I read once somewhere that if a corporation’s behavior were diagnosed as we do humans, it would be classified as a sociopath. But it’s not just the collective; a lot of managers are sociopaths as well. They only care about getting as much value out of their investments (people and things) as possible.
One could logically argue that you get the most out of people and things by treating them well. A sociopath might argue that you get the most out of people by making sure they understand you have all the power and they won’t hesitate to use it against you. There’s a lot of truth in both those statements.
Here are some rationales though:
We suck as managers and we can only monitor your value by seeing if your jacket is on your chair that day.
We don’t actually need your jacket on your chair, but we need some other people’s jackets on their chairs, and they’ll complain pitifully if they don’t see your jacket on the chair too.
Executive leadership is irritated that we’re paying for fancy downtown office space with no jackets hanging on chairs, but breaking the lease would also be costly.
As you can see there are some very critical reasons why your employer might need you to report to the office in a pandemic.
I’m back in the office most days, and I have no problem with that.
The firm at which I work has not yet required vaccination as a prerequisite for coming in, but they do “encourage” vaccination, and “ask” vaccinated people to provide proof of vaccination to the firm.
We’re all hoteling (meaning nobody has his or her own desk, you just reserve a desk every time you’re in) except partners, and the desk reservation system freezes up if you haven’t submitted proof of vaccination. Again, vaccination isn’t required. It’s just that the reservation system freezes without it. HR says they’re aware of the problem, and are working on it. Since I’m in the IT department, I’d probably know if anyone was working on it, and I haven’t heard anything.
On the one hand, I have to kind of admire the creation of a vaccination requirement without actually declaring that there is a vaccination requirement. On the other, that’s weaselly lawyer bullshit. But okay, so be it.
There is also (since the surge) a mask requirement for everyone, vaccinated or not. Only people in private offices with the door closed may remove their masks.
It is ignored to a disturbing extent. There is no enforcement. Any communication to the HR department about non-compliance is met with deafening silence. At best they’ll send out a firm-wide (or at least office-wide) email restating the policy. But the firm will not (so far, anyway) take any action against those who don’t comply.
And who wants to be, say, the mid-level IT drone who complains repeatedly about a partner with $20 million in annual billings who won’t wear a mask? Not me. And apparently not the HR department, which is responsible for promulgating and enforcing mask policies.
And, even with the above-described weaselly vaccination requirement, partners aren’t hoteling, so don’t have to reserve desks, so aren’t affected by the back-door vaccination requirement. I have no way of knowing whether that partner with a zillion dollars in annual billings has been vaccinated.
Keep in mind at many companies the senior executives and leadership have often enjoyed flexible work arrangements for decades, broadly pre-dating it becoming something offered to lower down the line white collar workers. I think there’s some value to a primarily services based, white collar company to have a physical location and some working in the office, but I also think if senior management has long enjoyed flexible work arrangements and they can’t point to any significant reason that widespread work from home is not working then you have to question the motivation. Why is a CFO assumed to be fine to take a “working vacation” to Bermuda but a staff accountant is assumed to be unable to do their work at home so they don’t have to do a 2 hour round trip commute every day?
Edit to add, the Atlantic had an interesting questionnaire it suggested every senior leader in a firm answer before mandating a return to the office:
I have no doubt that some managers are just awful and only oppose WFH for purely awful reasons. But as a supervising attorney myself, I long for a return to the office, and to the courthouse, because I can see that there are legitimate obstacles to all of us doing our best work this way.
Part of it has to do with the abrupt transition to efiling and the limits of conducting court over Webex, which would not be solved by making people come into the office. And I have been railing against upper management for thinking otherwise.
But part of it is the loss of the collegial, collaborative environment we used to have. I supervise ten lawyers, most of them pretty new; I can’t watch them all every minute. When I was a staff attorney, I didn’t have to call my supervisor or figure it out myself every time I had a question; I was surrounded by people who could help me with all but the most difficult issues. When I did need to talk to my supervisor, I could see whether she was in her office and whether she was already talking to someone or free to talk to me. If she was talking to someone but I had a quick, urgent question, it was easy to interrupt. Now I field phone calls, emails, and text messages all day long, and it’s difficult to triage. When I’m on the phone with one person and another calls (a daily and often thrice daily occurrence), I don’t know if it’s urgent, or if it’ll be quick, and they don’t know I’m on the phone already or whether I can pause this or wrap it up. They could call one of their colleagues, in the way they used to just pop their head next door, but the newest attorneys who need it most don’t have those kinds of relationships. We’re losing new people at a higher rate, and they’re making more mistakes.
