What justification is your agency providing for working in the office?
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Anonymous
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While my company hasn’t articulated it quite so directly, these are the key reasons:
1. Collaboration is critical, and newbies need in person time with colleagues (on their team and beyond) as well as their supervisors (ffs!) to develop relationships and acclimate to the work culture. 2. Supervisors who say everything can be done remotely are shouting themselves in the foot. When leadership hears you say that, they immediately believe you are not equipped to be a leader. If you don’t get it, you don’t get it. Plus, they think you are selfish, lazy or both. 3. Introverts are suffering as evidenced by the uptick in requests for mental health accommodations or STD. And everyone (especially extroverts) lost soft skills and are acting out in new and bizarre ways. 4. Some people simply aren’t producing. You might not recognize this because leadership was all warm and fuzzy and very accommodating during the pandemic, so now many of you foolishly believe it’s fine to work from home without childcare for your infant/toddler/young kid. It’s not. Some of you think just passively replying to emails is working. It’s not. Nobody needs to be in the office 5 days a week, but please stop whining about coming in 2-3 days/week. And please don’t just sit behind closed doors when you are in the office (ffs!). |
bakersman
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Anonymous
| Quiet quit is real. In many cases, people aren’t doing sufficient work for their salary. With WFH there is not the accountability for one’s time like in the office. When you add quiet quit and lack of real collaboration, there is a productivity and innovation gap that is real. |
Anonymous
Thanks to teams, I can literally see who is online. I’m seeing far too many yellow or blank bubbles. Like, all the time during core hours. Then I’ll notice a flurry of emails late in the day for maybe 15 minutes. That’s why we need people in the office. |
Anonymous
This. |
Anonymous
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Most people are not disciplined enough to consistently work productively from home.
Connecting to a zoom call while you are walking your dog and having your camera off is not the same as working. You may think you are 100% focused on work or that you are great at multitasking but you are not. People are biased towards thinking they work more and are more productive than they actually are. Everyone thinks they are doing a great job from home but 1/3 people actually are while 2/3 are putting in less work |
Anonymous
| We need someone to come in one day each week to mail certain documents that can only be served by mail. Our management didn't think it was fair to only require the paralegals to come in to do this- I fully support that line of thinking, because the mailing is not the primary part of their job either. So there's a reasonable justification for requiring someone on the team to come in one day a week. There are ad hoc meetings that pop up that are better done in person, so I also agree that people should come in for those as needed. |
Anonymous
| What are the employees specifically getting paid to do and how much of that needs to get done in a specific time frame? I am right now an admin for a hospital radiology department. We see about 3 patients an hour and my job is to make appointments and arrange transportation from wards and arrange blood tests for the invasive procedures. If that very visible job doesn’t get done, then I get called out on it. It’s not rocket science to measure productivity. I don’t understand what the issue is. Hold employees accountable to their job role. |
Anonymous
Sorry, I phrased that really poorly. There's a reasonable justification for having one person come in each day of the week. |
Anonymous
+1. People also seem to think employees can't goof off in the office if they want to avoid working. Browsing the net, playing games on phone, chatting with people and going for walks are just a few examples of things people can do from the office. If you don't have measurable productivity metrics you're not going to be able to effectively manage people in the office either. |
Anonymous
We’ll put |
Anonymous
Yup, same. People in our agency are being required to go in 1x per week or 2x per pay period. I am remote but on days that I go in, it's a ghost town. Very few people, no meetings are being conducted in person, everything is still on teams, and nobody is actually collaborating and nothing has been suggested by management to facilitate such collaboration. It's just butts in seats in a dreary, rat infested building. |
Anonymous
If you are a manager, why don't you try... managing? Like, have a conversation with those people about their availability and productivity. If you are not a manager, it's none of your business unless your work is being interrupted, in which case... go to the manager. I don't understand the purpose of having middle management if they cannot even do the most basic managing, but this is government we are talking about after all. |
Anonymous
These meetings can be done on teams. I prefer that they be done on teams rather than being trapped by a manager at a time of his choosing and listen to him drone on and on and on. |
Anonymous
+1 NP here. The ones in the office seem to talk to each other a significant part of the day. Those who want to work, literally can't focus. It is clear that most of the people in my office literally have nothing to do all day. They sent most of us home, with the idea we would be reachable - certain (highest) priorities are cyclical - and the teams needed have not been reachable for at least two months. Yet, they will not tell them to come in during their (respective) most in demand time. As long as there are people to make it look like we are there, the higher ups are happy. The same higher ups that barely came in all summer, and disappear for good chunks of time. But as long as the lowest paid are in person, I guess? 
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