Deloitte tells staff they can work from home forever
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The above is a little tongue in cheek but also true. I think it is important to acknowledge that different people have different lives and want different things. I can certainly imagine being in a situation where I would want to work remotely.
People have varying needs. Some people are suited to office life and some people are suited to working from home. And some people like a mixture. Until relatively recently, organisations have had to put everybody in the same environment. Remote working isn’t good because you can work from home per se, it’s good because now the working environment can be tailored to the individual instead of forcing everybody into the same environment that is undoubtedly sub-optimal for a large proportion of the workforce.
I get that not everyone needs to collaborate a way that requires face to face to be efficient but many do. As a simple example I'd expect a UX designer to be far more efficient to hand their phone to their co-worker and say "try this" instead of on slack "hey, sync to the latest version, oh you're in the middle of something? Okay, stash that, now grab my version, build....several minutes later....okay now navigate to this menu. no not that one. Pick Foo->Bar then scroll down and click the Moo button. Okay now, try it"
Someone will now pipe-in that Figma solves this. Fine, I chose a bad example. In my case it would be passing a game so Figma would not solve it.
doesn’t sound like a good use of your time, but for many people, it’s a third option that definitely has it’s pros/cons
It boils down to this: a 100% remote policy doesn't rob you of what you need, but a 0% remote policy robs those of us who prefer WFH from what we need.
Also I think the current setup is working to a large extent because everyone is remote and playing field is even. It will be somewhat complicated after half the team is on-site and other half is not.
WFH makes businesses less effective.
Indeed and the annoyance I feel from that while I'm trying to concentrate is matchless.
If a company became less efficient due to a lack of "drop everything" taps on the shoulder, it wasn't efficient in the first place.
I simply do not believe meritocracy can exist.
Our biological sensibilities are too easily confused by concepts we don’t fully grasp, and come on; there is so much rubber stamping and favoritism (even now I know the founder of my company is invited to private sessions in DC to hammer out rules that favor us and we’ve proven nothing).
This forum seems to have too much of a naive and weirdly trusting belief in such subjective and hand wavy ideas when literal reality is offering plenty of evidence to the contrary in the political sections of a newspaper.
Absolutely. I've found mostly-remote with some office days works very well for me, personally, and this seems to be new normal in the bank that I work for. There are also times where we want large gatherings, too.
One thing that I feel gets missed around the idea that being in the same building builds collaboration: I personally find the opposite a lot of time. It might make for easy catchups for people in proximity in the building or campus, but it often leads to implicit decision-making by proximity, where people aren't included, even when they should be, if they happen to be on another floor or another building in the same campus.
At my first job they were so crunched for space my desk in the open office was about ten feet from the entrance to the men’s bathroom. I got to quickly know everyone’s schedule, and knew I just had to leave my desk at certain times during the day due to certain coworkers… my manager was not happy when I cited that as my reason for quitting a few months in!
If your manager was so unhappy I'm sure they would have been willing to swap desks with you and experience the - uh - ambience ...
About 7 years ago I worked in a building where the offices all shared a bathroom with several other companies. We would always need to go to the 2nd or 4th floor if we needed to go #2 due to someone on the 3rd floor using the toilet to squat, which resulted in foot prints on the seat and $#!+ on the back of the toilet seat…
Luckily they decided to tear down the building so we were forced to move. But that is the worst experience I’ve had.
So you’re definitely not crazy haha
Edit: nothing wrong with squatting toilets, just using a sitting toilet as a squatting toilet is the issue.
Oddly enough, by my second trip, that same bathroom(I assume, but can't be positive) had at least 2 functional western toilets, bidets and all. First time using one of those, and not what I'd describe as pleasant, but story for another time :).
On another note... in my wife's country many people actually do use western toilets as squatting toilets. People typically have just a typical western bowl, with no tank or seat.
The Japanese style toilets have a little button, there's 2 versions. The first uses the water pressure to function, so when you press it, the water causes it to come out and spray, these don't have any control, it's dictated by your taps water pressure.
The other is the fancy eletric ones that can go from very basic, to multi adjustment, temperature, self-cleaning, etc.
When I first saw these in Asia I thought they were absolutely stupid and pointless.
But one night I got food poisoning and ended up on the toilet, a bit messy, and i used the bidet to clean myself and...
Ok when I got gastro living in australia, I went to the toilet so many times i made my bum raw with toilet paper that it hurt.
