I don’t get it. Companies want to make money. Study after study proves that WFH generates greater productivity on average and, therefore, more output and more money. Surely, it must be costing more to maintain massive office buildings and overpay useless middle managers to lord over employees?
I work in a role that was something like 80% travel before the pandemic. Now it’s 0% travel. The company could not be happier; we’re able to offer more competitive services at lower prices than ever before, employees are happier, and our customers really couldn’t care less whether we meet them on site.
They’re still paying to rent/lease, and to maintain the empty office buildings. They’re trying to get their money’s worth, even if it ends up costing them in the long run.
My company just sold about 90% of their buildings. Then consolidated whoever left that likes to work in office (I don’t know why anyone would lol) in one building. They’re still only occupying 8% of that one building.
Plenty of reasons people choose to keep going to the office. No need to hate on them, but also no need to force the rest of us back either. I work full time remote WFH and personally love it.
to add to this, time spent on traveling. Also, home is a comfort zone for many workers so it just saves time and increases productivity and you don’t want to be kinds tired after the day ends.
These are exactly the reason I prefer to work in office. WFH actually makes the office more pleasant, since there is less people there, which gives me more space and less noise.
Unfortunately, the long commute time kind of forced me to be at home. U.S. really need to fix their freaking transport system.
I strongly disagree that there are less distractions in the office.
I live on the east coast but my company is on the west coast, occasionally I fly out and work there and often the first hour, maybe 90 mins of the day is coffee run, breakfast, water cooler chat, stand up, more chit chat, second coffee run, someone comes over to chat, general melee as people muck around, someone makes a loud joke, hour lunch break, late.coming back. afternoon coffee run… it’s just chaos
It's good for companies that rent office space, but not for companies that own those offices. This is corporate landlords throwing a shitfit, and they have a lot more money and own more news outlets than companies who rent.
being devils advocate here, they probably are blinded by the reports of workers who are inefficient at remote work. I want remote work as much as the next guy, I am deeply passionate for it; but I can see why management teams would want inhouse. Easier to monitor and punish mentor the under-performers if you are physically present in the building. The higher ups don’t generally care about stats, they only care about what issues are being brought to their plate/causing more work for them… and the underperforming workers are a pretty big additional work for them.
with WFH it’s generally harder to analyze what areas the worker is struggling, and it also lacks the one on one with the worker. You can still technically do a video call or screen-share but, it’s harder to monitor the worker to verify that said mentorship is taking effect, without compromising the privacy of the worker and the system at hand. It’s possible to do but, you lose many tools such as constant monitoring of multiple under-performers at once that make it harder to actually monitor and mentor. This is without including that remote work is much harder to actually monitor work activity vs work productivity until it is too late(end of day, missed deadline, etc).
Just anecdotally, I noticed that more junior team members were FAR more willing to ask me for help with something after we were pulled back to the office. That can be mitigated with thoughtful collaboration efforts when operating fully remote, but I didn’t even know they needed help until they could just pop by my desk and ask for something. And they started doing it frequently.
But to be clear, I greatly prefer full remote for myself and again, thoughtful approaches to team management can solve or mitigate a bunch of the remote work downsides, probably.
They get huge tax breaks for the bodies those buildings were supposed to bring to their cities. Now that nobody's in them, those cities aren't getting the extra tax money from the office workers anymore, so they're pressuring companies to bring workers back to the office. No giant, money-thirsty corporation wants to maintain a huge, expensive office building, but they're stuck doing so unless they want to sell it at a loss and risk pissing off the owners of whatever palms they had to grease to get the deal in the first place.
There have been further studies that show that work from home may not be as productive. The science doesn’t seem to be as settled.
You also may have issues with coordination where some face time would be good on an as-needed basis. It may not need to be full time in the office, but I can see wanting some in person meetings.
Use a map that has incorrect information for every nation. Have Canada be Mexico, China be France, US be Australia, etc. When nothing is right it’s real hard to have an issue with the accuracy of a map. It isn’t even crucial prop for the movie. Stop cutting off profit possibilities because you keep forgetting to learn your lesson.
I just read “Remote: Office Not Required (2013)” and I’d recommend it for anyone who is having these talks at work. It’s a quick read and I found my copy at the library. We have to advocate for your interests. I will take an in person meeting over a video call any day of the week, but that in no way means that you can’t get the same work done virtually as you can in person and it is significantly less pleasant spending life in an office than having to do a video call zero or more times a day.
It is clear that remote work works just fine. I think the problem runs deeper than productivity or social needs and is more about some unknown insecurities and values that workers and managers have about work. Traditionally work is something that happens above all else. We orchestrate our lives around work. Remote work changes this and that’s a huge deal. IMO that’s why it’s hard to debate this topic using facts around productivity or mental health or even company success, because it’s a philosophical debate about how we live.
Hey google, I heard people like money. Maybe if you pay willing employees a reasonable amount to commute, they’ll be willing to come in. Otherwise, shut it.
Jesus Christ Caviezel, did playing Jesus Christ make you a loon?
Well, supposedly: “During filming, he was struck by lightning, scourged by accident, dislocated his shoulder, and suffered from pneumonia and hypothermia.” I can’t imagine being struck by lightning is great for your brain…
It’s amazing how consistent it is that the ones screeching the loudest about pedophiles constantly seem to get outed as pedos, if this holds true I wonder what secrets Jim Cavaziel is hiding, I wonder if he is in fact the Hollywood person getting adrenochrome from aborted babies that Qanon nutters constantly imagine.
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