Regarding return to office policy, I hear many speculations and reasons hypothesized. Mostly by employees who don’t really know and who had no choice in it.
I would like to know is if there are any lemmings out there who have been involved in these talks.
What was discussed?
How is something like this coordinated amongst others businesses even rivals.
What are the high level factors that have gone into the decision?
Bonus points: is it even possible for employees to prevent or reverse these policies at this point?
I’m at the very bottom level of management, so I’m not invited to these meetings. But I get to hear the story afterwards. The basic jist is that all the old employees are fine to work remote, however, the new employees are largely getting lost. There’s no water cooler meetings or impromptu hallway discussions or ‘hey Jim, I heard you screaming next door, what dumb thing did your customer do?’. The transfer of tribal knowledge isn’t happening when the new folks are remote. As much as I will make fun of the above, I will admit that I learned more of how to do my job through those impromptu ‘meetings’ with my coworkers than I ever did from any formal training.
So, to your point, how do we get back to working from home again? I’m not sure, but I would starting thinking about how to encourage more connections with your coworkers. Not the forced meetings where you talk about why the wiggly line isn’t going up, more like, “hey bob, whacha been up to today? Oh yeah, that system doesn’t work for me either, the trick is you have to log-in through the other portal…”
I’ve been remote for 5 years, since Covid. And it’s been wonderful. I’ve been more productive, happier, better relationship with my family, had more time for hobbies and cooking healthy, spent WAY less money on fast food and gasoline. Before Covid I was in an office and hated it, but didn’t even know why, after I was home for a few weeks I realized why, it’s because I wasn’t being interrupted and distracted every 5 seconds all day long and when I had meetings I could keep working while talking on the video call instead of having to log off, get up and walk to a meeting room.
Now they are making half the company come back in if you are within some arbitrary radius. Which means teams are all split like mine where half must now commute in, but half don’t, so me and half my team now has to commute in just to go into a conference room and join a video call with the other half.
And the meetings are scattered all over every day so that basically means no actual work will get done every day.
I’m looking forward to chatting with my coworkers and laughing as productivity tanks.
Maybe instead of having meetings all day and forcing people to commute in for a computer based job management could be clear about what is needed, enable people and set them up for success and then leave them alone to get it done.
It feels like trying to swim 100m, but there is a manager walking along the edge next to you asking you for updates every 5 seconds. Still swimming and the more you ask the longer this takes.
I think RTO is just a power play. They can do a soft pay cut, a soft layoff as people quit, establish dominance and force employees to be their fake little family instead of their actual families.
It’s so ridiculous.
It’s the same fad thing as Open Office Layouts were a decade or two ago. Everyone hates it, productivity tanked, it was miserable, but everyone was doing it so CEOs did it to show how current they were.
Fun fact: open-plan layouts have been ruled sexist in the UK.
Sorry, but what?
I hate open-plan layouts as much as the next guy, but how on earth are they sexist?
Our office allowed voting to elect a committee to determine what return to office should look like. I was elected to it. They also hired external contractors to mediate basically. Some people came into it thinking everyone should go back to office, but by the end of it we settled that being in office should be required for certain types of work activities and not for others, and apart from the required activities for in office employees could be wherever. We drafted this up into a formalized agreement and everyone was happy with it.
Then the president who did that program retired and the new guy immediately scrapped the whole thing and forced everyone back into the office overnight without any discussion from the committee or other employees.
Sounds legit
In my corporate experiences, these decisions were made unilaterally by the C suite without discussion.
This is pretty much the answer everywhere. So this post must be targeting c suite folks… on Lemmy.
Yes, hi, we do exist. And we were trying to get CEO to implement a hybrid policy for years before covid. He hated the thought. And he was the type of person that would not hesitate to fire an entire department if they felt bold enough to complain about it. When I started there, I didn’t immediately report to him. Anyone there who had a layer of management between themselves and him had a pretty ok work experience there. Direct reports to CEO basically had to manage a toddler who was also the emporor with new clothes. I took the promotion to be his whipping post because I wanted to leverage it to move on. Instead now I have PTSD from an abusive boss and am not able to work full time.
tl;dr – the C suite does discuss things amongst themselves with and without the CEO. But CEO already knows what they want to do, usually can’t be swayed, can only be warned what the consequences of their decisions will bring.
