Im pushing for WFH, but it’s not going over very well !
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If you closely follow the automation tech scene the top question you should be asking yourself is “If I don’t need to be there with other people to get this done, how easy will it be for them to automate what I do?”
Many jobs that felt bullet proof 5 years ago are suddenly vulnerable. Including professions like counselors and lawyers.
Roofers still seem pretty safe.
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A quote about Elon I saw over the weekend that made me laugh:
He talked about electric cars. I don’t know anything about cars, so when people said he was a genus I figured he must be a genius.
Then he talked about rockets. I don’t know anything about rockets, so when people said he was a genius I figured he must be a genius.
Now he talks about software. I happen to know a lot about software and Elon is saying the stupidest sh*t I’ve ever heard anyone say, so when people say he’s a genius I figure I should stay the hell away from his cars and rockets.
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Hybrid WFH had been a part of my life since pre-COVID, and like many others, for me the pandemic normalized it. I think that long-term, hybrid will be the future in many lines of work, simply because humans are social animals. Examples:
Healthcare. Yes, telehealth is a great thing and is here to stay, but physicians and other caregivers still need to be in the same space as their patients. Residents in training still need to be in an operating room and watch in person as a senior physician performs surgery.
Service professions like law, accounting and advertising will still insist on regular in-person encounters. People will want and need to be in the same space–less often, but still regularly. That includes client meetings and collaborative internal work. Any lawyer who’s been in practice more than a few years will tell you how much learning and mentoring occurs while sitting in a room with a senior lawyer and watching her talk right on the phone or interact with a room full of clients. Ad agencies “do creative” by brainstorming in a room together.
This isn’t limited to traditional professions. A friend of ours is a writer for a cable series. He says the in-person writers room is indispensable to what his team does.
Hybrid WFH had been a part of my life since pre-COVID, and like many others, for me the pandemic normalized it. I think that long-term, hybrid will be the future in many lines of work, because humans are social animals. Examples:
Service professions like law, accounting and advertising will still insist on regular in-person encounters. People will want and need to be in the same space–less often, but still regularly. That includes client meetings and collaborative internal work. Any lawyer who’s been in practice more than a few years will tell you how much learning and mentoring occurs while sitting in a room with a senior lawyer and watching her talk right on the phone or interact with a room full of clients. Ad agencies “do creative” by brainstorming in a room together.
This isn’t limited to traditional professions. A friend of ours is a writer for a cable series. He says the in-person writers room is indispensable to what his team does.
Anyway, that’s how I see it. Hybrid will end up being the future.
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I agree - there are some roles that are just better in person. Some roles are better almost all remote with occasional buzz/brainstorming/observation times (but everyone needs some face time for mentoring, training, etc. on certain topics). Hybrid balances pros (and cons) from each - itself having pros/cons.
Telehealth has been great to get an update on medicine doses and how it’s going. It’s been great for a simple diagnosis. But a physical or surgery consults or caring for a real, natural, body - in person. Of course, those roles could be split between individuals.
I appreciate those that are helping make sure in-person days are designed for the right interactions. Have the face to face meetings. Leave time for informal opportunities. Sitting in an office on video calls is a waste of time that could have been done from home.
I feel like the pandemic increased entitlement and people saw how they could work, but aren’t now putting in the same effort to have some of the disciplined approaches Rocker listed above. I also don’t think going back to full in-person, except for certain types of business roles, is really fully feasible either. Even days in office I feel will be more flexible, coming in later, leaving earlier (getting kids to school, from daycare) and starting/finishing work from home (emails, heads down projects).
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I think that one of the other outcomes of the pandemic is that people have started to re-evaluate their priorities. I know I certainly have.
There has always been this expectation from corporate America that people work their a$$es off every single day and give every bit of themselves at all times to their jobs in order to scrape out a living. Feels like lots of people have taken stock and said “I’m no longer willing to sacrifice my physical/mental health in massively stressful, understaffed jobs simply so the corporate overlords can buy another yacht or so the stock prices can tick up a penny this quarter”.
As we watched hundreds of thousands of people die or get very sick, some of the priority pendulum swung back towards having some semblance of work/life balance and not focusing every effort on making $$. That pendulum may end up shifting back as jobs get replaced by AI or consolidated, but I get the sense that people are less willing to work in jobs that treat them like crap just to earn a buck.
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one thing I’ve noticed about working from home is that my driving skills arent as sharp as they once were. I used to drive enough that I was used to lots of traffic and congestion. I’m not nearly as comfortable today as I was pre-pandemic.
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Having lost interest in a 1-hour commute one-way on top of 9-hour shifts (every other Friday off) I was already starting to transition to a hybrid remote office in late 2019. The pandemic lockdowns accelerated that to full time remote.
Many of my on-site days were spent in a windowless office divided into eight cubicles and there was always a nasty bug going around making everyone sick in turn. I’m a loner by nature so there were many days where I didn’t speak a single word all day. It was literally depressing.
