Lets discuss working from home vs working in the office

In My Humble Opinion
1

I was talking with one of my young underdrones at work the other day about our new office “policy” that our people were expected to be in the office four days a week if they weren’t on a project. I say “policy” because AFAICT it doesn’t seem to be enforced and there are plenty of loopholes and workarounds. I know some other companies are a bit more draconian in their application of their policies.

Anyhow, the point here isn’t to discuss the policies but the pros and cons of working from home, working at the office, or some combination of both.

Now due to the nature of my work, I’ve enjoyed some ability to work remotely since 2001. By the time right before COVID came around, I rarely went to my office, and when I did it was usually so empty I didn’t bother staying the entire day anyway.

So here are my thoughts:

When I was my Underdrone’s age, just starting a career in consulting in the late 90s/early 2000s, there was an advantage to coming to the office. You made friends and connections with your coworkers. Going out to lunch together or drinks after work was very common. There weren’t a lot of tools for remote collaboration, so you needed to be physically co-located.

Fast forward to even before COVID, whether it is a client site or the company I’m working for, very rarely have I found it beneficial to physically go to my office. I am managing teams and working with clients who are distributed globally anyway. My manager and leadership structure is also usually physically located somewhere else. Offices are like 75% empty and most of the other people there are from other teams or departments or just so focused on their work that they can’t interact with anyone else.

So I have to wonder, what is the point of having a bunch of random people sit in a big room together doing unrelated tasks with no supervision?

2

I’ve worked remotely for about 11 years now. The main benefit of having people in office is that, if there are any technical issues, it can be solved right away by IT on-site. A lot of managers also just feel better, psychologically, about being able to walk over to someone’s cubicle and talk to them right away in person as opposed to the feeling of that person being 900 miles away.

But I agree, overall, the benefits of remote still outweigh in-office for both worker and boss alike. My former company saved a huge amount of money by closing down one office and sending a lot of people remote.

3

My son is starting out now with a company that loosely requires 3 days a week in-office. He says most people are there T-Th, but there will always be exceptions. I told him to have maximum flexibility such that if someone he needs to meet with is there on one of his WFH days, he should plan to go in just for that. IMHO face time is important, especially early-on in the career.

My company is still mostly WFH and I have heard about the challenge for newbies getting to know their team mates in this environment. Some have been with us a year or two and have never met thier manager or team in-person.

My company now requires only a couple days per month in-office, and when I have gone in it’s empty. Hardly seems worth it. OTOH the extensive WFH culture has been extremely isolating. I appreciate the flexibility most of the time, but something is missing from work now, mainly human interaction.

4

I work from home. I feel I miss nothing. I did have to go into the office for a brief time. I had to pay for transportation. I had to wake up much earlier. I had to wear pants.

5

This is the biggest problem with the “hybrid” model as we call it where I work.

The one benefit that the in-office work clearly provides is the in-person meetings that some people think are valuable. But the benefit of this is directly opposed by the fact that people are going into the offices on different days, and so still don’t see a lot of people face-to-face.

A big advantage to WFH is that businesses can reduce the amount of office space needed, but that makes it literally impossible to have everyone attend an in-office day on the same day. No one will pay for a large number of offices that are almost all empty 3 or 4 days per week.

6

You would think that would be evident, but it isn’t. At the site that I’m based at, the company removed desk phones, downgraded the internet bandwidth, and is now doing “shared hosting”, i.e. hotelling, but has recently come out with their 4-day-a-week in-office policy with the aspiration for a full time in-office schedule, resulting in overflows taking up any open conference room and guest office space. The irony is that this results in lowered productivity, greater frustration in trying to set up and attend meetings, and general unhappiness, plus needing to spend time packing and unpacking workspaces every day. (I have my own private office because of seniority and need, but it’s kind of a shitty office that no one really wants.). And since nearly all of our calls are with remote parties, all I do is go into the office and immediately get on the phone, Teams, Zoom, et cetera.

