I spent most of 2020 working from home, for the first time in 16 years of working. I surprised myself by finding that I don't really like working from home.
I have a decent home office setup: dedicated room, nice chair, big monitor, but I still don't get as much done as going to a different physical place that's dedicated to work.
I think what I hated was not the office, but the open office, which is truly awful. I started a new job and now I have an office to go. I'm currently sharing with a couple people (who are rarely there) and soon will have a dedicated private office. It's a world of difference.
I think most people who hate the office really hate: open offices, long commutes, being required to be there for specific times. If you could get rid of those most people probably wouldn't mind and might even prefer the office.
I got my job during the pandemic; it's my first actual tech-related job. So I've never seen my coworkers in person. But I can get my work done for the day within 3 to 4 hours, and my manager is happy with how much work I'm doing, and the pace at which it happens. That means that for the rest of the day around those 4 hours, I can do whatever I want.
I can't do that in the office. If I were to go into the office, I'd need to either (a) spend longer over the same tasks to stretch them to fill out the day because I'm constantly being observed, or (b) finish my work at the same rate and ask for more work. Both of those options are obviously not ideal from my perspective as someone who wants to expend the minimal amount of time to get work done.
Why would I want to wake up earlier, commute, set up at work, not eat what I want (or what I can at home) - just to sit at a computer, something I could do at home. At least at home I can 'finish early' (save for meetings). Going physically into the office is not in any way to my benefit. It's a lose/lose/lose/lose/... situation for me. I'm seriously considering getting another job that's almost entirely remote-only.
Seconding this. For individuals who can't separate work and play without physically separating them, yeah, I get you. I just don't have that problem, and there are almost no benefits to meeting in person for me.
Additionally, WFH (especially remote-only) gives me a chance to move to a bigger place outside the big city without having to balance the choices of between a small, cramped space for a shorter commute, or a bigger place with a longer commute. I like living in a place where the air is a little cleaner, there is more space and I don't have to commute for 1-2 hours back and forth on public transport or drive a car (at least not most days in the week).
A bigger place in turn solves the issue with penny-pinching or bureaucracy-heavy companies making it difficult to create a work environment which suits me. Yes, money is still a thing, but when tech is something you love anyway, spending a few hundred / thousand bucks on a work environment which will last 10 years is not that big of an issue.
At least right now, its a cycle which reinforces itself very nicely for its benefactors.
Going skiing for 2 hours a day is 1000x better than going to the office. I get to meet _real_ people who don’t _have_ to tolerate me because we work together. Yes this is super cynical and real relationships form at work, but for the most part, work relationships are transactional and ephemeral.
In addition (for me at least), working from home means that I can open the window and get some fresh air. I've never worked in professional offices with windows that open and there was never enough ventilation. My nightmare is a long meeting in a cramped conference room - hours of breathing in a mix of carbon dioxide, sweaty feet odors and respiratory droplets.
100% this. Ever since wfh started, I never had a single "brain melt" that regularly happened in the office due to 1h+ meeting in 4 sqm room and co2 levels going through the roof.
Yep, as someone who works sporadically but intensely, I much prefer getting everything done in half a day and then leaving early and enjoying the sunshine. If I was managed in such a way that I needed to find something to do to fill the rest of the time, I would be unhappy and have poor output because of the nature of ADHD.
> But I can get my work done for the day within 3 to 4 hours, and my manager is happy with how much work I'm doing, and the pace at which it happens. That means that for the rest of the day around those 4 hours, I can do whatever I want.
This is on purpose: as a senior dev, I estimate 1 point to 4 hours of coding work. (Roughly.)
Of the other 4 hours in your day, I expect roughly 1 hour CR stuff/editing wikis/answering emails, 1-2 hours meetings, 0-1 hour learning, and 1 hour walking in circles between things/bathroom/coffee.
Welcome to a “work day”.
The part of the office that’s a benefit is those two hours of coffee + learning can be with other people — and those 1-2 hours of meetings tend to be more productive.
> "If I were to go into the office, I'd need to either (a) spend longer over the same tasks to stretch them to fill out the day because I'm constantly being observed, or (b) finish my work at the same rate and ask for more work."
You might also consider trying c) Spend that extra time learning a new career skill that both benefits you in the long run and your employer in the short run. That's been my principle and it has served me well over a lengthy career.
I'm struggling with your comment. What's the difference between the dedicated room you have at home, and the dedicated office at work, which you state is mainly empty except for you? Is it a mindset thing? You just can't get into a 'work' mode whilst at home?
I'm totally in the other camp - I love working from home, and have been home-based for over 4 years now (dedicated room and set-up etc.). The only difference that covid has brought, is that my partner is now also work-from-home, which interestingly has impacted my productivity somewhat; We prefer to just sit around and chat, than focus on work - It now takes a bit more effort to get my head down and focus. :)
All that said, I'd still not want to go back into an office. Here in London, this means over an hour commute each way, on typically standing-room only trains, and then 8 hours in noisy open-plan with tiny desks, and your stuff kept in a locker.
Ultimately it's down to choice: Going forwards I'd like to see companies offer the choice of working in the office, or working from home. That way everyone can work in a location that suits them best.
I too have come to realize that I in many ways miss the office. The main thing is the clear separation between home and work both mentally and physically.
At work I had my work desk with my work computer and work files and my work stuff. At home I had my home desk and home computer. When at home I could not (easily) access my work computer or work files. When at work I could not access my home computer and home files. It made it easy to compartmentalize the two and stop one bleeding into the other. There was something definitive about walking out of the office for the day that I kind of miss.
I also liked my 'commute', which was either a 20 minute bus ride or a 50ish minute walk. It gave me a chance to clear my head, refocus and switch 'modes'.
Going forwards I'd like to see companies offer the choice
Obviously agree. As much as I really do miss the office, I hope to never again have a job where I am forced to be there 5 days a week.
Part of it is the separation. Another part is that it becomes a little depressing for me to be in the same place all day every day. There’s just no variety in your day. Going to an office you at least are in a different place for a while, there’s other people around, even if they’re not right in the office with me. Commuting you see different things and get a feel for what’s going on. There’s an outside world.
I mean sure you can go for walks and run errands while you’re working from home, but somehow it wasn’t the same for me.
It's the separation of church and state, right? Obviously annecdata, but a pretty decent amount of people I know struggle with the blurry lines that working from home brings.
Like, it's easy to say "when I put on work clothes [whatever they may be] and leave the house to go to the office I'm 'working'." You're paid to go to a place and sit there for 7 hours. Everything that happens in that time is easy to mentally stick in the "they're paying me for this" box.
If you're working from home and sat on the sofa wearing your PJs from the night before until midday the separation is much harder. Does the working day start when you read that first email on your phone at 7.15am (that normally you don't worry about until you're on the train)? When does it end? What if someone emails when you're making your dinner? Does it feel like replying to a work email at home, or an extension of your working day?
