Google and JPMorgan have each told staff that office attendance will be factored into performance evaluations. The US law firm Davis Polk informed employees that fewer days in the office would result in lower bonuses. And Meta and Amazon both told employees they’re now monitoring badge swipes, with potential consequences for workers who don’t comply with attendance policies – including job loss. Increasingly, workers across many jobs and sectors appear to be barrelling towards the same fate.
In some ways, it’s unsurprising bosses are turning back to attendance as a standard. After all, we’ve long been conditioned to believe showing up is vital to success, from some of our earliest days. In school, perfect attendance is often still seen a badge of honour. The obsession with attendance has also been a mainstay of workplace culture for decades; pre-pandemic, remote work was largely unheard of, and employees were expected to be physically present at their desks throughout the workday.
Yet after the success of flexible arrangements during the pandemic, attendance is still entrenched as a core metric. What’s the point?
Unpopular opinion: Teams collaborate better in presence. Remote attendance is inferior to being in the same room even with the most expensive Cisco board or meeting owl.
However if you’re working on your own, processing to-dos, a team around you will be a hindrance. However, creative processes just don’t work that way and require interaction and variability to occur.
That isn’t stopping executives from offshoring more and more functions… and yet, “you’re more creative in the same room”… yeah thought luck my devs are in fucking bengalore… 8000 km from our offices…
The vast majority of workers doesn’t have to be creative. A dev is a Software Engineer, most of the time that means applying already thought through procedures to hopefully well documented requirements. So what is your point?
If you see no creativity in’a software engineer you’re a lost cause…
Seriously, imagine that dudes code if he never once thought creatively about an engineering problem lol
Then why have they spent the past 40 years outsourcing shit to other countries
How do you explain the dominance of free and open source projects like Linux which are developed remotely by people all over the world?
There are plenty of examples of people collaborating effectively from different towns or time zones. If anything, I think too many organizations are too inflexible or have simply been structured in a way that they can’t be efficient remotely.
Think of how much better the result would be if the workers had to commute, had less lunch options, couldn’t take a nap, and had to work in a noisier environment
Is this a trust me bro? Or you got recipets?
I mean it says opinion right there.
My counrerpoint is that it doesn’t matter if it works better for business when it works so much better for everyone and everything else.
You’re working for the business though.
No. The business is renting your time and experience … nothing else.
Problem is they still think you work for them.
So the benefits for people and society overall doesn’t matter?
I feel like way too many folks forget that employment is a 2-way street. I have a skill that my employer needs, and I give them my skill and time in exchange for my compensation (salary plus both hard and soft benefits). It is not my responsibility to make sure that the company is at its most successful regardless of my own personal comfort and happiness, my only responsibility is to perform the duties stated in my job description.
When (as is happening all over my industry) a large number of employers decide that something like remote work is now a high priority for them, then it really does stop mattering whether or not it’s best for the company, because all the employees with any bargaining power (which is to say, the good ones) will just leave for companies that do offer remote work.
Think about it this way, it’s absolutely in every companies best interest to pay minimum wage and/or offer no health insurance, 401k, etc (at least where allowed by the law) . So why do companies that need skilled workers offer those things? Because if they didnt then they would never be able to hire talent.
Whats best for the business is getting the best talent, and you only do that by being cognizant of what the most talented people in your industry want. And in most industries where remote work is possible, remote work is increasingly becoming something people want. And COVID proved that whether or not there are slight disadvantages to collaboration in remote work (I’m not personally sold, and the research so far is contradictory), it does work, so companies have increasingly fewer excuses to drag everyone back to the office
Cisco is fully remote besides any hardware production lines.
That’s really funny in light of your comment.
Even collaborative teams frequently have individual work that does not require regular in person attendance on a regular basis and many of us can collaborate just as well on a video call as in person.
I work in IT and a lot of my peers are distributed geographically and of course most of my meetings are with vendors who are also not local. So I go into the office so I can get on Teams meetings and take an hour long lunch that I would have worked through at home. I have in-person meetings maybe once a month.
If teams collaborate better im presence, why does everyone work in separate spaces? Even cubicles don’t make sense from your statement, get those people at picnic tables!
If your argument is “teams collaborate better with instant access,” then yes, but technology has bridged that gap.
A cubicle is probably the worst of both worlds.
I strongly disagree that technology has bridged that gap. There always is delay, no spatial information and no equivalent way to switch focus.
Sounds like a skill issue.
I know there is a personality aspect on socializers too.
I agree with this to a certain extent.
I do think it’s easier to be creative and brainstorming with other people when I am in the same room as them, but ultimately it should be a mix of both for that kind of stuff to accommodate for everybody - that way, people can start their to-dos in peace either at the office or at home, wherever they’re already at.
Exactly.
Studies have shown that worker preferences are somewhat evenly split between office only, hybrid, and full WFH. However, being on Reddit / lemmy is kind of a self selection towards the WFH crowd, so it’s become a quite an echo chamber on this issue. Whereas management tends to the social crowd who prefer full office. And it doesn’t help that management is pushing the return to office for other undisclosed but obvious reasons.