Work at ‘office’ only. For sure!
But that’s because I work with radioactive materials and I don’t want them in my home.I’m Team Work Where You Are Best.
Some people that means an office. Some people it means remote. The plan is the workers do the thing and get the money. A manager needing to see their ass in a chair to feel good about himself is a little creepy.
I go in to the office two days a week typically - by choice - because I like the focused office vibe and I want to see my colleagues.
I pick the days. I don’t have to announce them. If my alarm goes off and I feel like “damn I need an extra snooze” then I don’t go in. No explanation necessary.
Before Covid it was five days a week in office. I’m very glad for the choice.
Yeah I live alone and I need to see people daily in person or else I’ll go crazy. I love my coworkers.
BUT every person and workplace is different!!! I’m the same team as you…work where you’re best. For those whose jobs are flexible in location, it seems unfair to force someone to do either one or the other.
Home only.
Why travel to an arbitrary location to access equipment at a different arbitrary location.
Same on both accounts, but I suspect your equipment locations are on land? Mine are one sea (ships)
Some of mine was 30 metres up a radio tower so even if it broke we had to send qualified riggers to replace it.
Personally, it entirely depends on:
- how far way I am from the office
- how many other people are in the open office
If I were 5 minutes walk from the office, I would walk there because it provides better separation from work. It would be much easier to tell the boss “sorry boss, I am not at the office and thus I cannot take a look”. Not that my current dayjob has much of this, but, structurally, it would make it much better.
On the other hand, at home I get the benefits of peace and quiet. I am going to be on calls with remote people anyway, so I would rather not deal with echos, or noise from other people having their meetings. I also realize that I am a bigger bother in person because I will do the in-person equivalent of shooting off a slack message. A slack message can be snoozed. I cannot be snoozed when I talk to the person next to me. And, sure, I try not to, but it is a thing I do.
I am currently 100% remote, though, and it is one of the reasons I am not even attempting to look for another job. I get so much flexibility because I can just take my laptop with me and work from wherever the internet hotspot allows.
I’ve been wfh for i6 years, it would suck to go back now
As much as I’d love to work from home, I can’t. I’m too easily distracted and work would be at the bottom of my priority list at all times.
I’ll happily support all of you home workers, but I can’t trust myself to do what I’m supposed to do during “work time”.
I think a truly WFH world would force us to fundamentally rethink some of our common infrastructure designs. And one of those would be including multiple different offices in houses. Because most houses and apartments aren’t designed with WFH in mind.
If you have a dedicated place for work, (instead of a shared space, like a desk that you also use for your personal stuff), it helps you focus. Your brain compartmentalizes the rooms in your house, (which is why you’ll walk into a room and immediately forget what you went in there for,) so having a room that is dedicated to WFH will literally help you avoid distraction. If you try to WFH from the same desk that you play video games at, you’ll feel a constant desire to boot up a game instead of working. And inversely, if you try to play a game at your work desk, playing will begin to feel like a job. Your complaint is perfectly valid, and also so common that it would literally reshape the way our houses are designed.
For me it’s the opposite, I’m too easily distracted so all the people talking around me while I try to work make me lose focus. At home I can sit there in peace and quiet and actually make it through a document
Same. My productivity is awful in an office because we had an ‘open office’ and it was nothing but distractions and noise all day long. Not to mention folks coming up to you and asking you to do stuff verbally, which never got documented and therefore did not count as ‘productive’ activity.
at home everything is an email so I have a record of things I do that looks 10x bigger than I did in the office.
Yeah that is a good point, we also have an open office. I imagine if there were more separation with individual or team offices it would be a lot easier to work there.
it would, but people who design offices are buzzword lemmings who follow trends and don’t care about worker productivity objectively.
my first office had big tall cubes and it was gloriously quiet. we are now on our third office, but since only like 20 people come in on any day, it’s much quieter than having 50-80 people, half of whom are blabbing with each other or on the phone and everyone in 30 ft of them can hear their convo.
I’ve been fully remote since 2018 and wouldn’t have it any other way. I can get chores and cooking done during the day, don’t waste time or money commuting, and I’m more available for both work and my family.
People keep telling me I should “leave my house” and “interact with people” but that’s always fraught with peril and disappointment
I am for fully remote work. But there are a number of conditions here:
First of all, if you are a remote worker, you need to delineate zones. You shouldn’t work from bed or from a sofa in front of the TV. Set up a workspace for yourself. It could even be just an old table on a loggia. But it must physically exist.
Secondly, you cannot stretch time. If you work in a team, try to stick to a common schedule or discuss time zones in advance. There is nothing worse than a situation where you need to resolve an urgent issue, but the person who has the knowledge to solve it will only be online in 5 hours.
Thirdly, you need to have enough motivation to carry out the previous two points. This is important.
If all this works out, then remote work is magnificent. The commute to work is zero, and lunch can be whatever you want. It also solves the problem of open-plan offices. In recent years, they have turned the interior zones of those offices into warehouses filled with desks. It’s terrible.
Personally, I work from home, and in the evening I leave the apartment to go for a walk or sit in a park. This is enough to not feel lonely. Especially since the commute to work used to take me 1 hour in the morning and 1 hour back in the evening. In that time, you could sit through a movie session and still have time for go home from movie theater.
And then there are the days when you haul ass out of bed and fight your way in to the office, only to find that the network’s having problems and you have to work on the WiFi anyway. Why am I here, again? 🙄
I’m a millennial. The world has had complete overhauls every 10 years since I was born
There is no question that I prefer WFH, and I’m lucky enough to have an employer that doesn’t care about commercial real estate profits and would prefer to keep the money they would otherwise spend on renting office space.