Contrast working from home where I have two giant monitors, a standing worktable and desk to fight fatigue, big windows, essentially unlimited bandwidth to download files and support multiple simultaneous calls/vidcons, steps away from kitchen and bathroom, and no distractions or competing for space. Now, I know not everybody can have this kind setup, and for the younger people this makes it really difficult to form relationships and find mentors, but frankly my schedule is so jammed most days that I don’t have any time to mentor or casually interact with anyone, and any spare time I do have in the office is spent trying to catch up on real analysis work or planning that I would normally do in the time that I’m now commuting.

Rant over.

Stranger

7

That’s what I’ve been feeling as well.

I work in Manhattan (at least that’s where my office is). So this may be New York specific (or applicable to any big city) but I used to enjoy the “New Yorkness” of going into some big skyscraper or converted tech space with exposed pipes, working in close proximity with my team, small talk with coworkers, getting lunch around the neighborhood, drinks after work, that sort of shit.

These days, the combination of hoteling, remote distributed teams, constant use of contingency workers and constant layoffs and turnover makes every job feel like a random cluster of complete strangers. And why connect with any of them anyway, since half of them will be gone in a year.

As I was telling my young colleague, I would not want to be a few years out of college spending my entire day working remotely from my small apartment, only to spend the evening in the same apartment.

That said, I have a wife who works and small kids now. It’s much easier to take a 20 minute break to pick them up from school than to hire some overpriced nanny or juggle who ducks out of work early to race 45 minutes home to pick them up. I don’t want to be told I need to sit in some specific seat in Manhattan to have conference calls with people in Chicago, Tampa, and London.

8

Where I work they were starting to really push all this in the years leading up to the pandemic. Even though the vast majority of us were working in-office the way they claim they wanted us to, they were doing everything they could to make that in-office work as annoying and impersonal as they could.

If the bosses really want me to come into an office every day, they really need to make sure I have a spot of my own, that I don’t have to “reserve” every goddamned day.

9

I, too, have better equipment at home, although when I go into the office I bring some of it with me (and I have other peripherals I’ve left in the office desk drawers for my use when I’m there).

The one thing I miss from working in the office in the pre-COVID era is:

our organization sponsors and encourages big division-spanning discussion groups where we’d discuss racial inequity, homophobia, transphobia, economic disparity, xenophobia and ethnocentricity, sexual inequality and harassment and a host of other social problems, and the org culture is such that people were really talking about what it’s like for them personally; it wasn’t the usual corporate thing where some trainer delivers a PowerPoint lecture and you get checked off for attending the required event. It was voluntary, well-attended, and nobody hassled anyone about why they weren’t at their desk doing real work instead.

It just doesn’t translate well to Zoom. It doesn’t feel the same without the full component of body language and being in the actual room with the other participants.

But other than that, naaah. The other types of meetings are fine over Zoom and less of an interruption to me doing work (I can mute and listen and be doing data entry at the same time as the meeting is taking place).

10

When we returned to the office in late 2021, we started hemorrhaging people and the company reversed their decision allowing us to have a hybrid schedule working from home some days and the office others. Practically speaking this meant people just worked remote. I’m categorized as having a hybrid schedule at work and I can go weeks without ever going into the office. Well, I used to go weeks until some of my job duties changed. More on that below.

I’m in human resources (but don’t let that fool you because I’m an okay guy), and prior to COVID part of my job was to help with onboarding new employees and to run new employee orientation. COVID actually conincided with a promotion which saw my duties change, so I wasn’t running the show when we switched over to an online orientation instead of in-person (my company was pretty quick about sending us home).

A few months later someone tapped me on my shoulder to run orientation because all the facilitators had some sort of conflict in their area. No problem, I’m a team player. It was such a miserable experience. NEO went from something I loved to do to something I absolutely hated. It made me think of people who went from live theater to radio. I got very little feedback from my audience because they simply weren’t engaged. And I’m charming as hell so I know it wasn’t me.

I’ve noticed it’s taken me longer to connect to newer coworkers while working remotely than in pre-COVID days. I had some coworkers whom I had never seen in the flesh after working with them for almost a year. It’s just a bit more difficult to build a rapport online than it is face-to-face. This isn’t just about going to lunch with coworkers, which I didn’t do very often, or going out for drinks, which I have only done on a business trip, it’s about getting to know people.

11

There’s not really much point.

I think the real litmus test is whether or not the job itself requires collaboration, or whether you’re largely cranking out deliverables that you do yourself without much external input.

