American Work-From-Home Rates Drop To Lowest Since the Pandemic (bnnbloomberg.ca) 147
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Fewer than 26% of US households still have someone working remotely at least one day a week, a sharp decline from the early-2021 peak of 37%, according to the two latest Census Bureau Household Pulse Surveys. Only seven states plus Washington, DC, have a remote-work rate above 33%, the data shows, down from 31 states and DC mid-pandemic. [...] At the state level, the data shows all 50 have seen work-from-home rates drop from their pandemic highs. But the unevenness in their rates of decline suggests the trend doesn't have one cohesive explanation, and is instead the result of a hodgepodge of migration, socio-economic, gender and race factors, and possibly even politics -- Democratic states tend to have higher remote-work rates than Republican ones. Illustrating the complexity: States whose remote-work rates have fallen by as much as half to around post-pandemic lows include Mississippi and Louisiana, which weren't able to widely embrace remote work due to a reliance on in-person industries like manufacturing and oil and gas, but also more white-collar states that did welcome it, like California and Connecticut.
The latest Census data also underlines that employees' demand for remote jobs is outpacing the number of companies offering them. In 157 of the largest metro areas in the US, more than half of job applications were for fully remote or hybrid roles in August, according to LinkedIn data generated for Bloomberg, but postings for those jobs have been falling since early 2022, data from Indeed Inc. shows. In Colorado -- widely seen as a work-from-home haven and one of the few states that has maintained a rate above one third -- 76% of job applications in Colorado Springs were for fully remote or hybrid roles in August, the LinkedIn data showed.
Some areas are capitalizing on that scarcity. Alabama, with a work-from-home rate of just 15% according to the Pulse data, offers $10,000 to remote workers who move to the state's northwest Shoals area. The program has attracted about the same number of applications so far this year as in all of 2021 and 2022 combined, about 3,400. All 50 states pale in comparison to their largest cities' metro areas. In Washington, DC, where government bureaucrats are loath to go back to their offices, the remote-work rate is above 50%, the data shows. Similarly, Seattle, Boston and San Francisco all had rates near or above 40%. Average office attendance across ten big US cities remains about 50% of pre-pandemic levels, according to security firm Kastle Systems International LLC, no higher than where it was early in 2023.
The latest Census data also underlines that employees' demand for remote jobs is outpacing the number of companies offering them. In 157 of the largest metro areas in the US, more than half of job applications were for fully remote or hybrid roles in August, according to LinkedIn data generated for Bloomberg, but postings for those jobs have been falling since early 2022, data from Indeed Inc. shows. In Colorado -- widely seen as a work-from-home haven and one of the few states that has maintained a rate above one third -- 76% of job applications in Colorado Springs were for fully remote or hybrid roles in August, the LinkedIn data showed.
Some areas are capitalizing on that scarcity. Alabama, with a work-from-home rate of just 15% according to the Pulse data, offers $10,000 to remote workers who move to the state's northwest Shoals area. The program has attracted about the same number of applications so far this year as in all of 2021 and 2022 combined, about 3,400. All 50 states pale in comparison to their largest cities' metro areas. In Washington, DC, where government bureaucrats are loath to go back to their offices, the remote-work rate is above 50%, the data shows. Similarly, Seattle, Boston and San Francisco all had rates near or above 40%. Average office attendance across ten big US cities remains about 50% of pre-pandemic levels, according to security firm Kastle Systems International LLC, no higher than where it was early in 2023.
Even if the abattoir offered to let you WFH... (Score:5, Funny)
Your spouse would probably object rather strongly.
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Then they can go work at the office.
Pointy headed bosses (Score:5, Interesting)
Goes without saying those management types are still clinging desperately to the old ways, and in many cases succeeding, but on the bright side all employees now still have another significant metric to judge good employers from the rest, and this much change at least is permanent.
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I mourn mostly the end of the pandemic.
I still hope for another run so that RTO bullshit dies a fiery death sooner rather than later.
Re: Pointy headed bosses (Score:3)
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It's time we give the conspiracy nutters more leeway, I know we can pump this back to a global emergency if we only get more people to ignore safety measures and make them anti-vaxers.
