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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

#491

Post by danbolt »

ilaksh wrote: post #480
lampshades wrote: post #400

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm currently going through interviews and I think "collaboration" and communication is a real thing WFH is missing. You say that people can collaborate real-time from any corner of the planet but that hasn't been my experience. I have had two companies in the last few weeks (out of like 5) where my recruiter had no idea what stage of the process I was in because at some other point some recruiter had picked me up. I…

Those are process failures. People need to be responsible on some electronic communication medium and if they can't do that then they have to be fired.

Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. If the org has a clear goal and is organized enough, this sort of work can easily be distributed asynchronously.

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

#492

Post by snarf21 »

feyman_r wrote: post #194

I am an outlier and minority here - WFH should have worked for me, but I realized the lack of control over snacking when at home, and a lack of discipline to take breaks between meetings to walk and be active. I gained 20 lbs over two years. When I’m in the office, both these problems don’t exist; in fact 1:1s become ‘walking 1:1s’. I feel more healthier; the commute back allows me to disconnect from work and decline…

This is the thing I wish people would admit: it is all a preference. It's fine if some people want to WFH. It should also be fine if some people don't. Let employers fight to get their employees what their employees want or lose them to one that will. I wish I could work locally but it is no longer possible but I see a lot of benefits that you enjoy too. There is no absolute, just a preference for each person's priorities.

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

#493

Post by moomoo11 »

WFH is great for jobs where you don’t need to innovate _as much_ or do anything significantly meaningful but keep the lights on.

You really do benefit from being in person when doing something meaningful and impactful. It just works much better, and you only need a few people to do this and delegate the rest of the work to the WFH crowd.

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

#494

Post by freetanga »

awslattery wrote: post #266
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…

> unless perhaps the office is a 5 minute walk from home WFH for 2012-2023 here. With our first home purchase in 2018 being on the smaller size, and the introduction of our first child to the family in 2021, I started keeping an eye on nearby options. In March of 2023, a perfect little spot opened up that could support me and another employee in the same town. Pitched it to our small company, and now I have a dedicat…

Nice, and I agree with you. In my line of work would not be so easy, as large corpos have a bunch of job safety and info sec standards, beyond internet connection.

Clean desk policy, no take-home printouts, clear whiteboards with confidencial information, etc…

I had a WFH employee who once burn himself at home while making coffee with his own coffee pot, and sue the company as he claimed was a job-related accident. We had to settle and pay him, or have Unions making a big fuzz.

There are all sort of people in the workplace, and policies try to accommodate not only CEO whims, but also to manage a crowd full of many different types of people.

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

#495

Post by steveBK123 »

supergeek133 wrote: post #488
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…

This is actually a decent take. Most of our C-Suite doesn't live near an office. Or, to be specific WE MOVED HQ to where they wanted to live. We have other VPs and whatnot who live not near an office, or have winter/summer homes they go back and forth from. Meanwhile our mandatory "3 days a week in the office" starts September.

Exactly.

The guys who get to choose the office locations happen to choose ones that are good for the locations of their home(s). Also, a reminder that C-suite guys that have multiple homes do in fact actually use those multiple homes.

How do they do so? They have flexibility!

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

#496

Post by HelloNurse »

skissane wrote: post #414
FredPret wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> The CEO and analyst are both upper class Class can be more fine-grained than just lower/working-middle-upper People commonly talk about “upper middle class” vs “lower middle class”, and then I suppose there are even some people in between the two (middle middle class?) Well, in the same way there is surely lower upper class and upper upper class, and maybe even more levels than that. A person on an annual salary of…

There are other dimensions than number of millions; money might be an universal measure, but people are different.

Who is more upper class, a relatively impoverished Prince of the Holy Roman Empire or a billionaire by marriage and luck? Managers like the mentioned bank CEO, or someone who can rent them a house in the Hamptons because they have lived there for generations? An intellectual who has never really worked, or a wealthy rapper who didn't finish high school?