My company required everyone come back to the office. My team works in a terminal, we can do our work from anywhere. Everyone of my department went back in. I said no.
They said I could be terminated
I said go ahead and fire me, I’m the lead tech, 40 experience, I built and maintain more then half of the automation, I’m the only one who understands networking onprem and I cloud and has a security background.
I dare you.
They said they would make a special exemption for me.
The moral of the story… You can demand stuff from your company if your company can’t function without you.
Can you hire me and teach me the way 😆
You’re what I want to be when I grow up. I’m middle aged.
Bonus points: is it even possible for employees to prevent or reverse these policies at this point?
UNIONIZE
I can’t speak to what’s said in the meetings, but in a similar vein, we were told we needed to come back to the office 2-days a month because other people had to work from the office, and it wasn’t fair to them.
That’s it. That’s the rationale. Because it wasn’t fair to the people who had to be here. Mind you, my team has been successfully working remote since COVID.
🤦♂️ fml
It’s funny to me because of the return to office policy, the price of parking is going up, a lot. Like now I have to fight for an extra $2000 for parking + $1000 for meals + whatever day care will be.
Yep. I suspect that where I work, parking has some role to play in the RTO. I can imagine the department in charge of collecting parking fees saw a dramatic decrease in revenue.
Not that what I think matters to anyone (where I work), but any company that owns and manages their own parking facilities should not make employees pay for parking. It’s just bad form. But what do I know?
Yep it’s just a stealth paycut
Yep. Not counting the time I spent in traffic, nor the gas it took to drive, today I spent $59 just for the privilege to do the same job I could’ve done at home. Tomorrow I don’t plan on forgetting my lunch, so that’ll save me $13.
Make a sandwich. You don’t have to buy meals.
The rest sucks, though.
That’s what I do.
Sandwiches don’t grow on trees. Peanut butter is banned in the office. Deli meat is expensive.
Well then explain this one smarty pants!
Hole in one, checkmate! Pshh.
:P
Peanut butter is banned in the office
Most schools have even backed off on trying to do this. For children. Why are adults prevented from eating what they want? No one should be touching othe people’s foods.
It’s my understanding that some people have such an allergic reaction that even the smell fucks them up. It may sound silly, but compassion is in short supply these days, and subsequently should be lauded when seen in the wild.
Peanut butter is sticky. I’ve seen what people do with gum. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to ban it in places.
If you’re worried about an adult making a peanut butter mess, that motherfucker should not have a job.
It happens. It’s why we all clean our kitchen everyday. Peanut allergies rose a lot in the past few decades. It’s not like they just get hives. It’s not a hard thing to give up at work or school considering it could kill them. Like in my office we don’t even have assigned desks. I see people leaving crumbs all the time. Imagine them munching away on a bag of peanuts. They’re leaving that dust and crap all over the place. It’s such a small consideration that makes a huge QOL improvement for others. It doesn’t bother me at all.
I just make a bit extra for supper every night, and put it in a fridge, the leftovers are then my meal a couple days latter (never the next day - that gets boring!)
At the beginning of COVID, when our CEO decided all non-essential staff should immediately begin working from home wherever possible, our CIO declared all of IT to be essential on-site. Shortly after the meeting when the CIO made that announcement, people at my level (bottom-level manager) essentially all announced to our supervisors that we were going to refuse to abide by that directive.
My direct supervisor told us to relax and essentially said that the entire management team was going to sit the CIO down and have a come to Jesus meeting. Shortly after that the directive was reversed, and it was left up to managers to decide if their team could be WFH, hybrid, or fully on-site. It’s hard to stay CIO if the entire IT group is in revolt.
For many months after that, in the regular management meetings, the CIO would talk about how difficult it was and how everyone was suffering due to the requirement to work from home. He would talk about how many people told him they were longing for the day when we could all be on-site again. I have no idea who those people were, because everyone I spoke to thought WFH was fantastic.
