calling this a turf war and a standoff when it's actually just "management demands physical presence in office, can provide no actual reason for requiring this, throws tantrum" in every case https://t.co/54gwpu6sbd
— cait (@punished_cait) July 5, 2022
If we can keep the destruction of ‘only time sitting in an office is *work*’ culture, it’ll be one of the few positive side effects of the pandemic:
… Local human resources directors report job candidates are abruptly ending interviews when they find out remote work isnât an option. One said that a new biotech hire â who agreed to work three days a week in the office but was allowed to work from home for six weeks before moving to the Boston area â abruptly quit following his first 90-minute commute.
Nationwide, two-thirds of senior managers want their teams on site every work day, according to a Robert Half survey, while half of employees say they would look for a new job if forced to return full time. The return-to-office/work-from-home tug of war has even spawned an acronym war: RTO vs. WFH.
Pro-office executives cite the value of in-person collaboration and the need to maintain a vibrant company culture. Breaking with tradition is difficult, workplace analysts say, especially for bosses with an underlying belief, warranted or not, that people get more done in the office.
Ego could play a role, too. âThere are people that feel a sense of importance and authority when theyâve got people working outside of their door,â said David Schonthal, a professor at Northwestern Universityâs Kellogg School of Management.
Handing down mandates, instead of being open to experimentation, will only increase peopleâs natural impulse to resist change, he said. And forget about using new perks. âFor people who value autonomy, giving them soft-serve in the break room is not going to help,â Schonthal said…
âWe have a generation or two of CEOs and their HR advisers who have not had to deal with a restless group of employees,â said MIT management professor Thomas Kochan. Managers canât be âheld hostage to past strategies,â he said. âYou can no longer do this from the top down.â
And with every pushed-back return date, workers have become less inclined to believe theyâre ever going to be required to go back, said Elizabeth Mygatt, a partner in the Boston office of consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
Some long-empty offices are starting to come back to life, but the workers inside, including some managers, arenât necessarily excited to be there. One vice president at a small Boston-area pharmaceutical company would prefer to work at home most days instead of making the hour-plus drive to the office, and is working her way up to coming in three days a week. But sheâs struggling to enforce the policy on someone she supervises whoâs getting his job done just fine at home. âItâs a tough thing to manage,â said the VP, who asked not to be identified so she could speak freely. âUntil someone pushes me, Iâm not going to push him.â…
even MY company is doing “hoteling” and WFH for certain staff except the ones like me who (understandably) HAVE to be here because that’s where the people and graves and bodies are. the real issue is people realizing their bosses are idiots
letting people flex or work remotely saves everyone time and money but all these dumbasses signed 50 year office leases and hired 30 managers that do nothing but spy on your employees and now have to justify their existence
OR gambled on people being forced to commute into the city and spend their money on food and parking and convenience and now they realized they don’t have to live like that!
But what of the poor, suffering real estate investment trusts, and the parking-lot lease operators?
Remote work makes it more possible for people with disabilities, especially immunocompromised people, chronically ill folks, and folks with mobility disabilities, to stay in the workforce. Many bosses want us out because we're expensive to insure.
— Norma Krautmeyer ïžâ (@blushandmumble) July 5, 2022
Employers in high-demand industries / areas, like Boston, are discovering they might be able to find employees, just not the valuable ones they actually want…
True everywhere. Offices that canât be reached by transit? Not a great moment in time to push ppl back to two hours of driving a day.
— BBS (@therealbevin) July 5, 2022
Baud
Employers will tear down this economy before they give up their bargaining power.
tom
Iâve been working remotely for 10 years now, and I will never go back to an office. I wrote about it here.
OzarkHillbilly
THIS IS DISCRIMINATION!!! I, a union carpenter, never had the option of working from home!! Why should anyone else???
And for those who don’t know me, s//s//s//s//s//s//s/s.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
They have remote medicine. Why can’t they have remote carpentry? Just need better robots.
Suzanne
I tolerate the office. What I really canât stand is the commute.
Tom Levenson
@OzarkHillbilly: I’m sure you worked from home. Just not your home, most of the time.
gene108
Some of it is probably companies own their office real estate or are in a long term lease and donât want the office to sit idle.
Part of it maybe older bosses, who arenât used to the idea of remote work. If they donât see butts in seats, they arenât sure if people are working.
Some smaller companies might not have invested in the technology to go fully remote.
In the job interviews Iâve had, I really feel like whether work is in person or hybrid is based on some combination of these factors.
Suzanne
@Baud: There’s plenty of construction prefab.
trollhattan
Anybody else see the name Krautmeyer and suddenly want a hot dog with sauerkraut?
They’re probably counting on the recession to make desperate folks come back to their cubicles. Contra that, ditching millions of unneeded square feet of office space leases looks good on the bottom line.
pacem appellant
As someone who actually likes office culture, I was looking forward to RTO. Then, a year into the pandemic, something clicked in my brain. I’m never going back into an office again. I’m WFH for life, now, baby.
NotMax
Would have jumped at taking a pay cut back when if it meant jettisoning the two hours in each direction commute by mass transit from the nether regions of Queens to Manhattan.
trollhattan
@Suzanne: I’m car-commuting for the first time in fourteen years, and LOATHE it day #2. The only reason is my new boss pissed off somebody higher up and they moved us out of downtown.
NotMax
‘@Baud
DRONEZ!
Suzanne
@trollhattan: I cannot stand the utter waste of time consumed by commuting. I would go into the office happily if I could teleport.
Matt McIrvin
As I said in another thread, my spouse found an op-ed by some call-center boss salivating over the possibility of a new recession with mass layoffs that would bring all this worker-rights nonsense to an end and get these stupid entitled kids back under his thumb. The gleeful cruelty of it was amazing.
Another Scott
(repost) Look at this graph from CalculatedRiskBlog – note the huge number of job openings. Note the high number of “Quits”. Labor has more power than in any time in decades. Management doesn’t like it, but they’re going to have to figure out ways to deal with it if they want to get the work done. And if that means people working remotely, then people are going to work remotely.
Cheers,
Scott.
Alison Rose
Anyone who actually thinks like this can go absolutely fuck themselves. This is such a management-bullshit style of thought–no one below them thinks there is a “vibrant culture” in the company.
Fuck these babies. Do they want a little crown to wear around the office, too?
Yepppppppp. Fuck ’em.
This is me. I’m incredibly fortunate that my tiny little local independent company is allowing me to continue to work from home, even though everyone else has been back in the office for months, and even though I live barely over a mile from the office. But my mental and physical disabilities have made it literally impossible for me to even leave my apartment. (That’s not hyperbole–I haven’t set foot outside my door in God knows how long.) TBH some days I’m barely able to function enough to work from home, but I do it, and I’m glad I work for a company that isn’t forcing me to do something I cannot do or threatening me with firing because I can’t. But I hate that I have to feel so lucky and grateful for something that ought to be a no-brainer. Disabled people deserve to live, FFS.
