Give people autonomy to get their work done from wherever...they love it, and then you just decide to rip that away? Yeah, I wouldn't be happy either, and that's without thinking of sitting in my car for 2 hours every day. Screw that.
No wonder workers are unhappy, they found a work-life balance that worked for them, and it was taken away. People who moved away from high COL places to work remotely in lower COL areas only to be forced back to high COL places in a time of rampant inflation and astronomical real estate costs are being forced to come back to fully in-person, yeah, I'd be pissed off too.
One of the interesting things I realized when I went back to the office and then again back to remote was just how much time is wasted in the office…but it feels like you are working.
If I spend 8-9 hours in the office I feel like I deserve a reward. Even if I did nothing I endured being in an office. At home the only measurement I have is my output and depending on the day and how many meetings I have it can feel like I didn’t do much.
I usually do interesting things when WFH home , then decide it’s time to work. Sit at a computer (which I find boring in itself after a morning of hiking) then waste time on YouTube watching hiking videos for 3 hours before I start work.
I just think work is a chore and procrastination is easy. No matter where your ass is located.
Maybe the wasting time part is actually part of work. I’ve learned to just accept that.
Planning my time in advance means I waste less time but I don’t always bother doing it.
When I was in office, we were wasting time there too[1]. Just in different ways. Mainly socializing with coworkers, chatting by the watercooler, talking about our families/friends/social events, reading hacker news(?[2]), going for walks, fucking around with the coffee machine, going for walks with coworkers to get coffee, going to the bathroom 10 times a day to check my phone (I also have Crohn's so this isn't unheard of for me to do outside of procrastination reasons), and lots more captive meetings with little value (where I could otherwise be working during the meeting while WFH).
During a typical 8 hour day in office I might only get 2-3 hours of actual work done. It wasn't until transitioning to WFH that I realized it's actually incredibly hard to get even 6 hours of productive work done in a day.
I mean, I agree, but when you WFH you don't really socialize the same way. A little bit of chit chat between breaks in meetings maybe, but there's no equivalent of "stand around in the kitchen talking about hobbies"
I've worked from home remotely most of my carrer and I have actually spent quite a bit of time talking about hobbies with my coworkers. Even with my current coworkers, one of them is a tea afficionado and we have exchanged teas we like, one has similar taste in computer games (point and clicks) and we talk about this, another's husband has similar taste in novels and we have a semi unofficial book club and, finally, we have an actual book club within the company...
So, at least in my experience, socialising like this is entirely possible.
I am slotted to return 2 days a week soon and I look forward to absolutely blowing those 2 days in all the 'microinteractions' that are so important I have to return to office.
Back in that cagie, wagie. Those HR ladies aren't going to find anything to do if you aren't at the office! And think of all the poor restaurant and convienience store owners who lose out on your revenue. Not to mention the real estate investors!
If I'm in the office I'm losing 2hours a day to interruptions, small-talk that could have been a slack message. I also have to either spend time packing food, or ordering food because the office won't accommodate food allergy and dietary restrictions. So each week I lose a whole day to bullshit just going into the office.
Working a 8 to 17 job, my best hours are from 8:00am to 13:00pm.
It is when I get most work done. The reason why it slows down in the afternoon is because I have a designated hour for lunch break that won't count as "work" and it completely gets me out of the zone.
At home I can easily skip it and have lunch at 16:00pm, or just eat while I work and finish at 16:00pm.
On top of that, if I have to commute for 50 minutes before getting at my desk at 8:00am, and I know I'll have to commute back for 50 minutes when I finish, BE SURE my best hours won't start until 10:00am and that my afternoons will be even lighter.
AND FOR WHAT? I spend my day with headphones on without speaking to anybody unless it is lunch break or we have a meeting. I don't think I socialize more irl than through slack and calls.
Productivity is output per hour worked, yes. What happened at the start of Covid is that many of the jobs with bounded output (services, food etc) shutdown, leaving the white-collar work which is less bounded. Less hours worked but most of the money made implies that productivity would increase.
The same thing happened in reverse in 2021. Not complicated, but for whatever reason this isn't obvious to people.
When I went home, I saw myself slacking off. When I went back to the office, I saw myself slacking off, and initially I thought like many people "wow work from home has pros and cons".
Once I adjusted more to the work from home lifestyle changed and I started to get much much healthier. As I got healthier, I started feeling like working more. Then I started getting not slightly but a LOT more productive than I was in the office, and I also started taking on more leadership roles, and confidently doing things I struggled with before like the more soft skills side of things.
I started to really tally up what exactly the cost of working in offices was. The unpaid labour of commuting, the stress of commuting, the consumption of narrow food options (pack lunch or restaurant food), the shitty work desk setup, the loud environment, the social pressure to "look busy" and work in socially acceptable ways (For instance, no fidgeting). I have coworkers who got into car accidents, are still screwed up, and for WHAT?! They never wanted to come into the office, they were mandated to come in during bad road conditions, what happened was outright predictable. Forcing people to live in high CoL areas or travel tens of km/miles a day to sit in an office where they connect to a remote server anyways is busywork with no relationship to the actual work somebody is employed to do.
