There is no reason to count them as defeated.
They are just properly informed.
Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay
81–90 of 222 posts
Re: Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay
#82I have ADHD and am autistic so loud open floor plan offices are a challenge. I'm in the category of people most likely to benefit from remote. Honestly it's been a much bigger challenge trying to collaborate and connect with coworkers in the new world than trying to cope with an office. People often don't perceive you as an actual human if you've only ever been a video square to them. And quick collaboration just doe…
There's a compelling argument that new hires should be work from office for their first couple of weeks, and that their team should probably spend more time in the office during the new hire's first few weeks too.
That's no reason to throw out hybrid work wholesale, though, and if that's the only thing keeping a workplace from going full remote the full costs and benefits need to be weighed appropriately.
Re: Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's all well and good until you're the second job people are working.
And then you notice that they don't produce any work and fire them. What's so hard about that?
If you didn't notice before, you won't notice now. If they were producing enough work, why would you want them to leave?
Re: Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
The simplest reason is lack of effective communication, team bonding, and morale. People behave differently behind a screen even if incentivised by money. This becomes a problem at the scale of big companies. Eg - without body language, tone and context - everyone needs to be extra charitable to avoid miscommunication or distrust. This might cause people to be overly defensive in their approach to communicate.
I've said this in other places, but as a _manager_ it's much nicer to work in the office, in person. That gets more true the higher up the management chain you go. Managers spend most of their time in meetings. Meetings suck over video chat. This is the entire reason CEOs (and pretty much everyone between them and line employees) would rather everyone come back to work. It makes their workday more pleasant.
The idea of in-person meetings only works if there is one office where everyone is at.
I was forced to move to another state (pre-pandemic). The people on my team were in offices, but 5 different offices. So I moved to another state to be in an office, so I could sit on the phone all day, every day. There is no sense to that. It’s no exaggeration that the forced move cost me tens of thousands of dollars… and for what?
I recently had a FAANG recruiter reach out to me and when I brought up this concern when I was told I’d need to relocate to an office location, I was told the recruiter was in a similar portion on her team, spending all day on the phone because her team is spread across multiple offices.
In person meetings are great, but if the reality of the office strategy isn’t going to make them possible, then there is no point. I think the occasional in-person meetup can do a lot to build rapport with members of the team without being in an office all the time, or on a weekly hybrid schedule.
I’d go a step further to say that a meeting where 3 people are in a conference room and others are remote, is worse than everyone joining remote or from their desk. Meetings should either be 100% in-person, or 0% in person. Anything in between is a bad experience. I think it’s a safe bet that any company making news about return to office strategies has multiple offices with teams spread across multiple cities, states, and even countries. This makes meetings a poor justification for workers being in the office.
Re: Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay
#85Hybrid work is the worst of both worlds. Can't move out of a HCOL and now you have to co-ordinate with your co-workers to reap any "benefits" of being in-office. What would be really cool is reconceptualizing hybrid work as quarterly retreats, where the company provides housing and other amenities for 1 to 2 weeks every quarter. This gives everyone time to bond and work on harder problems. I get this wouldn't work as…
YMMV. I prefer hybrid with two days a week in the office.
You can dedicate those days to meetings and conversations and keep the remote days for more heads down work.
And if you can’t make it to the office due to snow or travel, you’re prepared for remote work.
Re: Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay
#86"Hybrid" is such a scam. What does it even mean? You come in to work 3-4 days a week? Cool, that's called "working from the office". If I still have to live in the same city/region as the office building and still have to commute most days of the week then what have they changed exactly? Most tech workers I know would do random WFH days when they needed to without a problem pre-Covid, and now that is just branded as…
It means you don’t get offshored right away.
Re: Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay
#87My boss (middle management) is very staunchly opposed to more than 1 day per week of WFH. She spends about 90% of her time on video calls, so I was always confused by that until she was telling me that when she does WFH she's always distracted by other things which doesn't happen in the office. Maybe a lot of the WFH opposition is really just managers projecting their own work ethic onto others?
When I work in the office I’m distracted by other things which don’t happen at home
This is why I like to work in the office at work from home days. It's usually just me and one other person in the entire building.
Re: Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay
#88A lot of business executives fall into the demographic that heavily invests into commercial real estate, which is facing some substantial depreciation. Telling everyone they need to get back to the office would help to keep those prices up. To everyone else, they have no incentive to keep fighting traffic every day (and paying for it) to go to an uncomfortable place full of maybe awful people.
Any source for this at all? I've seen it before and it's a top-rated comment here, but it doesn't sound plausible and it's exactly the opposite of what game theory would predict.
Re: Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay
#89A lot of business executives fall into the demographic that heavily invests into commercial real estate, which is facing some substantial depreciation. Telling everyone they need to get back to the office would help to keep those prices up. To everyone else, they have no incentive to keep fighting traffic every day (and paying for it) to go to an uncomfortable place full of maybe awful people.
The drive to get people back into the office isn't due to any sunk cost on commercial real estate — it's a strategy to prevent workers from working multiple jobs simultaneously.
Where I live the act of being "over employed" is considered fraud, and can land serious penalties. Because it is fraud, when your employment agreement stipulates that you will not divide your time in some manner.
https://mcmillan.ca/insights/employment-and-privacy-implicat...
Re: Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay
#90My boss (middle management) is very staunchly opposed to more than 1 day per week of WFH. She spends about 90% of her time on video calls, so I was always confused by that until she was telling me that when she does WFH she's always distracted by other things which doesn't happen in the office. Maybe a lot of the WFH opposition is really just managers projecting their own work ethic onto others?
> projecting their own work ethic
Alternately, they're projecting their own home environment, which won't always be the same level of distractions/benefits across different employees life-styles/situations.
"My house is filled with screaming two-year-olds and my commute is five minutes away, so obviously office-work is superior."