Several large corporations, most recently Amazon, have ordered their employees to return to work or be fired. They're actually whining about it. Folks, it was started for Covid. Covid is over. Get up off your asses and return to work!

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Originally posted by Fredward:
Several large corporations, most recently Amazon, have ordered their employees to return to work or be fired. They're actually whining about it. Folks, it was started for Covid. Covid is over. Get up off your asses and return to work!

Getting rid of the whiners would probably improve the caliber of a company’s workforce immensely, so the employer should take advantage of the fact that employees you really don’t want are self-identifying and proceed accordingly!

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Originally posted by Fredward:
Get up off your asses and return to work!

Amen.

My former employer set a bunch of people to work-from-home duty during that mess. I think what irked me the most about it was that the WFH people would call in with things like, "hey, will you go over to Receiving and see if my stuff came in?"

Heck, no! I've got my own job to do, and probably more, now that you jokers are sitting at home, playing with your dogs or kids, and raiding the fridge every 20 minutes. Want to know if your stuff is here? Show the heck up!!.

I'm of two minds about the hybrid/wfh/remote work phenomenon, and I'll toss it out here for discussion. First - I completely understand the bosses wanting people physically present in the office for lots of valid reasons. I'm a "go to work" person, and I prefer this. Perhaps it's a generational thing? It's easy to jump on the "lazy millennials" & "lazy gen z" bandwagon because in many cases it's entirely warranted. But not in all cases. And like it or not they do make some good points. Is the end goal productivity or presentee-ism? A lot of jobs in most corporate settings: IT, accounts payable, buying/supply chain, etc. do NOT require the physical presence of the individual doing the job. Why not offer more flexibility in these cases? Some jobs, sure, you gotta be there. But for those that don't need it I don't understand why the push for just being physically present. Maybe someone can explain that to me, seriously curious.

One of the challenges for the legit WFH roles as described above is enforceable work metrics. Where someone has a defined bucket of work that they are going to do today, tomorrow or tonight this works on its own. Without that to avoid massive imbalances you need some sort of metric, that is tied to something that matters, like pay, time off, etc.

Beyond that, you have firms asking for an honest days work from their folks, followed by silly and ineffectual tools to manage that. Best example ever is the workstation monitors that have been around for at least 10 years and improved to sense more than just being logged in.

Of course offsetting that you have tools like those a couple of my kids' friends have deployed that "jiggle" the mouse or simulate keyboard activity to create the illusion of being present while way longer than prescribed periods (whatever the hell that is). Those tools can be blocked or detected by competent IT departments, but it looks like an arms race in this space.

Then again, sitting in an office isn't a guaranty of any meaningful work either! Look at me typing away on Sigforum!

{back to real work now, I promise!!}

We had telecommuters prior to C19. So WFH isn’t something new. It was usually reserved for senior titled people. IE, ballers. Management needs these employees more than these employees need this job, so a perk is being able to live where you want, not have to drive into an office, avoiding dry cleaning and fuel bills, and potential wrecks on the commute in. And it may be provided to such an employee, whether senior titled, management, whatever, in lieu of a much higher salary, that perhaps the company’s HR group, can’t match.

I’m all for it but I also hold a senior title and have a proven track record and tenure at what I do. I got qualified for remote work, but we did an M&A which froze remote work conversions for our employees. As soon as this is lifted I will be converted. At that point I can move to my rural land and kiss the city and office goodbye.

I do agree, that some little shit fresh out of college, or NOT tenured at their company/position, suck it up and go in. Some of us, well someone very high up in my company told me “I do not care where you work from. You do such skilled and excellent work, as soon as the company allows I will personally get you converted so you can move to your land.”
During the pandemic I had many requests from my management, including the CEO’s office and every time I answered the phone on the 2nd ring. Just enough time for me to pull the headset off the charger and put it on my head and click “accept.” We were all remote work during the pandemic at my place of employment and they got the exact same work/effort that they did when I was in office. Yeah I had people on my team and dept who didn’t do shit and freeloaded the entire time, taking advantage of the situation. I did the opposite and my management knows.

So I’m all for wfh, but there are caveats. Blanket handing it, nope. But if it’s a perk that’s earned and your work has a track record, then I’m all for it. For what I do, and where, we have an instant messaging client, soft phone, email, cell phone. If I was in a cubicle, it would literally take an employee longer to get up out of their cubicle, walk to mine, which may or may not include using an elevator to get to a different floor. We got the cameras on our laptops so it could be a conference call request, on the fly, with video enabled, and every day I work I can do that within 60 seconds. I keep the dress shirt in my office hanging.

No one wants to employ, work with, or even be around whiners.

Companies have a right to designate the workplace and change it based on what is best for the company and its stockholders. Place of employment is included in employee contracts.

If you are going to whine, don't sign.

