Posted on 10/06/2022 8:15:53 AM PDT by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
Before I retired I trained youngsters from all over the country—while working at home.
They learned—I made sure of it.
In thirty seconds you can ask a simple question or two to know where the newbie stands.
Good managers can manage wherever they are—good trainers can train wherever they are.
Bad managers and trainers will be awful in the office or out of it.
Incentive? Take half your office space and convert to inexpensive private family apartments. No commute, big perk for some.
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I love this! Solves housing shortage in CA and “living above the store” is a time-honored way of life in cities. People also have incentive to stay with the company bc moving is a hassle if you quit.
Win-win!
My husband has been working from home for over 20 years, but does have to travel sometimes to do his job. By travel, I usually mean via airplane to get to the job site. With his current company, he was sent two large screens and a computer for his work. The whole team works from home, unless they have to be at a job site.
They do plan in person meetings two or three times a year. Team building type of events. They have a lot of fun, usually a few days long. The company saves a lot by not insisting that the workers come to an office every day. It’s only necessary sometimes, and maybe only for certain other jobs, but not his. We are fortunate.
“Well, let the market decide.”
Agreed.. My company has moved to a 3 days in the office 2 days remote.
The results, thus far..
1. We have lost a ton of people.
2. These people, with much experience moved primarily to our competitors. or a different industries.
3. We are having huge difficulty finding skilled people to fill positions. Primarily because our competitors offer 100% work from home and similar comp/ benefits.
Let them know that people can also work from home in Bangladesh as well...for a fraction of the price.
>You either come back to the office or you don’t have a job. That sounds good to me.
How’s “give up on your stupid disease-spreading centralized leftist-collectivist work cube fantasies or the people that make “your money” happen keep working but for themselves or someone else” sound?
The change happened when communications tech reached the point where collaboration was possible at a high level. All that was needed was a catalyst.
On a purely pecuniary basis, costs are incurred for each office employee by *someone*:
- Office space
- Office equipment above those needed for individual work (copiers/printers, conference equipment, trash/shredders, cleaning, electricity/heating/cooling)
- Time spent in commute
- Costs of commuting hardware (depends on locale; often parking, car wear and tear+gasoline, could be train or other conveyance, sometimes airfare!)
- Costs of food consumed in office environment (ranging from lunch to entire per diem costs, plus ‘perk’ or individually-purchased snacks, coffee/tea/whatever)
- Costs of work attire and maintenance/cleaning thereof, and other personal effects.
- Costs of transit within/during work (remember when people took 15 minutes to assemble and start the next meeting because they all needed to walk to the other conference room, grab coffee, use the restroom, be interrupted by something, arrive, and do their social things?)
(none of that even touches on the intangibles like not being mugged, not breathing smog, being there for family, not bothering others with one’s own music, dress, participation on FR, not putting up with office-y leftist propaganda, etc.)
I might be missing some but you get the idea. So we all know that if a cost is imposed by tax or necessity on a company, they embed that cost in the price charged to their consumer, right? So either a) these are costs incurred by the company and therefore in the former category or b) they are costs incurred by the employee who ... wait for it ... likewise embeds this in the cost of being employed by this company and requires a salary commensurate, which means the employer is paying anyway, which means their consumer is paying these costs anyway.
Lo and behold, since communication tech is pervasive, the employer is competing for this employee on a large scale. If company X wants employees in the office and paying $A, but company Y wants remote employees and is paying $A, the employee is able to realize that they’re making less money with company X. That’s why there’s no putting that egg back in its shell.
Obviously this varies — if the job is actually hands-on you have to be hands-on; if something is being made someone has to be there to make it or process it; stuff doesn’t package itself or drive itself around; and neither the article nor the above is about those jobs at all. Nobody had to convince an electrician to go to where the wiring needs done; the only challenge is getting the leftist lockdown/mandate/mask/testing insanity boot off our necks.
Wanna bet?
Some of y’all have some serious misconceptions.
1) People are not necessarily “goofing off” if they are working from home.
2) Not all employees are just cogs in a machine. They can’t all be replaced by snapping your fingers. Some have skills, qualifications and decades of experience that are in demand AND there are not enough of them to go around.
3) People in the latter category can get hired quite quickly by other companies in the field. I know because I’m a contractor and I’ve done several projects since the start of Covid. It doesn’t take that long for me to get hired (now unlike during the Great Recession when things were awful and I had significantly less experience).
If you try to treat your in-demand employees that way, they will quit. They simply do not have to put up with being treated that way. The employer does not hold all the cards. Choice is a two way street.
>The rest will be at work at 0900 the next day.
Yea, all clicking on job-hunting sites and gone in a month. Can you get 10 cents on the dollar on used crappy office furniture?
I found a white paper I will have to post about the loss of value for commercial buildings. Also the impact on property taxes which we all know the homeowners will need to make up. Also found a site discussing commercial to residence option. The interesting part I found is that after the cost of conversion to housing, the revenue was 40% less.
Easy to say “come back or you’re fired”. There’s still plenty of jobs out there and they’re offering remote work as a perk. People will just up and quit.
That said, the next move is employers realizing that if much of the work can get done with remote workers then WHY PAY AMERICANS? Just offshore whatever can be done more cheaply elsewhere. Many will have a rude awakening.
This is a great article on commercial real estate—note the chart on REITs in the middle of the article:
Commercial REITs are toxic trash—if any Freepers own any shares sell them now.
programming, is NOT engineering...
You must be a useless middle manager.
I’m not keen on going back to the office, and thereby taking a nice, fat paycut having to pay for gas at these prices. But if they tell me to go back to the office, I’ll go back. Otherwise they’ll can me. They don’t need to offer me goodies.
Forgot about IT?
Except for physical networking (the ethernet cable type, not the water cooler / coffee machine type).
“people can also work from home in Bangladesh as well...for a fraction of the price”
Long term that may well be the reality—but showing up for work in a cubicle farm because your boss is too stupid to manage remote work is not going to change it.
“1) People are not necessarily “goofing off” if they are working from home.”
I’ve been keeping a nationwide telecom network running just fine from my bedroom for the last two years. There’s no actual need for me to be in the office to do my job, and I bust my ass because if I slack, it would be noticed.
Couldn’t an AI computer program push most of that paper waste more efficiently?
“useless middle manager” is pretty redundant
I am now retired—but in theory my entire job could be done by AI.
There were only a few people in the entire country who knew enough about the job to help “teach” the AI what it would need to know.
The bosses were incapable of long-term planning so there was zero chance they would mobilize the experts to assist in such an effort.
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