Yeah, I’d hate that too. Probably more than being in my dark basement all day. I’m lucky and have a beautiful, bright office, with huge windows and great views out them.
My office requires 3 days in. We are primarily an operational business (container ship terminal) where the managers genuinely need to be here to do the job. Those of us, like me, in purely support roles were fully WFH for a while, but now back in regularly.
I worked from home for 10 years with IBM and while it was GREAT when my son was a babe, it got tired and I desired a job where I could be in an office with actual people.
They’re thinking, we want to cut our staff but don’t want to pay any severance or advertise a big layoff, so we’re going to make WFH people miserable until they leave on their own.
Color me surprised that people with a private office, door, and view of the ouside are more okay with returning to the office than those cubicle-dwelling office drones cramped into rows of soul-crushing monotony.
And no one I know on the pro-WFH side of the debate has said anything otherwise. Sure, if you want to go to the office, knock yourself out. If you have a job as you described, where the facilities you have at home are simply inadequate for doing the job, go to an office. No one wants to stop any of that.
The problem is, on the other side of the debate, there are a lot of people who do want to prevent others from working from home, even when that is entirely possible, the work gets done, and the workers themselves prefer it.
Give people the choice, as much as is practically possible. Stop with arbitrary mandates to be in-office some defined number of days, regardless of actual need.
Yeah, in my company there are really three camps. People with their own office loved returning to work. New employees who are looking to meet as many people as possible and socialize at work liked returning to work, at least part time. And experienced staff who don’t rate their own office overwhelmingly prefer to work from home.
Our entire claims staff (i work for an insurance company) is now working basically 100% from home. The programmers and actuaries are mostly working from home. Senior management is mostly in the office, and not fighting too hard to get everyone back because they’ve gotten so much pushback.
There are also plumbing issues – office buildings can get by with a couple of restrooms per floor; apartments need one per unit.
That’s an interesting thought. It’s still folly, of course–the people who leave are going to be the ones who can afford to because they can easily find better jobs. But there’s certainly plenty of “leadership” (don’t get me started on that word) that thinks bodies is bodies is bodies…
Like I said in the OP, I am curious what my national agency will do. We conduct hearings, and the law guarantees an in-person hearing. Phone hearings were a minuscule exception. With covid, we switched to all phone and video, and now we do a tiny number of in person hearings. No more than 5% of all hearings.
As far as I can tell, EVERYONE involved prefers the phone hearings. Attorneys, claimants, and judges. It will be curious to see if TPTB decide we need to go back to in person hearings.
So far, I believe everyone is required to be in office 1 day a week - except attorney advisors who were full-time WFH before covid. Judges have to go in only for in-office hearings - no more than 1-2 days a month. I’ve been going in for all of my hearings - 2 days a week, just because I live 6 minutes from the office and prefer not to hold hearings from my home.
Anyone is free to go into the office as frequently as they wish. As far as I can tell, NO ONE has chosen work from the office as their default preference. When I am in the office 2 days a week, there has never been as many as 5 other staff present (out of maybe 50). Yesterday, I think there was 1 other person in the office with me.
No idea how much time left on our lease, but we could easily give up at least 1/2 of our current space. Judges are contractually given certain sized offices. I don’t need half as much space as I’m given. (But I DO like my windows and my door!)
My company mandated a return to the office in late 2021 and we also started hemorrhaging employees. Ostensibly the reason for the return was so employees could better collaborate with one another, but face-to-face meetings were not allowed. A lot of employees contacted me with some variation of “If we’re still meeting on Teams, why do we have to come into the office?” To their credit, management did reverse their decision, and something like 90% of the company works from home at least part of the week. There are weeks I don’t come into the office at all.
In my opinion, the real reason management wanted us to return to the office is because of all the unused real estate we suddenly had. The few times I go into the office in any given month, it’s a ghost town and it’s actually kind of depressing. The company can’t get out of their lease, so they simply have to eat the cost for now.
I think working from home either full time or part time is pretty much here to stay. Working from home has effectively been a raise for me as I don’t spend time or money commuting, I don’t eat out as often, and I don’t spend as much money on office clothes. If my employer required me to come into the office, I might be willing to take a pay cut elsewhere because it’ll balance things out.
