WFH Policies – Based on anecdotal community feedback
theaussiecorporate.com
theaussiecorporate.com
Problem solved, I’ll earn more from a company that treats employees with respect and the other companies will go out of business. Labour shortage in Australia is real right now, so it’s literally going to be impossible for these places to hire soon.
While remuneration might be similar, there is a lot of red tape and working people willing to put up with bureaucracy are generally not as passionate and therefore try and palm off work or engage in politics.
I agree in principle that 100% in office roles are a red flag and not worth the hassle.
Our pay across the board is dogshit though, and we're bleeding devs but the company won't let management pay what's needed to retain people.
On that note, if anyone's looking for a senior/staff full stack swe with 5 years of react plus a whole bunch of other stuff, let me know. Please.
The change is happening, and I work for an energy company where they literally do not have the office space for 100% of staff to be back in the office (currently target 50%). So the change is happening, but I don’t think its as far along as this data states. I can say from a recruitment perspective there are many candidates who want a significant pay bump to go back to 100% office.
Ah, yes, the main portion of workers-from-home.
The fact they may have many more non-office workers doesn’t mean they don’t have large offices
I was simply saying that the figures may be overrepresented. The original title when I posted heavily focused on the 7.2% of companies who say they will force 100% in office. That number seems very low to me and looking through the data I noticed that the sample doesn't represent many of the largest employers in the country. The new title rectifies that.
Considering Zone2 is aspirational for many, not to mention those who'd rather live in the home counties (i.e. 'suburbs' I suppose) and get a certainly much more expensive train in (and then the tube) I don't find $12 questionable at all. But markets do differ! Interested to hear if that really is outrageous sounding in Australia.
Also, it takes 1.5 hours on the train each way. This is only 42 miles platform to platform. Also, no public transit syncs with the train on either end.
If they're willing to freely waste my time, then they must also be willing to freely waste their payroll budget. May as well demand more, as I'll clearly value the money more than my employer.
Also, quality of life matters. I want an office with a closable, opaque door and adequate ventilation. I'll provide it for free, or my employer can. If I don't have it, then I want hazard pay.
Might be anecdotal data, but from what I have seen, the amount of people that are working from home with proper equipment and dedicated space is really small. People work with their residential internet connection, which sometimes works well, and sometimes doesn't. They work on their kitchen counter on the 13" laptop screen on a hard stool. They work while their children are watching TV or doming homework in the same room on wednesday afternoon. They work while the maid is doing the vacuum cleaning. I could go on, but you get the idea.
If the offices where half as bad as those working conditions, there (rightfully) would be an uproar among the worker explaining how unproductive they are because of the bad conditions. But somehow all these problem magically have no effect anymore when they happen at home.
So business choose to provide a free place with premium computer screens so you can juggle all these windows, ergonomic chairs so your back won't hurt, both quiet and more social places depending on your mood, fiber internet connection with mesh wifi and redundant connection so your call don't look like a 3 FPS 640x480 GIF . And they'll ask that employees spend at least a bit of time in those.
Thats not the case for any of 20 friends and coleaguea I know.
Every colleague I know (not counting interns, etc) has a equal or better setup than what we get in the office, from display to office chair.
I can understand how this was an issue early in the pandemic, when change was sudden. I can also understand how this could be an issue for some junior staff, who aren't paid enough to rent a home with enough space. However if we are talking well-paid bracket, working from home is cheaper than commuting, dining, etc. Especially if they can afford a maid.
It is fundamentally idiotic and wastefull to move millions of people every day into the office and then back out, through traffic jams, wasting resources, causing pollution and deaths through accidents. So much for capitalism being efficient.
Other than taxes, most of that is mostly fixed cost (desk, insurance, hr paper shuffling).
Companies could pay junior staff significantly more if they eliminated facilitates costs and in-office perks for those employees.
I'd wager that upgrading from an N bedroom to an N+1 bedroom apartment would be much cheaper than providing an office for the vast majority of junior employees.
