Biden wants RTO

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:I trained, mentored, and built lifelong relationships with new employees during the pandemic and I don’t understand the dinosaurs who can’t imagine how this could be possible. It takes a more deliberate effort but losing a commute is worth it.

I find this surprising and not at all my experience. It’s not helpful to call everyone a dinosaur who disagrees with you, but my years of work experience has taught me not to call other people names.

I came to DC just over 20 years ago and quickly made a group of work friends in my office who were about my age. We had lunch together most days, did a lot of fun things together on the weekends, and have kept in touch as we’ve moved around in our careers. One of these work friends introduced me to my spouse years later, many have helped me with job promotions throughout the years and I’ve helped them.

Maybe all of that will happen to the next generation with just the same frequency over teams or zoom. I’m skeptical but I also understand that commutes are inconvenient so maybe people are just willing to sacrifice the opportunity for a lot of personal connections these days. Looking back a couple of decades these connections have been invaluable to me and I’m glad I made a lot of real friends in my first several years at work.

Different poster, but I can tell you that remote works had improved my relationships with individuals in my own community—my neighbors, my kids teacher and coaches, local organizations I can now spend time volunteering with, and my friends that I have time for now that I’m not grinding into DC every day. These relationships were suffering before. Nothing has been lost, it’s just different and in many cases preferable.

DP. You say “it’s just different,” but it’s not. You can’t equate good work relationships and good community and friend relationships. Your employer wants the focus on work. You may want the focus to be on other relationships, but that’s not what your employer is paying you for. You’re comparing apples and oranges.

It's like prison, if you are forced to basically live at work to get things done by participating in all the social non work stuff and having to work late when there are no distractions you build relationships at work while your home life suffers. Then the favoritism and affairs come in that scew things influenced by non work output. Wfh is pure work performance which is the most level equitable way to run a business or agency.

The negative side of in person relationships is favoritism or affairs, the positive side is friendship, camaraderie, and positive group morale. I’m sorry if you’ve never had a positive in person work culture, I had a couple of decades in my office with no affairs to show for it. What we have now is not pure work performance, it seems like minimal output and effort from a lot of people.

I don't know why it seems like that to you, but WFH is demonstrably more productive across white collar fields. People work more minutes and their output per minute is higher because there are fewer distractions. More deliverables, more meetings, and shorter timelines, and all of it more measurable.

I would understand of you had some other objection, like being constantly available or having someone monitor you via tech. But minimal output is not it.

I’m sure that some people work more minutes, but it also seems like a lot take advantage and work less. Harder to track if someone is working or out shopping when you never see them.

It’s only hard to track if you have no concept of what each of your team is bringing to the table. I mean really, you want to track white collar workers by the number of minutes spent at the computer? Who does this?

Are you a fed? Feds are tracked hourly. We are different than private sector. You can be fired or disciplined for time card fraud. If your work only takes you an hour and you then spend 39 other hours golfing, that is timecard fraud. You're expected to ask for additional work or do other work related tasks.

Yeah. That’s what I said. It’s stupid but you can keep trying to run government that way if you want. Bottom isn’t that far away now.

NP. *We* are not running government that way. It's how it's set up. There is so much that managers and supervisors would like to change. I personally have found that supervisors are only tracking employees time closely when there are other issues. It's hard to fire for performance, but timecard fraud is easy. Performance was likely the big issue though.

It's like how the federal government often charges criminals using tax code when the real issue is that they're murdering/importing drugs/criminal activities.

[Anonymous]

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Anonymous wrote:Are most people anticipating 2 or 3 days a week? I am ok with 2 but really dread 3.

NSF wants 4 days in the office; so going back to pre pandemic measures. Total bummer.

NSF is minimum 4 days per pay period on site, but they concurrently decided that if you are less than 50% on site (so, 5 days per pay period), you lose your office and have to hotel for the 4 days. So that is just an underhanded way of making it 5 days without mandating it. So, despite conclusively demonstrating that there is no need for a physical presence, we are indeed right back to 2019.

My agency has just decided to go the other way. Only 2 days per pay period “onsite” and almost all of us get only hotel cubicles (not offices) when we go in. Since travel counts as onsite work, and we travel >25 days per year, chances are none of us go back much at all. I’ll be clearing out my office and moving home!