Matt McIrvin
(But I do think that if we have another recession on the 2008 scale it’ll get these bastards effectively cracking the whip again.)
OzarkHillbilly
@Tom Levenson: Shit, most of the time I was working ON somebody’s home. Even if they didn’t own it yet. Except for the times I was working on somebodies workplace. Which I far preferred. Commercial rate, don’cha know.
@Baud: Booo! Hissss! Kill the heretic! Kill the heretic!
Old Man Shadow
My company recently accepted that the majority of us wanted to work from home and switched to that model for everyone except those whose job required them to physically be on site to monitor and fix equipment.
Working from the office is optional for everyone else.
Our productivity is up over 2019-2020.
I think this should be the standard model of business now. WFH is the norm, but you can work in the office with other likeminded folks if you need that interaction. This would allow for less real estate to be designated for commercial space and since the soon to be empty buildings still exist, they could be converted to affordable housing. Give tax credits to help subsidize the cost.
Fewer cars on the road. Less CO2 spewed into the atmosphere. Happier people. More housing.
What’s not to like?
James E Powell
@trollhattan:
They always do. Bosses & owners love recessions.
Ken
As energy vampire Colin Robinson put it in What We Do in the Shadows, “At every office I’ve worked at they always say ‘We’re a big family here’, and it does motivate people to work harder and neglect their actual families and put up with all sorts of degrading sh*t.”
Dorothy A. Winsor
gene108
@Another Scott:
There are a lot of quits, but there are also a lot of people applying for the job openings.
Thereâs a fair amount of churn in and out of jobs.
Edit: I also think some companies are trying to figure out if they need to replace quits or if they can get by with less staff. Theyâll post openings to see whoâs available.
Kropacetic
Damn, he must have lived fairly close to the city.
Personally, I’m still adjusting to WFH, but even when im on-site, I’m almost never in the office.
Another Scott
@trollhattan: Accounting is weird. I know of a place where overhead rates per square foot are based on numbers of employees (and a bunch of other stuff). When people are on-site, the accounting is easy – just do it the way it’s always been done.
But when they’re not? If half the staff is working remotely, what does that mean for fair overhead rates? Should people at home pay for empty office space and unused A/C? If not, should people in the building cost twice as much overhead as before? The 50 year old building still needs upkeep even if half the staff isn’t there…
These are solvable problems, but someone needs to do the work to solve them.
Cheers,
Scott.
frosty
I never liked WFH. If I had to do OT on a project I would stay late or drive to the office (25 miles) on a Saturday. I retired in Jan 2020 just as COVID hit. If I hadnât, my guess is that after two or three months of WFH I would have said WTF and left.
The company went back to 4-days RTO and one WFH but I know several of my friends that are still 100% remote. Depends on the immediate supervisor I guess.
evodevo
@Ken: I love the character…he is such a hoot…
Ken
Whereas I would seriously consider emptying bank vaults for a living.
OzarkHillbilly
My wife would love to work from home. I’m not sure I would agree.
But anyway, as it is, absent any possibility of high speed internet out here, she has to work in Sullivan, 11 miles away. And she is the ONLY person in the office. I have a feeling if her company wasn’t locked into several contractual obligations on their commercial property in town, they’d have let her go a year or 2 ago. They know it’s a money sink they don’t need.
As is, I’m happy she still has a job. This close to retirement, it’s hard to find another, and we ain’t moving.
bmcchgo
‘@gene108
My last company had a $90K per month lease in the West Loop Chicago and were forcing ppl to come back 3 days/alternate weeks. It had recently been bought by a VC.
Half of the sales team left for a direct competitor.
Gin & Tonic
@Suzanne: I was very fortunate to be able to commute by bicycle, and it was great during that part of the year when it made sense. Really let me clear my head on the way home.
Now Iâm retired, so it doesnât matter.
OzarkHillbilly
An asst superintendent tried that crap with me once and I looked him dead in the eye and said, “I already have a family. Guess what? You ain’t in it.”
HinTN
@OzarkHillbilly: How high speed does it need to be? I just got Starlink and it’s very reliable, just not gig city. You do need a clear view to the north, though.
zhena gogolia
I teach, so in-person is indisputably better. What isn’t better is in-person committee meetings and faculty meetings. I would love for those to stay on zoom for the foreseeable future. We have literally TWICE the attendance at faculty meetings that we used to, and it feels much more democratic. People have little side conversations on the chat that lead to real shifts in the larger discussion — it’s exciting!
gene108
@Another Scott:
It shouldnât be hard to find another cost basis for an overhead rate. If they can have half their workforce be remote, they may not be really tied down to a physical location like a manufacturing or warehousing business would be, so they can come up with a cost basis for the overhead rate thatâs independent of location.
Taking overheads as a percentage of different departments salary rates, Iâve found, works when people are working at different locations for a company.
Suzanne
@Gin & Tonic: The nature of my job is that the office I work for, where the clients and consultants are, and where the building is being built are not the same place.
I’ve noticed a bit of a regional difference in my industry. It seems to be that firms in the west were more adapted to remote work simply because we often had to be away from our desks and distances are large. Now that Iâm working back in the northeast, it’s like stepping back ten years. More hierarchy and traditional “culture” shit. Meh.
Grumpy Old Railroader
Retired so work at home every GD day. It is amazing how much work there is around the house. On the other hand, all my old work mates that run the commute trains are wishing everyone worked at the office because commute volume decreases equate to reduced number of commute trains. They already reduced the number of cars on each train. Next cut will be in the number of trains. So for example if a train runs every 30 minutes and reduced traffic means they only need to run trains hourly, some folks commute time is going to increase,
Unintended consequences indeed
Roger Moore
The most extreme cases are ones like Tesla, where Chief Egocentrism Officer Elon Musk decided everyone must come back to the office without remembering they had kept hiring through the pandemic without a corresponding increase in their office space. When everyone showed up, it turned out they didn’t have enough chairs and desks for everyone, the WiFi couldn’t keep up with the number of laptops trying to connect, etc. This is supposed to be a historic genius.
Omnes Omnibus
@frosty:Â â
I have never liked WFH either. I think we may be very much outliers among the Balloon Juice crowd. I would miss contact with people, and I like being able to separate work from home.
dmsilev
I can’t really work from home. Home doesn’t have 3-phase power, a reliable supply of cryogenic liquids and compressed gas, and various other odds and ends that I need to do my job.
OK, we do actually have 3-phase, but I think my neighbors might object if I repurposed the power circuit for the building elevator for …stuff.
