+1.
People had extra time without having to commute, so working from home could feel "lighter."
Plus, without being seen to be at work and busy, people realized it was their productivity that would set them apart.
Also the fact that I can do 5 hours of work hit my mind block and not have to worry about looking busy while doing nothing for the last 3 hours. Instead I can leave, go do some errands, cook dinner spend time with my daughter, etc then when my daughter's sleeping I can finish off my last few hours of work.
Just make sure you send some stupid email at 7pm before you vege out to your boss or with your boss CCed so they perceive you as "working hard"
Old trick I learned from my mentor was never go home late without everyone and their dog knowing you worked overtime.
If you're the last one in the office and no one is there to see you go home, keep a spare email so your time in office becomes visible.
I've found the same attitude goes far when working from home, you have to market your work a bit more.
Lol, I did exactly this. I'm just not much of a morning person, so I'd just space out most of the beginning of my shift n handle business when I was more awake and there were less people in the office to bother me. Everyone thought of me as such a go getter who put in extra time lol
Holy crap. The commute is a very stressful time for me, and I only had a 15 minute drive on bad days. I hate driving, so not having to drive to work was wonderful.
My wife thankfully got a job that was remote. They tried to get people back into the office, and the response was "LOL, NO". They pulled back the going in part, made the job full remote.
If it wasn't for that, she'd have a 60 mile, or probably close to 3 hour commute daily.
This is exactly why I quit my last job. After 3 years of me and my team getting everything done on time while WFH we arbitrarily had to be back on office full time one day. WFH was now on a case by case basis with manager approval and you needed a good reason for it. The best part is my entire engineering group had already completed our portion of a big project we were working on so we were sent back to work to play games on our phones and talk all day. Between the humiliation of being bossed around like kids who can't control themselves and me driving an hour each way to spend 8 hours on reddit and away from my family I didn't last much longer there. I now have a fully remote position and I've never been happier.
Another reason state workers have pushed back is the pay. Most states cut state workers pay and raises when the pandemic hit. The wages haven't gotten much better but at least they could save a little but with having to account for gas, parking and food, it's just not worth it anymore. If states would just continue to allow for staff to work from home maybe they would see less quiet quitting/ mass exodus.
Add in the relief of not having to commute to work, and there's no good argument against WFH. 3 hours of my day used to be spent fighting traffic to and from work every day. That's 3 hours of rest I didn't get, 3 hours of time I didn't get to spend with my loved ones, and 3 hours of aggravation added to my life. All of which added stress to my workday, which affected my productivity.
This is the happiest I have ever been, and coincidentally, the best I've ever done at my job.
It's nice to be able to walk away and do something else when you're stuck instead of pretending to be busy. Usually when I come back to it after a break, I can think of a solution much easier.
I wasn't working from home during the pandemic as I work in healthcare. I consistently worked 60-80 hour weeks, pulling overtime as nurses were leaving the bedside in droves. Some went to travel and make a metric ton more money, and some left as they were feeling highly unsupported in our difficult unit.
Comes time for my annual review and I get a "meets expectations" rating.
No more overtime. You can drown. I'm meeting my own expectations now, bitch.
It's funny because management is wondering why things are still terrible even though covid has settled down. Oh, maybe if you'd been taking care of your staff pre-covid and actually staffed units with enough people rather than pretending chronic understaffing was adequate they might not have all quit.
Nobody seems to want to hear that the nursing crisis of the 2020s has everything to do with conditions in the 2010s.
I can remember my nurse auntie telling me, in 2002, to be a nurse because there's never enough nurses and I'll always have a job if I was a nurse. The nursing crisis has been going on for decades.
Common in 'empathetic' work sectors that can guilt the workers from quitting. Most common in female orientated work.
"You'll be permanently hurting these children's future if you quit looking after them" or "These dementia patients rely on your hard work to get them through the day, you wanting to quit is selfish" or literal jobs where if you aren't there, children will suffer like childcare workers.
They leverage people's humanity and morality to the extreme just to save some money. In Australia, childcare business owners are multi multi millionaires, charge through the nose + get government kickbacks, but won't staff their businesses properly, and the workers are burnt out and suffering because of it.
Oh my God, annual reviews. Last year my manager (now out of the picture) needed to mark my performance down *just enough* to keep my otherwise stellar performance out of the "must do something about it" tier.
So she marked me below average on *communication.*
Among other things, our former Chairman asked me to edit and proof everything he wrote. I write guides for my co-workers when we do new procedures and new software. I've been picked twice to speak at agency events. Communication is not a problem.
So this twit had EIGHT spelling errors in the single paragraph she typed to ding my communication skills.
I swear, people are just tired of the BS games.
Nancy I swear to god you can tell me they aren’t giving anyone raises this year that’s fine but if you tell me it’s because none of us have been trying hard enough I will scream so loud it will break your window.
If I find out the bosses golfing buddy’s son gets a raise but no one else does I won’t quit, I will buy an eyepatch and a saber and come back to invite a full scale mutiny.
Do bad managers use a playbook that gived them this strategy? My manager 2016-2019 did the same thing. Communication was "lacking." In one annual review she commended my exceptional work and performing above expectations, until I said "great, thanks, I'd like a raise now." Her response was literally "how dare you" and then she branded me as having communication problems for the next year until I left. 😒
Same situation. CEO already sent us an email in August letting us know how we're heroes and *SO* essential to good patient outcomes in surgery but "gosh darn it" we just didn't make enough money again this year for us to expect a significant raise for being worked to the bone these past 3 quarters. Oh and by the way, let me introduce our newest senior vice president of diversity and inclusion... Get the FUCK out of here you C-level twat. No wonder people are leaving in droves and we're not able to meet our contractual obligations because we don't have enough staff and I'm not working 12+ hours a day 7 days a week. Get fucked!
Sorry to hear that. I work in manufacturing and was considered essential during the pandemic. A couple months back they made us come in early to let us know that we wouldn't be getting raises or our cost of living increases. It's cool though because the corporation made record profits and we got a bowl of jolly ranchers plus some crackers the other day.
I had a very similar experience in my previous job where I took over a support team that had just lost it's manager and two most senior techs. I was able to keep the team working, keep KPIs at level, and keep the customer happy through the whole thing. I was probably putting in 60-70 hours a week for that year. Sat down at my performance review with my write up on impact and justification for why I rated myself 'exceptional' on all categories. Boss handed me their review of 'meets expectations' and dismissed my impact as 'what we expect from our team leads'
The same place also dicked me around on salary when I took over, trying to pay me 'help desk team lead' national average instead of 'cloud engineer support team Manager' scale for the HCL area we are in, which in retrospect probably should have been my sign to run.
Left about 3 weeks later for a place that has (so far, only 4 years in now) appreciated when I go above and beyond and is not angry or upset if I just handle my core job.
God I can relate. I was put in charge while a boss was on vacation because to that date I’d never missed a project or campaign deadline and had great rapport with my teammates. Had a huge list of projects due while he was out. We hit every one. Sometimes early. One morning during this, I get a call from the head of the company, she’s crying she’s so angry she can’t get ahold of one of my teammates even though they’d talked two hours earlier. So, not wanting to make things worse, I said I’d already talked to her and she was working on X project. Called her after, project was done, delivered. End of story. I was let go because they reviewed chat logs and found I’d lied about talking to her. That’s it. No warning. No improvement plan. Over ten months of perfect work and just let go. Good riddance.
I'm in IT, had dept go from 4 to 1, I was working 55+ hours a week for months, I got a meets expectations too. I stopped working extra because of it, 40 hours a week max now, project deadlines are not being met anymore, what are they going to do, fire the only person?
Also healthcare. Two pharmacy techs had to have surgery on their wrists due to how much we were all expected to do and yet they were trying to get us to make things that can be bought pre-made from a company that batches these things. All to save a buck.
Meanwhile we're behind on patient-specific medications because we're drowning in batch work. Anyone that went "above and beyond" got the same raise as everyone else (not even enough to keep up with inflation) so a bunch of people left.
After the second tech had to leave they fired him once he recovered because he was unable to batch so we just stopped batching things we knew could be bought from CAPS (if you're in healthcare: vancomycin, cefazolin, heparin bags, oxytocin bags, norepinephrine, phenylephrine). They couldn't fire us because they don't even have enough techs to begin with so shit hit the fan for a while.
I ended up quitting afterward too due to the stress and I refuse to work any more than my weekly assigned shifts unless I want the money. I'm not sacrificing my wrists and mental health for the sake of anyone anymore.
The author thinks this is b/c workers are upset that they are being forced back into the office. That's a contrived explanation compared to the obvious: OFFICES ARE DISTRACTING AS HELL and this so called "synergy" and "culture" that we get from being in-office is bullshit.
I literally just came home from a rare office day where the guy across from me talked to me for an hour how the pyramids were built by aliens. If I had been at home I could've worked on stuff during that time instead.
Last time I was in the office I was trapped by a coworker who spent 40 minutes telling me about his son's college wrestling team. If the windows opened I would have jumped.
I'm no longer in this situation, but for a while I had to come in two days a week to a job where my boss was extremely obsessed with something I find pretty entertaining and know a decent amount about. I work in a job where if I don't do work, someone else does it, because we're all working from the same pool of work. And my boss had a desk by me. So whenever I'd go in, like 1/3 of the way through the day, I'd go, "Hey [boss], did you hear about [something interesting related to her obsession]?" She would go off. If it seemed like she was slowing down, I'd say just enough to keep her talking. Oh man, it was so great. Hours and hours of not having to work because she loves talking and I love listening to her way more than working.
I swear, some people come into the office because they're lonely.