Those number seem weird to me. In my company, the office space amounts to roughly 10 to 15% of the wage cost. IE: if we completely cut offices, and replaced it with absolutely nothing, we could only afford to offer a one time 10% salary bump across the board. This is less that the average yearly salary bump we have offered on average over the past 5 years.
This means that we could give a one year "leap" in salaires if we moved to fully remote, forever, assuming that fully remote has absolutely 0 cost (which is not true).
> I'd wager that upgrading from an N bedroom to an N+1 bedroom apartment would be much cheaper than providing an office for the vast majority of junior employees
You are saying that you think it's more expensive to have an office space able to accommodate 50 workers, rather than paying for the difference in rent between an N bedroom and an N+1 bedroom for 50 families ? Again, this does not really match my perception of the real estate market.
Where do you work wgere salaries grow exponentially? Certainly jot the case for most dev jobs in uk
Conservative estimates:
$x00 standing desk
$1000+ chair
$xx000+ climate control
$x00+ ultra wide monitor
$100 mechanical keybord
The vast majority of people, even in the tech industry, do not have these privileges, so the scale is not nearly weighted as much in favor of home work.
We spend a lot of time at our desk and so spending a few thousand dollars to create a comfortable workspace is far from exorbitant.
This is so deliberately myopic as to make me question whether your argument is in good faith.
A "$xx000+ climate control" is something _literally anyone who's employed_ would have as a furnace (or, slightly less commonly, as a/c, but still very prevalent[1]) and is not a unique expense to WFH. The perk is being able to set it where I want (vs. my employer setting it for me), not simply "having it." And if a $100 mechanical keyboard is a truly unobtainable indulgence for budget reasons, surely a $100 car repair to facilitate commuting to the office is, too.
[1]: https://paylesspower.com/blog/air-conditioning-statistics/
I pay daycare to keep the kids in a separate location. Good luck trying that with coworkers.
We were a partially remote team pre-pandemic, but there aren't enough meeting rooms / phonebooths in the office buildings. I'd miss an hour or so of meetings / work per week trying to find a meeting space for a zoom call. My home internet craps out of a meeting about once a month. It's clearly superior than the in-office situation, with triple redundant 10-9s internet, but no chairs.
My 30 year old, $100 office chair is better for my back than the uber expensive and stylish chair that I lifted from the office. The expensive chair broke mid pandemic, fwiw.
I work in a gilded crown jewels office building, so it's not a budget issue. It's a facilities / management failure, but pointing that out is forbidden.
It has been like that in most of the companies I've worked in. The only exceptions were office buildings that hadn't been "upgraded" yet.
There is an uproar among the employees!
It is always ignored because the decision makers would have to admit complete incompetence before listening to feedback.
Industry-wide, the vast majority of employees are saying they'd prefer renting / buying a home office on their own dime (and would even take $10K's in pay cuts, on average for permission to do it!)
However, industry-wide, management still thinks cube farms are providing positive value.
In all seriousness, look into Ethernet (over Cat6, not powerline). We went from multiple disruptive dropouts a day to almost zero just by moving away from WiFi.
I think this is one of those "YMMV" things. For us, in an 60-ish year-old 4br house, we'd get occasional drop-outs, as well as relatively poor (~25MBps) performance.
For my BIL, in a newer house with his Xbox and the router on the same circuit, it's rock solid.
I've had great several hundred meg connections fall on their face when the microwave was turned on
8 of the 9 people in our database support team left because they just didn’t want to do this. They easily found other jobs without this requirement. We basically can’t hire anyone else because when they learn that they must come to the office, they lose interest.
And Canberra is fairly small and we don’t have a traffic problem worth mentioning. Getting to work is easy. People just don’t want to now that they know that they can work from home.
I assume the outcome will be no one wants to do this work as an employee and they’ll end up filling the holes with expensive contractors (who may even be made exempt from this requirement).
Compare to, for example, ACT Government, which announced months ago that they’re permanently moving to flexible working arrangements.
It’ll be interesting to see over the next ~12 months how much federal government talent is lost as a result.
What’s new is that people realise there’s another way, and they want it.
