Return-to-office orders look like a way for elite, work-obsessed CEOs to grab power back from employees : workreform

[+] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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[+] [email protected] -11 points 1 year ago (9 children)

If the CEO of Zoom is asking for staff to go back to the office, it may not just be a desire to control.

I find that a lot of people who defend full remote tend to speak past issues like coordination and mentoring. You may have some CEO's seeing that people are doing individually productive work, but the organization as a whole isn't productive.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Show it, the studies have shown that workers are more productive when remote. Evidence would help make things easier to stomach with this insane RTO push. Covid is still kicking around, and the dramatic return to commutes is damaging to our planet.

Coordination comes from competent leadership regardless of location. Any company larger than 10 people needs some way to handle coordination. Async coordination is really under trained and under utilized as a result but works really well with remote workers. You can't async everything tho so synchronous coordination happens the same way remotely as it does in person, with a meeting and sequential execution. This is basic stuff for people who work with logic often like programmers who have had remote work opportunities for decades now.

Mentoring, you're worried about that when most companies won't pay for training or provide time or bandwidth for mentorship. Assuming leadership is onboard with the actual costs and output reductions that come with mentorship, you collaborate mostly the same way IRL as you do remotely: by looking at a screen together. Which is far easier over zoom / teams. Or you ask questions in a call or through chat.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I've posted in other comments that a lot of the initial studies were based on self reporting surveys, not actual measurements of productivity. One study that used actual measurements from a call center later revised their report as there were issues found like increased call backs.

And as for in-person versus virtual, I've seen a lot of staff don't ask as many questions online as they do in person, even with video conferencing and chat being widely available. You also have some cases where senior staff used to do mentoring and providing some technical direction on projects they aren't working on no longer doing so either because full remote tends to push everything up to the lead, which ends up getting drowned in more communication than hybrid. Sure, the senior staff may be more productive by some metrics, but the department isn't and senior management is going to to try to fix issues on the department level. And as others have noted, there is a shortage of qualified staff, so you can't have everyone be senior staff.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

people have lives far, far beyond the scope of offices and business. people have dreams, desires, goals that matter a trillion times more than 'mentorship' or 'organizational productivity' ever, ever could.

centering these discussions around business-school shit is being fundamentally blind. the fact that we have to cloak everything in 'productivity' language is a sick show of penance.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago

That's fine that people have lives outside of work, but employers aren't paying people to have good lives. An employer isn't going to self advocate for less productivity.

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[+] [email protected] -15 points 1 year ago (25 children)

I for one am sick of WFH. There I friggin said it. It's isolating, lonely, and never stops, because there's no divide between work and life. I'm sick of working 12 hours and barely even leaving the house. I miss learning from colleagues who are discussing things I'm not super familiar with, looking over their shoulder to learn more. I miss forming real actual bonds with colleagues and becoming friends with them once we've quit whatever shithole company we met at.

I know this is the minority opinion but I'm really sick of EVERY SINGLE DISCUSSION being about how management is just trying to control staff. Some of us actually want to be in an office and genuinely dislike WFH. I can make a genuine argument for more efficiency in office too, even including commute. Etc. This is all debatable, it's not just about commercial real estate values.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago

I'm sick of working 12 hours

Longer hours I feel are better suited to an office, at least that way it's not so draining with others around you

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