I've come to appreciate what the two points of return to office are, in regards to jobs which can be done 100% remote. The first purpose is to stroke managements ego by having all their reports do a performance for them. I'm not a performer, and I'm tired of being sick and stressed and tired and doing a worse job to satisfy some deranged manager's ego, that's not what my job is, that's not what I went to school for. The second use is to make your employees lives so miserable that they will want to quit their jobs so you don't have to lay them off, since the law doesn't properly recognise such tactics as constructive dismissal yet, and management can exploit this.
I thought it was pretty clear that the rise in productivity during the pandemic was almost fully explained by the fact that low productivity service sector jobs were not being done during the pandemic.
And the obvious flip side of it was that once those jobs started recovering, the output per hour would drop.
We're not looking at productivity across the board - we're looking at productivity at a particular company that send their workers home. Companies like my company. Productivity soared when the employees were sent home. Many companies reported similar findings.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 61.0 ms ] threadGive people autonomy to get their work done from wherever...they love it, and then you just decide to rip that away? Yeah, I wouldn't be happy either, and that's without thinking of sitting in my car for 2 hours every day. Screw that.
No wonder workers are unhappy, they found a work-life balance that worked for them, and it was taken away. People who moved away from high COL places to work remotely in lower COL areas only to be forced back to high COL places in a time of rampant inflation and astronomical real estate costs are being forced to come back to fully in-person, yeah, I'd be pissed off too.
If I spend 8-9 hours in the office I feel like I deserve a reward. Even if I did nothing I endured being in an office. At home the only measurement I have is my output and depending on the day and how many meetings I have it can feel like I didn’t do much.
I just think work is a chore and procrastination is easy. No matter where your ass is located.
Maybe the wasting time part is actually part of work. I’ve learned to just accept that.
Planning my time in advance means I waste less time but I don’t always bother doing it.
During a typical 8 hour day in office I might only get 2-3 hours of actual work done. It wasn't until transitioning to WFH that I realized it's actually incredibly hard to get even 6 hours of productive work done in a day.
[1]: https://xkcd.com/303/
[2]: Arguably there is still some career-related learning happening on hacker news
Currently working in a place with very few formal meetings so the experience might be atypical.
So, at least in my experience, socialising like this is entirely possible.
But that could be 2 days a quarter. The rest will be spent trying to NOT hear them while I crank up my noise-cancelling headphones to get things done
At home I can easily skip it and have lunch at 16:00pm, or just eat while I work and finish at 16:00pm.
On top of that, if I have to commute for 50 minutes before getting at my desk at 8:00am, and I know I'll have to commute back for 50 minutes when I finish, BE SURE my best hours won't start until 10:00am and that my afternoons will be even lighter.
AND FOR WHAT? I spend my day with headphones on without speaking to anybody unless it is lunch break or we have a meeting. I don't think I socialize more irl than through slack and calls.
So it's more likely that unemployment from lockdowns -> cheap labour -> no incentive to automate or efficient use of manpower.
That said, the US economy has been in a much stronger position than Europe so it seems there was the opposite of unemployment there.
But I find it hard to believe that some companies pushing a return to the office would be reflected in the national figures at this scale.
The same thing happened in reverse in 2021. Not complicated, but for whatever reason this isn't obvious to people.
Once I adjusted more to the work from home lifestyle changed and I started to get much much healthier. As I got healthier, I started feeling like working more. Then I started getting not slightly but a LOT more productive than I was in the office, and I also started taking on more leadership roles, and confidently doing things I struggled with before like the more soft skills side of things.
I started to really tally up what exactly the cost of working in offices was. The unpaid labour of commuting, the stress of commuting, the consumption of narrow food options (pack lunch or restaurant food), the shitty work desk setup, the loud environment, the social pressure to "look busy" and work in socially acceptable ways (For instance, no fidgeting). I have coworkers who got into car accidents, are still screwed up, and for WHAT?! They never wanted to come into the office, they were mandated to come in during bad road conditions, what happened was outright predictable. Forcing people to live in high CoL areas or travel tens of km/miles a day to sit in an office where they connect to a remote server anyways is busywork with no relationship to the actual work somebody is employed to do.
I've come to appreciate what the two points of return to office are, in regards to jobs which can be done 100% remote. The first purpose is to stroke managements ego by having all their reports do a performance for them. I'm not a performer, and I'm tired of being sick and stressed and tired and doing a worse job to satisfy some deranged manager's ego, that's not what my job is, that's not what I went to school for. The second use is to make your employees lives so miserable that they will want to quit their jobs so you don't have to lay them off, since the law doesn't properly recognise such tactics as constructive dismissal yet, and management can exploit this.
And the obvious flip side of it was that once those jobs started recovering, the output per hour would drop.