My wife worked HR or HR related most of her working life.

At the end of her carrier and Covid her area she serviced was the mis-south US and just before Covid she was required to drive an hr and a half one way to get to work to handle HR work remotely. Then after her normal work day and drive home she would still work another 4-5hrs at home.
All Covid did was eliminate the three hrs a day of driving and the 1-2 hrs of getting presentable to go to work. She just worked more hrs on HR stuff.
When she became eligible for SS benefits she got the hell out of dodge and had already decided that she was never going back to an office before she became eligible for SS.

Some jobs can and should be done remotely if the people can and will do the work remotely IMO.

Perhaps they should take up caseiculture as well.

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Originally posted by trapper189:

Perhaps they should take up caseiculture as well.

Goes well with the whine.

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caseiculture

My vocabulary enhancement is complete for the week.

Well, I love being able to work from home. I’m just as productive, if not more, and I save all the time spent driving in, wear and tear on my vehicle.
But I’ve always been the one who got to work at least 45 min early, work thru breaks to get projects done. So being home is great. And, my job is all reports. No physical contacts, it’s all done via emails or TEAMS calls, chats.
Heck all my bosses are out of state too. I will never go back to an office again after being remote. I’m extremely grateful I’ve been able to work from home since late 2020. You do have to have a good work ethic though I will admit.

The office gave me the equipment to replicate my computer set up at home: docking station and 3 monitors when I started working long before covid. We could always work from home. But if I was going to work, I wanted to make sure people saw me. Besides, I had to put produce outputs like reports and power point decks. I also had to work from home at least two weekends every month.

I know some people who are still on work from home. But all they do is fir up their computer, log in, and move the mouse every so often.

Before Covid, when I was working our mobility program I worked remotely mostly due to traveling. An internet connection anywhere in the world, hotel room, airport, loner desk at the other company I was visiting, I got a lot of work done sitting at the hotel's poolside bar. I worked from home some but I was never as productive at home as I was at the office or a remote site, too many distractions.

During Covid I was back to working in manufacturing when we sent home everyone who did not have to be onsite for us to make product. It didn’t really matter if they could effectively work remotely or not, we just cleared the building. And if you were needed in the building, BUT FELT UNSAFE DUE TO HEALTH CONCERNS, you got sent home as well, no questions asked. This went on for a year and a half, people being paid to stay home and do what the could do, or in some cases, not doing anything at all. When the return to work started there was a mixed reaction. Many people were happy to get back, some people never came back, and then there were the whiners. It got pretty rough for whiners.

Here's my take on it as a AF base cubical guy that does actual work.

Pros
The parking lot is easier to find a spot
The mindless office chatter has been significantly reduced.
The workforce attire is more professional.
There isn't a service dog that invades lunch boxes and pees on the carpet.

Cons
I don't know a few people that I supposedly work with.
I have to work in a personal electronics free environment instead of watching the view from my couch. <- wait, that's a positive.

Edit* - I miss that dog. If he came into my cube and nobody was looking, he got food.

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Originally posted by V-Tail:

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Originally posted by trapper189:

Perhaps they should take up caseiculture as well.

Goes well with the whine.

About 9 months ago I forced my dev team into the office 3 days a week, M W F. A couple of the quit. One is still looking for a job. (Tech hiring today isn't like it was pre-Covid) Our productivity is measurably up. We are completing 20% more Agile stories and points (non Agile folks, think of a story as an assigned tasks). In office has a lot of advantages, the main one being that one can work out a problem on the spot in a very short amount of time vs scheduling a Zoom meeting. One more advantage is that you know the employee is not working multiple remote jobs. I guess I fall into the hybrid InOffice / WFH.

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Originally posted by Bytes:

A couple of the quit. One is still looking for a job.

From the old days of aviation barnstormers, first rule of wing-walking: Don't let go of what you're holding until you have a firm grasp on something else.

I've telecommuted for the most part (save three years in the Pentagon and another at working a classified program) since 1993.

I've led geographically dispersed teams and do so today.

So long as the people get their assignments done on time and at an acceptable level of quality, I find zero issues with it.

So much fuckery occurs in the office that my productivity is significantly down on the days I'm forced to be in the office. Even with noise canceling headphones - cube farms are absolutely awful for productive work. For talking about fantasy football or your golf outing last night? They're great for that. It's also great for wasting 20 min out of every hour walking to the cafe to get free coffee. Constantly being interrupted when you're hours deep into a data analysis with a deadline fucking sucks. No I don't care how your stupid fantasy (insert seasonal fantasy league here) is doing and you sure as shit don't have to waste 20 min of my time giving me the ins and outs. You'd think that 25 years of declining to join in the fun would give people a hint...

But hey - at least the execs can get their balls gargled and their asses kissed on a regular basis now and justify their bloated salaries.