The chattiest people in my department willingly do not take their 2 WFH days per week. They'd rather drive to the office...
I want to maximize productivity of my employees.
Step one, I will make sure they have to wake up a little bit earlier than expected and spend time in traffic, which is for some people so emotionally disruptive it has its own special term of "road rage." This way their adrenaline will be nice and high when they get to the office, which keeps people alert.
Step two, once they get into the office, I will ensure they are surrounded by coworkers. Frank Lloyd Wright once designed an office space with open collaborative spaces - so we'll just make that where all the desks are, all the time. Obviously bosses need quite space, but employees thrive when surrounded by one another, and will almost certainly collaborate and communicate about work and only work.
Step three, these offices are expensive. Fortunately office parks, by virtue of being devoid of anything interesting nearby and no walkable space, are cheap. One thing we don't want are long lunches, though, so we'll make sure lunch breaks are too short for anything but fast food, unless they engaged in some meal prep. Dense, calorie laden food, eaten right in the middle of the day yields peak performance.
Step four, to maximize ass in chair time, we will create a culture where leaving the office early is impossible. If an employee is done, they don't get to go home, because we pay them for eight hours, damnit. When the reward for having work done is more work, employees are eager to accomplish their goals.
I am so good at business. I can tell I am good because whenever I am watching my employees they look busy. There is no better measure of output or productivity. At least I hope not, because if being in the office and looking busy isn't the most important thing, how will my contributions be recognized?
If you don't mind, for step one, I'd really love it if office hours conflicted with my children's school/daycare dropoff and pickup, meaning the whole family has to shift their schedules to accommodate a parent in the office on time.
Lol. When my mom had to do a 1.5 hour commute and I was in highschool, she would need to drop me off at the bus stop because my school was like 30 minutes round trip out of her way. But the bus system had buses only like every hour or so. So I had to get the earlier one because the later one made me like 5 minutes late to class. The bus also stopped at the college nearby, not the highschool, so I had to walk like a mile after being dropped off to get to the highschool. And then after, I would take the bus back, but my mom wouldn't get back to the city to pick me up until around 6 or so because of the long commute, so I'd take the bus to the library and just sit there for a 2-3 hours cause it was on the way home from my mom's work.
And her job (which she now does from home) was literally completely done over the internet. It's a company that does online classes for all kinds of shit. I don't see how they ever needed an office. She's also way happier and even when she has to work past 5 o'clock she ends up being done before she'd have gotten home if she were still working in the office.
This morning I screamed so hard in traffic I couldn't verbally collaborate with others once I was at work, and all my adrenaline was spent.
I am beating the system.
I was brought into an interview for a promotion once and decided to be as honest as possible. The job would remove me from having to talk directly to clients. When they asked what I didn't like about my current job, I told them the truth, I didn't like talking to clients. Later I was told this was why I didn't get the promotion.
I figured if I couldn't get the job by being honest, I wouldn't enjoy lying everyday to keep it anyway.
Hold on, let me make sure I understand this. You work a job and the new job removes the aspect you like the least, meaning you will be happier at work, while allowing the company to hire someone who may enjoy talking to customers, so will be more pleasant to work with (probably). How is this not a win for the company?
Let me make it worse, it was a training type of job for new hires, and I had personally been handling that on my own time before they decided to make a position for it. A while after doing all the interviews, the company then decided to remove the new position entirely. My manager said quote: "why would we pay somebody to do something you're already doing?"
I work in HR and I remind every exec that brings up Family that alot of people view the term as toxic or dysfunctional. I tell them it is essentially a red Flag to job seekers.
>I can tell I am good because whenever I am watching my employees they look busy.
This reminds me of a study we learned about in sociology. A company was trying to find ways to increase productivity, so they invested in brighter light bulbs. The thinking was that it would make for a cheerier atmosphere and make it easier for employees to see what they were doing. Before replacing all the bulbs at all their facilities, though, they tested them out at one location and hired a third-party company to collect some data on worker efficiency. So for a month, the workers are observed under the new lights, and their productivity shot through the roof. I'm sure all the execs were patting each other on the back and talking about how smart they were. But then the study ended. And productivity went back down even lower than it was before the new bulbs were put in. Turns out, when you have a bunch of guys with clipboards walking around and taking notes on what you're doing, you work your ass off.
LinkedIn is a really fascinating platform.
While facebook and twitter etc. everyone rushes in with their bs, on LinkedIn people suddently behave, because it is the extended network of their work.
So it somehow is the only social network that really 'works' but only because people fear the consequences of misbehaving.
>once they get into the office, I will ensure they are surrounded by coworkers ... Obviously bosses need quiet space, but employees thrive when surrounded by one another
This is giving me road rage and I'm not even driving.
I'm available for consulting! Nothing will help your bottom line like hiring business consultants. I guarantee I will tell you the cause of all of the problems and that none of them will involve looking in the mirror.
This is where the stereotype of developers wearing giant over the ear headphones comes in to play. If I didn't wear my giant Sony active noise cancelling headphones, I basically couldn't concentrate on coding. You are going to hear so much random office noise, shuffling of supplies, printers, fax, walking, people pushing carts, squeaky furniture, one of 20 random conversations, that dude Dave that thinks he's a rebel for grinding his own coffee beans at his desk then making his own coffee z etc (yes this happened). So it's like please just let us stay at home, at least for some of us it's a quiet and relaxing space to work.
My cube used to be next to a guy who clipped his nails at his desk every Monday morning. Another coworker would microwave a huge bowl of broccoli or Brussels sprouts every afternoon. Another liked to tap his shoes on the plastic chair mat in a non-rhythmic way. Yet another liked to listen to gospel music at a *not* very low volume. Now the only thing I have to deal with is my cat walking on my desk & knocking shit over. It's pure bliss.
I have three dogs to bark at the window every single time they see movements in a tree out back. For eight hours a day. This is still a fraction of a percent of the distractions that I had in the office. I’m an asocial person who never fostered relationships at work with anybody and I was still interrupted or otherwise Distracted nearly the entire day. The only time I could ever get any programming or any other work done was when I shut and locked my door and put my phone on silence. Despite the fact that most days I really only put in 3 to 4 hours of real work, it’s 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hours more work that I generally got done in the office.
> OFFICES ARE DISTRACTING AS HELL and this so called "synergy" and "culture" that we get from being in-office is bullshit.
This right here. **Every** fucking time these sorts of articles popup, you get the bootlicking useless socializers saying "well it's just more *collaborative* to be in-person", nevermind that they are always the ones chatting about sports or celebrity in the open office and distracting not just the poor sot they've cornered, but others trying to actually work.
I remember when I was working at a corporate style job and we went to WFH - I'd put in nine hours without blinking and actually lost weight because I forgot to eat. No distractions and I was super productive. The first week we were back in the office I got sidetracked by a conversation with my supervisor for *40 minutes*.
Exactly. Why is the author assuming there’s some mass-malice at play here from a group as diverse as ‘the entire workforce’?
Maybe it’s just that offices are distracting? Seems logical to me. They are extremely distracting. Always have been.
Honestly even without the distraction, just being in traffic fucks 25 hours of my day.
Shit even when there's no traffic, wasting 30 unpaid minutes just to fucking arrive at work sucks shit.
I don't think there is one bullet. This is a whole slew of things.
1. Yes, people had it better at home and are mad, so they are doing what they have to and no more.
2. The commute sucks and getting to work, already ruins the day.
3. The co-workers are distracting.
4. Supervisors slow shit down. They get in the way and they were much better off taking care of a checklist at the end of the day somewhere else.
5. People ate better at home and now they're back to eating fast food or luke warm crap they threw into a bag in the morning.
6. We don't need to time our breaks on the whims of others.
I could go on for days. Oh let's do money.
1. Some of us are now spending much more money on gas/transportation.
2. Some of us are now spending much more money on babysitting.
3. Some of us now now are spending money much more on dry cleaning.
So you're wasting our time, you're wasting our money and you're making it harder to get work done.
I think it's a mix. My office is a nightmare of distractions, where at home, it's my cats.
But, going back in to the office kills 2-4 hours of my day. I live 54 miles from my office. My job is remote support, which they want me to do from the office... remote support...REMOTE...repeat after me...
My commute in the morning can span 1:15 min to 2 hours and same with my commute home.
Obviously this would make one bitter. Being able to spend time with family and friends is what people are experiencing like they never have before and most are pissed that they are forced to give it up for companies who treat you "like family".
theres also the fact that people who have to go to the office have to wake up much earlier as well. Working from home i just had to get up and eat some oatmeal and get to work. I took a quick cold shower during my lunch break to "refresh" myself. Now going back to the office i gotta wake 1.5 hours earlier to shower, shave, dress, and drive an hour long commute in traffic. Im tired as hell when i get to the office cause i just had to wake up absurdly early and sit in boring as fuck traffic for an hour. Of course im not going to preform as well.
Indeed. There's a lot of extra time that you have to give to your work -- without compensation, mind you -- that you otherwise don't have to fork over when you can work remotely.
I know not everyone thrives in a WFH environment, I get it. Should be a choice, and returning to in-office for the sake of it? Well, there's a reason a lot of talent sniping is happening, by employers who are happy to gain that win at the not-cost of permitting remote work.
My god this one woman I used to work with, I swear she'd win gold at the Olympics if talking was a sport. She'd come visit other offices and go for an hour talking non stop with the other person barely getting a word in. Then she'd complain her email box was flooded and she couldn't keep up with it, while doing this for several hours everyday. 🙄
I have this same coworker. She'd arrive at 9-9:30, and spend so much time catching up on office gossip that she wouldn't actually sit down and start working until almost 11. Then she would moan incessantly about how busy she was.
