... And then they came for WFH

[herzlos]

We've got electronic passes but as far as I know there's no logging done so I could get away with it. I suspect you're somewhere you have to explicitly badge in too, where I am I can conceivably spend a whole shift within using my pass if someone is ahead of me at each door but that's terrible security practice.

Petty enough bosses could also look at the security camera footage to see, but my point was that if the boss isn't in they'll have a hard time complaining about minions not being in.

[Peregrine]

Oct 1, 2024 15:02:24 GMT -5 herzlos said:

I know the cost of our office building is calculated per head, and the cost of staff in a country has the same figure attached to it.

So if the office costs $1m/year and there's 1000 staff, the office costs $1k/each, and we cost salary, etc. + $1k/each. Those figures are then used to decide where to hire folk, what offices need expanded/shrunk/closed/moved and so on.

So having people in the office makes the office *look* cheaper to the accounting department.

Wow. That is a profoundly stupid way of doing things.

[herzlos]

Oct 2, 2024 6:00:30 GMT -5 Peregrine said:

Oct 1, 2024 15:02:24 GMT -5 herzlos said:

I know the cost of our office building is calculated per head, and the cost of staff in a country has the same figure attached to it.

So if the office costs $1m/year and there's 1000 staff, the office costs $1k/each, and we cost salary, etc. + $1k/each. Those figures are then used to decide where to hire folk, what offices need expanded/shrunk/closed/moved and so on.

So having people in the office makes the office *look* cheaper to the accounting department.

Wow. That is a profoundly stupid way of doing things.

Welcome to corporate America

[pacific]

A friend of mine that works for a very large (I will keep it vague) delivery company, many thousands of staff.
Had started to introduce mandated return to the office, so many days per week for all staff. A letter had been circulated saying that they had evidence that productivity had dropped following people home-working.
Knowing this was a bit suspicious, someone asked on a Q&A HR meeting (with many dozens of staff on it), where this evidence had come from. Head of HR then admitted that it was fabricated, they had no such evidence... Ooops! Grievances aplenty now incoming as people had been planning to relocate due to it, and quite possible that the person will lose their job, although not sure if they will re-evaluate their policy.

[Haighus]

Oct 17, 2024 4:53:33 GMT -5 pacific said:

A friend of mine that works for a very large (I will keep it vague) delivery company, many thousands of staff.
Had started to introduce mandated return to the office, so many days per week for all staff. A letter had been circulated saying that they had evidence that productivity had dropped following people home-working.
Knowing this was a bit suspicious, someone asked on a Q&A HR meeting (with many dozens of staff on it), where this evidence had come from. Head of HR then admitted that it was fabricated, they had no such evidence... Ooops! Grievances aplenty now incoming as people had been planning to relocate due to it, and quite possible that the person will lose their job, although not sure if they will re-evaluate their policy.

Idiots.

My partner was working as a work coach in a jobcenter during the mid pandemic. They were moving from telephone check-ins back to forcing claimants to attend in person, almost regardless of individual circumstances. This was not particularly popular with work coaches either, it wasn't pleasant dragging sick or disabled people into the jobcentre on pain of losing their lifeline money and telephones could be grouped into one list that would allow coaches to work from home some days if they wanted.

Apparently this change was based on evidence that claimants got a new job quicker if attending face-to-face (I view this as the "bully them into a job by making life on universal credit unbearable" hypothesis). You would think that such evidence would be easily accessible, it being a government body with good records. However, said evidence was never provided to the work coaches despite multiple requests to do so.

We are pretty confident it either never existed or was so flawed as to be worthless under cursory scrutiny. Much easier to hide than actually backing up an argument.

[easye]

Oct 17, 2024 4:53:33 GMT -5 pacific said:

A friend of mine that works for a very large (I will keep it vague) delivery company, many thousands of staff.
Had started to introduce mandated return to the office, so many days per week for all staff. A letter had been circulated saying that they had evidence that productivity had dropped following people home-working.
Knowing this was a bit suspicious, someone asked on a Q&A HR meeting (with many dozens of staff on it), where this evidence had come from. Head of HR then admitted that it was fabricated, they had no such evidence... Ooops! Grievances aplenty now incoming as people had been planning to relocate due to it, and quite possible that the person will lose their job, although not sure if they will re-evaluate their policy.

Quiet lay-off effort?  

