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Remote work has been studied extensively for decades and the findings overwhelmingly show that remote workers, when provided the right tools and support, are significantly more productive. Demanding people commute to an office was never about productivity.
Who owns commercial and office property? Guessing most aren’t by non executive, non board member, working class
https://realestate.usnews.com/real-estate/articles/commercial-real-estate-market-trends
There’s a reason they combine office with data centers and the rest of commercial has been down
They made a bad decision gambling on overvalued office and commercial property leases and want to push their loss onto workers because they love to socialize the losses and privatize the gains
100%
how to tell if a tube photo was taken in summer:
Why? They are not wearing summer clothes
gets to office and signs into zoom meeting
I was pushing to hold desk meetings back before we were in COVID.
Why am i stopping everything I’m doing to go sit in a room for 30 minutes and listen to everyone else talk about crap not related to me in which I’ve got maybe 5 minutes worth of things to say by the end.
In most cases we were already broadcasting the meeting to someone not in the room across the country.
I see all these posts/comments about meetings that are obnoxiously inefficient, and I’m so sorry for everyone who has to deal with them; it’s almost completely foreign to me
I work medical, and our meetings are usually reps teaching us about some new or revamped devices… but they gather us on-shift to listen to a 5 min schpiel and have us sign a paper. If I’m busy, too bad and you can try and catch me next time. If I get called mid-teaching… my name is signed, and nobody cares. If I somehow miss it entirely… oh well, guess it’s on me now to learn any changes. We have one formal review per year that takes all of 10 minutes. Maybe 2 or 3 formal meetings per year… and if I can’t make it, doesn’t matter
I already hate the few meetings we have, as is; and I’m only “required” to go to one per year… and it’s maybe 10 minutes. Or I can dodge it, and just say “my bad” (though not a good look for you). I simply can’t imagine being constantly pulled away for bullshit… and I guess I’m grateful for that
Granted, my job has it’s own special flavor of hell and I should’ve been an electrical engineer. But all the lack of meetings involved makes me feel a little bit better; as penance for the other rampant bullshit I have to deal with
These meetings y’all speak of — I just can’t imagine how antsy and aggravated I would be to have to attend such idiotic fluff that “could’ve been an email”. Fuck, I can even ignore my emails with almost no recourse. Kudos to y’all for getting through it, cause I’d really rather not. Let me work, leave me alone, and then I go the fuck home; that’s all I want
Great 25 minutes of very relaxing work…
I’d rather put in my 8 hours get on my shit done and go the hell home.
Wfh is now 8 hours of moderately relaxing work and I don’t even have to have another 2 hours of driving in traffic.
Why not make a step further, and ask why do you even have 30 minutes meeting if it’s not useful?
My entire career could have been an email.
That’s a more complicated problem.
Quarterly employee feedback says people feel in general that they don’t understand what’s going on in the company and what projects / deadlines are coming up and how it all relates to other departments. Everybody’s pretty much in tune with what happens in their own department.
Project management spins up and creates confluence documents that contain all of this information. Analytics spins up weekly reports that go out to everyone.
Next quarterly, top issue is once again people don’t understand what’s going on at the company. We missed that, we didn’t hear about that, we didn’t understand those grass, we didn’t know the chart was updated. Bottom line is nobody’s reading the data there’s departments are churning it out for nothing.
And that my friend is how you get a daily 30 minute all-hands sync and a weekly all hands company meeting.
Sounds like a skill issue. Someone can’t write an update that isn’t the longest paragraph of text scientifically created to be the most boring and incomprehensible sequence of words put together as a biological weapon.
And by someone I mean everyone in the corporate world.I think it’s an occupational hazard. If you don’t have people interested in numbers you don’t have finance people and analytics people. The people who are interested in numbers are unfortunately also generally the kind of people that don’t understand that other people aren’t interested in numbers. There are correlating data with excitement because it’s what they feel.
Or analytics guy was having a rough week and said he was burning out from dealing with The analytics report. On the 6th it does this and on the 8th it did this and the 9th we had this sale. 99% of the people in the meeting only care that it’s up and to the right, flat, or down into the right
The graph technically needs two to three points on it and you need to explain why it’s aimed in whatever direction it’s aimed.
My update isn’t exciting but it is important. I need people to know this stuff or I’ll be fielding questions on it for the next 6 months as everyone individually discovers the changes.