I dropped a question into the polls-only thread
I’ve been WFH since the pandemic. They wouldn’t let us bring equipment like large secondary monitors home with us. I’m a graphic designer/creative manager and this was a big need, so I spent my own money on a much nicer monitor (actually two) and I have a great setup at home. Even though I have an office with a door, going back would be going backward, equipment-wise (I’m certain they would not pony up to upgrade us all, unless they realize it’s the only way they’ll get us back there), and there’s nothing I can do in the office that I can’t do at home, I’m worlds more productive (I work at work and don’t socialize much) so there is really no great incentive for me to return.
But, of course, if enough folks choose to WFH all the time, that will lead employers to shut down the offices so everyone will be WFH anyway, even the ones who don’t want to, so the decision will be made for them. Though I suppose someone’s decisions will be made by coworkers of the “opposite” faction anyway.
One of the problems with this debate, as I see it, is that the discussion is usually dominated by those who want to WFH five days a week. That leads to a spiral of “there’s absolutely no benefit to in person work except to real estate agents and bloodsucking middle managers.” Of course, it could be true, and maybe those who want to do any in office work are either vanishingly rare or corporate bootlickers, but it doesn’t feel that way right now? Maybe I’m wrong.
Smart companies will keep some real estate for people who want/need an in-office space, and offer hotelling/hot-seating for everyone else who prefer to WFH most of the time. A blanket decision to eliminate options will be bad for retention and recruiting - it will always leave someone unhappy.
I’m on an incident response/server monitoring team; we sit at our desks and wait for something to go into alarm, then we create an incident record and page the app team so they can try to fix their stuff or ignore it. Sometimes they ask us to create a Zoom meeting.
We were 100% WFH for 2 1/2 years once the quarantine started, with no problems, really. There are a few things that would be easier if we were in the office, but they don’t come up often: crisis situations, training new people, keeping an eye on people who are slacking off.
Last summer, the word came down from upper management that we would all be returning to the office 2 days a week, and our direct manager said that it would depend on how much the pandemic had really died down. A couple months later, I realized that, in the time we had been back in the office part-time, somebody on the the team had COVID, or was recovering from it, pretty much constantly. Since we only had one or two people in a workspace built for 15, we weren’t getting it from each other, but I emailed our manager and asked if that was a long-term problem. No specific response.
In December, I was in the office one day and realized we were missing some information, so, since my manager was also in the office, I asked him, what exactly am I supposed to be getting done by myself in the office that I can’t get done at home by myself, and he didn’t have an answer for me. He said he was authorized to let people WFH full time if they wanted to, but he had to have a reason, so I asked if he had looked at the weather forecast lately (we’re in Minnesota…). Big snowfall coming, so he sent out an email saying everybody can WFH for the next two weeks, then when that two weeks was up, he sent out another email saying we could WFH through the holidays so we could avoid sharing holiday illnesses with each other. He’s been finding reasons for us to WFH pretty much full-time since then, so, go me.
He also just pointed out that upper management has realized that their hiring pool is much larger if they don’t have to interview only people willing to live in the Twin Cities, Raleigh or Memphis, our three big data centers, so full-time WFH is probably going to be an option going forward.
Well, companies have been making choices that affect their employees based on economics basically forever, so that part isn’t all that different, but as has been pointed out, there are some jobs that can’t be done at all, or as effectively, from home. So maybe if your employer ends up being one that shuts down in-office work completely, you should look at working in one of those jobs that can’t be done as WFH.
I mean, that’s what a whole lot of pro-WFH people are doing now. They’re quitting jobs and getting new ones based on the WFH opportunities. Why shouldn’t we expect the same from the pro-office workers?
I thought one of the pros that WFH advocates have been consistently mentioning was all the money companies can save by shutting down their RL offices? So is it a consistent upside or not?
My employer is reducing space and hopes to save on real estate. (They own the space, so they will need to rent or sell it to do that.) But they aren’t planning on totally shutting down home office. They plan to maintain space for regular “all hands” meetings (which different departments will hold at different times, so we can share that space). And some departments work better in the office and will stay in the office. But even if they let everyone who can effectively work from home so so, there will be direct for those who want to work in the office AND the company can save on real estate costs.
You can do both. My employer has reduced our office space by about 75%, which saves money for them, while still allowing those who need or want to work in-office to have an office.
The real problem here is that apparently, far too many businesses have found themselves stuck in long-term leases they can’t see to get out of.
More precisely, the problem is sunk-cost fallacy thinking – it doesn’t actually cost more to pay for empty office space, it just feels more expensive.
That’s our situation. But in another 18 months we’re cutting at least half our space. It remains to be seen if the landlord will be flexible or we tell them to take a hike. We really don’t “need” an office, so I think we’re in a strong bargaining position