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This means if we convince more people to ignore pandemic prevention recommendations and get them to deliberately flaunt how little they give a shit about it, we might finally get our pandemic back and kill any RTO talk.
Its not that simple (Score:2)
Some people are disciplined, can manage themselves, deliver the goods and so work from home fine. Some are not and can't and do need to be managed to get any work out of them.
Also - and I speak from experience when I started a new job during covid - getting up to speed remotely when a lot of the required knowledge is in the heads of other employees not written down can be a VERY steep learning curve.
I can't speak for others but personally I learnt 10x as much when sitting next to someone who could go throug
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Some are not and can't and do need to be managed to get any work out of them.
You need to get rid of these people, whether they're working in the office or remote. I've found that when I need to get my head around something, a video call with the right people screen sharing is just as good as an in-person catch-up. The key, though, is to let them know ahead of time what you want to learn, so they have a chance to prepare themselves.
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Remote with a conference call you can.
Like when he has an issue, you think "is it related to this?"
And you can check it on your own pc without disturbing the focus on what you both are looking at.
Besides the point that in a personal conference call you don't have to be quiet, while in an open office you must.
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I'm the lead dev and the one I'm helping is generally a junior or medior.
They only come ask me for help if they can't find it themself with some pointers.
And no I don't work in a monastery.
But here in The Netherlands we have something called open office spaces.
Read: 10+ desks in one room with (almost) no sound proofing,
It is the horror for work that needs concentration. Cubicles would actually be a step up over this.
There is only one
Re:Its not that simple (Score:4, Insightful)
It is not that I can't work with noise around me, it just reduces my performance (around 40%) and it is tiring.
As a contractor (rate of 80~90 per hour!!) I get hired to port legacy code to modern stuff.
Of course I can put on noise-canceling headphones, but what is the point of coming to the office then?
Legacy code that does not confirm to code standards, often is spaghetti-code and of course no documentation.
Every time I get interrupted I loose my mental image what the code is doing (or at least supposed to do) and how I'm gonna solve that problem.
https://contextkeeper.io/blog/the-real-cost-of-an-interruption-and-context-switching/
It totally depends on what you do for your job. But for the highly technical things? Yeah silence is needed.
Re: Its not that simple (Score:2)
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No, it's true....
I've worked larger govt contracts before, for an entity that is not just US but worldwide....so, distributed workforce all over. Most of us never
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Maybe for some projects , not all. Depends on the level of collaboration.
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I would posit that most in-person "collaboration" levels are overrated....and are just as easily accomplished online, especially since the online meeting tools have evolved so greatly.
We simply don't need to be in the same meatspace as each other in order to work together....proximity no longer adds anything pectinate to the equation.
Re: Its not that simple (Score:2)
Meatspace, yeah ok, I get it, you're another aspie who cant handle face to face interaction. Fine , stay in your basement.
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over a flakey Teams call with screen sharing
Why are you still using flakey Teams? Teams has some questionable design choices, but it has been working solidly for me for at least a couple of years. It was pretty rough when it was first rolled out, but in terms of being able to instantly transition from text chat to voice call (or video, but we hardly ever use video) and screen sharing they got all the kinks worked out a couple years ago and it works perfectly.
I find it much easier to work with someone when I can see their screen either on half of my b
Why try to make sense of it? (Score:2)
But the unevenness in their rates of decline suggests the trend doesn't have one cohesive explanation, and is instead the result of a hodgepodge of migration, socio-economic, gender and race factors, and possibly even politics -- Democratic states tend to have higher remote-work rates than Republican ones.
Why does it have to be tied to anything in particular? Why can't it just be a random coincidence, depending on whoever is in charge's requirements to return to work? What's this need to derive equations from various facts? Why can't a cigar just be a cigar?
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Because there MUST be a reason to support whatever narrative I try to push!
Not to sound heartless... (Score:2, Troll)
I'm hoping for another pandemic.
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I am heartless.
It cannot come fast enough. One or two more pandemics and that RTO bullshit is dead and gone.
