Having to go back to the office is not employer abuse, and certain entitled people should stop whining as such

The BBQ Pit
103

Just taking the thread at face value (the subject line), my reaction is “get over your own damn selves”.

Yes, there are a lot of benefits to teleworking, if you’re able to do so without tripping over household members. I’ve been doing it nearly full time for 8 years. You get back hours every week that would be wasted on commuting. You save a fortune in commuting expenses and clothing. And if you’ve got a hot project going, you can put in the hours you need to without having to, say, make your way home on busy city streets late at night…

But there’s also a lot to be said for being in-office. Popping your head over the cubicle wall to brainstorm ideas. Being able to see the people in the meeting so you don’t talk over each other by accident. Not being interrupted by family members. And when you’re done for the day, you go home and you’re done - no temptation to keep working just a little bit longer.

I think a lot of employers are going to realize that a hybrid approach gives the best of all worlds. It can save on required office space (my company is 100% "

And if you started a job pre-pandemic that required you to be in-office 5 days a week, your employer has every right to require that you return once it’s considered safe.

104

I’m curious - why do you think that? I personally don’t care either way as my company (a large multinational) has actually formalized a very flexible hybrid model for the post-pandemic future. (Though as a regular reader of Ask a Manager I’m beginning to think that my employer is uniquely super-reasonable)

105

But is it smart?

I have read anecdata that some companies’ metrics (productivity, etc.) have gone UP during the work-from-home phase, and yet the top brass is STILL insisting that everybody come back to the office.

106

Because they are terrified that it will be discovered that they themselves actually serve no useful purpose whatsoever.

I had a manager once whose sole purpose seemed to be to walk down the hall ever couple of hours, to make sure the highly trained multi-degree professionals were actually sitting in their chairs working. A totally expendable individual.

107

I had a manager who, in order to make monthly financial goals, started firing people.

Of course, he eventually fired enough people to make the bottom line look good that he was fired because he no longer oversaw enough employees to justify his job.

108

I guess he figured that once he fired everyone, profits would be infinite.

109

Sure they have the right. The company is paying people and they can tell those people what they need to do to keep being paid.

Thing is, people have found they can do the job from home just as well and avoid a commute (which is time consuming and expensive) and they get other benefits like not needing to pay for childcare (also expensive).

So, when their employer demands they come back they are understandably reluctant.

110

And many of them have said that they will then look for alternative work that allows them to do the job efficiently from home.
Companies that take advantage of this will gain good employees. Companies that do not will whine and complain about how hard it is to get people to work, and seek to find someone else to blame for their business tanking. Blame lazy employees, blame minimum wage laws, blame the government, blame anything other than their own shitty management decisions.

111

My job is having people come back to the office. They are not going to let anyone WFH full time.

I think this is a mistake. We’ve been working from home for over a year and have not missed a beat. Productivity is the same.

I could literally do my job from anywhere that has a stable internet connection. I could do my job from Starbucks. Some of the arguments for returning to office are hollow, at least for me. Team cohesion, face time with your team members and what not. I work out of the Roseville, Ca office. I am the only team member there. Part of my team are in Florida, and the rest, including my manager, are in Los Angeles. In my 15 years with company, I have only worked in the same office as my supervisor for 3 years.

We communicate through email, Microsoft Teams, Webex and phones. Everyone who works like we do should work from home. It is literally better for everyone. Less gas used, less cars on the freeway, fewer cars in the parking lot, less absenteeism, less office space used…etc… We work with technology. Our productivity is tracked with metrics.

I understand it is their decision. But they should rethink it.

112

Don’t confuse your perspective, with the perspective of others, as if it’s somehow universal, or a paradigm that others should follow. Just sayin’

113

I’m back in the office but we could easily be doing our work at home. We’d probably be more productive if we were at home and Zooming, but I work for someone who doesn’t accept remote work as ‘work’…which is kinda dumb.

114

Same here.

In fact, I set it up that way loooong before Covid ever happened.

Give me a laptop and a good internet connection and I can do my job from anywhere in the world.

My boss knew that but said I had to be in the office (before Covid) to support the staff that had to be there. Which was BS because I could do it remotely but it took Covid to prove it.

Now my boss keeps asking in Zoom meetings if everyone is ready to go back to the office and there is silence. Everyone wants to keep working from home but no one wants to say it.

115

I’ve got a colleague of 14 years who was not thrilled about returning to work in person with a long commute. She’s found that her family time was much, much improved, and her productivity at work was much higher. She just in fact broke some important productivity records in her area. But the demand was that she return to work in the office doing the same exact thing that she excelled at doing from home.

She did not complain though. Didn’t call it “employer abuse”, and didn’t think she was entitled to anything.

Just announced today she’s found another job with a competitor who will let her work from home. So we just lost one of our best people together with a huge amount of institutional knowledge.

She won’t be the last.

116

So where did she acquire this institutional knowledge?
My guess is that she learned it in the office.

Because the office is where the institution lives–where it grows, where it breeds and grooms offspring, so it can continue into the next generation.

Working From Home has become the new mantra, sweeping the business world with promises of change and improvement.
But it reminds me of another mantra that swept the business world a couple decades ago, with the same promises:
“outsourcing”.

Back then, the new high-speed internet enabled a new idea : working remotely. what today we fondly call “working from home.”
( Except that “home” was going to be in India.)

For a few years, everybody was preaching it.And it did turn out to be a pretty good deal–for a few types of businesses.
But in the long run, the idea lost its glamor. It turned out that organizations work better when people know each other. and have human contact. The short term gain caused long-term problems.

