Now everything is just boring, dull and disconnected. I feel like a worker drone just going from task to task, trying to balance slack in the mix to not get left behind. There are other people in the company or my team, but I don't connect with them. They could equally be NPCs.
Same as you, I am also very worried about not being able to advance in my career any further if things continue the way they do
You should build your life outside of any company:
- mixing friendship with work rarely ends well, you might end up competing with your best friend for the same promotion, he might not even be your best friend, just making you think that he is
- dating in the workplace is a minefield, you can easily get into trouble
Don't be attached to a company, you can find another role in seconds.
You don't need to keep up with everything in the company, you just need to be good at what you are doing.
You don't need to be promoted at the company, you just need to improve your skills, it might be easier to leave and join another company, or even rejoin the same one in a more senior role than to go through the promotion process.
The point is that at a company you are a line item in the budget and you will be forced out the moment it’s not financially beneficial to keep you around.
That generalization definitely doesn't hold for everyone. I've made so many great and lasting friendships from work over the years - even picked up some new hobbies and gone on trips together. If I'd come in with the attitude that it's a bad idea to make friends or socialize with coworkers, I would have missed out on a whole lot of life-enriching experiences.
This sentiment confuses me. Maybe it depends on the kind of company you work at, or maybe it's a cultural thing (I'm in the UK), but I've met many of my best friends through work, as have most people I know. It seems like one of the main ways to make new friends as an adult, and to be honest I've never experienced any downsides to it.
I truly believe a hybrid schedule is best. 5 days per week in the office is overkill, but 2-3 days a week would help me tremendously. I’m gearing my career towards finding that balance now.
My order of preference is:
• Everyone in-office because they want to be there
• Everyone in-office and some want to be there
• Everyone in-office and most don't want to be there
• Hybrid where everyone picks what works best for them
• 100% remote
And yes, where I choose to work I do value my happiness more than the happiness of others.
Instead, I have found that it's basically impossible to stand out in the ways I have in the past, via charisma, camaraderie, being inquisitive, etc. Remote work has basically devolved aptitude into a series of scores & metrics. It feels like working at an Amazon factory. Slack is a nightmare to keep up with.
My hypothesis is that the shift to more WFH has not reduced opportunities for advancement at all but has drastically shifted from one population, who knew how to maximize output from office interactions, to a population that knows how to maximize output from more virtual settings.
People who shine at the coffee machine, at business lunches, who are good at putting pressure on employees who arrive late at their desk, or know how to look efficient in front of a superior during in-presence meetings are completely clueless in how to operate virtual teams efficiently today. There are two possible responses to this: adapt or fight for the mythical "return to normal".
I am actually quite happy that this shift occurred at my company. New managers we didn't expect to be in 2019 have risen from nowhere amongst our ranks and are driving their teams surprisingly well. They are showing great initiative in establishing new processes and finding tools to support their operations, their team morale is generally good, I sincerely believe they are making us better in the long term.
Other managers, mostly late boomers I have to say it, are taking a huge hit to morale. We regularly receive complaints that we don't allow firing employees just because they don't want to come to the office. I actually had a senior manager telling me to f.off because I told him "you are a leader, it's your job to motivate her to come work with you at the office, not ours." I have recommended letting him go since...
One thing is for sure: moving to virtual settings, even partially, is requiring new management skills. I am still thinking this over but I believe managers' self-esteem plays a big role in the transition to virtual settings: many old school managers tend to assume they are successfully managing as long as they can see their employees physically at work during office hours. Whoever comes earlier and stays later is automatically ranked a better employee, even assured promotion, and whoever comes to the office for a meeting is immediately perceived as a better employee than those who joined online. Many managers who don't feel they have physical power over their teams anymore are struggling to regain control.
This approach doesn't work anymore in office settings, especially with qualified workforce. With WFH, there are people who start later, who disconnect earlier, who come back online after dinner, during weekends, who go on long lunches during work days or interrupt their morning for a 9.30am-10.30am workout. From what I see in our books, this doesn't affect our numbers negatively but stresses the hell out some of our managers. I am seeing a lot more flexibility in my employees than in my managers, which is somehow ironic!
To conclude my point, I think the issue with adopting a more remote/hybrid approach in the company stems from a lack of self-confidence amongst entry-level and middle-level managers in their ability to use "modern" tools to both interact more efficiently with their teams and to acquire the data they need.
Any manager who still struggles to share me his or her screen during a virtual session and can't refrain from complaining orally that "these tools suck" in 2022 has become a red flag to me.
That old school mentality of "promote the person who sits down the earliest" actually has a lot of truth behind it.
Is it necessarily rigorously fair, equitable, management style? Is it accepting of working parents with a school run? Hell no.
But... I can definitely say, I can see it working.
I like to think that some "collective intelligence" emerges in all organizations where users progressively become aware that some tools do not cope well with others. I have heard about these screen sharing issues with Chrome on Mac, but I expect from my managers that they switch to more stable "combinations" after a few weeks max, and stop complaining after two years.
That said, I think the ability to advance is highly dependent on (1) what type of work you're in, and (2) the culture of the company. If the type of work you're in is genuinely remote-compatible, the prevalence of remote work will actually help solve the problem you're concerned about. I know many who work full-time remote positions in big corps and have not had trouble advancing.
Same thing that happened with masks, no one was ok with someone else choosing differently because the bigger group would force their way over the smaller group.
* You want to be in-person: If everyone is remote there's no point in going in.
* You want to be remote: If everyone is in-person, you're at a career disadvantage.
People didn't just choose to peacefully wear masks though. There was a large militant group that pushed for mandates to force everybody else to also wear masks.
This is another hidden downside to remote work; the sycophants and ladder climbers (not accusing you of being one) didn't go away, they simply had to adapt to the environment and find new means of doing so. In my experience this entailed being invited to endless clearly-unnecessary-but-mandatory Zoom meetings, the value of which was at best questionable. Only to find out said meeting was really a scheme for management visibility, filmed before a live studio audience of senior engineers.
You shouldn't have to work from home because others want to do so. Other people shouldn't have to work from the office because that's what's best for you. Ultimately I see this working itself out with people changing jobs, perhaps for a period of years, until things have sorted into a "work from where is best for you" equilibrium. That could be a chaotic and disruptive time for many people and businesses :(
I wouldn't go back to remote working if you doubled my salary
I wonder if this is an American thing where bosses are still seen as the authority figure? In my country a company is seen as a team effort. Treat your employees as adults not school children.
What country?
why not? It's probably just as likely you wouldn't be where you are if your several pivotal points in life went only slightly different.
Watercooler/lunch/coffee break social interactions are all but dead when working remotely.
And if you're not naturally sociable, convince yourself that this is the type of person you have chosen to be. "I'm the type of person that makes these small efforts."
I always think of it in basketball/coaching terms. If there's a non-shooter at the top of the key and the coaching instruction is to sag off them, don't react instinctively and rush out to defend. Just stick to the process and the odds are that over time the smart method plays to your advantage. Don't get upset if people don't reply (they might be busy, for one thing) and don't overwhelm them with replies if they do.
You make your own “serendipity”.
Some just win a small lottery at times, and don’t even realize it.
I wouldn’t be where I am if remote work was the norm, and I worry about my ability to advance.