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Posted
15 minutes ago, MonkeyDoughnut said:

Isn't that mindset the same one employees are using against companies asking them to return to offices.

Idk about you, but I don't think of my relationship to an employer as them being a customer of mine. Maybe if I'm on contract, sure. But as an exclusively employed salary earning dude, they fuckin control my family's healthcare. And most Americans/workers are in a similar position. 

That's not a normal market interaction as you are trying to frame it dismissively

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Posted (edited)
1 hour ago, Captainant said:

What a unique mindset: the market should adjust to your business's needs, not the other way around

Agreed.  people staying home are more supportive of their direct local markets/ businesses.

I have worked in office/ in market for my whole career until 3 weeks ago.  Now I am 50-50 wfh/ travel.  It's a big adjustment, but the single biggest thing i like is minimized disruption.  I feel way the hell more productive with my "office time."  With communications these days, you can still interact easily and collaborate.  I don't have to see someone in person to get their input/ evaluation on something.

The return to office calls seem to be much more of a manipulative control mechanism than actual synergy or productivity, IMHO.  One thing that differentiates things for us is that we have some very direct measures of results/ productivity.  It's like "Bitch, count the money.  My team is kicking ass, so move the fuck along..."

Edited by slorch
Posted
2 hours ago, NotActuallyALonghorn said:

Yeah, but you can take work calls on the shifter if you WFH. You can do it at the office too, it's just a bit awkward when the stall next to you flushes.

Or plays "We are the Champions" on his phone.

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Posted
Bingo.   There are two main reasons all of this has happened and real estate is one of them.   The other is good old fashioned "we've always done it this way (worked in the office)" bullshit.   C suite people don't trust worker bees to do their jobs unless they know where the physically sit.  Even though I physically sit in my home office, someone in the ivory tower can't stroll through our office building and see me. 
And the really fucking funny/sad thing about that is I can count on one hand the number of times I saw anyone from the C suite on my floor in the 9 years I worked in the office.  I never saw the CEO (who sat 9 floors above me) on my floor in those 9 years.   Being in the office the majority or all of the time is an antiquated mindset.   I still can't wrap my head around why more companies don't see remote work as a net boon.  It drastically increases the talent pool you can draw from.    Yes, reneogiating or terminating leases/owned buildings is a pain in the ass but it's not like they have to eliminate all of their floor space.  And how much of that space was sitting open/available pre-Covid anyway.  NYC and SF might have been full up but was Houston?   Dallas?   Seattle?   What about Kansas City, Salt Lake City or Charlotte?   
Companies that are adjusting to this and thinking big picture are going to win in the long run.  

You’re missing the third big reason, which is a not-so-subtle way to have force reductions without layoffs.
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Posted
1 hour ago, Captainant said:

Idk about you, but I don't think of my relationship to an employer as them being a customer of mine. Maybe if I'm on contract, sure. But as an exclusively employed salary earning dude, they fuckin control my family's healthcare. And most Americans/workers are in a similar position. 

That's not a normal market interaction as you are trying to frame it dismissively

My perspective has always been the one with the money, the one that is paying is the ultimate customer. Only reason I work at my current employer is that they are paying me. (W2 or 1099 doesn't really change that to me)

Posted
1 hour ago, MonkeyDoughnut said:

My perspective has always been the one with the money, the one that is paying is the ultimate customer. Only reason I work at my current employer is that they are paying me. (W2 or 1099 doesn't really change that to me)

This is fucked up man

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  • 2 years later...
Posted

https://www.fastcompany.com/91440457/600-employees-took-paramount-skydance-buyouts-following-rto-mandate

 

Quote

While employees leaving in large numbers due to such mandates seems like a major upheaval, some research says that is the point (at least in part). According to a 2024 Bamboo HR report, back-to-office mandates can help companies avoid layoffs. Per the report, nearly 2 in 5 managers, directors, and executives (37%) say their company enacted layoffs in the last year because fewer employees than they expected quit during their RTO. Likewise, 25% of VP and C-suite executives and nearly 1 in 5 HR pros (18%) say they actually hoped employees would voluntarily leave amid mandates.

 

  • Rage+1 1
Posted

I’ll munch some crow in this thread.  2.5 years ago I predicted companies’ calling employees back into the office would suffer and that the backlash against wfh would be temporary.  I still think companies doing away with wfh will perform poorly over the long term, but I overestimated workers’ leverage.  I underestimated the odds of worsening economic conditions contributing to companies’ motivation to use forcing folks back into the office as a way to reduce headcount without doing layoffs.  I also underestimated how quickly companies would lean on AI as a way to reduce headcount (doing away with wfh employees first).

I still think that long term, wfh will be common and companies that embrace it will be better off.  But in the short term, remote employees seem to be proper fucked.

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Posted

https://www.apollotechnical.com/working-from-home-productivity-statistics/#:~:text=A study by Standford of,home increase productivity by 13%.

Much of the international literature is the same, productivity increases in the industries well suited to work from home.

But, this isn't about productivity or employee well being. It is about control and, par for the course, those that can not work from home by nature of their job are happily standing against their fellow workers.

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Posted
6 hours ago, Im_smarter_then_you said:

I commute about 30-45 minutes each way daily.   They’re thinking about moving to a new office that is 1.5 hours further.   Yea.  Not gonna work

The new office is now 5 minutes away from the boss' house.

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Posted

My company is starting RTO in January. 3 days a week for employees that live within 50 miles of the office. Luckily I live 65 miles away but they'll come for me eventually. People are PISSED. 