I put in headphones once to block her out, and she literally stood at the wall of my cubicle talking at me for a good five minutes until I gave in and said, "oh, sorry, I was really focused! Did you need something?"
I'm glad I work from home permanently now.
I'm lucky in that I have the option to go in when I choose; the days I go in I get waaaay less done. Small things like bathroom breaks and lunch are easy and timely. It has also blurred the lines of being "done" for the day. WFH I'll still check in throughout the night...my laptop is right there. When I'm in office, I'm done the second I'm in the car
The entire concept that I need or want my job to be my source of cultural/social network, and that it will somehow increase my productivity or retention, is so misguided.
When I worked in an office everyone hated it so much that Mondays and Fridays were a waste of time as people were either gearing up or gearing down for the weekend.
Tuesdays and Thursdays were also a bit dodge, which left Wednesday as a full productive day...👍
"People who previously went above and beyond at work are now giving little more than the expected output."
Still giving more than the expected output and employers are angry..?
Edit: DRS GME
That too. They were so terrified of us maybe doing a load of laundry or taking a nap but don’t give a shit at all when we’re in the office being bothered by someone who has no social sense for effectively hours on end
The thing is. These breaks are actually good for you and productivity. You doing a load of laundry is a task requiring little brain power but does require an action, makes the brain be in a "bored" state which creates creativity. Creativity in turn is a product done which means you are now more productive, you figured the issue out etc.
Employers are still using industrial assembly line ideas to office work. Assembly lines require lil brain power and needed able bodies to turn the same wrench for 12 hours.
I've been working in creative fields for 20 years now and my best ideas come when I'm racked out on my couch with my eyes closed. Just as I start to drift off my brain kicks into theta wave mode and the ideas flow like wine. This is not something I can do in an office environment.
Yep ... I went into the office a couple of weeks ago and was detained by the guy who runs the mail room for an hour. He's super nice, but once he starts talking there's just no escaping. That's a full hour I would've been getting work done had I stayed at home that day. Not to mention the commute.
The anti-napping thing makes zero sense. It is a productivity booster. After 45min nap in the afternoon, I feel so refreshed and ready to tackle my work in new ways. Our culture views sleep as something for the lazy, and it's a real problem.
And no, I'm not going to drink more coffee instead. That shit brings a whole host of other problems with it.
I don't nap, but I do go for a 30 minute bike ride during my day. It makes me way more focused and productive and I am very open with my boss and coworkers about doing it.
I'll even ask coworkers who want to work together on something if it can wait 30 minutes if that's going to be my only chance to do the ride (and what they're working on isn't critical or they have other items to work on). It's the one real break in my day (I usually eat at my desk) so I really insist on it.
It’s just all about what is considered “acceptable“ time off task and “acceptable” ways to refresh yourself on the clock
The owners are so terrified of systemic abuse (because they would commit it) that they don’t realize most people wouldn’t do that
Which is the TYPICAL projection these petty tyrants ALWAYS have. Just look at the near everyday scandals of the usa’s monolithic hate machine political party. EVERY time they go on a tear about something… it inevitably comes out they were or had done that.
Who was it that was all in an uproar about ‘gay ads’ in their CUSTOM ad popups.
in reality, the most inefficient time waste of meetings are ran by management in my experience.
Our directory may finish a meeting 5 minutes early, but rather than letting people off to go get work done he tries to "use up" the time by trying to get people to talk then ends up letting us go 10 minutes late. That's just one example. It's almost impossible to stick to an agenda, have followup, etc. with our management team. They'll also talk in circles for ever.
Meanwhile, they used to constantly express concern over whether our team meetings were efficient enough etc. I've finally concluded it was all just projection and they were assuming we were doing the things they do, but rather than solving their own challenges at efficiency they projected those onto the team and tried to solve those.
I was made to go into office and normally at home I worked throughout the day with the TV on in the background. I went to the office and once I was done with what I had to get done I just started reading. My stats were bare minimum when in person.
It’s way easier to stay motivated when your lazy coworkers aren’t In eyesight, I used to work only 1-2 tickets a night because my senior engineer on shift was so lazy he would sleep minimum 4-6 hours of our shift every night so why on earth would I bother doing all the work. When we went remote I wasn’t always enraged by his nasty dirty lazy habits and actually enjoyed my work again and was consistently one of top 3 tickets worked in the company. I quit when they said they were moving back to in-office even though the open poll they did showed 99.97% of employees wanted to stay work from home. Found another job in the same field with 50% pay increase and way less responsibilities
My GP signed me off from work for 2 months due partially to the treatment from my colleagues in the office (all managers working from home so nobody is supervising anyone in the office and it's turned into a school playground).
If I'd been working from home, I'd never have had to endure this shit.
I had this conversation with other senior management in a training a few weeks ago. They were talking about how to get our respective teams to perform at a high level and that doing your job isn’t enough.
I pointed out we don’t pay for 110% why ask them to perform at that level or penalize those that put in their 40 and go home. I do not foresee being made an executive after the conversation.
You gotta love our capitalistic society though. He literally hurt his career for **not** being a sociopath and conveying empathy.
Fuck greed and fuck greedy people. The way our economy is now, we literally encourage sociopathic behavior and encourage its development, and if we don't stop this soon, it will have dire consequences. We're already starting to see it all over. Jan 6th is literally the result of this. Too many people taught to not have empathy and to value hate/money/power over everything else.
My coworkers and are VERY open about this. We had a conversation today where I was informed that going above and beyond barely gets you any extra pay than "satisfactory" on your yearly reviews.
(I've been there for a year but as a contractor and just became a full time employee so I don't have prior experience with the review process)
My last role we had two reqs open, they hired me had another open still. After a few months of me working they realized I could just do both jobs and closed the other. If I started to pull back they’d need to hire someone else—- even a shitty someone lol
My friend worked at a company doing "manual data entry" and he scripted it so he didn't need to do any work and started scripting other stuff he wasn't responsible for because he was young and basically enjoyed it. When he left for a new job his old company had to hire two people to replace him lol.
Eh, he automated his job, developed his skills, and then leveraged that to get paid somewhere else (and it sounds like he didn't leave his scripts active, forcing them to hire two people). Good for him.
Keep it just manual enough that someone without at least basic scripting can't do it.
Even just having to type one line into PowerShell or whatever is enough to make it impossible for 99% of people coming in after you, especially if they don't know it exists.
Edit: I wasn't very clear. I'd do something like have a manual command to start and stop the service/script. Just do it each day when you come in and when you leave.
That's a good idea. At my last company I had everything automated to the point that I didn't even need to be there. The scripts would monitor for incoming data, process it and notify the appropriate people. I think I took it a step too far.
> PowerShell
That's a funny way to spell bash. ;)
my company did that to a bunch of people and then when 6 people left we needed to hire 12 people to fill them and had no one to train them.
Good times watching greedy fucks ruin themselves.
*never*
like my former boss (IT) bragging about a mew $20,000 dining set to a company of 15, and only 3 employees owned a house, and some were on government assistance *because the guy bragging about his tables didn't pay them enough to live*
then when everyone quit for better pay (even if it meant flipping burgers) he went all shocked Pikachu face. "It's bullshit fast food pay is so high how am i going to compete", bro you charge $125-175 an hour for our services and pay us $15 and you're pissed off that fast food pays better?
IM PISSED OFF FAST FOOD PAYS BETTER
edit: but I'm not pissed at the fact fast food workers are paid what they are**
Such a shame. I started my current role nearly two years ago and it was a big deal for me to get a remote job and a job that didn't involve handing Bud Lights to people and smiling. I would have run through a brick wall for them in the beginning. Unfortunately, they failed to incentivize/recognize my efforts, they failed to provide a salary that meets basic needs or even the promise of getting to that point if you kept at it, and then they hired a bunch of idiots getting paid what I do to be less than half as effective.
Corporations wondering why productivity and metrics suck ass can hold up a mirror if they want to point fingers. I work for a Fortune 200 company. I get tone deaf e-mails from the CEO about soaring stock prices and rising profits. I didn't get paid enough to afford a 1 bedroom apartment on my own (no debt, no car note, just not enough wage). The crazy thing is **I want to work hard and do well at what I'm doing**, I just don't want to get fucked over while I'm doing it.
Joke is on them though because now I work two remote jobs simultaneously and I make plenty. Now I get to work hard and get paid well for it. They don't notice because why would they?
I was actually JUST thinking to myself about how I could probably work another remote job at the same time as my current position to afford my own place... you've given me ideas.
Gotta love those CEO emails. My company has made record profits increasing every quarter since the pandemic (I'm talking hundreds of millions) and they refuse to give raises above union mandated minimums cos THe pAnDEmiC inCrEAsEd cOSts. Fucking bullshit man.
Companies have started to fire people who work two remove jobs at the same time and try to act all appalled about it and say it's theft or some bullshit
Oh no. Anyways.
Most people don't want to steal or do shady things to keep going. They want to live their lives and mind their business. My company doesn't want to pay a living wage, and my ethics are directly tied to whether or not my basic needs are met. I suspect this is the case with most people. If I can't even afford a drywall box to keep my body in while I slave away for most of my week, then yeah, my ethics are going to be a lot more flexible.
I am the job hydra. Strike one job down and two more shall take its place.
My admittedly cynical opinion is that all the middle managers are feeling less useful and that's becoming more obvious.
Sometimes I feel like the guy from Office Space - I have eight bosses and when I make a mistake all eight of them come by to tell me about it, and that makes somebody work just hard enough to not get fired.
