My wife did the work from home thing for the past year.

It really depends on the employee how much work is getting done.

My wife got more work done from home than being in the office. Her company was very "old school" and wanted in person interactions. When she was in the office she had several hours of meeting she would have to sit through when only 15-20 mins applied to her department. Now she sits on a Zoom meeting and mutes her screen and gets her work done.

She can now postpone answering a non time sensitive email where that person would have just came to her desk for an immediate answer.

My daughter is in software and now does 3 days at home, 2 in the office. During The Sickness they were 100% home office.

She really likes the social aspect of going to the office, and I think in the long run it is important to careers and company culture to have people in the office face to face. But her being able to work from home a few days per week is a huge plus for her. It is very convenient for her family and personal life.

Mostly what I've seen is that some people are going to be very diligent, and they are going to prosper. Their productivity will be noticed compared to the slackers who decline meetings and are always late with their work.

I don't think the isolation of home office is a good thing, and this is one more step along that path. People need to connect, and work is a big portion of our hours.

Musk is a pretty smart guy. He is ordering his employees back to work at Tesla. The right employee with the right job can work remotely. That is a rarity.
Lazy undisciplined people who need supervision simply cannot work remotely.

I worked 11 and 12 hour days managing crews working at healthcare sites days during the pandemic. Of course HR was working from home and wasn't in a hurry to do anything. The company had laid off 1,000 employees, meanwhile my region added 200 employees in 2000. It was stressful and after two years I am going to look for something else, may join the work from home movement. I have the discipline for it.

Two observations:

It’s real hard to learn anything if you’re the smartest guy in the room. So you got to change rooms and be with real people from which you can learn.

Office culture is its own thing along with the corporate culture coming down from the top. It’s extraordinarily difficult to learn these and how to navigate office politics without being in the actual office.

You need to learn to deal with people and eat an occasional shit sandwich. Being at home inhibits your ability to learn how to navigate these waters.

quote:

Originally posted by ZSMICHAEL:
Musk is a pretty smart guy. He is ordering his employees back to work at Tesla. The right employee with the right job can work remotely. That is a rarity.
Lazy undisciplined people who need supervision simply cannot work remotely.

And in my experience, that's a very large percentage of the population.

Heck, it's hard enough to get them to work when they're in the office. Let them work from home and you'll be lucky to get any significant amount of work out of them.

quote:

Originally posted by SIGnified:
It’s real hard to learn anything if you’re the smartest guy in the room. So you got to change rooms and be with real people from which you can learn.

There's a lot of truth in that statement. It's also the reason why I prefer to shoot with people who are better shots than I am because I learn from them. I've found that when I shoot with people who can't shoot as good as me, I don't shoot as well.

Elon Musk recognizes this is a BIG problem, and is changing course basically without exceptions...

Elon Musk tells SpaceX and Tesla workers they must return to the office full-time

Elon Musk delivered an ultimatum to Tesla and Space X’s corporate workforces: Spend a minimum of 40 hours a week in the office, or leave the company. Musk today confirmed in a tweet that screenshots of an email sent to workers was real. According to The New York Times, workers at both companies received similar memos from Musk that made clear that all workers must report to a main office for 40 hours a week. Musk also wrote that employees would no longer be allowed to work from “remote branch” offices not related to their job duties, giving the example of an HR worker for the Fremont factory who works out-of-state.

“The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence,” Musk said in a memo to SpaceX employees obtained by NYT. “That is why I spent so much time in the factory — so that those on the line could see me working alongside them. If I had not done that, SpaceX would long ago have gone bankrupt.”

Musk taking a hardline stance on remote work is in stark contrast to a number of other major tech companies that have allowed all or most workers to request to work-from-home permanently, including Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce and Slack. Apple recently suspended a requirement that workers return to the office at least three days a week.

As Bloomberg reported today, Twitter employees — who are likely to be reporting to Musk once his acquisition of the company is complete — have internally expressed some concern the SpaceX and Tesla remote work policies (or lack thereof) herald unwelcome changes for their own workplace.

Tesla’s career website still lists a number of salaried and hourly remote positions. It’s unclear whether the new policy will apply to those positions. Engadget has reached out to Tesla for comment, though we are unlikely to hear back: the company dissolved its corporate communications department in 2020.

https://www.engadget.com/elon-...-time-223747961.html

When asked how he would respond to people who consider in-person work "antiquated", Musk tweeted "They should pretend to work somewhere else"

This message has been edited. Last edited by: nhracecraft,

I think it depends. For example, there are jobs where teams are distributed. Whether you're in the office or remote, you're in phone meetings all day.

I agree w/ the above sentiment that this is not an issue of where one works. It's of culture and responsibility and accountability. Forcing people to come into the office doesn't mean more productivity. Still the same lazy people doing subpar work.

The one area where office is useful (but again, doesn't help for distributed teams) is whiteboarding. If you're not just presenting or discussing but actually doing collaborative work that is facilitated by a whiteboard, then that's one aspect where being in the office (or some common area) is valuable.