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Re: More like Work-On-Home (Score:5, Insightful)
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less reliance on massive buildings that bring with it their own ecological and economical impacts
While every other thing you list is absolutely on point, this one stood out, and not in a good way. Distributing work to home away from massive buildings is not ecologically or economically sound. It is easier, cheaper, and less carbon intensive to heat and provide lighting for groups of people rather than individuals. The vast majority of homes provide worse working ergonomics putting people at higher risk of negative health effects.
I am a major WFH advocate, but this one point is not something I preach as
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Some of that is debatable. You could support either side with an analysis, depending on how your office building was built and heated compared to how the homes of the workers were built and heated. If you've got middle-income people commuting from a newly-built development to an old office block, there's possibly less CO2 emitted by keeping them home.
Similarly, I know a lot of technical people who have build themselves a home office to a considerably higher ergonomic standard than they would have been able
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HEAT???
Who cares about that...it's the fucking Air Conditioner that's the concern for us in this part of the US....
Mine actually clicked off about a week a go, first time since about early April I think.....
Heat...sheesh....
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Ok, this is a new one on me.
Can you please expand on this? How is WFH promoting negative health effects???
Let's see, with WFH, I get to sleep in later, so, more sleep.
I get to eat better as that I can cook at home, healthy meals, which is easier than carrying prepped meals to office (or eating out).
I have much less stress, not having to deal with idiots at the office, or in traffic to wo
Re: More like Work-On-Home (Score:4, Interesting)
I developed tendonitis from working at home and using my home keyboard / mouse (which are of the gaming type). My home PC chair also was not terribly ergonomic (but looked cool enough). This was confirmed by my orthopaedic doctor and my own reflection of home working practices. In comparison, my work equipment was extremely ergonomic: expensive keyboard / mice for desktops, standard cube height desks, and Herman Miller Aeron chairs to boot.
Yes, it is my own fault, and it was a great learning opportunity: I got better equipment at home, a better chair (not going to spring 1k for the Aeron chair though), and saw an Occupational Therapist for learning how to properly make my "work" environment more healthy overall, regardless of if I'm at home or in the physical office. Things like posture, stretching, timed breaks, etc., have really made a difference.
Perhaps I'm the exception, but if anyone else out there has experienced this, look into a good OT course on how to properly work on a computer. It was like 2 one hour classes and was covered under health insurance. I was very skeptical at first but became a believer.
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I would posit you are an outlier here....
I have never been in an
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I would posit there is no evidence of who is the outlier here, both are just anecdotes about personal experience.
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What? When I am not home I turn off the heating, air conditioning. Maybe you just have too much money or live in an apartment, or in a place so cold that the pipes freeze if the heating is off, but in that case you could still turn the thermostat down.
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Offices are not necessarily much more efficient.
- For one, you are assuming homes are not heated (a lot of places, homes are heated even when there is no one home to avoid pipes freezing)
- Homes have an existing footprint, people work within that home... buildings and office are extra infrastructure
- Offices have a lot of space that is unused a lot of the time. when workers are in meeting rooms, they are not using their desk and vice versa. when the office buildings are not in use, they still need to be hea
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Agree with most of what you say apart from assuming "zero waste" it just has to be more efficient overall.
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>ecological and economical impacts
If people are pushing into previously undeveloped areas (e.g. wilderness) with their roads and utilities trailing them then that is far from a positive for ecological impacts.
>less wear and tear on public infrastructure
It is there to be used, you just need to maintain it. It isn't meant to be put on a shelf and admired. For instance, fewer people using public transportation because they are more scattered now isn't a good thing.
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I guess it is really down to how much of a commute the average employee has in a place. For us the average round-trip is around two hours, so everybody seems to want to do everything they can to limit how much commuting time they need in a week. It would be nice to get down to two days in the office a week, but it looks like we are stuck with 3 for now. A few people come in 5 days a week for various reasons... and a few are 100% remote.
Re: More like Work-On-Home (Score:2)
Re:More like Work-On-Home (Score:5, Insightful)
Now America is getting back to work instead of pretending to work. This will trigger a lot of people but I have seen productivity at my Fortune 100 employer drop to an all time low with this "work" from home stuff.
