Yes, we had the people say they were going to go back so they could keep their office or desk. They aren’t going back more than a day a week. Hardly anyone is. But why did they even want to sign up for that? My thought: kick me out and give me another reason to wfh…oh no…
My home setup is better than i have at the office as well. The only reason to go in is to socialize, so i pick what looks to be a more social day to go in the office. But now no one respects calendars either…7am call, 5pm call. Those kill any thought of going in.
Unclear if you’re agreeing that this is the case.
All the people we’ve had working here in the past year have been 100% WFH, Friday’s off. And it’s been at least as effective as 5 days a week in office. Everyone works at 100% efficiency, except when I occassionally push them to take a break. I expect that most actuaries have enough drive that they’d perform similiarly.
offices have too much socializing and going to get coffee and screwing around on GoA and so on. I bet that pads an hour a day or more for most people, and 2 hours a day for cordwood employees. WFH has none of that for ee’s that have a bit of drive.
Well maybe at Lake Wobegon Mutual Insurance, but I don’t buy it as a rule of thumb.
There’s much less interaction, much less time for training & mentoring, much less ad-hoc lesson time for junior people, much less camaraderie building, and too much burden falls on people in the office relative to people WFH.
I agree with not buying the 100% efficiency argument, but I think a 100% WFH company can work. And all of those things you mention can be developed, but it requires the development to come from the top and requires more effort on managers and supervisors to make it work. I also think it is probably better/easier for smaller or newer companies to make this transition.
I think it is probably extremely difficult for a large existing company to transition from primarily in the office to 100% WFH.
Most of that is neither measurable nor definable. The rest of it is easily replaceable with wfh technology by people who are actually interested in working from home. This ‘I have to breathe in your airspace’ is boomer level stuff for people who refuse to change for no good reason.
I don’t need to trade 2 hours of my life every day commuting so I can have some vague sense of camaraderie with people I work with. I can do that by having a 15 minute conversation over zoom every monday morning where I ask how everyone’s weekend was.
And as I noted elsewhere, all that non-definable stuff, that’s what people in office are doing instead of working. At least that’s what they were doing when I worked at HO. developing ‘camaraderie’ when there’s a project we’re working on.
much less time for training & mentoring,
that’s built in here. We take defined time for training. Mentoring happens on an ongoing basis. In fact sometimes I have to close off the conversation with ‘OK, that’s enough old man stories about this project for today’. There’s plenty of time for training and mentoring.
much less ad-hoc lesson time for junior people,
This happens all the time, as I’m reviewing tasks with our ee’s. When it comes up when we’re IM’ing, I just IM "got time for a call’, and we hop on a video call and go over it.
Our junior staff and our coop students get better training here than any office environment I’ve ever been in.
Oh, I think a WFH company can work, it just won’t be/cannot be the same as if people were co-located together.
WFH requires a different culture. There will be different challenges.
My son just graduated college and is looking for his first real job. I told him to NOT look for a WFH gig. He should seek out a workplace with learning options and mentoring.
You would be better served telling your son to find a boss that he thinks will mentor and train him. Regardless of environment the manager makes the difference in how well you’re trained and mentored. If he takes an office job with a shite manager his career will start on the rocks.
At my current office, I have my own refrigerator, my own bathroom, my own break room, my own gym, my own pool. A drive-to office has to compete with that (or pay me a shit-ton more, especially with gas prices these days ($6+/gallon here).
Well, really, in a room full of actuaries and we are arguing soft stuff like this?
I’ve been there. We were one of the first companies to go paperless in my industry, and it was three months of discomfort for me. Yes it’s easier to just go to the filing cabinet and pull a file, and handwrite notes. Until it’s not, because it’s easier to actually just pull up the CRM and type in the notes. It just took three months for me to be more comfortable doing the CRM than the paper. And then, the benefits were worth it.
We had a 75yo working with us who had a hard time moving over. I had to explain that if someone called when they weren’t around, I couldn’t read his handwritten notes in his paper file that was in his desk 500 miles from me. His solution? Keep the paper notes and the CRM. Geeesh people. Don’t be that guy.
There are two things I have not been able to replace from my time in a cube-farm:
The pop-up discussions that happen when you bump into people on the way to/from the john/meetings/etc.
The serendipitous learning that happens when you overhear what other people (other actuaries, underwriters, finanance folks, etc.) are doing when working at their desks.
Just about everything else – the social interactions, the collaboration, and the supervision – can be handled via technology if people adapt to such (and, with the pandemic, things have become much better in that regard).
That second bullet point is where I see a particular downside to 100% WFH, especially when considering actuarial students on staff. Whether that cost is greater than the intangible benefits is debatable.
I can see that many people want to WFH, and prefer it, but that wasn’t the point.
My point was that people are more effective when they are together.
SpaceLobster’s trying to contend that people are more effective working in isolation than when they are together in an office. I think that idea is preposterous. My experience has been different than his, so he “Ok, Boomer”'ed me.
