I generally don’t believe in unfettered good rather I believe there are benefits and drawbacks to whatever course of action is chosen. A few years back, long before Covid, we started allowing our customer service representatives to work from home. These are employees that spent the vast majority of their eight hour day on the phone with customers and we could monitor their actions just as well at home as we could in the office. The benefit to the employees are obvious. They save a significant amount of money not having to commute, not having to spend money on work clothes, and being able to run errands during their lunch break. For the company, we managed to cut turnover down by about 30% for our CSRs which saves us significant money in the long term. (Turnover is expensive.)
We’re facing a similar problem at work. We have a significant number of employees who have grown used to working from home these last nearly 18 months and they don’t want to come back into the office Covid or no Covid and I know we’ve lost a few employees to other company’s that made WFH permanent. For a lot of employers, I suspect they can’t stand the idea of seeing a lot of precious real estate sitting empty and unused.
I can’t deny the benefits of working from home. It’s almost like getting a raise. But I hate that my home office, where I have my hobbies, is now also a work space. I would much prefer to work from the office but I’m an outlier I suspect.
That’s the thing, though: there are plenty of people out there that don’t think there is literally any drawback for a company to allow free and permanent WFH for any and all employees who wish to do so. That’s what sparked this whole question.
I am sure that many employers are looking at some kind of hybrid model. It seems to be accepted that leaving employees completely out on a limb, with no personal contact is not a good idea while forcing them to commute daily if they don’t want to is probably counter-productive.
In the UK at least, there is another problem. It seems that some employers are wanting to cut the salaries of the WFH workers. The justification is that they don’t have the same costs as their WFO colleagues so why should they get the same pay. Naturally, the unions are up in arms about this.
I guess the question is “according to what logic” should WFH folks be deferred to. There are multiple competing yardsticks.
The number one concern for me is safety. I don’t know exactly what the safety situation is where you work, but my industry in general has been tearing out cubicle walls and sitting people elbow to elbow for quite a while now. This was already a worker-hostile move IMO, but in a pandemic, it’s specifically unsafe. IMO the company does NOT get to play physician saying “you’re vaccinated, lots of people are vaccinated, it’s a lot safer.” Employers are never to be trusted with your safety or well-being beyond what the law compels them to do.
The second concern is effectiveness. Has the team demonstrated it can perform with many or most staff WFH? Then management has no grounds to say this is a performance issue, so frankly they can go pound sand.
The third concern is simply bargaining power. If you’re going to lose employees unless you make X concession, then it ought to be a no-brainer to figure out a way to accede gracefully without putting your distaste and distrust on display. Market pressure works both ways, and it seems like it’s management’s turn to eat it. They need to think carefully how their actions here will reflect on their ability to retain and compete for talent.
If any of concerns aren’t met, then management needs to really articulate why they want to endanger and/or inconvenience people. Because the pattern I’ve seen is that they really just prefer to cram people into offices “just in case” there’s a little more labor to be extracted.
Fair disclosure, my preferred arrangement is hybrid. I like seeing my co-workers in person twice a week. The only heavy-handed approach I’d want to see is for teams schedules to be synchronized (team A works home the same days, team B works home maybe different days). So it’s not like I’m against the concept, but I weight more my preference of other workers combined with distrust of management.
I hope someone’s arguing that employees don’t incur the expenses of working in a physical office either.
Man I hate this management tactic of arguing “here’s how you can get by with less.” No, idiot, you pay me what the market demands for this skill. I will decide how to manage my personal expenses.
My office- when I was still commuting into work in the Before Times- was completely “open concept”: just a bunch of desks scattered around a large room. I had to wear headphones all the time.
And, as an artist, I was near the other artists… who really like for their work environment to be dark. I on the other hand, have to be in a lit environment, especially in the long dark winters we get up here in Edmonton. As a result, everyone else was sitting in the dark, while my desk had two lamps on at all times. What really made me mad was that I didn’t get to sit near the window and thereby get some natural light- the higher-ups put other people near the windows, and they kept the blinds shut at all times.
Now that I’m working from home, I’m in the basement… but I have eight overhead lights to stave off the depression. That might be a huge part of why I’m so resistant to returning to working at the office.
That only works if workers out the other side of their mouth aren’t saying that the employer is responsible for paying a living wage and making sure their employees have an acceptable lifestyle
Some companies have a geographic pay policy where an employee’s salary is based, in part, on their location. i.e. An employee in Dallas will typically be paid more than the equivalent position in Amarillo or El Paso. Companies that have such policies are going to have to think long and hard about how they determine salary in an era where so many employees work from home.
