RTO in many cases is the height of hubris.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I agree with your general point that for many jobs there's no reason to go in, but 10-20 hours/week is a crazy overestimate of most people's commutes. 20 hours is 2 hours each way/5 days per week. Very few people are doing that.

I drove downtown for years. It was easily 45 minutes in the morning assuming nothing bad happened in traffic. To keep the commute tight, I'd leave my as early as possible. Already dressed, quaffed, made up, etc. My kids and I would get to daycare/before school care a couple minutes before it opened. When they turned the lights on inside the building, we were allowed to go knock on the door and do drop off (totally reasonable on their part).

In the afternoon, anything was possible traffic/commute wise.

It was awful and the stress of it made me downright ill.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I have a sincere question about posts like these every time I see them.

The people making RTO decisions are also humans. They have families and commutes and also enjoyed the benefits of remote work. The vast majority of them are not uber-wealthy Bezos/Musks. Many of them are even staff level HR/budget/external affairs professionals. We see these people every day in the workplace and know them.

They are making these calls for a reason. They may be wrong, but they are not EVIL.

All of us would have better outcomes if we remembered that, and were willing to hear people out in good faith and maybe influence each other. Calling names on other sides is both wrong and also unhelpful.

They do it out of a sense of self preservation, and don't care about the costs to you.

If you are a CEO making big bucks, and there is even a chance, even a tiny one, that making everyone sit in the office could improcce something, somewhere, that may make a difference in your annual bonus, so it's back to the salt mines.
Also, what people have said about it being hard to monitor remote, and large expensive leases that must be justified.

The CEO doesn't care if you have to get up earlier, pay for gas, waste hours in traffic - all of the negatives don't impact him. Employee happiness isn't necessarily measurable on the balance sheet, and how many CEOs are really paying attention to reasons for turnover? How many CEOs do you think pick the health care plan based on what most EEs want as opposed to, "well my wife likes to visit the dermatologist" or whatever.

They are not EVIL, they are just self interested. To a degree that can be short sighted.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I just cannot imagine another situation where I would ask people to spend 10-20h per week, and hundreds of dollars, so they can physically sit in a different location for absolutely no reason other than that I can force them to be in the same location as myself because 'they have a choice to work here or not'. I would be so embarrassed and ashamed to enact that policy if it was not 100% necessary. RTO is the Bill Lumbergh from Office Space of policies.
It would be one thing if someone is in the medical profession or needs to physically interact with someone else. But to take 10-20h away from other human beings, away from their family and their health and their rest, given we have one life to live, when we KNOW it's not necessary, is to me downright cruel and just the height of hubris and arrogance. I cannot imagine wanting my employees lives to be worse, instead of better, if better was an option.
We're all going to die. Sure we have to work, but do you really need me to sit on a train for hours each week so I can do zoom calls from a specific room you designate, when we've proven that we are now a digital society and do not need to do this?
It's just so amazingly tone deaf and selfish.

Widespread WFH was a concession to a pandemic. It was, always, a temporary concession under dangerous circumstances of an illness spread by breathing. It was never — never — said or meant to be permanent.

If you want to work at home, go find yourself one of the millions of existing WFH jobs.

Snort, it wasn't a "concession" - you make it sound like a gift! It was a way for them to keep their business alive during a pandemic. If everyone was in the office, getting sick and being hospitalized, productivity halts. Not to mention what if the boss gets covid?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What I think is absolute hubris is thinking that working from home has no impact on team engagement, cohesion, creative problem solving, company culture, and general communication. I am in No Way championing RTO to prepandemic norms, but I think there is significant value for being in person once a week. With natural fluctuations for people / kids being sick, holidays, school breaks, dentist appointments, etc. I feel like this averages out to employees coming in 3 days a month. If you truly think you are an independent contributor and that you gain nothing from going to the office in person occasionally, I would argue you don’t understand your role in your organization or you are shortchanging your org in the value you could contribute and short changing yourself in terms of career development and refining your soft skills.

