Return to work push?

[gabito]

I work from home. We employees are spread across the world, so I don’t think we’re going back to the office as long as the company exists.

The only reason anyone pushes to go back to the office is to justify management’s existence. I don’t need them, nobody does, use their salary for bonuses or to buy pizza or something.

 

[High Plains Drifter]

I'm coming from a completely different perspective... kinda the opposite of the OP's inquiry.

My wife puts in about 50+ hrs wk and although she's been super overloaded, stressed, and burned out... more and more lately, she's also been coming to terms with the possibility of temporarily ( how long?) being unemployed or working from home if she were to quit or be terminated and take on a completely new role. I know everyone goes through this at some point but she's put in almost ten years and is really struggling right now.

She's looked into remote data entry jobs regarding working from home but we feel strongly that there is very little job security in that and honestly, she would lose a lot... the lack of interaction, feelings of accomplishment, etc... the good things that are part of a demanding "hands-on" career. She's worked so hard for so long with this company that she's with and she feels that letting it go would be essentially throwing away a huge investment.

Last week she confessed to me that she's not sure that she's ready to leave. I think that the whole idea of working from home seems a lot less appealing to her now that she's given it some serious thought. Very understandable.

Regarding her mental health/ coping mechanisms, when she gets home after 10-12 hours, I make sure to minimize the blahblahblah. I'm obviously pretty talkative but I totally understand that she needs her time to decompress. If she wants to share with me, I have a little section of my brain that absorbs and remembers as much as possible regarding her day, her challenges, etc. It's not a "Tell me about your day while I actually tune you out" kinda thing. I feel like since I genuinely care about her emotional and mental well-being, that I need to listen... even when I may not really feel like it or have my own things going on. If I know that she needs to share or vent about whatever, I encourage it and wait till later to discuss other things. She does meditate... in the bath listening to whatever relaxation solfeggio ambient music and she also crochets/ knits which is fairly therapeutic for her along with selling her stuff on etsy. Gotta have other outlets of expression and creativity imo. Anyway, she needs and deserves respect, support, validation, and subsequently solace... which I try my best to provide her each and every day.

I apologize if this isn't really in the spirit of the OP's intent but again, just a different perspective on "the grass is always greener" and all that. Honestly felt good to get that out.

 

[soliloquy]

everyone has a different industry/country/jurisdiction/law/capacity/ability/knowledge/experience, and thus everyone's approach to this would be vastly different.

If it works for some, GREAT!! more power. If it doesn't work for some, then more options, theoretically, be given to them. I think the issue i'm having with this is the 'one size fits all' approach.

Though I understand something like Sales is client facing, so its 'fine' to have them come to the office. For me, there is zero value for us to work from the office. All our work is digital. Even in the office when we have our meetings, we are sharing our screens and have headphones as in-person meetings have zero value to us.

location also has little value as we dont have restaurants/cafes/parks around us, so there is little incentive for us to do anything outside of work 'while at work'. We dont communicate with other departments either, so for us to be in the office, in my opinion, has zero value.

One of the things I was arguing with my manager about this is that if you force us into the office, one thing you'll lose out is ad-hoc project support. If we are at home and something comes last minute, we CAN work on it immediately. But if the client sends us anything at 4:59 and we have to leave to catch the train, we wont reply till the following business day. Who is mad now? The client? yup!

I think, in the ideal world, it would be GREAT for us to let people choose how they prefer to work. They like to work from home? great! office? great! hybrid? sure, go for it.

and its also a lousy defense given by employers saying 'well, other companies are also returning to office'. Just because everyone is doing it doesn't mean you have to do it. If it makes sense for one, then thats fine, it doesn't have to be the case for all.

 

[PuckishGuitar]

Work has set expectations for 2 days a week in office. In my case though my immediate team is based in UK while I’m stateside, and we provide global support, largely as individual contributors too. Only real reason to go into the office in my current role is just for meetings locally since I don’t otherwise have much daily interaction with others in my business unit. So I’m maybe hitting one day a week now, and even then I’m leaving after lunch to skip traffic and finish up at home.

However I do like the change of scenery (11th floor that overlooks a large park/flood control reservoir, miles of greenery), and sometimes easier to focus on grinding out work when I’m not surrounded by guitars. It’s good to catch up with others too every once in a while when going in and stay up to date on latest projects. After 3 years of this I’d like to get back to a more engineering/operations based role that would require more group interaction, which gets stilted in Teams calls sometimes.

