Will you go back to the office?

[dothemath]

My company does not ask for monitors back when people leave. I use a personal monitor anyway.

[ViceFleeble]

Did you locate the hidden camera and bug that the company placed inside the monitors to track your every move?

[ao_fan]

Yeah i also use my own monitor. When covid first happened they said they could supply monitors but i wound up buying my own.

[Maphistos_Sidekick]

At the time I shifted to WFH (before the pandemic), the company would have sent me a single conventional monitor if I had pushed hard enough. I think they’ll now send a pair of conventional monitors.

When I work in my office at home, I connect to a 31 inch ultrawide monitor I got for that purpose. On rare occasions when I work in the living room, I connect to the 60-inch TV.

[Snikelfritz]

I think most upper management types are extremely extroverted, so they think everyone is like that and would prefer to be in the office.

[Maphistos_Sidekick]

Running articles on companies using Labor Day to push the return to office message seems to be a thing.

The WSJ is running this (supposedly a non-paywalled link):
https://www.wsj.com/articles/back-to-the-office-hybrid-work-remote-labor-day-11662151436?st=2jj1gqj329940id&reflink=desktopwebshare_permalink

A couple of quotes:

When everyone was working remotely earlier in the pandemic, Mr. Kostelnik said he found that his “A players” were self-sufficient and thriving but his B and C players weren’t benefiting from the knowledge and experience of their colleagues.

“It’s not about productivity; it’s not about the output or making sure you’re getting what you pay for,” he said. “The office is a resource.”

Workers largely prefer flexibility both in terms of when they work and how often they go to the office, surveys have shown. And while the labor market has been tight, many companies have obliged them: Some firms that initially planned to bring people back three days a week decided to opt for two instead. Others, including cloud-communications company Twilio Inc., initially rolled out hybrid arrangements but changed course and decided to go remote-first.

Some hiring managers say they have been able to attract talent by telling prospective candidates they can work from anywhere. But the number of remote jobs has started to fall, even as demand for remote roles remains high. Around 17% of paid job postings in the U.S. on the professional-networking site LinkedIn offered remote work in July of this year, down from a high of around 20% in March. In July, paid remote jobs attracted the majority of applications, at around 54%.

When it comes to primary motivators for going into the office, “putting in facetime” rose from 2% last quarter to 10% in the most recent quarter, according to a survey of more than 10,000 knowledge workers from Future Forum, a consortium funded by Slack Technologies LLC, Boston Consulting Group and MillerKnoll.

“That is not good,” said Brian Elliott, executive leader of Future Forum, referring to making an appearance in front of superiors as a reason for going to the office.

Workers should ideally be motivated to go in to collaborate and build relationships with colleagues, Mr. Elliott said, not because they feel it’s important for the boss to see them working.

The same survey also showed that 40% of employees working mostly or entirely in-person said that doing so was helping their career trajectory.

[3rookie]

@Maphistos_Sidekick

Running articles on companies using Labor Day to push the return to office message seems to be a thing.

When everyone was working remotely earlier in the pandemic, Mr. Kostelnik said he found that his “A players” were self-sufficient and thriving but his B and C players weren’t benefiting from the knowledge and experience of their colleagues.

“It’s not about productivity; it’s not about the output or making sure you’re getting what you pay for,” he said. “The office is a resource.”

Workers should ideally be motivated to go in to collaborate and build relationships with colleagues, Mr. Elliott said, not because they feel it’s important for the boss to see them working.

I agree with these messages 100%. In my experience, building relationships in the office also translates to significant knowledge transfer. I must say that I respect those who still feel the Covid risk is too high, and companies should continue to have solutions for them and be flexible on this front.

[John.S.Mill]

I don’t like to interact with people in the office, so not sure how much I “learned” from my colleagues. Everyone’s personality is different. If you’re an extrovert, then I’m sure an in-office experience benefits you more.

