My employer has thankfully taken the opposite approach. They decided that the only people who had to return to the office were those who needed to interact with directly humans or physical objects. Anyone who could do their job from home was free to do so. My boss said he was happy that employees could live where they wanted instead of within an hour of one of the offices. I took him at his word and moved from California to British Columbia.
wow that’s crazy, workers have standards for themselves and now the bosses can’t push us around and force us back to the office? wonder what would happen if we had those standards for more things…
I worked for a self-proclaimed data-driven company. They didn’t understand how to use data and just used it to justify arbitrary decisions. They hated their employees so much, it was wild. They taught their people managers to use data to gaslight employees by telling them they were happy (most of us weren’t). If you don’t feel your employer appreciates you, do what you can to leave.
But many bosses are getting impatient, and many are using the approaching Labor Day holiday as an occasion to officially put “work from anywhere” policies to bed, whether workers like it or not.
I like how they think it’s up to them. They’re absolutely against history on this one. The precedent been the collapse of the feudal system after the black death.
The example of Amazon’s mandated RTO has been much discussed elsewhere as a notable exception to that company’s normally data-driven approach. As I saw commented elsewhere:
“If we have data to show that mandated RTO is more productive then let’s share and act on that. If we’re going with opinions then let’s use mine”
The elephant in the room here is that ‘the data’ doesn’t exist, and for good reason: ‘Productivity’ is subjective in most jobs to begin with, and even where it isn’t Remote vs Office is not a significant variable.
Consider some ‘traditional’ proxy measures for productivity- punctuality and attendance. It’s pretty clear that if someone isn’t at work then they aren’t productive and many employers will put employees through formal processes to dismissal in response. Why don’t we see this being highlighted with remote work? Should be easy and obvious to measure and demonstrate right? Could it be that these things improve with remote work?
Consider also the pandemic impact on remote work and that we are talking about a return. It’s clear that many organisations could manage perfectly well, as they themselves have proved.
They said -- out loud, with words, as well as with actions -- that they neither trust nor respect us. Many of them installed tracking software on remote hardware so that they could be alerted if employees took their hands off of their mouses long enough to even think, because if we're not living in their own panopiticons, they think we're all trying to fuck them over.
Which, to me, is the admission that they're actively and consciously trying to fuck us over.
They're not upset today that RTO hampered "productivity", because they don't care about that. They were, and are, willing to pay the price in order to physically lord themselves over people. What they regret is that people quit, and they've struggled to hire, and those that they have interviewed have made demands of them -- like higher wages, or to be able to work remotely.
They regret the feeling that they lost power when attempting to reassert it.
Most bosses regret how they mandated workers return to the office. They blamed it on not having enough data
Jane Thier 5–6 minutes
Why aren’t workers particularly appreciating—much less adhering to—return-to-office mandates? Probably because adults don’t like being ordered around.
“People do want structure, and people like boundaries,” former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell last year. “But they don’t like to be told what to do, so I think the secret is to not make them feel like their autonomy is being denied or that their ideas aren’t important, while still giving some structure.”
If only managers had taken the hint. Four in five (80%) of bosses told workplace software firm Envoy that had they had a better grasp on their workplace data, they would have taken a starkly different approach to their return-to-office plans. The problem, they said: They didn’t have access to data that would help them make their decision. In a white paper report, Envoy surveyed 1,156 U.S.-based executives and workplace managers whose employees operate on some form of hybrid schedule.
Over half (54%) of managers told Envoy they’ve had to forgo making a critical decision about the workplace because they lacked the requisite data to support it. Without that data, nearly a quarter of them admit to making decisions based on “gut instinct,” which naturally leads to resentment and disappointment. Fifty-seven percent of bosses said if they had better access to data, they could better measure the success of their in-office policies.
One such example is Amazon, whose RTO plan was admittedly prompted by the feelings of senior leadership, not hard data. “It’s time to disagree and commit. We’re here, we’re back—it’s working,” Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, reportedly said of in-person work. “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”
It’s difficult to ascertain just how effective in-person days are compared to at-home days, especially when actual productivity could vary based on any number of factors not necessarily related to location. It’s even harder for companies who operate on an ad hoc basis, letting individual teams decide for themselves when to come in. Though experts speak highly of this kind of “organized hybrid,” it can be difficult to assess its effectiveness at a company level. “With so much variability, it’s difficult to know how to improve efficiency in order to save critical budget,” Brooks Gooding, a workplace experience program manager at a software firm called Braze, said in the report.
