The Absurdity of the Return-to-Office Movement::The return-to-office demands make little sense from an overall economic perspective, while working parents, in particular, benefit from not having to waste time commuting to an office, writes Peter Bergen.
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Biden just did this to federal agencies…
For no real reason, Republicans wanted it, but as soon as Biden did it, they shut up about it. Democrats don’t brag about it, because democratic voters hate it.
There was zero reason for it.
The reason Biden did it is because his donors wanted it..
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The ownership/management class sees Return To Office as a symbolic fight over class power. Who has the power, the worker class or the ownership class?
It has nothing to do with real hard numbers, efficiency, or really anything to do with rational choices at all. It has everything to do with the politics of who is considered to have the power in the modern workplace. The workers or the boss?
The ownership class knows how much they are stealing from the worker class so they really don’t want workers to start realizing how much agency and power they really do have if they work together as a class…
I think everybody needs to keep the conversation on forced RTO focused on this. Yes there are arguments that forced RTO is about commercial real estate property values and I am sure there is truth to that but we really need to see this story for the simple, broad collective story it is; we are in a class war, the rich know it and that is exactly why they don’t want to give in to the extremely reasonable accommodations of allowing workers to do their jobs remotely.
All they care about is the message it sends if they agree to worker demands, everything else including the reasonableness of the demands is noise to the people with the power and money.
I feel like they’re fighting an up hill battle against startups. If you’re a tech startup, you don’t have to invest in physical office space. You can hire competent people from anywhere. Pay them competitively and not have to drop 50K a month on a corporate office lease. It’s a minor edge in the long run, but something of an inevitability I think. Anyone genuinely competent realizes that if you force people to go into the office, you’re just gonna have people who dick around in the office and make idle conversation while staring at their phones instead of doing honest to God work.
Ours made everyone come back to work at one office if they live within 60 miles. Datacenter floor is collapsing. Two areas are closed due to vermin being exterminated. Charmed life.
my wife has to go in 3 days a week as of January. she’s off this week as she said, quoth: “The fan that kept making more and more noise finally stopped working so I’m home all this week”
Did we really need spmeone to say this? Is it not self evident? If a company requires hybrid work for me it’s a huge red flag
Rich people are having their fee-fees hurt because no one wants to (unnecessarily) come to the office
I sympatize with folk that want to stay home, but I personally am functioning much better in an office environment with those talked-about chance encounters. I am interested to see where we will be in 10-20 years when it comes to working from home.
I’m not going to down vote you - some people do like the social experience at work. I just respectfully disagree. I’m at work to make money and to keep my skills sharp - I don’t (and have never really) enjoy hanging out with coworkers outside of the normal work related areas.
As a mostly introverted person, work from home has been a godsend. I can focus on communicating with my manager and coworkers in ways that are more comfortable for me - and thus result in a more positive experience for everyone.
Plus the amount of work I get done at home is easily double what I was doing when working from the office 5 days a week.
This is me. No distractions = more work getting done, more time to think on emails and project plans, etc. In the office, I go home exhausted by the 15th person that interrupted my train of thought that day.
You mean those times the boss scolds you about because you’re just chatting in the hallway instead of working at your desk as it should be. Oh, you’re having a quick in person discussion with a colleague with the white board? Did you book that room a week in advance? No? Well, do that meeting somewhere next to people trying to focus. And why are you all standing around the desk for? Showing each other’s work? It’s gossiping more likely. Back to your own desk!
That was my experience for the last decades until work from home really happened. I had the impression many bosses liked to stop chance encounters so you just did your best keeping quiet and pretending to be busy. Encounters happened despite the environment, not because of it.
And then suddenly in the last year talks in the hallway were the most important stuff ever. Sure.
Losing 3 hours of your life per day stuck in traffic, polluting the planet, spending money you dont have in gas and downtown lunches so your colleague can tell you all about the weather and you can assist to the same meetings on video calls with people that are in another country… yay…
ok? and they aren’t, that’s the point. it’s absolutely bewildering seeing so many people now defend the hellish grind that previously was at most grudgingly accepted as most of adult life - working 5 days in a row, out of the house all day, commuting, up early, no matter the weather or your mood or health. insane.
