Curious to see as it seems to be a trend lately
My company made a big push for moving everyone in person last year as long as they were within an hour and a half of one of the offices. Between the 8 people in my department and 12 in another department I work with a lot, this affected no one. Even if it did, my department would only end up with 2 people in the same office, and they have relatively separate jobs.
They were asked several months after the mandate if there was any noticeable or quantifiable increase in productivity, moral, etc… ofc there wasn’t but they said they “felt like it was better” . They also mandated that all new hires will be in person at one specific office… The office that they paid for a very large extension to be built at just before covid and just got completed last year. Go figure.
It was never about productivity, it was always about useless managers needing to act important, and property owners keeping their property value.
It’s an excellent opportunity to dust off the resume.
You can pry my work pajamas from my cold dead hands.
Love the work PJs!
Article on Dell from a month ago: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/06/nearly-half-of-dells-workforce-refused-to-return-to-the-office/
Interesting article. The author cited a study by Stanford claiming that 100% remote work resulted in a small drop in productivity. I’m curious as to how they would determine that. My [annecdotal] experience has been that orgs that are fully in person are completely inept at measuring productivity. Remote work just shines a giant spotlight on existing broken processes.
I would say the same about “culture”. Good culture is highly intentional and dragging a bunch of people into the office for cheap pizza is not “good culture.” In my experience, whether everyone is remote or in person does impact the culture, but that impact is dramatically outweighed by the effort – or lack thereof – by leadership to foster good culture.
Mandatory hybrid 3 days a week.
The rule was unequally applied. Lots of people left. Some got laid off. Many more are looking. No one is happy.
Hybrid. Not happy.
We returned to office immediately after the mandate was lifted. I don’t think anyone expected it to be permament, so there was no issue. It just went back to normal.
Not in this wave, but right after covid “ended” they wanted us to return to the office. There was some back and forth and since then the agreement is hybrid, at most 60% home office.
Im quite happy with that. I work in-person 2 days a week, but I do embedded so it is often needed to do more. When it makes sense I have 0 problem with doing more days.
Interesting related data point (since there aren’t many answers here yet, and I hope to stir more) - my company embraced remote hiring aggressively and recruited a fantastic batch of talent.
I figured, remote work and all, it would be easy come, easy go. I figured we might lose remote folks as quick as we recruited them. I was wrong.
So far, annecdotaly, our staff attrition rate is significantly below what it was when we hired 100% in-person, all things considered.
You guys hiring?
I saw this at my last job as well. My division was fully remote and had almost no turnover. We were also very productive, despite relatively poor leadership. Turns out when people like their jobs, they don’t leave.
It’s not great but I honestly like it. For a few reasons
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It forces me out of the house to get my full 10k steps in. Which I never get when I wfh due to my ADHD and putting it off.
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I always feel if my coworkers are online I’m hesitant to ping them because they may be busy and I don’t wanna bother them. If in the office, I can see if they’re not that busy and have been able to say hi.
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I have a toddler and when she’s not in daycare she, or my partner, likes to come in and break my flow
We’re 3 days a week in which is good and bad since I def am able to see most coworkers at least one day a week and also have two days I can wfh and either leave early or have an easy morning, but is weird due to when people come in.
For #2, how are you checking if they’re busy or not? I got frustrated a lot in office because someone would see me spinning in my chair, incorrectly assume I wasn’t busy instead of thinking deeply about a problem, and come up to break my concentration because “I wasn’t busy.”
If you don’t have a team working agreement or regular conversations about communication patterns both in-person and remote you’re possibly contributing to the problem. I prefer Slack messages because I can consume them when I need to and ignore them when I need to focus. If someone absolutely needs my attention they can Slack/Zoom call me to break my focus.
Of course you should also never just say hello.
1000% agreed on no hello. Got constant "hello"s from many team members. They’d even wait for me to reply before sending messages… Only figured that out after my boss brought it up in a 1:1 … I just thought they realized the answer to the question.
I’m not talking about “sitting in your chair thinking” times. I’m talking about those micro BS conversations that people have around the office just to relieve from the monotony and try to bond. “Oh I spent last night playing this game/watching this show/ etc.” or right after a meeting.
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A company I was at tried it and all developers said they’d quit if the policy were introduced. Management backed down really quickly after that.
Hooray for unions, even if informal.
