Flexibility for parents is great. I've worked remote for a long time and having additional flexibility to take care of sick kids and still get some work in while they're asleep and later in the evening is great. Much better for everyone than forcing another PTO day just to stay home.
However, I've also been seeing remote work and parenting being pushed way too far since COVID. One of my friends cancelled daycare for their 3 year old, thinking they'd just watch him at home while they worked. Didn't take long to realize that they weren't getting much work done while tending to the demands of a 3 year old, and it became impossible to hide when the child would interrupt every meeting multiple times over.
One local company I'm familiar with went remote during COVID and had significant problems with quality of work and communications. The kind of quality problems that impacted customers (not a traditional tech company, their product required employees to do specific work for each customer). When they started narrowing down on the problem employees, one of the top causes they uncovered was parents of young children trying to do the job while watching their kids. It can work with a 13 year old home for summer break, but it just doesn't work for very young kids who need a lot of attention.
> - preventing sexism, ageism, and other forms harassment at work: can’t sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully auditable zoom/slack environment vs in office.
I'm going to have to disagree with this one. My friends in HR said the number of inter-employee problems went way, way up during COVID remote work. Employees communicate outside of official channels, in voice meetings that aren't recorded, and in chat rooms you don't control. Some people get extremely difficult to work with when they're arguing with a screen name instead of talking to a person face to face.
- I work in cybersec, all those alternative channels can be monitored or blocked just fine, and still better than “closed office door + handsy VP” which has plagued the workforce for years and years.
- you mention conflict resolution as the remote challenge examples. I mentioned sexual harassment and ageism. Very different.
I think you didn't read my comment. The problem was parents cancelling daycare because they thought they could take care of kids and work simultaneously without impacting their work.
They literally had daycare, cancelled it, and brought the problem on themselves after WFH was instituted.
> I work in cybersec, all those alternative channels can be monitored or blocked just fine,
You are deluding yourself if you think none of your employees are using their personal phones to talk to each other, or that groups of employees don't gather in personal Discords and chat app groups.
As a parent, taking care of a child is itself a full time job. Your friend is either an idiot or was banking on his work being stupid enough to let it slide.
Parents leaving work early and not staying late because of kids is an office problem you didn't mention.
Employees using a personal discord sounds positive. Work relationships are building remotely. When employees in person become close they call personal cells and go to bars to discuss how clueless leadership is. Leadership isn't capturing those conversation why is it suddenly a problem if a discord is used?
Why is that the company's concern? I genuinely don't understand what responsibility the company has for employees actions outside of work.
If we are now both working from home, does that qualitatively change the situation? When working from home, what even is "outside of work"?
This is very common, even when working in an office. Has nothing to do with working from home
*reported
It could be that people felt more empowered to report incidents, but the reality is probably just that the nature of harassment has changed and is just different from how it was like in-person.
Or it could be that the number of incidents actually just went way up? I don't understand why everyone tries to inject alternate explanations to wave away inconvenient situations.
For all we know, it could be worse. Given the fact that a lot us have trouble separating work and home when we work remotely, maybe there is more pressure to let coworkers in that space more.
The parent commenter was absolutely trying to dismiss the core of the story by injecting an alternate reality into it.
> If they're not equally likely, I'm sure you'll have no problem demonstrating that?
The situation I'm referring to was not a simple reporting change. It involved employees quitting over bullying, and in one case there were issues severe enough that law enforcement became involved.
So, not, it was not a simple case of people reporting things differently. These problems did not exist pre-WFH at this company.
But if you're dead set on finding ways to reject this and substitute your own reality, I suspect even this won't convince you.
I really don't know why you're so aggressive. You did not include the context in your original comment that you did with this one, and so someone put forward a very reasonable explanation as to why reports may have went up.
I don't think you can generalize that to other companies or even other departments at your company.
Will HR do anything about a handsy VP in a he-said-she-said situation? Maybe. Will they do anything when you send them screenshots of a VP’s icky chats? You bet.
Actually, they will likely transfer the woman or otherwise screw over her career to protect the handy VP.
