Is WFH an unfettered good? Should those who want it be deferred to?

In My Humble Opinion
21

Is it an “unfettered good”? I don’t think so. It’s great not having to commute or put in “face time”. And I like having the flexibility to pick up my kids from school or run other errands as time allows. But it also makes me feel very disconnected from my company and clients. I feel very much like George Clooney in “Up in the Air” after Anna Kendrick shows up with her idea to replace his corporate travel with online meetings. Everything feels very impersonal and distant. Kind of like trying to do my job through a mail slot.

What I used to like about work was things like putting on a nice suit (or at least professional clothes), taking the ferry over to Manhattan, grabbing coffee or lunch with coworkers at our regular local spots, maybe grabbing a drink after work or meeting my wife for dinner somewhere. And also, on occasion, meeting a client or my coworkers face to face to hammer out some problem in 10 minutes or an hour which would have taken hours or days worth of misinterpreted emails and awkward Zoom calls. Even just having the ability to not deal with the kids, the nanny, my wife, etc while I’m trying to work is nice.

Now I have to remind myself to change my T-shirt in the morning before my first call.

22

I’ve been WFH for the past 6 years. When I started with the company I was office based with a two hour daily commute. Then I transfered to a different team that is spread across 3 countries and 5 time zones. There were no other team members in my local office so it made perfect sense to WFH. Unlike people who were dropped into WFH due to the pandemic I had time to pepare. I live alone and set up a nice office in a spare bedroom. The company policy at the time was that they’d provide a laptop, docking station, and mobile phone but the rest was up to me so I was able to set it up how I liked. I’ve saved a fair bit of money as train fare was around £2400/year and not buying lunch out everyday.

There are a couple things I miss a bit about not being in the office. The town where the office is is much bigger than where I live so there were more options for lunch, shopping, and pubs.

23

Not to pry if it’s something you want to keep private, but as a lifetime consumer of alcohol who doesn’t know a ton about its production…what kind of company is employing both engineers and distillers? Are you running some kind of combination distillery + engineering consultancy??

24

Basically. We design and build breweries, wineries and distilleries. We do everything from writing business plans and working with investment teams to showing up on site and teaching them how to use their equipment and build recipies. We are starting to hit a growth phase after doing this for the better part of the decade and soon we’ll be building our own distillery to use partially as a school. We’ll also have a full research lab next door. I’m spending about a quarter of my time planning this next phase so some times I start talking about what we will do as what we do.

25

And that’s a good example of why I hate it when people talk about these things in absolutes, like if we have WFH, no one will ever be allowed back in an office ever again.

There are some jobs that simply have to be done in a particular place. There are other jobs that can be done anywhere. And there are some jobs that are a mix. What’s wrong with letting people figure out the best option for themselves and their particular jobs and/or lifestyles? Those who prefer WFH will tend towards one type of career, while those who like going into work will tend towards others.

What we really need to take away from this last year and a half is that lots of jobs can be done from home (or anywhere you can get Internet access, really), and that most people doing such jobs actually will do their jobs, even if their bosses aren’t in the room right next to them. “How do we know you’ll actually work?” was always the big management issue with letting people WFH, and now, we have a prolonged, real-world experiment which proves that, even under adverse conditions, the work will get done. This question should be put to rest.

26

Well, I’m not sure if you’re actually responding to me directly but I said initially that my guys are 100% work from home right now and they can keep that job indefinitely. Or at least mostly work from home there is on site work for a week every other month and an annual visit to me so we can spend a week working in person.

But for them to move on to the next level of training other people that will have to be done in person. Either training new engineers to work for me or new distillers to work for others. Online learning modules are being developed but some things need to be learned hands on with a colocated teacher.

27

I was mostly using you as a jumping off point for addressing this from the OP:

But the second part of what I’m wondering is, does what I want matter at all? Should the folks who want to WFH for good be deferred to? After all, if the answer to my previous question is, there’s no good reason to not have universal permanent WFH, then I’m just being selfish and I should be ignored. Should I be?

There seems to be an assumption that if the WFH people prevail, no one would ever be allowed to work in an office again, which is just silly. I was using you as just the example of why it’s silly for some types of jobs, while also explaining that even in those cases than can be done entirely WFH, there will still be a matter of choice in most cases.

We need to stop framing this as a fight between those who like office work and those who like WFH, and frame it as “Let the workers make a reasonable choice for themselves whenever possible.”

