Doesn’t mean fragile ego management and oh my real estate is devalued jackasses won’t fight for return to office tooth and nail.
At the end of the article:
Younger firms and CEOs also tend to be more enthusiastic about hybrid work arrangements, meaning they’ll get more popular over time as existing business heads retire, he added.
So don’t worry, those fragile ego managers will die out over time.
I don’t want hybrid, I want full remote. Hybrid means I still have to live in a stupid expensive city to have a decent job. Full remote means I can go live where I want.
This… I recently took a fully-remote position, but my wife is hybrid so we’re still tied down.
I was on hybrid. I hated it. I was so much more productive at home where I could be comfortable and distraction-free. If you want work friends, fine. Go to the office. Never again for me.
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My employer went fully WFH for their engineering/tech teams just before the pandemic. Our CEO specifically stated the desire was to hire the best engineering talent no matter where in the world they were, and not make anybody feel left out.
In roughly the last year or so they have encouraged employees who live less than an hour away from an office to come in a couple times a month. So I guess that technically we’re hybrid as well now. But they again made it clear that it’s only if it’s within a reasonable distance.
I personally haven’t set foot in one of our offices since 2019. The office closest to me is 2+ hours away in another state. I have coworkers on my team that would have 6+ hour drives. And then there are employees living in other countries throughout Europe & Asia who certainly aren’t going to commute to our Berlin office…
Hybrid is perfectly fine as long as the employer doesn’t try to blindly force it on everybody without exception.
Also hybrid meetings suck.
We did all of our meetings via Zoom whether we were in the office or not.
Hybrid work in a giant organisation - on Wednesdays my whole team is in the office, but of the ten of us, no three are in the same site, so it’s on WebEx anyway
Oh don’t worry, just as many of the young managers have a fragile ego. You’re just going to see it come out differently.
Yeah, no.
Narcissists and antisocial types have weaseled their way into positions of power since time immemorial.
They will continue to do so.
I don’t understand why this got downvotes, there is even research supporting this.
edit: Maybe it’s the common misunderstanding of what it means to be “antisocial” in psychology? Many are still not aware it has nothing to do with keeping to yourself or other socially neutral behaviours.
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Don’t forget car companies and oil lobby will fight it really hard so we can keep burning our planet
We should tax busniess who could have workers WFH but don’t let them to cover the societal costs they impose lien traffic and pollution
Just require employers to pay for 60 minutes of travel time a day every time employees have to go to the office no matter where the employee lives and you’ll see they’ll start sweating.
If only
I would almost* like to see that litigated again. Last time the argument was “people have had to travel to their workplace before starting since time immemorial, so no change now”
But now that for many jobs the work location is arbitrary that argument wont be so easy.
*“Almost” since the money would still be on the other side
I wish we didn’t need these things to go to court for them to change, but it would require an extremely progressive government in power for that to happen in any country…
Government doesn’t help much with court, except where they change the law
That’s what I meant, why should we need to go to court to get that right recognized when it should be the government changing the law without court intervention?
Right now, and it’s been this way for a while, the labor market is favoring the workers, so employers had to keep WFH or lose workers. It’s surprising that the person writing this article missed that as also a long term trend.
I suspect that now that the economy is cooling, the demand for labor will also cool, power will go back to the employers, and you’ll see less and less full wfh positions.
What indicators are there the economy is cooling? Genuinely asking because I thought we just got a great report about economic growth at 5.2%, which is the fastest quarterly rate in 2 years. I know the interest rates are high, but people are still spending.
Us job growth is down, inflation is down, jobless claims up, consumer spending down…pretty much every indicator over the past few weeks has showed the economy cooling. The 3rd quarter ended in September.
They do mention the favorable workers market as a contributing factor, and they say that it would take a recession to see the trend reverse
My bad, thanks for the correction.
I got to the part
“We are three and a half years in, and we’re totally stuck,” Bloom said of remote work. “It would take something as extreme as the pandemic to unstick it.”
And I think even a mild recession is going to “unstick” a lot of it, as I personally don’t believe it is in the benefit of business, for collaborative work (such as software development). I ended up not reading the entire article.
The long term demographic trend is towards labor power, ceteris paribus.
To expand on this, Baby Boomers were the largest generation of people in America. They’re all retiring or dying now. There are not enough Gen Z to replace them and the number of Gen Alpha will be even smaller since birth rates fell off a cliff in 2008. Unless the US decides to reverse its anti-immigrant policies, the supply of labor will be going down for the foreseeable future, meaning labor will have much more power.
Can you tell the employers that? They don’t seem to be getting the memo from all of the strikes.
They will fight while they still can. But will eventually lose the war.
Which is why you’re already seeing a push for AI.
Australia would be reducing in population were it not for immigration, and we’re nowhere near as low as Japan
Tell that to the dashboards that track my in-office days.
That is the most middlemanager thing I have ever heard of.
And if you don’t meet the minimum requirement it’s going on your permanent record!
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Companies hiring for my career are having a hard time finding skilled employees for anything other than fully remote.
What kind if career area are you in?
UX Design
I hqve a friend that is looking for remote UX research role if you know anyone in the industry.
Same with IT jobs lol
Obviously, there are many reasons why that’s a good thing. But I do worry that it’ll erode the boundary between work and free time even further. The best jobs I’ve ever had, were when I had a time clock.