None of this is to say that the risk to your health in this current climate is necessarily worth it. But the idea that working from home comes without a cost isn’t true either. You’re not in the best position to see the cost because it’s not falling on you, but that doesn’t mean others in your company aren’t paying it.
Some jobs I’ve had would take 5 times as long if everyone were working remotely. The one place was a solar startup with a new mounting and racking system - hardware, tangible. We needed to be onsite to handle the prototypes ourselves, with our hands, not just see them on video (which was often hinky and spotty). People were too disorganized to have 20 meetings per day in 15 minute increments. Sometimes I’d wait all day just to catch someone whose answers I needed right away.
Other jobs, yeah WFH is better. The one that had 4 hours of commute time per day including walking through homeless encampments at 5am to get to the train was one I was glad to stay home for.
There’s a lot of cynical responses in this thread - managers are doing it to make themselves look valuable, or they’re incompetent and can only evaluate you based on you time-in-office, or they want to justify rent on expensive office space, etc - but I tend to side more closely with the legitimate reason hypothesis. For knowledge workers, much of the value they add is based on being able to meaningfully coordinate with each other and execute well as a team. Managers know that this is enhanced through personal relationships, high-bandwidth conversational channels, and ad hoc conversations. We have not yet figured out how to do any of those with a 100% remote environment.
As an anecdote, at my company (I’m in software development), upper management closely monitored what they could measure early in the pandemic. And they saw that things like number of checkins, tickets filed, tickets resolved, etc, all actually increased. Remote work was working! Except now, almost a year and a half in, it’s obvious that entire teams didn’t know at the level of detail that they needed to what other entire teams were doing. They were duplicating each others’ work, or building round holes where the other team had built a square peg, etc. The actual end-product - the thing that actually matters to our customers - was completely falling off a cliff. Being able to chat each other up in the hallway or look over someone’s shoulder for five minute - those things matter. A lot.
That said, there are very good reasons a lot of us went to full-remote last March, and those reasons are becoming largely true again with Delta. We’re going to have to suck it up a while longer, and I hope you get that accommodation, @Eva_Luna.
I don’t understand what your day-to-day is like, but I fully believe that, for some jobs, all-remote is file indefinitely. Sales is probably like this. They were spending all day on the phone anyway, and it was more important for them to be able to get on planes and fly to customers. It’s probably totally fine if we don’t require them to come into the office - ever. Maybe your job is like that, too. But don’t extrapolate from your role to all knowledge workers. For many of us, the in-person is so critical to the work we do, even if it’s in ways that is hard to quantify or even articulate.
In my experience, this “working vacation” is actually a working “vacation” for the senior exec. They don’t get a week in Bermuda where they are working and another week of vacation where nobody can contact them at all because they aren’t working. That week in Bermuda IS their vacation, and they log in to do work, take calls, answer emails every day.
I retired at the end of 2019, but it’s been interesting talking to my successor about this. By far the people most interested in getting back into the office are the younger folks, say folks with less than 10 years’ experience. A large part of that is the social bonding, but some of it is also apparently the value they put on in-person training, not so much the formal seminars as the one-on-one meetings with the boss.
A lot of the older employees, e.g. managers, are less interested in coming back into the office, in fact a few folks close to retirement age just sold their homes and are commuting from places like Florida or Maine.
There’s always that very senior person who thinks the business only works well when everybody is in the office, but there are fewer of those people than there were two years ago.
Yeah, that was what was behind my IMHO thread: this seeming idea that there is literally no legitimate reason not to allow unlimited WFH if it’s feasible and that any resistance to the idea is just objectively wrong. I was wondering if that was true.
Update: my doctor filled out the accommodation request form today, I forwarded to HR, and the request is approved through 12/31 with reevaluation if conditions warrant it. More later, but PHEW! And if a law firm can’t make employees follow a mask mandate, this country is screwed.
All the reasons cited, plus a maybe more cynical view: some of those managers are people who WILL screw off if they aren’t watched, so they assume others will, too. The gentler version of this is that some folks actually know from experience that they aren’t that productive at home and fear others won’t be, despite evidence to the contrary.
