Oof, that was just depressing.
It would be one thing if he said “I feel like people work best in the office and I don’t mind it, so I’m okay with it.” That’s a personal belief I disagree with but reasonable.
But… “Chase deems it necessary for the shareholders, the CEO doesn’t like whiners.” WOW. And if they demand unpaid overtime and cut salaries, for the shareholders?
Sales staff…
I’m not going to say working on an office should be mandatory, but i think we are missing something around employee development on wfh. I’m noticing an increased divergence between those coming in regularly and those who wfh all the time. Fine if someone is content at the level they are, but a company needs a sustainable development pipeline and we are all fooling ourselves if we think we have any idea how to make that happen remotely only 5 years in to the experiment.
My company reaffirmed its support for flex. They expect 3 days a week on-site and said they would track.
Last week they told us all there is a dashboard in our own workday profile that shows our numbers.
Through end of march i was 137% of expected attended days in office. (Did not count the 14-16 days of travel i had.)
I over attend bc it is more convenient for me to attend than wfh. (Very short commute.) But i think people looking to grow in their roles benefit from togetherness. I am glad the company has flexibility overall
The flexibility is the key. My team still has that to the extent it can (Tuesdays and Wednesdays are in office days, which isn’t flexible, but I’m allowed to come in at 9:30 and leave at 3:30 to avoid traffic/do school drop off or pick up), but some other teams have management requiring a full 8 hours in the office (but why? Doesn’t make sense to me, we are all adults here and can address individual issues instead of enacting blanket rules).
I would prefer flexibility to choose the best days for me to be in office, but it could definitely be worse.
And another mandate for 5 days in the office…
It seems that much of these mandates are coming from companies/industries where there is a large difference in compensation between the small & big players. Actuaries do not get paid more from large insurers than from small insurers (consulting groups not withstanding) and therefore companies do not have the same leverage that Blackrock, Chase, and Goldman have.
My firm went to an “average at least 50%” guidance about 6 months ago. I was just thinking as I was commuting in today how less busy it seems on Thursday than Tuesday. Even my office… I could believe people are averaging 2-3 days in my office, but if you come in on a Monday or Friday it’s still a ghost town. Even Wednesday and Thursday seem a little low for a hybrid workplace.
what’s the over/under on when two companies agree to share dedicated office space, one gets Monday-Tuesday, the other gets Thu-Fri, and they alternate Wed? That way each can have 2.5 days in-person each week and don’t have loads of unused office space for the other 2.5 days per week. Each company is only paying for the space and time it actually uses.
Seems like a good proposition from a building owner’s perspective. They can charge less rent to each tenant (something like 65% of the base rate, not quite down to 50% because of overhead and management of the arrangement and such) and still make more because their occupancy rates can go up.
That would only fly if there is absolutely zero branding
I think it is probably easier for a 1000 employee office to just rent enough office space for 600 employees and just bank it being half empty every day except bonus day
The big bosses agreed that we’ve outgrown our building. Now they’re searching for something more suitable. I hope it’s nearby. 
Digital screens which show the logo and schedule of the company which is “in” the office that day. Boom. Done.
Yeah, but then you never actually have everyone in the office at the same time. My solution allows for everyone from all tenants to be together a couple of days a week.
Would everything be a dock where you plug in your own laptop and then remote into a company-specific virtual machine?
Seems like a headache. I guess a third party could handle the physical hardware component, or one of the two companies can take it on for both companies… but at some point, just merge or accept that you don’t need offices.
I think one company reducing its footprint to 60% of original and telling teams they are M/W or T/Th and alternating fridays. no need to share with strangers.
People do it from home. Why not an office?
Yeah, there are still a lot of papers in filing cabinets or books in offices or personal touches that the company and/or workers might not want to share with other companies. Not having personal touches to your work space might have a negative effect on productivity.
Though, I’m not sure how I’d suggest making it work. I’m FT WFH so they have to make space for me when I come to the home office anyway and even that seem like a bit of a pain.
It’d essentially be the experience I have when I go into “my” office.
My work-issued laptop is for a region different than the offices I usually visit. So, when I go into the office, I unplug the ethernet cable to the dock of wherever I’m sitting, connect to the guest WiFi network, and VPN in from there.
Conceivably, for a shared office environment, the wired ethernet could be itself a “guest network”.
I don’t know what complications there would be for teleconferencing gear in conference rooms.
I think a big challenge for sharing an office like this between two companies would be that that IT security is really almost impossible when the attacker has physical access to the computer.
So if i were in charge of IT security of a company sharing office space, i’d be worried about who the other company is letting into the office.
Of course there is the issue with the security of paper documents too.
I’ve worked in companies that take up several floors of a multifloor building. If there are two companies in the building or occupying several floors of the building, you could have one dedicated full-time floor for each company for the C-suite and all the company paraphernalia. The other floors could be shared (each company having those floors for 2-3 days a week).
I haven’t had hard-copy documents for work in years.