Two stories to make my case:

I manage several teams in the procurement department of a large IT company. We worked remotely pre-pandemic, but came together once a month for required training. That day counted towards the recommended 1 day per week. As a team lead I was very lenient with that “day” and my team probably averaged 2.5 days per month with some people coming in at 10am or leaving at 3pm for traffic or kid related pick up / drop off. When the pandemic started we didn’t do any extra video calls or engagement activities. We thought “we know how to be remote!” Around 6 months I noticed we were just less connected as a team - despite taking every day. Around a year, little cracks started to show because people didn’t know about special projects or certain initiatives that they would have wanted to participate in. Even though these things are announced in meetings, I think people were missing out on the coffee maker / lunch time chats to say “let’s work on that together”. In Year 2 people started leaving. I had to start arrranging coverage when previously team members naturally stepped up to cover each other, knowing it would be reciprocated. Without a personal connection, it was just a job no different than the same function at another company. It has been a long hard fight to build a team back to a fraction of the connection and camaraderie we had pre-pandemic.

Second example - I once worked in Chicago and had a client in Vancouver BC back when FaceTime/video calls didn’t exist yet. We worked on the project for months before meeting in person. We were a consulting company delivering services to an internal department and the travel expense was considered extraneous and unnecessary. At a mid-point we went out to the client for 3 days. Just 3 days over 6 months. Somehow taking in person and also sharing meals with the team and getting to know them was SO impactful. It felt like when we got back to Chicago that all of our meetings went so much more smoothly, we communicated more efficiently and solved problems more collaboratively.

TL;DR - A small amount of face time is priceless. It doesn’t take much to establish and maintain that connection, but it’s short sighted to think in person time is useless.

NP here - I don't think face time is useless. In fact, I had an in-person meeting yesterday that went way better in person, even though it could have been a phone call. I just think it's mostly not worth the tradeoffs. That is, yes you lose something with remote, but most of us are willing to give it up in light of what we get by not commuting, and most employers are willing to give it up if they are saving on CRE (those who aren't are going back, IMO, mostly for CRE reasons not employee camaraderie). And with the current hybrid situation, most mandatory in-office days do not include in-person meetings even among the people who are all there on the same day, making mandatory in-office entirely useless to employees.

BTW, in your first example, it's wild to me that you look at employee disengagement during a global health emergency, in which people were dealing with a ton of personal and family issues (and which was followed by a really strong job market where people could get raises) and say that losing your monthly in-person was the reason for disengagement. People had other priorities -- which ties right back into RTO not being worth the benefits of chatting in person, even though those benefits exist.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I love RTO. I’m a nanny and have been waiting for years for this moment. Finally the house is quiet during nap time, no more mess all over the kitchen, no more kids screaming whenever parents pop in and out to ‘help’. The kids are peaceful, no fighting for attention, we can do crafts and not get micromanaged, we can play games and sing and not be shushed because parents want to zoom right in the living room instead of going in their home office, and I don’t have to hide in the bathroom during nap time to have 10 minutes to myself. I miss being able to go home at 6pm, but I’ll take finishing at 7:30pm any day, to have an entire shift of peacefulness with the kids.

You had your time. It was 3 years of misery for nannies, with RTO. Now it’s our turn to enjoy our work environment.

extremely niche and irrelevant argument.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree with your general point that for many jobs there's no reason to go in, but 10-20 hours/week is a crazy overestimate of most people's commutes. 20 hours is 2 hours each way/5 days per week. Very few people are doing that.

I drove downtown for years. It was easily 45 minutes in the morning assuming nothing bad happened in traffic. To keep the commute tight, I'd leave my as early as possible. Already dressed, quaffed, made up, etc. My kids and I would get to daycare/before school care a couple minutes before it opened. When they turned the lights on inside the building, we were allowed to go knock on the door and do drop off (totally reasonable on their part).

In the afternoon, anything was possible traffic/commute wise.

It was awful and the stress of it made me downright ill.

Do you mean “coiffed,” perchance? Or do you really mean you had imbibed your morning pick-me-up?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree with your general point that for many jobs there's no reason to go in, but 10-20 hours/week is a crazy overestimate of most people's commutes. 20 hours is 2 hours each way/5 days per week. Very few people are doing that.