This all seems to be amplified greatly if you're not particularly fussed about your job. FWIW and in my experience - the people who do the best working from home get at least some kind of work satisfaction, and are also best at properly defining their working day and getting in to it as if they were actually leaving the house.
The trick from working from home is finding that separation between home and work. In particular, you want to make sure you _don't_ work in the sofa wearing your PJs.
I do a fake bike commute before and after work and it's done wonders for my happiness and work-life balance.
Rings true to me. I'm pretty happy working from home. I try to imitate a well-defined work day: I change to work clothes in the morning and to home clothes after being done. I have a separate laptop for work and work only, not even private emails on that device. In the same vein no work chat or email on my phone, once that laptop closes I'm reachable again next morning.
> It's the separation of church and state, right? Obviously annecdata, but a pretty decent amount of people I know struggle with the blurry lines that working from home brings.
They should join the antidisestablishmentarialist cause! Mostly because I've never had the opportunity to use that word before.
I moved my desk to a different room, and the first 6-9 months of working from home were OK. Once winter came, the darkness at 17.00 (or sooner) plus the strongest level of lockdown we've had in Denmark[1] was pretty miserable.
[1] Non-essential shops, all restaurants etc closed, though no restrictions on private gatherings, going outside etc. (I realize most of the rest of Europe had stricter restrictions.)
My problem is I don't have a dedicated area at home for "work". And even if I did, I'm the one paying for it. My work desk is also my computer desk. So by the end of the day, maybe I want to play a PC game, but the last thing I want to do is spend more time at the desk.
While I also like the idea of choice for people on either side of the spectrum I feel being remote while part of your team/company is not puts you at a severe disadvantage. Both in the sense of being involved in new projects and ideas and visibility compared to peers.
I'm curious to see how this hybrid approach plays out in the future.
For some people it's just a mental change. I work from home and have done it for over a decade now. I'm reasonably productive and prefer it to being in the office every day.
I'm still going to a local coworking place once a week basically to have a change of environment - it makes a massive difference in a long run. I also really enjoy working from the car service waiting room when I get there every few months. I had one of the most productive days on a 6h flight. I don't expect this applies to everyone of course.
I work in a different room to my partner and we don't see each other apart from at lunch time. We do take a whole hour for lunch together every day and often have sex, but other than that we both have our own work to do. Do you not have separate rooms?
Im one of these people that prefers the office, all else equal. But it isn’t equal. With full time remote I can live somewhere that is close to my parents, my in laws, and which supports my wife’s career goals. That is worth so much to me. I think I’d accept at 2/3 - 3/4 pay cut to work remotely if really pressed. To me, that’s the killer feature of remote work. How many people have picked up their kids, left behind deep friendships, and moved to the Bay Area? Tons. A huge amount of human happiness is sacrificed to be in the office.
This is the part that's baffling for me. I see WFH as an opportunity to reclaim so much of our lives from our employers. That's why I cannot empathize with anyone desperately desiring to go back to an office. In my mind they are literally saying they thought life was better when their employer dictated where they were for at least 8 hours a day, dictated where they live, how much time they will spend commuting every day.
That's crazy to me. I cannot wrap my head around it at all.
> That's crazy to me. I cannot wrap my head around it at all.
Personally I agree, however ...
The main problem is with those who can barely afford modern house prices as it is, without having to add an extra room at their own expense so their employer can cut costs.
And whilst it's possible to use a kitchen table, a large number of households (especially younger ones) need two incomes to pay their mortgage and in many roles there's no way two people can both WFH in the same room.
It's fine for established workers or those with reasonable housing, but it prices a large part of the youth out of those jobs.
I like living in cities so it’s never been a problem to find an employer where I want to live. You can also choose a combination of employer and workplace that gives you the commute you want.
I’ve never had a problem with running an errand or even just taking off and going for a walk in the middle of the day while working in an office. I get that there are places where that’s a problem, but I don’t know, don’t work there I guess? You don’t have to just immediately acquiesce and accept whatever demands the first company who offers you a job wants.
I do think that it is reasonable for individuals to want to go back, for a lot of reasons. Coworking space is popular with some people for a reason. Some people really prefer working around others and working away from their home. Some homes are filled with distractions or even filled with abuse, making an office a respite from these problems. Most people (I suspect) don't have extra bedrooms lying around to convert into home offices and people who like living in the bay area due to social connections aren't going to be happy seeing their rent rise by $1500/month to get that extra bedroom they need for a comfortable home office.
If I had a 15m commute from where I currently live to an in person office - I'd go. But I can't do that while also supporting my wife's career.
open offices, long commutes, being required to be there for specific times.
And this is exactly what awaits most people after Covid. Programmers are lucky for having any options at all.
It makes no sense. Let people fucking WFH if they want to and set up a laptop for Zoom/Teams in meetings, as long as they come in for important stuff now and then.
> If you could get rid of those most people probably wouldn't mind and might even prefer the office.
But that's what "the office" means. It means shitty unoptimal work conditions, it means hours a day stuck in traffic and it means visibility is as important as productivity. You can't get rid of those things, they are effectively part of the definition of working in an office as far as I'm concerned.
I love working from home. I'll never go back to any kind of morning commute to a noisy workspace full of managers breathing down my neck for as long as I can help it.
They’re not though. I work in an office now and my commute is a 15 minute walk. If I need to go do something during the day I do, nobody complains. These jobs exist, you can find them.
My biggest complaint about working in an office is having to make major life choices based on my employer's location. I have to live within commuting distance of the location that works best for their office. I would greatly prefer the freedom to make my own choice of where to live.
I do not mean to offend, but this is what schooling does to most humans - you commute to school, have clear distinction between home and school spaces, have clear distinction between school and neighborhood buddies (some overlap happens), various rituals...
I think you're right. I do like working from home, but working in the office wouldn't be anywhere near as bad with a private office. Open offices are a scourge. Unfortunately, where I work, the commute wouldn't go away, though. There's no way around it: if everyone goes to work every day there are too many people on the road.
You don't know what you're doing then. It's illogical to think going somewhere, using time doing so, makes you more productive, you lose productivity by traveling, ipso facto. Doesn't make sense.
Brains are highly associative. Different neurons fire depending on things like location and time of day. This has been studied in terms of learning. Students who are tested on a subject tend to test better if the test is in the same location as the learning. And also test better if the time of day is the same. (The flip side for this with learning is recall will be worse when it matters, so it’s even better to teach in a variety of locations and times.)
So, given the associativeness of neurons, it’s very common for people to have different levels of productivity in 2 different environments. If you play games on the same computer you do work on, then just sitting at said computer can be a distraction. Also just the act of moving to a distinct location can put the mental state into work mode.
You may not be as susceptible to some of these effects as others, so you might not notice as much, but they are very real, and can be difficult to work around.
