Management are assholes and idiots.
Nothing will get better without demands. People need to organize.
But if I’ve learned anything from history, it’s that the ownership class would rather murder all of their employees than give a few dollars more a day.
It’s because the few more dollars per day empowers people not to have to deal with exploitative practices, to be able to save an emergency fund, to be able to look elsewhere for opportunities.
They had literal segments on Fox where they were complaining that companies couldn’t strong arm people anymore because COVID turned the balance in labor value. Uber is known to give desperation compensation much lower then drivers who are more selective. Data is used to min-max labor exploitation.
Here’s the actual study if anyone cares to read it.
Skimming it, a couple things I noticed: This was a study of over 7,000 people across all departments at a large healthcare system. They found on-site workers skewed younger with shorter tenure and remote workers skewed older with longer tenure.
One potential pitfall: They didn’t control in any way for department or role, and so floor nurses and housekeeping staff who must work fully on-site are being compared to tenured nurses working utilization review or revenue cycle staff whose job is billing/coding and who don’t have to interact with anyone in their roles. In-person and remote jobs in healthcare tend to be very different jobs. I don’t know how well this study could be generalized to other types of job settings based on this info
That domain is “Frontiers In”, but it would be so much cooler if it were “Frontier Sin”. I want to stay apprised of all the latest developments in crimes against morality
Thank you, this was exactly what I was wondering. I’m all for remote work, however it’s not really fair to compare completely different roles.
Job satisfaction has so many variables, I don’t envy the difficulty of designing an accurate study of this.
extroverts can’t understand that not everyone is like them. more at 11
As an extrovert, please let me work from home. It’ll save me a commute so I can spend more time with people I like
Yeah. COVID lockdown was my golden era.
I secretly despised people at my company that wanted to demolish remote working completely after COVID on the pretence that people are traumaticed by the solitude and need to get back on the horse 100%.
Eventually only max. 30% remote was allowed and became company norm.
Even then some of these pieces of shit actually forbid remote working from their subordinates.
Those subordinates then gave them absolutely garbage employee reviews and made their worklife hell. Now they are in some other company torturing some other poor souls.
These are the same people who create useless team building exercises.
It was everyone’s golden era. And then the owner class pressured the political class to memory hole the period so we forgot all the lessons we learned.
It’s why we need to bring unions back to forcibly make sure those lessons are applied.
Even if they do understand that, I’m not sure it matters. I’m an introvert so I know how easy it is to think of extroverts as annoying, overbearing sausages. However they have needs just like I do. Isolation genuinely harms them just like over stimulation harms me. I think it brings some realism to this topic if we remember that maybe they aren’t doing everything they’re doing just for the sake of shoving extroversion down your throat: maybe they are just trying to meet their own needs. It’s like the flip side of what introverts always say: don’t take it personally if I need to withdraw from you, I’m just meeting my own needs. Can you make the same allowance for them?
Sure, but they have the easier solution. They can socialize anywhere. Meanwhile, for us: income isn’t optional.
To say nothing of the ethics of using a captive audience to meet your ‘needs.’
Right? I often like being around people. I don’t want to do it in the fucking office
Extroverts can’t understand that not everone wants to listen to them yap. Updates at the hour.
Whether it’s a mix of control or egos, I think it is mostly about the fallacy that they are leaving unspent productivity on the table. Yet, COVID proved that people can be effective at home. It’s nonsense to assume that you won’t do the job and then somehow get paid for it. It’s a strawman.
That is why, after all logical arguments were made, and bad faith responses dispelled, they chose to say it was about culture. That undefinable metric exist solely in the validation of HR and management. Pizza lunches, recognition events, and captive audiences.
Yes, and…
those in upper management need us to see them there, in front of us, IN CHARGE.
That’s all it’s about. They need you to kneel and scrape and fucking bow, and for that, you gotta sit in a car ten hours a week and work in an uncomfortable open-space cubicle where you can hear everything, including Betty from finance chewing.