OzarkHillbilly
@HinTN: I don’t know. Cable would work but we’re out in the country so satellite is it and for voice communication, which is central for her job, there is a 20-30 second lag. Just doesn’t work.
The sad part is that back in 2010, they laid pipe for fiber optic in front of our house as part of the Obama stimulus. Guess what? It’s still empty because once the Repubs took control of congress, they were never going to appropriate the money to fill those pipes no matter how much it might help their constituents. No way were they gonna let Obama take credit for anything.
Suzanne
One thing I just want to note is that I see a lot of comments like “they should take all that office space and convert it to residential”. And that is, of course, much easier said than done. It would never be affordable housing, eitherâŠ.the cost premium of the redevelopment would make it luxury housing in most cities. Also, please note that many cities simply cannot absorb shit-tons of residents without building a lot of social infrastructure like schools and hospitals and grocery stores etc etc etc.
Roger Moore
@OzarkHillbilly:
I work in a lab, so it’s similar, if not quite as extreme, for me. There are a few things I can do from home, but my main job is working on things I need to physically touch and interact with. It says something bad about our media environment that so much news has focused on the kinds of jobs where working at home is a realistic option and so little on the jobs where being physically present is required.
Kay
@frosty:
Agree. I like a clear line. But I don’t have a 90 minute commute either – I might change my mind with that.
Poe Larity
If we could just get rid of the RAVE Act these employers could entice the youts back to party. Our 401k REITs demand it.
dmsilev
@Suzanne: There are a couple of conversion projects near me, one just finished and the other which is just kicking off. And yeah, the resultant units are $$$. Even by local LA-area housing-prices-are-nuts standards. Most of the condo construction around here seems to be build-from-scratch rather than conversions.
CaseyL
I figured out that the parts of in-office work I don’t like are: having to get up that extra bit early, having to get dressed in real clothes, and having to commute.
Once I’m in the office, as long as I have things to do, I’m perfectly content. I do have a better computer here (big monitor, can have multiple apps and documents open at once and see them all at the same time) and far fewer distractions (two kitties at home, both wanting constant attention).
Sometimes I even have co-workers here. Our in-office days are staggered; many times, I’m the only one around. But there’s some overlap one or two days. It gets a bit comical: we’re all in our offices with the doors closed, so we can take off our masks, so if we want to chat, we put on our masks and go knock on doors.
I should note I work for a university medical center, which is why we’re still able to be this careful. I realize most workplaces have thrown in the towel on precautions.
But I’d hate having to go into the office every day again. I hope that doesn’t happen. Like, ever.
Roger Moore
@gene108:
I think a huge part of it is that productivity for a lot of office work is hard to measure. Bosses who have dealt with that by equating physical presence in the office with hard work just assume everyone working from home is slacking. It’s the same mode of thinking that wants people who show up early and leave late, regardless of decades of research that shows overwork kills productivity.
Suzanne
I want to note that conversion of a building from B occupancy (business) to one of the R occupancy categories is a fairly difficult conversion, which is why it isnât done that often. There would need to be a lot of money put into fire separations, means of egress, separating mechanical systems, vertical transportation, electricalâŠ.
9 times out of 10, it would end up being cheaper to tear down and build something new on the site.
Roger Moore
@Matt McIrvin:
The cruelty is the point. So much of modern management makes more sense when you remember that simple mantra.
OzarkHillbilly
@Roger Moore: I have to say that now that I am retired, I miss working as part of a crew. The camaraderie was…. special. Hard for me to explain. I suspect the lab is similar. That said, I don’t miss the 1 to 2 hr commutes at all.
Ruckus
The work I did for most of my life required me to be – at work. Not because of the boss, which was me for 25 yrs, but because the work could only be done on location. I owned a machine shop and a bicycle shop. For another 20 yrs of my life I worked in a machine shop. There is only one place to get the work done in either, a work location, where one can shape/weld metal. And in the Navy, I worked, ate and slept in the same place – which wasn’t exactly home like.
gene108
@Roger Moore:
The media is primarily composed of college educated people, who almost exclusively know other college educated people who do white collar professional jobs.
Sure, a reporter or network executive may know someone who works in a college lab running excitements, but I doubt they really know many cashiers, warehouse workers, etc.
I think this why so much news coverage is focused on the professional middle class folks. The people in media really donât know anyone outside that circle of people.
OzarkHillbilly
Was just gonna say that 9 times out of 10 that’s what they end up doing.
Martin
Part of the propaganda against the masses by the capital class is that people need to adapt to the economy. We need to adapt to the location of jobs, the schedule of jobs, the danger of jobs, and so on.
And every so often that gets tested. 90%+ of the workers ON EARTH had their jobs modified due to Covid. The location, schedule, dangers all got thrown up in the air overnight. And the conclusion we were supposed to draw was ‘oh fuck, the economy is going to go to shit’ due to all of that upheaval, and it sorta didn’t. Sure, lots of individuals were laid off and needed assistance, but GDP dropped by 20% for a very short time, and then pretty much everything came back, even before everything got put back in place.
The reality is that the economy *is* the workers. Almost all of the work still got done even though the workers got dumped off the table. Individual companies went under, but others filled their shoes. Delivery made up for what in-person couldn’t adapt to. We stopped going on vacation, but bought physical goods instead. The bag of goods didn’t really get any smaller, but what was in the bag changed a lot. All of this meant that workers jobs changed, their day to day changed, but in the end they still had jobs – different jobs, but in many cases *better* jobs.
Workers may not have been able to articulate this change, but sensed ‘hey, the economy can adapt to me, I have more agency here than I thought’. It makes sense that there’s a resurgence in organizing because there’s a new sense of what’s possible.
Suzanne
@dmsilev: Condos (as opposed to apartments or dormitories or assisted living units with a single owner) present a specific problem for developersâŠ.. namely that in most jurisdictions, individual unit owners can sue for errors and omissions. So there’s a lot of exposure and that entails a cost premium.
Almost Retired
About 50% of my soon-to-be-discontinued law practice is focused on representing employees with disabilities. A common reasonable accommodation request was a full or partial work from home arrangement. The companies invariably pushed back on this accommodation as an “undue burden,” braying about efficiency, accountability and morale.  And the pendulum was swinging away from WFH as an accommodation in the mid teens, with Courts increasingly deferring to the employer’s concerns about the arrangement. Even in California.
And then COVID. In mediation last week, the dipshit employer tried to make the morale and efficiency argument to oppose the extension of WFH for my disabled client after the entire workforce was ordered to return. The mediator laughed out loud at their argument.  We settled.
narya
@Omnes Omnibus: I used to hate WFH and never did it, in part because I need multiple screens, not just a laptop screen, to be able to do my job. They sent us home in March 2020, and I haven’t been back yet. Many of our staff really must be in the office–we see actual patients, and not everything can be telehealth (blood tests and dentistry are two examples). About a third of our current visits are remote. But for us admin types, they kinda sorta want us to come back, but they haven’t forced the issue (in part because they gave away the spaces my team occupied). And it turns out that meetings are easier to manage when we all just log in; before this, we needed a bunch of meeting rooms, and folks were coming from across the city, so this really is better.