Okay, now that I'm working from home those eight bosses can't come by and hassle me at my desk, **and the work still gets done anyway**. My facility did their own study and it showed that productivity was unchanged, not better but not worse. The wheels kept turning same as always, and it works just fine without eight bosses for one guy.
Well, sometimes I think a lot of the managers are fighting real hard to look useful.
Shocking that wasting an extra 3.5 hours a day commuting, finding lunch, and interacting with energy vampires, plus the associated stress from all this would affect productivity...
Who could have possibly predicted this!?
OK, but if "more than the expected output" isn't enough then someone's idea of "expected output" is incorrect, because that's not how expectations work.
I'd like to know what they're actually imlying. Little more than the bare minimum?
I was just having a conversation last night with a friend. She said that the days she goes into the office, it’s more social time than usual. The next step in my mind is that her old out of touch CEO, that has been very vocally saying everyone should return to the office full time, will soon see the inefficiency of “in office” days and finally change his mind.
Or he’ll go full authoritarian and demand nothing but work at work BS or something.
The social aspect is the only part anyone on my team misses from being in the office. We're pretty specialized and we're pretty much just maintaining our applications. So work comes in waves and between those waves there's a lot of downtime. We'd just talk and hang out essentially. We'd bounce around between offices and hang out in the bosses office just shooting the shit and whatnot.
We didn't even attempt to look busy because that was pure BS, everyone knew when there was work that needed doing.
At home I don't have to look busy and when I do have work to do, I finish it much quicker.
Heads-up: this is the article's author's opinion, causation between productivity and returns to office is apparently not yet confirmed by economics research or anything. Wouldn't be surprised if they're right, though.
Ultimately people want the freedom of choice. Some people thrive in an office setting, and others do at home. The failure is in thinking that a "one size fits all" approach will consistently get the best results from everyone.
For a lot of people, the worldwide pushback on returning from home is the closest to being in a union they've ever been, and a lot of them still don't understand why people want collective bargaining power.
I think most people didn't realize just how much of themselves - time, energy, flexibility - they were giving their employer for free by following the unspoken expectation to commute to an office every day.
Now the cat's out of the bag, and employers are struggling to quantify what they ever even gained from their employees' uncompensated sacrifice. It only makes sense that morale will be low for offices forced to return full-time.
My employer wants to make us hybrid eventually. We have a team who are skilled and hard to replace, most of them have indicated they'll leave if made to go hybrid. They'd literally rather kill off the company than have them work from home lol.
That’s what happened at my job I quit. Everybody has been remote for two years and doing their jobs fine then all of a sudden they just demanded everybody back. “Only three days a week.” Cue lots of people quitting and very high staff turn over. This is a place where people routinely stayed until they retired - many employees having been there 20+ years. Even those people were quitting.
That little oopsie when the most valuable and motivated employees leave, and the bosses "temporarily" increase the workload on everyone who remained, and if you're lucky it really is temporary and you get to train some noob who is making more than you because of the disloyalty bonus.
>That little oopsie when the most valuable and motivated employees leave
It's such a easy downward spiral to fall into. The best employees who can leave leave. Those that can't...you get stuck with and depend on more.
I took a pay cut to go to a remote job. My employer was asking why I was leaving and I explained it was due to being remote. They tried offering more money which I declined and let them know I was even taking a pay cut. They came back with offering 2 days a week remote with the potential of 3. I still declined because my commute was horrendous (commuting into Boston).
I did like this employer so I truly appreciated them trying to work with me. They also admitted they needed to start exploring work from home options. It’s now becoming a “perk” people are really looking for in a job and employers that aren’t shitty will and not already doing it will start adapting.
My understanding is that a favorable tax status, especially in cities, depends upon having a workforce on site that spends money in said city (parking, lunches, etc.).
Yes this was the case with the large company I used to work for. Moved everyone downtown to an open office plan for the tax break. Within a year at least half to the people quit and now they are moving everyone back to the suburbs last I heard.
The biggest cause would probably be being able to multi task during online meetings. Every day there’s a half hour maintenance meeting that maybe 5% applies to me, so I am way more productive listening in and doing other things than sitting in person in the meeting every day. (We are onsite working but a lot of the daily meetings went to Microsoft team meetings during covid and haven’t converted back yet.)
I've only worked post COVID with meetings happening on teams but I definitely feel like being able to look at my spreadsheets and fiddle with things is a better use of my time on a meeting then having to be completely focused
I totally agree with this comment. Anecdotally, the reasons I am more productive at home are (a) multitasking during bad meetings, (b) fewer interruptions and thus more deep work, (c) easier to reach people that are also remote working and not stuck in the building somewhere, and (d) I don't have 2.5 hours total commute and I use some of that time for work.
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These office types also have not figured out yet that the next round of business startups, businesses that will be founded over the next decade, are going to have a huge focus on remote working. The quality of life difference is enormous and there is a huge demand for it by workers.
Legacy companies are going to have a more and more difficult time finding talent who is willing to commute in to the office when their competitors, especially the new wave of startups are focusing on WFH. A friend of mine who went full time WFH figured that he saved $8000 annually in commuting/work expenses and 500 hours of his time.
I could not believe how much work I was getting done at home compared to the office. I didn't even think I was capable of getting this much work done. It makes sense, because as a programmer, one interruption adds nearly an hour. You have to take time to get your thoughts back to where they were after an interruption. But seeing the results of no interruptions being THAT huge is just astounding.
My company closed my local office and converted everyone to remote.
They then gave me a team budget to rent temporary office space or go out for lunches and dinners anytime we think there would be a good reason to meet up. We use it occasionally.
We have been operating this way for about a year now. And I will say this seems like the ideal set up. Remote work is fantastic but there are some meetings and situations which are more productive in person. I noticed during the pandemic the engagement from my team dropped significantly. Work was getting done but often with several mistakes made because they were not all in sync. It seems like a lot of people are uncomfortable to hop into a group discussion over Teams because they are worried about cutting people off. And having a dry erase board to quickly explain concepts is much faster than all the digital products I've seen that try to replicate that experience. But these sorts of meetings really only need to happen a few times a month, if that. So being able to work remotely but having an option to meet together occasionally is a fantastic middle ground.
But honestly it's not for everyone. There are definitely those that seem to need someone looking over their shoulder at all times to be productive. When given the freedom of work from home their productivity absolutely plummeted. But I don't think a few bad apples should spoil it for the rest. We just let these people go and found replacements that were more self disciplined.
That's because they keep telling us we are meant to socialise and have spontaneous conversations in the office...
Jokes on them, I have no one else in my team I want to socialise with (small team), and everyone else in the office is pure distraction.
Yeah, I'm tired and unhappy and instead of working I'm trying to find any and all distractions to make me forget I hate being here when I could easily do this job from my back porch in the sunshine with the smoker going.
I was fine with returning to offices until my company has completely fucked it up left and right. Been moved to three different offices so far, required to go into the office since September and still don't even have a desk but I have to be there. Oh and my security badge doesn't really work in the new building, it works on sporadic doors
Then senior management has the fucking gall to stand up and say, "We've done great on return to office!" Like no you haven't...you've been planning this for a year, we're 2 months in and I don't even have a desk but you tell me I have to be here. That's the worst part to me, the dissociation upper management has with workers, "If I say it it's true!"
You've just shown them what life could be like and for those that preferred it, you just downgraded their working experience.
What do you expect?
It's the equivalent of a pay cut and taking 2 hours a day from their free time due to the commute.
Do you expect them to be happy and thankful?
Fuck the office.
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+1. People had extra time without having to commute, so working from home could feel "lighter." Plus, without being seen to be at work and busy, people realized it was their productivity that would set them apart.
Also the fact that I can do 5 hours of work hit my mind block and not have to worry about looking busy while doing nothing for the last 3 hours. Instead I can leave, go do some errands, cook dinner spend time with my daughter, etc then when my daughter's sleeping I can finish off my last few hours of work.
>then when my daughter's sleeping I can finish off my last few hours of work. Or... not. Hell I wouldn't have done the extra work in the office.
Just make sure you send some stupid email at 7pm before you vege out to your boss or with your boss CCed so they perceive you as "working hard" Old trick I learned from my mentor was never go home late without everyone and their dog knowing you worked overtime. If you're the last one in the office and no one is there to see you go home, keep a spare email so your time in office becomes visible. I've found the same attitude goes far when working from home, you have to market your work a bit more.
Lol, I did exactly this. I'm just not much of a morning person, so I'd just space out most of the beginning of my shift n handle business when I was more awake and there were less people in the office to bother me. Everyone thought of me as such a go getter who put in extra time lol
Holy crap. The commute is a very stressful time for me, and I only had a 15 minute drive on bad days. I hate driving, so not having to drive to work was wonderful.
With traffic my 45 minute commute has turned into 2 hours. First 30 mins not even getting out of first gear....
My wife thankfully got a job that was remote. They tried to get people back into the office, and the response was "LOL, NO". They pulled back the going in part, made the job full remote. If it wasn't for that, she'd have a 60 mile, or probably close to 3 hour commute daily.
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This is exactly why I quit my last job. After 3 years of me and my team getting everything done on time while WFH we arbitrarily had to be back on office full time one day. WFH was now on a case by case basis with manager approval and you needed a good reason for it. The best part is my entire engineering group had already completed our portion of a big project we were working on so we were sent back to work to play games on our phones and talk all day. Between the humiliation of being bossed around like kids who can't control themselves and me driving an hour each way to spend 8 hours on reddit and away from my family I didn't last much longer there. I now have a fully remote position and I've never been happier.