All day, every day, so that Brent the VP can feed off your collective energy admiring him like he’s a big shot. That’s why he’s the only asshole who wears a tie to an office of business casual colleagues.
Can confirm. How Money Works talks about it (Here on YouTube) regarding the recent mass layoffs by big tech, first, by pressure through RTO mandates, then blaming layoffs on AI, only they got rid of too many people and their businesses couldn’t run.
So why did they do it? Vindictiveness. Because of the great resignation during which workers had some negotiating power, and the C-suite resented that and wanted to show everyone who’s boss.
I’ve been following the trend since the early 2010s when we realized that crunching development teams is useless for meeting deadlines, but dev companies crunch anyway, traumatizing the team.
I’m pretty sure billionaires aren’t especially bright, rather started with generational wealth and then got richer through luck and ruthlessness, to the point that they only failed upwards. (There are a few exceptions who understand the social contract, but they really are exceptions.)
And they surround themselves with sycophants so that their psyches are completely comfortable. They stop actually considering data or news that might hurt their feelings, which means they make bad decisions that cost their companies money.
I can’t believe how much more I get done when I’m left alone and focused on the task at hand.
I don’t feel particularly isolated. Everybody is different but a once-week team chat and seasonal social lunches fill my cup.
Turns out when you can do errands and meet non-work friends for coffee as you please you don’t need to lean on your office family so much for connection and purpose.
I have daily voice calls, usually several times a day.
Seems like my country has mostly moved back to offices now though and finding remote contracts is tough. Man I miss the pandemic. Not the death and suffering, just the compassion some people showed others. Sure there was a lot of people who just lost their minds entirely, but I feel like the overall sense of community was better back then.
Yeah, but community doesn’t make the corpo pigs moneyz, so back to in-office work, slave!/s
Yeah not a problem at all for many. The ineffective remote workers are the same ones ineffective in the office, the ones on 15-minute side chats in the cube rows (loud of course) every hour. Great collaboration on the latest sportsball match, glad we were able to bring that back.
We actually have the recommendation too: oif you need to do something like sign for a package, let a contractor in for an hour to fix something, etc, then use a vacation day (with 2 weeks prior notice, of course). The flexibility goes both ways though, “can you do this quick thing Wednesday night”?now gets escalated to find approval for after hours work. Payroll/HR is not very flexible or responsive.
Who TF is using up an entire PTO day so they can sign off on a package when they are literally already home?
It takes me longer to take a shit than it does to sign for a package.
And It definitely takes Debra in Product Management longer to get to the point than it does for me to let a plumber in, and out.
This honestly doesn’t sound like much flexibility at all. If you need time to take ahit - you use your 4 days of PTO. If the company needs time to take a shit on your head - you work late.
Sorry I mean in the new RTO mandate, that is what is now done. Not allowed to WFH for one of those days, to take care of a ~15 minute interruption. Now it costs a PTO day (and the resulting delays of business stuff by an employee off for a day, doing 0 work).
It absolutely is not flexible. And it will harm the business as a result.
Ah okay it makes sense now. Sorry read it wrong.
Yeah they shoot their own foot a bit
If they’re going to be pedantic about every little penny, every second. Well… Two can play that game.
Sorry you’re dealing with that.
Yep. Always comes back down to respect, 2way street, etc.
Indeed, malicious compliance is the game.
Hybrid mode do me well.
Allows to have the advantages that on site have ( real contact with the collegues ) while allowing to take a breath from transportation.
“I think flexibility is here to stay,” she said.
This is the problem with academics. They do a study, find something is logically better, then assume humans will act logically.
Unfortunately, most CEOs don’t give a shit if their employees are more happy, productive, and less likely to quit if they work remotely. They just want to feel like they have control over people’s lives, which is why we’re seeing more return to office initiatives.
The point of the study is to generate knowledge, not to set policy.
As the other reader says, the point of studies is to develop objective truth.
After one generation, this new objective truth starts getting ingrained in people’s minds. That’s usually because after one generation the people who held old beliefs are out of the scene and new young people who believe in obvious things come to be part of the scene.
