Submitted 1 year ago by L4s@lemmy.world [bot] to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/09/02/return-office-mandates-2023-remote-work/
Bosses mean it this time: Return to the office or get a new job! — As office occupancy rates stagnate, employers are giving up on perks and turning to threats::undefined
It’s funny how at least American employers act like we’re not at full employment. While the market isn’t as good for employees as it was about a year ago, the employees still have more leverage than the employers.
It’s not quite that simple. The job market is pretty wonky right now. Around 180,000 tech workers got laid off at the beginning of the year (including myself) and even in high-level somewhat niche roles, I see job postings that have 300-1200 applicants.
With all those laid off people searching at the same time it’s also very hard for anyone with pretty much zero work experience on their resume trying to break into the workforce.
I’m lucky my role is remote and even though it’s not required I spend a day fortnight in my office as we still have staff who have to be on site.
Head of our company is pushing to get rid of our offices in Australian capital cities as they were just for administrative roles and client meetings.
The staff who have roles that need to be on site have been given extra training to be able to do other roles with remote options.
Maybe we are fortunate to not care about work/city culture here and making work more difficult to keep cities “bustling” seems like a real cunt of a move aimed at the worker.
I highly doubt the push is due to anything but the profitability of commercial real-estate, hospitality, probably councils etc, and a range of other businesses that benefit from millions of daily customers coming to their locales — all the businesses built around a high level of centralization, and refuse to adapt to the changing world.
Micromanagement and extroverts who love the social routine are the minority being used to distract us from the scared capital.
For such “genius” “business leaders” they sure can’t understand the concept of supply and demand
They just want to make people they view as lesser than them suffer.
Suffer on the way to work, suffer finding a parking spot, suffer getting into the building, suffer working, suffer getting out of the building, suffer getting back to the car, suffer on the way home
Over and over your asshole bosses are getting off on your suffering
Well yeah, but also I think it’s just that the same people who own these businesses that people work for, and the friends and family of those people, also own lots of property much of which is office space which they don’t want to lose money. That and all of the businesses (e.g. Starbucks) and the property they’re in that partially make money from people on their way to work. And if you want to go even deeper, if people are WFM then they may not have to eat out as often, might not need to pay for a lot of things as often if they have more time. So much money can be lost and rich people all know each other and have class consciousness, I think that’s why we’re seeing so much anti-WFM propaganda
This is the key, and it cuts in different ways and needs planning strategy.
If we don’t go into town, then the businesses associated with going to work in town are in trouble, so coffee, lunch, snack, may as well get a book, after work drinks and then late food. All have less customers. Some of whom are themselves!
So a spiral of decline, less retail jobs in town, less secondary and tertiary employment “in town”.
Theoretically we can now spend some of that money locally IF the local has the supply and this is where political strategy is needed to replan where we sleep as always where we spend our casual cash. And in many cases these dormitories are not well planned for that.
So unfortunately we need to wait out this next phase of resistance in order to build political consensus for zoning and planning for more sustainable local hubs.
Feck off. I’ll sacrifice salary for personal time.
0, take it or leave it.
You’ll see my ass when my workload demands I be in the office, which happens to be about once a month.
Same. I don’t understand how I once tolerated 5 days a week at the office doing nothing.
Do that and I’ll find another one just to spite you.
Headline seems weasel-wordy.
Numerically vague expressions (for example, “some people”, “experts”, “many”, “evidence suggests”)
I.e., are most bosses doing this? 50%? 20%?
Executives: But we have a 20 year lease on this enormous office building! You guys have to come back! Besides, we can’t breathe down your necks or waste 6 hours of your day (plus commute) if you’re at home actually being productive! Wait, why am I telling the truth? I never tell the truth. Not too my wife, my mistress, my kids, my parents, or the IRS, much less you parasites! Don’t you know how much more money I could have if I didn’t have to pay you ungrateful peasants?
Should’ve known my company would never let work from home be permanent. They own the building and the land.
Bold strategy cotton let’s see how it plays out for them.
I can tell you the headline the bossman will have in the coming months.
No one wants to work anymore
But, lets me honest, that’s basically the free square in bingo now.
No one wants to work anymore
We just don’t wanna work for people who don’t get it when so many other people do.
Natural Selection.
Is anyone actually living this out there or is this all just bullshit?