I drove downtown for years. It was easily 45 minutes in the morning assuming nothing bad happened in traffic. To keep the commute tight, I'd leave my as early as possible. Already dressed, quaffed, made up, etc. My kids and I would get to daycare/before school care a couple minutes before it opened. When they turned the lights on inside the building, we were allowed to go knock on the door and do drop off (totally reasonable on their part).

In the afternoon, anything was possible traffic/commute wise.

It was awful and the stress of it made me downright ill.

Do you mean “coiffed,” perchance? Or do you really mean you had imbibed your morning pick-me-up?

Clearly I meant I drink my hair.

Thanks.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have a sincere question about posts like these every time I see them.

The people making RTO decisions are also humans. They have families and commutes and also enjoyed the benefits of remote work. The vast majority of them are not uber-wealthy Bezos/Musks. Many of them are even staff level HR/budget/external affairs professionals. We see these people every day in the workplace and know them.

They are making these calls for a reason. They may be wrong, but they are not EVIL.

All of us would have better outcomes if we remembered that, and were willing to hear people out in good faith and maybe influence each other. Calling names on other sides is both wrong and also unhelpful.

They do it out of a sense of self preservation, and don't care about the costs to you.

If you are a CEO making big bucks, and there is even a chance, even a tiny one, that making everyone sit in the office could improcce something, somewhere, that may make a difference in your annual bonus, so it's back to the salt mines.
Also, what people have said about it being hard to monitor remote, and large expensive leases that must be justified.

The CEO doesn't care if you have to get up earlier, pay for gas, waste hours in traffic - all of the negatives don't impact him. Employee happiness isn't necessarily measurable on the balance sheet, and how many CEOs are really paying attention to reasons for turnover? How many CEOs do you think pick the health care plan based on what most EEs want as opposed to, "well my wife likes to visit the dermatologist" or whatever.

They are not EVIL, they are just self interested. To a degree that can be short sighted.

All of the costs and negative impacts to workers are also experienced by upper management. Also, even assuming that management is solely focused on increasing their annual bonus and doesn't care at all about people, attrition and turnover affects that bonus.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree with your general point that for many jobs there's no reason to go in, but 10-20 hours/week is a crazy overestimate of most people's commutes. 20 hours is 2 hours each way/5 days per week. Very few people are doing that.

I drove downtown for years. It was easily 45 minutes in the morning assuming nothing bad happened in traffic. To keep the commute tight, I'd leave my as early as possible. Already dressed, quaffed, made up, etc. My kids and I would get to daycare/before school care a couple minutes before it opened. When they turned the lights on inside the building, we were allowed to go knock on the door and do drop off (totally reasonable on their part).

In the afternoon, anything was possible traffic/commute wise.

It was awful and the stress of it made me downright ill.

Do you mean “coiffed,” perchance? Or do you really mean you had imbibed your morning pick-me-up?

Clearly I meant I drink my hair.

Thanks.

Who doesn’t like to quaff their coif?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:GM CEO just told people get back to work.

Bottom line way back in 2007 my company started remote. Any employee with children was required to show proof of child care or a nanny, my facilities dept. would visit home to set up office and ensure they had an appropriate place to work at home and had to be online business hours and available.

Most women were looking for free child care or run errands or go bus stop.

My co worker did get approval. He had a home office identical to work, one kid in after school program and they rocked it 830 - 530 pm every day.

Most washed out .

There's a major difference between wanting to meet your kid at the bus stop and providing full time childcare.

Right? I unabashedly pick my kid up from the bus stop on WFH days. It takes maybe 10-15 minutes out of my day and she's totally self sufficient while I continue to work. I'm not paying for aftercare because someone has a problem with me or my DH being away from our desk for 10-15 minutes. The point of WFH is not to be in heads down mode from 8:30-5:30 everyday. If that's the expectation, then I will refuse to answer any email outside of those hours and see how that goes.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I know at my place a lot of the white males in management are unhappy the younger women aren't available to them with WFH and that is a major factor in the RTO decision. Obviously they are in leadership roles so there's no one to challenge their decision.

