The Return to the Office Has Stalled
The number of companies that require employees to be in the office full time has actually declined to 42%, from 49% three months ago, Scoop said. Employees at companies with hybrid strategies work an average of 2.5 days a week in the office.
I just want to thank you for taking the time to post an archived link, instead of something blocked behind a paywall. I appreciate it!
Hybrid jobs don't make sense to me. If it's a job that can be done from home, why are you forcing workers to come back to the office 3 days a week?
Just started a hybrid job and can give one reason: being trained remotely sucks.
Every question has to be a chat/email/call and you don’t get the passive learning of hearing a solution that randomly comes in handy later.
This only gets worse as you move up the org chart and the duties & skills become more nebulous. If your job has "mentoring" rather than "training," then it's really hard to build skills remotely.
I can give one perspective. I average one day a week in office, and it’s necessary for certain tasks and helpful for others. Then, we all complete our tasks independently on our own time the other days. Office days are driven by need but we’re free to work from home otherwise. Hybrid makes sense for us.
But, it’s nonsensical the companies that set an arbitrary amount of days you need to be in person just because.
I do a monitoring job and outside of training newbies being in the office (thankfully only a few times per month we have to go to the office) feels just so pointless. Sure, the extra hardware does help but we don’t have things happening that much too often and our tools actually work better on the VPN.
Add to that the fact our shifts are 12h (day and night shift) in exchange for working less days in a week - when someone lives further from the office it’s a full day, exhausting ordeal. Getting up at 5.30 am, returning home 10pm kind of thing.
Interpersonal relationships is a big reason. Our CTO has been pushing for us to continue to go into the office as much as possible for cultural reasons. At first I was very hesitant, but it appears he was at least partially right. There has been a noticeable shift of communication style and a decline in trust amongst people who used to work together in the same office and are now working remote. We used to play board games and solve jigsaw puzzles during lunch breaks/downtime and had very friend-like relationships. Now, we're turning scheduled meetings into removed sessions because we have nowhere else to do it. We now have recurring meetings where we play games together virtually for an hour, but it's nowhere near as effective as building relationships and, most importantly, trust amongst our teams.
The cliche of “Great Communication Skills” on resumes comes into play with WFH. For me, unless you are an absolute all star at your job and can complete everything without anyone’s help ever, you need to have better communication skills than tech skills.
This sounds like a problem for commercial real estate that the free market will take care of. As such, the only likely outcome is using taxpayer dollars from the working class to bail these speculative rentiers out while further consolidating ownership in the sector.
From the title I was thinking a reboot of the TV show The Office
My reaction was “Noooooo! Lightning won’t strike twice! It’ll disappoint everyone!”
At the company I work at (in software R&D, about 40% of the workforce), I'm a strong advocate for remote-first policies. My immediate boss understands a lot of my concerns, but seems to deeply want to return. When asked why, they come up with these vague ideas of connectedness and poetic visions of sparks flying in the creative process afforded by a meeting room.
Yet only it's only them and the sales department in the office day-to-day. I think they just want some company but don't want to outright say that.
I don’t think increased connectedness or creativity in-person are necessarily fanciful ideas. Rather, I’d argue the more important question is if it matters. In some lines of work, maybe so; in others, maybe not.
I recently switched from a hybrid IT job to fully remote. There were several justifications for return to office from my former employer, both the spoken: better communication/collaboration, better meeting attendance, information security - and unspoken: monitoring of newer or less trusted people, office space going unused, managers' feelings, etc.
There are technical solutions that could be implemented to address the spoken reasons, but the unspoken ones are the bigger drivers from a management perspective.
Your conclusion completely applies to my job. I work in a state funded non profit. We were fully remote during the whole pandemic and converted the whole workflow to work remotely. We were forced to return to the office full time 5 times a week and although the whole team hates it, the bosses argument is "yeah but We prefer it this way".
The truth is that weak leaderships benefit from everybody being in the office, because bullying and blaming isn't very effective through channels where they can be easily registered. Also, unnecessary commuting breaks people, makes them more numb and more obedient.
What drives me crazy is that - at least for my former team - having to move to remote work essentially overnight forced us to come up with new communication and reporting processes that were better than in-person. Which we still had to use when forced to go back to the office because not everyone worked at the same location. So there was no benefit to going back except to please the bosses and those few workers who claimed they actually wanted to return.