To protect what’s left of my mental health, I set aside a space for a desk, chair, monitors, etc., and that is my “office.” I ONLY work in that space, and I turn it off at the end of the day. The other thing I do is wear “work” clothes for work, then change at the end of the day. It’s been pretty effective in setting up a barrier.
But work “culture”? Fuck that.
Salty Sam
My step-daughter started WFH with an environmental consulting firm- Â the company has been WFH its entire existence (10-15 yrs). She loves the job. Â Sheâs been working for them since February, and just last week, got together for the first time with some fellow employees right here in the same city.
âVibrant company cultureâ does NOT depend on commuting to a brick and mortar office building. Â If they switched to RTO, sheâd quit in a heartbeat.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
supposed to be is doing a ton of work in that sentence
If it wasn’t for his ego he might not be able to breathe is likely closer to the truth.
Avalune
Our office is claiming to be considering âflexible work hoursâ but also indicating they want you in the office 4/5 days, so it hardly seems remote. Iâm currently interviewing for a position that would be processing stuff 100% wfh if all things go as intended and Iâm very hopeful. I like seeing people there and some in person interaction and will prob make guest appearances even if I get this other position but I hate the dress, the 40 min drive each way, the poop coffee, lack of access to food if I forget to pack or donât want what I packed, the hard office chair, the tiny monitors, the constant noise and interruptions, and whatever the fuck that ticking in the wall is – so Iâd much rather be at home.
Roger Moore
@Suzanne:Â â
Yeah, for a lot of those things, it might well make more sense to tear down the existing buildings and build something new that’s designed for its new function. That new function might be pure residential, or it might be residential above commercial, which would at least solve the need for new grocery stores and the like. If the change in office usage were bigger, you might also have space for things like new hospitals and schools.
Kropacetic
@Omnes Omnibus: I struggle with WFH tho I like the idea in concept. Hence my 20 year undergraduate university career.
different-church-lady
Safety risks aside*, there are benefits to having people working together in a space, especially in endeavors that require creativity or frequent problem-solving. Not all jobs are like that, but the idea that there’s no down-side to 100% remote work is bullshit.
(* I’m not putting safety risks aside. I’m saying if that’s not your reason for insisting on remote work then maybe you’re being the unreasonable one.)
TheOtherHank
I went remote at the start of the pandemic. Two years later I got laid off. Found another job that is officially remote (even if the pandemic ever ends). The funny thing is that even though I was looking for remote positions all over the country, I got a job with a company that is about 8 miles from where I live. It does free up possibilities, though. My wife (whose job requires her to go into the office (hands-on health care)) is looking for jobs outside the area where we live. Now we can go anywhere I can get reasonable broadband.
Omnes Omnibus
@narya: Not everyone has space in their homes to do that. My brother’s family had one person working from home and two kids doing remote high school. My brother continued going to work. They had trouble coordinating spaces where they could all have zoom shit going on at once. This was in a three bedroom ranch with an office.
different-church-lady
@Another Scott:
Yes, but if we enter recession that will change fast.
Roger Moore
@narya:
This is almost exactly what I did for the brief time I was working from home. It’s really helpful to have some kind of mental separation between work and home, even if it’s just a change of clothes, going into a different room, and using a different computer.
Salty Sam
Heh. A good buddy of mine retired recently- when I asked him how retirement was going, he replied, Â âI donât know where I ever got the time to work for a living!â
Martin
One of my bigger frustrations with the Covid response is that there was so much potential to do work from home *well* and yet almost all companies did the shittiest and least creative implementations of it.
I’ve long held that the most important aspect of a company to understand for investment purposes is its culture. Some companies are inherently better suited to adapt to these kinds of situations than others, and there’s pretty much fuckall you can do to change that internally. If you have a culture of high-touch supervision, being able to walk into someone’s work space and evaluate their work product, then it’s unlikely that will EVER change. It’s ingrained across the organization, and about the only people that are ever able to successfully pull off a substantial culture change like that are founders. The organization will grind against any and all incompatibilities with their culture until they reach the brink of failure. If workers demand changes to that culture, the most likely outcome is the workers will get replaced.
Which businesses did best? Those whose culture is to exploit the shortcomings of their competitors without any real judgement as to what those exploits should look like.
bruce.desertrat
I literally and demonstrably got more work done from home during the Pandemic than here in the office, but the Boss (of all of us, not me directly) is just certain that anyone not in the office is slacking.
Unrelatedy /s , we’ve had about 1000% turnover of senior staff and faculty.
bruce.desertrat
@different-church-lady:
Hence the Fed working as hard as they can on a punitive recession that will do fuck all to help inflation but sure as hell will teach those uppity peasants their places in the world.
narya
@Omnes Omnibus: TOTALLY get that–lots o privilege over here in narya-land around these issues. I will say that, if we (as a society) wanted to, we could work around the issues you identify and build some flexibility in places where it doesn’t currently exist. But yes–I am very fortunate to be able to do this.
Suzanne
@different-church-lady: I think one of the intractable problems remote work helps solve â or at least sands the edges off â is housing affordability. Housing expenditures as a percentage of income have climbed dramatically in the last 40 years or so. That means that people either rent forever, which leaves those families vulnerable to a lot, or they buy, but many can’t afford to be proximate if they work in an urban area. I think 100% remote isnât going to happen for most companies, but there’s also a lot that could be done with people coming in one week a month, or one day a week, or whatever.
different-church-lady
@bruce.desertrat: You really think an economy being kept afloat by nothing but cheap money can go on forever?
Feathers
In a positive psychology class I took in college, the professor told us that the biggest thing we could do for our personal happiness would be to have a short commute. Basically, a commute sucks. It sucks in slightly different ways, so that you can never just adapt and tune it out. It is a soul crushing debacle to begin and end every day. People don’t want to go back to that.
The other thing that is going on with the bosses is that they have made part of the reason for their existence the “vibrant corporate culture” they create. Spoiler alert. It doesn’t exist. People hate it there. There is a small subset of people who like this sort of stuff. They have taken over corporate leadership and push everyone else out of these roles. People have gotten out from under their control for two years now and they don’t want to go back.
Ruckus
@Salty Sam:
I retired about 10 months ago and it is grand. I’ve had time to build some furniture to replace the congloberation of stuff collected over several years and moves. But other than that it’s really not all that time consuming, as I live in an apartment instead of a SFH. Clean, vacuum, occasionally, enjoy retirement after starting work 60 yrs ago.
different-church-lady
@Suzanne: Speaking of cheap money, unaffordable housing is probably the biggest symptom of it.
