This is a very old fashioned perspective. You can learn the skills you need to progress via online courses, videos, screen sharing with colleagues etc. If you’re being promoted because you’re visible rather than because of the quality of your work then your workplace is fundamentally broken.
Offices are full of constant distractions e.g. People tapping you on the shoulder, coughing, making drinks, having meetings and so on. At home I can focus purely on my job and face none of these distractions. I can also work the hours that suit me. I’m a morning person so WFH allows me to do 7am - 3pm if I wanted, instead of a rigid 9-5 and therefore the company gets more productivity out of me.
I think you’d be surprised. I know many companies who have given up their offices to go permanently remote.
If your company wanted to outsource their work to a cheaper country they would have already done so. Outsourcing happened long before WFH and will continue to happen. It’ll also continue to show issues with outsourcing that already exist (timezones, language barriers, work quality, legal issues, tax issues and so on).
Yes. Quite frankly socialising isn’t what I want from work. I want to go to work, do my job and then go and meet/spend time with my actual friends and family rather than being forced into work social activities.
No one should be forced to WFH permanently if they don’t want to. However, no one should be forced to go into the office when they can do their work from home. Flexibility is what’s going to become the deciding factor for many employees when looking for new work.
I don’t think team size really makes a difference. It’s more about moving to an asynchronous system of communication i.e you can’t just go over and tap Mike on the shoulder, instead you might have to wait 10 minutes for a reply. A lot of people don’t like this change.
This is a big factor. Offices are full of constant distractions which often mean you do less work than you could otherwise have done. For me, WFH removes all of those distractions and means my employer gets more, focused work out of me.
I would note also that “career progression through connections made at the pub after work” is also a form of discrimination. Tom, Dick and Harry may do alright from it, but it discriminates agains Susan, who has to go home straight after work to pick up her children from school, it discriminates against Mary, who finds pubs to be hostile environments, and it discriminates against Mo, as alcohol is against his religion.
While it might never be possible to entirely eliminate “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know” from career progression, it is possible to recognise that certain situations are not a level playing field and therefore shouldn’t be held up as something to get back to.
This all said, I have found myself looking for work now at a company that is asking or will be asking everyone to return to the office partially or full time.
I think working from home hasn’t been great for me personally. And although we have the option of the office, going in and sitting alone - as happens now - isn’t much better.
our offices will have limited spaces for those who want to return to office based , i think its 15 in my local office , you have to book a desk and bring your own wipes , keyboard, mouse its a bit like hot desking which i cant see working as what if some one dosnt wipe the desk as good as the next person , as i said previously it will suit some people , and wfh will suit others its down to personal choice , and businesses should be providing that option … not a blanket you must do xyz as its been shown that flexability does work
Let’s be honest - a lot of the time (probably 9 times out of 10) whatever the person wanted to ask Mike about wasn’t urgent, and could have waited for a reply, so the “instant” response wasn’t really necessary. It also disrupts Mike’s workflow as he is now being asked about something probably totally different to what he is actively working on. “Task switching” has been shown to really harm productivity, so the office being “handy” for this isn’t as great as people might think.
It’s rude to expect people to instantly do things when they may already have a higher priority task on the go. As @Ordog says, you can always use other methods of communication (like Teams) and these can also work well if the problem is urgent. Frankly, a lot of the time people would do this in the office anyway as they wouldn’t want to walk up to the 3rd floor from their ground floor office when they were busy, so they would phone, email or message their colleagues in the same building.
That’s fair, but for me I want a company where most people are going in regularly which is what I’ll look for. I don’t think I’d choose a company now where it’s completely optional to go in. One wfh day a week or something, that’d be fine.
Not saying every company should do this, different companies have always catered to different employee desires.
Company wide email today saying they want every back in the office full time from next week, and they’ve taken out new office space (mainly due to an acquisition).
If there’s one silver lining to COVID for me it’s that I’ve been able to continue working from home. I was always remote at Monzo, but when I got the Sphere offer (in March 2020!) there were no full time remote workers there and I was negotiating a hybrid split with the team. By the time I started, so had lockdown, and so after my interviews I didn’t end up going back into the office until we did the Twitter acquisition. Went in to run the “war room” on the day of the announcement and then once more for the “Goodbye Sphere” party.
And Twitter has committed to permanent remote working for anyone that wants to. It’ll probably be months before I go to the Twitter office, and it’ll only be on my terms. Which is how I like it
If Twitter can do it at the scale / level they are at then there’s no excuse really. Those companies that say it won’t/can’t work are literally just making excuses and are only cutting their nose off to spite their face. imho
Slight disclaimer, there are obviously some industries where they physically can’t work from home.
I saw a tweet from a tech recruiter (not sure what companies they work with) that basically said, whenever a company mentions getting people “back to the office” they immediately start reaching out to employees of that company and have had huge success doing so
Basically, the people have spoken and the genie is well and firmly out of the bottle at this point. It’ll become clear that forcing people back to the office now will be a massive strategic disadvantage and those companies will lose their best employees.
It occurs to me something that we haven’t discussed is where you are in the country impacts how you feel. If you are in London or on the outskirts you think about going for a drink after work and nice places for lunch and then get the train home.
Now some of this is the same in Manchester, leeds and the like.
however for many of us in the midlands and North-west the workplace is a barn on an industrial estate where if you are lucky there is a sandwich van. There is nowhere to go at lunch for a walk. Nobody goes for a drink after work because everyone drives.
yeah my office is in an industrial park with a catering van that every one on the estate used to go to , and the same no one went for a drink as we were all driving
Nobody would ever want to go for food or a drink after work because they all were driving or had other commitments as you said. So we had to arrange these in advance.
We do the same now we’re working from home too, so it’s no difference.
We’re also at the painful point of the ‘work/life’ balance thing where for the last couple of decades, ‘work’ has far outweighed ‘life’ in that scale. People have got used to that the only people they regular see face to face is work colleagues and so ‘have a laugh’ with them.
It seems that at the moment you get to a certain age, and generally the people you interact with is going to be work colleagues or your family. So, take away the work colleagues and then 24hrs a day with your family can be very testing.
What about actually socialising with people that are NOT work colleagues? When do you do that? It’s fairly typical that at the moment people make friends at school, they then leave school and they move to get a job somewhere else and leave all their friends behind. How about being able to get the job you want and being able to keep your friends from your childhood?
It’ll be interesting to see if there’s any stats in night school, fitness classes and ‘group activities’ for adults (things like choirs, yoga groups, self defence classes) to see if there has been an increase in participation in those sort of things as people who are now mainly working from home are looking for other, non-work related ways to mix and mingle with other humans.
