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IMHO, it depends on the role. Do you have a role that benefits from in person collaboration, or do you have a role where focus is the priority?
People get into warring camps about remote or onsite work, and we rarely talk about engineers, designers, accountants, etc. having very different needs. One size doesn’t fit all.
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%
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
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.Noone reads the email.
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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”.
I think, it’s a completely different thing to be in outside and on the internet/recorded. It’s different medium so it shouldn’t be treated the same.
how to tell if a tube photo was taken in summer:
Why? They are not wearing summer clothes
They don’t care about this part at all. This is your time. It’s your fault for not being rich.
evryone look irritated getting randomly photographed
Trains are a much more desirable way to get to work than driving is.
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.
Bro, EW lmao.
Tbf, you could probably sleep fairly safely on a lot of trains in the US. That said, it’s entirely too frequent, when I ride my area’s transit, that I see some wild shit that I’d really prefer not be asleep around.
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
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.
That guy in white with air pods looks like he’s going to be at 110% at prompt engineering and LinkedIn engagement.
Surely he’d be more productive if he got the LLM to do the prompt engineering for him?
He’s writing a LinkedIn post on this exact matter as we speak, on how he LLMed away his own position for the greater good a.k.a. The company.
Yep! Who else would set their bag on the floor of a metro, lol.
You guys don’t understand that this is is the goal. Happy rested people thinl a lot, demand things, want a better life. Unhappy and exausted people only want to go home and go to sleep, they loose their souls and think that this is better enough. Those are easy to control
It’s not a conspiracy, it’a a distributed systematic failure that can only be solved by cultural change.
Luigi is culture right?
Wahoo
I think its a conspiracy fact
Plus, look at the great job of keeping commercial real estate prices high they’re all doing
Eh? Since when Happy AND rested people think a lot and demand things? They are happy AND rested. They would not. On the other hand, tired, angry people would definitely demand a better life. The question is - is it going to be granted to them.
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.
🤣🤣🤣
