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- cross-posted to:
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Office mandates don’t help companies make more money, study finds::Three years after the coronavirus pandemic sent people to work from home in record numbers, U.S. employers are still struggling to get people back to the office.
Its an open secret that middle managers are trying to save their asses.
Every middle manager I know is openly opposed to forced RTO. It’s a huge pain in the ass from a policy enforcement perspective because, in their enthusiasm to make sure people are taking it seriously, they’ve decreased managers’ discretion for attendance. Now employees have to take a sick day if they can’t come in, even if they’re perfectly capable of working from home (eg a software dev with a broken ankle), or else have to jump through multiple hoops with HR.
I actually kind of like my office. It helps that I have an actual office to myself of course, but I do like the ability to put together a quick hallway chat or grab a room with a whiteboard and even just appreciate the higher bandwidth of communication I can get when physically present. But I also want to allow people to work from home if they’re having a TV delivered or if their kid is sick.
The standard, now rote, response from everyone up to the director level is pretty much “I know, it sucks. But it’s policy, and if you don’t do it there’s going to be consequences that I will not be able to handle for you.” They may put a happy spin on things for newsletters, but from where I’m from it’s seen as a legacy from an older culture running at the level of VPs and above who don’t have a direct hand in operations.
Nah. Middle managers would prefer to wfh, too. No one wants to lose 2 hours commuting.
I would rather have my team happy and working well rather than bitching about a crappy commute. I don’t enforce the organisation’s WFH rules on my team
And also just laziness. It takes more effort in leading a remote team and initiating intentional communication instead of doing the good ol’ drive-by management and let communication and coordination up to “your in the same room, you figure it out”.
It’s much harder to hide corruption when everything is being recorded!
As an anecdote I work in a 20 person team and we hardly have any managers nor meetings. I honestly haven’t even seen many of my coworkers I work with daily but we all keep loads of records from boards, to RFCs to traditional docs and wrap that all up with daily stand-ups. We’re incredibly productive.
Remote is amazing when done well and I don’t see how any CEO could say otherwise with a straight face. It saves so much money that all the “connection” gaps can be easily filled in with team building and workations and other events.
It is the future, well its already the present but many haven’t caught up to it yet.
The argument I see in articles is engagement. Remote workers are less likely to give feedback and are less loyal to the company they say.
I’m not sure remote work is responsible for that. There have been enough meetings where everybody in the office just nods along and loyalty went out the window after layoff waves became normal.
Although there is a camaraderie that is easier to build in office that keeps people around a bit longer, office politics also erodes that goodwill.
As someone who has been remote since 2020, I can definitely say I have far less loyalty to my employer than I did before. But my feeling is that I had far too much loyalty before, not that I don’t have enough now.
My quality of life has nothing but improved since going remote, and I can only hope that opportunity grows for more people in the future.
Companies themselves are responsible for less loyalty to the company. If a company doesn’t take care of their employees they never deserved their loyalty to begin with.