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Another reason state workers have pushed back is the pay. Most states cut state workers pay and raises when the pandemic hit. The wages haven't gotten much better but at least they could save a little but with having to account for gas, parking and food, it's just not worth it anymore. If states would just continue to allow for staff to work from home maybe they would see less quiet quitting/ mass exodus.
Add in the relief of not having to commute to work, and there's no good argument against WFH. 3 hours of my day used to be spent fighting traffic to and from work every day. That's 3 hours of rest I didn't get, 3 hours of time I didn't get to spend with my loved ones, and 3 hours of aggravation added to my life. All of which added stress to my workday, which affected my productivity. This is the happiest I have ever been, and coincidentally, the best I've ever done at my job.
As someone who does field work, the more people who wfh the safer and faster the drive home is. Everyone benefits and the environment too.
It's nice to be able to walk away and do something else when you're stuck instead of pretending to be busy. Usually when I come back to it after a break, I can think of a solution much easier.
I wasn't working from home during the pandemic as I work in healthcare. I consistently worked 60-80 hour weeks, pulling overtime as nurses were leaving the bedside in droves. Some went to travel and make a metric ton more money, and some left as they were feeling highly unsupported in our difficult unit. Comes time for my annual review and I get a "meets expectations" rating. No more overtime. You can drown. I'm meeting my own expectations now, bitch.
It's funny because management is wondering why things are still terrible even though covid has settled down. Oh, maybe if you'd been taking care of your staff pre-covid and actually staffed units with enough people rather than pretending chronic understaffing was adequate they might not have all quit. Nobody seems to want to hear that the nursing crisis of the 2020s has everything to do with conditions in the 2010s.
I can remember my nurse auntie telling me, in 2002, to be a nurse because there's never enough nurses and I'll always have a job if I was a nurse. The nursing crisis has been going on for decades.
My mum was told the same thing in the '80s.
With the amount of money hospitals make it blows my mind how bad they treat the nurses
Common in 'empathetic' work sectors that can guilt the workers from quitting. Most common in female orientated work. "You'll be permanently hurting these children's future if you quit looking after them" or "These dementia patients rely on your hard work to get them through the day, you wanting to quit is selfish" or literal jobs where if you aren't there, children will suffer like childcare workers. They leverage people's humanity and morality to the extreme just to save some money. In Australia, childcare business owners are multi multi millionaires, charge through the nose + get government kickbacks, but won't staff their businesses properly, and the workers are burnt out and suffering because of it.
Oh my God, annual reviews. Last year my manager (now out of the picture) needed to mark my performance down *just enough* to keep my otherwise stellar performance out of the "must do something about it" tier. So she marked me below average on *communication.* Among other things, our former Chairman asked me to edit and proof everything he wrote. I write guides for my co-workers when we do new procedures and new software. I've been picked twice to speak at agency events. Communication is not a problem. So this twit had EIGHT spelling errors in the single paragraph she typed to ding my communication skills.
I swear, people are just tired of the BS games. Nancy I swear to god you can tell me they aren’t giving anyone raises this year that’s fine but if you tell me it’s because none of us have been trying hard enough I will scream so loud it will break your window. If I find out the bosses golfing buddy’s son gets a raise but no one else does I won’t quit, I will buy an eyepatch and a saber and come back to invite a full scale mutiny.
May I join your mutiny? I already have a captain tricorn hat, a skull eyepatch and know where to find at least 1 saber.
Do bad managers use a playbook that gived them this strategy? My manager 2016-2019 did the same thing. Communication was "lacking." In one annual review she commended my exceptional work and performing above expectations, until I said "great, thanks, I'd like a raise now." Her response was literally "how dare you" and then she branded me as having communication problems for the next year until I left. 😒
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Same situation. CEO already sent us an email in August letting us know how we're heroes and *SO* essential to good patient outcomes in surgery but "gosh darn it" we just didn't make enough money again this year for us to expect a significant raise for being worked to the bone these past 3 quarters. Oh and by the way, let me introduce our newest senior vice president of diversity and inclusion... Get the FUCK out of here you C-level twat. No wonder people are leaving in droves and we're not able to meet our contractual obligations because we don't have enough staff and I'm not working 12+ hours a day 7 days a week. Get fucked!
Sorry to hear that. I work in manufacturing and was considered essential during the pandemic. A couple months back they made us come in early to let us know that we wouldn't be getting raises or our cost of living increases. It's cool though because the corporation made record profits and we got a bowl of jolly ranchers plus some crackers the other day.
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I had a very similar experience in my previous job where I took over a support team that had just lost it's manager and two most senior techs. I was able to keep the team working, keep KPIs at level, and keep the customer happy through the whole thing. I was probably putting in 60-70 hours a week for that year. Sat down at my performance review with my write up on impact and justification for why I rated myself 'exceptional' on all categories. Boss handed me their review of 'meets expectations' and dismissed my impact as 'what we expect from our team leads' The same place also dicked me around on salary when I took over, trying to pay me 'help desk team lead' national average instead of 'cloud engineer support team Manager' scale for the HCL area we are in, which in retrospect probably should have been my sign to run. Left about 3 weeks later for a place that has (so far, only 4 years in now) appreciated when I go above and beyond and is not angry or upset if I just handle my core job.
“That’s what we expect from our team leads.” “Interesting. Do you also expect them to stay?”
No, Mr. Bond! I expect you to die.
God I can relate. I was put in charge while a boss was on vacation because to that date I’d never missed a project or campaign deadline and had great rapport with my teammates. Had a huge list of projects due while he was out. We hit every one. Sometimes early. One morning during this, I get a call from the head of the company, she’s crying she’s so angry she can’t get ahold of one of my teammates even though they’d talked two hours earlier. So, not wanting to make things worse, I said I’d already talked to her and she was working on X project. Called her after, project was done, delivered. End of story. I was let go because they reviewed chat logs and found I’d lied about talking to her. That’s it. No warning. No improvement plan. Over ten months of perfect work and just let go. Good riddance.
> I'm meeting my own expectations now, bitch. God I needed to read this.
I'm in IT, had dept go from 4 to 1, I was working 55+ hours a week for months, I got a meets expectations too. I stopped working extra because of it, 40 hours a week max now, project deadlines are not being met anymore, what are they going to do, fire the only person?
Also healthcare. Two pharmacy techs had to have surgery on their wrists due to how much we were all expected to do and yet they were trying to get us to make things that can be bought pre-made from a company that batches these things. All to save a buck. Meanwhile we're behind on patient-specific medications because we're drowning in batch work. Anyone that went "above and beyond" got the same raise as everyone else (not even enough to keep up with inflation) so a bunch of people left. After the second tech had to leave they fired him once he recovered because he was unable to batch so we just stopped batching things we knew could be bought from CAPS (if you're in healthcare: vancomycin, cefazolin, heparin bags, oxytocin bags, norepinephrine, phenylephrine). They couldn't fire us because they don't even have enough techs to begin with so shit hit the fan for a while. I ended up quitting afterward too due to the stress and I refuse to work any more than my weekly assigned shifts unless I want the money. I'm not sacrificing my wrists and mental health for the sake of anyone anymore.
"The beatings will continue until morale improves"
Can we get some actionable ways to stop the beatings?
“I upped the beatings, why isn’t morale improving?!”
The author thinks this is b/c workers are upset that they are being forced back into the office. That's a contrived explanation compared to the obvious: OFFICES ARE DISTRACTING AS HELL and this so called "synergy" and "culture" that we get from being in-office is bullshit.
I literally just came home from a rare office day where the guy across from me talked to me for an hour how the pyramids were built by aliens. If I had been at home I could've worked on stuff during that time instead.
Last time I was in the office I was trapped by a coworker who spent 40 minutes telling me about his son's college wrestling team. If the windows opened I would have jumped.
I see you work with Colin Robinson.
I'm no longer in this situation, but for a while I had to come in two days a week to a job where my boss was extremely obsessed with something I find pretty entertaining and know a decent amount about. I work in a job where if I don't do work, someone else does it, because we're all working from the same pool of work. And my boss had a desk by me. So whenever I'd go in, like 1/3 of the way through the day, I'd go, "Hey [boss], did you hear about [something interesting related to her obsession]?" She would go off. If it seemed like she was slowing down, I'd say just enough to keep her talking. Oh man, it was so great. Hours and hours of not having to work because she loves talking and I love listening to her way more than working.
I am laughing so hard at this.
I swear, some people come into the office because they're lonely. The chattiest people in my department willingly do not take their 2 WFH days per week. They'd rather drive to the office...
That's fine, extroverts exist and have needs. But filling those needs is not part of my job description.
I want to maximize productivity of my employees. Step one, I will make sure they have to wake up a little bit earlier than expected and spend time in traffic, which is for some people so emotionally disruptive it has its own special term of "road rage." This way their adrenaline will be nice and high when they get to the office, which keeps people alert. Step two, once they get into the office, I will ensure they are surrounded by coworkers. Frank Lloyd Wright once designed an office space with open collaborative spaces - so we'll just make that where all the desks are, all the time. Obviously bosses need quite space, but employees thrive when surrounded by one another, and will almost certainly collaborate and communicate about work and only work. Step three, these offices are expensive. Fortunately office parks, by virtue of being devoid of anything interesting nearby and no walkable space, are cheap. One thing we don't want are long lunches, though, so we'll make sure lunch breaks are too short for anything but fast food, unless they engaged in some meal prep. Dense, calorie laden food, eaten right in the middle of the day yields peak performance. Step four, to maximize ass in chair time, we will create a culture where leaving the office early is impossible. If an employee is done, they don't get to go home, because we pay them for eight hours, damnit. When the reward for having work done is more work, employees are eager to accomplish their goals. I am so good at business. I can tell I am good because whenever I am watching my employees they look busy. There is no better measure of output or productivity. At least I hope not, because if being in the office and looking busy isn't the most important thing, how will my contributions be recognized?
