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 ...
Excellent insight. My buddy is head asset manager for a huge bank. Commercial RE is cratering. The venerable Met Grill in Seattle stopped opening for lunch. Crime is so bad in Seattle Amazon stopped work on buildings there and declared they are moving to Bellevue.
Amazon reversed it’s RTW policy after two of their employees were attacked, with one dead.
Institution forfeited all of their moral authority during the covid scam.
I moved on to five acres in a rural county and installed Starlink. Excellent service.
I wonder how many oldsters who remember commuting on the "distressway" in Boston would agree with that.
Some people work best from home. Others don’t work at all. Even some good workers who are forced to work at home, see the vacuuming, or the child that needs tending. And they put work second to home. If they were at work they would be good workers.
Disagree. These are the same folks goofing off at work.
I had one women who watched her kids for about 5 hours a day. The kids went to morning daycare or school. She was only intermittently available to work. We asked questions and things like that. But when her husband came home from work, she had dinner. left him with the kids. And she gave us a solid five hours of great work. She was quite productive. She was a software tester and product manager. I think she was more productive at home because she could test and write up bugs without interruptions.
Some people work well when work is in their face all the time. They go home, and work from there and because work is no longer in their face, they don’t do it. They do house work instead. If your the type of person who needs lots of uninterrupted quiet time to get something done, it can be done very well at home, if family knows not to interrupt. But if your the type who is always putting out fires, answering questions and going to meetings or you require a team to keep you motivated, you will likely fail when you get separated from clients or co-workers.
It all depends on how you work best. How your family respects your work time, and of course, what your job is. I hate managers working from home. Often their employees suffer as a result that their manager isn’t always there. Help desk, reception, HR are also bad at home jobs. And of course anything that requires real paper forms or some physical client contact like a nurse. Some jobs can be work from home as long as someone else is working in the office. A nurse or doctor can handle calls when the office is closed as long as there is a nurse or doctor who is actually in the office during office hours.
But other jobs, like testing, documentation, some product management and of course programming can be done at home quite easily. A women who lives across the street from me is a insurance claims adjuster. She works from home. And I think she is far more productive. She sends her kid to daycare. And spends a solid 8 hours in front of her computer . She says she gets about 50% more done at home because there is nobody chatting her up. And she has made her work environment exactly perfect with no need to set up or close down every day. Her coffee is her favorite. Her lunch and drinks are exactly what she wants. The whole set up is conducive to getting a lot of work done. And if her child is sick, she can easily handle it without taking the day off.
Nah, just the BUMS.
Boy do I have a lot to say about this. I have been an engineer who has worked for 40 years at designing sophisticated electronic systems for aircraft in an office environment (with a good lab). Our office of mostly engineers and support staff produced many great products. Our arguments and discussions at the office were more productive in one day than a month of remote on line meetings. the networking that took place is not possible in a remote environment. During Covid I went into the office the whole time through 2021 and LOVED it (I decided about 3 weeks in that we had been lied to and this was all BS).
We were a small remote office and corporate shut us down and told us all to work remote. Some of what they did was favorable to the employee and some was horrible. Anyway I have been “working” remote for almost 2 years.
In the meantime , just prior to covid, our company (and I think other large companies) were turning the office environment from reasonable comfortable for engineers into a horrific setup where engineers are given 5 feet of desk and they are now lined up elbow to elbow. So now going back to the office is not like going back to what we had before covid, but into a rather degrading workspace environment compared to what was experienced for the last 40 years.
I am a subject matter expert and collect my paycheck. I work and travel (which I like to do) as required but no longer feel any personal investment in my company. I do not really care what happens. They have poisoned the office space and have destroyed the culture. The brain drain across several of our cooperating divisions is so severe that I doubt we will ever be able to design the innovative products that we have designed for the last 40 years.
I give my company a C- for how they handeld covid, but corporate culture is now so poisoned due to political correctness and making 100K+ employees work elbow to elbow that I am not sure there is a path forward.
And about micro-aggressions.I think that I lived in a culture where micro-aggressions occurred hourly because all that mattered was the excellence of what we did and not peoples feelings. Over time , everything got sorted out as to who did what thing best and when you could lead and when you could follow. Lots of very informal, but powerful structures were set up. This culture is all gone and I doubt that in 20 years we will be able to do much at all that requires 20 people working on a complicated engineering project
“Here’s a thought: If your boss tells you to come in, get your butt in.”
Here’s a thought: If you boss tells you to come in, get another boss at another company that “gets it”.
You work where the job requires, and to the work they require you to do.
If you don’t like it, quit and find another job.
There’s no shortage of companies to work for…
Except it’s not about carbon emissions, it’s about control.
Seems their plan to release a virus on the world had some unintended consequences
People found out what sort of leftist drivel was passing for education.
They also discovered a thing called work/life balance
We're not up to 15 states yet but we're getting there. This from a company that had everyone in two states, including contractors and subcontractors, and all were required to commute in prior to COVID-1984.