Within our group we have application support people who do in-person support of our users and workstations. That team does hybrid WFH and has a rotating schedule so there is always one person at each site every day.
There are other teams that don’t actually have to be next to the user for support. Those teams are primarily WFH.
I was primarily on site through the pandemic and transitioned to WFH after things opened up.
Back when I was mostly on site, I would get concerned about things not getting done when I was WFH. Since I’ve switched to primarily WFH, I get concerned about things not getting done when I’m on site.
The only time I experienced any feeling of social isolation was at the height of the pandemic when I was on-site and alone in an office. I’m no less alone when I’m working from home now, but it doesn’t bother me.
WFH because 1) it’s better for the environment 2) people I don’t want to see are at the office 3) I don’t wanna commute 1 hour one way 4) fuck getting up early 5) we call people that aren’t in the office anyway, which defeats the point of showing up, and 6) I hate my job.
From a societal perspective I think we should be working in common spaces so we can be near people and learn to socialize. We’re losing second and third spaces. Fewer people having children also means less forced interaction and I fear we are heading towards a more isolated society.
Unfortunately, not everyone would lives close enough to comfortably go into an office, which leaves people burning 2-3hrs of their day just doing that. And all the commuting also impacts the Earth.
Edit: Adding that I mentioned “common spaces” and I did not mean situations where people are forced to work in toxic environments. I have been lucky to develop many friendships and also help support many relationships that have formed in the past place I worked at. The majority of the people around me were introverts, working around like minded people helped all of us.
I do think the modern workplace isn’t really a good place for this either unfortunately. In my field at least it’s like everybody is a corporate mercenary. They’re going to come in, make no friends, do their jobs and then quietly leave for a higher paying position as soon as they possibly can.
Which is fine, but it’s a pretty poor place to get social nourishment.
Yeah, the normal office is not the place to make friends.
But I guess for a shared workspace for people working remote, it doesn’t really matter what they do or if they change jobs. You can make casual conversation with regulars at the water cooler or coffee bar without the weird forced interactions of working for the same company and “team building”. You’re both in this common space because you want to be there, rather than sitting at home.
Yeah, that’s why I mentioned common space, since those people would want to be there. Being forced to do hybrid ends up being weird since most of those people don’t want to be there and it doesn’t really let you form bonds as much.
I don’t think those kinds of positions would really benefit from being in office given the competitive nature.
Mixing your personal and professional life is a surefire way to be create an abusive and exploitative environment.
The exploitative companies basically want to ‘foster togetherness’ so they can exploit they works via emotional manipulation techniques, and often seek to isolate workers from the outside world or life outside the office.
This is very much based on the industry of course. I’ve formed life long friendships with people from my last job. I just saw one of them I haven’t worked with in 5 years and likewise a few others during halloween. I was in a position to be able to nurture those friendship and workplace dynamics.
I don’t want to socialize with or date my co-workers. I don’t want to play politics to get promoted or have to befriend my boss or navigate office-relationships where I risk getting fired for offending or rejecting the wrong person. I also have had repeated problems with female co-workers trying to cheat on their partners with me, which I do not miss.
For me, working from home removed that problems and got me 3 promotions in 6 years. Because what matters now is my work, and I can do it without being distracted or worrying about upsetting a co-worker who will report me for sexual harassment because I rejected their advances.
Maybe thats just how offices are because I’ve never done office work but get a lot of social interaction out of my coworkers, even if I don’t meet them outside of work.
I agree on trying to bring back some semblance of the other spaces, and I’m an introvert. But work isn’t ideal for that, not only because of potential turnover, but also the rule of thumb on bringing too much personal stuff into work that can backfire on you.
How about more work from home where it makes sense, giving more time back that was spent commuting, and a four hour work week with equal or greater pay. Make socializing possible both in time and income given.
This is why I actually like my hybrid schedule which is two days in the office and three at home. 1 day per week in office would be enough most of the time, but the regular in person does help with feeling connected for a lot of people but 5 days is massive overkill.
We switched to hybrid once covid died down, but the genie was out of the bottle. Most people didn’t want to come back. Since they also implemented a system where people chose what days they were in, it was hard to get proper overlaps. That company is now fully remote and have leased out their offices. As long as the hybrid is thought out, I do think it can work.
We all had the same days in the office so it was worth being in the office, so that was thought out. Some people don’t want to work from home and they work in the office 5 days a week which works for them. I’m just glad we have flexibility!
I think any company that isn’t flexible and forcing 5 days in office (for those who work on computers) is on borrowed time.
I can socialize outside of the workplace, thanks. Why would I want to do that with my coworkers? They’re not family and rarely ever have I befriended any and that’s fine.
Edit: I’m all for 3rd places making a comeback, to be clear, but I neither need nor want forced socialization in an office.
Having your coworkers be your only social interaction is a recipe for being exploited.
Third spaces are fine but if you make me come into an office for teamwork I’m finding another job that doesn’t make me pay to commute and be away from home.
Office. For me personally: I like the contact with colleagues, I am more efficient in the workplace.
Home only.
Private bathroom. Private break room with full kitchen. No commute. No pants. What’s not to love?
Plus, from the comfort of my home, behind the shield of a screen, I’m comfortable enough to say things and conduct myself in ways that are absolutely necessary to effectively do my job, but would never feel comfortable doing face-to-face.
