The Last Stand of the Corporate Peacock
wrk3.substack.com
wrk3.substack.com
I think I'd agree with you, but I'd put it this way: "Fine, co-locate teams at the same office with their customers. No more distributed teams, anywhere, for any reason."
The only reasonable exception to that rule is first-line support team in the opposite time zone, that's it.
Also ban, hoteling/hot desking. You know what also f-cks up in person collaboration? Not knowing where your coworkers are sitting.
Most RTO is executives trying to have their cake and eat it too. The decisions are directly contradicted by other decisions they've made and ideas they advocate for.
The internet likes black & white. There's little room for shades of grey and any expression of nuance just invites hot takes. Like this one.
I like a day's worth of face time once a week or so. It's not because I like to show off to my colleagues or minions - most of my direct colleagues are not in the same country as me. I prefer it just because I'm the sort of person who prefers a little, but not a lot, of direct human contact when given the choice.
The managers get given the choice and may just prefer it innately. It's irritating that they elect to inflict it on others if it's not economically rational to do so.
"I don't work as well when I'm not in the office, so all those other guys are slacking off" would presumably be the thought process.
What I think's interesting is that those pushing for RTO rarely seem to be using data to support their positions. I don't know if it's that they're people who prefer "intuition over evidence" or just that there's a lack of evidence supporting a stance that they're emotionally committed to, but it's something I've noted quite a few times now. Or perhaps it's just that once you introduce the decision as data-driven you get into interminable arguments about methodologies and so on?
I don't really buy the various borderline conspiracy theories about a tie between corporate management and local property prices simply because that same set of people seems to have been wildly enthusiastic about the various offshoring waves that preceded Covid and the resulting WFH boom.
If other people perform worse in the office it just means those that prefer that environment will do that much better in their careers.
Especially as you get into higher management levels, your coworkers are also your competitors - if the guy in the office next to you gets a promotion, you don't get that promotion.
Mandatory hybrid == RTO, but optional hybrid - a combination of hybrid for those who live near an office and remote for those who don’t - can please both camps without drawing battle lines between them.
1. Everyone taking calls from their cubicles
2. Remote people calling in individually, onsite people calling in with 5-10+ people on one screen in a conference room.
Both are horrible and fully remote is better than this for basically everything except team-specific stuff (e.g. sales onsite, execs onsite, software remote, that sort of thing). But if you're going off of numbers alone, hybrid makes the most sense and I don't think hybrid makes sense just being an optional free-for-all.
Everyone's circumstances are different so you can't come up with a policy that everyone will like.
I really liked the dream of working from wherever, but now I would prefer not to go back to remote work. Granted, this very much depends on your coworkers.
That describes only some offices, and also I definitely don’t prefer it to the tune of thousands of dollars and a couple hundred hours per year and a bunch more micromorts.
And there are people who insist others come back since they themselves are extroverts, and they need someone to talk to (not my company, but family).
I'm not a particularly social person, but in general I'd rather work in an office near my coworkers than remotely. But, I'd rather work remotely than work in a large open office space. A cubicle might be okay, depending on how many people are sharing the same room.
Another big factor is your commute. Spending an hour or more on a daily commute is very taxing, especially if you're raising a family.
I’ve definitely found that having other people around during some of my work week has a positive psychological impact for me, and solve it this way. At the coffee shops and spaces I frequent, I often see and cowork with folks I know from my various hobbies and clubs in town.
I remember that, even when I was in-office full-time (pre-2020), sitting in the same cube/desk area as my teammates… we mostly communicated over Slack about work. Only very occasionally would we come look at one another’s screens - less than I screen share over Zoom or Slack Huddle with them these days. (Slack Huddles are especially more efficient than anything that could be done in-person, as you can both view one another’s screens.)
I definitely did enjoy hanging with my colleagues in those days - really, socialization was the majority of our in-person interaction (well, and meetings, which I might argue are better conducted over Zoom, as some people being physically imposing, reducing helpful input from others, was always a thing).