That means you are a bad people manager, plain and simple.
My team working remotely accomplished all productivity targets and objectives, with more care and speed compared to working in office because the team didn't waste 2 exhausting hours everyday on commute. Except for the bootlickers, there is no reason to force anyone to go to the office.
It boils down to why your company hire people, to lick the boots of C-suites, or is there real work to be done.
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Now America is getting back to work instead of pretending to work. This will trigger a lot of people but I have seen productivity at my Fortune 100 employer drop to an all time low with this "work" from home stuff.
That means you are a bad people manager, plain and simple.
My team working remotely accomplished all productivity targets and objectives, with more care and speed compared to working in office because the team didn't waste 2 exhausting hours everyday on commute. Except for the bootlickers, there is no reason to force anyone to go to the office.
It boils down to why your company hire people, to lick the boots of C-suites, or is there real work to be done.
This, it's much harder to pressure people to work extra hours for free when you cant brow beat them in person, or to criticise them in order to lower their self esteem enough that they won't question being abused.
I'd like to see a comparison between the US and other developed Western economies as in the US it's a choice of "do what we tell you" or "and no health care for you". This is for states with worker protections, as little as they are. I'm not even starting on "at will employment" states.
Re:More like Work-On-Home (Score:5, Insightful)
but I have seen productivity at my Fortune 100 employer drop to an all time low with this "work" from home stuff
Productivity is measured in dollars per hour worked. Would be really interesting to hear which Fortune 100 company that was because they nearly all did phenominally well during pandemic.
If you mean some other metric, what metric was down for you?
I have seen a lot of managers during pandemic that are effectively bad managers that don't measure anything that didn't see people physically doing some work and thought it didn't get done. Not saying it's you but is it possible that you are just needing to look into the way you measure if your own observations deviate so much from what professionals measure?
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What is your metric for a company "doing well"? Grabbing a piece of the 6 trillion dollars pumped into the US economy or the trillions more Europe and others pumped in is not a per worker hour productivity metric. That was fake cash which triggered inflation. The Dowcand other indexes have barely moved in the last few years.
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What is your metric for a company "doing well"?
Profit. Honestly I get what you are saying but I feel like you won't find other metrics that work across the board (although I'm happy to be surprized).
About productivity, as we are in tech it's notoriously hard to measure developer productivity. However on things we have like 'storypoints per time' and such there has been no evidence of productivity going down. There has been a lot of demand from companies for evidence that WFH does not work, but even the likes of Gartner (who are generally slanted but sti
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IMO, wfh is right for some people and places and not for others. Some will be more productive, some less but it is case by case or team by team or company by company varying based on individual drive, company culture, the product or service and so on. Technology has helped too. When I started managing we didn't have all the communications tools we have today so wfh wasn't an option but these days with the right conditions, sure, why not?
It is irksome to see people making blanket statements that "wfh is a
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> but I have seen productivity at my Fortune 100 employer drop to an all time low with this "work" from home stuff.
Correlation does not imply causation, and certainly anecdotal evidence is not a good indicator of anything. If anything you can prove any anecdotal story when you have enough people in the company.
> Work isn't fun- it's work.
Normally this is a mantra of a bad boss/manager.
Even if it is true, what about the time outside work?
Am I supposed to spend hours of my personal life, away from my fa
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Work isn't fun?
I pity you. I really do.
Re: More like Work-On-Home (Score:3)
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I only know that I wouldn't.
At least not for long. Life's too short to put up with assholes that make your workday miserable.
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NO work is fun....it wouldn't be work if it was fun.
I work purely to earn money to fund my fun.
If I won the lottery tomorrow, I'd leave skid marks out the door and never work again.
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I already have more money than I can sensibly spend in a lifetime. I work because I enjoy it.
My work is in IT security, and I work for a large financial group with very interesting and very impossible machines that are very impossible to put my grubby little fingers on (legally) if I wasn't working there. I get to play with these machines and if I break them, I don't get punished but praised. And for some weird reason they also dump a ton of money on me for doing it.
What's not to like?