 

[jaxadam]

Work?! Who has time for that?!?

 

[wheresthefbomb]

I've been in the service industry most of my adult life and public schools the last 6 years, so no WFH for me. I did get paid to stay home on "administrative leave" for 3 months when COVID first happened, which was lit. I remember zooming into staff meetings with a glass of bourbon and a pipe next to me (though I no longer partake of either). They had "voluntary" busywork for the people who were going insane to come in and do, but I wasn't one of them. I wish I could say I'd used those months more productively, but so it goes.

That said, I think that absolutely any job that can be done from home, should include the option to do so. Though I hadn't considered it in this sense, I agree completely with @Xaios that, where practical, it should be a right.

 

[Drew]

I apologize if this isn't really in the spirit of the OP's intent but again, just a different perspective on "the grass is always greener" and all that. Honestly felt good to get that out.

Glad this is a space you feel comfortable opening up.

Honestly the common thread here isn't in-person or remote being the answer, so much as top-down "solutions" for all workers are not likely to be the right answer for ALL employees. If we've shown in Covid that we can work effectively from anywhere, then a savvy, responsive management team should see that as an opportunity to offer flexibility to their employees at very little to no cost.

Giving employees the choice of remote or in person work allows them to find the best ways to balance their personal and professional obligations for them. It will almost always be better than prescriptive requirements of remote/in person time.

 

[Velokki]

My work is basically meetings and calls all day. I used to always work from the office - it was just the way it was.
But ever since the start of the pandemic I haven't worked a day in the office. Every so often I will suit up and meet a client at a location, but 99% it is remote.

I absolutely love it. I get to take a nap, practice guitar daily, go to the gym, eat healthy and avoid smalltalk. I also get to take walks outdoors and always have internal meetings while walking outside with a headset on. You could never convince me to work full time at an office again. It has been a massive net boost on almost all areas of life.

 

[thebeesknees22]

My work is basically meetings and calls all day. I used to always work from the office - it was just the way it was.
But ever since the start of the pandemic I haven't worked a day in the office. Every so often I will suit up and meet a client at a location, but 99% it is remote.

I absolutely love it. I get to take a nap, practice guitar daily, go to the gym, eat healthy and avoid smalltalk. I also get to take walks outdoors and always have internal meetings while walking outside with a headset on. You could never convince me to work full time at an office again. It has been a massive net boost on almost all areas of life.

take a nap! is that even working? haha

 

[p0ke]

I can't even imagine going back to the office full time anymore. There's no push for it over here as far as I know and even if there was it wouldn't impact me.

I go to the office 1-2 days a month just because it's nice to see my colleagues once in a while and talk about something other than what the kids have been up to for a change.

There's downsides to remote work, sure, but the benefits outweigh them by a mile or so. The main downside is that I don't wanna play music anymore because my music room is also my office, but I guess it's really just a matter of areanging things.

 

[High Plains Drifter]

Something I'd like to add here after reading these replies, is that my wife has been looking at job opportunities that could add a much longer commute and I wonder how that in particular, factors into peoples thoughts here regarding their own situations. She's been concentrating so much on what she thinks might be a good fit for her that she didn't give much consideration to how much time she might be sitting in traffic if she were to work far from home. Her current commute is less than 6 mins from our home. I told her that I don't want her to wind up somewhere on the bottom rung of the ladder where she's vulnerable to the chopping block and also sitting in traffic for 1.5+ total hours each day... especially if it's a dead-end job with little or no potential for advancement.

Wondering @soliloquy and others, how much a long commute plays into the appeal of working from home?

 

[budda]

I had a 5hr round trip for band practice twice a week. Never doing that again.

Imo if your commute eats up 45m+ (aka when a punch clock would roll up to an hour) and its unpaid, hell nah. I also know people have longer commutes than that.

“It takes a hour to get from Toronto to Toronto” it also takes 2-3 hours to get from Toronto to Toronto (and I dont live there).

My city is much smaller but to go to the opposite end of the city in regular traffic is 1.5hr round trip minimum, by car.