Exactly. The opportunity to sexually harass is seriously diminished, and people are also being judged by work product and not nepotism etc - makes sense when you think who’s pushing the movement the most strongly.

This is a real thing. It's not just harassment, it's the manager who likes to have someone bring coffee and paperwork, who likes to watch a gaggle of cute interns, who judges competence based on appearance and small talk, and who enjoys seeing someone stay late. That type of manager thrives on control of the physical space and control of people's physical presence.

Then you have another kind of manager who would never sexually harass anyone, but who creates a lot of low-level HR issues involving discrimination, bias, thoughtless comments, unfair policies, employee turnover, etc. This is a person who has given little thought to what the job of manager actually is, and who genuinely doesn't know how to manage except by counting heads. Being physically separate from them can be beneficial, even though these managers are not "harassers" per se.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What I think is absolute hubris is thinking that working from home has no impact on team engagement, cohesion, creative problem solving, company culture, and general communication. I am in No Way championing RTO to prepandemic norms, but I think there is significant value for being in person once a week. With natural fluctuations for people / kids being sick, holidays, school breaks, dentist appointments, etc. I feel like this averages out to employees coming in 3 days a month. If you truly think you are an independent contributor and that you gain nothing from going to the office in person occasionally, I would argue you don’t understand your role in your organization or you are shortchanging your org in the value you could contribute and short changing yourself in terms of career development and refining your soft skills.

Two stories to make my case:

I manage several teams in the procurement department of a large IT company. We worked remotely pre-pandemic, but came together once a month for required training. That day counted towards the recommended 1 day per week. As a team lead I was very lenient with that “day” and my team probably averaged 2.5 days per month with some people coming in at 10am or leaving at 3pm for traffic or kid related pick up / drop off. When the pandemic started we didn’t do any extra video calls or engagement activities. We thought “we know how to be remote!” Around 6 months I noticed we were just less connected as a team - despite taking every day. Around a year, little cracks started to show because people didn’t know about special projects or certain initiatives that they would have wanted to participate in. Even though these things are announced in meetings, I think people were missing out on the coffee maker / lunch time chats to say “let’s work on that together”. In Year 2 people started leaving. I had to start arrranging coverage when previously team members naturally stepped up to cover each other, knowing it would be reciprocated. Without a personal connection, it was just a job no different than the same function at another company. It has been a long hard fight to build a team back to a fraction of the connection and camaraderie we had pre-pandemic.

Second example - I once worked in Chicago and had a client in Vancouver BC back when FaceTime/video calls didn’t exist yet. We worked on the project for months before meeting in person. We were a consulting company delivering services to an internal department and the travel expense was considered extraneous and unnecessary. At a mid-point we went out to the client for 3 days. Just 3 days over 6 months. Somehow taking in person and also sharing meals with the team and getting to know them was SO impactful. It felt like when we got back to Chicago that all of our meetings went so much more smoothly, we communicated more efficiently and solved problems more collaboratively.

TL;DR - A small amount of face time is priceless. It doesn’t take much to establish and maintain that connection, but it’s short sighted to think in person time is useless.

NP here - I don't think face time is useless. In fact, I had an in-person meeting yesterday that went way better in person, even though it could have been a phone call. I just think it's mostly not worth the tradeoffs. That is, yes you lose something with remote, but most of us are willing to give it up in light of what we get by not commuting, and most employers are willing to give it up if they are saving on CRE (those who aren't are going back, IMO, mostly for CRE reasons not employee camaraderie). And with the current hybrid situation, most mandatory in-office days do not include in-person meetings even among the people who are all there on the same day, making mandatory in-office entirely useless to employees.

BTW, in your first example, it's wild to me that you look at employee disengagement during a global health emergency, in which people were dealing with a ton of personal and family issues (and which was followed by a really strong job market where people could get raises) and say that losing your monthly in-person was the reason for disengagement. People had other priorities -- which ties right back into RTO not being worth the benefits of chatting in person, even though those benefits exist.