I have heard that when productivity didn’t drop, the CEO asked, “Why are we paying all these high rents for office space if everyone is just as productive and happier working from home?” It was around that time that the CIO started to talk about WFH like it was a good thing.
At this point, there’s no sign it will ever end. We are allowed to hire people from out-of-state and most people are WFH full time. They’ve reduced office space to the point where we all couldn’t work on-site even if we wanted to.
He would talk about how many people told him they were longing for the day when we could all be on-site again. I have no idea who those people were, because everyone I spoke to thought WFH was fantastic.
My old CEO would pull this bullshit, too. He’d say like “I’ve heard from people that [wild claim]”. The team was like 5 people it’s not like I couldn’t go ask people if they actually said that. I think it’s some sort of asshole-lying mechanism.
It’s a classic manipulation technique. It’s never “I think that…” It’s always framed as “Lots of people think that …” to give it credibility, but it’s a lie and meant to manipulate you into feeling like you are alone and the group all thinks differently than you to force you to comply.
Lots of leaders do it. Trump does it constantly. CEOs do it. Abusive people do it in their relationships.
Once you know it and recognize it you start seeing it EVERYWHERE from dishonest people.
It’s funny to ask them “Which people say that?” If you can. It makes them SQUIRM.
CIO been spending their money on REIT shares…
I happened to be involved in such a meeting this morning.
The conversation around the general policy was mostly supportive. The main concern is that we do not have an official policy in place and various teams are setting their own rules, which is occaisionally resulting in collaboration issues.
The other main issue, unsurprisingly, regards what we can do to make sure that people are actually working when they are at home. For the most part, people are getting their work done, but there are always going to be people trying to take advantage and we discussed ways to track that without getting too “big brother” across the board.
Sounds like we are going to implement a 2 day wfh allowance coordinated within teams, based on their schedules so that we have at least half of each team in the office each day, with exceptions for people with extenuating circumstances.
We are not going to put any kind of tracking software on their machines, but we are going to monitor overall output.
2 day wfh allowance
So
- staff has to locate nearby
- new applicants must be nearby
- everyone needs a car
- the office doesn’t offset any of this
- but 2 days you get to be home and productive. Woo!
Someone needs to be fired. Pick the guy who talks about ‘organic conversations’, as if water cooler chat and constant interruptions are the true medium for knowledge sharing, or the sexist git who forces Linda to shop for office clothing where Gavin skates with khaki and a polo, and raise the average EQ with a quick meeting.
I gotta be honest- sounds weird you weren’t already tracking output already.
Like was output before wfh just “theyre in the office today”?
We are. Just not with software that checks keystrokes, mouse movements, etc.
I never understand places that dont have some sort of work management methodology.
In technology, we often use agile. Its complicated, but one key part is that the individuals determine what needs to be done to get an overall effort completed, creates the individual tasks in an application, schedules them for completion and makes notes about status as they go.
Its a little micro, but it ends all questions of “is this person working”. Either theyre getting stuff done or they aren’t. We have regular sessions to check progress and reports are generated on an ongoing basis. If someone is dicking around it shows up real fast.
I can’t imagine that places still just raw-dog all the work. What is Joe doing. No clue. When is he going to finish? Dunno. How is the project going? Beats me. Are we staffed appropriately? Good question.
Boiled down to “Me in charge. Come in” as a response to leadership.The reality is they rented out an office to hold 200 people, laid off half of them, and then were upset the place always looked empty when they brought clients around. It went from “You all need to be in office on Wednesdays, so we look like a big company”, to wanting everyone to return.
The problem is a good majority of people had moved away during covid. Those were the first people to be laid off unless they were superstars. They had a lease agreement until 2026 and were already subletting the previous offices (They kept moving into new spaces as they grew before other leases were up) that also had long contracts. I am no longer there, but rumor is they are trying to sublet the 200 person office and find yet another small space. They are slowly turning into a real estate company.
My wife’s employment (a national company providing services to homes) not only embraced the remote work that COVID forced her into, they closed down their central customer service call center to save that money.
This year they’re talking about taking all the administrative people out of the local offices and only needing the service people pick up supplies and having the remote workers pick up the volume.
