My favorite time in the office is during the summer period when a random set of people is left behind because of vacation. You get to speak to different people than your usual crowd, the cliques are split up, sometimes you even speak to someone from a different department.
The work-from-home with an office available have been a bit like that.
This is the way. People can debate all they want about in office VS remote, however there is VERY clearly some level of preference for employees whether they want one or the other. The pandemic just straight ripped people out of office chairs into their homes without even asking. This is a happy medium IMHO.
For what its worth - my company was setup from the get-go as 100% remote and do quarterly in person meetings. When we recruit we are very up front about this "you need to be comfortable with essentially operating on your own".
Within engineering, the more junior people really wanted to return to office. The people with 10 years of experience and 2 kids at home really wanted to stay home. Not surprising, really.
Our engineering team remained remote, but not everyone is happy about it. I get emails every other week asking engineers to not come into the office very often because we don’t have enough extra desks for remote employees to be in the office very frequently.
> Did you care to ask your employees what they think? Why not?
While I do think it’s very important to keep employee’s desires and career goals in consideration, questions like these aren’t necessarily aligned with what’s best for the company or getting work done. If you survey employees about how many hours they’d prefer to work each week or how big they want their next raise to be, you’re not going to get answers that reflect what’s best or even realistic from a business perspective.
That doesn’t mean you can ignore your employees desires, of course! But you do have to keep in mind that most employees will default to responding with what’s best for them personally, and for a lot of people from the general population that can mean something very different than what’s best for their team or the company.
He said “I realized” rather than “we decided”. It heavily implies that it was his decision.
How did you end up choosing Tue - Thu? Would it not make more sense to “sync” with each other in the office on the start and end of the week?
So move far away from the office. Got it.