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I think work is fun. I know that I am in the minority but I actually look forward to Monday mornings so that I can get into the office.
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Who'd want to see that?
Or, as I usually put it, whenever someone tries to extort money from me because they claim they filmed me jacking off and now threaten to send it to all my relatives and friends, my usual question is why they send that extortion note to me. They should send that to my family and friends, they're the ones they're threatening with seeing something that makes them want to invent some brain scrubbing device so they could un-see it.
Re:More like Work-On-Home (Score:4, Insightful)
...I have seen productivity at my Fortune 100 employer drop to an all time low....
It sounds like working for your company just sucks if what you're saying is true. Here's a little mental exercise. You enter the building where your office desk sits, and:
1) All the servers you work with are in the next state over.
2) All your files are stored on said servers.
3) All your coworkers communicate through email, phone, or instant messaging because they are distributed through multiple buildings.
4) All presentations are done through, and all issues resolved through, collaboration software (Zoom, Teams, Jabber) anyway because it's more efficient than every.
Is it:
A) More effective for everyone to travel to the same location, which might not even be in the same city, for the meeting, which has to be scheduled at LEAST a few days in advance, and which will be holding up people's work until the issue is resolved?
B) More effective to schedule that same meeting for a couple hours later in the same day using remote collaboration software?
It is obviously B. Following that, is it more efficient to:
1) Require everyone to drive to their local office to load up the remote collaboration software?
2) Fire up that same remote collaboration software from home?
I'm choosing 2 as the more logical answer because I watch it happen every single working day.
It's fundamentally stupid to have people drive to an office to do the exact same remote work as they would do from home. Long gone (for most places) is the situation where people need to travel to a common office to access working resources, because all of those working resources are now located in locations far removed from that common office.
I would wager that most productivity drops being witnessed are more closely related to The Great Resignation than to any other factor. Extraverts like to blame work from home because the realization that office work is more efficient without constant human interaction is just too much to bear.
My experience has shown that productivity rose significantly during the pandemic, when we started working from home. We all got much more done because we were left alone.
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Re: More like Work-On-Home (Score:2)
Re:More like Work-On-Home (Score:5, Insightful)
I've absolutely noticed the same thing. I've led four software development teams on four different endeavors since WFH started under COVID. Productivity during this whole period across all four teams was tangibly, measurably lower than in the 25 years that came before.
I'm pretty sure you'll find that it isn't just WFH productivity that's tangibly lower. Productivity from workers in the office is also tangibly lower, from what I've seen. The pandemic burned people out. Badly. And what we're seeing is an industry-wide struggle to get people to actually care about what they're doing again.
More to the point, what we experienced was that at least initially, working from home significantly *boosted* overall productivity, though productivity then declined over time because of burnout. Then, at some point, some folks started returning to the office, and things leveled off, up until management got the bright idea to force everyone into the office. That's when productivity fell off a cliff and never recovered. In fact, it seems to have declined further since then, presumably because of burnout plus meeting overload.
In my experience WFH is a drag on everything. And that fine. I have no problem with somebody suggesting that less productivity is a reasonable tradeoff for improved conditions for the workers. That's an honest argument.
In my experience, it's all over the map. Some individuals are much more effective when working remotely. Some are much more effective when working from an office. Some are in between. And the same is true at the team level as well.
For example, if your team is already distributed around the world and the people you're working with are in different states, there's absolutely *zero* efficiency benefit from doing work in an office unless you are too distracted by whatever else is going on at home (e.g. kids that are home from school during the pandemic). And there are potential efficiency gains, because people tend to be more cautious about scheduling meetings if they know you're working from home, so there are fewer B.S. meetings, and most workers tend to work at least slightly longer hours if they aren't having to commute (though it is critical to have managers who constantly stress the importance of maintaining a good work-life balance, because "slightly longer hours" can all too easily become "much longer hours", which can cause workers to burn out, and then productivity takes a nosedive).
On the flip side, if your team is working on something where close in-person collaboration is happening regularly, particularly where senior employees are substantively mentoring junior employees at a nontrivial level, then being in the office *can* be a huge efficiency win (but that isn't necessarily so, and that sort of thing can be done just as efficiently when remote, but it requires a lot of planning and leadership, and generally requires folks to at least be in roughly the same time zone, give or take).