I’m not going to spend time rewriting my update to sound thrilling and engaging in order to attract the eyes of the lowest common denominators attention span.
So we have a meeting, everyone listens, and if they say afterwards that they weren’t told or weren’t paying attention, there’s a recording of the zoom call so they can try again.
It’s work, if it were fun and enjoyable 100% of the time we wouldn’t be paid to be there.
No, you write you shit once so it’s understandable, and if you can’t you learn how to do it since it’s your job. And then if someone has questions you refer them to your writing, and eventually they learn to read what you write, since it’s their job.
Your email explaining you shit has the same power of zoom recording, more even, because it’s concise.
It’s work, you’re paid to be there, no need to make it harder for everyone just because you can.
my wife kept getting pressured to go into a specific office location every week. 2-3 hour commute each way to sit at a desk on video calls with little IRL interaction
Uuh, I remember the London Tube.
It’s so soul draining (noticed the empty eyes and avoidance of eye-contact) that it convinced me to start commuting to work by bicycle in London when it wasn’t all that common (and which ultimately took around the same time).
Bike commuting kind of rules though.
It’s not about productivity.
It’s about control.
Guess who gets to work in private offices instead of the “productivity enhancing” open offices!
When my last company went to an open office plan, everybody (even the CEO) had to be out in the open because the whole company moved into one big room (with a little cordoned-off area for meetings). Granted, this was because we were on the edge of folding and we moved into the one big room to save on rent. But it did produce a nice “we’re all in this together” vibe because it sucked ass for everyone.
This point i don’t get…in all my jobs, team leads, department managers and basically all management level employees are sitting in the same open office as everyone else. I have never been somewhere where this is not the case. Is this a predominantly American thing?
They’re talking about the c-suites who make the decision to call everyone back to office, I presume
Yup, director level and above get their own office
CSuite get their own entrance and tunnel, don’t want to enter with the rest of the plebs and walk in the same hallway
I don’t overthink people’s expressions on trains, nor do I think we should be taking pics of people who look upset because they look upset.
IF yOu’rE iN puBliC, yOu Can’t ExPeCt pRiVacY - americans
It’s easier to just say “just because something is legal doesn’t make it okay”.
evryone look irritated getting randomly photographed
There’s at least one time traveler in this picture
They don’t care about this part at all. This is your time. It’s your fault for not being rich.
Trains are a much more desirable way to get to work than driving is.
Environmentally, absolutely…personally? I absolutely fucking hate using public transport. I’d take 90min of sitting still in traffic alone in my car over bumping and griding with random strangers for 90min on a train any day.
I do not. I can read or watch movies while riding a train. No chance in a car.
The stink (perfume or BO) and unwanted proximity to strangers makes it a very unpleasant experience, no book or movie can make up for that IMO.
Listening to podcasts, ebooks or music are good when driving, I also tend to get very anxious when traveling and I’m not driving, it’s unfortunate lol
If they’re really, really good.
Here in Munich, our public transport is much better than any American city, but I still hate taking the train in summer. AC either does not exist or is far too weak. Taking the car takes 40, maybe 50 minutes, the train 1h25min. I still take the train, mind you, but it’s so much more exhausting than the car…
I have to mention my daily commute is between two cities outside Munich.
I’m counting down the months until my work relocates to our new head office. I can say goodbye to the 35-75 minute commute (each way), and have a reliable ~60min train ride.
Sure it might take longer, overall - but I’ll be able to relax by reading a book, taking a nap or playing a game. I’d much rather that than deal with the anxiety of bumper-to-bumper traffic in a sea of SUVs filled with inattentive drivers.
I literally drive past at least one accident every day on my way to work. The Monash Highway in Victoria, IYKYK.
It really is the least talked about benefit to public transport, yet is so significant. Sure you can’t do too much but you can watch a show/movie, play a game, read, write, draw or even do your taxes and shop from your phone and laptop.
Certainly can’t do that driving around. And it let’s you relax and change from work mode to home mode. Even if you have to do a little drive to and from the station.
Plus like you mentioned, less chance of delays and being involved in accidents. Win win win win.
Never thought I’d find myself in agreement with The Dark Lord, yet here I am…
I always try to argue this when people say they’d rather drive to commute.
When you drive both you and your employer lose time. When you take a train you keep your time in a way.