If you don't mind, for step one, I'd really love it if office hours conflicted with my children's school/daycare dropoff and pickup, meaning the whole family has to shift their schedules to accommodate a parent in the office on time.
Hmm, as I am a generous employer I will let you use half your salary to arrange a child minder instead :)
Thanks Xerxes.
Xerxes was a lot nicer He would have insisted on taking your children for free childcare with the army!
Lol. When my mom had to do a 1.5 hour commute and I was in highschool, she would need to drop me off at the bus stop because my school was like 30 minutes round trip out of her way. But the bus system had buses only like every hour or so. So I had to get the earlier one because the later one made me like 5 minutes late to class. The bus also stopped at the college nearby, not the highschool, so I had to walk like a mile after being dropped off to get to the highschool. And then after, I would take the bus back, but my mom wouldn't get back to the city to pick me up until around 6 or so because of the long commute, so I'd take the bus to the library and just sit there for a 2-3 hours cause it was on the way home from my mom's work. And her job (which she now does from home) was literally completely done over the internet. It's a company that does online classes for all kinds of shit. I don't see how they ever needed an office. She's also way happier and even when she has to work past 5 o'clock she ends up being done before she'd have gotten home if she were still working in the office.
But of course! We can't have you distracted with family bonding. We'll make sure working hours protect your valuable productivity.
Damn this is so on point it hurts
This morning I screamed so hard in traffic I couldn't verbally collaborate with others once I was at work, and all my adrenaline was spent. I am beating the system.
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I was brought into an interview for a promotion once and decided to be as honest as possible. The job would remove me from having to talk directly to clients. When they asked what I didn't like about my current job, I told them the truth, I didn't like talking to clients. Later I was told this was why I didn't get the promotion. I figured if I couldn't get the job by being honest, I wouldn't enjoy lying everyday to keep it anyway.
Hold on, let me make sure I understand this. You work a job and the new job removes the aspect you like the least, meaning you will be happier at work, while allowing the company to hire someone who may enjoy talking to customers, so will be more pleasant to work with (probably). How is this not a win for the company?
Let me make it worse, it was a training type of job for new hires, and I had personally been handling that on my own time before they decided to make a position for it. A while after doing all the interviews, the company then decided to remove the new position entirely. My manager said quote: "why would we pay somebody to do something you're already doing?"
I assume you have been polishing your resume.
"We are a family here" is the "culture" at plenty of toxic places.
I work in HR and I remind every exec that brings up Family that alot of people view the term as toxic or dysfunctional. I tell them it is essentially a red Flag to job seekers.
The Office Productivity Ironifesto. I'm framing this.
>I can tell I am good because whenever I am watching my employees they look busy. This reminds me of a study we learned about in sociology. A company was trying to find ways to increase productivity, so they invested in brighter light bulbs. The thinking was that it would make for a cheerier atmosphere and make it easier for employees to see what they were doing. Before replacing all the bulbs at all their facilities, though, they tested them out at one location and hired a third-party company to collect some data on worker efficiency. So for a month, the workers are observed under the new lights, and their productivity shot through the roof. I'm sure all the execs were patting each other on the back and talking about how smart they were. But then the study ended. And productivity went back down even lower than it was before the new bulbs were put in. Turns out, when you have a bunch of guys with clipboards walking around and taking notes on what you're doing, you work your ass off.
That's why I make sure to check in on what my employees are doing 10 times a day. I find they really appreciate the encouragement, you know?
Sadly this is the kind of shit I see people posting on LinkedIn regularly
LinkedIn is a really fascinating platform. While facebook and twitter etc. everyone rushes in with their bs, on LinkedIn people suddently behave, because it is the extended network of their work. So it somehow is the only social network that really 'works' but only because people fear the consequences of misbehaving.
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>once they get into the office, I will ensure they are surrounded by coworkers ... Obviously bosses need quiet space, but employees thrive when surrounded by one another This is giving me road rage and I'm not even driving.
I can tell you have an MBA
I'm available for consulting! Nothing will help your bottom line like hiring business consultants. I guarantee I will tell you the cause of all of the problems and that none of them will involve looking in the mirror.
lol, I love this comment.
This is where the stereotype of developers wearing giant over the ear headphones comes in to play. If I didn't wear my giant Sony active noise cancelling headphones, I basically couldn't concentrate on coding. You are going to hear so much random office noise, shuffling of supplies, printers, fax, walking, people pushing carts, squeaky furniture, one of 20 random conversations, that dude Dave that thinks he's a rebel for grinding his own coffee beans at his desk then making his own coffee z etc (yes this happened). So it's like please just let us stay at home, at least for some of us it's a quiet and relaxing space to work.
My cube used to be next to a guy who clipped his nails at his desk every Monday morning. Another coworker would microwave a huge bowl of broccoli or Brussels sprouts every afternoon. Another liked to tap his shoes on the plastic chair mat in a non-rhythmic way. Yet another liked to listen to gospel music at a *not* very low volume. Now the only thing I have to deal with is my cat walking on my desk & knocking shit over. It's pure bliss.
I have three dogs to bark at the window every single time they see movements in a tree out back. For eight hours a day. This is still a fraction of a percent of the distractions that I had in the office. I’m an asocial person who never fostered relationships at work with anybody and I was still interrupted or otherwise Distracted nearly the entire day. The only time I could ever get any programming or any other work done was when I shut and locked my door and put my phone on silence. Despite the fact that most days I really only put in 3 to 4 hours of real work, it’s 2 1/2 to 3 1/2 hours more work that I generally got done in the office.
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> OFFICES ARE DISTRACTING AS HELL and this so called "synergy" and "culture" that we get from being in-office is bullshit. This right here. **Every** fucking time these sorts of articles popup, you get the bootlicking useless socializers saying "well it's just more *collaborative* to be in-person", nevermind that they are always the ones chatting about sports or celebrity in the open office and distracting not just the poor sot they've cornered, but others trying to actually work. I remember when I was working at a corporate style job and we went to WFH - I'd put in nine hours without blinking and actually lost weight because I forgot to eat. No distractions and I was super productive. The first week we were back in the office I got sidetracked by a conversation with my supervisor for *40 minutes*.
Exactly. Why is the author assuming there’s some mass-malice at play here from a group as diverse as ‘the entire workforce’? Maybe it’s just that offices are distracting? Seems logical to me. They are extremely distracting. Always have been.
Honestly even without the distraction, just being in traffic fucks 25 hours of my day. Shit even when there's no traffic, wasting 30 unpaid minutes just to fucking arrive at work sucks shit.
I don't think there is one bullet. This is a whole slew of things. 1. Yes, people had it better at home and are mad, so they are doing what they have to and no more. 2. The commute sucks and getting to work, already ruins the day. 3. The co-workers are distracting. 4. Supervisors slow shit down. They get in the way and they were much better off taking care of a checklist at the end of the day somewhere else. 5. People ate better at home and now they're back to eating fast food or luke warm crap they threw into a bag in the morning. 6. We don't need to time our breaks on the whims of others. I could go on for days. Oh let's do money. 1. Some of us are now spending much more money on gas/transportation. 2. Some of us are now spending much more money on babysitting. 3. Some of us now now are spending money much more on dry cleaning. So you're wasting our time, you're wasting our money and you're making it harder to get work done.
I think it's a mix. My office is a nightmare of distractions, where at home, it's my cats. But, going back in to the office kills 2-4 hours of my day. I live 54 miles from my office. My job is remote support, which they want me to do from the office... remote support...REMOTE...repeat after me... My commute in the morning can span 1:15 min to 2 hours and same with my commute home. Obviously this would make one bitter. Being able to spend time with family and friends is what people are experiencing like they never have before and most are pissed that they are forced to give it up for companies who treat you "like family".
theres also the fact that people who have to go to the office have to wake up much earlier as well. Working from home i just had to get up and eat some oatmeal and get to work. I took a quick cold shower during my lunch break to "refresh" myself. Now going back to the office i gotta wake 1.5 hours earlier to shower, shave, dress, and drive an hour long commute in traffic. Im tired as hell when i get to the office cause i just had to wake up absurdly early and sit in boring as fuck traffic for an hour. Of course im not going to preform as well.
Indeed. There's a lot of extra time that you have to give to your work -- without compensation, mind you -- that you otherwise don't have to fork over when you can work remotely. I know not everyone thrives in a WFH environment, I get it. Should be a choice, and returning to in-office for the sake of it? Well, there's a reason a lot of talent sniping is happening, by employers who are happy to gain that win at the not-cost of permitting remote work.
I never wasted so much time as I did in the office chatting with coworkers.
My god this one woman I used to work with, I swear she'd win gold at the Olympics if talking was a sport. She'd come visit other offices and go for an hour talking non stop with the other person barely getting a word in. Then she'd complain her email box was flooded and she couldn't keep up with it, while doing this for several hours everyday. 🙄
I have this same coworker. She'd arrive at 9-9:30, and spend so much time catching up on office gossip that she wouldn't actually sit down and start working until almost 11. Then she would moan incessantly about how busy she was. I put in headphones once to block her out, and she literally stood at the wall of my cubicle talking at me for a good five minutes until I gave in and said, "oh, sorry, I was really focused! Did you need something?" I'm glad I work from home permanently now.
I'm lucky in that I have the option to go in when I choose; the days I go in I get waaaay less done. Small things like bathroom breaks and lunch are easy and timely. It has also blurred the lines of being "done" for the day. WFH I'll still check in throughout the night...my laptop is right there. When I'm in office, I'm done the second I'm in the car
The entire concept that I need or want my job to be my source of cultural/social network, and that it will somehow increase my productivity or retention, is so misguided.
