Posted on 09/03/2022 6:17:41 AM PDT by DoodleBob
Labor Day marks the line in the corporate sand.
Many company leaders say the end-of-summer holiday represents the best chance to finally lean on workers to return to the office this year.
After months of encouraging white-collar employees to return, or attempting to coax them back with free pizza, warm cookies and catered lunches, many executives now say they feel emboldened to take a tougher stance. No longer can workers merely come to the office if they so choose; this fall, executives say, attendance is expected and the office resisters will be put on notice.
...
...After Spotify offered most employees a choice on their work setup, about 60% chose to work from an office a majority of the time, while roughly 40% decided to remain largely at home.
“Psychology comes into play on this,” Ms. Berg said. “Nobody is telling me that I need to come in. It’s just my choice. And I think that is very important for you as a human being, too. I’m smart; I know how I want to do my job, when I want to do my job.”
She added: “If you recruit grown-ups and then you treat them as kids, it’s going to backfire.”
...
Some hiring managers say they have been able to attract talent by telling prospective candidates they can work from anywhere. But the number of remote jobs has started to fall, even as demand for remote roles remains high. Around 17% of paid job postings in the U.S. on the professional-networking site LinkedIn offered remote work in July of this year, down from a high of around 20% in March. In July, paid remote jobs attracted the majority of applications, at around 54%.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Yeah, that’s easy for you to say, because you’re dead.
Of course not. But the idea that he has to come to work in person because I have to be here in person is best suited for a school playground; it takes nothing of reality under consideration.
A welder gets X dollars per hour for his or her services; if the welder finds this compensation to be inadequate, then he or she leaves for greener pastures.
In the case of your company, the six welders clearly thought they could do better elsewhere, and they voted with their feet.
(If the marketing staff was present in the office would that have discouraged the welders from accepting a better offer?)
My company’s policy is to force me to comply to disarming myself. I find working from home to be the only option to getting around this policy. I have found out most companies are anti-second amendment.
This is true. My company is subleasing some of the property. The real estate footprint has been greatly reduced.
If the company has a "green" initiative that's the card to play against them.
You can't claim you're "green" and require all of that above!
Verizon was keen on having us work from home because our business was supporting other corporations working from home. With global clients I had to keep a 24 hour schedule to host calls to direct service changeovers from other networks to our own. The first time I worked with people in China or Viet Nam, it gave me pause for a moment.
Some occupations scream remote work from home. I once tried to name all of the managers, senior managers, directors or vice presidents that I directly reported to in those ten years but couldn't remember them all. In corporate shuffles I would be assigned to someone and then a week later to someone else. A couple of times I reported to Vice Presidents, usually to add to their personnel headcount to make them less redundant. Needless to say, I didn't talk to my management, every day and sometimes not even every week.
I had a one year notice from my team lead that I would be laid off but when it finally happened, I was amazed at the "yuge" severance package! I lived on it for a couple of years until I felt I could go on SS with a small penalty and still keep a good investment portfolio.
I enjoy going to work, always have. But my commute to my current job is a nightmare. Really, if it were any worse I’d look for another job.
That being said, during these covid times I’ve been working remotely from my daughter’s home several states away. Well, first it was covid, now it’s because she had to divorce the bum she found out she married.
But, my firm has recently hired many people, some at the highest levels, who are working remotely. I think they are committing to a hybrid model. I mean they might have hired the top dogs anyway, but not an admin person who is 100s of miles from ANY of our several US offices.
Which is all great for me and I’ll take it and say TYVM!!!
Yep, agree. Don’t talk to me about how much paper I use when you got me driving 90 miles round trip. Which, just to be clear, right now my company is not.
G-d bless them really, they’ve been wonderful to me and all the people in my department. Some of our co-workers complain, but not my group. We complain we are too busy, but not about our treatment.
Few serious jobs are actually in “urban” downtown centers anymore, unless you’re New York City.
Fair point—I did have one job many decades ago where both my boss (a big wig) and I traveled constantly.
Our only face to face meetings were on those (rare) occasions when we were passing through the same hub airport (like DFW or Atlanta).
“If you’re not replaceable, you’re not promotable.”
“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 :).
Heck, I know everyone doesn’t feel the way I do.
And I understand that. I just feel differently. I think it is okay to disagree on this.
And I do appreciate fully the ability to leverage virtual meetings.
At this point in my career, I do a lot of meetings now. There may be 10-15 people on them, and often, I am the only one actually showing my face on a camera. Everyone else has theirs shut off.
I show my face deliberately for a specific reason-because for me, I always regarded my ability to communicate effectively with people across the board as a personal strength.