Companies and mangers who are smart won’t fall for a fake war between all-remote and all-in-person. They’ll figure out who prefers which and give people the responsibilities that match. That might mean someone who’s mostly remote might have to go in person occasionally, and managers will have to get used to not being on top of their charges constantly (which is a good idea even if you’re in the same building).
Dumb companies will fall for Anne Laurie’s binary construct.
Feathers
@Suzanne: Â I don’t know what is going to happen, but I’m convinced that a reckoning is coming about how zoning has been a (multi)generational post-war disaster which has left us without adequate housing for our current population numbers.
I keep remembering a professor who talked about the German policy of 100% affordable housing. Namely, that local governments weren’t allowed to give building permits for homes that were too expensive to rent to people making the local salaries. The housing stock distribution had to match the local population. Don’t know if that’s still how it works, I read in the last few years about Berlin voters demanding that recently built luxury housing be purchased by the government and turned into public housing. There was just a story this week about how a $100 rise in average rent increases local homelessness by 9%. We really have allowed the capitalists to take over and pushed the consequences of their actions onto individuals, and eventually, the government.
Captain C
@Roger Moore:
He does seem to miss important details more often than someone in his position should.
Salty Sam
Heard a guy on the radio yesterday talking about this, and he told of a guy that he knows who, once his work-day (from home) ends, he shuts down his computer, goes out the door, gets in his car and drives around the block, and then comes back in the house and announces âIâm home from work!â
Said his teenage son looks at him like âWTF Dad, you were just here a few minutes ago!â
grumbles
I work for a former startup, we were bought by a huge company you know the name of.
We more than doubled revenues during the plague years, and this was after several years of growth, going international and expanding our range of offerings. We moved out of our ~300 person office and got a ~50 person executive playground. I’ve been to it exactly twice.
The parent company, a very old, very conservative blue chip, surprised us all by following our lead and selling their HQ and going mostly remote permanently.
I rather suspect these articles are subsidized by people with heavy investments in CRE who become incontinent looking at our example. In the mean time, I’ve worked from home since March 2020 and am never going back.
Matt McIrvin
I’ve seen some conservatives grousing that Biden needs to order everyone in America back to the office. Like he can even do that.
I would expect the next Republican federal trifecta to try some kind of legislation to ban or restrict remote work, just to own the libs and put the little people in their place.
Suzanne
@Feathers:
For me as an architect, the challenges are less in separation of zones (residential, commercial, industrial, etc.) than they are in architectural design requirements like setbacks, “character” requirements, public comment periods, required percentages of open space, minimum parking requirements, etc etc etc. We simply have to make urban spaces more productive, and all of this shit does the opposite.
Kropacetic
Both plausible candidates for MA governor included a lot about reforming zoning in the commonwealth and focusing new housing around existing or expanded public transit.
One dropped out, I’m now stoked to vote for Maura Healey in November.
Half considering using my “unenrolled” voter status to take a Republican ballot, but do I want the possibly sane guy or the Trumpy guy who lost to Liz Warren 33 to 67 a few years ago?
Matt McIrvin
I think I’m with the people who would happily work in person if they didn’t have to do the commute. I actually like being in the office with people at least some of the time; it keeps me focused and energized. But I don’t like wasting two hours a day of my life pushing through Boston-area traffic jams, and that’s what it often used to be. It’s just emotionally and physically punishing.
Pre-COVID I usually negotiated to work from home one day a week, and that was nice. It wasn’t always my most productive day of the week but it could be.
On the other hand, being in a nearly deserted office is depressing–I’ve done that too–and right now, the minority of office workers who actually go in are often in that situation. There’s little point.
Another Scott
@Feathers: Yup. An economy that working people can’t afford is not sustainable.
I’ve told this story before: My MIL and some friends left small-town MN for DC in early 1941 to get government jobs. They ended up living in a boarding house on P Street (which is still there, but is condos or something now). Cheap housing is essential, and if cities don’t explicitly zone for it then it will exist as an underground economy (e.g. 15 workers renting a house) which has its own problems.
We can fix things like these, but we have to be willing to do the work (to fight the NIMBYism, to fight “they’ll bring CRIME!!1”, to fight the developer and realtor lobbies, to fight the money-laundering absentee landlords, to fight the slumlords, etc., etc.). A big part of the solution is probably targeted taxes, but it needs to be done in a way that doesn’t cause a race-to-the-bottom (e.g. a national tax on real estate, 2nd homes, etc.). That could also be used to address things like local schools being so dependent on local property taxes (and all the inequity that results).
Lots of work to do!!
Cheers,
Scott.
Roger Moore
@Martin:Â â
I suspect a big part of this is that WFH was first presented as a short-term expedient rather than a long-term shift. We were first told we just needed to stay home for a few weeks to stop the virus from spreading, after which everything would return to normal. That was then extended a couple weeks or a month at a time. Companies that didn’t really want to switch to WFH took that as an excuse not to plan for a large scale shift and did everything as a short term expedient. By the time it was obvious WFH was going to be around for a long time, the initial expedients had already hardened into a WFH culture. Management that didn’t really want to do WFH didn’t want to spend the time fixing things, so they tolerated what they had put together by accident until that long-awaited day when everyone would return to the office. That’s how you get half-assed solutions.
Salty Sam
My retirement story is kinda roller-coasterish. Â Laid off six years ago, with no desire to work anymore, wife and I sold our home and put everything we had into a cruising sailboat and set off for the tropics.
There was a dawning realization that hammocks strung up between palm trees gets really boring after awhile. Â So weâre back now, hired on as professional grandparents, and Iâm happily rebuilding my blacksmiths forge to go back in business.
Life is weird.
Ruckus
@Feathers:
Very few get paid for commute time/effort. In SoCal a long commute most often takes a car, even as we have some reasonable commute trains/subways/busses and are building out more. But in a population of 10 million people, which is more than a number of states, there likely will never be enough reasonable public transportation.
The point is that commuting to work is your time, not your companies time (at least in the vast majority of cases). So if you have to go into work, and you don’t live within walking distance, you drive. Here with a large portion of that 10 million people. It would be better to not have to go to work if the work can be performed at home. In the end, most of the time, for any work performed on a computer WFH is quite possible and that takes commute time down to less than a minute and zero fuel burned. So other than in person retail, medical, machine work, physical repair work, auto mechanics, and the like. WFH is more than likely just fine – as long as you leave out the pompous, arrogant, know it alls that make up a lot of the supervisory class.
Suzanne
@Another Scott:
I want to be clear that cities donât “zone” for housing affordability. They zone for residential types (single-family, high-density multi-family, low-density multi-family, etc.). Cities and other governments can incentivize affordable projects. But private developers essentially determine the affordability of what they build.