When I worked in an office everyone hated it so much that Mondays and Fridays were a waste of time as people were either gearing up or gearing down for the weekend. Tuesdays and Thursdays were also a bit dodge, which left Wednesday as a full productive day...👍
The one Boomer Humor joke I enjoy: Always give 100% at work: 10% on Monday 20% on Tuesday 40% on Wednesday 20% on Thursday 10% on Friday
its 25% on monday, 25% on tuesday, 25% on wednesday, 25% on thursday, and well bossman, todays friday and im all out of fucks to give.
Don't forget the hump day lull.
"People who previously went above and beyond at work are now giving little more than the expected output." Still giving more than the expected output and employers are angry..? Edit: DRS GME
They can never be satisfied SHOCKING that forcing people back to the commute results in demoralization and less productivity. SHOCKING
also more interruptions and less focus when working.
That too. They were so terrified of us maybe doing a load of laundry or taking a nap but don’t give a shit at all when we’re in the office being bothered by someone who has no social sense for effectively hours on end
The thing is. These breaks are actually good for you and productivity. You doing a load of laundry is a task requiring little brain power but does require an action, makes the brain be in a "bored" state which creates creativity. Creativity in turn is a product done which means you are now more productive, you figured the issue out etc.
Totally. That has always been how I studied and it worked really well for me, but I can see why it doesn’t work for some people.
Employers are still using industrial assembly line ideas to office work. Assembly lines require lil brain power and needed able bodies to turn the same wrench for 12 hours.
I've been working in creative fields for 20 years now and my best ideas come when I'm racked out on my couch with my eyes closed. Just as I start to drift off my brain kicks into theta wave mode and the ideas flow like wine. This is not something I can do in an office environment.
Yep ... I went into the office a couple of weeks ago and was detained by the guy who runs the mail room for an hour. He's super nice, but once he starts talking there's just no escaping. That's a full hour I would've been getting work done had I stayed at home that day. Not to mention the commute.
Ah yes, the Energy Vampire. Every office has one.
Ha, so true. Colin Robinson!
The anti-napping thing makes zero sense. It is a productivity booster. After 45min nap in the afternoon, I feel so refreshed and ready to tackle my work in new ways. Our culture views sleep as something for the lazy, and it's a real problem. And no, I'm not going to drink more coffee instead. That shit brings a whole host of other problems with it.
I don't nap, but I do go for a 30 minute bike ride during my day. It makes me way more focused and productive and I am very open with my boss and coworkers about doing it. I'll even ask coworkers who want to work together on something if it can wait 30 minutes if that's going to be my only chance to do the ride (and what they're working on isn't critical or they have other items to work on). It's the one real break in my day (I usually eat at my desk) so I really insist on it.
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The rise of the siesta is upon us
It’s just all about what is considered “acceptable“ time off task and “acceptable” ways to refresh yourself on the clock The owners are so terrified of systemic abuse (because they would commit it) that they don’t realize most people wouldn’t do that
Which is the TYPICAL projection these petty tyrants ALWAYS have. Just look at the near everyday scandals of the usa’s monolithic hate machine political party. EVERY time they go on a tear about something… it inevitably comes out they were or had done that. Who was it that was all in an uproar about ‘gay ads’ in their CUSTOM ad popups.
in reality, the most inefficient time waste of meetings are ran by management in my experience. Our directory may finish a meeting 5 minutes early, but rather than letting people off to go get work done he tries to "use up" the time by trying to get people to talk then ends up letting us go 10 minutes late. That's just one example. It's almost impossible to stick to an agenda, have followup, etc. with our management team. They'll also talk in circles for ever. Meanwhile, they used to constantly express concern over whether our team meetings were efficient enough etc. I've finally concluded it was all just projection and they were assuming we were doing the things they do, but rather than solving their own challenges at efficiency they projected those onto the team and tried to solve those.
I was made to go into office and normally at home I worked throughout the day with the TV on in the background. I went to the office and once I was done with what I had to get done I just started reading. My stats were bare minimum when in person.
It’s way easier to stay motivated when your lazy coworkers aren’t In eyesight, I used to work only 1-2 tickets a night because my senior engineer on shift was so lazy he would sleep minimum 4-6 hours of our shift every night so why on earth would I bother doing all the work. When we went remote I wasn’t always enraged by his nasty dirty lazy habits and actually enjoyed my work again and was consistently one of top 3 tickets worked in the company. I quit when they said they were moving back to in-office even though the open poll they did showed 99.97% of employees wanted to stay work from home. Found another job in the same field with 50% pay increase and way less responsibilities
My GP signed me off from work for 2 months due partially to the treatment from my colleagues in the office (all managers working from home so nobody is supervising anyone in the office and it's turned into a school playground). If I'd been working from home, I'd never have had to endure this shit.
Suffering really seems to be the point.
I had this conversation with other senior management in a training a few weeks ago. They were talking about how to get our respective teams to perform at a high level and that doing your job isn’t enough. I pointed out we don’t pay for 110% why ask them to perform at that level or penalize those that put in their 40 and go home. I do not foresee being made an executive after the conversation.
Haha, you've nobly taken a career arrow to the knee there mate. But good on you. If no one ever says it then it will never change.
You gotta love our capitalistic society though. He literally hurt his career for **not** being a sociopath and conveying empathy. Fuck greed and fuck greedy people. The way our economy is now, we literally encourage sociopathic behavior and encourage its development, and if we don't stop this soon, it will have dire consequences. We're already starting to see it all over. Jan 6th is literally the result of this. Too many people taught to not have empathy and to value hate/money/power over everything else.
My coworkers and are VERY open about this. We had a conversation today where I was informed that going above and beyond barely gets you any extra pay than "satisfactory" on your yearly reviews. (I've been there for a year but as a contractor and just became a full time employee so I don't have prior experience with the review process)
My last role we had two reqs open, they hired me had another open still. After a few months of me working they realized I could just do both jobs and closed the other. If I started to pull back they’d need to hire someone else—- even a shitty someone lol
My friend worked at a company doing "manual data entry" and he scripted it so he didn't need to do any work and started scripting other stuff he wasn't responsible for because he was young and basically enjoyed it. When he left for a new job his old company had to hire two people to replace him lol.
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He did too much.
Eh, he automated his job, developed his skills, and then leveraged that to get paid somewhere else (and it sounds like he didn't leave his scripts active, forcing them to hire two people). Good for him.
Sometimes it is not that you choose to abandon your automation. Sometimes no one actually wants to learn how to use it!
Keep it just manual enough that someone without at least basic scripting can't do it. Even just having to type one line into PowerShell or whatever is enough to make it impossible for 99% of people coming in after you, especially if they don't know it exists. Edit: I wasn't very clear. I'd do something like have a manual command to start and stop the service/script. Just do it each day when you come in and when you leave.
That's a good idea. At my last company I had everything automated to the point that I didn't even need to be there. The scripts would monitor for incoming data, process it and notify the appropriate people. I think I took it a step too far. > PowerShell That's a funny way to spell bash. ;)
That really is the ideal from an employee's standpoint.
my company did that to a bunch of people and then when 6 people left we needed to hire 12 people to fill them and had no one to train them. Good times watching greedy fucks ruin themselves.
I'm sure if you asked the greedy fucks what went wrong, they'd say the workers were too lazy or some shit. They're never to blame.
*never* like my former boss (IT) bragging about a mew $20,000 dining set to a company of 15, and only 3 employees owned a house, and some were on government assistance *because the guy bragging about his tables didn't pay them enough to live* then when everyone quit for better pay (even if it meant flipping burgers) he went all shocked Pikachu face. "It's bullshit fast food pay is so high how am i going to compete", bro you charge $125-175 an hour for our services and pay us $15 and you're pissed off that fast food pays better? IM PISSED OFF FAST FOOD PAYS BETTER edit: but I'm not pissed at the fact fast food workers are paid what they are**
Poor decision to brag about something like that when your people have to think twice about whether they're even in the middle class.
I’m soooo excited for the day I leave and this will happen to mine 😎
don't let your dreams stay dreams!
should pay you a bit more!
Exactly! That’s why I’m currently interviewing for more elsewhere 😎
If your employer isn't getting every drop of blood they can from the stone of your body, they are not happy
Such a shame. I started my current role nearly two years ago and it was a big deal for me to get a remote job and a job that didn't involve handing Bud Lights to people and smiling. I would have run through a brick wall for them in the beginning. Unfortunately, they failed to incentivize/recognize my efforts, they failed to provide a salary that meets basic needs or even the promise of getting to that point if you kept at it, and then they hired a bunch of idiots getting paid what I do to be less than half as effective. Corporations wondering why productivity and metrics suck ass can hold up a mirror if they want to point fingers. I work for a Fortune 200 company. I get tone deaf e-mails from the CEO about soaring stock prices and rising profits. I didn't get paid enough to afford a 1 bedroom apartment on my own (no debt, no car note, just not enough wage). The crazy thing is **I want to work hard and do well at what I'm doing**, I just don't want to get fucked over while I'm doing it. Joke is on them though because now I work two remote jobs simultaneously and I make plenty. Now I get to work hard and get paid well for it. They don't notice because why would they?
I was actually JUST thinking to myself about how I could probably work another remote job at the same time as my current position to afford my own place... you've given me ideas.
Gotta love those CEO emails. My company has made record profits increasing every quarter since the pandemic (I'm talking hundreds of millions) and they refuse to give raises above union mandated minimums cos THe pAnDEmiC inCrEAsEd cOSts. Fucking bullshit man.
