WP gift link expires in 14 days.
cross-posted from: https://derp.foo/post/119697
There is a discussion on Hacker News, but feel free to comment here as well.
Can I bring my dog to that office? Will it have my fridge there, and my kitchen? I’d also want a teleporter so that there’s zero commute time.
I think we’re a bit beyond just rebelling against the “open office” concept.
I would settle for just the teleporter, so home is still seconds away. Then I would have a fridge, and private bathroom, and access to my dog.
Can it be like the doors in Monsters Inc? I’ve got wall space for a door.
(Teleporters, even linked teleporters would be such a game changer)
Fuck that, I don’t want my boss coming into my house through a teleporter.
So many employers act like they own their employees as it is.
Maybe if there was a controllable delay on the teleporter…
NOTIFICATION: Your boss has entered the teleporter buffer. Allow materialization? [YES] [NO] [ASK ME AGAIN LATER]
Yeah, this take reads like some corpo shit. The advantages of remote work are many, as you mention. It’s a red herring to say people don’t want to come back because they don’t have their own space.
No commute is a giant plus and pretty much makes any return a deal-breaker.
Being in your own space (not space given to you by your company) is another giant plus.
The fact that I can be in the shower 20 mins before that morning meeting is huge.
There’s an attack on remote work right now, funded by all those middle managers who feel like they’ve lost some of the little power they had. Don’t buy into the smear campaign. There’s never been a clearer benefit to workers. Hell, many of them even designed the systems in place to make it possible (yes, looking at you Zoom – now you’re a joke).
Any job that can be WFH should be WFH.
Any job that can’t be WFH that requires sitting at a desk all day should give each person an individual office. The open office plan has been an absolute nightmare, and only benefits micromanagers. It’s a productivity disaster, and makes for a miserable experience, and only exists for the sake of surveillance. However, I doubt there are many jobs that can’t be WFH that require such a situation.
The real issue here is an intentional mis-framing, imo. Why must people get back to a traditional office setting? The only people who want this are employers who think that Butts In Seats = Productivity, and the only way to ensure it is to intensely surveil your employees. I also don’t give two shits if some real estate company goes bankrupt because business tenants stop renting their properties. Boo fucking hoo.
I’ve been working for a remote-first company now for over a year, and I won’t ever got back to working in an office. There is literally nothing about what I do that needs me to be physically present in any specific place. The problem isn’t “productivity” or “collaboration”, the problem is entirely based around a work culture that is fundamentally punitive, puritanical, and antithetical to life balance.
I’m very much WFH a huge percentage of the time. I don’t think I’m ever going to willingly go back daily or even weekly. There’s little to no point. Our society also should want to encourage WFH as much as possible just for environmental benefits.
There’s a lot of psychological benefits to having much smaller communities. It’s been shown that after about 150 people, we tend to not do so well. Seems like the technology is there. The psychology is sound. And our mental health is critical.
The intent and WFH could mean we all live better. Nicer places. Less commuting. Everyone just, happier.
Sooooo…… 💁♂️
Ehhh. I wouldn’t say the only people who want an office setting are managers. There are definitely some bonuses to going in to work for some people - a very “to each their own” situation.
But I think the distinction there becomes the “traditional” office setting, because, yeah, no one likes that corporate bull.
Isn’t it significantly cheaper for most businesses to be run remotely? What is the pressure of returning to work coming from?
The portion of managers which don’t actually contribute anything to productivity don’t have much to do if everyone is at home.
And the people who own the real estate (more often CEO, executives, board members than you might think) need their office buildings to maintain inflated values and collect those sweet, sweet lease payments.
I think this is an underappreciated reason. There is often plenty of subtle and not so subtle self-dealing with real estate and also other smaller businesses that serve the needs of offices. Those at the top can double dip extracting money out of the company for themselves, but WFH undermines that source of money.
Then you have managers at various levels who are nothing but dead weight and need people to micro manage or bully to try and justify their existence. Or are social butterflies who want people to interact with regardless if if it is productive or not.
WFH has costs to many managers and executives, so WFH being better for the company and most employees is secondary to their personal interests.
It is!
Most companies make BS solutions for fake problems. Not going to the office exposes a large chunk of fake needs.
Do families really need two cars? If you aren’t commuting every day, probably not.
Having more free time means people are more likely to cook and clean for themselves. Can’t make money off of that.
How many suits do you need to own? None! You only owned them because you are supposed to wear them in the office.
Dry cleaners? No longer a bill.
Gas? When you aren’t sitting in your cities parking lot of a freeway isn’t bought as often.
Speaking of parking lots, you aren’t paying for parking anymore.
Daycare and dog walkers aren’t needed anymore.
Going up work is expensive and companies want us addicted to these fake expenses.
many companies have multi-year commercial leases they suddenly can’t get out of and lots of office furniture they can’t liquidate. it’s a huge investment that suddenly worthless. (boo-hoo!)
So, I think the thing to do is to let workers talk frankly with their immediate supervisor and they’re team mates, and then let people decide for themselves where they would work best from. Weirdly, most people don’t go to work with the intent to do a bad job and can be trusted to make that choice for themselves.
