Posted on 09/13/2022 7:06:45 AM PDT by 1Old Pro
In June, Tesla CEO Elon Musk demanded that all employees return to their onsite workspaces, according to a leaked e-mail thread. If workers refused, Musk would consider it a resignation.
Again the news today is that the NY Times can't get people back to work. However, I won't post the link.
(Excerpt) Read more at shrm.org ...
It all depends on the type of work and industry.
>>Any CEO who has had employees working from home productively for the last 30 months would be a fool to force them back to the office.
Problem is, most people who work from home claim their productivity is higher, and most people that are responsible for managing people that work at home know that isn’t even close to true. In my estimation, about 15-20% of people can be trusted to work hard from home.
Granted I was an IT Contractor for the last 20 years of my career, 15 of those 20 years I worked from home and turned down contracts that required you work from the office and no remote work allowed.
Even it was more money, it wasn’t worth it, I hated working in a cubicle jungle and the commute thru traffic twice a day was maddening.
Remote work may not work for everyone but once you get use to it, it’s hard to give up
I believe Allstate Insurance permanently closed their whole corporate campus and has had 100% WFH for awhile, now.
I think such arrangements will continue.
Or not.
Yep. All 81 million of them (or 78 million or 79 million or whatever it actually was).
Or not.
“The most talented employees will be in demand—and they will dictate their working conditions”
That’s logical. In about 2005, before WFH was a big deal, our IT Support Tech moved from CA to AZ. She was SO good that they agreed to let her work from home as an experiment for the future. We knew 100% that it wouldn’t work. She was always on the go at the office, going to work stations to solve problems all day long.
It worked! She was able to offer support from home via phone and remote computer access, and never really missed a beat. She came to the office every other week for two days for regularly scheduled meetings.
Companies have realized they are paying for a lot of unused office space. Also the few workers who do show up regularly are tired of having to doing the at-location work that the home-workers foist off on them to avoid having to actually show up occasionally.
IT is one of those jobs that’s suitable for work from home.
Try it for nurses.
If they tell me I need to come on back and commute to an office, the closest one is 3 hours away. I think I'd tell them politely, "Umm...no. See ya."
A lot of people bring up the free market forces, but mention it mostly in terms of the tension between employer and employee, and the forces of supply and demand. But in competative markets, those businesses that have the most efficient and productive human capital should have an advantage. In that regard, the real discerning factor is which type of industry you work in. If you can reduce overhead by not having to maintain as much capital, but you can keep productivity and output, then you should have increased margins (actually not a margin, which is cost of sale versus revenue, but anyway) then you can afford to make your product more competitive, or to compensate your best people more, or maybe even both. If you work in a restaurant, or the service/hospitality sector, you don’t have much room to do that. Also, not very much with the trades or with manufacturing. If you deal in the knowledge sector or financial sector or brokering, probably so, but then you need good metrics on productivity, which those sectors tend to have anyway, and people don’t usually fake-it-til-they-make-it in those fields.
Businesses in competitive markets that are driven to succeed will weigh these options, or so I should think. If you can afford to be woke, maybe you don’t have much competition, and you should be focused on optimizing your position instead.
The same thing was said when workers demanded health insurance as a benefit rather than pay for it themselves.
The same thing was said when they demanded paid vacation days.
The same thing was said when they demanded family be covered in health/dental/vision insurance.
The same thing will be said again when another popular benefit will arise to help the workers.
Those who can’t do, use politics to get ahead.
That means they schmooze and go out for lunch and drinks, too.
Now that it's done, they are saving big on expenses associated with having facilities running heat/AC and janitorial services, you name it. I believe for me and colleagues, it will be left to a optional thing.
Yup. once they find out WFM works, they will just ship the jobs overseas.
if you can do the job in BFE america, it can be done anywhere there is a internet connection in the world.
LOL, with those numbers that probably includes ME in there somehow!
“What if they find all the deadbeats come in only to yak at the water coolers”
There’s a lot of truth to that. It’s not as if the slackers don’t slough off while in the office. They absolutely do, and have for decades.
Of course. That's why I included the condition that the employee has been working productively form home for two and a half years.
I work as a contractor, so I've seen how this return-to-office process has been unfolding for a number of my clients.
When they began this process in 2021, they were generally paternalistic and overly protective about bringing staff back to the office.
By the spring and early summer of 2022 they got much more aggressive and demanding. "Return to the office by DAY/MONTH or else."
Over the last 4-6 weeks I have noticed another clear change in sentiment from company management: They are now reduced to pathetic begging. Seriously. I've been privy to recorded webinars from CEOs who come across as whimpering children as they lay out a series of reasons for people to come back to the office -- none of which make any sense from an objective standpoint. Some of these reasons include:
- "We are more productive and/or collaborative when we work together." ... that one might have made sense in the summer of 2020, but after 30+ months of working remotely it goes right out the window for anyone with half a brain.
- "Our younger staff need to interact with senior staff in order to grow professionally." ... most of my peers don't GAF about any younger staff they didn't hire personally themselves, especially since these younger staff were almost universally the biggest cowards when it came to demanding protective measures in the office and vaccines among the staff in the first place.
- "We have an obligation to the communities where our offices are located, and we must support the small businesses that rely on companies like us to survive." ... that one is really audacious; it's something these @ssholes in government and corporate leadership positions should have thought about before they forced the staff to work remotely in the first place. My obligation to the community where a company's office was located ended the moment I was forced to work from home against my will. In fact, by establishing a modern office in my home that's better than anything I ever had in the corporate world, I now have obligations to a new community -- MY OWN.
Any competent manager would know this well. One problem with this is that the metrics for measuring productivity often don't make any sense at all.
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