Fully agree with this. I think some in person work really does improve team relationships and cohesion, but the tradeoffs are huge. For instance, I lose 3 hours a day with my family whenever I go in to see coworkers, so I'm not interested in doing that more than once a week, and started seriously job searching when the RTO requirement surpassed my person limit of 2 days. Also, poorly designed hybrid is worse than either - some days I'm there alone, on video calls all day. Pointless.

I also think remote disengagement during the pandemic is not a metric for normal times. I found that before my office fully reopened, going back to in-person conferences really helped my motivation and engagement, and even remote workers can do that a couple times a year. That wasn't possible at peak covid. In person work can be meaningful, but making it so takes some actual thought, which a lot of these mandates do not include.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I agree with your general point that for many jobs there's no reason to go in, but 10-20 hours/week is a crazy overestimate of most people's commutes. 20 hours is 2 hours each way/5 days per week. Very few people are doing that.

I drove downtown for years. It was easily 45 minutes in the morning assuming nothing bad happened in traffic. To keep the commute tight, I'd leave my as early as possible. Already dressed, quaffed, made up, etc. My kids and I would get to daycare/before school care a couple minutes before it opened. When they turned the lights on inside the building, we were allowed to go knock on the door and do drop off (totally reasonable on their part).

In the afternoon, anything was possible traffic/commute wise.

It was awful and the stress of it made me downright ill.

I also did this life for years and still do a few days a week. It's not a way to live. Now when I go in super early, I leave early. I may work a little extra in the evening to make up for it (maybe not, depending on the work load). Prior to kids, I worked for a company with very strict 8:30-5:30 hours, no WFH ever (even on snow days when it was mutually beneficial for us to keep working... if we didn't/couldn't come in, we had to take PTO). I left because I didn't see how I could manage to be a parent at that firm. I've heard they've lightened up a little bit, but now I WFH 2x a week, work 7am-3/4pm when I'm in the office and it's made all the difference. There's definitely a middle ground.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I have a sincere question about posts like these every time I see them.

The people making RTO decisions are also humans. They have families and commutes and also enjoyed the benefits of remote work. The vast majority of them are not uber-wealthy Bezos/Musks. Many of them are even staff level HR/budget/external affairs professionals. We see these people every day in the workplace and know them.

They are making these calls for a reason. They may be wrong, but they are not EVIL.

All of us would have better outcomes if we remembered that, and were willing to hear people out in good faith and maybe influence each other. Calling names on other sides is both wrong and also unhelpful.

They do it out of a sense of self preservation, and don't care about the costs to you.

If you are a CEO making big bucks, and there is even a chance, even a tiny one, that making everyone sit in the office could improcce something, somewhere, that may make a difference in your annual bonus, so it's back to the salt mines.
Also, what people have said about it being hard to monitor remote, and large expensive leases that must be justified.

The CEO doesn't care if you have to get up earlier, pay for gas, waste hours in traffic - all of the negatives don't impact him. Employee happiness isn't necessarily measurable on the balance sheet, and how many CEOs are really paying attention to reasons for turnover? How many CEOs do you think pick the health care plan based on what most EEs want as opposed to, "well my wife likes to visit the dermatologist" or whatever.

They are not EVIL, they are just self interested. To a degree that can be short sighted.

All of the costs and negative impacts to workers are also experienced by upper management. Also, even assuming that management is solely focused on increasing their annual bonus and doesn't care at all about people, attrition and turnover affects that bonus.

NP and LOL at this. As just one example among many:

"Meanwhile, Chief Financial Officer Brian West, who joined Boeing in August 2021, hasn’t relocated from his home in New Canaan, Conn. The company recently opened a small office about five minutes from his house."

"Managers eager to get employees back to the Arlington office over the past two years have turned to happy hours, guest speakers and even visiting alpacas, say people who have worked there. Calhoun and West are seldom spotted in the building, they say."

[Anonymous]

^Edit: Sorry, here is the link: https://www.wsj.com/business/airlines/boeing-ceo-private-jets-return-to-office-9bee2035