Post Covid-19 remote work plans and goals

I know there’s been plenty of commentary on this in the past, but I’d like to see a dedicated thread. Post Covid-19 remote work plans and goals.

My company is all over the place. We had some fully remote people pre-Covid, but not many and we’re hiring a few fully remote positions now, but I have a position which they won’t let me hire as fully remote. There’s talk of most my coworkers doing a 2 in 3 from home schedule. Which seems mostly self imposed.

I personally would love to go fully remote and am hoping to eventually have the option. I’ve asked about it, but my boss didn’t take it very well.

  1. It’d be great to live wherever I want, and not the specific city of my job. This would come with sizeable tax benefits as well.
  2. I think commuting into the office is a waste of time.
  3. I dress to impress and think it’s important, but I don’t really like doing it, and will be glad to save on clothes. I wouldn’t own half the clothes I do if it weren’t for work. I didn’t own a polo or sports coat before my first job.
  4. I have an espresso machine at my house and love having great coffee whenever I want.
  5. Lunch and snack options are so much better when working from home.
  6. The temperature at my house is whatever I want it to be. I was always cold at work.
  7. The noise level at my house is more manageable. I worked in a cube and would always be hearing 10+ conversations.

The only con is I’d miss the comradery of hanging out at lunch, coffee breaks, and happy hour. But it’s pretty heavily out-weighted.

Fully Remote - was partially remote

I have switched to fully remote from fully in the office. I work for a large company and none of the people I work with are in my office. So I can do remote meetings from home or from an office setting. After experiencing work from home for the last year, it was a no brainer for me. In general, the management wants people in the office buildings. I personally think it is because they really like to Big Brother everything.

I joined my firm just at the start of COVID so have been remote the whole time, but radio silence on going back. It does sound like we’ll have some sort of hybrid. I heard my previous employer mandate 3 in 2 out across the board, I don’t think I’d mind that too much. I think my ideal is 1-2 in, 3-4 out, especially since many, even most of the people I work with won’t be wherever I am anyway.

My company had a survey last summer, the question was “What is your preference after the office reopens?” And the choices were “Full Time Remote, Hybrid, Full Time Office.” Very few people chose the 3rd option. There has been no official announcement, but I assume each employee will have their choice. Especially since my department has hired 2 full time remote employees and converted an existing employee to remote.

I’m personally looking forward to going back into the office. I like having the separation of work and home. But I think I’d choose Hybrid. It’s nice to not have the commute a couple days a week.

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My company was in the process of moving headquarters - selling old building, and leasing new one. Given the timing, we are never going back to old office, and will move to the new office in the first half of 2022. We are going back hybrid.

I am skeptical of hybrid. The upside of working in the office is talking to people face to face, but if we are all in 40%, any given day, if three people want to chat, the chance all three are in is very low.

And, when there are meetings, we will have to use Teams if 1+ person is remote, and Teams from the office does not seem ideal, especially given in this new setup, it is open floor plan with nobody with assigned seating.

Yes I’ve wondered about this. Ideally there would be some sort of organized in vs out by team. I wonder if companies will seek to do that also because you can be a lot more efficient with commercial real estate if you’re always 80%+ occupied but each individual employee is only there 40-60% of the time.

I was essentially full-time WFH pre-pandemic, going into the office (5 hours away) for part of a week each month, for meetings and to spend some time with my team that (at the time) was concentrated in that office.

Something will change around the time the next school year starts up…but I’m not certain what the end result will be, and I expect that it will evolve over time.

Within my team, early in the pandemic, we were expecting that most people would go into the office for 2 or 3 days a week (concentrating meetings, etc. on those days) and WFH the rest of the week (project work), with the company encouraging more hybrid work as a means for controlling real estate expense in the face of a growing employee count.

However, in our broader department, we did have some folks that were going into the office when it was open on a voluntary basis last summer, because they preferred the separation inherent in working from the office. But on the other hand, there are other changes that have resulted in my team and my department having become more geographically diverse.

So…we’ll see.

We are talking about coordinating our time in the office.

I think that can help some. Certainly if small teams who work together can come in the same days, that will increase effectiveness.

My situation may be a bit unique, but there is a large set of people I work with occasionally, many of whom are in different departments, there may be times we can coordinate to come in the same day, otherwise feels pretty hit or miss.

For example, within my team, when (pre-pandemic) there were discussions on the flex-work program my company was very slowly talking about rolling out, we were thinking of being in-office Monday/Tuesday or Monday/Tuesday/Wednesday, concentrating our meetings on those days, and then leaving the rest of the week to focus on projects/real work.

The challenge, of course, is what happens when we are working with a team that is on Thursday/Friday schedule. The corporate objective was to reduce the need for office space, but if everyone wants to be in the office on the same 2-3 days of the week…

My Pixel just served up this related article:

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Working from home full-time.

Fully remote/WFH

I used to go into a satellite office, but no one on my team was there.

I am not certain if that office will ever reopen

Any company that doesn’t offer fully remote will basically get the scraps.

Most of the positions I see being offered now give the fully remote option. The ones that don’t are likely archaic in the culture/modernization department, which will not appeal to the younger talent pool.

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So, at lunch, while waiting in the lobby area for my first professional haircut in over a year, Android’s news feed presented this article:

My team was talking about picking in-office days as a team, so we could all show up the same days, but on days convenient to us.

My company requires 3 days in the office for most workers. My team chose two “team days” in the office and each selected their own 3rd day. I have to be in 4 days.

I suspect they will relax these rigid requirements in 6-12 months. I think they were trying to do the same thing company wide, which isn’t really necessary for productivity. It’s an awesome company in most ways so we’ll gripe among ourselves and then get over it.

PreCovid, we could have all worked from home 3 days a week but usually did 1 at most.

there are so many remote actuarial positions posted that if I worked at your company I would be jumping ship in a month

You could bring the machine to work. Then you’d be known as the espresso guy.