As a parent of a toddler, I’m shocked they thought this would work. Kids that young need constant social interaction with their caregiver.
The Covid 19 situations were different since many people were forced into them by daycares and schools closing or “going remote”.
Your friend, however, is an idiot. I know lots of people who have worked remotely for 10+ years, and none of them tried to work their job while taking care of a 3 year old - except maybe during COVID (because it was either that or quit).
I can definitely see the former going way up but the latter going way down.
Note that your HR friends is not a good measure of harassment. Maybe more people filed HR complaints because asshole and abusive behavior was easily documented over chat, etc. Whereas before, you had abusive behavior, for example, inappropriate touches but no witness that a person might not feel comfortable bringing up to HR especially if the abuser is somebody important.
Everyone knows that HR basically exists to protect the company. Unless you have ironclad proof, you may not want to involve them. Remote work would leave more of an undeniable paper trail.
This is an extremely common problem for juniors in the mentoring program where I volunteer: They graduate college, take remote jobs, and then slide into depression while working from home. It takes a while to work with them to get to the bottom of their issues, but often they'll realize that they're much happier in the weeks following company on-site meetings, then they slowly decline again.
Remote work doesn't work for everyone. Many people struggle in remote environments, especially juniors. The way remote work gets pushed as being perfect for everyone can be very confusing for people who discover that they don't like it.
It's even harder because the internet tends to be very hostile to these people rather than supportive. The correct answer, obviously, is that some people do better at different types of jobs. Yet every time this comes up, people come out and try to criticize the person, blame it on their lack of hobbies, blame it on something else, and refuse to allow that some people need face-to-face coworkers to thrive.
It's a real phenomenon that gets downplayed on the internet.
Sure, in office works better for some people and remote makes them miserable. They're real people.
But the side suffering economic compulsion is the remote preferred people being forced back to the office against their will.
If everyone can work how they prefer then great. But that's not the world we live in and to draw a false equivalence between the dominant (at exec level) RTO view and remote workers forced into unpaid commutes and time away from families gets our hackles way up.
The problem with this is that people's work preference doesn't always match up with the environments where they actually work well.
I've managed remote and hybrid teams for years. I've done this long enough to realize that a lot of the people who struggle to be productive at home will swear up and down that they're much more productive working remote.
The reason is simple: People aren't just expressing their preference for where they work best. They're expressing their preference for where they want to be. When it comes to low performers and difficult employees, they almost universally don't want to be at the office.
That's why it's not as simple as letting everyone work according to their preference.
Remote teams are hard for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is filtering for people who can actually work remote. Many people will claim they work well remote, but then you hire them and they're terrible at communicating, can't manage their own time, are constantly MIA during core working hours (a 4-hour window agreed upon by the team, in our case), and so on. It's hard to start removing these people from the company, but it's the only way to make it work.
All of those companies that switched everyone to WFH during COVID learned the hard way that you can't just take everyone and go remote. You have to build the team for it from the start. And it takes more than just asking people what they prefer.
If you have by yourself done something you can assume they can do something else on their own. The on their own is the important pieces.
<< Remote teams are hard for many reasons, but one of the biggest challenges is filtering for people who can actually work remote. Many people will claim they work well remote, but then you hire them and they're terrible at communicating, can't manage their own time, are constantly MIA during core working hours (a 4-hour window agreed upon by the team, in our case), and so on. It's hard to start removing these people from the company, but it's the only way to make it work.
It is all true, but it points to crappy management. You want to fire people, fire them. You can't keep them motivated, you failed as a manager. I keep saying this, but management class has gotten really used to easy approach to motivation ( pizza and threat of firing ).
Is the debate wfh is worse for these juniors or these types of juniors didn't exist before and won't with the rise of llms. Why cater to them now? Aren't they a product of over inflated salaries and expanding the industry too rapidly so quality of candidate drops? Isn't that correction going on right now?
