Do you think that Working from Home will be something people will eventually read about in the history books. Meaning everyone is destined to come to the office 5 x per week and whatever is going on now will soon come to an end. Working from home will no longer be allowed anywhere as a matter of company policy.
My opinion is when companies realize how much money they can save from employees working from home, it will become permanent.
Yeah, I see where you’re going. But this was a phase, just like the DYI-scanner in the supermarkt.
One or a few bad apples have spoiled it for the rest of us. There are serious concerns about the actual work that is done at home.
I admit that at noon I went for long walks with my dog, but on the other hand my working days were as long as before, logging in/out at the time I used to leave the house/come home.
When the pandemic hit, I was one of only two people allowed to work from home of nearly 400 employees.
Now, there are about a dozen working from home. One is working from another country, and another in a two-hour different timezone.
Most of those in our corporate office are working from home so it has become more normalized now. Time will tell if it is just a fad, but those who work from home rarely, if ever, call l in sick. In the last 4 years, I haven’t taken a single sick day.
My last place went fully wfh. They let their lease expire and moved all their 'puters to a data-center. They’re saving a fortune.
When people (like myself) wfh, the line between “work” and “home” blurs, and I’ve always “been available” at odd hours, I’d (of my own volition) check in at night and look at emails, answer questions, take care of little tasks (and count that time towards my weekly hours, which rarely made a difference but still…), and so on.
I was always “paranoid” that I’d be making lunch, in the can, etc., when an email would come in that’d require “immediate attention”, that I’d cut that time short unless I’d email my boss, “Hey, going out to pick up something for lunch, be back in an hour”, or similar.
If I have to physically come to work, those lines are drawn as hard as I want them. I can “put in my hours”, and as soon as I step off company property like Dr Kelso, I’m DONE for the day. I internally count commuting time as “time spent for the company” and take the attitude that “you can have me waste 2hrs day sitting in my car or on a bus, or potentially get an extra 2hrs work from me, your choice”. So I’d, again, internally, be putting in an extra 2hrs/day for the company, which they chose to waste.
If we take longer for lunch, so be it. If I’m in the can, so be it. If someone sends me an email when I’m gone, well, I’m “in the building… somewhere… so I must just be at a meeting, or at someone else’s desk, or whatever”. No apologies.
I’m looking for a fully remote gig, and kinda holding out for one unless it’s doable by pubtrans, because I don’t want the hassle if not nightmare of having to drive in each day, dealing with parking issues coming back home, getting snowed in, etc.
It’s a give and take. Want to impose limits on people, don’t go all Surprised Pinkachu Face when they put limits right back (eg, hard lines between work and home, commuting time/expense, etc.).
So we’ll see…
In history books we won’t be reading about working from home which was meaningless, but about how to fool 50% of population, ruin economy and do whatever real owners of the world wanted to.
Mike
The utility of work from home for the employer and employee varies considerably.
My story from the perspective of someone in devops with a distributed team working in a backoffice role…
Like most, my employer (an ISP) went WFH for all positions that did not require physical presence March 2020 through the end of 2022. Administrative offices were never fully shut but usage plummeted to near-zero with the few regulars being split between those whose jobs were tied to the facility, those without adequate home internet access for WFH, and a remainder who tired of being cooped up at home all the time or otherwise wanted that geographic bookened between home and work life.
The first ~2 weeks of adjustment were interesting. My team (IT) was already set up for WFH because of late-night change management (and sick days) so we had made the conceptual leap(s) already. Many of the rest had not and had to deal with the likes of kid/spouse/pet management, realizing that working from their couch wasn’t sustainable, that they had to be available via email/IM, etc. The VPN stumbled a few times. But we got through it.
Not everyone got WFH. As an ISP we have a large number of Installation & Maintenance people that have to be were the network is, including subscribers’ homes. Facilities maintenance, business support, datacenter folks had to be at their respective offices.
Early 2023 the administrative offices started being consolidated and reopened. Some found themselves without a nearby office to return to, others learned that their office was moving. I was in the latter case - the offices closer to our physical presence were closed while a swank new downtown office was opened. 2024 the hybrid model was replaced with 3-4 days in the office.
The new office is a former century-old warehouse - cool to look at for the first ~day, but the acoustics of working in literal concrete rooms grate. Add in the hellscape of hotdesk pack-in/pack-out for a workforce previously accustomed to cubes and it grates further. Also, the workforce was largely coalesced around the company’s presence so it’s an inconvenient drive for everyone.
For me - and most of the other orgs within the company I know - the workforce remains geographically distributed. My manager is on the east coast (with no local direct reports!), one co-worker moved to India, one is local, and two are on the west coast. The related team has a manager + one peer locally, and three on the west coast. And for all that’s great about collaboration, that’s handled by that corporate standard Teams calls; even when there are local people almost no one bothers with a conference room.
I’d rather go back to 2023’s hybrid model. Twice a month in the office is all that’s really necessary for sprint stop/start; once a week would keep faces familiar and also allow for collaboration days.
…
More generally, I can understand senior management’s need for working in-office. They spend the overwhelming majority of their day in meetings - be it in conference rooms, fancier telepresence than Teams, or informal deskside affairs. As one goes up the chain they also must work with incomplete information and being in-person with people who prepared the information to feel them out can prove critical to making high-level decisions.
But get outside of senior management and this need tends to fall off quickly. For starters, every minute of senior management meeting depends on many minutes - if not hours - of work performed by others lower down the hierarchy. And that work often needs to be focus work, best done in isolation. Even famously collaborative fields like marketing tend to be 75% individual focus work.
Other cases that come to mind…