That’s how society changes over time. Not people changing their minds, but new people with a different way of seeing the same things.
An old saying is change comes one funeral at a time.
Capitalism as we know it, isn’t about effectiveness nor efficiency, it is primarily about power. So long as this remains the case, workers will continue to be abused for the amusement of the higher ups.
Worked from home for 8 years, and routinely finished projects ahead of schedule which left me with a ton of time to work on furthering my education, personal projects, home maintenance and hobbies. Work life balance!
Been working an in-person role for 2 years now, have zero time during the day to do anything else, couldn’t do most of those things at the office anyway, and I make no additional money. These last two years have felt like my life has largely been on hold.
I’m very fortunate to have a job with a very small company (literally 4 people) where we get to set the rules.
It is funny to see the ingrained notion we (collective “we”) once had that working from home could never work. I started this job in 2018, and I often suggested we do a work from home day each week since we all had laptops. My bosses (co-owners of this company) always shot it down. “Oh we’d never get any work done!”
Then, of course, COVID. And while I certainly would rather COVID not have happened, it did convince them that working from actually works. And, of course, they loved it as well. So since 2020 I have not had to go back to the office. We still have office space for some minor things, and once in a blue moon we might gather there. But in six years I’ve probably spent six days in the office.
Heck, I’m fortunate enough to finally have convinced them we should take Fridays off, too. We piloted that program two years ago over the summer, and it, of course, stuck because everyone likes that—though we actually just take every-other Friday off. But still. Hard to beat.
Sounds like a company that somehow has no boomers dragging it down.
Bosses are in their 50s, but they came from a giant corporation then decided to make their own business.
You guys hiring? How’s your benefits package?
Unfortunately no.
Benefits are actually kinda bad, honestly. We have insurance but insurance companies don’t want to give good insurance to really small businesses like this. No vision or dental.
They signed a 20-year lease 10 years ago so they feel like they have to use the building.
Source: wild assumptions, i know nothing about commercial real estate.
It’s more the canteen and coffee shops onsite I think.
Our place guarantees minimum revenue to the canteen.
The company has to pay extra if the staff aren’t there.
Then there’s all the other businesses in the area. I imagine they come under pressure from local government to bring workers back to save those businesses
I betcha a nickle that the fines paid to the canteen would be more than offset by the increase in profits due to worker productivity.
It’s like the time theft myth, the belief that workers will intrinsically slack unless you micromanage them. In fact the opposite is true, when workforces are allowed to chat with loved ones and surf the internet their productivity improves.
Curiously, when a company mandates that 15-minute breaks are taken and lunch is eaten during lunch break (even when workers are obsessive and want to work through breaks) then their productivity improves even more.
But the upper management of companies don’t actually want to manage in a way that data shows maximizes profits.
If they would get rid of these terrible open plan offices, where people can hear the silent fart you try to squeeze out gently, and go back to offices where you at least would have a smidgen of privacy, this would improve office attendance.
While some part of me misses my fortress cubicle and undershelf lamp, complete with pillar obstructing the window so I had just two vertical slits…
I still only did good work there when I was alone in the office, usually before or after most people’s office hours.
Once enough people showed up it just became a daily social event ritual. This was well before covid.
When we got a new CEO one of the first things he mandated was RTO. He said the alternative was to shut the office down, and that he was fine with that (I highly doubt that) but a decision had to be made. And so RTO it was, because that had better vibes or something. It’s fascinating, the leadership has during several meetings mentioned how much nicer it is now that people are in the office, but none of the “grunts” I’ve spoken to like it.
HR drone always talks about how nice it is to see everyone collaborating in the office when we come in for quarterly meetings.
Nobody is getting work done. We’re all “collaborating” about sportsball or coffee machines or whatever it is, or just trying to tune it out. It’s a full day of productivity lost for nearly everyone there. Not to mention the early rise for a commute, cost of the commute, missed workouts, and exhaustion on the return home.
