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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

#351

Post by thegaulofthem »

FredPret wrote: post #318
flandish wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This example is a stark reminder that the complaints are most often not about details but about class . The CEO was upset others were allowed to perform as if they were of the same class. It’s always class when one boils it down, imho.

Not everything is a class dynamic. “Analyst at GS hanging out in the Hamptons” doesn’t scream working class. The CEO and analyst are both upper class, just different levels of power and seniority. That CEO is just a power-tripping asshole.

They may both be richer than you (they’re certainly richer than I), but they’re definitely not of the same class.

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

#352

Post by lampshades »

CoastalCoder wrote: post #200
dack wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

even if you like the place, hard to beat lunch with the wife

I don't mean this as cras, but even better is "lunch" with the wife. I.e., when the two of you are finally home alone and awake, because school is in session. I suspect for some marriages, WFH has been a real blessing.

And for other marriages, WFH has been a disaster. I know so many people who have ended up divorced after they were both WFH everyday.

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

#353

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

ibejoeb wrote: post #202
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…

Many people with families, or even just DINKS, would opt for private offices. Unless you've got a giant home with private space, working at the same time and while your home life goes on around you is pretty bad.

I've only got a small home. We finally turned the smallest bedroom into an office for me and the wife. It's great, and much more comfortable than commuting to an open plan noisy office. I have more desk space and nicer equipment at home.

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

#354

Post by coryfklein »

One efficiency of WFH that is underappreciated is the ability to match working hours to capacity. I can't count how many times I was in the office and 3 PM rolled around and I was completely spent. I knew that with a herculean effort I could probably squeeze a few more drops of productivity into my day, but it wasn't worth it.

But you can't just "go home" at 3 PM. So you check some emails. Look over your shoulder and pull open Reddit or – dare I say – Hacker News and you while away those final 90 minutes until you can walk out the door having said you worked a full 8 hour day. Neither you nor your employer really want those 90 minutes spent that way, but it happens, and it's demoralizing all around.

When working from home there is sooo much more flexibility to match productive hours with working hours. When I'm excited and energized and a project is in that flow state I might actually put in 10 hours. Other times at that 3 o'clock slump, I put headphones in and phone into a meeting (or listen to a recording) while doing random chores around the house. What time I check out of work is now a fuzzy mental calculation of how much energy I have, how productive I'd be, how much demand there is for my time, and, yes, a little bit of a simple desire to have life outside of work.

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

#355

Post by eloisant »

surgical_fire wrote: post #123
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea that employers need to give you everything you want is strange. They give you the least they can possibly get away with. Sure - some small subset of employers competing for the best employees will do this. But the average employer? I'm skeptical.

> They give you the least they can possibly get away with. And employees should take the most they can possibly get away with. When an employee doesn't behave like that, he is acting against his own interests.

Not only acting against his own interests, but making it worse for everyone by lowering the bar of what an employer needs to provide to hire.

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

#356

Post by CamperBob2 »

rqtwteye wrote: post #295
Roark66 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>My vaguely populist take is that the pandemic, WFH/remote and hybrid gave the mass white collar class a taste of what the C-suite has had for years.. flexibility. Exactly. I've been working 100% from home since 2017 (3 years before covid). I'd rather take a 50% paycut than go back to the office. Don't get me wrong. I did enjoy my life when I lived 15 min walk /5 min on a bike, from my job in a city. Before I got tha…

" I'd rather take a 50% paycut than go back to the office." People should stop saying this. Otherwise it will soon be the standard to take a serious paycut for WFH. .

(Shrug) If that's what it takes, that's what it takes. Commuting is for suckers, regardless of how many numbers are on your paycheck.

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

#357

Post by [deleted] »

rayiner wrote: post #179
steveBK123 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My vaguely populist take is that the pandemic, WFH/remote and hybrid gave the mass white collar class a taste of what the C-suite has had for years.. flexibility. Sure, these guys might go into the office but they do so from their pied-a-terre / 3rd home / whatever within a 5 minute chauffeured drive. They do this while maintaining a nearby suburban/exurban estate and maybe a lake/beach/ski houses where they spend th…

> My vaguely populist take is that the pandemic, WFH/remote and hybrid gave the mass white collar class a taste of what the C-suite has had for years.. flexibility. That’s not populist at all. It’s just another example of the white collar class enjoying the benefits of technology and globalization while everyone else gets left behind: https://www.epi.org/blog/wage-inequality-continued-to-increa... . Before the pandem…

[deleted]

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

#358

Post by toolz »

webdood90 wrote: post #288
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…

I suspect the lines are typically drawn between introverts and extroverts, so it's unfair to generalize here. I work remote and we don't have an office near me, but I'd love to go back. My job is where I spend the majority of my life. I like to get to know the people I work with by socializing over lunch, after work social events, etc. It's how I meet people. Collaborating remotely also sucks. You miss out on a lot o…

I struggle to see an ethical argument one could make to force rigid in-office work for anything but the smallest of companies (when the work could be done remotely). Eventually (and it won't take long) you'll hire someone that would benefit in many ways from flexible work and the only detriment will be that you would have to utilize your flexibility to satisfy your own personality traits the same as everyone else, rather than have rigid, harmful rules, that cater only to your preferences.

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

#359

Post by ghaff »

gitfan86 wrote: post #338
steveBK123 wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. He couldn't put it into words because the words wouldn't have looked good. But the obvious complaint was what are these slobs doing in my summer resort town, dining in the same establishment as me!! Rather than stuck in downtown Manhattan in the August heat. Or - the least they could do is go to Coney Island / Jones Beach / Jersey Shore or something eating some hotdogs.

I have not run into this attitude in tech from executives. Finance is much more of a heiracy culture I guess. I have run into this at a peer level though. I've negotiated WFH and extra vacation and have learned to keep it in the down low. They get mad at me, but I'm not the one that is their boss and I couldn't care less if they WFH.

It certainly varies. I've had a casual relationship with senior execs (subject of course to understanding that they get to make the decisions at the end of the day). However, I've heard the stories about some senior execs that are of the mindset of "Don't make eye contact with me unless you've been spoken to." I didn't quite believe it at first because it's never been my experience but it's a thing.

I haven't taken a month-long vacation for a while but when I did a few times in a long-ago role, there were definitely people who were at least a bit incredulous that I could get off with doing so.

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

#360

Post by pydry »

peatmoss wrote: post #201
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.

To me it beggars belief that companies spend so much on humans only to put them in an environment where it’s impossible to concentrate. I reckon at some point someone will figure out that the physical environment can be modified to make knowledge workers more productive, and start walloping their competition. I am on a distributed team with no in-person interaction, and I love commuting even though I don’t see anyone…

Anecdotally I think a a lot of the IT work that requires extreme focus has become commodified. That is, it's either done by some open source library or a SaaS or something.

I had a lot more of the stuff that required focus at the beginning of my career. In my last few jobs it's been more about hooking together subsystems from 11 different teams/companies in six different timezones.

Most bugs seem to happen because of misalignments or miscommunication. Intense focus just isnt as important any more.

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