The contractors and subcontractors are now spread out over five states. Prior to bringing the outlying contracting firms onboard, the company was scrambling to pry talent away from competitors. They had basically given up and resorted to overpaying marginal staff and trying to force their coworkers to make up the difference. Now with the expanded area, we have talent we never would have had before.
👍
Amazing how that works doesn’t it?
The people on the teams I work with are invariably scattered all across the country and sometimes overseas as well. So going into the office is not going to matter as far as that’s concerned.
I also don’t have to waste an uncompensated hour and a half of my day commuting nor spend all the money (clothes, gas, food, parking, daycare, etc) associated with commuting. I’m also not under the thumb of HR. I also don’t have to put up with all the noise you constantly hear from an entire floor of a big tower where the banks have their offices. While we still have useless time wasting meetings, I find there are fewer of them and for a lot of them you can just log in, hit the mute button and keep on working undisturbed. When there is nothing to do which does happen sometimes, you can do household chores or just watch TV for an hour instead of having to sit there trying to look busy.
Bingo. Went started the same thing in 2018 and it was expanding just as everyone went remote for COVID-1984. It was ridiculous.
Protect sensitive information on the computers screens? No, that's not happening and don't tell me about the "privacy filters". They don't offer any privacy from someone behind you or who is sitting right next to you. Sitting near a main aisle? Well, now everyone gets to see it.
Protect sensitive information that's being discussed? No, that's not happening when eight people around you can hear every word of the conversation. People waiting in the aisle to get into a conference room can all hear it to.
You're bombarded with every phone and in-person conversation around you to the point you can't hear the person you're on the phone with and they can't make out what you're saying.
You can't move your chair without bumping the person behind you. You can't fit papers on your desk without them getting in the way of the mouse and keyboard> Use the computer or go through papers; you can't do both.
The conference rooms were booked for the entire day because quick meetings that could have occurred at people's desks now had to be done in a conference room.
Nearby coworkers would have to leave their desks if tech support had to work on one of the PCs since everyone couldn't fit. An entire group of people would have move if the technicians had to replace a PC or monitor.
Going to the bathroom could be an excursion. You'd regularly have to visit other floors to find one without a line.
People in these jammed desks were getting sick more frequently. You could watch an illness infect workers one by one in a matter of days. The illness regularly came in with one of the staff who had kids in daycare. We had hand sanitizer and disinfectant spray everywhere to little avail.
The corporate hacks were going forward with this despite studies that were already out that showed the crammed desks lowered productivity. We had quite a few folks leave before remote work due to COVID-1984. The remote work may have been the only thing that saved the company.
Here’s a thought: If you boss tells you to come in, get another boss at another company that “gets it”.
"Getting it" is in the eye of the beholder.
Sure, "facetime" may seem like BS - and it is frequently - but for industries where there is a high human interactivity dimension to delivering shareholder value, it is VITAL that people work in person.
I never saw a successful sports team, musical combo, or military outfit where everyone worked in isolation and NEVER "practiced" together/only met on Game Day/Show Time/D-Day. Same holds true for many sectors in America today like financial services, healthcare, retail, oil & gas, and so on.
To be sure, some sectors can thrive where employees work remotely all the time. And to be fair, I got a LOT done when I was working remotely in early 2020 when I let my hair down so to speak - indeed I had to censor myself when I got back to the office because I got used to cursing up a blue storm at home while on mute.
Some people also may thrive in that remote all the time environment, including introverts, parents, people with live-in/elderly parents, people on the spectrum, grumpy old men, Deplorables who haaaaate forced pronouns or "join us in the lounge for free tofu on bring your imaginary spouse to work day." More power to them, and if you're a waitress and hate people, you CAN get an office job. Despite Reichskanzler Bidet's recent speech, it's still a free country.
At the same time, people who have the emotional intelligence to understand how many careers work, will thrive with return to office. That doesn't make them a sheep or a fake. It makes them the corporate equivalent of a concealed carrier with situational awareness.
/tinfoilhat
Stop snitchin’!...
Hey Captain - How insulting! so people who get their hand dirty are at a grammar school level?
Six welders who cannot be replaced quit when the “college graduates” were allowed to work from home. We are now 27 shop workers short - welders, machinists, pipe fitters, etc.
The company created a them and us - it will take a long time to repair. And the Marketing brat can’t turn a wrench...
The way our “team” worked was quarterly face to face meetings—but they were partially “social gatherings” and part “brainstorming sessions”.
That gave us all the face time we needed.
Any decent boss should be talking to their people by phone or IM almost every day.
It should be kinda obvious if somebody is “faking it”.
My remote job could only be done by a handful of people in the whole country. It also required zoom meetings with senior management where very tough questions were asked and I had to answer them.
Remote work does require bosses with intelligence above Neanderthal level.
;-)
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