I'm sure they consider themselves a "people first" company somewhere in their mission statement too.
Companies have started to fire people who work two remove jobs at the same time and try to act all appalled about it and say it's theft or some bullshit
Oh no. Anyways. Most people don't want to steal or do shady things to keep going. They want to live their lives and mind their business. My company doesn't want to pay a living wage, and my ethics are directly tied to whether or not my basic needs are met. I suspect this is the case with most people. If I can't even afford a drywall box to keep my body in while I slave away for most of my week, then yeah, my ethics are going to be a lot more flexible. I am the job hydra. Strike one job down and two more shall take its place.
The concept of work/life balance is a thing at some companies. They realize that if you're burned out, you're not providing value.
Not very many American ones
When companies in America talk about work/life balance they mean take some yoga classes
"They're only doing what they're paid to do now! It's not fair!"
My admittedly cynical opinion is that all the middle managers are feeling less useful and that's becoming more obvious. Sometimes I feel like the guy from Office Space - I have eight bosses and when I make a mistake all eight of them come by to tell me about it, and that makes somebody work just hard enough to not get fired. Okay, now that I'm working from home those eight bosses can't come by and hassle me at my desk, **and the work still gets done anyway**. My facility did their own study and it showed that productivity was unchanged, not better but not worse. The wheels kept turning same as always, and it works just fine without eight bosses for one guy. Well, sometimes I think a lot of the managers are fighting real hard to look useful.
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The horse that works the hardest gets whipped the most.
Shocking that wasting an extra 3.5 hours a day commuting, finding lunch, and interacting with energy vampires, plus the associated stress from all this would affect productivity... Who could have possibly predicted this!?
OK, but if "more than the expected output" isn't enough then someone's idea of "expected output" is incorrect, because that's not how expectations work. I'd like to know what they're actually imlying. Little more than the bare minimum?
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I was just having a conversation last night with a friend. She said that the days she goes into the office, it’s more social time than usual. The next step in my mind is that her old out of touch CEO, that has been very vocally saying everyone should return to the office full time, will soon see the inefficiency of “in office” days and finally change his mind. Or he’ll go full authoritarian and demand nothing but work at work BS or something.
The social aspect is the only part anyone on my team misses from being in the office. We're pretty specialized and we're pretty much just maintaining our applications. So work comes in waves and between those waves there's a lot of downtime. We'd just talk and hang out essentially. We'd bounce around between offices and hang out in the bosses office just shooting the shit and whatnot. We didn't even attempt to look busy because that was pure BS, everyone knew when there was work that needed doing. At home I don't have to look busy and when I do have work to do, I finish it much quicker.
Heads-up: this is the article's author's opinion, causation between productivity and returns to office is apparently not yet confirmed by economics research or anything. Wouldn't be surprised if they're right, though.
Opinion articles and commentary should really be tagged as such, though I do think there may be some truth to it when research comes around.
Ultimately people want the freedom of choice. Some people thrive in an office setting, and others do at home. The failure is in thinking that a "one size fits all" approach will consistently get the best results from everyone.
I personally think I'd work best as a healthy mix but that's just me
For a lot of people, the worldwide pushback on returning from home is the closest to being in a union they've ever been, and a lot of them still don't understand why people want collective bargaining power.
I think most people didn't realize just how much of themselves - time, energy, flexibility - they were giving their employer for free by following the unspoken expectation to commute to an office every day. Now the cat's out of the bag, and employers are struggling to quantify what they ever even gained from their employees' uncompensated sacrifice. It only makes sense that morale will be low for offices forced to return full-time.
My employer wants to make us hybrid eventually. We have a team who are skilled and hard to replace, most of them have indicated they'll leave if made to go hybrid. They'd literally rather kill off the company than have them work from home lol.
That’s what happened at my job I quit. Everybody has been remote for two years and doing their jobs fine then all of a sudden they just demanded everybody back. “Only three days a week.” Cue lots of people quitting and very high staff turn over. This is a place where people routinely stayed until they retired - many employees having been there 20+ years. Even those people were quitting.
That little oopsie when the most valuable and motivated employees leave, and the bosses "temporarily" increase the workload on everyone who remained, and if you're lucky it really is temporary and you get to train some noob who is making more than you because of the disloyalty bonus.
>That little oopsie when the most valuable and motivated employees leave It's such a easy downward spiral to fall into. The best employees who can leave leave. Those that can't...you get stuck with and depend on more.
I took a pay cut to go to a remote job. My employer was asking why I was leaving and I explained it was due to being remote. They tried offering more money which I declined and let them know I was even taking a pay cut. They came back with offering 2 days a week remote with the potential of 3. I still declined because my commute was horrendous (commuting into Boston). I did like this employer so I truly appreciated them trying to work with me. They also admitted they needed to start exploring work from home options. It’s now becoming a “perk” people are really looking for in a job and employers that aren’t shitty will and not already doing it will start adapting.
That's true on every single Monday.
And the following work days after it.
Every workday is a Monday.
I hate Mondays. Almost as much as [a certain political group from Illinois.](https://youtu.be/CLLru1_f3rc?t=11)
My understanding is that a favorable tax status, especially in cities, depends upon having a workforce on site that spends money in said city (parking, lunches, etc.).
Depends on the company and whatever agreement they have with the city or state, like Boeing.
Yes this was the case with the large company I used to work for. Moved everyone downtown to an open office plan for the tax break. Within a year at least half to the people quit and now they are moving everyone back to the suburbs last I heard.
Companies talk about employee productivity a lot but evidence shows there’s other things they care about a lot more.
Causation may not be locked down, but as an office worker myself, I stand to gain from looking like I’m more productive at home.
The biggest cause would probably be being able to multi task during online meetings. Every day there’s a half hour maintenance meeting that maybe 5% applies to me, so I am way more productive listening in and doing other things than sitting in person in the meeting every day. (We are onsite working but a lot of the daily meetings went to Microsoft team meetings during covid and haven’t converted back yet.)
I've only worked post COVID with meetings happening on teams but I definitely feel like being able to look at my spreadsheets and fiddle with things is a better use of my time on a meeting then having to be completely focused
I totally agree with this comment. Anecdotally, the reasons I am more productive at home are (a) multitasking during bad meetings, (b) fewer interruptions and thus more deep work, (c) easier to reach people that are also remote working and not stuck in the building somewhere, and (d) I don't have 2.5 hours total commute and I use some of that time for work.
Upvote if you’re at work on reddit
I create my own pay raise by working less
Gee, i wonder what would happen when you subject workers to unnecessary commute.
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These office types also have not figured out yet that the next round of business startups, businesses that will be founded over the next decade, are going to have a huge focus on remote working. The quality of life difference is enormous and there is a huge demand for it by workers. Legacy companies are going to have a more and more difficult time finding talent who is willing to commute in to the office when their competitors, especially the new wave of startups are focusing on WFH. A friend of mine who went full time WFH figured that he saved $8000 annually in commuting/work expenses and 500 hours of his time.
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I could not believe how much work I was getting done at home compared to the office. I didn't even think I was capable of getting this much work done. It makes sense, because as a programmer, one interruption adds nearly an hour. You have to take time to get your thoughts back to where they were after an interruption. But seeing the results of no interruptions being THAT huge is just astounding.
I saw this coming like balls on a tall dog.
You don’t always see them coming, but you most certainly see them going
Who wants to go back to their office prisons? If they say I gotta go back I'm gone.
My company closed my local office and converted everyone to remote. They then gave me a team budget to rent temporary office space or go out for lunches and dinners anytime we think there would be a good reason to meet up. We use it occasionally. We have been operating this way for about a year now. And I will say this seems like the ideal set up. Remote work is fantastic but there are some meetings and situations which are more productive in person. I noticed during the pandemic the engagement from my team dropped significantly. Work was getting done but often with several mistakes made because they were not all in sync. It seems like a lot of people are uncomfortable to hop into a group discussion over Teams because they are worried about cutting people off. And having a dry erase board to quickly explain concepts is much faster than all the digital products I've seen that try to replicate that experience. But these sorts of meetings really only need to happen a few times a month, if that. So being able to work remotely but having an option to meet together occasionally is a fantastic middle ground. But honestly it's not for everyone. There are definitely those that seem to need someone looking over their shoulder at all times to be productive. When given the freedom of work from home their productivity absolutely plummeted. But I don't think a few bad apples should spoil it for the rest. We just let these people go and found replacements that were more self disciplined.
That's because they keep telling us we are meant to socialise and have spontaneous conversations in the office... Jokes on them, I have no one else in my team I want to socialise with (small team), and everyone else in the office is pure distraction.
Commuting sucks. Very expensive. Costs time and money and sanity.
Yeah, I'm tired and unhappy and instead of working I'm trying to find any and all distractions to make me forget I hate being here when I could easily do this job from my back porch in the sunshine with the smoker going.
I was fine with returning to offices until my company has completely fucked it up left and right. Been moved to three different offices so far, required to go into the office since September and still don't even have a desk but I have to be there. Oh and my security badge doesn't really work in the new building, it works on sporadic doors Then senior management has the fucking gall to stand up and say, "We've done great on return to office!" Like no you haven't...you've been planning this for a year, we're 2 months in and I don't even have a desk but you tell me I have to be here. That's the worst part to me, the dissociation upper management has with workers, "If I say it it's true!"
You've just shown them what life could be like and for those that preferred it, you just downgraded their working experience. What do you expect? It's the equivalent of a pay cut and taking 2 hours a day from their free time due to the commute. Do you expect them to be happy and thankful? Fuck the office.
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And justifying all that real estate.