28

Even pre-pandemic we have had folks work remote. After 65 weeks of work from home only (except for rare cases when someone had to go into the office to deal with hardware issues), the office is now open.
It is totally optional until the end of the year. Right now most (90%) of folks decided to stay at home.
I’m one of of the folks that is going into the office. My commute is 4.6 miles (and bicycle in if the WX is nice). I like the office=work, home=not work dynamic. I have two monitors at work and in general faster access. It is just as quiet as home, and I have a nice view at work (overlooking the Mississippi river – bald eagles are not uncommon)
So even though I like office, I totally support folks who prefer at home. Some communication would be easier if I could just walk over to someone’s desk, or have them come to mine so I can show them what I am seeing, but it isn’t a HUGE deal
I wouldn’t say it is an unfettered good, but for my line of work (software development) the good outweighs the bad.

Brian
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29

My employer has gone from telecommuting (set days in office / set days at home) to ROWE (basically come into office as needed) to 50% mandatory in office whenever, to 100% WFH. There have been problems with all models.
It has been made clear all along working from home was not a substitution for child care. More than a few ignored that. When we ROWE’d, we were still supposed to appear in office for meetings. More than a few found reasons why they couldn’t. When we were 50% mandatory, some would work in office four-10s, then take a day off, leaving coverage to fall on coworkers.
In my opinion, problems should then be resolved directly with the employee by management. That doesn’t always happen - rather, a royal edict gets dumped on everyone.
Now, the commissioners have decided most of will work from home permanently, which I am fine with. Some are not. We work with data private information and tax information. Technically, there is to be no one else near to possibly glance at our screens. At the end of the day, our laptops and any paper is to be securely locked up. I can see how difficult that would be for anyone sharing a living space.
I think, if a person has demonstrated the ability to fulfill their job duties at home, can show their children are in a child care facility during core hours, and have the ability to follow security procedures, then yes, let them continue to WFH. Conversely, if a worker needs to be in office for whatever reason, let them.

30

Is anyone saying that it is an unfettered good, though? I guess you say that your colleagues are saying working from home shouldn’t be a problem for anybody - is that what they’re actually saying, though, or are they saying everyone should have the option to work from home? That’s not the same thing.

There are various groups of people for working from home, or at least working from home full time, is a problem. Young people in shared houses, anyone with very limited space, people who just need the socialisation aspect of work. (Obviously I’m only talking about jobs that can actually be done from home). Having some sort of office space, and the option to work in the office some of the time, is probably going to be essential for those employees, and for companies who don’t want to unnecessarily restrict their potential labour pool.

But that doesn’t mean everyone should be forced to go in to the office. For an awful lot of people it is not just more convenient, but makes work possible. I would literally not be able to work outside the home - I tried, and it made my arthritis far worse, and ended up with me frequently calling in sick. I ended up on disability benefits. Working from home, I’ve never had a day off sick.

Most of my colleagues in my team definitely do not want to go in to the office, but a couple I know do (I don’t know all their points of view). And it would be helpful if we could do some training in person in the office. I’ve picked up the software remotely no problem, but today I was training someone else in using it, and some things would have been far easier if we were physically in the same room.

But that’s a temporary problem which doesn’t need a permanent solution. Very soon we actually are going to have office space at our enormous office campus, and we’ll all be going in there for the occasional touchdown day, and could request training in person then (though not from me!).

I don’t think there’s any point rehashing the points made in other threads about the other advantages of working from home.

There’s no need to “defer” to the people who want to work from home or the people who want to go to the office. It is possible to enable both. While it’s understandable that you like the change of scenery and the social aspect, it’d be a bit much to expect other people to have childcare and commuting costs just so that you have someone to chat to.

31

One way employers could encourage people to be in the office is to ensure everyone had their own private workspace. The best would be an office, but a shared office or a roomy solo cubicle with high walls would probably also be acceptable. In my opinion, the open office plan sucks for employee happiness. I suspect most employees would be happiest if they had a private workspace rather than sharing a cafeteria table with 10 other people and all the associated noise and distractions that comes with the lack of privacy. I’m sure part of the pushback of WFO is that the employees don’t want to go back to a work environment where the layout of the office itself is a source of stress.

32

I think this is likely true. The ad agency where I work moved to a new (to us) set of offices in late 2019, which were “open office” – the party line was that it fostered collaboration and gave employees more flexibility, but I think everyone understood that the real reason was that it was cheaper than offices or even full-on cubicles. My impression has been that no one likes open offices except the financial folks.

