Your job sounds, uh, “interesting”. My wife has a bit of that, but it’s for a smaller company that is trying to find it’s way. Some days she knows what her job is, others she questions WTF she is supposed to be doing.
More often than not, I tell the PTB what I should be doing. Works fine. Sure I get the occasional SCUD missile but I take care of it.
My job is to ‘Take care of it’. It can be stressful in a ‘what the hell is that, are you kidding?’ kinda way, but at least working from home I do not get interrupted by brush fires.
Well, it’s like I was suggesting my workstream lead today about the state of chaos our client is in - we are consultants. The client can either tell us what they want us to do or we can make recommendations for how they might want to do things. Right now we are doing neither. As I see it, we have a limited window before whoever pays our bills figures out they don’t need us to be a bunch of glorified admins pestering them about how they do their jobs at over $2000 a day unless we can come up with something to show for it.
My project lead keeps suggesting we try to be on site a few days a week to build relationships with the client. I wholeheartedly agree with him because I want to present a good attitude. I, however, am full of shit because:
- My project lead is halfway across the country and will never be at our client site in New York
- No one seems to know which office the client actually works out of, if she works out of an office at all.
- The various people we work with seem to be scattered all over the place (my project leader was bemused because a stakeholder didn’t show up to a call and it turns out he’s based in Singapore).
- No one seems to know how to actually get us access to the client’s offices.
- After much asking around some other coworkers who are at the same client company, it turns out I can submit a request on the client’s internal portal for access, but those requests are usually summarily rejected as a matter of course.
- My project lead is switching projects in a few weeks so I’m not sure why he’s pretending to “build” anything.
The point is, why are we pretending the office is still something that people need to “go to”.
Sounds like the answer is to individually contact each client stakeholder your lead would like to include, just to ask them where physically they are, and whether they are typically WFH, in-office, or both.
Give the lead the resulting list and that’ll probably kill that idea stone dead.
Yeah, that’s nuts.
These kinds of things remind me of dealing with my late aged MIL as cellphones became first common, then universal, then landlines became mostly a thing of the past, albeit not for her.
She really could not get it into her head that a phone number now represented a person, not a place like it used to. She certainly knew that in some factual sense, but she just couldn’t integrate that into her worldview. She’d call my mobile and the convo was almost always like this:
Me: [looks at caller ID on mobile phone] Hi Mom!
MIL: Oh, you’re home. How nice!
Me: No Mom, I’m in Cleveland eating dinner in a restaurant. What can I do for you?
MIL: [long pause] Oh yeah, silly me. How’s Cleveland?
This was decades before she became sorta senile. She was fully mentally capable but just stuck in the “old dog vs. new tricks” issue.
She’d also call my number to talk to her daughter = my wife or vice versa. Because in her world, both numbers went to the same house and so were functionally interchangeable.
Looping back around ...
Your lead has the same cognitive defect. That somehow “group of co-workers” is connected to “place”. Which is a nonsense in your line of work and has been for 10+ years.
Seems like one hell of a lot of corporate managers have it too. Old dogs indeed.
Yeah, I’m sick to death of these days where I never seem to leave the house. Prior to COVID, I already had been fully remote for several years, but my company was renting me an office in a shared space down by the beach. The lockdown ended all office subsidies and there of course has been no mention of those coming back. I periodically browse the pricing of the local coworking spaces, but as much as I hate being at home, I hate paying $800/mo out of pocket worse. I even have looked at buying a space in a professional condo building, but haven’t liked then terms of the commercial loads I’ve been offered.
He’s not that bad. I actually don’t think he cares strongly about any of it that much anyway. But not to get off topic, what I do see a lot in these big companies are people mindlessly working on tasks without regard for their context. Like they’re cogs in some big dumb machine.
I think it is a problem with more senior leadership who are still tied to the idea that the way to make employees more “productive” (whatever that actually means for office workers) is to have them all sit in the same room where someone can watch them.
I am glad I can go into the office with the option of occasionally working from home, particularly when I feel like I might have a minor cold or need to be home for a delivery. Best of both worlds for me.
Back before my mother passed, I knew I was going to be spending more, and more time with her. I can work from anywhere with the proper equipment.
But, she would not allow me to upgrade her internet to a fiber connection. She mis-interpreted something she read online that a fiber connection was a fire danger.
So, knowing that arguing was pointless, and that I wouldn’t get much done in my mom’s small house, I rented a small personal office in a place called workshops. Very close to her home. I could sleep at moms when in town and work in my own space. It was ~$500 a month.
Then, she died. Never did move into the office. While they where understanding, I lost my deposit.