The letter defense company I work for is forcing everyone back into the office at the end of the month.
:raises hand:
You guys have been working from home?
Absolutely living this out. I just quit my job at Amazon because they wanted me to be back in the office or be fired, in a different city than the one I live in and started at the company at, eleven years ago. I chose to quit so that I’m still rehirable if I need to go back.
Other people have it worse than me, especially if they are on H1B visas where the option is RTO or GTFO of the country if you can’t find employment soon enough.
My work has us on a stupid hybrid schedule, but if WFH is ever ended completely, I’m gone.
Haven’t dealt with it personally, but know of people who have. The one constant is that the places that have a RTO mandate are short-staffed and brain-drained.
I haven’t seen it, personally (Toronto)
And they’ll win, eventually. They’ll take the L, replace employees over time and suffer for it but in the end they will win and we’ll all be back in office
Especially if the pay higher wages to get fresh blood.
If they pay me more to go back into office, then I’ll take the trade if the money is high enough. Everything has a price, as they say. But it better be worth all the extra shit you have to deal with, least of all being the sick people at the office. I haven’t gotten sick since COVID started basically
“The pendulum has shifted from employees having all the power,” wow how could that have possibly happened
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The new pushes for in-person work mark a major shift as executives directly acknowledge the challenges with the model — in some cases saying productivity has declined, and citing fewer opportunities for spontaneous collaboration, mentorship and connection-building.
President Biden recently called on Cabinet officials to urge their employees to return to offices this fall, as downtown D.C. struggles to regain its pre-pandemic crush of commuters.
The goal, Patel said, is to “get people excited” to come into the office to connect with their colleagues without overburdening them or limiting their ability to do focused work — something that’s been a struggle in the age of ballooning Zoom meetings.
Free food, great tools and attractive workspaces are a big draw, but HqO’s data shows that “the number one thing people want out of a workplace is concentration space,” Garbarino said.
With President Biden calling for federal workers to return to offices this fall, she may soon have to brave a two-hour commute through Chicago rush hour and rework her child-care plan — or consider a more drastic change.
The company now funnels energy and resources that used to go to stocking offices with coffee and snacks and determining operating hours toward creating intentional (and less frequent) opportunities for employees to connect in-person.
The original article contains 1,552 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
I am one of those folks that simply doesn’t have the personal discipline to work from home. There are literally dozens of us. While office life is lonely now, there’s no way that people who don’t need to be in the office to be productive should be made to come in. That said, my GF has a coworker who is WFH for a company that is based in the South but they chose to live in NYC (they didn’t live there at first) and are getting paid NYC wages, which somehow doesn’t seem fair.
I’ve got a weird and kind of opposite experience to your GF’s coworker: I started my current job as a remote employee this year. I think the median wage in my area is like 50k, but I’m making more than twice that because of my role’s market rate in areas like Silicon Valley and NYC. So I’m living relatively large considering my area. But I’m also not actually living large right now; we went for a 15 year mortgage term to minimize interest and allow us to actually live it large when we own our home at a relatively young age. It’s definitely weird to know I’m making baller wages compared to a lot of folks around me, but living within similar constraints as them.
Employees need to bite the bullet and come back to work. You had enough time sitting around in your underwear and skating off.
If that was an attempt at a joke, it failed.
If it wasn’t, now is the time to elaborate on it.
You don’t need to simp this hard, an Indian shill does it for far less than you do already. And does it remote!
Tar_alcaran@lemmy.world 1 year ago
worker: Gets new job Employer: Shockedpikachu.jpg
jonne@infosec.pub 1 year ago
Yeah, companies that are sticking to optional office attendance are going to snap up the best employees. Look for innovation coming from them.
SirEDCaLot@lemmy.fmhy.net 1 year ago
This exactly.
A year or two back there was an article about companies trying to return to office- the CEO of some upstart engineering company had a quote like ‘every time one of our competitors announces return to office we kick our recruitment into overdrive. We get all the best people that way’.
The companies that push return to office aren’t going to keep their most productive and intelligent workers. They’re going to keep the ones who can’t find anything better.
It’s really kind of funny… this is a combination of short-sighted management who think that being able to physically see their employees working somehow makes them more productive, and real estate- lot of dollars invested in commercial real estate and CEOs don’t want to admit their flashy new HQ in Silicon Valley was wasted money.