Damaging Results of Mandated Return to Office – It's Worse Than We Thought

Re:Damaging Results of Mandated Return to Office – It's Wors... by alistairSH on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @09:29AM (#36506167)

Wife works for a retail bank. Front-line employees didn't go remote - they need to be in retail bank locations serving customers. Back-office employees were 98% in-office prior to COVID. In several weeks, the company pivoted to remote work, including procurement of laptops (most non-managers had desktops). During the 2.5-3 years of COVID-induced WFH, their engagement numbers and measured productivity went up.

I've heard similar stories from friends and family in similar workplaces.

While I realize that's all anecdotal, I haven't heard any stories countering this narrative.

All that said, I like being in the office a few days/week for all the reasons mentioned. But, my team is all remote (hired that way, mostly pre-COVID), so even when I'm at the office, I'm only chatting with peers on other teams, not the people I'm doing project work with.

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Re:Damaging Results of Mandated Return to Office – It's Wors... by HDThoreaun on Wednesday June 28, 2023 @10:27AM (#36506996)

My company went permanent full remote. We are much less productive, velocity per engineer is about half what it was. I'll freely admit it's because the company is poorly managed, but in my experience tons of companies have leadership that isn't able to quickly pivot in the way needed for WFH to be successful. It requires a lot of effort to get remote engineers to communicate well and at least here it basically just doesn't happen anymore.

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