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The damaging results of mandated return to office

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Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#131

Post by pmontra »

I worked for a mobile operator for 5 years starting in 2001. We had 20 months to bootstrap the company and get at least 3 million customers. There were no virtual operators back then. We had to have our network, our software, our everything. We were a big startup, about 3k people.

I think that the only way to pull that off is working all together in an office. Too many things to do, people to talk with, known and unknown unknowns to figure out, etc.

But a couple of years after launch, when the dust settled down? Working from home would start to be possible.

I'm self employed and working from home now, for almost 17 years. The only two things that would make me go back to an office are either I can't find a customer for a long time or somebody covers me with gold, really a lot of it.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#132

Post by Ancalagon »

DarthNebo wrote: post #43

I used to just leave my work laptop back in the office locker, coz apparently we can't work from home anymore so no 'emergency/important' work after 5PM lol.

This is the kicker for me. Work can’t be done productively from home? Fine then. My laptop goes in my backpack at 5pm when I get into my car, and it stays there until I pull it out at the office at 9am tomorrow.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#133

Post by cat_plus_plus »

Companies that claim that work from home doesn't work better not be doing mass foreign outsourcing. US employees can easily tolerate 3 hour timezone spread and be available for instant meetings throughout the day, as well as frequent in person offsites. Plus at this point Michigan is not going to be much more expensive than Bangalore.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#134

Post by danjac »

RestlessMind wrote: post #49
alistairSH wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except almost all white-collar offices (in the US at least) went remote during the first 2-3 years of COVID. Most did so successfully. Yet, many now want to return to traditional office work with little evidence that’s a better way to work.

> with little evidence that’s a better way to work. You are assuming that decision makers are dumb. I disagree with that. My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.

They might be making the "best decision", but best decision for whom? Their own career, social standing and property investment portfolio? Or the best decision for the company and employee well-being and productivity?

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#135

Post by theshrike79 »

diego_moita wrote: post #19

I wish we stopped with the "companies should do this/should do that". Existing big companies are too comfortable and lazy for the remote work revolution. Remote work is a radical change in culture and work organization. It will take new companies with new workflows and organizational ideas to make it work well. We're not there yet. Managers don't understand yet how to do it, they need to read a lot of documentation (…

Source: Worked at a ~2k employee multinational when covid hit, it got bought by a bigger corp and got turned into an ~11k employee company later on.

Large companies were already multinational, people from India didn't fly to San Fransisco or Berlin for a meeting, they did it remotely. Some bigwigs and specific consultants did it, but the regular people just used Slack and maybe Zoom to communicate over time zones.

COVID just forced everyone to up their game with this, all meeting rooms got big displays, 4k cameras and Zoom integration after RTO was an option.

People going home got allowances to buy better gear for their home office (Mine was already good, so I upgraded my home theater setup). I had multiple work friends who moved hundreds of kilometers away from the city where our office was.

Even now most people are still 99-100% remote. They only come to the office when there are company-wide parties or team events.

Now I work for a smaller startup-ish company and we're mostly remote, it's recommended to drop by the office once a week, but it's not enforced. Some are there every day, some only come for the parties.

I personally know multiple highly experienced people (20+ years in the field) who 100% refuse any offers that aren't fully remote.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#136

Post by theshrike79 »

jabbany wrote: post #104
mrtksn wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Shouldn't the workers in the rich countries be terrified of remote work? You essentially open up against competition from much cheaper places and you might end up moving there to be able to match the margins. It's not that I'm against it - IMHO freedom of movement should be absolute and people should be getting the based jobs on merits and not on nationality, it's just that all this visa stuff that makes people drown…

Time zones still matter though. I have been in same-time-zone remote teams and different-time-zone ones. The dynamic is very different. Things that take minutes or hours when everyone is on roughly the same schedule, could easily drag on to a multiple day delay in a remote team that crosses many timezones. As for fully outsourced teams... They always could have done that even before remote work. Other factors seem to…

We've all been there:

  Them: Hello, 

  8-16 hours pass

  Me: Hello, did you need something?

  8-16 hours pass

  Them: How are you?

  8- 16 hours pass
.....

https://www.nohello.com

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#137

Post by Ancalagon »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #115
threads2 wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> slowing down passage of time My days/months have been flying by and I thought I was just because I'm getting older. Thanks for mentioning this in the context of working from home. I feel a little better now. Maybe I should get an office job too.

Stasis causes memory to meld together. Even an office job will become a stasis at some point. If you really want to undercut that effect, inject new experiences into your life as often as possible.

Really the answer is to just quit working and become a hunter/gatherer, or travel the world.

I’m only half-joking.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#138

Post by pmontra »

BLKNSLVR wrote: post #100
RestlessMind wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> with little evidence that’s a better way to work. You are assuming that decision makers are dumb. I disagree with that. My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.

> You are assuming that decision makers are dumb That's only a single aspect, whilst it's also a very wide aspect. They may not be dumb, they may be "politically smart" and their KPIs are easiest to meet when their subordinates are in the office. They may not be dumb, but they feel less powerful (and therefore that their position as decision maker is more vulnerable) when their workforce is outside of whipping distan…

KPIs adapt to circumstances but the thing about power is correct. I seen many power plays and the size of the "army" of the managers and how much they could assert control were important parts of them. If employees are dispersed they can't help the "generals" too much.

Re: The damaging results of mandated return to office

#139

Post by briantakita »

Companies that expect people to work in an office will not compensate for commute time. Once employees gained the time which would have been spent on the commute to do other things including work & personal matters, it becomes difficult to justify sacrificing that time every day to improve "company culture".
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