Inviting employees back to the office – if you dare | Hacker News Reader

Inviting employees back to the office – if you dare

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33 pointsohjeez58 comments

I've actually enjoyed working from home for the most part over the past 5-6 months. My only main issue is that I tend to work MORE from home as you don't have the normal water cooler interruptions or group BS sessions about football or sports or... this or that. I'm hoping I don't ever have to go back to the office.

Worked from home for a few years in the old days but wasn't really disciplined to be very productive. Now I am.

Working from home since ~6.5 months => I liked it a lot at the beginning (I wore pants on one day since 1.March, otherwise shorts all the time until today) but now I wish that I could go back to the office: I really miss being able to talk from time to time with somebody "real", having lunch in the canteen, seeing something different than my own walls, etc... :P

This doesn't rule out mixed style of work, some days you come in, some days you work from home.

There are things that face to face meetings are more efficient at, some don't.

I really hope companies would adopt more WFH friendly attitude.

just to clarify, what you desire is not specific to an office. you can have all of those things in a local community and many people who were remote before covid (including myself) were doing that.

I agree. Sit in your front yard and work from there if the weather is nice. You may find more people routinely walk by than you thought. Say hello. No need to drive to "your community". Especially now that more people are working from home.

Can you be more specific about what you mean by the local community? Are you striking up conversations with random people on the street, or are you volunteering, or some other such thing?

yes. having people around you to interact with does not require working in an office. people on the street. people at the dog park. people at the coffee shop. people bagging your groceries. people are everywhere (generalization , but if you browse HN you're probably not in an extreme rural area)

Whenever post-covid comes, if you WFH you can meet a local friend for lunch. Don't conflate covid-WFH and non-covid-WFH as a reason to dislike general WFH.

I wonder how skewed these discussions are on HackerNews. All the surveys from big companies show that an overwhelming percentage of people would love a mix of WFH and going to office in the future.

I really think HN is just super introverted or many were stuck in some toxic office culture.

I've always liked my coworkers in the various places I worked and being in their physical presence at work is a pro for me, not a liability.

For me, working from home isn't too bad, but not being able to go anywhere else either is very unpleasant.

Agreed. I’ve been lucky to work with great co-workers that I’m still friends with even after leaving. I think a mix of WFH plus going into the office 3 or 4 times per week would be ideal.

Replace "normal water cooler interruptions" with "posting to hn" and here we are.

I feel like we all did that before as well.

I changed jobs 6 weeks ago. Left one job, took 4 weeks off then went back to the same bedroom with a different laptop to start the new job. It's not easy, everyone is really helpful but there is no substitute for real human contact and bonding.

I like my coworkers and I miss seeing them. At least I have my girlfriend living with me, but seeing and talking to only one person most days is not enough for a healthy, fulfilling life. I've only had limited contact with friends due to the pandemic. They eliminated my desk at the office, to save space and thus money, so now I just have to make the best of a bad situation.

Yeah, totally agree with ya. Stay strong! The good thing is this won't be long term.

Once stuff returns to normal I'm going to get a gym membership. lol.

Did anybody ever (have to) discuss "responsibility/accountability" about getting back to work in an office?

Meaning: if my boss would tell me "come back to work at the office" and I would reply "nah, I'm scared that I might get infected" but then my boss would basically in/directly force me to, wouldn't my boss/company become responsible/accountable for me getting ill (if I and maybe some of my colleagues would then get ill)?

I admit that it might then become a quite complex situation (e.g. demonstrate through tracing that the spread occurred inthe office, what were the consequences, etc...), but probably a boss/company should think twice about pushing its employees to go back to the office, or not?

Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is pushing a bill to allow employers to kill off employees that way without consequences.[1] See "SEC. 122. LIABILITY; SAFE HARBOR".[2]

So get back to work and die for the Man!

[1] https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2020-07-29/covid-empl... [2] https://www.congress.gov/116/bills/s4317/BILLS-116s4317is.pd...

The company can never force you into it. I'm guessing in most cases where the employer forces the issue they'll send an email telling you that "the offices are now open and you are expected to return to working at the office starting on date X" without telling you anything else. No "or else" and when people push the issue they'll be reminded that they work 'at will' and are welcome to leave at any time. lol.

> when people push the issue they'll be reminded that they work 'at will' and are welcome to leave at any time.

This is one of those grey zones I was thinking of => if the boss/employer wouldn't have a valid reason not to allow its employees to work remotely (e.g. because s/he doesn't trust them and therefore wants to supervise them personally), such a "push" could be considered irresponsible?

An interesting conversation I saw elsewhere was about whether you could request accommodation under the ADA if you are at-risk or someone you are in close contact with is at-risk. It seems the answer is yes, but in your communication with your employer you will need to specifically mention accommodations and the ADA to be safe.