And a contrarian view: some people don’t want to work remote. One of my guys lives 50+ miles from the office, in a small house with a wife, son, and pets, and winds up working in the kitchen or at Starbucks. He’s dying to get back to the office.
Add to that, there are some managers that simply love to have meetings. They are basically lonely and bored for most of the day, so they schedule meetings so that they can chat about stuff that everybody already knows (or nobody needs to know) and have pastries and coffee brought in. It’s a social time for them.
I think a lot of it is just that so many employers, and the managers, are not familiar with remote workers,and thus are afraid of the concept. That’s an odd thing, since people have been working remotely since before any of those employers and the managers they’ve hired were even born. To me, it’s just like those outfits that are still–in 2021 no less–refusing to recognize qualifications or degrees earned online. Basically, they’re Luddites.
On average, more than 90% of my day is spent reviewing documents (electronically - clients typically upload them to our case management database), entering the information from those documents into the database so I can draft forms and support letters and cover letters for filings, assembling (electronically again) those same supporting documents to be filed with the filing, emailing clients or attorneys, training our admin in docketing (via Zoom - she is in another time zone, which is a whole different story)…once in a while I have a teleconference with a client or an internal Zoom conference.
Are there a handful of things that would be easier if I were in the same room with everyone? Maybe, but nobody seems to have an issue with calling me or Zooming me to ask a question or brainstorm, and I don’t work much with people in other practice groups (and many of the lawyers aren’t coming to the office much anyway - I think 80% of the offices have been empty). It’s a national firm, so even in situations when we are working on a case with someone in another practice group, they are usually in another city. And are probably working remotely anyway. Our clients are mostly working remotely; the biggest delay I had on a case in the past few months was when a client’s spouse misplaced her company letterhead, so she had to get more sent to her before she could print and sign documents and send them back to us. (At this point I am genuinely surprised at the number of clients who haven’t acquired printers and/or scanners so they don’t have to go in to the office to do stuff like that.)
Is this all ideal for developing a collegial law firm culture? Maybe not. And I sincerely hope the need for remote work is temporary, because I am fucking stir-crazy. But I’ll be damned if I am potentially going to risk my long-term health or even my life for any job, particularly one that can be done remotely just fine, and particularly when many of the folks in charge are working remotely themselves.
Nah. This is just cynical shop-floor griping. Very few people are actually mentally abnormal and very few managers are sociopaths. They are just normal people. Most have higher than average emotional intelligence. Stories about psycho managers loom large because they are more entertaining, not because they are actually representative.
Indeed. My juniors gently complain about me WFH so much because they don’t get the mentoring and assistance they want (which is a legitimate gripe on their part). This stuff about it being entirely about Luddism and bosses being assholes is wrong. Not entirely wrong, but significantly.
There are two sides to relationships with your coworkers. One is the collegial professional relationship, maybe you have lunch together, maybe you exchange small talk at the water cooler, or before a meeting starts. You’re not friends, but you develop an appreciation of the person as a person, and get that appreciation in return. This is harder to develop over a screen, but is a valid relationship to cultivate for business.
The second is the friendly relationship, particularly with young workers, the workplace is a common and normal place to meet other people socially. My niece this past Monday started her very first job post-college. She’s on a screen in the spare bedroom of her mom’s house. Her company’s main US office is 200 miles away.
When I got my first job post college, I was in a building with a couple hundred other people. We’d pick people up on the trip down to the cafeteria for coffee or lunch, we’d go out for a drink after work, join a bowling league. I bought my first home after a conversation with a coworker, where he let me know another coworker was selling her place. I could meet and interact with other people my own age. My niece doesn’t get that, and I’m not sure how that would work with a mostly remote workforce.
Yeah I never quite get this attitude. Is it mucho posturing? Why do people say this so proudly?
It’s also not representative IME. Lots of people develop friendships through work, which endure after they have stopped working together. And some extraordinarily high proportion of people meet their spouse through work.
I said that in the context of asking people to come back to the office at the expense of their health and medical debt. Office “friendships” just aren’t that damn important. However, my supervisor insists that it is, and unfortunately for me, even though I don’t think office relationships are that important, my income is, which is why I go to the office, despite not wanting to.