Braze operates on a hybrid plan with little consistency in attendance rates, which, as Envoy wrote, can make it “impossible for workplace managers to know how many people are on-site on any given day, and how to best allocate space and resources across the organization.” The RTO mismatch
Envoy’s data lays bare a fundamental mismatch that’s endured since the earliest days of the pandemic: Most bosses would rather have their workers where they can see them. Most workers demand a bit more latitude than that.
Granted, there are solid arguments for both time spent in the office and time spent on the couch. On one hand, remote work is proven to be between 10% and 20% less productive and can weaken morale and bonding, especially among younger workers and new workforce entrants. But people still overwhelmingly prefer at least a few days per week at home, arguing that physical office presence is more trouble than it’s worth and is rarely necessary to complete a task.
Ideally, a mix of both options—at the workers’ discretion—should fix the problem. Workers are flocking to jobs with flexibility, which has quickly become a must-have for most white-collar industries rather than a nice-to-have.
But many bosses are getting impatient, and many are using the approaching Labor Day holiday as an occasion to officially put “work from anywhere” policies to bed, whether workers like it or not. Alongside the usual suspects (like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs), those even include formerly quite lenient companies, like Meta, Google, and Salesforce.
Despite the fact that remote workers make more money and have fewer expenses, lower stress levels, and more time for family and errands, the office isn’t likely to disappear. In fact, workers can even be excited by the prospect—if they think it’s their idea. Data from Unispace found that a third of workers felt “happy, motivated, and excited” about an office return, but felt none of those things when the return was mandated.
As Atlassian’s Annie Dean put it, productivity, innovation, and creativity are “how-to-work problems, not where-to-work problems,” which will be solved only by an overhaul of how we understand work.
“This is a watershed moment of innovation of how work gets done,” Dean told Fortune, “but we’re still talking about the f–king watercooler.”
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Lost all credibility when it implied working from home is working from the “couch”. This is not what working from home means in a professional context. Dedicated working spaces with a desk, monitors, and a proper chair is working from home in a modern organisation.
Sometimes I attend to meetings from my couch. As did I in the office. But I have two great monitors, a height adjustable table, a great office chair, a fan, the light is perfect for my desk...
Sure, joining a call from the couch, bed, or toilet is a thing but it’s not something that is the entire day. I agree about having a better desk set up at home - I spent a lot of my own money making my home environment better.
When the pandemic started, my sisters and I would work from the dinner table. Then gradually we all drifted into different rooms, buying desks to work on. Pretty soon we had our own offices in our house. These people don't know or care to find out what normal people are like, they make decisions based on their own assumptions and that's why their employees hate them.
Treat them like humans, take the time to ask them what they think. Have some goddamn empathy for fuck's sake.
Completely agree! It’s a privileged place to be in to have the room to dedicate to an office but I think it’s necessary to have that setup to work from home properly without screwing your body, if nothing else.
My office is a 4 by 4m corner of my bedroom. I'm lucky in that I can devote that much space to it. But it's all about having a place you can dedicate to being your workspace. If that's on a couch, then let it be on the couch. At the end of the day, if you're fulfilling the tasks outlined in your job description then there's really nothing to complain about.
I spent the first year of covid working from the couch, and it was more than fine, at least from a work perspective. I was more productive there, I think, than I am in my home office! But it robbed me of my den. I was only able to be productive in that space by it no longer being a relaxation and entertainment space. So, I had to reclaim it.
But still, the idea of working from a comfortable space is something employers see as unprofessional, and a sign you're not actually working. They're wrong, but perception always wins out. And in their minds, that's what we're doing when working from home - being comfortable, relaxing, and not doing any work.
Employers have publicly accused employees of "time theft" over and over again since lockdowns started, and have brought it up in almost every discussion about RTO. They see people working from their living room as this "time theft", even as the amount of work that they get done has remained consistent with, or even higher than, what they got done at the office. Simply by being at home, were theives in their minds. Because they can't be creepy little shits and stand to greet us when we get back from lunch 2 minutes late, or time how long we're in the bathroom.
If you enjoy doing something, that’s leisure, and you should be paying for it.
If someone is paying you to do something, then it clearly isn’t something you’d pay for doing yourself, so you can’t enjoy doing it.
Work is suffering, or it isn’t “real” work.
If you aren’t suffering while claiming to be at work, then you’re clearly stealing your employer’s time.
