Posted on 07/07/2022 7:01:48 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
I noticed the shoes first. That I was wearing them. Real shoes, the leather kind, with laces. After a year and a half, I was finally returning to the office, and that meant giving up the puffer slippers and slides that had sustained me for so long. Real shoes, I quickly remembered, are terrible. Likewise pants. Likewise getting to work, and being at work. Whew.
That was summer 2021. I’ve since acclimated to the office once again: I don the uniform; I make the commute; I pour the coffee; I do my job; and then I go back home. There are costs to this arrangement, clearly. I lose some time—time I could spend working!—transporting myself, in shoes and pants, from one building to another. I miss the chance to finish household tasks between my meetings, or fix myself a healthy and affordable lunch. As a university professor and administrator, I have more flexibility than most professionals, and I’m not required to go in each and every day. But even so, I have less control over each hour of my life than I used to—a fact that could very well be making me less productive overall. Indeed, it’s possible, or even likely, that my employer—and yours—could help their workers and the bottom line, simply by allowing us to work from home or come in on a hybrid plan. Remote, flexible employment might be a win for everyone.
(Excerpt) Read more at theatlantic.com ...
Oh, I agree and chuckle with you.
I worked summer jobs in college repairing roads.
So, there’s that juxtaposition.
Most have huge, expensive office leases in place that can't be ended for many years. Chance of subleasing - close to zero. They have no choice but to order everyone back and make the best of it.
Work-from-home not only threatens the company's bottom line but that of commercial property owners as well - and those vast, newly vacant office buildings underpin a whole lot of retirement funds. If CRE crashes down to a true market value, our whole financial system could come down with it.
The theater must go on.
I finally convinced the senior manager who manages my project to let me keep working from home ... the turning point was when he realized that my 500+ square-foot office space is bigger and better than what his company's CEO has.
I think you are right. Office space is a very expensive piece of company overhead. If that space isn’t needed, because so many employees can work off site, then decisions will be made to let office leases expire.
Very good point. I’ve been saying for months that top U.S. investment banks have a major conflict of interest on this issue. Look at a place like New York City. Many of those banks aren’t forcing people back to the office because it makes sense from an operational standpoint. They’re doing it because the same banks have underwritten commercial mortgages on buildings all over NYC, and they can’t face the prospect of the massive defaults that are looming on the horizon with the dystopian nightmare the government response to COVID has brought on these cities.
It basically outsources overhead costs away from the corporate office and out towards individuals.
Electric, HVAC, insurance, etc.
In my class, we had to take a made-up computer language, write a linker-loader, a compiler, and an execution environment (A VM, if you will) to run said code.
In 10 weeks.
As a youngster, I often heard:
“If working was fun, they wouldn’t have to pay you to do it.”
If you can do your job from home, so can chinese prison labor.
I know someone who got hired into a new job recently and didn’t get an email address for nearly a month, because the HR and IT people were still all working from home and management had to keep sending email requests to get the email setup for this new hire. Perhaps HR had more pressing matters to focus on, but setting up a new email account shouldn’t take more than a few minutes. Something is dysfunctional about that.
Some of us (I used "some" on purpose") *are* much more productive at home and mgt would not listen to us before covid.
Since covid, their eyes have been opened, and they see that productivity is up among "some* of us, so there is no pressure to move back.
Besides--they had us clear our cubicles completely out last year, and they are re-purposing our floor space.
Yeah--the hiring of the HR people. They need to be fired if they are not working, or if they require micromanaging.
I’m a housewife, I’ve always worked at home!
Not anymore. You are thinking merit and hard work are important. That is white privilege thinking.
“Most people are good at self-motivating.”
You’re probably right. I was not so much. Been retired now for seven years but up until retirement i simply couldn’t bring myself to work from home. I would go to the office at 0600 and not leave until 6:00pm earliest, often later if there was still work to be done. If something came up after hours I’d go to th office to take care of it. I don’t think i would have fared well in today’s work environment.
I suspect most individuals who have adequate space at home and a job that can be done from anywhere would figure out that these additional overhead costs are a tiny fraction — measured in both direct financial cost and in time — of what they’d be paying to commute to an office.
And I think I heard the mayor, in NYC, urge workers to come back, because all those office workers support many small businesses in Manhattan.
When all those office workers in Manhattan would go out to lunch, and go shopping, their retail spending supported many businesses there. With people not going into Manhattan every day, those other businesses have suffered.
I'll bid I get it done in 2 weeks.
At 1/10th your price.
Must be nice. We were in the office every day. We had to get up every morning, put on real shoes and pants and drive to an office where policy said we had to wear stupid, pointless masks.
Corporate people got to work from home, but those of us on the operational level had to be on site, hands on. No such thing as remote work for those of us who actually keep things going in the world.
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