33

Open offices stink. There’s no real way to spin it otherwise. It makes you paranoid that everyone’s looking over your shoulder when you’re not doing work stuff 100% of the time. And they ARE looking over your shoulder, because they can’t help it if they’re seated behind you.

Workplace trust is a huge issue; in my experience white collar workers want to be judged by the job they do, not how they spend their time. But so much of modern white collar workspaces seem to revolve around keeping tabs on workers and enforcing conformity- open offices, low cubicle walls, IT monitoring your computer, badges tracking when you leave/come in, dress codes, HR policies, and so on. What makes it worse is that every example of cost cutting or employee mistrust is always presented with some absurd spin talking about collaboration, flexibility, etc… when it’s always a matter of saving a buck and/or putting eyes on workers. I always found it far more obnoxious to hear the rationalizations and sales pitches rather than them just coming out and saying “Yes, this is cheaper, so we did it.” Again, it comes back to trust. They feel like trying to sell it to us with some cock and bull story about flexibility and collaboration is better than the truth, like workers can’t be trusted with the real reasons.

WFH has almost none of that in practice. I mean yeah, they can watch your PC all they want, but you can use your home devices how you please (I’m posting this in a meeting in fact). Nobody has a record of when you showed up or left, nobody’s watching what you do- if you’re dressed appropriately, eating, taking a break to load the dishwasher, etc…

So I’m not at all surprised that people balk at going back to the office, when they’ve had a year without all that bullshit. My personal opinion is basically that the stuff I just mentioned is the root cause for WFH looking so comparatively attractive.

34

Speaking for myself, I started a WFH job in January, in what would multiple people have described as circumstances where it would be a problem. I have not met many of the people I work with daily at all, I have met some of them once, at someone’s leaving do picnic. Due to a last minute move during January lockdown, I wound up living in one room in a shared house that wasn’t even big enough to fit a chair in, so I spent 6 months working while sitting on the bed.

You know what? It’s been pretty good.

Yes, having a sensible setup would have been far better, and sure, it would have been nice to actually see people in person a bit more, but compared to wasting 2 hours in traffic every day and spending £100 a week for the privilege, like my previous job?

No contest. I can listen to music and badly sing along- at least if I’m not on a call- I can have my own laptop on as well when it’s quiet. I can get the laundry and other minor chores done while grabbing a drink, so I don’t have to waste weekend time on that. I can dance around the room like an idiot instead of having to look like a sensible grownup while having a stretch break. Though I’m not sure if I would have got away with this if I wasn’t quitting end of next month anyway, I even got to move across the country (into somewhere big enough for a desk) and keep working in the department.

35

Yeah, this is definitely a factor. Where I work, there was a push on the last few years before the pandemic for what they called “Workplace 2.0”, which was basically just Canadian Government Speak for “Smaller, shittier workspaces”.

And this has been the trend for most of my career. Every few years, our workspaces would get smaller, more closely packed, and less well-laid out. A few years back I was required to switch cubicles, and out of about 8 options I had to choose from, 7 were completely awful for one reason or another, and the 8th was just barely tolerable. I pretty much had to threaten to go on strike to get them to give me a better option.

And it’s so clearly all about the money, that it boggles my mind that they ever want us to move back to the office. They would have to be saving a boat-load of money if they let their leases on these buildings expire, so it should be a win-win.

36

That would require taking the long view rather than next quarter’s profits.

37

We’re the government, we’re supposed to look at least as far forward as the next election! :smiley:

38

True as far as it goes, but taking the larger view it’s an example of the “broken window fallacy”. Obviously, people need to eat, etc, no matter where they work, so business lost in some places will shift to others, not simply disappear.

39

I work in a cubicle office, and I have decently high walls. Sure, the screen privacy is nice, but for me, the crazy-making part of working in an office is the noise. My cube walls don’t stop the conversations, and the coworker with a cold who’s sniffling and throat clearing all day, or the hard of hearing boss who bellows on the phone, or the people who gather outside a conference room and act like they’re in a crowded bar.

I don’t process noise well (what was your first clue? :smile:), and my work requires concentration, not collaboration, so WFH has been an absolute blessing.

40

I think there is a point that some people are worried about out of sight, out of mind. Ask any graveyard shift. Hell, ask me.