Is it really hard to understand why some people are more productive working in physical proximity to the rest of the team? Why adding some commute friction is ok with them as it reduces communication friction later in the day?
The only things I like about working from home are the lack of commute, and the ability to do things at home during the day, like take a shower any time I want.
All the rest of it is better in the office, IMO. That said, it only applies if I actually have my own office, and not a shared workspace. (Which I did, pre-Covid, and I expect to have it again.)
Most of my co-workers did not have their own offices, so I expect they won't feel as kindly towards going back once we're all vaccinated.
In the end, for me it's kind of a wash. I get good things each way. But I'm pretty sure the business is going to want to go back to having an office because it simplifies so many things for them.
I don't share the pessimism over the office that many commenters here share, despite largely preferring home office work.
Many people don't prefer remote work, and they have good reasons for it. Even ignoring all people who are impacted by factors they cannot control, some people really just don't so well in a home office environment. The routine and structure of going into the office to do work and coming home to not do work is pleasant for many people. Some folks don't have good control over their work behaviors when they're not in that environment. They thrive more in an in-person environment. I'm willing to bet that's a lot of your coworkers.
There's a good chance that you'll need a lot of stuff to support people coming back to the office if it's anything more than a small fraction. If 50% of your workforce actually prefers to come into the office every day, that's a lot of investment! I would naiively expect that to support 50% of your workforce you'd need to invest more than 50% of what you used to invest to support the in-office work environment. I'm thinking bigger firms here, the ones that actually spend a lot of money on this stuff.
And lastly I'm just not convinced that businesses actually act based solely on hard figures. The math may point towards it being advantageous to have a more remote or distributed workforce, but the world doesn't run on people following "the math". People are messy and irrational and emotional and, critically, in key leadership roles that drive what the heck their company is actually going to do. Have a handful of executives who can't wait to get back into their comfort zone - the office - and that office spending budget will find a way to get spent.
> Many people don't prefer remote work, and they have good reasons for it.
It’s almost as if some people prefer one way and others prefer the other way! Which is why WFH advocates just want the option. They aren’t asking for everyone to have to WFH, just for the choice.
The back-to-office advocates however want to go back to office and force everyone else to go back to office. This is the difference in approaches. They don’t want people to have a choice—they want it their way for everyone.
Many back-to-office advocates are “social butterflies”, so they will not enjoy coming back to half-empty offices. They really need everyone to be there in order to thrive.
I am anything but a social butterfly, but would be upset if I came back to work in a largely empty office. I enjoy being around people even if I don't talk to them much.
Literally no WFH advocates I know say this, and none of them advocate for forcing others to work from home. Everyone knows the trade offs and are willing to live with them. Hell I’d be willing to forego all promotions forever, in writing, just to be given the option to work remotely.
"Remote-first" is a thing (see StackOverflow, in 2017 though numerous other examples occurred in the past year given COVID-19, representative links below), and a major factor is in fact the reality that asses-in-seats, visible heads, and even the apparently small detail of one group connecting to a conference call or Zoom session from a meeting room via Starfish vs. other individuals connecting via separate phones or devices creates strong inconsistencies in direct and indirect communications and status signalling.
This isn't to say that "remote first" is the same as "all remote", but it's very highly cognizant of the distinctions in visibility, manifestation, appearance, and status developing between remote or on-site, or even differing office-location teams or individuals.
TL;DR take the same work you did with paper and turn it digital and it will be more cumbersome not less. OTOH take the digital tools you have to change the offline work environment and everyone will me more productive than before.
The reason why people say remote first is because when remote is an afterthought the workplace, everyone who is remote has reduced productivity and has to run after people to get information and keep informed.
Just using Slack isn't enough. I'm watching a multinational "startup" where my wife is working every day and the boss(of the mothership) is a control freak that schedules an average of 10 meetings with her per week. Meaning she has to work after those meetings. And with everything being remote there is no accountability on the work hours. Facebook has the same problem.
The problem is that employees tried to fit their ridiculous offline work into an online work place. Instead of taking the online work potential and changing the way they work accordingly. It's the same reason why digitalization in most places results in more work even though it should be less.
A simple example is that for most distributed workplaces there is no reason to do synchronous standups. There are plenty of tools that allow for structured asynchronous standups across multiple timezones.
> with everything being remote there is no accountability on the work hours
I don't believe it's true. Or more precisely, I don't believe it's different than what happens in offices. Given the right (bad) manager, people will be pushed to do 10h days at the office too. In that situation it is on the employees to say no.
I'd argue for labour laws and/or unions here. Individual workers vs. collective management greatly disadvantages workers, as Adam Smith observed 245 years ago.
How is there no accountability? You have a thing to be done and a due date, or a progress report date. If there are processes that have to be followed, then they should be documented. Beyond that, the details are unimportant. A thing is assigned, a thing is either done or not done. There’s your accountability.
You and some of your peers may not be that way, but a sizable population of office workers probably don't like the idea of neutering their careers just so that they could be more productive (which that employer gets an outsized amount of value from).
No, but perhaps we'd like to "neuter" our careers in order to reduce the time spent in-transit, increase the flexibility with which you can do things around the house during the day, and generally avoiding the "management in passing" that can occur when you're in the office.
If it was a one-sided win for the company and no benefit being reaped by the employee then no one would opt for it.
Exactly. There are plenty of benefits I get from WFH that have nothing to do with productivity. My commute is 2 hours each way. WFH lets me recover 20 hours per week and use it either to catch up on work or (usually) for pleasure. WFH has allowed me to actually see my child during the weekdays and bond. WFH lets me eat a healthy, inexpensive meal at home rather than blow $15/day at the local oil-and-carb lunch shacks near the office. WFH lets me discretely run errands around my home during down time rather than having to just sit in my office chair picking my nose. WFH has saved hundreds of gallons of gasoline and carbon footprint from my commute. This past year has been pretty much all upside, and it’s going to suck to throw it all away because Mr. CTO just can’t bear to not have his minions crawling around the shiny office.
I see where you're coming from but as a counterpoint the following point can be made. I hope you take it as a healthy steel-man argument:
My commute is 20 minutes each way. I get to see and play with my child everyday because I manage to finish my work in time. I also cook my healthy home-cooked food with my family and also eat it in the office. I use bicycle or public transport to commute making me healthier. I can always run errands during office time because my team is considerate and understand the needs of us. I interact with my colleagues and tasks that took 2-3 meetings are now resolved in 1 single chat over coffee. The upside is that I have a healthy interaction with my fellow humans, and I can learn a few things from these interactions. It's going to suck to throw it all away because some WFH zealots want to stay holed in their cute little corner.
I really miss my commute to work as well. It was a 35 minute walk or a 9 minute bike ride, and I did it 5 days a week without thinking about it. In the morning it helped me wake up and after work it helped me _reset_ and not think about work.
