501–510 of 830 posts
Asking people to work from home was a significant raise for many people. All of the sudden, commute costs vanished, and people often gained another hour or more they could work.
It was also a huge savings for companies that could stop paying rent and other office costs (as mine did).
You want all the employees, and the company, to pay a massive tax so you can socialize and enjoy work more. You shouldn't be surprised there is resistance to this idea.
My biggest frustration with the WFH discussion has been that the vast majority of people say that the #1 (and sometimes only) reason they prefer WFH is to save time on the commute. But this has not led to any discussions on how we can actually improve the commute, improve housing policy so people can live closer to work, etc. Instead, people have simply decided that theh will WFH instead, an option which isn’t availa…
We also have the cost of housing. I can't afford to live anywhere close to the places that tech places typically pick, and they like picking downtown because it's cool, hip, and trendy. Thanks to investors, people moving from the west coast to my city, and the significant lack of affordable housing being built, I had to move even further away from downtown to afford a house.
With all due respect, this is mostly my problem with the "work-from-office" (WFO for ease) crowd. Generally, the stance of the WFH crowd is that each individual should get a choice of what makes that individual happy. Very few, if any, of the WFH crowd want mandatated WFH, it would make no sense. But then the WFO crowd often says no, I don't care what makes you happy, because you being in makes me happy. That doesn't…
I'd also add that comments like this: > Now, I am fully aware that there's a low of people for whom the horror of commute doesn't make up for the gains of socializing and others that just abhor having to talk to real-life people. Then there are people who work mainly to get paid and do not care to invest themselves beyond what is necessary. Are remarkably condescending. Folks opting for a better work-life balance, wh…
This was a stand-alone comment, separated from the comment about those that don't like to commute or socialize. I don't think they were implying that one means the other. That's how I read it anyway.
BTW as someone that works to get paid and does not care about investing myself beyond what is necessary, I wasn't offended by that remark and I don't think OP meant it in an offensive way. To me it comes off as accepting it as a valid reason for not wanting to come in.
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> Then there are people who work mainly to get paid and do not care to invest themselves beyond what is necessary. And then are people who are fully invested, but also aware that a lot of time in office is spend on ... other people trying to get socialization. Cause they don't build relationships outside of work, but still need to talk to people, so they drag meetings and discussions forever. And that is not being in…
The unfortunate fact is that at least in the US, even if you live in a "walkable", "transit oriented" city, there is no way to run a business that's community oriented. Which means that the only actual community available is your work community. How are you supposed to "build relationships outside of work" in that environment? I get that your opinion of this is that it's degenerate, and this may be true - but have so…
What have you tried so far?
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Yep. I also wanted to respond to this. My team had actual data that showed our productivity increased when we went fully remote. We also cut a full hour out of our work day (went from 8 to 7 hours per day). Also: > WFO produces better outcomes for the company. What's backing that up?
I am curious how you measured your productivity. I do think that a weakness in the published data is that methodologically it's tough to measure productivity if work isn't done in clear, countable units, so only some kinds of work gets studied. And clearly teams struggle with picking the right metrics for themselves, carving tasks into the right sizes, etc.
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Thats lucky for you but you must be aware of how uncharacteristic that is. When you get a new job that commute disappears unless the new job is close to the old job or you up and move.
It might be a bit uncharacteristic, but it still doesn't change the fact saying commutes have to be a minimum of 30 minutes isn't true. Its not entirely out of the ordinary to have a Many people have commutes much less than 30 minutes. Maybe 30 minutes is an average, I'd probably agree average commutes are close to 45 minutes, but that's an average not a minimum . Those words have two very different meanings.
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I assume that's just a bus/subway pass? At least where I live, parking at the train station, a monthly train pass, plus a monthly transit pass would be something like $500 or $600 dollars. To say nothing of taking almost 90 minutes door to door.
Yes that's the scale for monthly public transport ticket price in large number of continental European cities. I don't own a car so I may be out of touch with those expenses, 15% just sounded to me like a lot. The time value is of course then on top, but the parent accounted for that separately.
In Boston, if you don't have a car you almost certainly wouldn't be taking commuter rail with fairly few exceptions.
If you wonder why an argument might be controversial, it can helpful to imagine how it would sound like in mirror world: Assume for a moment that working remotly and a flexible workday would have been always the default. And now some companies decide: Hey let's contractually enforce a 9 hour continuous workday where all our workers will be locked in a big ugly building that we build just for that purpose (Btw. at lea…
There's a really cool philosophy paper "The reversal test: Eliminating status quo bias in applied ethics" - using a reversal like the one you describe (imagine a world where the opposite was true). But then the authors also do a double-reversal (imagine the world is identical to ours, but there's a policy about to be implemented which will make it into "mirror world" and we have the option to do nothing and let it happen, or act and prevent the reversal). Great thinking tool!
https://philpapers.org/rec/BOSTRT
full paper PDF: https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/statusquo.pdf
On business/project level:
Every project I've been on last 10-15 years had been geographically heterogeneous. I find such projects are working much better and more efficiently now. Instead of 2 classes of citizens, those who are in one of the main offices and those who are in satellite offices, we now all have to put in the effort and system to communicate, and we do. We're all first class citizens and all professionals who get work done and are aware of what's going on and what the process is. I dread going back to the hybrid office and the hated phrase "You guys on the phone won't see this, but we're sketching something on the whiteboard here", or when people ignore process or break stuff because 3 guys in a cubicle decided & did something and left other 100 people behind, etc.
On a personal level:
People come in variety of personalities, stages, circumstances, and preferences. You are not under stockholm syndrome for missing office any more than those who don't miss the office.
Personally, I don't miss the commute; I don't miss the inflexibility of hours; I don't miss the noise and distractions; and as per above, I don't miss the confusion that cliques in office can inadvertently create. I miss seeing some of the co-workers, but guess what - option to see them still remains. I spend a lot of time on video calls and phone, and feel I know and relate to my co-workers, with some of them even becoming friendly.
As for wages, sure... but there's no moral "right" I see to artificially inflate my salary due to made up benefits of being in an expensive office building. Either I bring something tangible to the table that's worth the money, or I don't. As well, I'm not convinced "body in the office" was ever any real benefit of local talent.
So, you're not alone by any stretch; and most executives for whatever reason are gung-ho on return to office. But for the project I'm currently on, I anticipate at least 20% drop in efficiency and effectiveness once that happens, and am planning mitigation strategies for my teams.
My 100 Croatian Lipa :)