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Posted (edited)

We did RTO today, barely a full day's notice. We used to have people exempt over 50 miles, not anymore. People hired under full time remote work policy from Temple got up super early today, felt terrible for them.

Edited by pacman
Posted
37 minutes ago, pacman said:

We did RTO today, barely a full day's notice. We used to have people exempt over 50 miles, not anymore. People hired under full time remote work policy from Temple got up super early today, felt terrible for them.

Surely the company is just doing a soft layoff of those long range workers.  No other logic makes sense.

Posted (edited)
53 minutes ago, pacman said:

We did RTO today, barely a full day's notice. We used to have people exempt over 50 miles, not anymore. People hired under full time remote work policy from Temple got up super early today, felt terrible for them.

i'm 44 miles away from proposed new office. That is a 2 hour drive each way in LA

Edited by Im_smarter_then_you
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Posted
1 hour ago, pacman said:

We did RTO today, barely a full day's notice. We used to have people exempt over 50 miles, not anymore. People hired under full time remote work policy from Temple got up super early today, felt terrible for them.

 

22 minutes ago, Snake Diggity said:

Surely the company is just doing a soft layoff of those long range workers.  No other logic makes sense.

I'm wondering if that's the play at my company too. We've had a hiring freeze for over a year though so lots of depts are bare bones - losing more people who quit over RTO could be very bad for them. We got a new CEO this year so likely this is just some bullshit "I'm the new boss so I'm gonna shake things up" type of thing. 

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Posted

Well turns out we're not doing it based on distance, rather how you're coded in the work computer, which they won't allow to be edited. I have an employee who lives 2 miles from the office who won't have to come in, and another in Houston who has to. I'm sure she'll probably end up quitting after the tearful convo I had with her this afternoon. Zero empathy from upper management either. We're gonna have depts who lose half of their people. Just fucking stupid.

Posted
2 minutes ago, NorthLoop said:

Well turns out we're not doing it based on distance, rather how you're coded in the work computer, which they won't allow to be edited. I have an employee who lives 2 miles from the office who won't have to come in, and another in Houston who has to. I'm sure she'll probably end up quitting after the tearful convo I had with her this afternoon. Zero empathy from upper management either. We're gonna have depts who lose half of their people. Just fucking stupid.

While I absolutely understand and often agree with calls to return to office for many employees (which puts me at odds with plenty of folks around here), I also see the utter dumbassery of entities that make it a completely arbitrary policy, and without any real thought as to cost-benefit analysis on a position and employee basis.

I've found that counting on a well-reasoned approach from anyone these days is pissing in the wind.  Every employee will bitch and moan and say that it's BETTER for them to work from home, and every policy calling for RTO will have so much stupidity embedded in it that any upside of a reasoned RTO approach will be wiped out by the stupidity of its execution.

And the world keeps spinning, faster and faster, fueled by dumbassery.

Posted
23 minutes ago, NorthLoop said:

I'm sure she'll probably end up quitting after the tearful convo I had with her this afternoon.

We're gonna have depts who lose half of their people. Just fucking stupid.

This is exactly what comanies want.  if you quit or find another job, the company didnt have "layoffs" or an employee reduction, they had natural resignations where the jobs werent backfilled and instead the duties spread amongst the remaining employees.   

that way theres no bad press about X company having 10% layoffs or something similar. and it avoids them getting sued for wrongful termination nor having to pay a severance package. 

 

but unless you are in some industrywhere getting fired fired - no matter what the issue was, makes you unhireable to other companies in your industry, you should probably call her from a non company cell phone, or use a burner phone / free phone number application and tell her to start looking for a new job, but to absolutely not quit the job.   

Make sure she asks HR  in email  that the change of WFH may impact her ability to come in the office, what options she has to keep her job. Are there any exceptions, can she apply for them, etc.

Make HR tell her in writing its in the office or you are fired.

then if she cant or wont be able to go into the office, make sure to use up any remaining sick days/ PTO and refuse to sign any HR paperwork.

When they fire her- which they will since Texas is an at will state- she can still claim unemployement after being let go

The company will fight it hard, and claim she was being fired for job abandonment or some shit like that. but she would have a good counter argument that her job description had materially changed and through no fault of her own, that change in description resulted in her being let go. 

its not guaranteed, but theres still a reasonable chance to get paid something while shes looking for work

and she can stick it to the company at the end.

 

and maybe just maybe she gets lucky because maybe  the chaotic application  of the remote work being revoked for 1 but not all was implemented in a possibly descriminatory manner, maybe the company fuck that up and end up firing too many people of either a protected class and/or residents of a specific area -i.e. anyone with cool job code 1 gets to WFH even if they live accross the street, while a single woman is forced to find a way to drive 50 miles both ways because she has job code 4

that could end up getting a decent settlement.  although I fully understand thats rare as fuck. more companies have gotten smart to that kind of shit. 

 

of course going that route means she would never be eligible for rehire again, but if they are fucking you over that bad, who cares unless you work in such a niche field you cant find another job if you get marked as unhireable. 

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Posted

my employer doesn't pay well. We have gone to 3 days in office, 2 at home. As a manager the only benefit is that I can take away WFH for low performers. That's a handy tool to push out marginal folks. But in the long run my organization - like every organization - competes for talent in the free market. Salary and non-monetery benefits (like telecommuting) make up the compensation mix. We will either have to pay market rates, or offer flexibility. Offering neither is a dead end. 

Posted

HR and its splinter sects needs to be mercilessly suppressed as a foreign and anti-American practice and ideology. Hire a talented manager of anything, aligned with organization goals, and pay them well to run personnel departments. Give them some employment lawyers and clerks and let them figure it out. 

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