No Stupid Questions

Mine consisted of me countering every single one of my manager's lame objections to remote work, including pointing out that we used contractors in fucking India and offering to change my name to Rajesh, and him simply ending the discussion with, "I can see we're poles apart on this."

I'm at the very bottom level of management, so I'm not invited to these meetings. But I get to hear the story afterwards. The basic jist is that all the old employees are fine to work remote, however, the new employees are largely getting lost. There's no water cooler meetings or impromptu hallway discussions or 'hey Jim, I heard you screaming next door, what dumb thing did your customer do?'. The transfer of tribal knowledge isn't happening when the new folks are remote. As much as I will make fun of the above, I will admit that I learned more of how to do my job through those impromptu 'meetings' with my coworkers than I ever did from any formal training.

So, to your point, how do we get back to working from home again? I'm not sure, but I would starting thinking about how to encourage more connections with your coworkers. Not the forced meetings where you talk about why the wiggly line isn't going up, more like, "hey bob, whacha been up to today? Oh yeah, that system doesn't work for me either, the trick is you have to log-in through the other portal..."

Our office allowed voting to elect a committee to determine what return to office should look like. I was elected to it. They also hired external contractors to mediate basically. Some people came into it thinking everyone should go back to office, but by the end of it we settled that being in office should be required for certain types of work activities and not for others, and apart from the required activities for in office employees could be wherever. We drafted this up into a formalized agreement and everyone was happy with it.

Then the president who did that program retired and the new guy immediately scrapped the whole thing and forced everyone back into the office overnight without any discussion from the committee or other employees.

In my corporate experiences, these decisions were made unilaterally by the C suite without discussion.

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.

I can’t speak to what’s said in the meetings, but in a similar vein, we were told we needed to come back to the office 2-days a month because other people had to work from the office, and it wasn’t fair to them.

That’s it. That’s the rationale. Because it wasn’t fair to the people who had to be here. Mind you, my team has been successfully working remote since COVID.

🤦‍♂️ ~fml~

My company required everyone come back to the office. My team works in a terminal, we can do our work from anywhere. Everyone of my department went back in. I said no.

They said I could be terminated

I said go ahead and fire me, I'm the lead tech, 40 experience, I built and maintain more then half of the automation, I'm the only one who understands networking onprem and I cloud and has a security background.

I dare you.

They said they would make a special exemption for me.

The moral of the story... You can demand stuff from your company if your company can't function without you.

At the beginning of COVID, when our CEO decided all non-essential staff should immediately begin working from home wherever possible, our CIO declared all of IT to be essential on-site. Shortly after the meeting when the CIO made that announcement, people at my level (bottom-level manager) essentially all announced to our supervisors that we were going to refuse to abide by that directive.

My direct supervisor told us to relax and essentially said that the entire management team was going to sit the CIO down and have a come to Jesus meeting. Shortly after that the directive was reversed, and it was left up to managers to decide if their team could be WFH, hybrid, or fully on-site. It's hard to stay CIO if the entire IT group is in revolt.

For many months after that, in the regular management meetings, the CIO would talk about how difficult it was and how everyone was suffering due to the requirement to work from home. He would talk about how many people told him they were longing for the day when we could all be on-site again. I have no idea who those people were, because everyone I spoke to thought WFH was fantastic.

I have heard that when productivity didn't drop, the CEO asked, "Why are we paying all these high rents for office space if everyone is just as productive and happier working from home?" It was around that time that the CIO started to talk about WFH like it was a good thing.

At this point, there's no sign it will ever end. We are allowed to hire people from out-of-state and most people are WFH full time. They've reduced office space to the point where we all couldn't work on-site even if we wanted to.

Bonus points: is it even possible for employees to prevent or reverse these policies at this point?

UNIONIZE

I happened to be involved in such a meeting this morning.

The conversation around the general policy was mostly supportive. The main concern is that we do not have an official policy in place and various teams are setting their own rules, which is occaisionally resulting in collaboration issues.

The other main issue, unsurprisingly, regards what we can do to make sure that people are actually working when they are at home. For the most part, people are getting their work done, but there are always going to be people trying to take advantage and we discussed ways to track that without getting too “big brother” across the board.

Sounds like we are going to implement a 2 day wfh allowance coordinated within teams, based on their schedules so that we have at least half of each team in the office each day, with exceptions for people with extenuating circumstances.

We are not going to put any kind of tracking software on their machines, but we are going to monitor overall output.