- finding and hiring staff will be harder
- attracting top tier talent will be harder
- rent will be more expensive
- childcare will require more sick leave
- illness will require more sick leave
- expanding to new territories will be harder
The c-suite evaluated the cost of rent pretty good and had an existing problem of not being able to hire above average younger talent because the work they were doing was pretty boring. Advertising a good hybrid wfh policy (once a week or once a month in-office depending on different factors) has brought in good people.
Basically, they saw that it was bringing in cash.
The biggest challenge has been getting new hires integrated well with existing team leaders.
There’s also team leaders that refuse to use Teams/zoom, but also don’t answer their phone. In the past you could corner them in their office but now they sort of anchor their team. It’s mostly self-repairing as they stagnate and other teams flourish.
I’ve been in discussions regarding returning to the office for my group, whether other groups should return to the office, and whether to keep the days in the office or add more.
For returning to the office, a lot of it came down to collaboration. My team does not use online communication tools to the quantity that it can substitute for in person communication. I advocated for a return to office for most staff, in part to benefit junior staff who weren’t communicating and needed mentorship. That meant the entire team had to show up on the same days, but I let them pick the days and changed those days on their request. The intent of the in person days is for them to talk to each other and coordinate.
One group resisted coming into the office far longer than mine. They were pushed into coming into the office, along with a change in reporting, because that group was blowing budgets and missing deadlines. I said you can bring them into the office, but you have to change their group culture to be more collaborative and talk to each other. It has been an issue working with members of that group because they’ve gotten used to a lack of coordination and communication, which created poor work quality.
When asked to go full RTO or increase days, I’ve pushed back. My group is mostly meeting deadlines and I see diminishing returns for more days into the office. I’m also aware it is a perk for staff, and not one I want to pull away. However, the gap in online versus physical interaction is still there.
If you’re going to fight back against coming into the office more, then you’re going to need to argue on the basis of coordination and collective productivity. I’ve seen a lot of people claim individual productivity, but that included a lot of rework that could have been avoided with some five minute conversations. Not emails, conversations.
On the flip side, if coordination isn’t a big deal, don’t expect raises any time soon. At that point, you’re a more easily replacable cog whose work can get pushed to places with lower costs of living.
I really dislike that a handful of people who can’t get their shit together to communicate over zoom are dragging everyone else (and the environment) down.
I’d also wager that some of those people also communicate badly in person, but at least do communication shaped activities so it gets a pass.
Like at my old job, there’d be long meetings both in person and over zoom where nothing would be accomplished. The problem is not if we’re in the same room or not. It’s that people don’t know what the fuck they’re doing at any level of this task. They don’t understand the system, and they don’t know how to run a meeting. The few times I just seized control and ran it like a D&D session went better. eg: "It’s not your turn. Please wait to speak. That’s an interesting idea but the
game we set out to playmeeting is about [topic], so we’re going to stay on topic. No,the rules say you can’t do thatthat’s not an option in a web browser.That worked fine in person and on zoom. The problem isn’t the medium. The problem is people.
That worked fine in person and on zoom. The problem isn’t the medium. The problem is people.
Yeah, but the problem of management is people. And I’ve pointed out that management aren’t always the people who don’t communicate. And issues with communication are made worse when everything is pushed to text where nuance is lost and everything is archived which can be used against you.
There are probably some teams that can work well remotely, but a lot of teams can’t. I generally find the best people who work remotely are highly competent at their job. Most people aren’t highly competent at their jobs.
And issues with communication are made worse when everything is pushed to text where nuance is lost and everything is archived which can be used against you.
There’s some truth to this, but also video chat is commonplace now. That can be recorded too, but so can anything. Some of my coworkers started using Signal for out of band communication even though zoom/slack said they didn’t retain any recordings.
If they can’t work remotely, they should be leveled up. Stop dragging everyone else down.
And again, if you can only communicate in person you’re probably bad at communicating in person, too, without realizing it. I think a lot of CEO types think they’re amazing because they walk into a room and everyone’s like “yeah boss got it that’s great feedback”, and they don’t realize they just said a bunch of garbage and people just agreed because he’s the boss.
