Work from home makes me LOYAL to a company, and makes me work my arse off! If you want to keep good employees, give them agency.
I do hybrid, I’m half-half from home and in the office. I work so hard when I work from home, and I’m so happy when I work from home, my desk is setup how I need, I get free coffee, I can listen to music, my dog sleeps on the bed. Most importantly, more of the work gets done.
I think the option to go into the office (on your own accord) is important. The main pro of the office is I can talk to team-mates and do learning sessions with them (the juniors).
But I do these as well from home every day too.
Unfortunately my work place is putting in place a 4 day in the office mandate, like we are children. All it does is make me want to look for jobs that respect employee agency.
Yes, as a well-paid, introverted, technical contributor who is internally motivated by their craft, with the luxury to afford good working space and at a moment in one's life where home haunts feel secure and supportive, you can't beat it. Like any tradesman in history keeping up their own shop, it's really quite empowering. I've been doing it for pretty much all of a very long career.
But it's worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of implied constraints there, and that the industries that drive the society we live in often rely on making the best of people who can't meet all those constraints.
There are people whose jobs need them work with other people dynamically, extroverts who need to be around others with a common aim to thrive, people with compensation to meager to carve out an effective home office, people who need on-site facilities, people with chaotic or draining home lives, etc
It's very easy to talk about why remote work can be extremely rewarding for some, but the big picture of a business or an industry needs to balance a whole bunch of other concerns -- some intrinsic and some simply inertial.
It's just not a single, simple topic where we can project our own experience as if it was universal.
> I’m lucky our team leads are intelligent to form their own opinions, and they are happy with having it both ways - it works for us
Absolutely wild that you seem to have been downvoted for essentially just saying that you like working with people who thrive because you give them agency and that nobody's happy about being treated like children.
Doing the opposite—micromanaging people—is how you create distrust and poison your productivity.
When I got my first corporate dev job, everyone thought it was weird that I kept desperately looking for my own quiet space to perform the work I needed to do, instead of just sitting in the cube where my shitty assigned computer was. I'd go out into the lobby, or the cafeteria, or an empty room, and be able to get in the right headspace for hours long focus. I ended up burning out at that job, because I'd constantly be interrupted and underwater trying to get things done. People should have the options available to find an optimal path toward meeting their expectations.
> But it's worth keeping in mind that there are a lot of implied constraints there
Amazon, Salesforce, etc should all fit well within those constraints. And nobody is suggesting that we ban offices - just stop pretending that all of us fit into those exception buckets.
I WFH 100% of the time. This allows my spouse and I to work. Without this one of us would have to leave the workforce to take the children to school. But because I WFH I can do the school runs and I realize I have it so good, it makes me unwilling to consider any other potential job offers.
And BTW, because I don't have to commute 3 hours like I used to I can now work as late if a task requires me to. So yeah the ability to WFH makes me LOYAL.
They might not have a choice (although this is somewhat relative); switching costs to changing jobs and a move elsewhere due to changes in family circumstances or rising rents might lead to a situation where one has to “accept” the 3 hour commute, at least until the right opportunity presents itself.
just curious how this works, do the kids just need a lift home and you can continue to work? Just wondering how you fit a full day in even with WFH (asking because both spouse and I are 3+ days in office and pickup/drop off kinda happen before/after the work days so WFH isn't make a big difference for us, personally)
I will stay on the ground where WFH is benefit for the company. That is what I believe and I want everyone to believe and I do not care what any kind of research will say. Just if employees will force it in that way it will be.
I'm not sure about that. Companies are still made of people and people aren't always rational or even good at their jobs. Managers might prefer butts in seats because it's easier for them. Or maybe they fall for the sunk cost fallacy and want people in the office because the office space is expensive.
It's not difficult to win at all, if I'm more productive at home, I'm more productive at home, and a smart employer would enable me to choose that. If I'm not, I'd like to have an external space, perhaps the office, to go to and be productive. A stupid employer would ignore their employees and just decide that the office is a universal good.
Now, if you're saying that it's a difficult argument to win with an existing employer who's mandated RTO (rather than a difficult argument to win in general), I'd agree, but I'd say that's true for nearly any argument at any sufficiently traditional, large, or bureaucratic company, about anything. The same place where it'd be difficult to argue for WFM is the same place where it'd be difficult to argue for better pay, dimmer lights, a change in ambient room temperature, less meetings, different duties, less overtime, the use of a mac vs windows pc, a different chair, or any other kind of benefit package, because these decisions get made and then applied without consulting anyone lower in the org chart until those people leave the company and come back asking for them as terms. That's the nature of those hierarchical structures, it's what allows mass layoffs it's what takes agency away from people, nearly by definition.