I am one of those who believes in a handshake. In looking into someone’s eyes. In listening to their voice. In watching their facial expressions, and in doing that, judging if they understand the issue.
The totality of those things was my own strongest personal asset, not just for how I perceive people, but how they interpret and perceive me in the decision making and planning process.
My face is an open book. I have never been one to hide my feelings, humor, anger, frustration exasperation, all of those. They plainly show, and are evident to those around me to the point is a standing joke. Being a weak person in some areas, I often feel the temptation to be dishonest as much as any person, and I sometimes struggle as I try not to succumb to that temptation. But my face will betray me every time, so...it keeps me more honest.
My boss recently deliberately wanted me to keep my camera on in a sensitive meeting...he was joking, but he meant it.
This personal characteristic has been both a blessing and a curse my whole life, and at some point, I decided to leverage it as much as I can to make it a strength as strongly as I can, and accept the weakness as something to be dealt with.
The point is, this pandemic, this isolation, this working from home, this jumping onto virtual meetings with faceless people who often don’t even have a picture of themselves, they have a dog, or a plane, or...anything, in a fell swoop, took away one of the tools in my arsenal I depended on getting things done, and consigned it to the trash.
It was very difficult for me to overcome this, so I had to work at it. That is why I feel so strongly about it, apart from the simple fact of getting things done.
They might not agree.
But I drove five miles of the worst part of Route 128 for the better part of thirty years, and my commute could take anywhere from 45 min at best to 1-2 hours commonly, and ranged to awful commutes that could take up to three hours, especially in bad weather.
And I never missed work because of bad weather. Ever. In my career now, if I am in an hour late, I don’t even need to tell anyone. But early on, I had patients to take care of, and was often responsible for setting up the department for the day, so it was extremely stressful. My only way around it was to simply go to work and plan to be in a half hour to an hour before I absolutely had to be there.
Otherwise, I could not deal with the stress. It was the only way I could cope.
So I am fully versed in the vagaries of bad commuting and understand that well.
That was a great post on your part.
I would clarify myself by simply saying that areas where working from home provides direct value to the employer, it should be encouraged.
And for employers, to provide value to employees by offering a work from home option even on a limited basis has great value both in real-time reductions in stress to existing employees, and serving as a recruitment and retainment tool.
It is interesting-the chair of my department was far ahead of the “work from home” game months before the pandemic, and was doing it largely as a “Quality of Life” incentive. So when the pandemic hit, and there was that short period where we didn’t know much about it yet, we were ready to have certain people working from home. We had employer supplied secure firewalls and workstations installed at home, and were ahead of things.
My point is that, where it can be applied, work from home privileges can and should be encouraged it it advances the efficiency and financial health of the organization. (I deliberately say “the organization” and not “the worker”. If the individual worker is happier and can be just as efficient, that is a happy byproduct. But it should not be the driver.)
It is not a panacea, or a “one size fits all”.
My overarching point is, there are some jobs and professions that lend themselves to remote work, and some that don’t.
And the decision should be up to the employer.
The employee can make the decision (and will) to only work at places that allow them to go full remote.
But the endpoint of that is not going to be more productivity overall, it is going to be less, IMO.
And Productivity is what set American industry apart for so many years. This is simply bringing US Productivity into line with many other countries as a part of Globalism.
And I don’t think that is a good idea. But it looks like it is going to happen, and according to plan.
Someone’s plan.
And by the way, congratulations on your retirement, FRiend...:)
I haven't heard of any employer mandating a 5x a week in the office "return to office" policy. They're all hybrid. To be sure, bank tellers, waitresses, bowling alley repairmen, and train engineers must be at work. But white collar workers driving a desk for a living, management should optimize their productivity.
There are many guys who simply cannot manage people unless they're in person. There are other leaders who can run things remotely with great efficiency. I believe the latter type of leader will win the day.
Certain businesses require interaction with the client. Obviously, these are not being discussed. There are other fields that require very little ‘face time’ to accomplish the job. Oh sure, there are those insecure / incompetent types that must see butts in seats to feel as if things are getting done. Of course, those people need the cover of a crowd to avoid having their inadequacies exposed. But this isn’t the 80s. Remote work has evolved to the point of having live VR sessions, group video chats, open audio ‘rooms’, collaborative work tables and drawing boards. There’s very little that needs to be done in person. Beyond that we have task tracking and version control to help manage the teams progress.
Banking, legal, communications, software systems, etc are far less reliant on in person interactions these days. The benefit weighed against the high cost of real estate often times falls short.
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