I suspect that within a couple of years, a lot of businesses will learn the same lesson.
I read lots of stories about people working from home successfully, like the 14-year colleague in this post. But the measurement of success in these stories is usually the short-term, (such as setting a new sales record for one month),and is based on an experienced person with previously-acquired institutional knowledge.

I wonder if, 14 years from now, a newly hired employee with no experience and who started today but worked only from home, will be able to match your colleague’s success.

Senior management is supposed to think long-term (even though they often do not)… It seems reasonable that for many businesses, the long term success of the company will benefit by keeping the employees in the office, sharing institutional knowledge, connected to each other and to the company-- around the water cooler.
.

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Some, perhaps, but certainly not the majority. Much of it is knowledge of specific systems used only by our organization. Some is knowing “who to go to” to get things done. (by phone/zoom) with people she’s never met in person. (we’re spread out over many buildings.) It’s knowledge of how to deal with specific clients - again, not in person.

118

I’ll take a different tack. There are several members of my team who believe incorrectly they are as efficient at home. They’re wrong (and we do have numbers to back this).

Funny enough, we do have a few employees who actually are as efficient at home as at the office, but they aren’t as vocally opposed to returning, either.

That said, we really don’t need to be 100% at the office, either. And I would love a hybrid model. Our management has claimed they’ll look into that once things get closer to ‘normal’ but I’m not putting a lot of faith in that until I see it.

119

This is likely to be me.

The pandemic slowed things down for us. Our company essentially shut down during it; record low oil prices plus tons of uncertainty just meant nearly zero work for a year. I scrambled to make ends meet; went on unemployment for the first time in my life, picked up whatever work I could (seasonal delivery driver at UPS, applied at places I wouldn’t have considered over the last couple of decades, etc) when I got a break; an old colleague knew things were bad up our way, and reached out with an opportunity to actually do the exact same job, but remotely, for another survey firm. They have kept me absolutely busy since January, and as long as I make project deadlines and am available for occasional Zoom meetings, I get to work how I want, when I want.

I am still working for my original employer; but not very many hours at all. Two weeks ago though, I got an email from them, saying they would like to have me start working full time again (even though we don’t have any chargeable projects for me to work on yet). I sent back an email saying I don’t mind helping as needed, but:

a) I will be working from home 99% of the time; I pushed for work-from-home for office folks YEARS ago, and the PTB said no; after being forced into it, there have been no problems getting work done. I’ve even gotten field work done, on my own schedule, in a timely manner, without being micromanaged.

b) I won’t jeopardize my other position where I have actual legitimate work coming in faster than I can get it finished at this point.

So far they’ve been amenable; but I can sense that the day is going to come where they will want to justify their office building. At that point, I’ll probably bail. And they will lose a LOT of institutional knowledge; I am the institution there. I’ve been there longer than anybody; even the owners. I am the go-to for all things; fieldwork, office work, decades-old files, I know all of it.

I’m trying now (since they are paying me for non-chargeable time) to at least prepare them; I’ve been recording video tutorials for all of the “things” I do that they’ve never had anybody else handle so that they won’t be dead in the water, but I see that we will be inevitably parting ways in the future.

120

One thing that’s more difficult with WFH is getting new employees integrated as part of the team both from a work and social perspective. Current productivity may be higher with WFH during the pandemic, but that’s likely because it’s being done by experienced people who moved from the office to home. But for an employee starting a job during the pandemic, it can be a struggle to feel like a part of the team in the same way as they would in the office. That’s the case with one of my kids. She started her first job during the pandemic and says she knows people about 1% as well as she would if she was in the office. And the work has been more challenging. She is not as likely to reach out to ask questions when it’s over Slack or Zoom. She’s happy they are going back to the office next month so she can feel like part of the team. Maybe in a few years when she’s up to speed she’ll prefer 100% WFH, but for starting out it’s made it harder.

121

I think is the hardest part of work from home. For me I added one employee back in October and I’m adding two more in the next week or two. All of these jobs are 100% work from home except what is necessary to go onsite with clients. For training my new sales guy we are meeting for lunch once per week so that he has an hour or two in person with the whole to ask questions and get comfortable with people so calling and emailing them isn’t a big deal.

That isn’t possible with my hire from back in October or my other new engineer since they both live 1,000+ miles away. With them it is about doing lots of zoom calls and phone calls. Initially, I talked to the first guy for an hour or two each day. Most of it was just general bullshitting to get him comfortable with talking to me and to not be afraid to call and ask questions and I’m planning something similar with the new guy. Basically, come sit in on this zoom call or let’s call and chat for a bit. It basically the same as dropping into someone’s office but you don’t have to wear pants.

I think a lot of older managers aren’t comfortable on zoom themselves so they make it awkward for everyone. Encouraging your employees to chat about trivial stuff is important so they are comfortable asking questions. With my new guy I’ve already introduced him to my current employees and am copying him on every email just so he sees the flow of work and what used to be one on ones are now more small group chats. I’ll also be forcing them to contact each other directly away from me so they get comfortable one on one with each other. Even if it takes an extra 3 months to get remote people as comfortable as office people that should come out in the wash of the first year’s extra productivity.

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TBF that experience isn’t universal either - I started a new job mid-pandemic, 100% remote, and don’t have any issues with not feeling part of the team. There’s chit-chat about recipes and stuff on Teams and people ask work-related questions on there same as they would in person.