Did they ever slow down? In Sydney apartment prices in the CBD and surrounding suburbs went up over covid, despite the lockdowns.
Corporations are responsible for something like 70% of global emissions. It's nice that you want to help, and I do too.
But bottom line, it has been an absolute failure of journalism and our regulatory bodies that the solution to climate change is somehow up to citizens driving and consuming less.
Corporations can feed themselves regularly, but there are 730 million people on earth without access to clean water. Enough is enough!
seems it is mostly the fossil fuel industry.
"The report found that more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 – the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established – can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities."
A good chunk are even state-owned!
Corporations producing less emissions is equivalent to consumers consuming less.
I think, in a way, that subreddit really reinforces what the parent comment is saying: people don't like it when their consumption decreases. When we see this [1] our thought isn't "how great it is that the company didn't spend emissions on building a full set of crayons", it's "this sucks, I didn't get a full set of crayons".
1. https://old.reddit.com/r/NonFunctionSlackFill/comments/egm4a...
Corporations produce goods and services that people consume. I think it is intellectually lazy to attribute all the blame of pollution to the producer side of the economic relationship rather than the consumer side. The people consuming the polluting goods and services usually derive most of the economic benefits, the producers and people along the value chain capture some value, and everyone not involved in the transaction (especially future generations) get to suffer the externalities without having the chance to prevent the transaction between producer and consumer.
Many people do not regard climate change as a priority and do not use it to influence their voting or buying decisions. E.g. in the march 19 2022 economist yougov poll of 1500 US adult citizens, out of 14 important topics, the issue regarded as "very important" by the largest group of people is "jobs and the economy" (65%) -- tied dead last is "climate change and the environment", which only 43% of the surveyed population regard as very important.
I am not optimistic that effective public policy and regulation to seriously address global warming can be rolled out until there is relatively wide support from the voting public to regulate things like human population growth & rationing of scarce resources. Politically I don't think any politician could dream of stating that they are in favour of a policy of population control, it'd kill their political career. I don't suggest we try to debate it now in this thread, it tends to lead to incredibly toxic discussions. In western democratic capitalist societies the social contract often seems to value individual rights and freedom over the needs of the collective -- at some level this seems fundamentally incompatible with "limits to growth" where one generation might need to leave enough resources for subsequent generations.
I work four days a week from home and one day in the office as a “team day.” Seems to work for us as software developers. Team day is not mandatory but everyone makes an effort to rock up and socialise a bit.
My wife is an optometrist and will continue to work from her practice 5 days a week.
Tropical island, maybe?
What is meant by "honestly" in your post?
And the second top level comment from that:
>The coding used by this survey is a joke. If 40% of an occupation says they work outdoors that's below 50% so it's bucketed into the work from home category on that criterion. I think if even 20% of a job is saying they work outdoors that's pretty strong evidence you're missing some information about what the other 80% are doing in their job that prevents it from being a work from home job. The net result of their setup is obviously a vast overestimate so take the 37% number with a grain of salt.
Eg: In Q17, the respondent have to say that they work outdoors every day. If the majority does only say that they works outdoors some days - or even most days - the algorithm infers that the job can be done fully from home.
It was super convenient, but doesn't work for 100% of visits, obviously.
Also as a former hospitality worker, my sympathy for those whose jobs preclude WFH entirely.
Personally I actually like working in person, just not every day, and I don't like commuting. If I had it my way I'd be within walking distance of work and doing something like 2-3 days a week in the office. But as long as every business is still in the city and the trains are still shithouse then I'm on team full remote, even if that's not my "true" preference.
That's IMVHO and without tangible proof give the best feedback witch is: IF the worker have a good place (and a calm family situation) AND the company is organized for real remote work nearly 100% want to be remote. If not...
Makes sense. Thanks.
So they admit it's a load of dingos kindeys.
Followed by this gem:
Now that we have moved past the peak of COVID
Bollocks.
Whether we’re past the peak positive test result count is much less impactful on people’s attitude and proclivity to socialize.