Posted on 07/16/2023 8:53:48 PM PDT by DoodleBob
Office attendance is slumping again and bosses have a warning: We are a worse company when you stay home.
In buildings across 10 major U.S. cities, office occupancy has fallen back below 50% for the past three weeks, according to Kastle Systems, which tracks security swipes into offices. The drop comes despite new return-to-office mandates that affect more than 600,000 workers and counting.
Hundreds of Wall Street Journal readers—many of them bosses and team leaders—responded to our story on the workers who say “it’s not my responsibility” to save the office economy. These bosses say employees who insist they are more productive while working from home are missing the larger picture: Team productivity is taking a hit.
The purpose of an office is to create a dynamic environment where people feed off one another’s energy, bond on a personal level and explore ideas in unstructured ways, many company leaders said. Remote work can’t provide those kinds of casual interactions that build culture and camaraderie, they say, which means it is worse for the organization and, in many cases, individual careers, too.
“Team collaboration really is much better and more effective with actual face time. Career growth also,” said William McNamara, a hiring manager who lives in Bellevue, Wash. “Sure, zealots will claim you can do it all remotely, but you can’t do it all as effectively for everyone, remotely.”
Still, work-life balance is a vital piece of company culture—one that workers say is helped by the option to work from home, at least part of the time.
(Excerpt) Read more at wsj.com ...
Work from your own homo.....
I’m too old to get back into that rat race. I’ll just find me some Biden bucks! (Well, heck, I guess I don’t quality!)
“These bosses” should have thought about this before they embraced the Branch Covidian idiocy back in 2020.
Cry me a river.
Productivity in many corps went up with WFH. Less commute time was often used to get work done. Any decrease in productivity NOW may well be a result of resentful employees facing a return to a commute. Management that judges by “butt in chair” time instead of output is incompetent.
When it comes to an operating model for a standard office-based business, I can’t think of too many things more idiotic and disruptive than working 3 days per week at one desk and 2 days at another desk in a different t location.
Working at home and going back to work can get super expensive. Start paying commuting costs, gas, breakdowns, maintenance, tires, clothing, having to pay to eat away from home$, hiring baby sitters, on and on.
It’s like taking huge pay cut...I wish them luck.
Workers from home are idiots, because being absent from the office makes it easier to fire them. They can be sent an email and legal obligations and the company can be done with them at the drop of the hat.
Yo, get back to work, y’all.
It’s human nature. While there are exceptions, most people are going to fo more in the comfort of their own home.
At the office, there’s little else to do. At home, there’s everything else to do.
They really screwed the pooch with the lockdowns, didn’t they?
That’s the right expression, isn’t it? I’ve never used it before!
Maybe the managers should try stamping their feet and holding their breath until they turn blue.
I’m sure it’s more enjoyable to work at home, because you can get the work done and get your housework done at that same time.
Bosses decides to treat all their employees as if they were lepers, and told them they needed to live in mortal fear of their potentially diseased co-workers.
There’s no coming back from that. These “WFH die-hards” are simply giving their bosses a major vote of no confidence right now.
Absolute bullspit. The office long ago became a place for management to pit employees against each other, forcing the productive to carry the incompetent ones, especially their bosses. Scott Adams of 'Dilbert' made a living exposing this since the 1990s. High-speed internet allowed the nonsense to stop.
Feed off one another's energy? That line is straight out of a marketing brochure for a scam startup.
Bond on a personal level? No one is going to bond with coworkers that they dare not speak the truth in front of. Also, just as the legal department how accusations of sexual harassment have disappeared (unless you're Jeffrey Toobin at CNN), and how accusations of racial or "gender" discrimination have also disappeared.
Productivity has gone way up since working remotely. We have processes that previously took four weeks that now get done in days. We also widened the teams across multiple states, something the company would never have done if not for the COVID-1984 lockdowns. There is no going back to the office for someone who's five states away.
Commercial office real estate owners in blue cities are the biggest pushers of office enslavement but companies aren't falling for it.
“Working at home and going back to work can get super expensive.”
I’ve been working at home for more than three years and count the money I have saved, including not needing to buy a new car, no more downtown lunches, thousands of dollars in gas, no new business clothes, etc, etc.
I even count the extra hours I have to be at home with the family and all the extra sleep.
“While there are exceptions, most people are going to fo more in the comfort of their own home.”
True. But it is really entertaining to watch the antics of those who try to get away with fo while on the job….
Sounds like you have achieved work-life balance.
Too many managers want the employee to marry the organization.
“These “WFH die-hards” are simply giving their bosses a major vote of no confidence right now.”
And vice versa.
The bosses spent the last three years proving that they didn’t need all that office space. And they are now demonstrating that they’re morons by pretending they do.
Word to the wise, folks … it’s not the managers who actually get the work done.
Add in this inflation, higher interest rates, on and on..
Going through all that expense and commute time to go back to work, and they quickly find you have far less money.
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