Regarding return to office policy, I hear many speculations and reasons hypothesized. Mostly by employees who don’t really know and who had no choice in it.
I would like to know is if there are any lemmings out there who have been involved in these talks.
What was discussed?
How is something like this coordinated amongst others businesses even rivals.
What are the high level factors that have gone into the decision?
Bonus points: is it even possible for employees to prevent or reverse these policies at this point?
I’ve been remote for 5 years, since Covid. And it’s been wonderful. I’ve been more productive, happier, better relationship with my family, had more time for hobbies and cooking healthy, spent WAY less money on fast food and gasoline. Before Covid I was in an office and hated it, but didn’t even know why, after I was home for a few weeks I realized why, it’s because I wasn’t being interrupted and distracted every 5 seconds all day long and when I had meetings I could keep working while talking on the video call instead of having to log off, get up and walk to a meeting room.
Now they are making half the company come back in if you are within some arbitrary radius. Which means teams are all split like mine where half must now commute in, but half don’t, so me and half my team now has to commute in just to go into a conference room and join a video call with the other half.
And the meetings are scattered all over every day so that basically means no actual work will get done every day.
I’m looking forward to chatting with my coworkers and laughing as productivity tanks.
Maybe instead of having meetings all day and forcing people to commute in for a computer based job management could be clear about what is needed, enable people and set them up for success and then leave them alone to get it done.
It feels like trying to swim 100m, but there is a manager walking along the edge next to you asking you for updates every 5 seconds. Still swimming and the more you ask the longer this takes.
I think RTO is just a power play. They can do a soft pay cut, a soft layoff as people quit, establish dominance and force employees to be their fake little family instead of their actual families.
It’s so ridiculous.
It’s the same fad thing as Open Office Layouts were a decade or two ago. Everyone hates it, productivity tanked, it was miserable, but everyone was doing it so CEOs did it to show how current they were.
Fun fact: open-plan layouts have been ruled sexist in the UK.
Sorry, but what?
I hate open-plan layouts as much as the next guy, but how on earth are they sexist?
It is a bit of a stretch maybe, BUT ALSO, try being a woman in a toxic male dominated workplace and I get it.
But the problem isn’t actually the layout, it’s the environment and culture of that place.
Exactly: I can understand that an open layout makes life harder for people in an already oppressive environment. This applies regardless of why the environment is oppressive any individual.
Claiming that “open environments are sexist” implies that they’re somehow inherently oppressive towards one gender. That’s absolute bullshit in my opinion: Open environments are just generally crap for productivity.