The thing is, in my entire career, I think I've spent all of maybe ten or twelve weeks in that second situation, but I'm pretty sure that every manager I've ever had truly believed that we were in that situation all the time, because they perceived a couple of orders of magnitude more value from in-person interaction and meetings than we did.
But don't snow me about how it's playing out. If your first impulse is to blame management, then my counter is that you shouldn't have to be "led" into productivity.
That's not snowing you. That's just being honest. If workers aren't productive, it is always the management's fault, because it is quite literally the job of managers to manage — to find ways to organize their teams that build on each person's strengths, whether those teammates are working from home or from an office. The fact that a lot of managers don't know how to do that isn't the fault of the workers, and blaming them or punishing them for the m
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Uh, you expect line level managers, the ones with least management experience to figure out how to inspire their teams to new heights of productivity over a zoom call?
That's an unfair and unreachable standard under the best of circumstances but blaming young line managers for being uninspiring is not helpful to anyone.
The real story is the pandemic was hard on everyone and managing a remote team across multiple time zones is harder for both the manager and anyone on the team who needs to collaborate with ot
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Honestly, work from home only works if you give people reasonable deadlines and the ability to do work on their own. But, if you're a micro-managing asshole that wants to organise 50 meetings a week, all while failing to grasp basic digital communication tools, then yeah you're going to see a decline in productivity and communication from your point of view, or you'll become even more unbearable and everyone will run away or just stop caring. That's what's real
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Or, the team isn't fit as "remote work" material if they need more than your average line manager to keep getting things done when not at the office?
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Almost no manager is "management material" on the day the first land the position. Almost every leader's first year is dogshit. Some select few might naturally fit into the role, but for anybody with a "normal" progression, it's a slog.
Military ideas (Score:2)
Newly minted officers have jack shit understanding of how things work in real units. Basically, they dropped from college into a real world situation. Their senior NCOs are there to make sure they are receiving the wisdom necessary to one day understand wtf they are doing.
The lack of humility amongst some - many - managers is astonishing. Their inability to put such ideas into practice is unsurprising. And yes, this kind of bad management is epidemic. Sure, they get removed from the system eventually,
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Scheduling 50 meetings has absolutely nothing to do with wfh vs office.
Everyone hates meetings. I hate meetings. When I was a senior exec I *really* hated meetings and I promise you I had a LOT more meeting invites every week than you've ever seen in a month scheduled by assholes right over my scheduled and blocked lunch hour, other meetings or even triple scheduling over other meetings, to say nothing of the morons scheduling at 5am or 10pm. Those meetings had absolutely nothing to do with wfh vs office
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And yes, I also got to "enjoy" countless of those management courses where they suggest meetings for everything, and the only reason any team I've been in charge of is happy is becaus
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Of course I said no. Even if I was fucking insane and wanted to attend it would not have been possible given the double and triple booking.
When I didn't want to go to a meeting, which was 90% of the time I'd just say I was double booked, even if I wasn't and tell them to send a summary and ask me any questions I was needed for after. Which almost never happened.
I don't know if it's true but I read a story that Steve Jobs would walk into random meetings, ask each of the 20 people why they're there and kick
Re: More like Work-On-Home (Score:2)
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You can train a monkey to be a manager but that won't make them a good manager. I've been through some of the most serious hard core how to be a manager courses and unfortunately they not only sucked but they were clearly not designed by people who ever managed anything more than a banana. Some of the stuff we were told or even required to do/say as managers was so fucking stupid. I recall one item about offers to new employees and a related discussion on raises and promotions in one of the classes. Sev
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The hiring one was a theoretical about a person who just got a raise and promotion at their previous job a month earlier and is now applying to the next level up from there at our company which involve another raise on top of what they just got at their current role and basically skipping an entire critical part of the career path getting a double promotion from junior to senior in 6 weeks. The question was how much do you offer? The answer most of us gave was, "nothing, the person isn't ready for that position yet". The official answer was "previous salary plus X%". Totally wrong and totally stupid but that was management class.