I enjoy the drive a lot. However, I also don’t live in a big city, so the drive is nice.
taking a nap
Well, I see you don’t live in America lol.
That highway is in Melbourne, Australia. I fell asleep on a train in Australia once as a kid and for some reason had my shoes off. When I put them back on I crushed a cockroach that had snuck inside. As long as you check your shoes before putting them on, you should be just fine taking a nap on an Australian train.
TBH I have also fallen asleep on the NYC subway and the worst thing that happened was I missed my stop and accidentally went super far in the wrong direction
Its partly tradition, power displays, and disbelief. People who’ve been managers for decades somehow believe that being in the office is the only true way to do work because that’s how it’s always been done. Then you have some managers who will always get off on the fact that they can hold people’s ability to feed themselves hostage to make them do what they want. Lastly, some managers just don’t believe you can be productive at home. After all, all the not work things are there.
I know this site is heavily weighted towards IT professionals and other pure-office-work type professions, but sometimes in office work really is better than work from home. Online meetings are largely useless, even when it’s a proper meeting, not just a should-have-been-an-email meeting.
In my current job, remote work isn’t an option, and I can’t tell you how much time I’ve wasted trying to get engineers and software devs to understand things that would have taken two seconds to understand if they would go physically look at the thing. But of course, they can’t do that because they are working remotely. Instead we get to waste half a day playing picture/video tag
Online meetings are largely useless
Oh! Oh! This is where people say “skill issue”, isn’t it?
If you can’t run a productive meeting over zoom you probably can’t do one in person, either.
I think this is all really subjective and depends on how your team does work. Getting people to work with you or understand things is a communication problem, and in my own experience, being in the office didn’t eliminate those issues.
I agree there are times to be in the office, but it damn sure doesn’t need to be every day all the time. IMO people need to adapt, be smart and figure out what works for their teams and themselves, not hold themselves to tradition for its own sake.
Managers should be empowered to make these decisions to do the research and figure out the best strategy for their situation, and I think many would like that responsibility.
This will depend on your work. All my work is on the computer. Showing someone something is as easy as sharing my screen (and this might even be better, as I can draw on it).
And I don’t agree online meetings are useless. All of my team work from home most of the time, and we work out how to make that work.
Having half the group in the office and half joining remotely I think is the worst of both worlds.
Remotely joining an in person meeting is horrible. Joining a remote meeting from your desk is fine.
Yeah except for the people around you trying to work as you jibber jabber 😆
Skill issue :-)
Wasting a lot of time on “explaining things” is an excellent indicator of overstaffing.
Which is completely orthogonal to the question of remote work or not.Explaining things often is a sign of over staffing? That’s a new idea for me. Why?
I think most people acknowledge that some things do gain efficiency in physical proximity. Most dont. We aren’t talking about you.
Though sending a solidworks file shoukd be easier than it presently ie.
Those things, and needing to prop up the commercial realestate market.
Humans have more worth and potential in life than being subjected to a soul crushing machine that drains the light from their eyes for their entire lives. We aren’t free.
White shirt guy maybe, probably either at making you extremely mediocre coffee (looks too straight to be a good barista) or doing something like the ux design for the app interface to a microchip that doesnt let your dog love you without microtransactions. The owners are lobbying for it to be mandatory, and all dogs without it will be liquidated by 2030. The app is spyware written by a large language model, and only sometimes works. Iphone only.
Tan jacket lady maaaaaaaybe.
Black+white checkered shirt guy is a cop, he’s already at work. He’ll be very productive later, already planning on attending the protest.
🤣🤣🤣
The whole “return to office” thing is a cocktail of like… “Feelings Driven Leadership” and “The Cruelty is the Point”. Oh, and “I’m incompetent so everyone else must be incompetent in the same way, too.”
Many managers make decisions based purely on feelings. You can show them data but they don’t care. They feel like being in-office is better. And maybe, maybe, it is, on some metrics. Are those metrics better for workers? Probably not.
And the cruelty? Well, as others have said, some people get off on having power over others.
The last point, there are some people who just can’t manage themselves so they seem to think no one else can, either. Like someone the other day was saying he can’t work from home because he’ll just play xbox. To which I respond, from the depths of my soul, fuck off. Grow up and stop making everyone else around you suffer because you’re an incompetent, unmedicated, shit. You can go into the office if you have to. Don’t make everyone else suffer a pay cut too because you’re trash tier at self control.