I've lost that completely now, I find it extremely difficult to motivate myself to go out for a walk when there is no goal. Also the office was much bigger and the walk from my desk to get a tea or go to the bathroom let me get around 3k steps a day just inside the office.
I can easily manage sub 1k steps a day nowdays since my desk/couch/kitchen/bathroom are about 20 steps from each other. Combine that with gyms being shut and lockdown preventing me from going surfing, I am in the worst shape I have ever been.
I guess working from home without lockdown would be a different experience, but as it stands now, I really need to be in the office for my general health.
Sure, but you're right that what you're describing is because of the pandemic and only partially has to do with WFH.
I've WFH for a long time and I've missed the gym, mid-morning Jiu-Jitsu, and going to the local coffee shop to mix up the day. I think we should change the terminology from WFH to something like Freedom of Work. I think what people really like is the freedom to work how they want. Classic WFH is the closest to that today, but the 'home' part carries a specific meaning that isn't really true for many who WFH.
And again, I've found pandemic WFH to not really be represent of WFH pre-pandemic.
The only difference being you could have that and others could have WFH?
From what I see whenever this topic comes up, it seems that the only zealots are those who want to work in the office. Remote working people are always more, "I work better this way, and you all can keep working as you prefer".
And, given the conditions you described most would be ok I guess. But, most don't have a 20min each way commute. Which then interferes with all the other points - seeing your children in the same vein as you do (if you have 1h or more of commute, you're going to miss the mornings and get home pretty much later, have less energy, etc), which also means you won't have the time to share on the home cooking (unless your partner does so and has a schedule that allows). You won't be cycling that distance either, instead you'll get a car, or public transportation. Running errands depends on the grace of your company, I'm sure many (and usually most where people are more inclined to work from home are exactly those where you won't be able to, either because the errands aren't geographically close enough or by office policy).
I do see value in in-person presence, be it for bonding, relaxing or discussing work, on the other hand, in terms of work I don't see why you would need 2 meetings and not a video call, or call, just as you could do over a coffee.
The other points about interaction, indeed, they have their own value.
This is what I want in the end. Different people in different roles perform different operations, and unifying them under remote-only/office-only buckets is stupid. Finding acceptance for different view points is really hard these days.
It’s not even a given that you’re neutering anything by working from home. I’ve worked with lots of people in the past who succeeded just fine working remotely. You’re not going to make CEO but there is no reason why your career should actually suffer working remotely. This mythology that remote workers miss all this “critical” break room chatter about the hockey game and therefore miss out on promotion is mostly anti-WFH FUD.
I agree with you, there is no good reason why a career should suffer from working remotely in a largely non-remote office culture. But a lot of dumb things happen in corporate environments when they shouldn't.
It depends on the company. IME, it's mid sized companies where the majority of the employees are forced into the office that most often have this problem. Small companies are typically tighter and have more flexibility anyway so it's fine. Larger companies are already distributed so it doesn't matter if an employee is taking another conference call from the local office or their house.
It is not just mythology, it is experience. Plus "break room chatter about the hockey game" is massive straw man.
I have seen exactly that happen multiple times. The in office workers were core team, the from home workers were invariably "secondary citizens". In terms of what tasks they got and how much influence they had. They were first to go when the company needed to lay off people. They were forgotten about when splitting tasks, making decisions, starting meetings, dealing with issues.
And second, emotional matters. The productivity does influences how team and management treats you, but so does "connection" and crap like that. If you have jerk tendencies or lazy tendencies, people tend to excuse those much more if they know you in person. Bonus if they perceive you as cool or funny.
How often do you think senior execs are in the office anyway? I bet they travel a good half the time. Heck, I traveled about a third of the time pre-pandemic. And larger companies are distributed all over the world anyway. Most senior people in my company aren't even in the HQ.
"Career" is just a word used to make your job more bearable. You work. You do the things those paying you need you to do. There's no such thing as "career." You have a job.
- Many people chafing to get back to an office are concerned that it's going to be a diminished experience with many of their teams missing
- As a sibling comment notes, remote workers will advocate for remote-first practices. For example, if anyone on a call is remote, everyone has to call in individually. No gathering in conference rooms. I knew teams that did this pre-pandemic. There are also practices that are frankly good in any case like everything needs to be written down, no hallway decisions, etc.
Do in-office people call in from their desks? Seems like a noisy office then, especially with an open office. Or does each in-office person have to reserve an individual conference room?
Once you have more than one office and teams split between them, you have to adopt practices which look a lot like WFH, such as putting conversations online, communicating asynchronously, and avoiding in-person-only meetings. Even if you made me go into my local office, there is literally one other person there who is on my team versus two dozen others around the world. Our WFH working method would not change discernibly.
I assume that many people here are with smaller companies or at least at companies where almost everyone they interact with is in a single location. That hasn't been the case with me for years. I'm basically never on a call of any size (including with my immediate team) where everyone would be in the same office (even if we were in the offices where we technically sit). I'm about to hop on a call where, even in normal times, there would be a mix of remote, two different US offices, and two different European offices. And that's absolutely the norm.
When I first started WFH almost 15 years ago, this was the exact conversation I had with my boss at the time. Video chat wasn't as big of deal then, so most calls were on the phone. Even though I ended up moving 2 time zones away, I kept my work hours the same, and it took almost a year before co-workers I interacted with regularly even knew I moved.
The pendulum of remote-to-onsite work is swinging back away from full-remote, yes, but I think this type of report has the air of "buggy-cart vendors in the age of the Model T" about it.
Major (or a subset of) employers do not like losing centralised control of their employees, but there are a large cohort of employees who wish to see remote or hybrid models of work and, critically, this trend was growing prior to COVID-19. COVID merely accelerated this trend, as it did with a lot of pre-existing social and industrial changes.
> And lastly I'm just not convinced that businesses actually act based solely on hard figures.
Correct. Large, Big-5-hiring, corporations are probably going to be the last companies to move to true hybrid models. They are behemoths that cannot be turned quickly. They have slow bones, vast inertia, and long memories, and will have been optimised for reporting chains that require face-to-face interactions and strong visual signaling. All of this takes time to change.
But I wouldn't expect that this return to all-onsite work will be completed before the pendulum begins to swing back again the other way.
> COVID merely accelerated this trend, as it did with a lot of pre-existing social and industrial changes.
My perspective is quite different. Perhaps for more innovative companies this is true that it accelerated the trend, but there are plenty of stuck-in-the-mud companies where COVID-19 forced their hand to move to remote quickly, and they would've never done this without COVID. That's was I saw (outside the FAANG, outside the US) in a traditional industry.
There was a telling survey posted some months back (can't find it unfortunately) "What accelerated digital transformation in your company?" and the answers were management or COVID, the response was overwhelmingly COVID.
