Regarding return to office policy, I hear many speculations and reasons hypothesized. Mostly by employees who don’t really know and who had no choice in it.
I would like to know is if there are any lemmings out there who have been involved in these talks.
What was discussed?
How is something like this coordinated amongst others businesses even rivals.
What are the high level factors that have gone into the decision?
Bonus points: is it even possible for employees to prevent or reverse these policies at this point?
In my corporate experiences, these decisions were made unilaterally by the C suite without discussion.
Our CEO literally woke up one Monday and demanded RTO by Friday. Fucking asshole works from home in Hawaii
This is pretty much the answer everywhere. So this post must be targeting c suite folks… on Lemmy.
Yes, hi, we do exist. And we were trying to get CEO to implement a hybrid policy for years before covid. He hated the thought. And he was the type of person that would not hesitate to fire an entire department if they felt bold enough to complain about it. When I started there, I didn’t immediately report to him. Anyone there who had a layer of management between themselves and him had a pretty ok work experience there. Direct reports to CEO basically had to manage a toddler who was also the emporor with new clothes. I took the promotion to be his whipping post because I wanted to leverage it to move on. Instead now I have PTSD from an abusive boss and am not able to work full time.
tl;dr – the C suite does discuss things amongst themselves with and without the CEO. But CEO already knows what they want to do, usually can’t be swayed, can only be warned what the consequences of their decisions will bring.
My company required everyone come back to the office. My team works in a terminal, we can do our work from anywhere. Everyone of my department went back in. I said no.
They said I could be terminated
I said go ahead and fire me, I’m the lead tech, 40 experience, I built and maintain more then half of the automation, I’m the only one who understands networking onprem and I cloud and has a security background.
I dare you.
They said they would make a special exemption for me.
The moral of the story… You can demand stuff from your company if your company can’t function without you.
Can you hire me and teach me the way 😆
You’re what I want to be when I grow up. I’m middle aged.
Boiled down to “Me in charge. Come in” as a response to leadership.The reality is they rented out an office to hold 200 people, laid off half of them, and then were upset the place always looked empty when they brought clients around. It went from “You all need to be in office on Wednesdays, so we look like a big company”, to wanting everyone to return.
The problem is a good majority of people had moved away during covid. Those were the first people to be laid off unless they were superstars. They had a lease agreement until 2026 and were already subletting the previous offices (They kept moving into new spaces as they grew before other leases were up) that also had long contracts. I am no longer there, but rumor is they are trying to sublet the 200 person office and find yet another small space. They are slowly turning into a real estate company.
Our office allowed voting to elect a committee to determine what return to office should look like. I was elected to it. They also hired external contractors to mediate basically. Some people came into it thinking everyone should go back to office, but by the end of it we settled that being in office should be required for certain types of work activities and not for others, and apart from the required activities for in office employees could be wherever. We drafted this up into a formalized agreement and everyone was happy with it.
Then the president who did that program retired and the new guy immediately scrapped the whole thing and forced everyone back into the office overnight without any discussion from the committee or other employees.
I’m at the very bottom level of management, so I’m not invited to these meetings. But I get to hear the story afterwards. The basic jist is that all the old employees are fine to work remote, however, the new employees are largely getting lost. There’s no water cooler meetings or impromptu hallway discussions or ‘hey Jim, I heard you screaming next door, what dumb thing did your customer do?’. The transfer of tribal knowledge isn’t happening when the new folks are remote. As much as I will make fun of the above, I will admit that I learned more of how to do my job through those impromptu ‘meetings’ with my coworkers than I ever did from any formal training.
So, to your point, how do we get back to working from home again? I’m not sure, but I would starting thinking about how to encourage more connections with your coworkers. Not the forced meetings where you talk about why the wiggly line isn’t going up, more like, “hey bob, whacha been up to today? Oh yeah, that system doesn’t work for me either, the trick is you have to log-in through the other portal…”
- finding and hiring staff will be harder
- attracting top tier talent will be harder
- rent will be more expensive
- childcare will require more sick leave
- illness will require more sick leave
- expanding to new territories will be harder
The c-suite evaluated the cost of rent pretty good and had an existing problem of not being able to hire above average younger talent because the work they were doing was pretty boring. Advertising a good hybrid wfh policy (once a week or once a month in-office depending on different factors) has brought in good people.
Basically, they saw that it was bringing in cash.
The biggest challenge has been getting new hires integrated well with existing team leaders.
There’s also team leaders that refuse to use Teams/zoom, but also don’t answer their phone. In the past you could corner them in their office but now they sort of anchor their team. It’s mostly self-repairing as they stagnate and other teams flourish.
Mine consisted of me countering every single one of my manager’s lame objections to remote work, including pointing out that we used contractors in fucking India and offering to change my name to Rajesh, and him simply ending the discussion with, “I can see we’re poles apart on this.”
Haha this came up a lot at my place. They offshore all these teams and then champion back to office as a very important reason for it.
Never worked in banking or finance. That job was at a company that made ultrasound machines.