Thinking about my previous jobs, I had some that I could absolutely have done from home, if the situations was such that it was an option. These were predominantly the programming-centric jobs, where I’d go get the requirements (can be in person, didn’t absolutely have to be), then I’d crank on the code for a much longer period to solve the problem and test the solution. That part absolutely could have been done at home- I mostly wore headphones and was tuned out of the world anyway.

Now my last job as a business analyst was all about knowing business processes and being able to elicit what the business actually wanted and needed vs. what they were asking for. This tends to work better in person I’ve found, but it’s not 100% necessary.

My current job though, is more about providing oversight on projects, acting as a sort of advocate both ways between the business and IT, and generally being a sort of “fixer” and/or person who can connect people to get things done. This doesn’t have to be done in person at all- it’s more about knowing what’s going on and who does what, so it’s not necessary to be in the office in order to point someone who needs something from IT at the right group. Or to point an IT person at the right business person to get approval to upgrade a network connection on X date.

I currently work 2 days a week in the office, and the only real advantage I see is that it breaks up being at home 85% of the time, and gives me some time with other people beyond my family and the adults involved with my kids’ activities.

12

I work for a software company. My company turned all the office space into shared space where we have to reserve a space every day. Speaking as a software developer, my workspace is part of the set of tools I used to be productive. It’s foolish for companies to expect developers and engineers to be productive in a hotel work environment. If every day I have a desk with different screens, different keyboard/mouse, different people around me, etc., it’s going to degrade my productivity, and just be a lousy work environment in general. Maybe the sales people and managers are fine with just plopping their laptop on a random table every day, but not everyone works like that. If they want us to be in office, they should at least make the work environment suitable for the work needing to be done.

13

I guess I’m one of the few who really disliked WFH. My home setup was really not conducive for a full day of work. It was intended for a few minutes of work every day, like to look at my bank account. Cramped space, uncomfortable desk. Hard to get ahold of anybody when I needed help. Very slow and unreliable VPN connection to the company. Plus plenty of distractions. Heck, my bed was in the next room, and very inviting!

14

Yeah, I basically have the same job. Sometimes it would be nice to have everyone in the room so we can “whiteboard” shit out. But most of the time I’m just on calls or looking at dashboards which I can do anywhere.

Which is why mandates to come to the office annoy me. I’ve been effectively running global teams stretched between the UK and the West Coast from my swimming pool. Now I have to trek into the office to hold the same conference calls? I don’t think so!

And furthermore, when my company does have happy hours and parties and whatnot, I’m always like “who the fuck are these people and where are the people I actually work with!?”

15

What kind of job? That matters. The biggest cry for WFH seems to come from programmer/software types who tend to be more introverted to begin with. I work in architecture/construction/interior design, and while it’s still mostly a desk job, I found WFH to be rather frustrating. Popping over to someone else’s desk with a sketch or a printout of a detail to discuss questions is a lot easier than a phone call or zoom. We are always getting samples to look at and approve, reps bring us products to review, and clients need hand-holding and jobsite visits to check on construction.

More than that, work/home separation is much more difficult if you don’t have a home office to close off at the end of the day. Personally, I was always mentally still at home while doing WFH, but when it was finally time to call it a day, I still felt like I was at work. Screw that. It’s nice to have the option when there’s a snowstorm coming or other scheduling issues, but I think a lot of the champions of WFH are either in a job that’s already primed for it, or they just work at a bad employer. I also get the feeling that a lot of the “Covid showed that WFH is just fine and doesn’t hurt productivity” reports were extrapolating a temporary situation coasting along on momentum that doesn’t necessarily pan out long-term.

16

Well, yes, of course, but it’s telling that I’ve never seen a WFH advocate denying this issue. It’s always the anti-WFH people who bring it up as some kind of great Revelation.

Of course if you have some kind of hands-on job, you have to be on-site. No one is telling plumbers to work from home.

The point is, even if it’s not every job in the country, the fact is, there are a hell of a lot of jobs for which WFH works quite well, and there’s no really compelling reason to force all those jobs to come in to an office ever day, or ever every week. Pro-WFH advocates have been making this argument for years, maybe decades now, with the bosses either just ignoring them, or coming up with bogus reasons why office work is better (“office culture”, anyone?).