Also lots of anecdotal stories from senior IT folks. A pretty common theme is that COVID forced a lot of experiments that were on the maybe someday/probably risky pile and a lot of them turned out better than expected.
Yeah, the shift was no means universal in breadth or depth, but it was there beforehand (remember Wework?) and this pushed more traditional industries to take it up.
Another example would be ties; already in Australia it was becoming common to see professionals wearing business casual rather than suit-plus-tie (especially in summer). A walk around the CBD of Melbourne recently suggested to me that COVID has hit suit-plus-tie very hard, but suit and no tie appears to be going strong.
Yeah, I largely agree that all-onsite will be a thing of the past. Eventually enough talented folks will just work elsewhere and businesses will react. I guess the real question in my mind is that if you work for a place doing a hybrid approach, are you at a disadvantage? Unless senior management folks also do the same, that lack of visibility is devastating to a career.
Anecdotally, I've observed that employers are conservatively opening to full-time remote employees based on needs. If a role can't be filled locally - they'll try in another office or full-time remote. I'd bet that as people move back to the office you'll see a settling towards equilibrium.
>> Have a handful of executives who can't wait to get back into their comfort zone - the office - and that office spending budget will find a way to get spent
you could have just said this. everything else you wrote is superfluous justification
This makes a lot of sense. I don’t think offices are going to disappear but instead companies will mostly move to a hybrid approach where you are expected to be in the office 2-3 times a week.
Most companies and a large amount of their employees were never able to make the jump to remote work mode. That is, they were trying to recreate the office experience while working remotely. The result of this is employees that are exhausted from being on zoom all day and a complete disappearance of work life balance. Moreover I suspect that the lack of in person meetings has also led to a lot of cases of misalignment and in some cases even conflict between different teams. Management sees this and they also get a lot of requests from employees that want to go back to the office which leads them to the conclusion that remote isn’t the best long term solution.
But like I said, this isn’t the fault of remote work but instead the result of companies not adjusting to a remote work mode.
With the hybrid approach they will get the best of both worlds. People will be able to have “meeting” days and “maker” days, which should lead to an increase in productivity without burning out the employees. At least that is the theory, only time will tell.
I see the hybrid model as being the worst of both worlds. Your house/apartment needs to have a room dedicated to working, just as if you were fully remote. However, you still need to live within commuting distance of the physical office, so you can't take advantage of working from somewhere with a lower cost of living.
I assume most people will be allowed to come in every day or most days if they want to. On the other hand, if something like a 4 fay home-1 day office model is commonplace, I'd also expect a lot of companies to switch to hoteling type seating arrangements.
And an arrangement where you have to come in on a weekly basis is certainly going to be much less attractive for remote workers who want to move to lower cost, mountain town, beach, etc.
One nuance of hybrid that often gets dropped is that there's a distinction worth drawing between fully remote and "WFH."
Coming in a day or two a week is only possible if you're still basically commuting distance from an office. It can in principle be a longer commute. But I'm probably not going to hop on a plane or drive 8 hours once a week to come in for a day of meetings. (Though I could once a month for a few days.)
I work at a company that's pretty distributed and remote anyway but I do know people who used to come into an office regularly who have moved out of commuting distance.
Yah. I do think companies will also be more willing to accept fully remote workers, especially ones from niche or high demand fields. But what will ultimately happen is that a fully remote worker in a mostly hybrid company will be at a disadvantage when it comes to promotions. Overall I think it is a good thing, because the option to be fully remote will exist
The big thing that companies won't get with the hybrid approach is the ability to reduce their office space expenses, though -- unless you go to significant amounts of hotdesking (which will be pretty unpopular I expect) then "all our employees are in the office 3 days a week and WFH for 2" still means "we need to provide space for a desk for every employee and our office rental costs are the same as if everybody was still in the office the whole week".
Overall I agree with you though that mostly offices are not going to go away but that there will be an increased degree of willingness to allow 2-days-WFH and similar arrangements, especially in sectors like tech where attracting and retaining good employees is difficult -- it's a relatively cheap perk to offer and the last year has raised corporate awareness of its desirability among some employees and that it isn't actually impractical.
Personally I hope we move to a hot desk approach since it will lead to much less waste, but I do agree with you that it won’t be popular. At least not right now.
Still there is a chance that in two to three years everything goes back to normal and the hybrid and remote model mostly disappear despite its benefits.
What I actually hope happens is that the governments and municipalities encourage companies to adopt a hybrid or remote model. The more people who work from home means less traffic and the need for less transportation infrastructure which could save billions.
Yes, hot desking in a nice new building with open areas and break out pods and all sorts of shit you don't care about, but not enough lockers for staff to store their things so you have to carry a ton of crap back and forth to work hoping a locker will become available one day.
The goal of hybrid models is to have people in the office when they need to collaborate, then work from wherever for individual work. But it seems like this will be hard to pull off.
If everyone is in the office on different days, then of course you lose the benefits of in-person collaboration. But if everyone is in the office on the same days, then it's harder to meet with people because their schedules might be full or you might not have enough rooms for all the meetings. Sure, you can try to align schedules by related teams, but it will be hard to get perfectly.
I just started a new remote job and have rented an office 45m from my house. The need to do this is related to school drop-off and pickup, but the benefits include:
- no part of our house needs to be dedicated to work
- work starts and stops at regular times
- I have at least 30m of language study time in the car (accounting for conversations with my daughter which will be a priority)
- my office is 5 min from trails I can run at lunch
Working from home, as in the spare bedroom, is a challenge and a buzzkill.
What I find most interesting is how people who love working from home can't seem to understand how their own circumstances don't translate for others. This bias seems especially present in a subset of the tech population.
If you think offices are going away, you're betting against decades of history where people work together in meatspace. If you think they do that because they can't get their work done virtually, you've fundamentally misunderstood both humans and also many of their own life circumstances.
Some people _in some industries_ can work from home. For many, that's not feasible. There is no "one way".
It's curious because I find it the other way. Every time I read something on WFH it's critical of it, along the refrain "it's not possible for everyone", case in point. In the real world WFH (for compatible positions) is usually not an option. Please apply the "there is no one way" to the real situation, it's not hard to find employers not considering the option even when it makes sense.
I'm not an advocate for work from home. The thing about covid is that it forced employers and employees to discover what was practical for work-from-home. And you may well find for some employers, work-from-home being practical is enough. Work-from-home doesn't have to be great or even good. Offices are incredibly expensive. Between not paying for office space and being able to hire anyone from around the world, the virtual organization gives the employer a lot of pluses that they can use to offset the negatives. And if in a given circumstances, this only works for some people. Well, they can hire replacements for the people it doesn't work for.
It seems like this will happen unless something stops it.
At least in the US, there has been moaning for a decade going on two about how hard it is to hire qualified people at current salaries in STEM. If you fire all the people who don’t like WFH backfilling them is not going to be easy, and even if you did that’s probably a good chunk of tribal knowledge lost.
