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this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Honestly. It's about more than money.
If your boss says you must return to the office, after 3 years of WFH. At best, it shows that they do not value or respect you, and are just making an arbitrary decision in a bid to sell more stocks.
At worst, there might be some insidious reason to make employees physically available. Maybe they are getting a kickback somehow, or selling data that they can only get when you are there, or maybe they are just horny and want to seduce you sexually.
A remote worker is often happier, more productive, and cost less to employ even if they are paid the same as an on-site worker. Offices do not have to provide parking, seating, HVAC, power, wifi, and will even have less physical security vectors.
If some people prefer to go into an office, then it should be optional. Not a hybrid model where they force you to come a certain number of days a week.
At the end of the day unless you are on some kind of probation or evaluation period WFH should be the default when ever possible.
Control is another thing. I can't tell you the amount of execs I've heard say "they're losing control of their company" or "I don't feel I have the same control over my people". It's crazy that they think that. What do they think the past 3 years have been when they've gotten record profits "oh, but our profits would be even better if we had people back in the office". Sadly no amount of data will override the entrepreneurial "it could always be more" what if that they throw out.
I'm working in IT and as my last team lead hasn't had any technical knowledge in my area, and he didn't had to for his job, he wouldn't even be able to control what I'm doing, ...
He couldn't control whether you're doing your work properly, but he can control that you "pretend* to be controlled by him.
It's never about making you a better worker, it's just about the illusion of control.
Think about it, when was the last time you had an interaction with your superior that actually had anything to do with your actual job? It's all just a huge charade.
Yeah, but there will also come a tone when the technical lead is being managed by someone with less technical experience than them.
At that point, it is less about telling them what to do and more about making sure they stay productive on tasks and projects that are important to the company.
The last part is important because a lot of the work management does at that level is supposed to be catching all the shit from other departments and setting goals, which does not look like technical work.
Any executive who has "lost control" of their business by allowing their employees to work from home is no more than the ring master of a runaway circus that they never actually controlled to begin with.
I've had the unfortunate displeasure of working for at least one company that made a full time job of keeping their employees under their thumb and I can say this much: the more you micromanage your workforce, the better your workforce becomes at professional time wasting. By that I mean finding creative ways to look very busy while achieving nothing of benefit to the organization.
But then again, much of the corporate world runs on incompetence so poor business decisions based on some executives feelings, rather than statistics, aren't exactly rare.
Control sounds insidious, but there are a lot of ways in which being physically present plays into your psychology and manipulates you into working harder/later/ect. Thinking back to the last time I was in an office, usually when someone was fired/they announced layoffs, the anxiety in the space was palpable. You ended up working later voluntarily just because you were afraid of not being seen at your desk and they'd fire you next.
WFH allows me to be more rational with my employer. They can't scare me into working harder, and I'm not at all attached to the "office culture" if it suits me better to leave. I think a lot of the "soft power" of the employer-employee relationship comes from physical proximity, which is why you have middle managers not involved with the bottom line profitability rooting for BTO.
The executives are nervous everyone will realize how overpaid and absolutely fucking useless they are. Every good workplace I've ever had, was absolutely nothing to do with the VPs/C levels. The best work places those people are barely involved in most of the day to day.
Can confirm. I quit my last job because they told us to come back to the office. In 2020, when COVID was still in full swing. And being remote was our company's entire business model.
People don't quit jobs, they quit managers.
I'm on my second probationary period entirely WFH, you shouldn't be required to work in the office unless the job physically requires it. Return to office is very often a big power grab by shitty management that don't know how to measure outcomes properly and instead prefer to micromanage. It is one of the biggest red flags.
I agree with almost everything hog say, and strongly think WFH is the future and worth the costs.
But I think physical security concerns are a fair one for some companies to hold for WFH, if they handle sensitive data where leaking is a concern.