When I take a junior or mid-level on I try to make sure that we talk about remote work during one-on-ones and that I make sure they have stuff outside of work to focus on or at least that they have a handle on this type of arrangement. In the first year I started doing this in 2018 I tried spending a couple of weeks just working and not leaving my apartment and by the end of it I had gone pretty toasty.
People forget that just as individuals have to work differently to do remote work, managers have to manage differently to do it too. To truly transition will require different habits of mind and a good understanding of what we actually need as people to survive.
I used to commute 1.5 hours each way until I got a car, then it dropped to 1 hour.
10-15 hours per week = 6-9% of my life - including time asleep.
Taking 16 hours of waking time per week, that gives me 112 hours to work with. Now that commute eats 9-13% of my conscious time.
Let's assume a standard 40 hour workweek - 35% of my waking time. Add in those compulsory daily highway joyrides, and conscious time spent on work rises up to 48%. Depressed yet? This includes the weekend. During the workweek you'll spend between (8 + 2) / 16 and (8 + 3) / 16 = 62.5-68.75% of your waking moments on work.
Now consider that car ownership + fuel + insurance could eat up to 30% of an average person's post-tax income.
Fuck all of that, a lot.
Employees can get together at quarterly / monthly off-sites, and juniors should be encouraged to get involved in community activities straight out of college. I'm not sacrificing my life and family time so you can stare at my grumpy face in the next cubicle.
Unless we're talking remote and international, in which case that obviously wouldn't work, but I assume you wouldn't apply to those jobs anyway.
That way you can get your office and some coworkers, and others can do what is best for them, and the company doesn't have to lease a huge office space. Win-win-win?
A: What if people could choose whether they want to live in decadent West or socialist paradise? B: Problem is, we want those who want to live here and ones that don't.
And that, in a nutshell is the issue with WFH. There are people who think they know better and feel obligated to enforce that view.
Constantly the office is treated as the only existing socialization source and it really makes me wonder what people’s lives at home are out of work.
There is nothing new here.
That was more because half the planet was told not to leave their homes. Sure, stopping commutes had an impact on pollution, but the roads were literally empty in major cities - that wasn't because people could suddenly WFH.
I don't deny the impact of lessening the number of people commuting, but how much of that was commuting and how much was everything being shut down?
I don't know that there would be as large an impact as people may hope.
Once covid hit, they saw the writing on the wall and have been liquidating their real estate holdings over the past 3 years or so. I live in Minnesota and they've sold five of their buildings here alone, including one of their older main HQ buildings.
They now have one HQ which is a three building campus and have gone to an almost 100% WFH model with an optional office arrangement where you can reserve a desk if you know you need to be in the office.
Many of the downtown Minneapolis buildings have also changed hands including the Wells Fargo and Capella towers. If anything, what you're seeing is a lot of the S&P 500 companies are divesting their commercial real estate holdings since it doesn't appear as though in office time is going to increase or be anywhere near what it was pre-covid.
If it is clear someone is being dishonest due to action speech delta, say so, loudly and in a manner that leaves a durable paper trail. Accountability dies in the darkness and silence.
Huh? Yes you can. Probably easier, but in different means. In the office it's much harder to sexually assault someone and get away with it. If you mean it's physically harder to sexually assault someone, well duh.
- disabled accommodations: this article, and anecdotes from people we know in this situation
- finding some method for a dramatic enough state change in environmental conditions as to back up from disconcerting climate change barriers we’re pushing into: I can’t recall the specifics but within a week of COVID lockdowns and no commutes, carbon and pollution in atmosphere plummets
- preventing sexism, ageism, and other forms harassment at work: can’t sexually harass someone quite as easily in a fully auditable zoom/slack environment vs in office.
- accommodating parents and their child raising needs with policies that don’t come out of 1950: every working parent I know with remote jobs experience significant flexibility here.
- affordable housing space: office space conversions are starting.
The longer the debate goes on about hybrid/wfh and the above tangible proven benefits vs RTO for “The Collaboration” and “My Socialization Needs,” the more I speculate our society doesn’t actually care about the above topics, at all.
Or, if we do care, this should be called out over and over and over. Bc it’s not getting discussed this way.