 

[spudmunkey]

Something I'd like to add here after reading these replies, is that my wife has been looking at job opportunities that could add a much longer commute and I wonder how that in particular, factors into peoples thoughts here regarding their own situations. She's been concentrating so much on what she thinks might be a good fit for her that she didn't give much consideration to how much time she might be sitting in traffic if she were to work far from home. Her current commute is less than 6 mins from our home. I told her that I don't want her to wind up somewhere on the bottom rung of the ladder where she's vulnerable to the chopping block and also sitting in traffic for 1.5+ total hours each day... especially if it's a dead-end job with little or no potential for advancement.

Wondering @soliloquy and others, how much a long commute plays into the appeal of working from home?

https://travelbehaviour.files.wordpress.com/2017/10/caw-summaryreport-onlineedition.pdf

In summary, adding 20 minutes of commute is like getting a 19% cut in pay in regards to "happiness", according to this study. I remember seeing a similar one a few years ago where it said cutting an hour of commute was like a $40k raise.

For the 10 years leading up to 2021, I worked in the office furniture industry, for dealers that supplied offices with all of their cubicles, seating, reception desks, conference tables, private office desking, built-in cabinetry, mailroom and S&R furniture, etc. My primary market was San Francisco. Depending on traffic, my commute drive was 20 mins or an hour from my office. If I took the train and walked the rest of the way, it was about 45-1hr mins. My significant other is a commercial interior designer, working alongside commercial architects designing office spaces. As we speak, she's designing office spaces for companies in San Francisco, and I offer my 2 cents on furniture layouts and product solutions. Much of her programming conversations are around flexible work spaces, assuming that not 100% of the staff will be in the office every day. But that's not every company. Her biggest project right now is for a governmental organization, and they are fully expecting 100% in-office.

There were two times I experienced a period of "work from home" during that 10-year stint. One was 2020 because of Covid, and one was in 2015 when our existing office lease ended before our new space was ready, so we worked from home for a couple of months. Both times, I found that while I was overall happier, I also found that I was less productive. I ended up having to work longer anyway because I was more-easilly distracted compared to working in-office. I also don't get out much in terms of a personal life, and I did miss the connection with familiar office-mates. But not having to pay for fuel/transit or parking, and then going out to lunch so much less was sooooooooo much cheaper.

But annoyingly, because my job required so many on-site visits to construction sites and client offices, I was having to commute into the city nearly every day anyway. And sometimes I'd have two meetings hours apart, and have to figure out how I was going to waste my time between them. Do I drive home and then come back in 2 hours? Do I just waste the time somewhere?

On the other hand, working for this same company, there was zero reason any of the accounting and HR departments had to be anywhere in person except for maybe interviews and firings.

So even within the same company, there's not a one-size-fits-all rule that's appropriate for the whole staff. My girlfriend works from home, but she's at a meeting not 4 blocks away from the office she used to work from, but she had to commute into the city carrying over 30lbs of physical material samples: (this table is ONE project's fabrics, carpet, wood finishes, wallpaper, paint, flooring, and countertop material samples)

 

[Stiman]

. I get to take a nap, practice guitar daily, go to the gym, eat healthy and avoid smalltalk.

take a nap! is that even working? haha

I do really struggle with this grey area personally. Do people feel like if you're meeting expectations, then it's kinda whatever? I never feel quite comfortable noodling on the guitar even though I know I'm meeting (or exceeding) expectations. I struggle with this dilemma.

 

[Fenriswolf]

While I work in a blue collar field, but thinks being able to work from home looks appealing, I'd like to offer my two cents.

First of all, you have to have meetings. You could have a piece of equipment that'll leave a crater when it blows up, or the computer version of that, but it can't be fixed until you have at least an hour meeting where you explain how to do your job to someone who is gonna leave in an hour to go play golf. And say you're good at your job...if you aren't in the office how are they supposed to know you know how to do your job and need to be punished by doing someone else's job?

 

[soliloquy]

Something I'd like to add here after reading these replies, is that my wife has been looking at job opportunities that could add a much longer commute and I wonder how that in particular, factors into peoples thoughts here regarding their own situations. She's been concentrating so much on what she thinks might be a good fit for her that she didn't give much consideration to how much time she might be sitting in traffic if she were to work far from home. Her current commute is less than 6 mins from our home. I told her that I don't want her to wind up somewhere on the bottom rung of the ladder where she's vulnerable to the chopping block and also sitting in traffic for 1.5+ total hours each day... especially if it's a dead-end job with little or no potential for advancement.

