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 ...
Our productivity is already in the toilet. Your post is spot on.
In many respects that would be good. Woke corporations are killing the Golden Goose.
Since I work from home four days a week, I will only miss it when I have to go to the office to meet with vendors which may not even require the one day a week that it does now. So instead of a 50 minute one way commute once a week, it may very well downgrade into one twice a month. Not sorry!
One year ago from today, production is DOWN 2.4%
Doesn’t take a genius to see where things are heading under Brandon. :(
This is directly from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. They’re not hiding a thing.
One of my last jobs required office work in a cubicle jungle, throw in what they called Hoteling where every day you could be sitting in a different cubicle, you logged into your phone which I helped convert the site, when I objected because I have books and documentation from every site I had converted and didn’t want to move that stuff around every day, I was told to bad deal with it
yep.
i’ve worked from home for >20 years and its standard in my industry now. I do travel quite a bit for work so it makes sense.
In some cases, it’s not a matter of social awkwardness. In some cases, especially for single parents, it’s about being able to have a job and still being able to parent. Not everyone has family to help with their children and a nine to five job does not always correspond to a child’s schedule. I personally know three women who wouldn’t be able to work at their jobs if they had to be in the office every day. A nine to five job at best with travel quickly turns into an eight to six job. Most school schedules run 8-3:30. And then there are sick day, snow days, holidays, spring and fall breaks and summer. This isn’t the 50’s anymore where mom stayed home with the kids and dad went to work.
It was hectic for me having a home office. I ended up usually having two work periods a day. Typically 5-6 hours during the day then 1-3 hours late night. It's a personality thing but I work better in a conventional office setting. Much of my work is a solitary, cerebral thing and I can zone in better at the task at hand. Retired now.
During the Covid stuff, I had a problem with retiree benefits with a former employer. A computer record was fouled up and the error rolled downhill to mess up my retiree insurance. Call the benefits hot line and that person not authorized to fix. Transferred to supervisor, that person not authorized to fix. Transferred to department supervisor, that person not authorized to fix. Transferred to big boss HR supervisor, he's a corporate VP and authorized to fix.
This was just business to me. I had a problem and he was going to fix it. My next step was his boss, the president. The VP was working from home. He sure was wanting to fix the problem fast. A baby was crying in the background and other kids playing. Three minute phone call and all fixed on the computer records. He sure wanted to get off my phone call. Lol
Yup—there does seem to be a bit of “keep all the crabs in the bucket” going on here—and that will lead to two tiers of employers....
Some will hire and keep the most talented workers who can and will work at home.
and others will have an office full of a large number of mediocre and unskilled time wasters and managers who spend most of their time baby-sitting and dealing with human resource issues instead of getting the work done.
Will it be (largely) racist?
Yup.
The employers are going to have to deal with it.
My wife and I both work at home each get much more time with each other and the kids and save money on gas and wear and tear on the cars.
>>In some cases, it’s not a matter of social awkwardness. In some cases, especially for single parents, it’s about being able to have a job and still being able to parent ...
Which is exactly the problem - I am tired of working with people who have babies screaming in the background - and no one else, but the person you are meeting with, to watch the baby/child. Which tells me, and most managers, people aren’t just working at home - they are taking care of the kids, cleaning the house, running errands etc.
How can anyone claim to be ‘working from home’, when they are watching infants or small children at the same time - the answer is, they are not.
Watching a baby or infant is pretty much a FT job when they are awake - if they are awake, you are not working - lets all stop pretending you are working with a 6 month old in your arms.
Here is my take on this.
The "talented employees" that you speak of are likely specialist workers in a commodity field like coding. Or, they might be level 3 support people who solve the nastiest of bugs. Or they might be designers or planners.
The less talented work-from-home employees might be call center workers or accountants doing payables and receivables work.
These workers might have been paid within a wide salary range where performance rewards one with a bump to the high end of the range, but they are locked into that range for a long time. The recent post-COVID demand for workers busted the ranges, but before that these talented workers (individual contributors most likely) would have been locked into a limited set of salary scales that are harder and harder to advance through once reaching the higher levels.
On the other hand, the management level workers (those whose salary is tied more to the position than the skill of the worker) are the ones who would be in the office, because they are needed to work with the higher levels of management. Their jobs are often to meet with leadership in strategy sessions, to review budgets and make recommendations, to hear confidential business plans or upcoming initiatives, etc. This layer of worker prefers the face-to-face engagements, especially as one advances higher into the leadership pyramid.
The bottom line is that the work-from-home employee may be locking themselves into a limited career range (and being labeled as a remote commodity worker) while the in-office worker gets the exposure to senior levels of leadership in the organization who likely are not working from home.
-PJ
They will be happy to work in the office soon....economy is crashing
Don't forget about saving the planet by not using as much transportation.
Or not. Businesses that fail to adapt die off first.
Every industry is different as far as who they promote and how they promote.
Where I worked we were spread all over the country—and while there was a “headquarters” most of the managers did not work there.
The visibility you discuss was only available if you worked at HQ. Folks who wanted it picked up and moved and commuted to the office.
The vast majority believed the quality of life working at home outweighed the benefit of potential advancement opportunities.
Since the “promotion pyramid” ultimately has great benefits for only a very few managers at the top this worked for everyone.
Not always. Our daughter works for one of the largest commercial insurance and reinsurance companies in the US. Their team (6 teams, about 40 people) productivity is up over 20% across the board. And company profits are way up because they were able to cut back their office space by about half.
They will occasionally go into the office for a few hours, or believe it or not, when they want to get together to celebrate someone's birthday. It's up to them.
Most people on this thread are discarding the extra job competition that this whole WFH phenomenon brings.
My team at work now has two new engineers from India. They don’t live in the USA. They work from India. They are nice enough people but I do have to help teach them how the company’s systems work etc.. But, India is a very large pool of educated people to draw from. And I don’t know their salary but I’m assuming they work for less money than I do. I’m just saying if you thought the H1B system was an issue, you haven’t seen anything yet.
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