Companies are on the war path against remote work
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Anonymous
This. I’m “available” around 10-12 hours a day. I do bus stop pickups, grocery runs, go on a run at lunch etc. My employer doesn’t care. They care about my deliverables and that I participate in certain meetings. |
Anonymous
I live 8 miles from my in office downtown DC. It took 65 minutes to commute by metro + bus. Now it takes even longer because metro trains are so spaced out and it's unpredictable (15 min between trains vs 2). It's a 15 min drive. |
Anonymous
Are you daft? I’m not whining. I have a beautiful big house in my “desolate area”. I have a lovely new comfortable car and listen to audiobooks on my commute. You’re the one getting bent out of shape that everyone isn’t taking Metro. 😂 |
Anonymous
Where do you live? When I lived on Conn Ave and commuted to Foggy Bottom it was almost always longer than 15 min in the car. This was pre pandemic. |
Anonymous
That's on HR - why did they bait and switch? Remote or not should be upfront! |
Anonymous
I’m convinced that many of them would be doing more. My sense of human nature is that there are many people who can be productive if closely supervised, and will slack off if not. “When the cat’s away, the mice will play” is a proverb for a reason. You may not agree, and you may even be right, but do you really think that’s an *unreasonable* point of view? |
Anonymous
If I can do my job 100% remotely why do I need to come into the office so the bakery down the street, which I never buy anything from, keeps getting tax breaks? That's just dumb. |
Anonymous
I don’t think it’s unreasonable but I think it’s wrong. I think the unproductive types spend a lot of time at work talking and chatting. It’s actually easier to determine someone’s productivity when they are working remotely. There were so many employees pre-pandemic who got by just by showing up at an office. I also don’t think most employees are working in an office where management is closely monitoring them. Most managers are busy and don’t have the time to be checking to see if an employee is working at their computer or is doing something else. |
Anonymous
DP but I'm in my late 40s. I've been doing this a long time. There have been absolutely been times I've been in the office 5x a week and not productive. Chatting, running errands, or just going online. I always get my work done, am a high performer, and want to deliver good work. But we aren't robots. It is human nature to work to meet deadlines, slack during down times, etc. Pre pandemic I worked at a global firm that encouraged hoteling and remote work. I WFH most of the time and went into the office usually 2x a week. I was much more productive at home most days. Now I'm remote full time, going in maybe once every 6 weeks or attending big meetings/company retreats etc. I love it, it's conducive to my kind of work, and I'll never report to an office full time again. |
Anonymous
It is "just dumb" to think that the broader implications of expanded WFH on communities, organizational profitability, tax base, environment, financial sector, etc. should be decided based on your individual productivity and whether or not you buy a sandwich. |
Anonymous
NP. What you are doing, as an employee in your late 40s who is not coming in to the office, is you are not giving any training or mentoring, formal or informal, to the young workers who are just starting out. You were helped throughout your career, especially in beginning, by working with or for more senior people, who would give you advice, show you how to do it, help you. Now you are declining to do the same for the younger workers. Whether you care about the stores who were supported by you before, whether you should care about them or not, you clearly don't care about your company, the younger workers, or anyone besides yourself. |
Anonymous
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Maybe someone has raised this before but for me, the mental health benefits of not being in person in a toxic workplace and not having to be stuck in a car/metro for 12 hours a week are the main reason I want to continue WFH.
I have been at my company for a long time. It’s top heavy, toxic, and has a lot of senior staff who are paid a lot of money to do very little but rearrange deck chairs while wearing suits and giving the appearance of doing work while really just watching their underlings do everything. Pre COVID I did all the “things” younger employers think they need to do to get ahead. Worked long hours, was insanely productive, worked through lunch, networked, volunteered for committees, got a work “mentor,” did professional development seminars, had outstanding job performance, etc. It didn’t really serve me the way I thought it would at all. I ended up on a team with real issues (bullying, racism, former employees suing for discrimination) and managed to emerge unscathed with a reputation for doing great work, but what I eventually realized was that no one was going to promote me. The higher ups would obscure my contributions and try to make it seem like they were responsible for the good work I did. I only got raises and promotions by demanding them and writing memos explaining in painstaking detail all my achievements, having very uncomfortable conversations with my boss who clearly didn’t want to stick her neck out but ultimately realizes she had to (or she’d lose her top performer), getting peers to share their salaries with me, etc. and it still took nearly a year each time. I was able to transition to WFH full time during COVID and I never want to go back. Being home I am able to largely be outside of the toxic crazymaking, bullying, grandstanding, micro aggressions, and shameless self-promotion that the crazies engage in to get to the top (or to try to stay in a leadership position because they actually don’t do anything meaningful for the company so playing office politics is their only way to get job security). The last company I worked with was like this, too, so I have no faith that elsewhere it would be different. I would like to hope it would be, but I am not holding my breath. For me, you can’t put a price on the mental health benefits of WFH. I sometimes miss the “friendships” I had in the office, but let’s be honest - those are never that real anyway in corporate America. |
Anonymous
You sound exhausting. No wonder they want you to not go to office |
Anonymous
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It's funny, the younger people in my office were excited to go back to in person work.
Six months later, they are want to go back to wfh because they have figured out that you have to produce just as much work sitting in an open office with other people talking and making noise all day long, so you end up wearing noise canceling headphones all day and it's just like being at home by yourself. |
Anonymous
Well open offices are in the 9 circles to hell, so no surprise there. I like both working from home, and working in the office, provided both options have a dedicated office space. No open office, or dining room table offices with kids running around. |