It will be easy if they hire people for those salaries from anywhere in the world. The only reason it's hard now is because they require them to live in SV which not everyone can do.
People worked together in meatspace because that was the only way. It simply wasn't possible to work from home even 20 years ago for the vast majority of office workers.
If you think internal combustion engines are going away, you're betting against decades of history. And if you thought horses were going away you were also betting against decades of history.
Things do change. Many people who can work from home now will. And many others will invest in home offices and join them. Some people can't work from home, but amongst office workers that number is very small.
Mmmm.... it's true for small places but for larger places like FAANG? They are spread out geographically in hundreds of buildings, and have to fly to see each other for meetings or anyway videoconference.
They do not actually succeed to "work together in meatspace" very well when their teams are already in different timezones, cities and even a drive away in the same city.
Some companies will springboard off this, and some will cling to the Old Ways.
> If you think offices are going away, you're betting against decades of history where people work together in meatspace
Historian here. If you're going to argue the past, then working together in close quarters at scale has only become a societal norm since the Industrial Revolution. Throughout most of (European) history, working from home was the norm.
This shifted when in the 19th century when industrialization moved the workplace for millions from small scale, artisanal home labor towards factories, workshops and crowded urban centers.
The impact on individuals and society was profound. This was also the time where factory workers found themselves facing extremely long workdays, non-existent worker rights, low wages and so on. That's what sparked social and emancipatory movements, and worker parties in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Throughout the 20th century, the workforce in the Northern hemisphere became increasingly more emancipated and educated. Post-war economic boom (1945-1975) and social-economic reforms - especially in Europe - created the momentum that turned a blue collar workforce into a white collar workforce.
Even so, in the late 20th century, many of the extant notions of how work ought to be organized were still firmly rooted in frameworks that first emerged during the Industrial Revolution.
Ever since the emergence of digital technology in the 1960s, visions of modernity and future living have always included the ability to work remotely or from home, rendering the centralized workplace obsolete. It's only now, 50 years later, that commoditization of digital technology has actually turned this into an option for millions of workers.
The problem isn't technology though, it's - still - the tenuous and complex relationship between workers and their employers that harks back towards demanding 40, 60, 80 hours in a centralized workplace where maximization of productivity is put front and center.
Now, in all of this, it should be clear that I'm not advocating for people to wholesale move towards working from home. Nor that people should go back to bare level subsistence living through local farming / artisanal production. That's not how this works.
In that regard, you're absolutely right to state there's "no one way" to organize work.
However, generalizing the notion that "people can't do their work virtually and need to see each other" is false as well as it doesn't take into account the historic backdrop that explains how modern society ended up organizing itself in a way that created centralized workplaces as a necessary requirement.
The fact of the matter is that the technology finally gives people a choice over the locality of their work. Artificially restricting that freedom for everyone because "That's how it has gone on for decades" or "some people in some industries can't work from home" are rather poor arguments in that regard.
What I’ve found is that I really enjoy going to the office, as long as the majority of my co-workers are not there.
Now that nobody comes into the office due to COVID, I can finally get something done there, and the view is fantastic. But a little while ago, when 4 people came into the office on the same day, I very quickly found myself longing for home, even though that’s still less than 4% capacity.
This reads more like consultants writing their FUD into a press release than actual news. I know that people and companies invested heavily in real estate are disappointed by this, but no amount of astroturfing is going to re-create the world of 2019.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nonfarm business labor productivity rose by over 10% over the course of 2020, despite the fact that most of us are working from home. (Source: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/prod2.pdf)
Companies that want to waste huge sums of money on offices are going to have to compete with companies that don't abuse their employees, doing the same thing for less. We're obviously not going back to how things were before.
> According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, nonfarm business labor productivity rose by over 10% over the course of 2020, despite the fact that most of us are working from home.
I’d push back on this claim with another piece of relevant data: employee mental health has plunged [1][2]. While it’s true that productivity has increased, it’s not obvious that this is sustainable.
I think not being able to look forward to doing anything new on a weekend is the reason mental health is plunging...not the fact that the commutes have been eliminated.
It's nuanced and different for everyone. The isolation has been brutal for a couple of my single friends in tech. Being able to mingle at the office was a big portion of their social interactions pre-covid.
Also not everyone has a living setup that works for WFH.
WFH is great for someone with a big house where they can convert some part of a room into a study. It’s less great for someone living in a studio or apartment with limited space.
I re-upped my lease just after WFH and they didn't raise the rent. So I'm not going anywhere and it seems like we'll be back to normal-er by the time it comes up again.
I've heard people say commutes are helpful for their mental health.
If you live in a rural place and commute into a suburb your commute is probably like an hour of forced meditation. If you like driving it might actually be good for you.
If, on the other hand, either end of the commute is in a city/you don't like driving it probably wears on you every day.
> I've heard people say commutes are helpful for their mental health.
I'm sure that for any drudgery out there, you can find someone to extoll their positive aspects. In my case my commute was rather pleasant, a comfortable 30 min bicycle ride. However most of my colleagues had to endure crowded public transport.
I wonder how much of that is due to Working from Home, and how much of that is due to Covid-19 with hundreds of thousands of people dying, weddings, funerals, churches, celebrations, etc being closed.
In an alternative world of working from home, but you are free to go the coffee shop to work, meet with extended family, and now have to worry about catching a potentially deadly disease, I would bet mental health would be much better.
Also, it is possible that employees were putting in extra effort so that they won't be one getting laid off in case their company decides to do a layoff. It was a scary environment in the beginning with a layoff being announced almost every day.
Yeah, it's weird how the narrative is that mental health has plunged because people can't sit in traffic and go to the office while completely ignoring we've been in a pandemic for over a year.
I miss pre-pandemic WFH, and want to get back that ASAP.
This is too broad of a stroke to be brushing with.
Personally, my mental health has gone worse for non-COVID reasons. I live in an apartment and the limited real estate means that it’s hard to dissociate work space from living space. I’m not the only person who lives in an apartment.
My favourite way to solve that dilemma used to be going to a cafe for a few hours. Guess what I haven't been doing since the pandemic started?
At the moment I'm blessed with plenty of space, and the office is the office. But still fewer social outlets than I would like. Summer can't get here soon enough.
I don't really like cafes either. I tried it during a brief period when full lockdowns hadn't started yet but we were allowed to work from home.
- Cafes are noisy. If you need to have a conversation, it's hard to hear the other person, and it can be hard to hear you, and you have to be mindful to not disturb you.
- You have to pay your way at a coffee shop, and I enjoy supporting local business, but I don't need to consume all the calories and caffeine of a new drink every 1-2 hours.
- Cafe seating isn't office seating, and if you sit too long in it you can tell. An aesthetically pleasing cafe chair isn't necessarily good for the back.