[pacific]

Oct 17, 2024 9:06:14 GMT -5 easye said:

Oct 17, 2024 4:53:33 GMT -5 pacific said:

A friend of mine that works for a very large (I will keep it vague) delivery company, many thousands of staff.
Had started to introduce mandated return to the office, so many days per week for all staff. A letter had been circulated saying that they had evidence that productivity had dropped following people home-working.
Knowing this was a bit suspicious, someone asked on a Q&A HR meeting (with many dozens of staff on it), where this evidence had come from. Head of HR then admitted that it was fabricated, they had no such evidence... Ooops! Grievances aplenty now incoming as people had been planning to relocate due to it, and quite possible that the person will lose their job, although not sure if they will re-evaluate their policy.

Quiet lay-off effort?  

That's quite possible, although I am not sure I would be able to credit anyone who works in HR with that level of intelligence (Machiavellian or otherwise!) 

[easye]

www.cnn.com/2024/11/20/politics/doge-remote-work-federal-employees/index.html

Remote work crackdown: How Trump’s DOGE could push federal workers to quit

President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, a nongovernmental entity helmed by billionaire Elon Musk and biotech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, is expected to make a push for an end to remote work across federal agencies as a way to help reduce the federal workforce through attrition.

Both Musk and Ramaswamy have recently publicly lamented the number of employees working remotely across the government.

A source familiar with early discussions about the focus of DOGE, as the initiative is known, told CNN that while nothing is final, early priorities include an effort to immediately end remote work across federal agencies, making a five-day work week a requirement for all federal employees.

“It’s a no-brainer step and many companies have done this. So why shouldn’t federal employees who are paid with taxpayer dollars be required to be in office?” the source said.

Run government like a business!

[A Town Called Malus]

Nov 20, 2024 16:04:28 GMT -5 easye said:

www.cnn.com/2024/11/20/politics/doge-remote-work-federal-employees/index.html

Remote work crackdown: How Trump’s DOGE could push federal workers to quit

President-elect Donald Trump’s new Department of Government Efficiency, a nongovernmental entity helmed by billionaire Elon Musk and biotech entrepreneur and former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, is expected to make a push for an end to remote work across federal agencies as a way to help reduce the federal workforce through attrition.

Both Musk and Ramaswamy have recently publicly lamented the number of employees working remotely across the government.

A source familiar with early discussions about the focus of DOGE, as the initiative is known, told CNN that while nothing is final, early priorities include an effort to immediately end remote work across federal agencies, making a five-day work week a requirement for all federal employees.

“It’s a no-brainer step and many companies have done this. So why shouldn’t federal employees who are paid with taxpayer dollars be required to be in office?” the source said.

Run government like a business!

Gotta love how the people in charge of efficiency don't understand what it means.

[mdgv2]

Run it like a business!

Not just any business!

But a Trump business!

Wait…why are am us bankrupts? Agains? Surely we am are 23rd times lucky?

[herzlos]

IIRC Musk hates home work, because he's got no idea what being productive is. He thinks people being in the office all hours with flashy screens is productive, because they look busy even when nothing is being done.

I think he also likes the power trip of summoning people into pointless meetings.

So I can see a big back to office push due to that. Whether they'll also do it to drive attrition instead of paying people off I'm not sure, maybe. They'll potentially try and push for some exemption to following workplace laws anyway.

If they actually wanted to save money, they'd be encouraging teleworkers in lower cost of living areas. It could revitalize the rust belt if some of those 1.2m remote Government workers were out there. They could even open up smaller satellite offices for some roles. Basically move everything out of Washington that doesn't need to be there.

[Peregrine]

Nov 20, 2024 17:41:59 GMT -5 herzlos said:

IIRC Musk hates home work, because he's got no idea what being productive is. He thinks people being in the office all hours with flashy screens is productive, because they look busy even when nothing is being done.

I think he also likes the power trip of summoning people into pointless meetings.

So I can see a big back to office push due to that. Whether they'll also do it to drive attrition instead of paying people off I'm not sure, maybe. They'll potentially try and push for some exemption to following workplace laws anyway.

If they actually wanted to save money, they'd be encouraging teleworkers in lower cost of living areas. It could revitalize the rust belt if some of those 1.2m remote Government workers were out there. They could even open up smaller satellite offices for some roles. Basically move everything out of Washington that doesn't need to be there.

Yep, that's exactly it. The data is very clear that remote work is more efficient than office work for a wide range of jobs but two groups of people really hate it: commercial real estate landlords who would lose a lot of money if offices close and idiot managers with an obsessive need for control, massive egos that demand an office full of fawning employees to show how important they are, and no understanding of productivity beyond hours spent at a desk. Elmu is certainly the second (see his "lines of code" debacle) and probably also the first.