After having food poisoning in Asia and cleaning with the Bidet then just drying off, even tho I went to the toilet many times, I didn't get a sore butt. This convinced me that they are awesome, and I've used ever since.
Sometimes you find a relaxing park. Sometimes you find a stairwell with a pointless top landing where you can hide and do frustration pushups. Sometimes you find a cheap hole-in-the-wall.
And sometimes...sometimes, you find a hidden bathroom.
It's easier with big companies in urban centers, because your badge often lets you wander into a bunch of random downtown buildings.
lol
No shoes or socks though.
Walking to work was glorious.
Now that I am fully remote, nothing will convince to ever set foot in an office again. I just rejected a position worth a raise in the six figures because management couldn’t commit to allow me working full time remote. I make that much extra just working on side projects with the free time I gain by staying at home.
I also have a crypto trading bot, but honestly, I stopped it recently due to the fact I wasn’t ready to deal with the volatility of the last few weeks.
I still prefer remote.
I bet people told you that you had a short "reverse" commute and therefore lucky that it was only 40 minutes each direction!
For a lot of people, this change is… literally and exactly nothing.
But yes, the remote fervor does not seem to be matched even by a quick skimming of job postings on LinkedIn.
It was imaginable in the mid 90s to early 2000s, distant history at this point.
I have a feeling things vary greatly based on the team and senior leadership. The sad reality is if you're the only remote person on a team you're going to have to really struggle to be seen and recognized as much as your peers.
1. Work from home in your primary geo, commutable distance, but be ready to come to work x times a week / on demand
2. Work from anywhere, but restricted to states where company has a presence.
3. Work from anywhere within primary country.
4. Work from anywhere in whatever time zone and country.
May be different terms?? Right now WFH is a big bucket
May be label them like we call self-driving car levels :)
Or is it a thing like "unlimited time off" where if you actually take advantage of it, you're considered last for promotions and first for pink slips?
consulting ranks/promotes you by what you bill (or sell once in management), so if you start taking too much PTO, your year-end bonuses start to go down and you get put into the firing line
Most firms don't care where you live because you're 99% traveling to a client site anyway
Deloitte US (article is about Deloitte UK) has announced a hybrid model.
Most US employees will fall in a 30-50% "co-location" range. Co-location is defined as any time 2 or more employees (or clients + employees) are in the same room at the same time. Deloitte does a lot of on-site work with both corp and gov, so if they want the Deloitte consultant on-site, that's still going to happen.
From inside the company, it's feeling like a lot of the back-office stuff is going to be remote first.
Leadership has been explicit about NOT ALLOWING employees to move outside of commuting range of a Deloitte office.
I'm personally in the lower co-location model, less than 10% "co-location". Given most of my team is in the north-east, and I'm located in south-east, I may fly in twice a year to have a few days of lunches and "planning" sessions with my team.
There will be a larger set of remote first or hybrid companies for sure though.
Commute time is really the main issue here and people including myself will hopefully consider shortening that for the betterment of our overall health and wellness.
This announcement probably means a lot more for the internal services staff and the accounting teams that don't go to clients often, but for almost all of the client-facing staff I doubt this makes much of a difference.
Luckily, we can switch jobs easily in this industry. Just go and join a company that suits your preference.
I'm already remote, but I'd definitely switch if my company forced me to go back. There's plenty of opportunities out there and life is too short.
If your company wants you to go back, fuck them. Go and look for something else. If your company goes full remote and you miss your coworkers, fuck them, go and look for something else. Meet your ex-coworkers after work at a pub.
If "fancy" means open plan and "perks" means sitting next to a foosball table that will further entrench my WFH preference. Things like free drinks and food might make a difference to whether to work for company A or company B, but there's nothing I care about enough to give up the extra time I have each day.
It's much more about talent acquisition/retention vs perceived output, etc.
For a lot of companies that did go all in, they generally give the money they would save in some other form (eg: food cards, paid home work setup, etc). The real estate itself is often also locked in for 10+ years anyhow so they can't easily get rid of that, and at best saves them from locking down extra locations.
$5 billion one time really is just a rounding error in that context.
That's 350k people who can work remotely now. Then you'll have the other Big 3 trying to stay competitive. That's 1 million employees who are going to be doing... something? Sure, not all will be remote, but still. That's a dramatic shift.
Did you even read the article?