Return-to-office mandates can’t fix stagnant post-COVID worker productivity

The Hill ^ | 03/25/2024 | GLEB TSIPURSKY

[coalminersson]

cal state employees were encouraged to work at home. Circa 1990s Of course that would save gas, and lighten the freeway load some days.

But it required management approval. I was chief of training for a mid-sized department. When my employees didn’t need to be in class they could do their research on designing classes, make calls, write memos and lesson plans from home.

Then we got a director who couldn’t understand how managers could measure results and not have to watch people work. That was the end of work at home.

Then the state went to 9-80; work 9 days 80 hours get a monday or friday off every other week, not bad Freeway traffic good on Mon and Fri in Sacramento where we had 200,000 state employees.

Some jobs need people there some don’t. the key is to figure out which ones and judge people by their completed work.

[EEGator]

That is a reasonable conclusion, so it will never stand. :)

[Myrddin]

My company bids labor rates based on either remote or on company premises office. The rates are higher for employees with a company office including floor space, desk, computer, networking, cleaning services, utilities. The customer is relieved of all of that overhead for the remote worker. If the employee is going to be required to be utilize an office on company premises, the rate is that value whether any remote activity occurs or not. I haven't had a physical office on company property since Sept 2014. My rates are offsite/remote. It's easier to be recruited to work on new contracts when you don't have a physical office to complicate the rates.

[Myrddin]

The "disadvantage" is that hybrid work schedules are ruining urban downtowns.

I always opted for brown bag lunch when working at a company office. It simply takes too long to venture out for lunch, wait in lines, eat and travel back. A waste of my time and money. In many downtowns, it is simply too dangerous to exit company premises to venture off to lunch. Lots of criminal activity.

[Political Junkie Too]

In many downtowns, it is simply too dangerous to exit company premises to venture off to lunch. Lots of criminal activity.

I understand that is a very real problem today. It wasn't for me before I retired.

In my last working years, I worked in downtown Houston, which was pretty safe. Houston's downtown is not residential and basically closes down after 7:00pm,so we didn't have the thuggish street crime. Downtown also has an extensive tunnel system that connects all the buildings due to the weather, and this is heavily policed to keep the homeless out.

-PJ

[Daveinyork]

This all makes me glad I sold my business and building before the pandemic.

[Myrddin]

I've had the "out for lunch" experience in San Diego, San Francisco, Oakland, Baltimore, Chicago, New Orleans. Fortunately the experiences occurred on business trips and were not an obligatory part of the daily work experience. Those places are much worse now. One of the perks of the post-COVID time frame is less travel and less budget for travel. In my first 20 years with my current employer, I would often travel every 2 weeks. My last business trip was in Sept 2017. I'm not shedding any tears over that change. By the time I took my last trip, the "travel" part of the company had figured out how to take government specified per diem and pocket the difference between actuals and authorized amounts. The traveler gets the raw end of the stick and the travel department is gloats over what they can skim off. Thankful to no longer be traveling.

[ShadowAce]

My company bids labor rates based on either remote or on company premises office.

My job is remote whether I'm in the office or not. Since I'm a Linux Systems Admin, my work is data center oriented. The data center was on another floor from my desk, so ALL of my work was done over the network.

Funnily enough, it's the exact same situation when I work from home.....

[Myrddin]

Very similar situation. I've been a UNIX sysadmin since 1980 and Linux since 1985. Windows sysadmin at an enterprise level for Army Corps of Engineers. My systems live on servers all over the country. I've never physically touched any of them in recent years. My last big physical server system build was a SHAPE in 1992. Sun 640MP (dual processor cabinets running synchronously for immediate failover). My first racks of VMware occurred in 2009 when I migrated from Sun workstations to Linux VMs on an HP server rack. Of late, corporate runs the physical hardware, I did the system admin and build the applications.

[Svartalfiar]

Most office jobs are ultimately going to end up as 100% on-site or 100% remote. The economics of the hybrid model simply don't work once you sit down and look at the numbers.

It depends onthe job. IT stuff? Sure, they only need to come to the office two days a month or for client meetings. But many jobs have work to where they can easily spend a day or two just working on the computer, which can be done anywhere. A hybrid schedule works great. My dad's a mid-management civil engineer. He's at the point where most of his work is meetings and phone calls, which can basically be at home nine days every two weeks. I work with a bunch of MEs, AEs, EEs, and related. Outside of component testing in the lab or hot test fires days, being in the office isn't much benefit when the team is split between two office areas a good 15min walk apart, and half the team is remote half the days anyway. The bit of benefit of being in the office probably isn't much compared to the waste of driving in for most of the team.

[ShadowAce]

I've been a UNIX sysadmin since 1980 and Linux since 1985.

heh. I understand typos happen, but it's still funny.

[Myrddin]

Where is the typo? I was a UNIX system admin inside Pacific Telephone in 1980. I built my first Yggdrasil Linux system in 1985 from a very early distro. Linus was attending UseNIX and getting lots of help from the UNIX academic and commercial community to push Linux along to a commercial grade product.

My early UNIX systems were on Western Electric 3B20S systems and UNISYS 1100-64 and 1100-92 mainframes. Later, a suite of 80 UNISYS 7000 (Power 6/32) machines and HP 9000 minis. I moved on to my current employer where I did system admin on SunOS and HP-UX systems as well kernel level device drivers for the HP-UX 7.0 systems built on the 68030 including full integration of the Mentat System V STREAMS package, Spider X25 L2/L3, HP 9.0 multi-LUN SCSI drivers and a tunnel driver between the BSD TCP/IP stack the the Mentat STREAMS stack to encapsulate TCP/IP over X.25 wrapped in SCSI frames to an external radio.

Part of the process of bringing in the UNISYS 7000 machines was fixing a dreadful attempt at an X.25 L2/L3 in their MPCC interface board and kernel drivers. In the process we found defective DMA interface chips between memory and the synchronous serial input from our Amdahl network. I found tons of defects in the X.25 L2 as well. After going live, I detected a defect in the CPU scheduler and passed the improved version to CCI in Irvine. The impact at their site was amusing. Under the old scheduler, the machine was nearly unusable by the time the 3rd user logged in. After the update they had new problem. All 32 dial-in lines were in use and the machine was still very responsive. That scheduler was rolled out to the Bell Operating Companies, but called the "Bellcore Scheduler" to have some corporate "gravitas". My reward was another promotion.

[ShadowAce]

The very first Linux kernel was released in 1991, and was barely usable.

1995, I may be able to understand, though I don't think many companies were using it at that time.

There is NO WAY you were a Linux Admin (or even heard of Linux) in 1985.

[Myrddin]

I stand corrected. I was running Xenix. The Yggdrasil release in 1991 smashed my Xenix root disk. It was in fact unusable. I didn't have a backup for my Xenix x86 system and put Windows on that hardware to host MS Word. My best Xenix system at the time was a TRS80 Model 16 (68000) based machine. It was actually 1998 when we opted for Linux over SunOS.

[ShadowAce]

Ahh—Xenix. I remember that—vaguely.