Kropacetic
@Suzanne: Supply matters.
jnfr
@zhena gogolia:
I love this. Thanks for the report.
I have massive hearing problems, I love Zoom everything because I can control the sound.
JaneE
50 years ago, while I was trying to get my first job as a programmer, I had an interview that was 1 1/2 hours away not during the rush hour. As it happened, the HR rep who was assigned to interview me had also been raised in the same town where I was living, and her first question was “do you really want to do that commute every day in the rush hour?”. No, I did not. We spend the allotted time enjoying a cup of coffee and talking about the home town and high school teachers we had in common.
I don’t imagine that commute is any better now.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
Remote working in an option in my profession and the amount of people who job was just being the office busy body was a real eye opener. My personal productivity went up by just not having to worry about if I looked like I working when I was working. People should only work in office who need to be there or they just get in the way.
Suzanne
@Kropacetic: Supply absolutely matters, and cities can put design and development requirements in place that affect the cost of development a lot. But apart from projects developed by a government agency, it is private developers who determine the cost of their projects.
ETA: this is typically determined through a calculation of highest and best use.
Omnes Omnibus
Again, people should be careful to try not to apply their personal preferences and circumstances to the all workers and workplaces.
Jay
@OzarkHillbilly:
best part of my former job, was my peeps,
worst part, was my DS, AssMan, Store Manager who managed through âneggingâ,
those of use who âdid the jobâ, knew and bonded with eachother, and also knew which AssMen and others who did everything they could, to avoid actually doing work.
dnfree
@Omnes Omnibus: I retired 10 years ago (or was retired), but I preferred working in the office too. Â I only lived a few miles from work, so the commute was never bad unless there was a snowstorm. Â But I had a work mindset and a home mindset, and it was easier for me to maintain if the two occurred in different environments.
Iâm not a multitasker either, so maybe thatâs related.
Steve in the ATL
@OzarkHillbilly:
Canât recall your backgroundâwere you part of a heist/caper crew or a dance crew?
I may watch too much tvâŠ.
Ruckus
@Salty Sam:
Life is weird.
That should be etched in stone on Mount Rushmore as it’s possibly more appropriate than what’s there.
I’d ask one question of you and that’s how many years did you work? I started in my fathers business 60+ yrs ago and I think that changed my perspective a lot, that length of time. And as I’ve stated here and before all of my work was performed in businesses that required on sight participation. When I worked full time in professional sports, I actually spent more time on the road than at home/office. So for me, when I retired, I was more than ready not to have to be at all productive for a pay check.
Roger Moore
@Suzanne:
Sure, but the market determines what kind of strategies they’ll take. If we limit the amount of housing that can be built, the builders will naturally focus on whatever is most profitable, which is almost always going to be the high end of the market. They won’t focus on affordable housing until the luxury housing market is satisfied.
Baud
When I work from home, the boss man can’t see me Juice.
mrmoshpotato
Oh it could?
Brachiator
I have been working at home for about 4 years. I love it, especially since it eliminated a long commute.
The downside of the new WFH movement is that home office deductions are no longer available for employees. I have not been seeing that employers are reimbursing employees for their expenses or increasing wages to provide some adjustment.
Geminid
@Old Man Shadow: One of my customers is a corporate management consultant. He’s pretty much retired now, but he keeps up as best he can. During the first summer of the pandemic he told me that some corporate managers had learned an interesting fact: aggregating their employees in a single location led to a lot of time spent preparing for and participating in meetings that they found could be done without once everyone was working remotely.
Suzanne
@Roger Moore: Of course. But itâs important to recognize who-does-what in order to understand how to achieve desired ends. It is not as simple as city planners getting out a pen and looking at a map and deciding to draw a “zone” and put all the working-class people in it. They donât have that kind of direct power.
If you want to get more affordable housing, you have to incentivize it and put the legal/regulatory/market environment in place to make it profitableâŠ. because private developers build it. That “developer” could be as small as homeowner who wants to convert their garage to an apartment.
Development is complicated because it is highly localized and because there are many stakeholders.
lowtechcyclist
@Roger Moore:Â â
I would guess that WFH is also throwing a monkeywrench in the aforementioned “arrive early, leave late” bullshit, because how the fuck can they tell anymore?
Whatever one’s preferences on working at home v. in an office, the demise of that tax on workers’ time and energy would be a Good Thing indeed.
Gin & Tonic
@Roger Moore: Robert Caro, the biographer and historian, who almost by definition works alone, has an office in a different building (NYC here) and puts on a jacket and tie to go to work every day.
tom
@different-church-lady: at least in my line of work (software engineering), people don’t have to be in the same location to do frequent problem solving. If something come up that needs several pairs of eyes, people simply get on a video call, share screens, and figure it out. That is certainly not the case for a lot of jobs, but it is for mine and I suspect a lot of knowledge work.
I agree that there are downsides to remote work, and what they are greatly depend on the type of job. But for my line of work, and I think a lot of knowledge work, the benefits of remote far outweigh the costs.
Roger Moore
@Gin & Tonic:
I think you need to check the assumption that Caro works alone. He does work with at least one research assistant, and it might be better to have an actual office if you’re going to have someone helping you.
PaulB
I’m sorry, but, really, WTF? My reason for insisting on remote work needs to be about safety or else I’m unreasonable? Seriously?
What about cost, convenience, the environment, traffic, family, child care, pet care, dealing with disabilities, etc.? There are literally dozens of reasons why I might find working remotely beneficial to me and to those around me. Why am I being “unreasonable” in considering those factors when I have the conversation with my company about working remotely?
lowtechcyclist
@Suzanne:Â â
You know your stuff, so I don’t doubt you for a second. But it really is rather distressing to hear that that’s how the economics of office-to-residential work (or rather, don’t).
Because sure, so many systems in a building have to be redone when you don’t have shared kitchens and restrooms anymore, but an ignorant outsider like me would look at the structure itself and say, that’s still worth a lot not to have to redo, and then think, continuing WFH is an opportunity to put a real dent in the housing shortage that so many areas are experiencing these days, with residential prices going through the roof. But apparently not.
Right now, I’m sitting in the sort of house that should be ‘affordable housing,’ a smallish single-family home in Plant City, FL that my wife’s late grandmother used to live in. It’s not that long since it was worth maybe 60-70K, and now Zillow, Redfin, and similar sites are saying it’s worth a quarter of a million. (ETA: It’s within commuting distance of Tampa, but I guess people didn’t used to commute there from this far away.) Ultimately, you’re swimming against the tide to try to create affordable housing if there just plain isn’t nearly enough housing in the first place.
In this case, we’re the beneficiaries of this bubble because we’re getting the house ready to put on the market later this month, but it still horrifies me to see rather ordinary housing that people of no particular means used to be able to afford suddenly become way out of reach if they aren’t already owners.