You’re forgetting the whole…" I invested entirely too much in corporate real estate".
When there’s instability in the market a lot of fortune 500 corporations will start investing in corporate real estate as a “safe bet” to hedge more risky investments.
Skyscrapers and large office spaces are on paper horrible investments and have an awful time filling enough vacancies to offset their upkeep. The only thing that makes them a “safe” investment is that every company uses them as a way to bank equity. If those same companies pulled the rug from under themselves they would all lose that safe equity piggy bank.
Skyscrapers and large office spaces are on paper horrible investments and have an awful time filling enough vacancies to offset their upkeep. The only thing that makes them a “safe” investment is that every company uses them as a way to bank equity. If those same companies pulled the rug from under themselves they would all lose that safe equity piggy bank.
This is just the sunk cost fallacy though. You can inflate the paper value of assets by playing games like this, but the bill always comes due in the end. Yes, companies that do this can juice their books a bit in the short term, but they’re harming themselves in the long term. They retain a bit higher book value for their real estate, but they make whatever goods or services they provide noncompetitive in the marketplace. They have competitors who aren’t bogged down by past bad real estate decisions. Those competitors can outcompete them on price and can attract better talent. Meanwhile, they’re stuck in their ways, fruitlessly trying to inflate their real estate holdings, all while their revenue is plummeting because they can’t attract good people and have to charge higher for their services than their competitors.
It’s just the sunk cost fallacy. You could inflate the book value of real estate by doing all sorts of foolish things. You could create a subsidiary and have that company rent out some of your floor space for absurdly high rates. But you’re ultimately just robbing Peter to pay Paul. Those commercial real estate properties have already lost their value. The value was lost the minute it was proven that work from home was a superior work model.
These companies are going to go bankrupt at a mass scale when the next recession rolls around.
Fuck, these companies might actually be violating the law. Deliberately choosing unproductive business practices just to cook your real estate books is something Enron would do.
The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent.
You’re right. It’s all right. Except the part where you think they can’t do this for long. How long did it take Madoff to get caught?
And there are enough barriers to competition to sustain this as long as they need. If anyone threatens them, they can just buy the competition.
This is just the sunk cost fallacy though. You can inflate the paper value of assets by playing games like this, but the bill always comes due in the end. Yes, companies that do this can juice their books a bit in the short term, but they’re harming themselves in the long term.
I mean… That’s kinda what late stage capitalism is all about, squeezing blood from stones on a quarterly basis.
You could create a subsidiary and have that company rent out some of your floor space for absurdly high rates. But you’re ultimately just robbing Peter to pay Paul.
Reminds me of the twin towers. One of the reasons it was such a catastrophe is because the towers were such a money sink that the city of New York subsidized the development by relocating a ton of government offices to there.
Fuck, these companies might actually be violating the law. Deliberately choosing unproductive business practices just to cook your real estate books is something Enron would do.
Pretty much the standard quo nowadays…why invest in things like labour when you can just inflate the worth of assets for free? Capitalism is about reducing cost while simulating growth, there is no reason to actually invest in the company if you can simulate investment enough to make share price go up.
Capitalism, such efficiency!
Pull all your own, sell office space. Profit?
Maybe if capitalism actually relied on competition for growth as capitalists often claim, however it’s pretty easy to recognize that corporations often work together to create their own demand.
fuck your unmedicated ass, you can go to theboffice if you want
The office or a park with cell reception, a cafe, a fucking wework, a…
Yeah, you just have to know yourself. Personally I feel like I need to go into the office once per week otherwise work starts becoming an abstract thing. But I’ve known some co-workers I wouldn’t see for months at a time that were really on the ball. Ask an obscure question about something really technical on slack and get an answer within seconds kind of thing. I knew another guy that said he had to come into the office every day because his family was too distracting.
Everyone needs to know what works for them and be a responsible professional about it.
And yeah managers that want 100% RTO are just admitting they can’t handle working from home. Ok that’s your thing, but it’s not a thing for everyone else.
Anyway I got out the the RTO thing because I told them of the times some computers were having issues and I had to work the whole weekend (from home) to fix them. If I’m going to be 100% RTO then I’m 0% WFH and the next time something like that happens I won’t be able to start working on it until 9am on Monday morning. So I’m still in the office one day per week, weather permitting, which is my preference.