Wondering @soliloquy and others, how much a long commute plays into the appeal of working from home?

Thanks for the question (can I just quit my professional email responses when I'm not getting paid for this?!)

So, I live in the Greater Toronto area, home of the busiest highway in North America, and I think in the top ten world wide? I have to white knuckle my way too and fro work. It's exhausting and terrifying and I hate it! And my commute is 20 mins to an hour +, depending on the traffic. I get exhausted driving in this nasty strip in 15 mins or so.

At the same time, I drove about 15 hours on the highway/roads of Iceland, where there was, maybe 1 car every 40 mins that I'd see? Great views; no road rage; I'm safe and nothing is actively trying to kill me.

Some how I was perfectly happy driving those 15 hours, with not a single muscle in my body aggitated/irritated/hurting/annoyed/irked.


As such, my response to this is will be biased and skewed. Take my response with a grain of salt.



Avoid busy commutes at all cost! Have shit tons of traffic lights? Annoying. Have to dodge trucks? Annoying. Have drivers that think speed limits are suggestions? Annoying. Have people defy highway logic (as in be the slowest in the left lane), annoying.

It's little stressors that will get in the way. Those little stresses will turn to micro aggressions at work...or worse still, at personal relationships.

I'm a manager, so I get to hear peoples opinions all the time, and I'm feeling everything they are going through. Many complain about how they let out their frustrations on their kids or spouses when they have done nothing to deserve it. Or worse still, they are mentally exhausted from the commute that they can't function when they get home. Gym? Fuck that. House chores? Haha, good luck. Cooking? Just order out and eat unhealthy. Also waste money but you're way past caring.

It's a vicious cycle that I would not recommend on anyone.



Now sure, the above may not apply to everyone. It could be vastly different for different industries that you, or your spouse may work in. It could be the time of the day. It could be easier cost of gas/insurance etc.

It could also be needing 2 cars so one person isn't left stranded?



And because I'm loving the environment...save the environment?


And as @budda mentioned above: this may eat into your/her sleep; and take a toll on people's mental health.

My personal advice is to avoid traffic and commute.

 

[Grindspine]

My job is 100% in the lab. Even during the lockdown, when elective surgeries were put on hold, I was temporarily transferred to help register COVID samples for the state department of health. Ever since the pandemic, it is like surgery centers are doing double-time to make up for missed procedures.

Since my job description includes handling lab samples, it is not something that can feasibly be done remotely.

 

[Hollowway]

I think work from home is great, and am all for it, EXCEPT that there are a lot of people who pull this crap of having software/hardware to jiggle their mouse, and who hold two full times jobs, or who otherwise are putting in a couple hours of work on a full shift. They piss me off, because it’s ruining it for the people who legitimately do work from home. That kind of bullshit taking advantage of the system is what is pushing many employers to get people back to the office, or making them go to contract work with no benefits. Most of us could actually do good work at home, but the lack of trust is brought on by a minority of people abusing the system.

 

[MaxOfMetal]

I think work from home is great, and am all for it, EXCEPT that there are a lot of people who pull this crap of having software/hardware to jiggle their mouse, and who hold two full times jobs, or who otherwise are putting in a couple hours of work on a full shift. They piss me off, because it’s ruining it for the people who legitimately do work from home. That kind of bullshit taking advantage of the system is what is pushing many employers to get people back to the office, or making them go to contract work with no benefits. Most of us could actually do good work at home, but the lack of trust is brought on by a minority of people abusing the system.

Eh, sounds like a management problem, and more over an excuse that places blame on the worker and not the bloated corporate structures which allows for jobs that amount to "just showing up."

 

[Anquished]

I work Hybrid but it’s non enforced. Means I can hide at home to get paperwork done or come in for integration/ftf meetings. I like being able to do both.

I think for companies where you can do it, it should be a no brainer. You can draw from a bigger pool of people around the country and the flexibility is seen as a huge perk.

My partner had a job in London that went non-enforced hybrid over Covid, so she moved out when it was over. Then the company got a new CEO who ordered everyone back in the office 3x per week and found most people just quit instead.