Funny story I like to tell: one April Fools day I started a rumor that the company was getting bought by Toshiba. I created a fake Wall St. Journal article written in their bland style and left a couple printed copies on random manager’s desks with illegible initials scrawled on them. Within 2 hours our dept (IT) had an emergency meeting to reassure us that it wasn’t true. They said upper management was VERY upset and wanted the perp to come forward (no recriminations - yeah right!) and explain the reason for it. I’ll never forget my manager, who was British and generally looked like actor Bob Hoskins, dressed as a pirate because it was April Fools Day. The jam-packed conference room was utter chaos and he was standing on a chair in his pirate costume waving his arms trying to get everybody to shut up.
I kept my mouth shut. A friend of mine who worked around a lot of managers said the tone of their conversation that week was like… why now? why Toshiba? As if there might be a grain of truth to it. Months later it turned out our company had a very secret project going with Hitachi to develop a miniaturized combat ultrasound machine for the army, because they were encountering landmines etc that threw out plastic shrapnel, which was really hard to see with x-rays. So apparently the big shots thought somebody might be teasing them about the Hitachi deal, and they were worried about the army getting wind of it and doubting their ability to keep the whole thing secret. Bonus: the device was codenamed the Tricorder, and physically modeled after the shoulder-strap tricorder on Star Trek TOS.
I happened to be involved in such a meeting this morning.
The conversation around the general policy was mostly supportive. The main concern is that we do not have an official policy in place and various teams are setting their own rules, which is occaisionally resulting in collaboration issues.
The other main issue, unsurprisingly, regards what we can do to make sure that people are actually working when they are at home. For the most part, people are getting their work done, but there are always going to be people trying to take advantage and we discussed ways to track that without getting too “big brother” across the board.
Sounds like we are going to implement a 2 day wfh allowance coordinated within teams, based on their schedules so that we have at least half of each team in the office each day, with exceptions for people with extenuating circumstances.
We are not going to put any kind of tracking software on their machines, but we are going to monitor overall output.
2 day wfh allowance
So
- staff has to locate nearby
- new applicants must be nearby
- everyone needs a car
- the office doesn’t offset any of this
- but 2 days you get to be home and productive. Woo!
Someone needs to be fired. Pick the guy who talks about ‘organic conversations’, as if water cooler chat and constant interruptions are the true medium for knowledge sharing, or the sexist git who forces Linda to shop for office clothing where Gavin skates with khaki and a polo, and raise the average EQ with a quick meeting.
At the beginning of COVID, when our CEO decided all non-essential staff should immediately begin working from home wherever possible, our CIO declared all of IT to be essential on-site. Shortly after the meeting when the CIO made that announcement, people at my level (bottom-level manager) essentially all announced to our supervisors that we were going to refuse to abide by that directive.
My direct supervisor told us to relax and essentially said that the entire management team was going to sit the CIO down and have a come to Jesus meeting. Shortly after that the directive was reversed, and it was left up to managers to decide if their team could be WFH, hybrid, or fully on-site. It’s hard to stay CIO if the entire IT group is in revolt.
For many months after that, in the regular management meetings, the CIO would talk about how difficult it was and how everyone was suffering due to the requirement to work from home. He would talk about how many people told him they were longing for the day when we could all be on-site again. I have no idea who those people were, because everyone I spoke to thought WFH was fantastic.
I have heard that when productivity didn’t drop, the CEO asked, “Why are we paying all these high rents for office space if everyone is just as productive and happier working from home?” It was around that time that the CIO started to talk about WFH like it was a good thing.
At this point, there’s no sign it will ever end. We are allowed to hire people from out-of-state and most people are WFH full time. They’ve reduced office space to the point where we all couldn’t work on-site even if we wanted to.
He would talk about how many people told him they were longing for the day when we could all be on-site again. I have no idea who those people were, because everyone I spoke to thought WFH was fantastic.
My old CEO would pull this bullshit, too. He’d say like “I’ve heard from people that [wild claim]”. The team was like 5 people it’s not like I couldn’t go ask people if they actually said that. I think it’s some sort of asshole-lying mechanism.
It’s a classic manipulation technique. It’s never “I think that…” It’s always framed as “Lots of people think that …” to give it credibility, but it’s a lie and meant to manipulate you into feeling like you are alone and the group all thinks differently than you to force you to comply.
Lots of leaders do it. Trump does it constantly. CEOs do it. Abusive people do it in their relationships.
Once you know it and recognize it you start seeing it EVERYWHERE from dishonest people.
It’s funny to ask them “Which people say that?” If you can. It makes them SQUIRM.
I can’t speak to what’s said in the meetings, but in a similar vein, we were told we needed to come back to the office 2-days a month because other people had to work from the office, and it wasn’t fair to them.
That’s it. That’s the rationale. Because it wasn’t fair to the people who had to be here. Mind you, my team has been successfully working remote since COVID.
🤦♂️ fml
It’s funny to me because of the return to office policy, the price of parking is going up, a lot. Like now I have to fight for an extra $2000 for parking + $1000 for meals + whatever day care will be.
Yep. I suspect that where I work, parking has some role to play in the RTO. I can imagine the department in charge of collecting parking fees saw a dramatic decrease in revenue.
Not that what I think matters to anyone (where I work), but any company that owns and manages their own parking facilities should not make employees pay for parking. It’s just bad form. But what do I know?
Yep it’s just a stealth paycut
Yep. Not counting the time I spent in traffic, nor the gas it took to drive, today I spent $59 just for the privilege to do the same job I could’ve done at home. Tomorrow I don’t plan on forgetting my lunch, so that’ll save me $13.
