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CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

forbes.com

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Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#181

Post by throwaway2990 »

pie420 wrote: post #131
luch wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

a videoconfering system that is reliable and easy to use is essential to remote management. You need to have as little friction as possible to propose a 1-1 or a 15 min roundtable to quickly brainstorm something orally. Then you need remote "telemetry", meaning access either to chat messages, email, tickets, etc. and a way to process it at scale (without reading everything) in order to defuse sticky situations based…

You just described Teams, Slack, Skype, and Zoom. all ubiquitous and industry standard.

All trash. A meeting in person is always shorter cos you don’t deal with audio issues a talking over each other and the mountain of other issues from remote calls. No amount of money in good hardware fixes this no matter what anyone claims.

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#182

Post by hosteur »

Joeboy wrote: post #143
lolinder wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it takes being in person for your management to tell that someone is not doing anything and PIP/fire them, then I'd certainly call that poor management. You shouldn't have to look over my shoulder to know that I'm doing my job.

How specifically would I know that? Last time I gave somebody the benefit of the doubt I ended up doing their work myself over Christmas. I'm interested to know what I should've done to avoid that.

Well, impossible to say without context. But maybe it is more interesting what you should do afterwards. What did you do afterward?

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#183

Post by jedberg »

programmertote wrote: post #81

I left Amazon a month ago (voluntarily) for a fully remote role because they asked me to move to Seattle/Arlington. When I joined them, I was already in a different state because of my wife's work. So I told them, I cannot join if they don't give me remote exception; it took them ~4-5 weeks to get the sign off for remote exception from the VP. I took the job and 9 months in, Jassy decided to force everyone back to th…

I used to work at Amazon too. I also refused to go in (even though the office was only a 15 minute drive) because I signed up for a remote role and I wanted to keep that flexibility.

> I wonder if Amazon would check the Slack+Chime logs to see how the activity drops before and after RTO mandate.

They already have and they found that productivity was way down. They don't care. They made this decision from the gut, despite claiming to be a data driven company. When anyone called Andy on it he just said "sometimes we make decisions that we know are right" blah blah.

Their data shows their decision was wrong from a productivity standpoint. But that's not why they did it. They did it so they wouldn't loose their tax breaks from all the cities that were threatening to pull their subsidies if they couldn't show enough butts in seats in the downtown areas. Also they over-hired in the pandemic and need people to leave because their attrition numbers were too low for 2022 and 2023.

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#184

Post by CodeNest »

programmertote wrote: post #81

I left Amazon a month ago (voluntarily) for a fully remote role because they asked me to move to Seattle/Arlington. When I joined them, I was already in a different state because of my wife's work. So I told them, I cannot join if they don't give me remote exception; it took them ~4-5 weeks to get the sign off for remote exception from the VP. I took the job and 9 months in, Jassy decided to force everyone back to th…

Totally agree with your move!

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#185

Post by hshsh667 »

abadpoli wrote: post #156
smrtinsert wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost any value is worth it. On your death bed you will never say I'm glad I spent those years of my life commuting for Amazon instead of everything else I could have been doing.

It’s not so clear cut. If I stay at my RTO job for a few more years, I can probably retire at 35-40, versus taking a pay cut and retiring sometime in my late 50s. I’d say that’s worth the commute.

No, it's not. Just think about your stress levels commuting, people infecting you with all kinds of diseases at work that lower your quality of life and have the chance to impair you to a great extend.

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#186

Post by sanderjd »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #80
melenaboija wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What tools are needed for better remote management?

More formal communications and explicit cultural norms around communication. People in office do tend to communicate organically with the humans around them, but online it's much harder.

Sometimes I wonder if those of us who prefer remote work are just the same set of people who found "communicate organically with the humans around them" to be a major hindrance to their productivity.

Increasingly more over time, I have come to really miss the office I went to every day before I worked remotely. I miss having coffee and lunch with people, saying hi on the way in and out, and I really miss having team meetings and 1:1s and brainstorming sessions in person. But I don't miss my desk even a little bit. I spent as much of my time as possible working from private cubbies.

When I'm working, I don't want people around, and I don't want to be pulled into "organic" communication. In practice, the best process (for me) in an office setting was to ping people asynchronously - "hey let me know when you have a moment, I want to brainstorm about xyz" - and then get together when it works for both of you. But this is the same process used in remote work!