But what the market will bear isn’t set in stone and changes based on current conditions. If you lived in San Francisco in 1999 you were competing for jobs with other people in the Bay Area or those willing to move there to take a job. But in 2021 you might be competing with people in Eureka, Chicot, or even out of state in Colorado Springs. That’s going to be a factor in what the market will bear.
The response to this assumption is “do these people have the power to change the current situation?”
How many of them are there? If they all decided to leave their current employer and find jobs that would give them what they want, would their current employer be in such a bind, that the costs of hiring replacement staff be more than their perceived costs of permitting unfettered WFH?
These are the questions that companies are wrestling with.
One of the drawbacks of having everyone work from home, IMHO, is that many strategic goals that groups are striving for, do not get worked on. All companies have to be continuously improving, or they will eventually get left behind by their competitors, this even extends to back office operations for manufacturing companies. When whole teams work from home, there is less collaboration, less brainstorming to solve problems or find efficiencies.
Our company is doing a modified approach, and on an individual basis. Some teams just don’t work well on a disaggregated basis for long periods of time, as such those roles are not being offered WFH. Many of our back office folks are being offered up to two days a week to WFH. If this becomes a performance issue, it will be addressed on an individual basis.
There are too many factors to be considered to just make a blanket policy decision with regard to the WFH issue.
Easily flipped the other way. Employers don’t get to look at my commute and decide I can live on a little bit less. The entire reason we need legislative intervention on that front is that employers have demonstrated they’re both incompetent and untrustworthy on that front.
Creating a whole “work from home” workforce is not in the best interest of labor over the long term. The majority of the workforce that can work 100% from home is the same as commoditizing them. Companies over the long haul will figure out how to automate these roles, and significantly lower their costs. This likely would have been achieved anyway, but the pandemic and the WFH movement will hasten its coming.
That’s really going to be interesting thing. If everyone is WFH then cost of living adjustments just don’t matter as much. So why offer a wage that would be necessary to survive in San Francisco or NYC, when you can just offer the wage that someone living in Kansas would be more than happy with?
I work for the US Government and our regional office is in Atlanta. I have a co-worker who during this max work from home time has moved all the way to the tip of South Georgia. When we eventually will have to come to the office (I imagine at least 1 day a week), I have no idea what he’s going to do. But for now, his Atlanta salary goes a LOT farther in south Georgia than it did in the Atlanta metro area.
It turns out a lot of those Silicon Valley workers didn’t move to the heartland to make their money stretch farther. Instead, they moved to the 'burbs. Surely, some of that is because they knew they’d probably have to go back to the office at some point, but a lot of it is they’d rather live in those areas than, say West Virginia, even if offered thousands of dollars to move there.
And while this may still mean there end up being a bunch of highly skilled tech workers available for hire in Kansas or Oklahoma, I wouldn’t hold my breath waiting for it to happen, either.
I’m not sure that true it is much easier to deny the humanity of a person you’ve never seen. If a person just becomes a computer in another part of town who sends in tps reports instead of Bill who likes his coffee black and has a daughter who is checking out colleges for next year, it becomes much easier to replace the computer.
I think there is value in those water cooler conversations because they humanize us to the people that make decisions about who to promote or fire. It makes your idiosyncrasies a fun fun quirk rather than a problem to be solved. Of course, the counter point would be if your boss doesn’t like you then being an anonymous computer may be a step up.
True for automation, less true for offshoring. It’s a lot easier to offshore jobs that have been made 100% WFH than it is jobs which ‘require’ office time. It’s also a lot easier to cheapify jobs that are currently done in metropolitan offices, if you can WFH them to literally anywhere in the US where the cost of living is lower.
An insurance company in Japan made the news in 2017 when it laid off 34 employees and replaced them with IMB’s Watson Explorer AI. These were employees who worked out of the office in a culture where employers typically demonstrate more loyalty to their employees than US companies. If automation can save the company money and increase profits it’ll come whether or not the employees are working from home or the office.
In my job I have a one-to-one meeting with my manager every week, where we discuss what I’ve been up to, what’s coming up, and various other issues. That used to happen in person, but for the last 18 months it’s been happening remotely. The basic relationship hasn’t changed: I’m held to account for my productivity, whether the discussion happens in cyberspace or meatspace.
Yeah, aside from work there are a lot of reasons why someone might choose to live in a Californian suburb over anywhere in West Virginia. I don’t necessarily see WFH making places like West Virginia more valuable.
I have my doubts as well. A firm in San Francisco seems more likely to pick up a remote employee from another area with a good tech work force like Austin or Redding. And it’s going to take a few years before we start seeing significant shifts in worker location. If we see a significant shift at all.
Same here. In fact, my boss started just a few months before we started working from home because of Covid. I’ve only seen her a few times over the last year and a half and we have weekly “face-to-face” meetings. I have a few newer coworkers who started during Covid that I’ve yet to see in the flesh.