That's not wrong and stupid. That's having a corporate policy of trying to keep good employees. Now if it said to give them the higher job title *and* a salary bump, then that would be stupid, but if it just said to match the competing salary up to some percentage above their current salary, that's a good general policy to have around, provided that it is A. at the manager's discretion (e.g. if they really would rather not keep that employee, they can not make the offer) and B. subject to being able to es
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I was unclear.
This theoretical was a potential new hire. (PNH)
PNH was junior level until last month at their previous company where they are still employed.
Last month, PNH got raise and promotion at old company to mid level.
PNH applied for senior level at our company yesterday which comes with new salary band above PNH salary at old company because we'd be hiring as a senior person.
PNH is at the bottom end of mid level and wants us to hire them as senior level. They are not senior.
PNH is an unknown quantit
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Uh, you expect line level managers, the ones with least management experience to figure out how to inspire their teams to new heights of productivity over a zoom call?
No, I expect every level of management to do its job. The upper management has to prioritize hiring the right teams and putting in the right infrastructure to make remote work easy. The IT teams have to know what they're doing and work with the line-level managers to find the right solutions to the problems that they have. The line-level managers have to learn to use the tools at their disposal to manage effectively, including things like figuring out how often to schedule 1-on-1 meetings for a given emp
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I've absolutely noticed the same thing. I've led four software development teams on four different endeavors since WFH started under COVID. Productivity during this whole period across all four teams was tangibly, measurably lower than in the 25 years that came before.
I'm pretty sure you'll find that it isn't just WFH productivity that's tangibly lower. Productivity from workers in the office is also tangibly lower, from what I've seen. The pandemic burned people out. Badly. And what we're seeing is an industry-wide struggle to get people to actually care about what they're doing again.
I think this is largely a result of how the US treats it's workforce, particularly it's educated and skilled workers. It's something that would be happening regardless of the pandemic.
If workers are treated as replicable cogs, cost centres, hinderances to profit, you'll find managers continually trying to abuse them, punishing those who don't work extra hours for free (or not enough extra hours), criticising work or a desire for a home life to lower self esteem, it's only a matter of time until people ge
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"If workers aren't productive, it is always the management's fault, because it is quite literally the job of managers to manage."
You're right if you mean that it's management's fault for not firing them. I agree.
There's productivity that suffers due to unclear goals, inefficient organization, misaligned purpose - that's the fault of management.
If the productivity issues are because of absenteeism, distraction, and just a general tendency towards doing nothing if not being micromanaged - that's not manageme
Re:More like Work-On-Home (Score:4, Insightful)
But don't snow me about how it's playing out. If your first impulse is to blame management, then my counter is that you shouldn't have to be "led" into productivity. Kindly fuck off somewhere else please.
Perhaps you are unsure as to what the word leadership means; it doesn't mean I, as the employee, figure out what you need as the manager or owner. Literally up to you to LEAD. You can cry "don't blame management" all you want, but management are the ones in charge. If I am slacking, and you keep me around for no reason other than to defray from your obvious lack of input, congrats on proving what everyone is telling you about micro-management being the problem.
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So your answer to "management can't get me to work as hard when I'm distracted at home" is "fire me"?
Maybe take some responsibility as an adult?
It sounds like you are crying out for micromanagement if you are less productive when someone isn't there riding your back every day because that's the only real difference between office and wfh; the employee needs to be more self motivating and responsible.
I've seen remote groups that have their cameras live during their entire scheduled work period. Is that what
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Maybe take some responsibility as an adult?
As the saying goes, "We don't do that here [techuniverses.com]." It's easier to blame someone else than admit you're incompetent or lazy. Or both.
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It's weird to me seeing that mindset from an adult. Blaming management for not inspiring him. Just wow, I dunno where that idea even comes from. Management isn't about inspiring anyone. That's just bullshit HR talk. Mostly management is there to do paper work, collect statistics for upper management, report to HR when someone isn't working and repeat the top down orders from upper management. As if every line manager is General Patton or MacArthur leading the fight against Hitler or something. Most o
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No, I think you're confused about "leadership". Leadership is required to make a group great. "Management" is required to keep shitty people in line.
