it saddens me to say that.
I don’t have the Alexa spyware in my house. I do my job. But some other remote workers don’t. Why we can’t have nice things.
Hiring overseas people is a payroll/accounting nightmare. It’s why it is rarely done.
Where I worked we did fire the “process not results” managers.
There was zero tolerance for them.
It was not personal.
It was business.
I noticed that with remote workers, programs that used to take 2 days to write now took over a week. I didn’t know if it was Java or the problem of not knowing the data. Onboarding people became a nightmare.
We always did initial onboarding and first week’s training in person—in quiet conference rooms which could be in any location—not necessarily any office.
I was one of the designated trainers. Once we had three or four new hires I would set up the conference room location and do the training.
Then I would mentor the new hires for the first year—the probation period.
Yes, you are.
Or rather, you are about 10% or so.
In most companies I work with, “remote work” is “No work”.
Our remote staff in corporate is pretty good at delegating all tasks and accomplishing nothing. Enough so that when two of them quit, we did not replace them and saw 0 loss. One was our EMS guy, who managed to do zero recordable work for SIX BLOODY MONTHS. I called him a few times, and there was always enough background noise that I knew he was out and about.
Locally, most of the layoffs with John Deere were remote workers. They were replaced by overseas workers or just eliminated.
Now there are great exceptions. Many IT people are very productive outside of an office. No politics, no personal interaction that can be negative. Work in their jammimes.
But for most people, remote work does not work.
Already happened.
And they are moving BACK, because those guys across the globe either can’t do the job, or the job has no value doing.
That is a big, and valid, point.
I was a happy engineer with an interesting and fulfilling career, till I was told I needed to do my DEI bosses job and my own.
Because she could not do her job.
After a bit, I was told that it was time to move on. Middled aged white guy and was time to move on. So I did, found a different industry, and ended up a manager because I had functionally BEEN ONE for a decade.
But I do miss the days of wine and song as a happy engineer. Lots of freedom and accountability. Now all I have is accountability
I figure one of the reasons I did so well teleworking in my previous job (COVID) was because I had literally spent 2 decades in the office first. It was just the norm back then. So I started my current job with 3 months in the office in Silver Spring, MD, before going remote here in Florida.
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