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Post by Peregrine on Nov 27, 2024 6:41:37 GMT -5
It feels like most IT or roles where otherwise face to face work is not required are settling into a 'hybrid' system (this word seems to be in vogue). That way you can reduce office costs (only 50% of staff in at any time means you can downsize commercial costs) while also satisfy the higher-ups that your staff are still connecting, being monitored etc. It's tragicomic how this "compromise" ends up being the worst of both worlds. You have to pay for an office but then you also have to pay for all the remote work infrastructure, and then you have the farce of five team members in the office at their separate desks on a video call because one person is working remote that day. So much money lost to satisfy the egos of idiots. I am partially sympathetic to older business owners. I'm not. The only people who suffered from this "problem" are the idiot managers who had no clue how to evaluate employees beyond butts in seats time and/or office politics. Any decent manager already had evaluation metrics based on work delivered so changing the location of the employee didn't change anything. Something like the cheats at your job would have been discovered within the first week and everyone involved would have been fired. And it would have been much less likely to happen in the first place because everyone would have known their performance metrics involved calls per hour, average resolution time per call, etc, and doing no work would have been immediately obvious. As an example when my job went mandatory WFH for anyone who could (I couldn't) almost nothing changed with performance evaluations because it was all already based on projects delivered per quarter, my boss knowing the expected days per project and being immediately suspicious if something took longer than expected without a known reason, etc. The only real difference was that instead of spending several hours a day pretending to work by sitting at my desk and scrolling forums, talking to coworkers, etc, I just took a 6-hour lunch break every day. And judging by the constant level of output for all my coworkers who were scrolling social media every time I walked past their desks I imagine it was about the same for them. But hey, my boss was still happy with our productivity! |
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Post by herzlos on Nov 27, 2024 7:49:52 GMT -5
It feels like most IT or roles where otherwise face to face work is not required are settling into a 'hybrid' system (this word seems to be in vogue). That way you can reduce office costs (only 50% of staff in at any time means you can downsize commercial costs) while also satisfy the higher-ups that your staff are still connecting, being monitored etc. It's tragicomic how this "compromise" ends up being the worst of both worlds. You have to pay for an office but then you also have to pay for all the remote work infrastructure, and then you have the farce of five team members in the office at their separate desks on a video call because one person is working remote that day. So much money lost to satisfy the egos of idiots. It depends on the setup. Our deal is that the company pays for 1 set of equipment, whether that's home or work, and we all have laptops anyway. So I paid for my own physical chair and desk at home, and split equipment between my home desk and work desk. I got a pretty fancy desk and it cost me about 2 weeks worth of saved fuel*. I did have to pay for the bigger house myself to get the private office. I assume similar applies to a lot of people. Most WFH/Hybrid jobs don't really require much beyond a chair, a laptop, and possibly a headset. With hot-desking you can potentially save costs significantly too, as if desk sharing is possible you can get away with, say, 75 desks for 100 staff.
The video call thing is interesting though, it's definitely a bit of a waste to travel into an office just to sit on video calls, and it may be that in some setups having 1 home worker causes more of it. But if you deal with multiple sites anyway it's less of an issue. I work for a big global megacorp, so my boss is in a different continent and I work with teams in most time zones so only a small proportion of meetings can actually happen in the same room but you can schedule stuff so that those people are in the office anyway. Most hybrid models have core days across teams. So team A is in Mon-Wed, team B is in Wed-Fri.
The time zone thing is another argument for WFH. I have meetings at all hours (5am, 10pm, whatever) purely because I can do them from home. I ain't getting my ass into the office for 4:45am for my salary.
*I reckon that since I went WFH/Hybrid in 2020 I've saved about 1600 gallons of diesel, which would be about £11k. That's ignoring the 66k miles I didn't put on my car, extra tires, servicing, etc.
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Post by herzlos on Nov 27, 2024 7:52:51 GMT -5
See those cunts? All mysteriously disappeared one day. Fired for gross misconduct. That's the thing; you should still be able to tell if people are doing their job. And it's not as if skiving in the office isn't a thing anyway. Studies seem to show that office workers are only about 30-40% productive anyway, and I'm sure we all know folk who seem to get nothing done. They probably also have a nickname like "Motion Sensor" (only works when someones there). |
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Post by Peregrine on Nov 27, 2024 7:57:01 GMT -5
Sure, but at that point why have the office at all? It sounds like your company has arranged everything required for a fully remote operation but they're still paying for 75% of an office to appease some clown's ego. And that's the issue in general. Once you enable hybrid work there's zero practical reason not to go all the way to full remote. It's this weird awkward compromise where they understand the value of remote work, create all the infrastructure and organization required to enable it, but then back down at the last minute and throw away most of the benefits. |
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Post by herzlos on Nov 27, 2024 9:02:12 GMT -5
Oh it's worse, we've got 100% desk capacity to accommodate all staff at once, but most people are in the office 2-3 days a week. So the place always feels empty and it's hit and miss if you bump into someone without planning for it.
I actually like office work and feel there's a merit to it. Discussions in person are definitely better than video chat, you get a better connected team and all that intangible stuff. What I miss most is the watercooler talk where you may find that another team is doing something you can borrow from, or have ideas or whatever. But it depends on the work of course, it makes some sense with creative jobs like software or marketing, but less for stuff like real estate or data admin.
Not everything can be done remotely either though. Stuff requiring sufficient security clearance isn't allowed to leave the building, so if I was on a military project I couldn't WFH. If specialist equipment is needed then it can't always be taken home, and so on. Secret Santa sucks remotely.
So as contradictory as it sounds, I like going into the office as long as the home/office balance suits me. I get more work done at home and can be a lot more flexible, but it's nice seeing people in person. Again the caveat is that I've worked with most of my coworkers for 20 years at this point so they make up a large chunk of my social circle and I'd happily spend time with most of them outside work. So I tend to be in the office for meetings/social stuff and stay at home for the work (and posting here).
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skyth
OT Cowboy
Posts: 488
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Post by skyth on Nov 27, 2024 10:12:50 GMT -5
When I'm showing someone how to do something, it works better in person than through a video chat. Even though you can share your screen, being in person right there and having the close interaction just works better. I've had someone ask me how to do something and I've told them I'll explain/show when we're in the office together.
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Post by Haighus on Nov 27, 2024 12:30:06 GMT -5
. Secret Santa sucks remotely. My experience is that secret santa sucks in person too... |
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Post by Haighus on Nov 27, 2024 12:33:10 GMT -5
I currently work hybrid, but I can't avoid the on-site stuff because it comprises my clinic commitment and no one has devised a good way to do a physical exam over the phone yet... Hybrid obviously makes sense if you have some job aspects which require physical presence.
If my clinic is fully telephone I can do it from home.
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Post by herzlos on Nov 27, 2024 13:44:16 GMT -5
When I'm showing someone how to do something, it works better in person than through a video chat. Even though you can share your screen, being in person right there and having the close interaction just works better. I've had someone ask me how to do something and I've told them I'll explain/show when we're in the office together. It's much better for gauging how well they are understanding the thing. I find teaching (in general) so much easier in room than remote. |
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Post by herzlos on Nov 27, 2024 13:45:58 GMT -5
. Secret Santa sucks remotely. My experience is that secret santa sucks in person too... You have a point. It sucks even worse remotely. One of the covid years we posted gifts to each other (or bought on Amazon and got shipped to), and it just lacked the usual banter. But we're a pretty close team that usually push it a bit on the 'what's an acceptable gift' factor. |
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