The first months WFH were terrible. I have a severe hearing loss so I wasn’t able to understand anyone very well in conference calls. The loneliness was making me bat ■■■■ crazy. My elderly dog died and he was the number one reason I wanted to be home more in the first place. I wasn’t very productive at all. A lot of that was just 2020 though.
Today I am still full time remote. My office has a large window to the street and my young dogs keep me company. My employer made slow but steady improvements in accessibility mostly in live transcription in Teams and Zoom but also instant messaging has become commonplace. I find that for the first time in my career I’m actually able to overcome my disability and blossom as a senior team leader. They also beefed up their VPN and tech support system so we are rarely inconvenienced by technical issues.
My cube is still there and I go dust it off every few months or so. Each time I find the office environment extremely distracting and I get very little real work done. It only reinforces for me that I’m making the right decision. I’m usually there specifically for meetings and I feel very left out because I cannot understand everyone without the transcripts.
The search engine algorithms seem to like to send me anti-remote-worker news like the Forbes article linked above which I coincidentally read before coming here to see this thread. I think they’re biased against it and heavily influenced by CEO opinions, businessmen who certainly do not speak for the average office worker.
I confess to the occasional power nap or chores but I can say with utmost certainty that I’m working much harder than I ever did in the office. I also work in IT so it’s common to have to sign in at all hours of the day and night. I use the flex work arrangements to manage these situations without getting into unpaid overtime.
The meetings though. So many meetings. Double, triple booked with not even a five minute bio break. We’re all trying to come up with strategies to cut that down and get real work done.
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I wear a hawaiian shirt but I have been doing that for years using the “eccentric computer guy” excuse that normally is accompanied by t-shirts and jeans.
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I’ve seen reports some companies got tax-increment financing to build the offices, and some of those agreements for repayment require certain “performance metrics.” If the building is vacant, you obviously aren’t going to meet the metrics; and all the money you thought was going to be reimbursed by the public sector just became an unrecoverable cost, making people go back to an office to work is all about avoiding unplanned losses.
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Some data from Axios that I just got:
1 big thing: Work from home is winning
Data: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Chart: Axios Visuals
With the pandemic long behind us, evidence continues to mount that working from home will be a lasting feature of the American economy, Axios Markets co-author Matt Phillips writes.
- Why it matters: It’s hard to overstate the importance of the fact that more than one-third of American workers aren’t schlepping into the workplace each day.
Newly vacant office space, surging demand for housing and massive shifts in consumption patterns — suppressing spending at the businesses that cater to office districts — are just a few of the big economic changes that can be traced to the WFH revolution.
By the numbers: The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual survey on American time use provides some of the most authoritative readings on the trend.
- Nearly 35% of American workers worked from home on an average day last year, up from just 22% a decade earlier.
- Yes, but: Peak work from home — nearly 40% in 2021 — may be behind us.
Between the lines: The work-from-home trend is far more pronounced among those with college degrees, of whom about 54% work from home on an average day, according to BLS.
Over a third of Americans worked from home on an average day in 2022 (axios.com)
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Economist did some macro-analysis of WFH data, mostly US data but with Europe & Australia mixed in. Their focus was on “what is the future of cities?”
In terms of productivity levels pre-Covid, hybrid mode has been a wash. Interestingly, full WFH has been about a 10% decline in productivity.
(This is macro data / analysis, so exceptions abound, but 10% is a really big number, since productivity improvements tend to be 1-2% a year, at best.)
Economist generally concludes that hybrid work means cities will continue to be big engines of economic output because of the need to have some onsite presence.
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Economist noted the same, likely from the same data.
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I mentioned that the news aggregate algorithms tend to give me headlines against remote work. This rolled in the other day.
The headline in the preview here is cut off but it includes the click-baity
Of course not. It’s about the CEO who said this. Individual workers’ work-life balance and mental health are unimportant.
I’m empathetic to the concerns with on-boarding new employees and have been supporting in-person training for the few we’ve had. If I switch jobs, I fully expect to have to commute again until I can establish a remote work presence.
My manager lives and works two time zones away and she is motivated to leverage the “New Normal”. Lots of virtual team events like Star Wars Day competitions. She schedules annual on-site visits. As I’m in a senior role, she asked me to mentor our junior employees and I see the point in this even if it means I get less of my own work done and I am lacking the wisdom and charm to maintain such relationships.
Finally, the article talks about how remote work siloing just doesn’t help the lesser employees. That’s perhaps true but it also isolates the toxic sentiments that come up when people are forced to carry those lesser employees. Maybe the problem isn’t remote work, it’s your choice of employees.
I have leveled plenty of criticism toward the “Great Resignation” that occurred among the younger generation, including my step kids. One tenet I’m warming up to though is the attitude that we are not wage slaves. We just contract with a company to provide X number of hours of our lives and no more. Easier said than done for salaried workers but I do try to limit myself to 80 hours per pay period and have mostly been successful.
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