That being said, there are some legitimate reasons why some people want a return to office that extend beyond the “butts in seats means productivity” and “people will realize I’m not providing value if we work from home” that a lot of people jump to immediately.
Some professions benefit a lot from face to face communication and coordination. The job can be done remotely, but it’s a lot more work. Because rather than accidentally coordinating, you have to be deliberate with every interaction. Wfh has led to a lot less idea spread between teams in those areas, and often there’s little idea about how to promote “so I was talking with Jan on the other team, and we had this idea…” Outside of making it so people can randomly talk to one another.
Some businesses have significant investments in their office space. If they’re not using it the pressure to divest from an unneeded asset is strong. Because everyone has this pressure, they might lose significant money selling at a loss, or as a penalty for breaking the lease.
If they believe that the wfh trend will slow and possibly reverse to some degree, then they don’t want to sell when it’s cheap and be forced to buy when it’s expensive again. This is often coupled with the previous point.
The final reason has to do with attachment and people. When people don’t see each other, they’re less attached to one another. If your job is just a place you quietly work and get paid, there’s less human connection stopping you from jumping ship immediately.
You are also slower to adopt the company culture, which aside from bullshit buzzword stuff actually has value as the set of poorly defined social contracts about how the company interacts with customers, and generally “does stuff”. The actual company culture that makes you know that project plans go in spread sheets, the project proposal in a text document, and how people expect the documentation wiki to be formatted. What style of gif to use to get a chuckle and make people remember the important bit.
It also creates some difficulties for new entrants to the workforce. A lot of people with little or no office experience have reported a much harder time getting situated without people nearby to lend a hand. That process is much harder if there aren’t people nearby, so some people want to encourage more people to come back to let that work better.
In the end, these aren’t enough for me to think we should be forcing people back, but they’re worth considering and talking about as a company or team.
Force them to treat commute time (within reason) as work for which the employee must be paid, and you’ll see a bunch of companies blanch and do an about-face on their attempts to get people back to the office.
As for the primary thesis of the article, well, if I go into the office I’m the only person on my floor even if the building is at full occupancy—there are two desks in the basement and the other has been untenanted since a couple of years before the pandemic. I’d still rather stay home, and not waste the time and gas, even though it’s only a 15-minute drive along back roads.
I don’t know how you can factor commute time in. Is it my fault if my coworker decides to live twice as far as I do? Unless the company moves the office, the worker decided to work there.
Honestly this kind of attitude hurts workers way more than it helps them “well yeah I could get an extra $10k a year, but Bob over there might get $15k, so no deal.”
And if your coworker wants to spend an extra hour in their car (even if it’s paid), that sounds like their problem, not yours
No it’s about shared duties and having to complete more tasks because I live closer to the office. That’s not right. I could be listening to an audiobook or podcast if I had a long commute. Even play a game If I take a train or bus. In fact this kind of unequal treatment is part of the push for unions in certain environments in the first place.
I think you can factor it in along with all other benefits. Employees absolutely consider commute time when applying for work. If companies want employees in office and are trying to compete with employers that allow remote work, they need to start making a case for why the commute is worth it. Tech companies tried doing that with ping pong tables and beer, but now that remote work is so common that doesn’t carry much weight. Compensating an employee for commute time in some way seems like a reasonable benefit that companies should consider offering.
Mileage compensation is one thing, but not including it in hours you work. I guarantee that would create resentment and hostility in every workplace.
Is it my fault if my coworker decides to live twice as far as I do?
I’d rather just let them sit in traffic thinking they gamed the system.
Well, I did say “within reason”. So the company would need to factor in how close the nearest available housing that the employee can afford is to the office, and/or where the employee lived before they were hired. So they can define a maximum distance that they’ll make payments for, but it has to be sane.
If there isn’t enough housing for their employees within a sane distance of their office building, maybe the company should move.
(There’s also a whole discussion in there on the extent to which employment is a choice, and who has the decision-making power.)
the company would need to factor in how close the nearest available housing that the employee can afford is to the office
Define “affordable”.
Are we talking for a studio apartment with a fold out single bed that converts the dining room into a bedroom, or are we talking enough land for your teenage kids to ride their motorcycle around without noise complaints - because the neighbours are too far away to hear it. Something in between perhaps?
There’s plenty of housing on the same city block as my office. And I can afford to live there. No way in hell would I choose to live there though.
My boss, by the way, lives so close to work he uses the company wifi network at home. He also starts work before breakfast and finishes work several hours after dinner, every day. And works weekends too. Your probably don’t want to get into a debate with your boss about working conditions - chances are they work under far worse conditions than you do, even if they have a private office.
I can identify with this. I went on early retirement (5 years ahead of time) because I was sick and tired of an open-plan office that kept distracting me constantly. If I had to get something done seriously quickly, like consolidated month reports etc, I had to do it from home. My productivity was at 50% or less at an office because of constant interruptions, or colleagues talking at the desk next to mine.
And of course senior managers would have their own offices, so they could get work done.
The rule should be, if open-plan offices make so much sense for collaboration etc, then everyone gets an open-plan office, including HR and the CEO. They can also go meet in a meeting room for private conversations.
It’s easy to make decisions for employees when you don’t have to follow those decisions yourself… want employees back at work, yes then make it better for them.