What COVID did was give us a real-world, long-term opportunity to put this to the test - a test that WFH passed with flying colors.

And WFH doesn’t just benefit the workers. As pointed out many times, it benefits the employers by reducing costs, it benefits the people who don’t WFH by taking millions of unnecessary commuters off the roads, and it benefits the environment by reducing commuting overall.

17

My bed was literally a few feet away from my desk. I hated working from home, but had no other choice than to put up with it for 3 years (at different companies) because of the pandemic. Last year I was finally able to get an ADA accommodation to not WFH and I’m soo much happier now. I’m also literally the only non remote person in my entire department.

18

I’ve been on varying degrees of telework - from home 2 / office 3, to fully remote, for about the last 15 years.
In 2013 I joined a project that, except for the initial startup month or two, was basically 100% remote. A lot of team members weren’t even local to the client’s HQ. It was like getting a 10,000 a year raise: zero commuting costs, no “work clothes” (though that had become a nonissue anyway as “businesswear” had evolved into “business casual” to “OK to wear jeans”).

Back in 2018, the contract was renewed. This time, it included a requirement to have x person-days onsite each month. While my tasks required ZERO interaction with anyone at client HQ, I was asked to come in once or twice a month to make up for the folks for whom that was impossible. I couldn’t really argue that - but it meant that on that day, I had to pack my computer up, drag it downtown on the Metro, walk 6 blocks, sit in the hotelling area with a bunch of people I didn’t know (and maybe 3 that I did), and interact with absolutely nobody aside from the 3 people, when we went out to get lunch from a food truck. This is exacly the scenario you describe! But the contract required on-site warm bodies, so…

My current project, which is 100% telework for me (they just recently started making locals come in 1 day a week, but I’m not even in the same time zone), could benefit from a little face-to-face time. Tossing around ideas. getting tech support, and so on. But we manage remotely.

Not having local tech support is a big problem. When my computer died (it bricked itself trying to install a Windows update), it took 3 days to get a replacement. A few years back, my computer locked itself when it let me set a passphrase that was not valid, and could never unlock it again. I had to ship it off the New York to get it fixed. My employer (which is a very large tech firm) got rid of local tech support a few years back; I’m sure there’s a net cost savings, but when YOU are the one whose computer has died, it really sucks to lose several days of productivity.

Last time I was at the corporate office, it was a ghost town. This was actually BEFORE the pandemic - but they have a policy of encouraging people to work at client sites (which makes sense), or at home, rather than coming into the office just to be seen. If you’re on a project where everyone is “at the office”, you don’t even have a permanent desk space assigned. you have to hotel a spot every day, and you can’t leave your stuff overnight, so it’s hideously inconvenient.

As far as the logistics of WFH: Until 2020, my “office” was a lap desk (or a rolling table) in the family room. It can be hard to set boundaries between work and home time, where being in the office means when I’m done, I’m DONE for the day. I develop bad habits, like sleeping until my first mandatory daily meeting (which is at 9 AM central time), which means my work day runs later, which means I’m too tired to get up early the next day… The discipline of going to an office means being up, and out of the house, early enough to arrive by 8:00 or whenever; an hour wasted in the morning, and another in the evening, but then I’m through.

19

I handle ADA accommodations at work and I’ve never had someone ask for one to work in the office. Would you mind talking a little bit more about the nature of this accommodation? i.e. How does it help you perform the essential functions of your job? During COVID we did have some employees who had to come into the office because they couldn’t effectively work from home. But this wasn’t handled on a case-by-case basis it was the whole department, or at least parts of it, that were coming in.

And just so we’re clear, this is a good faith question on my part. I’m not asking because I doubt you, but because I’m genuinely curious to learn more about something that might be applicable to me. I do respect that you might find the question to be a bit personal and would rather not discuss it at all. No hard feelings if that’s the case.

20

I’d like to mention that since I WFH, I get to surf the web on my personal laptop during downtime. Even on busy days, most calls involve playing at least 10 minutes of recordings. During that time, I can check my e-mail, Facebook and the Dope without damaging my productivity. Were I in the office, I couldn’t use my personal laptop and I suspect surfing the web on my iPhone would get me in trouble for no good reason.