• finding and hiring staff will be harder
• attracting top tier talent will be harder
• rent will be more expensive
• childcare will require more sick leave
• illness will require more sick leave
• expanding to new territories will be harder

The c-suite evaluated the cost of rent pretty good and had an existing problem of not being able to hire above average younger talent because the work they were doing was pretty boring. Advertising a good hybrid wfh policy (once a week or once a month in-office depending on different factors) has brought in good people.

Basically, they saw that it was bringing in cash.

The biggest challenge has been getting new hires integrated well with existing team leaders.

There’s also team leaders that refuse to use Teams/zoom, but also don’t answer their phone. In the past you could corner them in their office but now they sort of anchor their team. It’s mostly self-repairing as they stagnate and other teams flourish.

There was no discussion. The CEO likes it this way. His bootlickers invented a bunch of bullshit justifications in order to make the RTO rules seem to have reasons, but there isn't one other than the CEO likes it this way.

People have tried to discuss it reasonably but it has become clear that it is an emotional matter for the CEO and discussing it like adults is not possible.

I've been in discussions regarding returning to the office for my group, whether other groups should return to the office, and whether to keep the days in the office or add more.

For returning to the office, a lot of it came down to collaboration. My team does not use online communication tools to the quantity that it can substitute for in person communication. I advocated for a return to office for most staff, in part to benefit junior staff who weren't communicating and needed mentorship. That meant the entire team had to show up on the same days, but I let them pick the days and changed those days on their request. The intent of the in person days is for them to talk to each other and coordinate.

One group resisted coming into the office far longer than mine. They were pushed into coming into the office, along with a change in reporting, because that group was blowing budgets and missing deadlines. I said you can bring them into the office, but you have to change their group culture to be more collaborative and talk to each other. It has been an issue working with members of that group because they've gotten used to a lack of coordination and communication, which created poor work quality.

When asked to go full RTO or increase days, I've pushed back. My group is mostly meeting deadlines and I see diminishing returns for more days into the office. I'm also aware it is a perk for staff, and not one I want to pull away. However, the gap in online versus physical interaction is still there.

If you're going to fight back against coming into the office more, then you're going to need to argue on the basis of coordination and collective productivity. I've seen a lot of people claim individual productivity, but that included a lot of rework that could have been avoided with some five minute conversations. Not emails, conversations.

On the flip side, if coordination isn't a big deal, don't expect raises any time soon. At that point, you're a more easily replacable cog whose work can get pushed to places with lower costs of living.

If you accepted a remote job, you should have it in writing that the job is 'remote' work.

If your job wasn't remote initially, but assumed it would be remote going forward, you should have demanded that the job has changed to 'remote' in writing.

If your job wasn't initially remote, was temporarily made remote, and they are now changing back. Be prepared to walk.

Boiled down to “Me in charge. Come in” as a response to leadership.The reality is they rented out an office to hold 200 people, laid off half of them, and then were upset the place always looked empty when they brought clients around. It went from “You all need to be in office on Wednesdays, so we look like a big company”, to wanting everyone to return.

The problem is a good majority of people had moved away during covid. Those were the first people to be laid off unless they were superstars. They had a lease agreement until 2026 and were already subletting the previous offices (They kept moving into new spaces as they grew before other leases were up) that also had long contracts. I am no longer there, but rumor is they are trying to sublet the 200 person office and find yet another small space. They are slowly turning into a real estate company.

My wife's employment (a national company providing services to homes) not only embraced the remote work that COVID forced her into, they closed down their central customer service call center to save that money.

This year they're talking about taking all the administrative people out of the local offices and only needing the service people pick up supplies and having the remote workers pick up the volume.

They let us know their thinking here. I don't personally have a dog in this fight, live a few blocks from the office so either way is fine with me. They landed on "hybrid" but now I just work at the office and do not bring my laptop home.

Their thinking:

Collaboration really is better in the office, zoom does not replace the experience of just being here and aware of conversations around you (fair enough) we are already paying for the office (not a real reason, could sublease, we already did with half of it).

My thinking (they don't care but) working from home benefits the rest of my family more than it does me. I can bike to work and do. Reclaimed the space in my house that was office, and absolutely ignore work when I'm home. Certainly would not force anyone else to, like my job did, but glad to have a space to work outside my house.

There are decades of case studies showing people interact with people they have never met with more hostility, skepticism and less patience compared to people they have met in person. I am very much in favor of flex and hybrid work, but people who work in teams need regular face time to maintain the rapport.