You don't "lead" slackers to greatness. That's not how it works.
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Get better cooperation software.
If anything, WFH increases productivity because now you can continue working on your project while the all-hands meetings happen that used to keep you from doing anything sensible (aside of mentally undressing the intern) while the narcissist droned on about how awesome the company in general and he in particular is.
Now you have the narcissist drone, you can work on your project, you have the narcissist's cost center to put the time on and your project is in time and on budge
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I have no problem with somebody suggesting that less productivity is a reasonable tradeoff for improved conditions for the workers. That's an honest argument.
No, an honest argument would be to recognise that there is no universal link in productivity to working either from home or in an office. Some people work better in WFH vs office. Some teams work better in WFH vs office. Some specific tasks are more productively handled WFH vs office.
Honesty is recognising there is no single argument around productivity unless it applies to a specific individual, in a specific working environment doing a specific task.
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I don't necessarily disagree with you. Some people work better from home. I contend that "most" do not, and it's borne out in my experience with the aggregate output of teams - not individuals.
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Re:Work from Home Stuff (Score:5, Insightful)
Not all boomers are like that. I'm one, and I loathe going to the office.
And I lead a team of 6, who are all (except one, who's going away soon) excellent performers working from home. As a matter of fact, they were (and are) willing to go beyond expectations to maintain this status quo (WFH).
Our employer started asking people to come to the office 3 days out of 5. I told my country manager my team would not observe that requirement, and I presented plenty business justifications for that. For example, I will not ask my people to wake up at 5:30 AM at the latest, so that they would be able to arrive in the office at 6:30 AM, because their shift starts at 7:00 AM. Conversely, those in the afternoon shift shouldn't be forced to arrive home at 10:00 PM, just because management needs to justify money spent on renting some big-arse business building. These people are highly skilled and there's a shortage of that locally. They would have no problem finding work elsewhere, and our employer would risk losing millions of dollars a year from this project alone, all because they wanted people to clock in for a stupid reason.
Luckily, the country manager fully agreed and our team is officially exempted.
If you want to continue WFH as an employee, you need to present data supporting you.
1. Have good business reasons;
2. Show a list of similar openings from other companies allowing WFH, which match your skillset;
3. Actually be a skilled employee who clearly brings value to the company;
etc.
And if your employer is pig-headed enough to insist, search for another job.
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1. Have good business reasons;
I see this as a wrong approach. The business reason should only come into it if there is a clash between the desire to WFH vs the office. For example I see no good business reason for me to WFH. The business doesn't care. I see no good business reason for me to work in the office. The business (for my role) doesn't care. There's no business reason one way or the other.
However I have very VERY strong personal reasons for not wanting to get in a car and drive 70km every day in peak hour traffic with fuel at E
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Yeah with the fuel prices over here I don't want to drive in traffic myself if I still had an ICE car.
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It was a generic statement, not "the business reason, as it applies to thegarbz".
As you said, the business doesn't care if you have to drive 70 km every day in peak hour traffic. Your problem, not theirs.
But the business cares if that commuting affects their bottom line. For example: "I will have to drive 2h each day, during which the client will be offered no support".
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Still beats suffering in open floor hell.
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I live exactly 5 walking minutes from the office.
You will still rather see me quit and find something new than returning there for 5 days a week.
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I live exactly 5 walking minutes from the office.
You will still rather see me quit and find something new than returning there for 5 days a week.
Sounds like you live/work a large cave. But is it warm in the winter and cool in the summer? /sarcasm
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It's temperate enough to ensure my existence there is sufficiently more bearable than in any open floor hellhole.
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This article is more of a propagadna piece than reality. There's an awful lot of malicious compliance, badge sharing, swipe-and-walk, and attrition remains very high in spite of a lousy tech job market. We're losing people to direct competitors who allow full-time remote regularly, to the point that there's a big rift between management (who does not care at all) and HR (who is tasked with enforcing CEO policy). Many managers have a don't-ask don't-tell policy on in-office attendance: as long as they aren't