The downside is you can't walk-and-talk or get a coffee together or find a spot with a whiteboard, everything is soul-sucking video calls. But for me, losing the "organic"-ness of communication, specifically, is a pro, not a con.

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#187

Post by zdragnar »

StableAlkyne wrote: post #175
datadrivenangel wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdotally, I know a few other Amazon people who have decided to effectively quiet quit / just do their jobs and risk the pip because of senior management's lack of care.

> just do their jobs and risk the pip Absolutely bonkers that doing the job you were hired to do can get you canned

When I interviewed roughly 10 years ago, I asked every person I met on the team roughly how many hours a week they worked. Every single person deflected and answered a question I hadn't actually asked.

For that team at least, the job you were hired to do was to get results. I imagine OP was referring to people simply putting time on the clock and being just present enough to avoid notice, without actually caring whether they were getting the same results a full level of effort would achieve.

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#188

Post by y-c-o-m-b »

datadrivenangel wrote: post #91
programmertote wrote: post #81

I left Amazon a month ago (voluntarily) for a fully remote role because they asked me to move to Seattle/Arlington. When I joined them, I was already in a different state because of my wife's work. So I told them, I cannot join if they don't give me remote exception; it took them ~4-5 weeks to get the sign off for remote exception from the VP. I took the job and 9 months in, Jassy decided to force everyone back to th…

Anecdotally, I know a few other Amazon people who have decided to effectively quiet quit / just do their jobs and risk the pip because of senior management's lack of care.

wave. I've been doing this for the last two years, but really dialed it in to the extreme over the last year. I don't give a shit if I get PIP'd at this point. If a company is willing to screw me over at every turn with no remorse and not an ounce of compassion, then this is how I'll fight back. Fuck em!

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#189

Post by pauldix »

tonystubblebine wrote: post #112
dpflan wrote: post #63

"Offices across the U.S. are at an all-time occupancy low, and commercial real estate is starting to see an all-time high of almost 20% of unleased space, according to the Wall Street Journal. The reduction in real estate spend has enabled companies to reduce their operating expenses, thereby positively impacting their financial health. This poses the question: Are return-to-work mandates better for the workforce or…

I think there is something to this. We have a long term lease for what is now an empty floor at 799 Market in SF and our landlord will not let us buy our way out of the lease, even at 100% of remaining rent. There are about 120 seats on our floor and about 1000 in the building. I’ve heard only sixty people use the building in a given day. So the usage rate is much much lower than the occupancy rate, i.e. we count as…

OMG we had half of the 4th floor of that building on sublease when the pandemic hit (and for 2 years prior). The week of the first lockdown in 2020 we were all set to sign a new long term lease for an entire upper floor and half of the one below. Lockdown happened and we told them "let's just hold off on this for a bit". They were, of course, disappointed and desperate to get us to sign.

We held off, and it quickly became obvious the pandemic was going to be a long term thing. So when our sublease expired in September 2020 we moved out and have been fully remote and distributed ever since. We lucked out and dodged a bullet by not signing a long term lease for more space than we needed at the absolute top of the market.

Granted, we were already 60% remote at the time so it wasn't a completely massive shift. But that's it, we're remote and distributed and we're never looking back. Good bye central office!!!

Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management

#190

Post by ExpendableGuy »

alberth wrote: post #120
shortrounddev2 wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read an advice column in the Washington Post a couple weeks ago [1] in which the person writing in was asking for advice about implementing RTO mandates. They work for a non-profit and found it hard to manage people remotely. Their complaints were: > 1. They have daily check-in meetings with everyone on the team to make up for the lack of impromptu chats in the office > 2. Collaboration is harder over email than in…

> 2. Stop using email. It's the worst format of online communication. Slack, MS Teams, etc. The difficulty with this, is that work can spiral quickly into just spending the whole day responding to chat (slack/teams/etc) and no one ever gets any actual work done.

Thank you. I will fight this new trend of 100% Slack/Teams/Etc. as long as I possibly can.

Email provides a barrier between you and the work -- email isn't a real time form of communication. Chats, meanwhile, imply immediate response. Hell, these apps even show when you're active -- I've gotten passive-aggressive messages like, "I know that you have DND on, but can you confirm you're seeing these messages?" chats outside of working hours.

I get why Slack/Teams/Etc. is a great supplement to email, especially when it's a smaller internal team collaborating. But ditching email is a terrible idea.

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