Being in the office exposed me more to being micromanaged and dinged up on irrelevant stuff like my constant phone usage, and made my relationship with my past managers more toxic. Now all my behavioral issues are hidden, and only my products are evaluated, which is how it should be.

[ao_fan]

Yeah you certainly lose that collaboration ability with coworkers with everyone wfh. I think that is the reason they are sort of pushing us to go back a few days a week after labor day.

My main issue with this is i hate my apartment and am constantly looking to escape either to a another state entirely thousands of miles away or to my parents house which isnt thousands of miles away but commuting to the office from there is awful and i wouldnt do it.

I think my plan is going to be to go to the office close to full time when im in my apartment and not at all when im escaping my apartment.

We also hired a lot of entry level people since the pandemic and i barely know them since we are not in the office. Thats weird.

[ao_fan]

If this wfh thing lasts forever what’s to stop employers from outsourcing the work to cheaper labor in other countries?

[Lucy]

Some were doing that before the pandemic. I think the two major downsides are

Time zones
Availability to visit from time to time

[John.S.Mill]

and accent. some people just can’t understand certain accents and makes communication quite difficult

[Lucy]

Accent is more of an issue with East Asia than with South Asia in my experience. (In part because it’s not just accent, it’s also a fluency with English grammar.)

It occurs to me that a lot of south and central America is in compatible time zones, and a lot of people there have excellent English and lower wages than the US, though.

[Ajstudies]

@ao_fan

what’s to stop employers from outsourcing the work to cheaper labor in other countries?

This is the same argument I’ve been hearing for years against allowing remote work. Personally I think the quality would suffer. We are not just number crunchers.

[Lucy]

But that’s not an argument for disallowing remote work. If it makes sense to work remotely, it might make sense to hire cheaper labor. But i can’t see any argument from the employer’s perspective that says, “don’t let people work from home, because if you get good at that you might be able to get employees for less money.”

[twig93]

No, I always hear it as an argument for the employees: don’t insist on working remotely 100% of the time. If your job can be done from home, it can be done from India.

[Lucy]

But if it CAN be done from India, do you think your employer will never notice? Lots of jobs are fine from India.

[Ajstudies]

Lots of jobs are fine from India, but I don’t think mine is. We have a few 100% remote actuaries, but they were onsite pre-Covid, and thus steeped in “the way we do things”. They are also still US based.

[twig93]

Personally I disagree with the statement that lots of jobs can be done fine from India. There’s always a loss. But whether the employer cares is a different matter.

I would MUCH rather talk to an American customer service rep than an Indian one, for example. The Indian ones have a thick accent that is difficult for me to understand over the phone, and in my experience they tend to be trained to read from a script the canned solution to a common problem rather than use their brains to listen to what my issue is and think for a minute before trying to actually help me with my problem. They also waste a ton of time asking me how my day is and profusely apologizing that I’m having the issue. I’d rather they STFU while the voice recognition software searches for keywords in my statement.

BUT… a demonstrably sufficient quantity of people in management DNGAF if the quality of their call centers suffer that loads of them have been outsourced.

No, my job can’t be done as well from India as from my home. But that doesn’t mean someone won’t try. And they’re more likely to try if I insist that there’s no benefit to the company to me showing up to the office… which is also probably not a true statement.

[twig93]

In general you can skimp on essentials, especially including actuarial work, for years, maybe a decade, before a big massive problem emerges that calls attention to the issue.

I once worked for an employer who had done exactly that. Eh, last year’s products & rates are fine. We can cheap out on experience studies: so long as we show the board we did something it’s not too important if it’s right. Financial reporting is just numbers on papers.

Until it’s not. I was brought in during the “oh shit, I think we’ve neglected things for too long” phase, at which point I think they roughly doubled the actuarial staff to cover the same workload. But the prior managers probably had praise heaped on them for running lean efficient departments (whose few overworked actuaries were cranking out un-reviewed error-filled work).