That’s terrible. My company is doing a RTO mandate, but it’s far more flexible than that. No one is being forced to move. People inside the radius aren’t happy about it, and I expect some of them will find other jobs after bonuses are paid out, but all in all it’s looking like a better policy than what some others in the industry are dealing with right now.
We have always hired remote actuaries and rely on that model even more so now (virtually all of our experienced hires in the last 5 years have been remote, and even some in senior executive roles have been, including my boss).
There was a post on LinkedIn about Amazon returning to 5 days a week in the office and every one of the 35 comments was saying how great it was. I must be in an alternate universe.
Auto-Owners is currently going through a RT-hybrid-O order right now and it’s going poorly. I am not affiliated.
Some people have quit, many others are seeking new jobs. Approximately 7% of their employees signed a petition with personal statements of how it negatively impacted them and emailed the petition companywide. I’m told morale is low, and people are saying they don’t really want to get work done.
I think a lot of employers are doing exactly that.
Do we have data on what percentage of workers were working in-person in 2020 and what percentage are within, say, 30 miles of an office that they’re allowed to return to in 2024/25 when they’re being expected to return?
Just curious. I think my employer is now >50% remote, so I assume I don’t have anything to worry about but who knows?!?!
Depends on some Finance jag-off in your company noticing, “Hey, we lease this building, but no one uses it, and we are stuck until 2030. We should make people come to the office!”
Yeah, I debated the right distance. 50 miles from the sticks to an office in suburban Omaha is pretty different from 50 miles from Riverside to downtown Los Angeles in any case.
Maybe I should say “1 hour rush hour commute time”.
My prior employer drew a line at 25 miles, which is how I discovered my house is 25.2 miles from their midtown office (a bird would be shorter distance though). Still takes 75-90m to get there door to door.
Not that I’m against hybrid working, I actually switched bc it was silly working hybrid in an office with no one I worked with or supported.
I started WFH a few years before the pandemic, because I was spending 90+ minutes a day commuting to the local office…and I didn’t work with anyone in the building. If my employer reversed course and started requiring me to come into the office…it’d be time for me to change employers or to retire.
I actually do prefer working in an office…but spending 90 minutes in traffic to just stare at a computer all day is dumb.
Fortunately, my company is pretty decentralized, and pre-pandemic had a pretty strong culture of “hire the right person, regardless of where they are…and we’ll figure out how to make it work”, so there’s a low risk of such silliness. Management does have a strong bias for 3-day hybrid being the standard, to the extent that it’s more-or-less a requirement for people who are local to their teams…but it’s the standard because that’s more-or-less what emerged organically in the past couple of years.
Now, if my company were willing to pay to make it possible for me to do 3-day hybrid at “my” office (either the one that I report into, or the one where my directs work), I’d entertain a discussion…but given the costs of commuting or relocating to a different continent, I doubt that’s going to happen.