Unfortunately, there do exist people willing to get paid for doing nothing, pretty much every employer ends up meeting some sooner or later, so even those who claim to look for people who “like and are passionate about their work”, in reality end up trying to catch the lazy grifters to cut them out.
Most professional jobs can’t be done from a couch without screwing your body or compromising your work space, etc. A laptop on your knees isn’t a professional work environment for most people.
I spent a while during lockdown taking video calls from my bed. It doesn't matter where you are. The whole point of a laptop is to be able to work anywhere.
See also small businesses consistently blocking bike lanes and pedestrianization despite that being repeatedly shown to massively boost profits, because people in cars just fucking drive to walmart.
I'm not sure that they ever had any data because the data would probably suggest that management had the lowest productivity out of any employee. Middle management is filled with too many meetings, they're all promoted to a level of incompetency, and have delusions that they contribute more towards the success of the business than the skilled people below them.
That would just require them to admit that, as managers, their jobs are to sit in meetings and delegate work. Currently, most of them don't want to admit that - especially upper management about middle management - but as soon as they needed some kind of quantitative measure to highlight their productivity, it would be normalized and accepted.
They might be a little bit behind the successful innovators, but I think anyone actually observing the data and shaping their policy accordingly will be fine.
We all knew productivity in at least US companies was up as a consequence of home office. It was all over the news. It's just that management either don't understand the data or are unwilling to shape their policies by it.
In general, people make decisions based on their convictions, not based on evidence.
That’s a great example - makes me wonder who actually liked it in the first place to sell it - my boss, his boss and basically everyone I knew hated open space. Where did this scourge originate?
It's just much cheaper, and often you don't even need one seat per worker. So the gamble is that "sure, people hate it, but we save so much money by making the office shittier that we can afford a slight dump in productivity per worker".
It's not that they actually think it's good - that's just something they pretend so that they don't have to tell the truth. The truth is that they made a calculation and concluded that having happy employees just wasn't worth it.
I think companies tend to underestimate the value of happy employees.
At the time, open office space was supposed to create a better environment for collaboration and as alternative to the dreaded cubicles.
This was also in time where people would send physical paperwork to each other through an internal mail system from one cubicle to another. Like there’d be an assistant to carry paper around.
It also made the office sizes more flexible.
It might work for people who desperately need to bounce their creative ideas off each other, but for anyone else it just plain sucks.
At this point I would consider a return-to-office mandate at my job to be a massive pay cut. It’d be the equivalent to spending an extra 2-3 hours a day working (because that’s what the total commute would be), plus money on vehicle upkeep. If they weren’t willing to couple it with a ~40% raise, or with letting me reduce my hours worked by 10-15 per week to compensate for the commute time, I’d quit before the change in policy went into effect, no question.
But people still overwhelmingly prefer at least a few days per week at home, arguing that physical office presence is more trouble than it’s worth and is rarely necessary to complete a task.
If that required data and research to realize, they’re simply out of touch or stupid. More likely this is just an excuse for not realizing they couldn’t bully people as effectively as they’d hoped.
It’d be the equivalent to spending an extra 2-3 hours a day working (because that’s what the total commute would be), plus money on vehicle upkeep
Maybe this is one of the reasons I actually prefer going to the office. For me, it’s only 15 minutes by metro.
No additional cost, very little wasted/lost time, and I actually enjoy being able to draw a line between work and life by putting them in different physical spaces.
Perhaps it also helps that my managers encourage people to work from wherever they feel they’re the most productive. It’s nice to know that I have the option to work from home without having to explain myself.
what WFH has really brought to light is how miserable car-dependency and suburban sprawl is.
The problem isn’t going to work, the problem is that for most people going to work entails needing to drive a car for an hour, and it’s actually insane that people have just blithely accepted that until now.
Nah, being at work was driving me towards a nervous breakdown. Open office + management that liked to just drop in at my desk uninvited and without a heads up had me an absolute wreck.
I did not handle the panopiticon well.
You could place me next door to the office, and it would have been the same.
It really makes the argument that CEOs and managers couldn’t be elected really weak. They’d probably be far more competent if they were chosen by workers once a year or so.
CEOs and managers are being elected, by the board. Which in turn, is being elected, by the owners. Which in turn… more often than not, can’t be bothered to actually think through the consequences; either they’re power tripping themselves, or anonymous “public” owners, or workers who can’t tell their taxes from their compensation plan.
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