Yeah, we’re in a similar boat with new CEO, RTO, etc. The increased collaboration is amazing: now instead of video calls, we have in-person in a cubical video calls because our team and department is scattered across multiple physical locations. Additionally, the increased collaboration from non-team “pop-ins” is a much-needed break from doing the work we’re brought in to do. Not tomention, all of the systems we manage are now much closer in case of emergency: colocated the same 50+ miles away or “cloud”. Maybe /s maybe I’m pro-CEO.
we have in-person in a cubical video calls because our team and department is scattered across multiple physical locations.
You’ve got to insist everybody be at the same location for collaboration. Demand management to arrange conference room, flights or travel and hotel rooms. It might cost a pretty penny and effort but think of the synergy created.
Even before COVID/WFH, this was the case of being spread out. CEO basically eviscerated on town halls, with a dead-eye blank stare in reaponse, then continues to champion RTO in the face of direct conflicts of their own words.
There aren’t enough cubes for the full timers, there aren’t enough conf rooms or other reservable meeting spaces, there isn’t distribution of needed equipment (headsets with ANC, decent mics or computers that can do noise supression without making the computer uselessly slow.
Mentioning these things are ignored though. The CEO and others continue on. Performing remote work for maintenace, patching, etc. outside business hours got a lot more obnoxious to “the business people”, now that we seek approval for outages during business hours to do the work inthe office, as mandated.
There aren’t enough cubes for the full timers, there aren’t enough conf rooms or other reservable meeting spaces, there isn’t distribution of needed equipment (headsets with ANC, decent mics or computers that can do noise supression without making the computer uselessly slow.
This is a feature not a bug to the CEO
Our CEO started talking of RTO while he himself was at home, not even a Teams background to try and hide it. Haven’t seen him in any office during any of the subsequent townhall meetings either. He’s just one twunt in a massive circlejerk
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I worked on site for 4 months before my remote work was approved and it was literally the most unfulfilling life I had
I would work 9 to 630, come home so tired that all I could do is throw something quick to eat and watch TV (didn’t process what I was watching) then later fall asleep and rinse and repeat
How anyone is able to do this lifestyle is a testament to humanity’s ability to adapt
Working culture is fucked up and needs to change
I was in the same boat for about a year. It was beyond fucked, and now with hindsight my wife and I call that period “the great fog”, because I was so absent even when I was home and “rested”.
It was like I was living as a ghost, unable to perceive much beyond the feeling of fatigue.
The assholes at HR were doing everything they could to make the process harder. And even more insulting the company had the entire workforce remote for building maintenance they chose to do on a building they didn’t even own.
So it’s OK to work from home when the business needs us to do so, but not when our disability needs us to do so? Hypocritical motherfuckers had no line they wouldn’t cross.
My company was perfect except for their strict stance on in-office hours (I broke them routinely)
I recently quit my job and just as of the last few days I finally feel reset, or close to
mental peace, clear mind, a lot of energy and wit slowly coming back
I have an unusual situation - immaterial commute, flexible hours - and enjoy working in the office more than working from home. Have done both and working from home is a drag.
Doesn’t mean I’d force others to come in! But the only thing worse than a meeting is a teams meeting, and there is a lot of value for me getting that space back in my house, and in the incidental learning I both receive and provide to others when we are in person. Also it’s entirely possible I’m too introverted to happily work from home.
So as long as work provides a common space to work I am happier here. I do think the environment benefits from fewer commuters but I don’t drive to work because it’s so close.
The real problem is usually not the office itself, but the journey there and back.
Yeah I am very,very sensitive to commute time, and recognize my situation is uncommon (arranged on purpose though - I won’t take a job far or more than one city bus away) I wonder how the answers would change if the office was in the same building as your apartment, or within a mile as mine is. I really don’t want any part of my home life to be my employment.
I couldn’t agree more: if the commute took less than 20 minutes (on foot or by bike), remote working would probably be rated less favourably.