So employers get a productivity boost and cost savings if they sacrifice their employee's mental health? I'd love to believe we live in a world where that would stop them.
I mean, the technology industry (especially FAANG) aren’t exactly known for sacrificing long-term growth for the sake of short-term penny-pinching in the context of employee happiness.
Any company that (pre-COVID) had a proclivity to sacrifice short-term profits by providing free food and other generous onsite perks is probably also a company that might choose to scrap plans to cut back on offices if doing so has a positive impact on their employees’ mental health.
it's very possible that mental health is dropping due to the rest of society being closed down as well. if everything other than "office life" opened up, i imagine mental health would go up too.
Just an anecdote of this one guy, but I really would love to go back to office right now. WFH has killed my enthusiasm and I really don't think my overall productivity has gone up.
Covid Lockdown - and almost complete absence of ability to visit relatives, travel (especially internationally), go to restaurants, participate in group activities - has been much harder than simply WFH.
Your cited source also shows 10.9% more hours worked and only 0.8% more hourly compensation (and -1.6% real compensation) comparing Q4 2019 to Q4 2020. Does the data show whether people are more productive because they are happier living more flexible lives at home, or because they simply have worse work life balance? Does it show whether these changes are roughly homogenous, or if there are pockets swinging up (down) the mean hours worked (compensation)? What's the variance?
You can levy a dozen counterfactuals at the use of BLS data like this to support permanent WFH. The analysis needs to be way more holistic and BLS figures aren't nuanced enough.
You look at a multi-day Slack discussion with big architects and PMs without any progress... In the old days it would be a series of important meetings where those important people would be making important face and saying important sounding words. There would still be no progress, yet there would be the feeling like the progress is being made. Slack makes it so obvious. We're definitely going back to offices :)
and even more important aspect - without offices there isn't jet-setting across the world nor fat expense accounts. The only thing left for CEOs and all the other execs is to actually do their job which is their least favorite activity and which they usually are hardly capable at performing.
It’s not most trustworthy when you accuse someone of lying and then proceeded to cherry pick single statistic, that’s not even from carefully controlled study designed to answer those questions.
The productivity numbers, unlike inflation, don't compensate for basket shifts. So if people stop putting on low productivity things like plays productivity rises but it isn't real.
There arent any real study on work place transition, productivity, and overall AVERAGE health of employees had been conducted.
Even on the smallest scale of sample size, I thrived during the work from home year, yet my SO can't wait to get back to office work where they can socialize with coworkers face to face.
Any call for either OR are dramatically overweightted.
One question though. Tools to work fully remote have been around for at least 20 years now. Want to work from Montana in 2001? Webex, messengers, version control, DSL internet, everything has been there for decades. We also have precedents of major projects (say, open source) shipped by distributed teams since that long, too. Yet, pre-Covid very, very few companies have actually figured out remote. Why? Is it because companies are slow and stupid? Google doesn't seem stupid. Why have they been paying $500k comp in the Bay Area all this time when Tennessee or India were right there all along? Maybe they took special pleasure in pointlessly overpaying and abusing their employees, as you call it?
I think it's hard to use FAANGs for general trends like this. Google for example in part hires people to keep them from going elsewhere or building a competing company. One of Google's big perks to lure these people is all of the onsite amenities. Google and the other big tech companies are unique in a lot of ways, and in no way represent the average company in the US or even in tech though.
What will be interesting is if WFH (I like to say Freedom of Work) continues to take hold, will companies like Google have to adjust or be ok missing out on employees?
We broke our lease in May, we'll get a new office, but it'll be 1/3 of the size of the old one - and mostly meeting rooms. The open plan will be small, sparsely populated and flexdesks only. We have grown 18% this year.
My company has promised to do some nebulous studies about remote work and productivity and decide the WFH / back to office question based on the data, but it’s exceedingly clear from how they are talking that there will only be one conclusion possible from these “studies”: that everyone will be forced to come back to the office. They could find a 50% productivity increase but it won’t matter. All the top execs are utterly dogmatic about in-person and there can be only one conclusion possible.
This, I feel, is the issue: The decision makers don't want to work from home themselves. It doesn't have the same appeal that it does for individual contributors, and having employees out of sight is almost unthinkable.
There are certainly going to be exceptions, but anyone wanting to work remotely permanently will have an uphill battle.
I love working from home, especially not missing the commute. The only times I've thought 'damn I wish we could be in an office right now' is when:
- Refining stories, it's a bit easier to read peoples body language. Not everyone is super outspoken which is required when you're in a videocall.
- Retrospectives, also a bit harder to do online - though the tools are genuinely improving.
- Working together on architectural issues. Me and a colleague were using draw.io to think up a design and it just wasn't as easy as standing in front of a whiteboard together. I really miss that.
There are shit loads of people who own expensive offices, in London that includes Russian oligarchs, no wonder so many stories are out saying people want to come back to the office - they don't.
Speak for yourself... I want to go back to the office. I would prefer some flexibility to work from home a day or two per week, but I enjoy the structure of working in an office as well as collaborating and socializing in person with colleagues.
Perhaps in the future that will change. But for now that is how I feel about the situation.
P.S. I didn’t read the article, so I can’t comment on that. I was just reacting to the ridiculous statement that no one wants to work in an office.
Socialise in your own time. That's not work and you shouldn't be getting paid for it. I know people like to believe work gets done like the stock photos of diverse people in suits laughing. It doesn't. If work was about laughing literally anyone could do it. Many people go to offices every day and do literally nothing.
Working without (socializing all day) is doing your job. (Working without socializing) all day is being a drone. And likely not even doing your job any more effectively.
I would argue that for some of us it is. As a domain expert on security, I'm not directly member of the teams. Still at office, over hearing related discussions allow me to possibly help them or be aware of up coming things that I or my team(security) should be aware of and possibly track. This is certainly type of socialising that is work.
Sorry, but no. Work is supposed to work for me, as well as me working for it. Some people might be fine with perfect compartmentalization of work, but I would find it soul crushing to just be a corporate machine for 8 hours a day.
Then work part-time. Every second you're at work is a second you're a corporate machine. No wonder so many people don't get anything done, if they don't actually work the time they're paid to.
Exactly. I consider coffee breaks and the like to be a healthy part of work life balance. They stimulate new ideas and learning in a way that video conferencing does not. Software is not like back breaking warehouse labour (which I used to do). An unhealthy mind produces nothing but shit output.
I chose my field specifically because it matters to me what I work on and doing it while being surrounded by great people matters even more. Not as a means to an end. That would've just left me bitter fourty years from now.
I didn't even know software had big money until I joined the industry, which probably explains my whole philosophy WRT in-person work.
Then don't work for a big corporation. I work for a small company from home. My work is interesting and varied and I don't have the time to socialise, even if I wanted to. I get to spend more time with my family instead.