Depends on the industry / job. But I would not say working remotely is less than working in the office. The person has much to do with it. Seems similar to a smart guy in a crappy school or a dumb guy in an excellent school. It's what you make of it.

Given that we're talking about people sitting at their computers on the internet, without anything physical going in and out of the premises to monitor (or the neighbors to notice and complain to the municipality about), I don't see how this could be enforced from the employees home municipality's side. And if the company's physical nexus locality tried to do it, you'd see a lot of companies moving out of localities that tried it. This would be a major squeezing Jell-O situation.

quote:

Originally posted by a1abdj:
In addition to all of those concerns, I've been waiting for all of these municipalities to start getting more interested in charging companies with at home employees for permits to do so.

Many places around the country have a permit (with associated fee) for conducting business out of a residential address.

Keys to business success:

- Creating a great culture.
- Hiring the right people.

Many, if not most, managers and leaders think they do the above, but they don't. Many don't care. Many have old school, rigid mindsets. Many just think of themselves. Managers must be servant leaders whose sole purpose is to make their team better. That's how success happens. Without that, they will fail today and in the future.

It will take time to transform the mindset of managers, but companies will figure it out sooner or later. The ones that don't will fail.

Where people are located has little to do with business success as long as the 2 items listed above exist.

Agreed.

You need to have the right metrics to gauge productivity and efficacy. Manage the project or program. A manager is not a supervisor. A manager facilitates and enables an employee to do their job. He doesn't supervise. Unless of course he was hired as a supervisor but I assume that's not the types of jobs what we're talking about here.

Time spent in the office is a very loose, poor proxy for effective productivity - good job quality and speed.

If you need to supervise when you should be managing, you've hired the wrong people.

Instilling culture happens in person, and until corps start their own business schools, they will need to do that in offices.

(IMO, Tesla and Apple could probably start a schools, and get excellent applicants, and instructors. Not sure if that would be good for society, though.)

Past a certain level, I can see why either people want to work from home/the old school offices with secretaries who screen contact are needed.

When I have to do “my work” I usually have to turn off my phone, email, and not be in the office.

I’m sure big dogs have to deal with that, even more.

I never heard of any kind of permitting for home offices, unless it involved lawyers/doctors/architects, etc who may have a significant amount of traffic.

I think “done right” it could be a large Boone - but it will take reworking homes so they have small offices in them/having people focus on work, etc.

One of my siblings is in IT with a large, well known corporation. They’ve been remote since March 2020. His bosses have said productivity is up since then. They have no plans to return to the office.

When I commute to work I start at 7 and leave at 3:30. I do not turn on my computer at home. When I work from home I am online with my coffee at 6 AM. I finish at 3 but I don’t turn off my computer. I usually end up at meetings after that and probably end up doing more work after dinner.

In short I am way more productive working from home. Some jobs it makes sense.

With technology, it's going to be easy to make sure people are on the job when they're supposed to be if they're working from home.

We're not there yet as some people can fool the tracking system just by moving the mouse.

People who have real jobs to do as measured by their output don't need to be monitored.

It is all dependent on the type of business, company culture, expectations, job, etc. I've worked remote for the last 4 years and doubt that I would work in an office again. I do outside sales so it kind of comes with territory.

quote:

Originally posted by nhtagmember:
I’ve been working remote for almost 8 years now and other than some personal discipline, I have my home office and at 5pm I close the door and that room doesn’t exist until 8am the next day.

For the better part of 15 years I lived to work. Nights and weekends. No one cared. Finally I just work normal business hours. No one cares. I now have a life that doesn’t revolve around a job.

But I’ve decided to have a life and the company will survive with or without.

I think working remote is the best thing to ever happen and should have been the norm once computers came into the mainstream.

These are my feeling as well. Remote work in IT since 2014.

We don't have any of the shit the OP has though. Management or team leads need to crack down on that shit PDQ. At first, the company I work for was regular 8 - 5 (or 7 -4) to a 9 X 80 schedule (80 hours over 2 weeks, so every other Friday off). In January of 2020 we went to 4 X 10 schedule so I get every Friday off, plus work from home. However, unless something comes up I am at my laptop from 7 - 5 Mon - Thurs. I rarely reject meeting unless it literally has nothing to do with me, which is rare.

quote:

Originally posted by SIGnified:
Two observations:

It’s real hard to learn anything if you’re the smartest guy in the room. So you got to change rooms and be with real people from which you can learn.

Office culture is its own thing along with the corporate culture coming down from the top. It’s extraordinarily difficult to learn these and how to navigate office politics without being in the actual office.

You need to learn to deal with people and eat an occasional shit sandwich. Being at home inhibits your ability to learn how to navigate these waters.

That's 3
But I agree wholeheartedly!

Unfortunately for the last 2 years my company has been hiring folks who live hundreds of miles away. So we're back in the office but only 40% of the team is local now. :|