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Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

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Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#151

Post by kjkjadksj »

tayo42 wrote: post #106
Veliladon wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not only will those employers competing for the best get the best, they'll get it at a discount rate because remote workers are on average willing to accept an 18% pay cut to remain fully remote. Employees are literally willing to pay employers to stay at home. The middle manager who is awful at their job and so insecure they need to "see employees working" is costing the business not just in talent acquisition but w…

Middle managers aren't making these decisions to have people go back to working in offices

Their job is to support their staff against higher management. They are failing to do that if their teams are begrudgingly going back to work. They really do have all the leverage here. A business cannot function without labor or else it would just be the c suite as the only people employed.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#152

Post by steveBK123 »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #83
mytailorisrich wrote: post #30

People who like WFH will never want to return to the office unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home (they may be forced to, but they won't want to). For many people the time and cost savings of avoiding a daily commute cannot be offset by a nicer office. Those who are happy to return to the office in general are those who do not like WFH and prefer more contacts and a change of scenery. A nicer office…

See if I lived five minutes walk from work, I’d want to be in the office even less. Why sit there between meetings if I am five minutes from my home? Why bag a lunch when my kitchen is down the block? I’d probably show face at the obligate meetings then just go home for the day if I could.

What's funny is my boss, a total hardo, during latter stages of COVID did live 5 minutes from work.

He used it to his advantage to show his face in the office, but rarely ever put in a full day. So sure he might show up on reports as being a 2-3x/week attender while others were doing 0-1, but many of those were morning-only, afternoon-only, or drop-ins for an in-person meeting of importance. Plus the occasional Friday solitude getaway to the empty office.

To his credit he really put no RTO pressure on us relative to his management chain.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#153

Post by sneak »

harshaw wrote: post #10

I think its fair to say that RTO is not about data, or studies, or about anything really. Leaders across all industries have decided people are coming back. Perhaps there is a secret cabal of commercial office space lenders who are putting pressure as share holders, or some other conspiracy theory. But it's happening - no one can do anything about it (except vote with your feet), and no one is going to get better acc…

It's always a good thing when bad companies with bad managers are free to alienate and otherwise drive away their best talent.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#154

Post by Cthulhu_ »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #83
mytailorisrich wrote: post #30

People who like WFH will never want to return to the office unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home (they may be forced to, but they won't want to). For many people the time and cost savings of avoiding a daily commute cannot be offset by a nicer office. Those who are happy to return to the office in general are those who do not like WFH and prefer more contacts and a change of scenery. A nicer office…

See if I lived five minutes walk from work, I’d want to be in the office even less. Why sit there between meetings if I am five minutes from my home? Why bag a lunch when my kitchen is down the block? I’d probably show face at the obligate meetings then just go home for the day if I could.

I'd do it because I think it's better to have separate work / life areas; right now my WFH spot is also my PC gaming spot and the bedroom and the place where laundry dries, and I wouldn't mind more distance between work, leisure and private life.

That said, five minutes means one could come home for lunch.

But anyway, five minute walk to work is highly unlikely; a lot of people (most? citation needed?) have a commute to work, either driving or public transit. I'd rather have a nice private office or small team room than a big open and loud office space.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#155

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

steveBK123 wrote: post #96
AvAn12 wrote: post #9

Joel Spolesky has made this very point many times in the past: "Private offices with doors that close were absolutely required and not open to negotiation." I work on a Data Sci team that moved to an open floor plan in 2018. What happened? Anyone who needed to work intensively on a project would work from home instead of in the office.

Open floorplans are especially problematic if your team handles any mix of development & operational tasks. Wall Street tech it's pretty typical to do your own SRE/L3 and honestly even L2/L1. Everything from business user "hey how do I.." customer service questions down to "the server is on fire, alerts are coming in .. ". Open floorplans mean even if you have an agreed PagerDuty type rotation, everyone gets sucked i…

Is that a bad thing? Since we started WFH, I’ve heard a lot of stories of oncalls spending an hour on things that could have been handled in 5 seconds if the right person had gotten sucked in on the way back from coffee. “Oh, I recognize this bug from two years ago, here’s what you gotta do.” “That customer’s symptoms are impossible, ask for more details on how they’re doing suchandsuch because they must be leaving something out.”

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#156

Post by captainbland »

btbuildem wrote: post #131
Zetice wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If all of this results in an office layout revolution that includes many individual offices opening into shared team spaces, I am 100% here for it.

It won't. The push for open-plan spaces was motivated by cost-cutting. Layouts with many closed offices would cost far more to build, and take up more square footage to host the same number of employees. At a time where savvy businesses have dropped their commercial leases / gone full remote, and the more conservative / less accepting of change ones are left holding the bag, I would not expect anyone to make big inve…

To be honest I think with hybrid, open offices make a lot of sense. Realistically you want to be able to hot desk because that's where the cost savings are made in a hybrid situation. You sort of fractional-reserve your office space. Of course it works only so long as nobody calls an in-person all hands.

The in-office days are social collaboration days so it doesn't make sense to keep people in separate boxes for them. Then people's home office setups are their cubes if they want them, which most people seem to.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#157

Post by amluto »

The nicest office, by far, that I ever worked in was a four person office, and my officemates and I were generally working on almost completely unrelated things. Outside the offices was a nice lounge, quite large but extensively broken up with furniture and architecture, with lots of couches and blackboards.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#158

Post by lanstin »

mytailorisrich wrote: post #30

People who like WFH will never want to return to the office unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home (they may be forced to, but they won't want to). For many people the time and cost savings of avoiding a daily commute cannot be offset by a nicer office. Those who are happy to return to the office in general are those who do not like WFH and prefer more contacts and a change of scenery. A nicer office…

I don't know, I worked in the 90s when I had a private office and it was very nice compared to the shitholes being offered now. To be sure salaries were like 25% of what they are now, but the thing I like about WFH, the ability to close the door and pace around and think, and also to start to research some topics and get a pile of articles and books, and then forget about them, and then come back in a few days with my former mental state roughly reflected in the physical arrangement of the documents, making it easier to weave things together in kicking ideas around/brainstormy kind of way, was very much present in the private office. It's not like people didn't wander around and chat and overhear what things were going on, but we had the ability to focus as needed. I think a nice office would be a good inducement.

Re: Want employees to return to the office? Then give each one an office

#159

Post by layer8 »

downrightmike wrote: post #91
makingstuffs wrote: post #66

People need to stop trying to make things return to the original office model. Employees have realised we are equally as effective working from home and simply do not want to waste 2+ UNPAID hours of every day travelling to a corporate building for the sake of it. Nor do people want to spend £10+ a day on food and drinks which they have in their fridge, at home. Then there is also the social pressure of having to go…

Humans have only been working in offices since the industrial revolution, before that it was nearly all WFH. WFH is our natural state.

This wasn’t true for any kind of collaborative work requiring physical presence.
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