I arrived. I clocked in. I was working.
I clocked out. I was no longer working. I didn’t really think or worry about work that much.
With working from home, there’s a danger you keep working for longer, or are never truly mentally ‘off the clock’. The work day ends, but you’re in the kitchen and remember that thing you had to do, and quickly log back in. Or the boss, who’s used to calling you, calls you after hours to check something.
It’s important to have a hard dilineation between work and not work. For all its downsides, the commute to and from the office offered that.
If work from home is the new normal, we need to find new ways to safeguard that dilineation, and ensure work time doesn’t bleed into free time. Also, that the work space doesn’t invade our personal space too much. Like a box of work documents in the kitchen that makes you slightly stressed by its sheer presence.
It requires some self control, but it’s not that hard to create a boundary when working from home. I’d rather exercise some self control than waste so much of my time and energy on the daily commute. A boss calling you after hours for anything short of an emergency is a shitty boss. He could just as well do that if you’re not working from home, after all.
Set alarm, clock in, clock out. If you’re unable to do it at home it’s because you would have been unable to do it by going to the office, people do so much unpaid overtime no matter where they work, it’s ridiculous.
Eroding that boundary can also be in your favor… I can step away from the desk for a few minutes to start my laundry, prep something for dinner, or even just go to the grocery store during “lunch” because I can bring the food straight back home since I’m not far away from home at an office. Working remotely is giving me back time. And this isn’t time “lost” from the employer’s perspective… I’m just doing something useful with my break times rather than wandering down to the water-cooler to chat with other employees.
The trick is to allow only the erosion that you find acceptable. That’s a matter of personal organization and self-control, and each person has to set up a system that works best for them. I use a spare bedroom as my office, and I only go in there during working hours. Everything work-related stays in there.
you’re in the kitchen and remember that thing you had to do
You take your phone, mail a quick message to yourself “remember to do x” and continue cooking. It offloads the issue from your mind as you handled it for now and first thing tomorrow you will deal with it further.
…exactly the way you used to do it when you went to work at the office every day.
Yes, that’s the point to keep the same separation. I don’t sit on my work chair in private time either.
Obviously, there are many reasons why that’s a good thing. But I do worry that it’ll erode the boundary between work and free time even further. The best jobs I’ve ever had, were when I had a time clock.
I’m the exact opposite. I like there being fewer boundaries between work and free time and these things blurring together more. I’m only allowed to be busy with work between 9:00 and 17:00? What if I’m stuck on something, I can’t do a chore in the house to clear my head? What if I have a good idea at 22:00, do I have to wait until the next morning to try it out?
For me this compartmentalization of my life feels unnatural. It feels much more natural to just flow between work and personal stuff. I may be struggling with how to implement something, so I’ll stop coding an empty the dishwasher, let the problem simmer in the back of my mind. Usually it’s cleared up after taking my mind off it for a while. It would be hell to have to just sit at my desk staring at my screen, trying to force my brain into doing something because now is ‘work time’ and I can only spend that time on work. In reality when I worked from the office every day that time would just have been wasted with some aimless web browsing.
I think we should move in the opposite direction: less separation of work and personal time and get rid of the whole concept of working and personal hours to begin with. Just do what needs to be done, when you want to do it.
The work day ends, but you’re in the kitchen and remember that thing you had to do, and quickly log back in.
When I have to work in an office and that happens, I am instead up half the night worrying about the consequences. I’d rather get sleep.
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I have two desks in my apartment in opposite corners of the room. One for work, one for everything else. Works nicely.
I can appreciate that that worked for you. That arrangement for me stressed me out too much. Was always worried about being in trouble for being 3 mins late etc. It was awful. I’m more than capable of turning work off when my day ends. I see 5pm, I stop and don’t start again until my next scheduled time.
I do exactly this; log on occasionally to finish small things, take the occasional emergency call from a colleague to help them out, work a little past the end of my shift just to get stuff done, etc. whilst I recognise it’s bad and advise others not to do it, I do as it feels like a small sacrifice for what I get in return.
I am 100% WFH. I save 2 hours a day on commuting, plus not having to iron shirts and general office-level prep. I save money on fuel and car maintenance. I have ready access to my own food and drink and is healthier than what’s in range of my office. I get to be with my family more, help the missus with our 2 young kids when needed, do housework or play with the kids on my lunch. I can focus on my work rather than having people constantly talking to me.
All these things combined make me considerably happier and calmer, even though my job is actually incredibly stressful :D haha.
Whilst I never condone working for free, I justify it to myself as a trade; never make me come to an office ever again and I’ll chuck in the extra 10% every now and again, haha.
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You’re thinking in the right direction. And, employers are going to increasingly insist on what I like to call repressionware, hardware and software installed in your home workspace that effectively leashes you to work, vitiating many of the advantages wfh gives today.
Employers will quickly learn that leashing a person to their laptop will not prevent wasted time, it’ll cause them to waste time in other ways, and will drive away talent. The only harm is when it impacts outcomes, which is easier and more beneficial to track.
It’s pretty obvious when someone is underperforming, you don’t need to know whether they’ve been doing the laundry between meetings.
It is dead until they need to train the next generation of workers. If they can do it full remote and train the next generation, they are going to stop paying the expensive city premium.