I think though, that for hybrid or work from home to win in the shared mindset - productivity has to be accounted for.
It feels like employers that switch to RTO office mandates do so on a “hunch” that WFH is less productive. At least that’s what my company is doing. They have not shared any stats that hybrid work has affected outcomes. Yes the company was down in outcomes for 2 quarters, but that’s mostly related to consumers not spending + inflation + economic instability.
Because the board need a more tangible boogeyman to point to, they blame the “lazy work from home ethic”.
But I’m yet to see ANY evidence that hybrid work decreases productivity or outcomes. In fact, I strongly believe, and could probably produce evidence, that Hybrid work ensures better workplace outcomes on average in a vacuum.
Employee agency -> less stress, more loyalty -> better outcomes
Think it was the FT that reported, there's no data indicating RTO improves productivity. It is being done either on a hunch or as a form of stealth layoff.
During my time as an executive, the CEO of the company pushed for a return to the office despite widespread success with remote work during COVID. He personally disliked WFH, even though productivity data from every team showed improvements, and employee surveys were overwhelmingly in favor of continuing remote work. A small minority preferred the office, which was understandable, but the overall results were clear: WFH was beneficial.
Despite this, the CEO disregarded the data and announced that employees wanted to return, citing a need for in-person collaboration and productivity improvements—claims that directly contradicted the evidence that had been gathered. His decision was based on personal bias and gut instinct rather than the facts.
This led to significant fallout. As executives like myself left, key engineers followed, resulting in a mass exodus of talent and customers. Within two years, the company was a shell of its former self and was ultimately sold off for a fraction of its value to some shit kicker PE firm.
Also funny, was that the CEO had always hated WFH, even prior to Covid, even though he himself was always happy to exercise it personally. Even whilst doing WFH himself though, his opinion of anyone else WFH had always been that any of them claiming to actually work was "full of shit" and "taking the piss" and in fact doing absolutely nothing. This of course did not apply to him because he was an executive and executives are different.
Where you getting that free coffee from? I work from home but still have to pay for mine, although did recently get a good deal in sprouts in that yellow sticker section. Real good deal! But not free ;)
Not OP, but less than a dollar for a great espresso that I don't have to wait in line or walk further than 100 feet for is practically free, especially considering the opportunity cost of the time it would take me to walk to the cafe at the office.
I’m fortunate to be a software engineer, I have about 4yoe and mainly work on frontend code.
But it’s been a very long road from being a university dropout, to getting an Electrical Engineering degree, and then transitioning to Software mostly in my spare time
I will offer a counter-example despite being very much pro-wfh.
In my little corner of the universe, the company, its execs and some rank and file, who appear to genuinely either want to be in office or appear to bosses ( or both ) are not super keen some of the vocal anti-rto people showing others that they too could stay home, leave early.. you know, all those things management did not that long ago.
And the thing is, for me anyway, paradoxically I am waiting for the other shoe to drop by and, as a result, genuinely doing as little as possible ( 'cept for the ridiculous projects, can't do much about those ).
Companies had it. They had their gay little compromise in the form of hybrid, which I hated anyway. And now I am just saying meh. Funny thing is, I am clearly not the only one.
It really isn't. For me, hybrid is genuinely the worst of both worlds. My internal sleep rhythm is screwed each week, just because someone had a bright idea that today will be everyone in office day ( and unsurprisingly almost never is.
I get what the companies are doing. Hell, blind monkey can see what they are doing. Scale back full WFH and claim compromise and flexibility by, but also slowly putting in more required days in office and token flexible day at home ( and in Amazon's case -- full RTO ).
If you are objecting to the particular use of the world gay, then I might be just betraying my age, where gay used to mean lame.
"gay" in that sense is a pejorative against homosexual people. You could almost make it work with the original definition though.
From Wikipedia -
> Gay is a term that primarily refers to a homosexual person or the trait of being homosexual. The term originally meant 'carefree', 'cheerful', or 'bright and showy'.
I do hybrid, I’m half-half from home and in the office. I work so hard when I work from home, and I’m so happy when I work from home, my desk is setup how I need, I get free coffee, I can listen to music, my dog sleeps on the bed. Most importantly, more of the work gets done.
I think the option to go into the office (on your own accord) is important. The main pro of the office is I can talk to team-mates and do learning sessions with them (the juniors).
But I do these as well from home every day too.
Unfortunately my work place is putting in place a 4 day in the office mandate, like we are children. All it does is make me want to look for jobs that respect employee agency.