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A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

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Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#101

My partner works in operations for [fairly large company]. Her job is to min/max space use, organize for hiring pushes, keep the office space humming, revamp existing space as needed, plan out new space... etc. etc. etc. It's an interesting job, she's probably the person you're pissed at when your desk gets seemingly randomly moved to another floor. Right before COVID, she was managing a HUGE densification project to…

Can you expand on "[The executives have] seen enough they don't like about full WFH"? I'm trying to gather enough anecdotal and "research-y" data to make decisions around this for myself and friends/co-workers.

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#102
post #7

I suspect a lot of the "we're all going to be remote from now on" sentiment is overblown. It seems to me more likely that there will be a few more remote friendly companies, and a very few more remote-only companies after the dust settles, but the real shift will be for most "office based" workers will be the expectation of partially working from home. There is a big difference between "never going to an office again…

I'm curious to see what other changes come about in this new sometimes-remote world.

These days, most professional employees get a set amount of vacation time, lets say 20 days. In the previous system, if you wanted to fly halfway around the world to visit family or what-have-you, you might use half of those vacation days in one go. Now, if you're only expected to be in the office 1 day per week ("Meeting Monday"), you could take that same trip and use just 2 days of vacation, assuming you're working, or at least a making a passable semblance of working during the rest of that trip. Heck, you could take almost half of the Meeting Mondays for a year if you work the rest of the time.

In some sense, that's no problem. One of the big points of remote work is that it doesn't matter where you are, as long as you get your work done. But the reality is, those occasional in-person days seem to be very important for really connecting with teammates. If Nomad Ned seems to always be missing Meeting Monday but I can rely on Local Larry to be there, I may be much happier and feel more connected with Larry, even if they both take the same number of vacation days per year.

Between geopay, tax rules, wanting employees to be close enough to an office for in-person meetings or emergencies, etc, I think employers are going to become much more invasive in terms of tracking the locations of their employees going forward.

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#103
post #26

Simply put, if my employer told me I needed to be in the office more than 5 days per month, I would find a new employer. I'm more productive than ever. I'm happier than ever. I'm eating healthier. I sleep better. My marriage is stronger. My finances are kicking ass. I won't give this up.

I do not need an expensive car anymore when I am working from home. That alone is huge benefit.

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#104
post #7

I suspect a lot of the "we're all going to be remote from now on" sentiment is overblown. It seems to me more likely that there will be a few more remote friendly companies, and a very few more remote-only companies after the dust settles, but the real shift will be for most "office based" workers will be the expectation of partially working from home. There is a big difference between "never going to an office again…

My company has already said that we will never be a remote working company after the pandemic is over (we have all been working remote since last March and they are saying that it probably wont be until August or September that we move back to campus). I think most of that is because the company just finished building 2 million square feet of additional office space on campus just before the pandemic.

Has anyone brought up the Sunk Cost fallacy yet? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sunk_cost#Fallacy_effect

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#105
post #101

My partner works in operations for [fairly large company]. Her job is to min/max space use, organize for hiring pushes, keep the office space humming, revamp existing space as needed, plan out new space... etc. etc. etc. It's an interesting job, she's probably the person you're pissed at when your desk gets seemingly randomly moved to another floor. Right before COVID, she was managing a HUGE densification project to…

Can you expand on "[The executives have] seen enough they don't like about full WFH"? I'm trying to gather enough anecdotal and "research-y" data to make decisions around this for myself and friends/co-workers.

It'd be hard to do so without getting a little too specific but I will add two pieces of context:

1) The company has a small technical corner, but is mostly a non-technical org.

2) The average age of the company is quite a bit older than one more focused on technology might stereotypically be and, at the risk of sounding ageist, has proven to be far less interested in engaging with modern technologies that would make WFH smooth/productive.

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#106
post #79
post #26

Simply put, if my employer told me I needed to be in the office more than 5 days per month, I would find a new employer. I'm more productive than ever. I'm happier than ever. I'm eating healthier. I sleep better. My marriage is stronger. My finances are kicking ass. I won't give this up.

Too take the exact opposite view : Simply put, if my employer told me I needed to setup zoom calls every time I need to talk to someone more than 5 days per month, I would find a new employer. I'm less productive than ever. I'm more depressed than ever. I'm eating poorly and drinking more. I almost don't sleep anymore. I just want to spend few hours by myself instead of being constantly around my family members. My f…

How many of the issues above do you control? I could make an argument the zoom calls being the only thing.

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#107
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of outsourcing was basically done with the difficulty set on hardest to get at perceived lowest labor costs. So you ended up with big time zone differences, cultural and language issues, etc.

Yeah, exactly. Back in the 90s-2000s, though, it was easier to deal with an office-based outsource hub that had its own line manager, etc, mostly because things were so damned slow to send back and forth that you wanted to chunk project coordination. Those were comparatively rarer in the US, since anywhere you could put one together had enough tech industry to make the costs there prohibitive. Nowadays, you could jus…

> Nowadays, you could just hire from the flyover states, find all the good techies that didn't make the pilgrimage to one of the traditional hotspots, and train them on the last bits on the job for not very much more money than an international team, when all costs are accounted.

Why just the "good" or "perfect" techies?

They need to be less picky about who they hire. One could even go with the less desirable, "diamonds in the rough" candidates and still do well. If it worked passably with guest workers, it can work with flyover candidates.

As for my personal situation, I'd be happy to have options that were more than just government or healthcare.

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#108
post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you expand on "[The executives have] seen enough they don't like about full WFH"? I'm trying to gather enough anecdotal and "research-y" data to make decisions around this for myself and friends/co-workers.

It'd be hard to do so without getting a little too specific but I will add two pieces of context: 1) The company has a small technical corner, but is mostly a non-technical org. 2) The average age of the company is quite a bit older than one more focused on technology might stereotypically be and, at the risk of sounding ageist, has proven to be far less interested in engaging with modern technologies that would make…

Walmartlabs?

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#109
post #101

My partner works in operations for [fairly large company]. Her job is to min/max space use, organize for hiring pushes, keep the office space humming, revamp existing space as needed, plan out new space... etc. etc. etc. It's an interesting job, she's probably the person you're pissed at when your desk gets seemingly randomly moved to another floor. Right before COVID, she was managing a HUGE densification project to…

Can you expand on "[The executives have] seen enough they don't like about full WFH"? I'm trying to gather enough anecdotal and "research-y" data to make decisions around this for myself and friends/co-workers.

Despite all the individual cases of people claiming WFH makes them more productive, in the aggregate employees are not. In the particular data I've seen, new employees and more junior employees suffer significantly, even while more senior engineers hold steady or improve, perhaps because their responsibilities shift to more easily quantifiable metrics than knowledge sharing, mentoring, and onboarding.

Re: A recent poll of employees who are working remotely

#110
post #64
post #26

Simply put, if my employer told me I needed to be in the office more than 5 days per month, I would find a new employer. I'm more productive than ever. I'm happier than ever. I'm eating healthier. I sleep better. My marriage is stronger. My finances are kicking ass. I won't give this up.

You are quite privileged

Why? Because an individual has difference circumstances they are automatically "privileged"?
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