My company does have an office, though, and I don't live more than an hour away. I will go into the office for some things, like whiteboard planning meetings, training and other things. It's going in everyday for the very few times it's actually beneficial that I can't stand.
Because I don’t want to? I’m enriching my life with these social experiences.
Why do you care how I spend my time if I’m not harming anyone or failing to fulfill my responsibilities? It seems like you have a bit of an axe to grind here.
The pressure from banks, direct real estate investors, and holders of real-estate / mortgage-backed securities has to be absolutely immense. I trust virtually nothing reported in this space presently, most especially "mood" pieces (e.g., "everyone is clamoring to do X", whether that's remaining in or departing offices).
My anecdotal and unscientific evidence that the world will go back to offices is that I'm interviewing lately and interviews have started returning to in office. This is in an area that legal office capacity will only return to 100% next week.
Interviewing works well remotely and has an incredibly high travel/task ratio it seemed like a no brainer to keep them going remotely but alas.
> “Either downsizing has already taken place, or plans have changed as the impact of extended, unplanned, remote working has taken a toll on some employees,” KPMG said.
So...they don't know which it is. Great article, Reuters.
Corporate world is too fragile. Many office towers are used as collateral for loans. Low occupancy can trigger re-evaluations. I can only imagine political pressure in places like nyc and sf
As the pandemic eases, I suspect we'll see a bigger return to the office than expected.
The biggest driver will be human nature. Political machinations that work in person for self gain do not necessarily work with WFH. I'm already hearing some FOMO as people that work in the office are promoted over people working remotely.
I've hired, developed and promoted roughly 300 people in my career (including those who left for a better job at other orgs). I don't mind WFH co-workers, or the extra work that they make for me when it comes to managing them. I can not, however, help them develop their talents as fast as those I can interact with physically. Therefore, I can not promote them as quickly, or perhaps at all. I suspect I'm not alone.
Even if people just go from 5 office days per week to 4, that’s a reduction in office use by say 20% (in reality slightly less because at 4 days/week in office I’d want a personal desk which I wouldn’t at 1-2 days/week, but on the other hand a few days a week I’d be fine with sitting in a shared space as I can focus when I’m at home).
The question isn’t how many companies will “go remote”, it’s what fraction of the week people will be remote on average. What happens to the market for office space of demand drops 20% in a year?
I think the idea of 100% in office for no other reason than “managers like the idea of seeing people work” is dead. Some companies will keep this policy but those companies will be at a huge disadvantage in recruiting.
Only if people stagger their off days equally across the week. If instead everybody takes Friday off, you still need the same office capacity Monday-Thursday.
Yes and if people still want personal desks, it's 0% regardless. In reality the figure will be somewhere between 0 and 20%. But 1 day/week sounds very low imo.
Before Covid, we had gone to 1 remote day per week, with half the people on Monday and the other half on Friday. We had 1 fully remote person in IT, and a few in Sales. We had already decided not to go 2 remote days, though we had seriously considered it.
That left us somewhat prepared for Covid. I think fully remote has gone better than expected, but I'm pretty sure we'll end up with an office again and 1 remote day.
Our company is still trying to decide, but there clearly is a push to get mostly everyone back in the office. Most recent communication from CEO left a speck of hope for some fully remote positions ( and pre-covid, it was basically treated as a reward for some employees ), but it was very light on details.
Both me and my manager love remote and we are both doing what we can to show that remote works for the company.
That said, I fully agree it is not for everyone. My wife absolutely hated it. I just wish some middle management practice was not forced upon me, when it is clear it is not needed.
They already monitor everything I do with software. Why do they need my physical body?
It's difficult to manage full stop. Not necessarily impossible.
There is a role for good leadership within a corporation. Part of that is to ensure that organisational system is working together towards the quality achievement of a common aim. This is difficult at the best of times but remote working adds additional challenges and if you thought leaders were struggling before how do you think they'll fair with the additional challenge.
My company put out a survey. (not a software company, but leans toward engineering staff) 5% wanted to return to 5 days, 5% never wanted to come to the office again, most wanted to come in as needed, or 2-3 days a week.
There isn’t much to this article. The ads on that page take up more space than the article. So the comments here are much more useful.
They interviewed large firms: what is the breakdown at the industry and country-location levels? These large (publicly traded?) firms need to send messages of confidence and “normalcy”.
It’s clear that some types of work are better with fewer people around, some require more people. Collocated people can communicate very well. Whatever helps add predictability to these large firms will be adopted.
I save about 2 hours a day by not commuting. I wouldn't mind commuting a day or two during the week, but there's no way I'm going back to 5 days a week in the office.
> Most chief executives said they wanted vaccination rates to exceed half the population before they started to encourage staff back to the office - a target which is close to being met in Britain but remains distant in much of Europe.
I know we've collectively decided we're done with reality and annoying things like "facts" but that target is no where near met by Britain.
The UK has decided to aggressively give everyone first doses of vaccines, and it is true that nearly 50% of the population has their first dose, but a fraction of that has received the second dose, precisely because of the aggressive 1st dose strategy.
Sure it's possible that one dose is enough, but my cynical guess is that getting everyone one dose is primary so the UK can show up in statistics like the one quoted above. UK data source for anyone interested [0]
“Either downsizing has already taken place” - direct quote from the article. And they are comparing the reduction between August last year and today.
I would conclude this means companies planning to downsize already have done. The companies who were not really planning to are still not going to do it.
This also matches my personal experience and that of my friends and professional network.
I'm curious to the longer term effects of companies that move hybrid setups. It would seem to me (although anecdotically) that in this setup working fully remote might hinder career growth due to visibility and being less involved in new projects and ideas. It's also easier to form a bond with colleagues f2f compared to over a VC.
I feel like there's a lot of people here that really hate going back to the office because they already moved out of location and are desperate to avoid any commute if possible.
This has gotta be a PR piece by Commercial Real Estate interests.
I bet they are offering “multi year lease discounts” to lure the company property divisions.
This pandemic has proved and reinforced the notion that all knowledge work can be performed remotely and more efficiently.
The other class of workers don’t need offices: manufacturing, food services, maintenance you name it.
Just in time for the next covid wave brewing with new variants. I've seen system dynamics and epidemiologists refer to western gov't pandemic strategies as yoyo policy. I feel like it's a 50/50 race of vaccines vs variants. And part of it is an irrational level of resistance to change.
I have a decent home office setup: dedicated room, nice chair, big monitor, but I still don't get as much done as going to a different physical place that's dedicated to work.
I think what I hated was not the office, but the open office, which is truly awful. I started a new job and now I have an office to go. I'm currently sharing with a couple people (who are rarely there) and soon will have a dedicated private office. It's a world of difference.
I think most people who hate the office really hate: open offices, long commutes, being required to be there for specific times. If you could get rid of those most people probably wouldn't mind and might even prefer the office.