No real mandate for me, but I usually come in a few days a week to see people and change the scenery up a bit. My commute is pretty short. We would not have enough office space for any real mandate and for some reason we keep assigning people to desks which makes any real space management a complete nightmare when there are department events that bring everyone on site.
The parking area is usually the best visual measure of who is on site and it seems like it has plateaued around 60-70% of pre-covid levels in spite of some significant growth.
Maybe more like Decatur, NE to somewhere near the North Omaha airport. Iâm guessing thatâs a much faster commute if youâre targeting an 8:30 AM arrival time than Riverside to downtown Los Angeles, despite being nearly the same number of miles.
I didnât mind going to the office to meet with people in person. I really did mind going to the office to stare at a screen and meet with distant coworkers over teams. And most days, that was my job.
Auto-Owners Insurance has fired two employees involved in a petition opposing the companyâs return-to-office policy. The Lansing, Michigan-based insurerâs new policy requires employees to work in the office twice a week starting this month. Prior to this, staff had been working remotely since 2020, with one in-office day a month. The company announced the change last July. Auto-Owners said the employees were not fired because of their involvement in the petition, broadcaster WLNS reported.
âThe associates were not terminated because of the content of the petition to continue to work from home,â the company said in an email to WLNS. âWe made the decision to terminate regarding violations of company policy, including but not limited to those relating to the misuse of computer equipment and resources.â Last month, more than 100 employees signed a petition asking Auto-Owners to reconsider the policy and restore remote work flexibility, the report said.
Employees at the insurer raised concerns over the financial burden of the companyâs return-to-office policy, including higher commuting costs. Some workers also felt misled, saying the insurer had previously assured them it had no plans to enforce stricter in-office requirements. Additionally, certain employees were reportedly hired under agreements for fully remote roles, further fueling frustration over the policy shift.
My company is now recommending we come to the office⌠wait for it⌠at least twice a year. Our new HQ opens in April, itâs triple the size of the old one but still only holds a fifth of the company.
Thatâs certainly what it sounds like to me. Fwiw, my prior employer has explicit policies against that. They were obviously written to make it hard to unionize, but those rules would have applied in this case.
I would say that âorganizing a petition against the company decisionâ is not a work-related function, and the petition was sent over work email.
They werenât fired for making a petition, they were fired for sending it from a work email.
Would they have been found guilty of a different infraction if theyâd instead sent it only from their personal emails to everybody elseâs personal email?.. Yeah.
Absolutely, it was foolish to organize against the company using company resources. Not many people stop to think about how anything they do on their company laptop is not personal.
Of course, if theyâd been organizing a fantasy football league over company email, no one would have been fired, and no one would have cared.
So it was certainly about the petition, and it probably didnât help that the story leaked (although unclear if the firings occurred before or after it leaked), so itâs definitely retribution, but not the illegal kind. As you say, they would have found some other policy violation to terminate them for it.
The old one held 85 people. We have about 1,200 FTEs, maybe more like 1,300. For all staff events we rent a big space (twice weâve rented Nats Park in DC). It was a ridiculously undersized space, as many of our teams have more people than could fit into the largest room in the old place.
I donât mind meeting in person once a quarter, the office is very close to a DC Metro stop so itâs pretty convenient. And they have so. Many. Snacks and drinks.
My company has a policy allowing for incidental use of company resources (basically OK if cost is de minimis). This would clearly qualify in terms of the actual cost of an email being sent and received. But Iâd be lying if I said I thought that defense would hold.
I think you can drop the ârealâ. We have no employment rights. I can literally be fired this afternoon for wearing a pink shirt and my boss doesnât like pink and I should have known that.
About the only thing that we can NOT be fired for is being a member of a protected class. Our employers canât fire us because weâre black or white or male or female or Jewish or Christian or atheist or pregnant or a veteran. But if we WERE fired for one of those reasons the employer can say âtwig wasnât fired because sheâs a woman; she was fired for wearing a pink shirt!â And who has deeper pockets when that goes to court?
It has to be pretty egregious. If the employer retains marginal white employees and fires marginal black employees while maintaining good documentation that the fired employees were marginal employees⌠itâs pretty darn difficult to prove that itâs actually because they were black.
I guess the other right we do have is a pretty sacrosanct right to be paid for all of the time that we worked⌠even if we did a crappy job or it in no way benefitted the employer ⌠like if we donât progress beyond initial training. They still have to pay us for that time.
Looks like Jamie Dimon misses the good old days. My sisterâs friendâs husband works for JPM so sheâs upset about the change. My mom, who believes itâs all going back to normal (1970s normal?), feels vindicated. I mentioned my company just recently went to 3âŚ
