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One quote that really stuck with me is from the YouTuber “Practical Engineering”
He was talking about how we often call road construction workers lazy for standing around, while one person is doing the work.
At one point he says something to the effect of “Next time you’re working, pay attention to the actual amount of time you spend actively doing things, you might be surprised to realize it’s not that much. It’s just natural to need time to break and think to do your job properly - the only difference between them and you is your work activity isn’t publicly visible”
Similarly I take the stance it’s none of my business what people do at work as long as it doesn’t interfere with me. Results are what matter, and even then that’s between them and their boss.
I’ve lost count of the times I’ve watched apparent slackers achieve great accomplishments (and not because they got someone else to do their work). Conversely those who complain about the amount of work they are putting in often turn out to be unproductive (sometimes covering up their laziness with that narrative, or just doing their job really inefficiently).
Another thing I noticed in school is when you’re in an exam, take a look around - you will notice nearly everyone is just sitting staring and doing nothing. You haven’t entered the twilight zone, they’re just thinking, you don’t notice when you do it because you’re too busy…thinking!!
There are also loads of safety regulations on work sites. If someone is going into a confined space like a sewer, someone is monitoring their air, someone is in direct communication with that person, someone is watching over any lines or cables that have to go with the worker, and a whole group is directing traffic to make sure no one drives into the work crew.
Yes good points. He also covered how work has to be done in sequence so there is inevitably lots of waiting as dependencies are completed.
Precisely. You don’t pay an electician to dig a hole. You don’t let a machine operator do electrical work, and so on.
Middle management especially basically only exist in the numbers they do because of in office work culture, which is very often just distractions from actual work.
80% of their ‘job’ is either useless or counterproductive to what the organization is actually, or at least supposedly, designed and intended to do, and they know that a mass adoption of a paradigm that makes this obvious would lead to them not having jobs.
So we get masses of propaganda to disabuse us of the notion that their mostly useless ‘work’ needs to exist in the way that it can.
This is made all the more ironic (and horrifying) when you know that most of these people also profess to care about the poor, the climate, but that’s less important than feeling like queen bees in their corpo hives, so fuck anything that might actually significantly reduce co2 emmissions and significantly increase the quality of life for a huge amount of workers.
Nah, a good manager would change your opinion. A good manager is a filter and barrier from corporate bullshit. They’ll enforce on you what clearly needs to be done, and they’ll handle menial paperwork shit on their own. It’s more efficient for the manager to fill out the same form five times for five people than it is for each person to fill out that form individually. For an individual, it might take half an hour each. For the manager doing it five times, it’ll take twenty minutes for the first one, and 5 minutes for each additional form.
A good manager will argue back until what whatever they want you to do with your timesheet makes sense before they have you do it. A good manager is a great asset and a huge benefit for everyone involved.
One thing I learned over the years is that there is zero training in being a good manager. Promotions to management are based upon two things: technical expertise or relationships (brown-nosing/nepotism etc.) Having managerial skills is completely unnecessary for the job.
Very few “managers” take the time to observe, study, and gain the skill set needed when they are in the job. Most end up regurgitating the most recent MBA bullshit fad.
And the long lunches and the birthday parties and the “oh someone brought in x, we better run and get some before it’s gone” too many reasons NOT to work when in an office.
What? Those are some of my favorite parts, it’s free food after all lol
…maybe I’m more extraverted than I thought…
You might like them but it would be hard to argue that they improve productivity while people are busy eating the free food.
Work that’s all about pure productivity is boring and monotonous, the little bit of randomness from a birthday or pot luck is nice to break up the monotony.
I swear some of y’all on these comments are actually middle managers who hate fun LMAO
The explanations given for requiring return to the office 99% of the time are related to productivity. They’re pointing out the blatant hypocrisy because there is a lot of shit that reduced in office productivity and that’s being ignored in all of these articles.
Exactly. The point is that work from home is probably more or at the very least not less productive. Other preferences and considerations exist of course but it is not as clear cut based on productivity as many return to office types make it out to be.
are CEOs really working
all dayat all? No. here’s what they’re doing instead.fuck all.
What, you mean to imply Elon Musk couldn’t possibly be simultaneous CEO and Chief Engineer of five separate companies with wildly different technical specialties, all while spending twelve hours a day on social media if CEOs actually had a job to do?
Commie.
I find it interesting that “attend meetings” is said in the same breath as “walk around” and “take lunch or bathroom breaks”.
Meetings are way worse for productivity than breaks and water cooler bullshitting, at least in my experience. There’s more of them, they take longer, and they tend to leave me with a vague sense that nothing’s really getting done and everybody’s sort of okay with that. AND they’re treated as an obligation in a way that taking breaks is not.
At least when I get back to my desk after walking around, I feel a bit more refreshed and ready to get back to work. In fact, it’s usually meeting burnout that prompts the walk-around in the first place.
Useful meetings do exist. A lot of stuff can be lost in communication and one meeting can save a lot of time in getting everyone aligned in a short time. But figuring out when a meeting would be useful and when it’s unnecessary is a skill in itself and a lot of times the people calling for meetings are not the ones who have the necessary information to make that call.
The useful meetings usually happen organically. A group of people are trying to accomplish something and at one point they decide ok, let’s all get in a room / on a call together and iron this out.
Found a link to the article here: https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2024/09/18/remote-work-from-home-survey/75266226007/
Which references this survey with no access to the data or methodology used: https://www.surveymonkey.com/curiosity/surveymonkey-research-workplace-culture-and-trends/
So it’s an opinion piece with no real justification or factual foundation you’d expect from a journalist.
How many breaks did Jessica Guynn have during the day she wrote that text?
I mean, it’s not really a “in office” v “remote working” debate - people will slack off and make themselves look busy regardless of where they are. That’s caused by a case-specific mix of motivation, discipline, or other factors. That’s a line management issue rather than a work location issue - WfH just gets scapegoated for that.
Ultimately it will be the money starting to talk - if the accountants start complaining about expensive office space not being used to its maximum, then they’ll start instructing folk back to the office. It’s a shit reason but unless your contract specifically says remote, it’ll be the balance sheet making the decision for you (edit: unless it really doesn’t work for you and you go nuclear with the “resign” button of course)
I’ve read that the “resign button” is one of the biggest motivators for back to office bullshit. If you resign, it cheaper than them laying you off. Saves a shitload of money, to my understanding.
Here are some sources.
https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/4800828-office-mandates-cause-attrition/
5 days a week in the office is inevitable. Everyone will start following Amazon’s lead. I’m 100% remote so I’m sure at some point, some overpaid exec will have the great idea to get rid of positions like mine.
Smart companies will allow remote work, and be able to recruit top talent that wants to work remotely. From what I’ve heard, Amazon is a terrible place to work in pretty much any non-executive role.
My company saved so much money by going fully remote. They were practically begging us to go fully remote years before the pandemic started, but there were too many people still attached to office culture (honestly I was one of them, I didn’t have enough space where I lived at the time for a dedicated office and I had toddlers running around and interrupting all the time). But as soon as lockdowns came, my company seized the moment and permanently closed our main office and half of our second office (they still kept a smaller office for visitors and for the occasional on-site meetings and events). The rent alone was in the $1m/year range, we got free breakfast and lunch, fully stocked snack cabinets, unlimited coffee, drinks on tap, etc. They don’t have to pay for any of that anymore.