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

#497

Post by deathanatos »

Zetice wrote: post #473
deathanatos wrote: post #422

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you want to share with us how that belief is incorrect? It seems downright trivial to me that giving employees 4' desks packed side to side, back to back in rows requires less square footage and no walls, vs. an office. (And thus, the race for short-term gains in terms of less real estate trumped the long-term gains of SWE being able to think, and the race to the bottom began. It seems to me the costs of open-offi…

It's trivial to you that a few extra pieces of drywall and a handful of additional planks of wood would launch the cost of a buildout into the stratosphere? Are you even reading the comments about studies showing the lost productivity (and therefore revenue) caused by open office spaces? I didn't say it wouldn't cost one penny more than an open office, I said it wasn't wildly different. So many buildouts go halfway a…

When I consider "the cost of the buildout", I consider that to be the cost to do the buildout, nothing more. Productivity gains/losses are outside the scope of that.

I.e., the claim, as I read it, is that construction of an open office is more expensive than a non-open floorplan, per employee.

(If you consider that, yes, I think open office is the long-term worse option, and the parenthetical in my comment pretty clearly denotes that.)

> I didn't say it wouldn't cost one penny more than an open office, I said it wasn't wildly different.

This still isn't clear to me. An office is probably, what, 10' square, at least? Google thinks, "The North American office size average is currently 150-175 square feet per employee. Open office spaces for tech companies typically use even less at 125-175 square feet per person". That's considerably more room than an open office floorplan, which is probably closer to 4'x4', maybe 4'x5'.

> So many buildouts go halfway already with the tiny "phone rooms"

My company had 3 of those, back to back to back, occupying what like 30–40 sq ft total? That's hardly "halfway".

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

#498

Post by smeej »

flandish wrote: post #215
steveBK123 wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My favorite story on this thread is that during the hybrid period, GS CEO threw a fit when out in the Hamptons because some analyst (fairly junior role almost at the bottom) had the balls to go introduce themselves during a workday lunch at a restaurant. He couldn't articulate a specific, valid complaint like "I was out at a client lunch and they were goofing off" or "I was on a vacation day while they were supposed…

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.

So many of the comments are acting as though the underling employee actually is of a different class.

I'd bet anything this young person is used to having his family name make him welcome at any table he wishes to join, even in the Hamptons. He's on the well-worn path through a brief stint as a junior analyst before he's running some bank or hedge fund somewhere and the CEO of GS hesitates to approach his table.

This isn't the action of someone either boldly or naively misunderstanding his place. This is the action of someone who has grown up knowing his place is wherever he wishes it to be.

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

#499

Post by solardev »

pydry wrote: post #360
peatmoss wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you mean "commoditized", like work that used to be hard and custom is now generic? If so, totally agreed... we've moved up the ladder of abstractions quite a bit and there's less of a need to build up from the ground these days.

To me, though, that calls less for private offices and more for effective async collaboration. With 11 teams, nothing is going to get done over meetings except some basic alignments. The actual work of integration needs to be fully documented and agreed upon in writing in a way where provider and consumer can look at while actively developing, like a living API spec with specific schema, response and error codes etc. all laid out. If any team fails to adhere to the spec, well, the spec is right (as of any given version).

Even if we were all in person in the same conference room talking for hours one afternoon, none of that is going to stick around more than a week or two before some detail diverges.

The meetings are perhaps good for managers to walk away with some basic summary of a decision, but the actual engineering and IT work can't happen in them. I wish more managers would realize that and give teams more time to actually collaborate through individual async contributions, not just sitting together in a room -- there's a big difference.

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

#500

Post by eschneider »

Brusco_RF wrote: post #306
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…

Respectfully, this is an example of rigid thinking that isn't productive or accurate. Apply marginal thinking the way economists do. People's propensity to return to the office falls on a spectrum ranging from 0 ( the people who are already back in their cubicles ) to 9 ( "You'll need a SWAT team to get me back to the office" ). A 5 on that scale is a marginal worker. Provide an incentive for them to return, like a n…

It's much more "offer me work SO rewarding, the commute is worth it" or "money SO good, it makes the commute worth it." Office amenities probably won't get if done, as many folks can just setup the home office the way they want it, or at least as well as most private offices.
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