I think a lot of CEO types think they’re amazing because they walk into a room and everyone’s like “yeah boss got it that’s great feedback”, and they don’t realize they just said a bunch of garbage and people just agreed because he’s the boss.
I bet. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the CEO gives direction, hears “can do, boss!”, but it doesn’t actually get done because there isn’t a triggered deliverable to verify. You may have junior staff doing what they’re being told, but it isn’t what the CEO wants because it is going through several layers of telephone and, because everyone is remote, it is harder to identify where the problem is.
When I worked an old job in the office, the game of telephone from the CEO down was so bad. People would get in their head that some things were MUST HAVE, but if I sneakily just asked the CEO directly he’d be like “no that’s not important”. But the designer thought he wanted it so she told the product lead it was important so our team product guy was told this was “straight from the top”.
Sooooo the highly competent people will go work at remote offices and the ones that force in office work will have the others?
Except there are problems with training. Companies are going to need to train more competent staff. How do companies train competent staff without competent staff in the first place?
That’s not “except”, that’s “and”.
Sounds fair to me.
Not emails, conversations.
Do you believe such conversations are impossible by telephone?
One thing I’m learning as the company I’m at grows is that there are a lot of people who simply suck at communicating. they don’t know how to do it by messaging, they don’t know how to do it by email, they don’t know how to do it by phone call, and they need somebody right there in front of them to point out their bullshit and drag out what they’re trying to say
I noticed this morning that it sometimes feels like I’m talking to fucking AI. somebody asked me to review something with no context, says they did something, I point out hey didn’t you actually do this and not that, then like a dumb AI chatbot they just agree with me and say yes you’re right it is that and then don’t elaborate. this is not a conversation that you can have remotely, because the person on the other end is a fucking idiot that can’t communicate. this conversation goes slightly better in person, because you are more likely to take the lead in it
Sounds like people have been put in positions which do not fit their skills. This should be fixed by either developing their skills or putting them in a position that fits their abilities, not by other people doing their job for them in person.
Not impossible, but 80% of human communication is non-verbal. When we converse, we’re not mere robots passing data back and forth.
Video call then?
There was no discussion. The CEO likes it this way. His bootlickers invented a bunch of bullshit justifications in order to make the RTO rules seem to have reasons, but there isn’t one other than the CEO likes it this way.
People have tried to discuss it reasonably but it has become clear that it is an emotional matter for the CEO and discussing it like adults is not possible.
CEOs basically have to do it, and most want to. And they think “hey I’m the CEO so I must be doing something right - my way is clearly the best way.” And that’s that in their minds. Hustle culture goes all the way to the top CEOs in the world. They just use different language, like “you must be driven, you need to want it more, if you don’t move aggressively to succeed then your competitors will…” they truly believe it’s the correct and virtuous life. To force it on others, in their mind, is doing them a favor.
Why do they have to?
I guess they don’t, I was just thinking of how their job is essentially meeting and talking with lots of people, including inside and outside the company, and this benefits from in-person interactions moreso than, say, a programmer’s job does. It would have been more accurate if I’d said a CEO’s job is easier to do well and more enjoyable when everyone is in the office.
I completely agree! I would then ask that the CEO force his bootlickers back into the office, but leave everyone else alone. It’s not like he would ever degrade himself as to speak to the unwashed peasantry that is the employees.
Well that’s for sure. But this is where their egos go big. They aren’t about optimizing just their job and leaving others alone. No, if it’s their way, it must be the best way. After all, how could anyone want or need anything other than they do? Unless something’s wrong with them! /s
They let us know their thinking here. I don’t personally have a dog in this fight, live a few blocks from the office so either way is fine with me. They landed on “hybrid” but now I just work at the office and do not bring my laptop home.
Their thinking:
Collaboration really is better in the office, zoom does not replace the experience of just being here and aware of conversations around you (fair enough) we are already paying for the office (not a real reason, could sublease, we already did with half of it).
My thinking (they don’t care but) working from home benefits the rest of my family more than it does me. I can bike to work and do. Reclaimed the space in my house that was office, and absolutely ignore work when I’m home. Certainly would not force anyone else to, like my job did, but glad to have a space to work outside my house.