And since as you say, the decisions that affect housing availability are made locally, it’s hard to solve what has become a nationwide problem. To a patzer like me, anyway, it looked like office-to-residential conversions could at least help ameliorate this situation, and it’s a real disappointment to hear, from someone who knows what they’re talking about, that it’ll make little if any difference.
FelonyGovt
Open thread- I believe someone, maybe MisterDancer?, was collecting up instances where people could no longer prescription meds they needed as fallout from the Dobbs decision. Hereâs another one.
Gin & Tonic
@Roger Moore: He writes alone. His primary research assistant is his wife.
different-church-lady
@PaulB: Maybe. Maybe.
PaulB
At a prior company, where we (supposedly) had flexible working hours, my manager dinged me on my annual performance review for being the first to leave the office every day. Not only did he blindside me with this criticism (rather than having this conversation with me when he first noticed this) but he had no answer when I pointed out to him that I was an early riser and that my emails showed that I was in the office a good two hours before any other worker arrived, including him, and that those two hours were the most productive hours of my day. He also had no answer when I pointed out that I was getting all of my assignments done on time and with high quality, despite my supposed slacking off by leaving early.
I started looking for a new job immediately and left the company a few weeks later. Life is too short to put up with that nonsense when you don’t have to.
I bring this up because that conversation years ago resembles the conversations I’ve heard about from managers who don’t like their employees working remotely.
PaulB
Seriously, then, why even bother to bring that up? I would assume that safety is so low on the list of reasons why someone would want to work remotely that it’s something that rarely even comes up, much less that it should be a determining factor. Those other factors I mention, and others I could probably come up with given a little more time and research, are just as valid and just as reasonable.
Edited to add that safety isn’t mentioned in the Boston Globe article nor has anyone else here mentioned it. That one really came out of left field.
Starfish
@different-church-lady: Is this a joke?
We have been collaborating during the pandemic on Zoom. Slightly less work gossip, but only slightly.
The other day, I knew someone was about to quit before they publicly announced it because of their online behavior. They weren’t even on my team or anything.
Suzanne
@lowtechcyclist: The devil is always, always in the details. Converting a 40-story glass tower in a dense downtown is a lot different than an exurban office park full of cheap low-rise buildings.
Conversions of any type are pretty difficult. There’s a lot of unknowns and a lot of financial risk. Usually there is enabling work required, which means more phases of work, which means cost. New builds are in most ways a great deal easier, especially if there’s underground work required. Scrape the site, start over, all in one phase. No dealing with weird conditions, you can have crews roll through one after another. You can even prefabricate a lot off-site and bring it in and really just assemble the building. And if the buildings already on the site aren’t worth a whole lot (and usually they aren’t â the land is the valuable part), theyâre not worth the trouble and expense to keep.
Sure Lurkalot
I retired before Covid but my final gig was a comboâŠI got a nice office downtown with 24/7 paid covered parking and the ability to WFH whenever. Luckily, one BR in our home was already office like and I added the equipment needed and desired to make it a productive space. Now itâs a pay the bills/craft room combo.
I had commuted to jobs daily prior to that (anywhere from 2 to 10 miles) and it was nice not having to commute on bad weather days, especially in dark winter on snowy/icy roads.
I think itâs good if more people have the flexibility to WFH. Commuting is dangerous, bad for the planet and thereâs better ways to spend time (especially if your commute is by car). But I donât deny thereâs a cost for urban downtown areas and office parks. Once environment is built, itâs not just a matter of converting one type of building to a different useâŠthe whole paradigm shifts, as our brilliant Suzanne so well informs.
Soprano2
@Omnes Omnibus: I don’t want to WFH either. I have no good space for it; I have not that great internet, a cat, two dogs and a retired husband. I wouldn’t be able to get anything done. Plus, l like going to the office – I want a hard separation between work and home. Honestly, I’m tired of all the worshiping of WFH. I got so tired during the worst of Covid of not knowing who was working or when they were working. And no, I don’t want to message you on Teams every time I need something!
Steve in the ATL
@Soprano2: something that works well for certain people doesnât work well for everyone? Â Whatever, crazy pants!
Kent
My 24 year old daughter works for a small social media marketing firm out of Los Angeles. Â They basically manage social media accounts for business clients so run the Instagram, twitter, FB, etc. pages for a big suite of small and medium businesses. Â She specifically manages a variety of clients from jewelry chains, fitness chains, and spas.
Her boss lives in LA but the entire company of about 10 account managers is spread around the west coast and it is all virtual. Â She works from home (her bedroom in our house in the Portland area) but spends at least half her time working from Bend OR (where her boyfriend lives) or various beach towns when they are surfing.
I gotta imagine her boss is saving a TON of money by running his business completely virtual because no suburban suite of offices to pay rent/utilities on. Â Plus he can recruit talent nationally rather than only people with commuting distance of their LA location.
I expect businesses like this are going to drive the tony expense-laden firms out of business that have fancy offices and lots of costs. Â We donât live in a Mad Men world anymore.
Kevin
I have a 10-15 minute commute and still wonât ever go back. Mostly itâs because my coworkers had little desire to treat covid like a real issue. I can do my job (accountant) better at home with minimal distraction.
Iâve averaged once/month in the office this year and thatâs plenty for me. Anyone demanding people return to the office is just too lazy to figure out a new operating system.
JML
I don’t want to go back to 100% WFH; I do like seeing people at work and getting some of that collaboration action on the fly that’s harder to do via the interwebs. But I also hate having to be back in the office full time again, because there’s really no reason for it. The university’s argument is all about “vibrant culture”, and my previous boss (who has retired now) was one of these old school bosses who wanted all his people where he could see them, especially because he was someone who thought that in person was always the best way to communicate. (Probably because that was the style HE preferred) But I was just as productive at home as I was in the office, and while my commute is only about 30 minutes, it’s also almost 30 miles.
For me, I’d work 2-3 days a week in the office and the rest from home. The fact that they’re bending themselves in knots at the senior levels to avoid even talking about it as an option on campus says something. But the reality is, the teaching faculty increasingly don’t show up on campus unless they’re teaching in person, and they’re trying to pretend that’s not really happening. Since their over half the employees on campus, the unwillingness to consider options for the rest of staff is increasingly noticeable. We’re hiring a new head of HR and I’m hopeful they’ll be more forward thinking…
Soprano2
@Suzanne: What do you think about repurposing parts of malls as living spaces? It seems to me it wouldn’t be that hard to do.
Soprano2
@Steve in the ATL: I don’t mind people working from home, but I get tired of the “Why would anyone do anything else?” attitudes. Lots of people don’t like it or can’t do it, and lots of jobs can’t be done from home. Try cleaning a sewer main from your home.