ADA does not require accommodations or ADA be mentioned, only that a request must be made. Once made, ADA applies.

As far as remote work, if the company has any remote employees in any position similar to yours, they will have an extremely difficult time justifying in person being a job requirement.

https://www.eeoc.gov/laws/guidance/enforcement-guidance-reas...

I don’t think the employer is accountable for infectious diseases that are transmitted in the workplace, given that a minimum safety standard is meet. I have, for example, not heard of any liability concerns with teachers returning to the classroom.

I'm no lawyer, but if there are no liability concerns then why are they proposing to legislate liability waiving laws?

https://www.businessinsider.com/gop-liability-protection-pro...

The same reason that many states have anti-SLAPP laws. The pure mechanics of defending a lawsuit can be terribly expensive, even if you know you'll win in the end.

In reading the actual bill (linked elsewhere), it seems the legislation precludes liability for all suits (brought in state or federal court) for coronavirus unless all of the following hold:

a) the employer was not following any guidelines for coronavirus

b) exposure was caused by gross negligence or willful misconduct

c) the plaintiff suffered actual harm from the exposure to coronavirus.

I added emphasis on any--in the event of conflicting guidelines, the employer needs only follow one of them. So if any jurisdiction in the chain says "it's a-ok to pack your employees without masks!", there's no liability for the employee if they follow that, even if the locality says "wear masks! social distance!"

While I don't know the details of occupational health and safety laws, I have to imagine there's a general-purpose "unsafe working conditions" action that can be brought even in the absence of specific regulations (I don't readily see one in the US code, but I'd expect at least some states would go that far). This would preclude such suits under pretty much any situation; in particular, you have to actually be exposed to coronavirus and can't merely show that the environment is unsafe.

To insure indemnification. Because otherwise someone getting coronavirus is going to result in a flood of plaintiff’s attorneys looking for paydays.

The other issue is that if someone comes to work sick with any infectious disease, liability would get shifted to the employer, which means that would give the employer a right to impose policies that could be draconian. For example, why wouldn’t an employer have a right to inspect your home. They suspected you weren’t engaging in good cleaning practices? After all, since liability would be on the employer if you showed up to work and got people sick (even if asymptomatic,) then they’d have a duty to supervise you 24/7. Or how about an employer firing you for attending a protest, or not wearing a mask outside of work? If there is potentially tens of millions in liability at stake, an employer would have to monitor employees 24/7, perhaps even employing private contractors tracers to keep tabs on people in order to ensure infections didn’t originate in the workplace. A plaintiff’s attorney can be a powerful force. “Don’t use hairdryers in the shower” is a good example of the impact of plaintiff’s attorneys against common sense.

I'm not sure if there's any relation between this and liability, but worker's comp is accepting claims claims from people who can plausibly explain that they got COVID at work

It's not super related. Worker's comp generally pays out for all injuries, even if the company did everything right to prevent them; it's more accident insurance than liability insurance.

Yes. We're allowed to work from home until the office is free of all temporary safeguards. So until they're fine having people elbow-to-elbow with no masks and no shields and no protection, I'm allowed to keep working-from-home, and I probably will. Restrictions won't be lifted until November anywhere in the world, probably won't be until January in Montreal.

Over here in Germany I've been ordered back to the office (open plan, what else) for at least two months now. It feels like decisionmakers are scrambling to get the biggest slice of "back to normal" they can legally get before the therefore inevitable second wave takes it away again. WFH played out pretty well (the teams I know are badly implemented partial remote under regular circumstance, so going uniformly remote was an instant improvement), so it's just "because reasons". I suspect that it's nothing more than C level being afraid of appearing weak in front of owners.

Morale is low because it feels outright unethical when highly WFH-able offices are reopening while other businesses are still hemorrhaging money due to being forcibly closed. A community has a fixed transmission risk budget if it wants to keep the virus subdued and that allowable risk should be allocated on need, not based on first come first served.

I'm one of those who probably cannot be convinced to go back to the office. Why would I want to go back to losing an hour and a half a day to commuting? What problem does this solve for me? I find most aspects of my job are actually easier when working remotely - in particular, being able to get people to leave me the hell alone for those two or three hour blocks of concentration. I used to have to go hide at the office in order to work without someone asking me a question every fifteen minutes.

When I was in the Bay Area, I was commuting 2-2.5 hours a day from Lafayette to the city, on BART, for almost 10 years. I moved to San Diego and the commute was still an hour+ most days (20 minutes there, 45+ minutes back).

Every time I think, well would be nice to go back into the office, I think about all the wasted time just getting to one and I am disabused of the notion rather quickly.

