RTO and No Childcare.
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Anonymous
They don’t “need” to offer any of those things. |
Anonymous
It’s been FOUR YEARS. Find another program, parents. Your responsibility. |
Anonymous
Nope. They are absolutely correct. DP |
Anonymous
Yeah, it really is. |
Anonymous
Then they don’t do weekday “activities.” They’re not compulsory. |
Anonymous
Federal jobs are in high demand. For the few who do quit (rather than just tantrum and threaten), they’ll be easily and expeditiously replaced. |
Anonymous
They do if they want to retain employees who are parents while shifting from WFH to RTO. I left a job pre-pandemic because they changed the WFH policy and it totally screwed up my childcare arrangement. They wound up offering me an extra 20k to stay and I turned it down because the cost to me of RTO would have eaten up the entire raise -- we would have had to buy a second car in order to accommodate dual commutes every day including drop off and pick up. I shifted to a job that was FT WFH and have been in it ever since. I've hired multiple people from my old company in my current role and the family friendly nature of my current company was a major draw in several of those hires. Our comp is similar to my old company but the WFH and flexible hours makes this a much better place to work especially for people with kids. It's a very inexpensive way to attract and retain talented people. Employers that don't accommodate employees with kids wind up with a lot of churn and lose senior people, institutional knowledge, and sometimes even clients. I guess that's fine if you're a call center or something low level but it's not great if you need a skilled, educated workforce. |
Anonymous
No. |
Anonymous
I’m a teacher who runs after school activities. This gives parents an extra hour to get to the school, which is why I suspect most of the students stay. It isn’t actually interest. But on my end? I have to pay for my own children to be in aftercare so I can stay and supervise 30 students past work hours. Running these activities costs me thousands. So I won’t be offering them much longer. That’s one of the reasons you don’t see a lot of after school activities anymore. They run on burnt-out teachers who are now deciding to put family first. |
Anonymous
That’s your prerogative but seems rather inefficient and pedantic to force employees to spend hours a week moving their laptop from one office to another with no actual benefit. I spend 10-12 hours a week commuting to use my laptop by myself in a conference room. I don’t work with anyone in my city. Because of this I’m looking for a new job. Why spend 10-12 hours in a car when I can spend it with my kids or exercising? I have a low mortgage rate so simply moving would be financially foolish. I don’t think spending 100k a year to educate 2 kids is wise either. This means it’s off to a new job I go. |
Anonymous
Louder for those in back. I don't understand this mentality. Are people pushing to have kids in crowded aftercare programs (that don't exist) for hours and hours... why? Because they feel guilty about what they did with their own kids? How can you not want better for kids? ALL kids? |
Anonymous
I think a lot of people haven’t worked in a long time and don’t understand how the nature of work has changed for office workers. Or they aren’t office workers. They actually think there is a benefit of going into the office and that it’s part of work. They don’t understand how many people are going into an office to use Teams. They don’t understand how everyone uses Teams to meet because of the ability to share documents and the chat feature. Also the fact many employees are in different locations. Technology has changed the workforce tremendously. Can you imagine now attending a meeting where you all sit in a conference room, no one has a laptop and someone hands out printed documents? People don’t understand that no longer happens at many workplaces. Tomorrow I’ll be commuting into the office to use my computer by myself in a conference room for meetings with the UK. No one on the calls is in my city. How does it make sense for me to spend two hours commuting to do that? If they want to enforce a true RTO like pre-2020 then they need to get rid of Teams, reinstate office phones, and not allow any sort of video conferencing. They also need to change staffing models so that staff aren’t spread out geographically. At this point requiring full RTO is like requiring us to use phone calls and faxes instead of email. It’s archaic. |
Anonymous
+1. I'm a fed in HR and we have hundreds of applications for every job posting, so many that we often cut them off at a certain number, or advertise for only a limited time. |
Anonymous
You keep trying! Adorable. Open that wallet and start paying for your childcare. Enjoy your commute as you RTO! |
Anonymous
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There are two issues that are getting conflated here - RTO generally and the potential federal RTO.
RTO generally raises all the issues many have mentioned, that it seems archaic in some instances, that it will impact retention etc…I think in general that’s a societal issue which is kind of going to be worked out over the next several years, probably resulting in hybrid workplaces in most cases. The push from DOGE is different because the purpose isn’t even ostensibly to improve productivity or collaboration but literally to make employees miserable so they quit. Consequently, worrying about retention or the impact on the work itself seem to not matter at all. Now, somewhere cooler heads may prevail as even some of the new appointees in these agencies recognize they actually need experienced staff to get things done but the language from DOGE is concerning. Businesses have also used RTO to reduce headcount of course but ultimately they also need to be worried about keeping good employees and getting their work done, whereas DOGE is apparently unconcerned about such things. |