For me, while I have worked from home in past jobs, I enjoy going to office as it puts me into a different mind set all together. I have found that I need a separation of environments, otherwise I would spend my off time at home working into the late hours. Also, I would easily spend the entire time sat down in a chair instead of walking around every now and then in an office setting. But that’s me and how I function. I know not everyone is like that.
I had a separate wardrobe for work, had a separate phone that I turned off when I went to bed, separate laptop, all that.
It really helped me keep a sense of separation.
But most of the time my commute was on a bus so I could work the whole way in and out. Commuting by car would have suuuuuucked.
The wardrobe is a good point! I would also add that if your behind computers all day that you spend the extra to make your home office environment comfortable as much as possible. You really do take climate control for granted in the office setting 😉
Not sure why you’re getting down voted to hell. I don’t understand why people refuse to believe there is anything beneficial to human collaboration about being in person. It was a lot easier to help out teammates for a 10 or 15 minutes chat near a communal white board or on pen and paper as opposed to scheduling a virtual video call, and creating a diagram in power point or lucid chart in advance for something I could sketch by hand in 60 seconds in real time. Also those discussions did lead to SMEs overhearing and dropping in to provide additional help were great. Unfortunately this hybrid choose your own home or office location is just the worst of both worlds for those that come in.
A lot of people don’t like to drive 2 or 3 hours in a day for that 15 minutes around the whiteboard when you can instead do an hour inefficiently in an online meeting and still get ahead in terms of times spent on work.
It adds up when you have a lot of meetings where you need to do that. Also 2 to 3 hour commute is insane. And I’m not suggesting office work needs to be 5 days a week. Also the type of work really makes a difference as well. I’m also not sure wfh is more efficient. In the in office days meeting room availability dictated the number of meetings you could have a day. Virtual has created meeting hell for me at times.
In the in office days meeting room availability dictated the number of meetings you could have a day. Virtual has created meeting hell for me at times.
That never stopped people having meetings. Before virtual you had good ol’ teleconference and you were on the phone the entire day. You also had clients wanting a meeting or the company office in a different city/state/country/continent that wanted to discuss things so you travelled multiple hours for a one hour meeting in some cases. Fun times.
Time management and the ability to say no remain important, in office or work from home.
Also 2 to 3 hour commute is insane
A 2 to 3 hour commute (1 1/2 hours both ways) is unfortunately given the traffic situation and general suburban sprawl structure of the US not insane at all here. It is considered a long commute, but not super far out of the ordinary.
You don’t deserve to be downvoted for your reasoned opinion. I do really disagree with you, though, and think that people will look on the pre-pandemic times with a similar eye to the 1500s. Just backwards.
There are certainly jobs that will always be in person–healthcare could be a good example. Most probably don’t need them for any reason at all. The real question is deciding which is which.
What chance encounters have you experienced? Generally interested, since I’m stuck enforcing a RTO plan while being full time remote.
Just meeting people in the hallway for a quick chat where we stand on different projects, what other teams are planning and so on, as well as personal stuff. Just your average office chats.
I have all of those too, just online lol. When in the office people shouldn’t be stopped in the hallway anyway, if they’re in the hallway it’s because they have some place to be. By stopping them you’re disrupting their work.
I’ve seen others make this argument in other threads. It really does tell me that people view this in a very different way. It does seem to me that you find the chance encounters and social aspect of the job to be beneficial. A lot of people, myself included, find those to be exhausting, in the way, and detrimental to mental health. At home, all that overhead disappears and I can just do my work.
As an non-office worker remote work is quite foreign to me to begin with but I imagine that if I had to do such work I wouldn’t get any of it done at home. For the very least I’d need a proper home office that’s only for work but I bet that even then I would just fuck around doing other stuff rather than put in the hours I would if I actually had to go to work.