I'm saving 3-4 hours a day now. There's no way I'm going back to commuting. At most, I'll go in a day or two a week for meetings and face time.

How do you prevent people interrupting you on chat?

I can't. But I do find they're less likely to interrupt in chat than they are in a physical space.

Also, it's a lot easier for me to finish what I'm doing before answering a chat than it is to finish what I'm doing and answer someone standing next to me. Although I'm known for putting a finger up in the air at them and making them wait.

Close the chat client?

I work in a hospital. 90% of the administrative staff is still here, in our offices. Those of us who didn't get laid off never left.

Sure, we get asked if we 'have any symptoms', have our temperatures are taken at the front desk, and we're required to wear a mask going in/out of the building...but other than that, it's business as usual.

The office my wife works in, they won't let anyone come back. They can work from home, which is fine-but she's tired of being cooped up. She had to sneak in on a weekend to get some devices for testing.

They are considering opening back up in the fall, and would be requiring everyone to wear a mask the entire time they are in the building.

We're going out to eat in restaurants again, we're all still going grocery shopping (where I've never see anyone cleaning anything), malls are open, so what's the big deal with going back to work?

> We're going out to eat in restaurants again, we're all still going grocery shopping (where I've never see anyone cleaning anything), malls are open, so what's the big deal with going back to work?

You're exposing yourself to those places for very brief periods of time. Why should I equate feeling safe walking into a building with open doors and windows for less than 20 minutes, to sitting in a closed office with HVAC running all day for 8+ hours?

Moreso, why should I feel obligated to go back to the office because your wife is tired of being cooped up?

I'm fine with clingy extroverts going to the office if they need to socialize that badly. I'd rather not be demanded to make a return just because.

I fully agree that opening up the offices before there's a vaccine is very unsafe and shame on any company that brings people back early but it's not just extroverts that want to go back to the office. Speaking as an introvert with social anxiety basically 100% of my physical interaction with other humans happens in the office and WFH in my tiny nyc apartment has been miserable (better than being sick for sure, but not something I'd do for one day longer than required). Especially in tech, isolation is real and we can push for caution while also recognizing the human cost of cost of having people at home (for my company they're increasing tele-therapy resources; maybe as this stretches on more and better solutions will be discovered)

You need 113 sq feet per employee to maintain 6 foot distancing guidelines. Y'all in your offices have at least that much. Folks in cubicles and open offices do not. The restaurants and grocery stores are supposed to make sure that they have 6 feet in between customers, and of course, customers are allowed to leave if the guidelines don't look like they can be followed.

What makes you think I'm not sitting in a cubicle?

Cub-icle?? Whats that, I have never seen one in every open office I have worked at.

> in our offices

Office = building

pi * 6 * 6 = 113

But shouldn't it be a 3 foot radius? Or about 28 square feet.

Because if everyone had a 6 foot radius people would be separated by 12 feet.

That sounds odd. I work at a hospital and if you're not patient facing or need some sort of specialized equipment then you're at home, likely through the end of the year if not longer.

Running into a store for 10 minutes is very different from spending 8 hours in an enclosed space.

Personally eating in restaurants seems like the worst possible scenario, I don't understand it.

> We're going out to eat in restaurants again

Where I am (Bay Area), restaurants are outdoor only.

It seems like these requirements will lead to layoffs; as some companies will find it easier/faster to get rid of staff than to change their modus operandi.

Not to mention that with so many people laid off, Management easily can think, "We'll just hire new people. It's a buyer's market." ...Though I'm not sure it actually _is_.

The more skilled the labor the less likely they are unemployed, so it depends on who you’re hiring.

I'll gladly sign up for a FAANG job to take someone's spot who is overly fearful of infection. The salary is just too good and is totally worth the risk.

It talks about cubicals. It says "cubicals are coming to an end". The authors aren't familiar with the open offices...

Before March I never truly questioned if commuting by bus 2-3 hours a day was really worth it. (By car it's only a 30 minute drive to work but I don't drive and I have no desire to, and the bus lines here are really dumb. I just used the time to sleep.) Now that I have that time to spend with my family they'll have to open up an office near me or arrange for a taxi to pick me up and drop me off every day if they ever want me coming regularly into the office again.

Last I was there I picked up all my things so I don't even have any designated physical space there anymore, and I love it.

We've been back since May, no changes other than face-coverings required while in the general building (but not always at your own desk). AFAIAC we locked down too early in my neck of the woods, the infection rate is only going upward at this point, but another "lock-down" isn't going to happen.

Where are you geographically?

I don't want to back to the office has nothing to do with covid. After all I never stop going to the gym, restaurant all these time, albeit secretly. Its that I prefer to work from home. My job doesn't require anything thing that can only be provided in the office anyway.

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