I’d also say all our in-person hanging made us more of a monoculture - half my team would hit the gym downstairs and be spotting each other on bench press during lunch breaks. Whereas in my current remote role, I work with folks who never go to the gym, but are into dance, cooking, theater - all sorts of more varied things! I think the variety of life perspectives may make us more productive as well, though obviously there are too many variables at play to really compare these work scenarios with any sort of objective metric.
Assume that people in the office are 5% more productive than people at home. Just assume that's true. That matters... to the company.
But if I work from home, I have a 30-second commute. Assume I have a 30-minute commute to work, so an hour a day. That turns an 8-hour day of work into a 9-hour hit on my time. From my perspective, that makes me 12% less productive.
There's a way to work this out equitably. You want me to work in the office? Pay me more. Make WFH vs. RTO part of the terms of employment, and adjust the salary to match. It's worth more to the company? Fine. Pay for it. Not working in the office is worth something to the employee? OK, but you get less money for it.
Arguments that WFH is as efficient as working in the office are missing the point.
But since I am here, I thought it was about US Broadcaster NBC and its owner Comcast. But was something else, an interesting read nevertheless.
As a person, I would like people to think of me as fair. And that's for the workers to decide not a commenter on a forum.
How does paid vacation or benefits like health insurance fit into your model of the business existing to make money? You almost certainly provide those kinds of perks to your employees even though paying somebody while they are sitting on a beach somewhere doesn't directly help the business.
Think of work flexibility as just another perk. It's something you do to attract and retain the best people and allow them to do their best work.
They have to evaluate their employees and people who aren't doing well working remotely may require closer management, may lose their wfh benefits, or something else.
You are as necessary as that old lion, enjoying his pride, the day before the new lions come to town.
"Enjoy." --Daniel Tosh
It's some sort of inability to generalize from the local to the general? I dunno.
But, as brk and gosub100 said, this is probably a troll. Someone couldn't actually be that clueless and tune-deaf... could they?
EDIT: I think we can all be like this. It's something I reflect on.
That said, we are all, by default, some part selfish from the getgo, for oursself, for our ethnicity, for our religion (or lack thereof), for our family, etc.
It's our actual, physical inheritance from our mammalian body construction. Pack mentality gives us if not outright pack warfare, then at least callous disregard for the happiness of those in which out-groups we conjure up out of thin air. Yes, kinship theory is real and human beings can transcend it, but it must be a conscious effort to do so.
That is the baseline human nature. That's why history is so belligerent and why our "evolution" hasn't really gotten us beyond warfare, destruction of the Earth, and ever-growing unhappiness. It's also why the most brutal and callous of our people are now our leaders.
These are all personal choices, however subconscious, that stack up into the majority -- and we are, across the globe, across cultures, like this, until we choose to embrace compassion as our core precept, but few have, because they're still in their default state, raised by callously unconcerned, yet confident, "traditional" cultures.
Yes. Most definitely. Personal experience has often changed my approach to, or the salience of, or - more rarely, because I genuinely try to be both empathetic and rational - my entire opinion about, oh gosh... An embarrassing (in hindsight) number of things.
This is inevitable, isn't it? Like, we all learn best through experience. No one can perfectly (however empathetic) assimilate another's point of view. And, anyway, exercising empathy is dangerous, because it makes us more vulnerable to manipulation by people who cynically evoke it.
Where I land with this is to self-limit the scope of my own judgment. If I have not experienced something, then as far as possible I defer to those who have. If something matters a lot to someone else, and only a little bit to me, I defer to them. My model of the world will never be perfect, so I'd like to minimize the consequences of my own limitations.
However, I don't think we should be feeding the troll.
This is every day for a developer though.
He's one of those, but don't worry, all o'y'all, we ALL reap what we sow, for good or ill.
"Time will tell." --Bob Marley