Suzanne
@Soprano2: Depends on what kind of mall. Low-rise strip mall retail probably isnât worth the cost of redevelopment as is, and more units would be needed, so it’s another scrape-and-start-over situation, probably to low-rise wood construction (five stories or fewer). If youâre talking about a big mall, like the Mall of America or Roosevelt Field or whatever, those types of buildings donât convert well to residences. By code, residences need windows and means of egress and fire partitions or barriers between units. If the building itself is going to be kept intact, it’s probably better converted to office or educational or healthcare use. Those sites are also advantageously zoned, and rezoning to residential is usually not desirable for an owner (less profitable than retail).
The project I am working on now is a redevelopment of a large suburban mall, but the entire mall is being demolished and the entire site is being redeveloped much more densely (think vertical). There will be some residential, but as mixed useâŠ. High-density residential on top of some high-density commercial. And it will be luxury housing, not “affordable”.
Steve in the ATL
@Soprano2: easy peasyâtween housing surrounding Hot Topic!
Soprano2
@Suzanne: That’s interesting, thanks for the response. I hadn’t thought about needing windows. We have a mall here that’s still doing well, but we lost the Sears anchor a few years ago and the space is still vacant. I wondered about the utility of turning it into living space.
Suzanne
FWIW, if youâre really interested in increasing the amount of “affordable” housing â which is generally defined as “below market rate” â probably the best way to do it is to eliminate single-family residential zoning to allow homeowners to build guest houses/ADUs or convert garages or whatever. Large-scale affordable projects, owned by a public housing authority or funded by HUD, are not too common. And new construction, either on a greenfield site or a redeveloped site, is usually too expensive for a developer to want to do it as “affordable”. They will build market-rate housing first. Even that is good, thoughâŠ. more supply is needed.
This is why itâs important to understand who-does-what in this system we have.
kindness
With all due respect it was pretty easy to spot which managers were idiots during zoom meetings too. I think a lot of the return to work is ego driven by ego needy management.
satby
@Omnes Omnibus: I’m struck by how many people are ok with working in an office but hated to commute. Working in downtown Chicago and living in the outer edge of the city meant that my commute and many of my neighbors’ was by the Metra trains. Which was nice: it could be social or not as you chose, it created a clear break from the office hours, and the bonus was regular exercise walking to and from the trains. An entirely different experience commuting by car, which I had to do for years too.
Another Scott
@Suzanne:
I agree that defining “affordable” is crucial, but zoning has a huge impact on the housing mix going forward. At least in my county – I’m sure it’s different around the country.
E.g. FAIRFAX COUNTY COMPREHENSIVE PLAN, 2017 Edition POLICY PLAN
Housing, Amended through 2-23-2021 (12 page .PDF)
Of course, any plan depends on county elected officials and managers being determined to implement the plan…
FWIW.
Cheers,
Scott.
Suzanne
@Another Scott: Thatâs a policy plan. There’s no zoning in it at all. It doesnât indicate anything about what can or cannot be built in specific places/defined zones. Itâs a general outline of goals for housing, but thatâs all it is. Again, private developers will set the prices for their units, and cities can incentivize them.
Your county probably has links to the zoning maps on their website. That will tell you, down to the foot, what parcels are designated as which zone.
Omnes Omnibus
@satby:  I have never lived more than 10 miles from my work place. Commuting has never been too bad. OTOH that is because of choices I have made.
GoBlueInOak
@different-church-lady: My job involves running a department that daily problem solves on project finance investments that involve several multiples of millions of dollars. We are 100% remote since start of pandemic. Â Our creativity & ability to strategize solutions in real time as a team has not been impacted AT ALL by WFH. Team productivity is up since start of WFH. Our investment volume has tripled. And Iâve added, on-boarded and trained multiple new staff over that time period.
You have no idea what your are talking about.
Another Scott
@Suzanne: Yes. There are lots of specific zoning pages and maps and so forth, but the zoning has to fit the plan.
Yes, buy-in from developers is a problem and market forces are a problem. My (poorly expressed) point is that localities can drive the shape of the housing stock via plans and zoning that meets those plans. Local government matters.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Benno
@zhena gogolia: our zoom faculty meetings are atrocious. Half the time is spent complaining that students donât turn in cameras when we have to shift classes online (weâre still being very flexible). Most of the complaining is done by faculty members who donât turn on their cameras.
Bill Arnold
@CaseyL:
Offices, with doors, were no longer the norm pre-pandemic. (I ‘d be OK with RTO if they were still the norm; had an office with a door for decades.)
Open plan was the norm just pre-pandemic, maybe with offices for some managers. At least in corporate America.
Huge open spaces, optimized for spread of respiratory viruses and for constant distractions.
In a job in a open-plan office that ended in a cost-cutting layoff just prior to the pandemic, I once out of curiosity counted (IIRC) 14 audible conversations or 1/2 conversations, about 5 of which were loud and clear enough that I could have written a transcript for them.
Combined with 190 degree peripheral vision for motion, it was hell on concentration.[1] I could fully focus/flow for maybe 5-10 seconds at time, which made work output (software, mostly) pretty choppy. The entire team sat at a single long table. Daily “standup”/scrum meetings were over videoonferencing (webex), with everyone seated at a 30 foot table (one guy remote).
The impact of the âopenâ workspace on human collaboration (2 July 2018)
(bold mine. I might have worked at one of those two field study sites post-open-plan-office conversion; the description precisely matches.)
[1] Some of us see the gorilla, reverse-engineer the experiment, and suspect 40% that the intently watching graduate student to their right was the one in the gorilla suit. (Hypothetically.) Many are able to block out reality hard enough to not see the gorilla, or, way way back when on the savanna, the lions.
Ruckus
@PaulB:
When I worked in Pro Sports I had a cubical for when I was in town. The lady in the next cubical once chided me for showing up at 8:30-9 on the days I was in the office. I asked her when I left for the day. She didn’t know because she came in at 7 and left at 3:30. I usually left at 5:30-6 because I had to communicate with people all around the country and I’m anything but a morning person. She was an hourly worker and I was salaried and I worked, during the season, 7 days a week, often well more than 12 hrs a day at events. She had no idea what I did or how many hrs a week I worked. She found out when her husband took over one of my assignments, the amount of time that some of us worked. She never mentioned it ever again. People get used to their lives, they often don’t recognize when someone else does things in a different manner and either gives actually acceptable results.
Matt McIrvin
@lowtechcyclist:
In my profession, they have ways. Ping ’em on Slack, see if there’s a response, look at the timing of code checkins and ticket comments. Working online puts you in another kind of fishbowl.
Paul in KY
@pacem appellant: I was the same way. Worked in office (only 2 of us) all of 2020. Had to start WFH and feel this is the way to do it and that I was a dingbat for coming into office when I didn’t have to.