this post was submitted on 02 Mar 2024
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Yes, there are clear benefits to working in person. If one can't see that, I'd say that person has social issues. I could go on...
BUT, WFH is clearly a better solution all in all. Better for employee mental health, better for the environment, all that and more.
My company (software dev) seems to be navigating this well. We're leaning heavily on hiring people local to our remaining office. One person is required to come in, Tuesday-Thursday, and that's what we hired them for, a warm body in the office to assist. For the work I do, I need someone around to accept deliveries and help around.
While no one else is mandated to come in, it's nice that they can. Teams meet up, get to know each other, work together briefly, etc., good for morale. We're social animals, we benefit by socializing. This should be obvious, but lemmy tells me otherwise.
One time I was hanging around the office, wanted to meet a user to fix their SSD. Couple of other folks were there, no one on my team. Shooting the bull with the CSR manager I learned a useful thing I didn't know! Couple of devs sitting in front of me were talking about a thing my team was confused about. "Hold up! So what's the deal with that?" Wouldn't have thought to ask them otherwise. Talking to another guy I became aware of some new tech I didn't know about.
Picture this: I have two people wanting me to help them, both asks being equal. One I know personally, the other I've only seen on Zoom. First guy came to my wedding, the other I haven't seen since I onboarded them. Who you think I'm helping first?
Story I related to senior management, including the CEO, while having dinner one night. Poster on reddit claimed to be a tech recruiter. This guy kept a list of local companies mandating RTO. He went after them on LinkedIn for remote work, "Like shooting fish in a barrel." LOL, half our staff, the best half, would walk if RTO was mandated.
I definitely know everyone can't work from home, I've got a couple coworkers who can't focus there because they got kids, or a spouse who works from home and takes meetings in the one office, or they need the social interaction. But, wfh saves gas, saves money on commute, allows saving money on childcare, more flexibility with doctor and dentist appointments, and has tons of other benefits. It's got lots of benefits, especially in cities with tons of traffic. Having it be a choice seems like the best option all around.
All with ya! Mandating RTO is a bad strategy, companies will lose top talent. But, as I said, there are benefits to getting together in person now and again.
Study after study even before covid shows remote workers are more productive. You shouldn't have to go in the office if your job can be remote unless it's for a day of monthly meetings for that face to face time. If your day to day can be remote it's better for the business and the workers to be remote.
For sure! I see a lot of value in conferences and retreats for that purpose. Personally though hybrid was so much worse than full remote. As soon as we went hybrid people just went totally dark from the rest. I would come in every few nounths and having to catch the cubical jockies up to speed on what the rest of the world was up to. Also way too much gossip in office sometimes.
Hybrid also led to a bunch of duplicate tracking of work. Jira, emails, chats, in person conversations, in person meetings, white boards, Visios, PowerPoint's, etc all to talk to different people to say the same things.
It was also a generally dysfunctional place to work but some of it was introduce with RTO.
Yea, lemmy's biggeat issue is that it's chockful of delusional kids.
The only part I disagree with is sharing such things with c suite - too much of a potential to backfire.
Dude Lemmy is full of 40+ year old nerds like me. It's probably the oldest community on the Internet demographically.
You silly kids.
Have you seen Facebook?