Top management at my place is finally, after 3 years, going to insist on people coming in at least 1-2 days a week. Funny thing is they’re almost admitting that it’s a feature and not a bug that they expect about 10-15% of people to quit instead of coming back.
They’ve been embracing attrition the last couple of years and hiring most new support/programming staff on the cheap in India, so it’s no surprise.
We continue to have a hilarious standoff where management keeps sending “you have to be in the office 5 days a week” emails that are almost universally ignored. Millennials seriously DGAF.
Our policy is that everyone comes in on Tuesday for a staff meeting, plus one additional day. My partners and I don’t track the additional day, so I have no idea if people are doing it and personally don’t care. Also, if anyone has a reasonable reason to not be there on Tuesday, it’s fine. And, my partners and I probably want to come into the office even less than our employees, so we pretty regularly cancel the staff meeting and make Tuesday optional. We tried and failed to get out of our lease at the beginning of the pandemic, if we weren’t stuck with it we’d get rid of the office entirely.
My daughter works for a progressive non-profit in DC and lives a 45’ train ride from the office. They now have to return to the office 2-3 days per week. Her boss is trying to convince her and the others on their smallish team to make Friday a mandatory day–“C’mon, it’s be fun…it’ll be casual, and we can all go out to lunch.”
It will be quite a miracle if it just so happens that the 10-15% of people that quit are the 10-15% least valuable employees that they want to leave. I think there will be some overlap, mostly among retirement aged dinosaurs that have been coasting along during WFH because hey, why not collect a paycheck while transitioning into retirement? But they’re also going to lose some people who are good but just aren’t going to put up with it. Why risk it?
I’ve been recommending that my group comes to the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and I’ve been going in on those days except when I have to travel or have out of office meetings. Most people come in on those days, but some people seem to come in very rarely. There don’t seem to be any real consequences for not coming it at my company.
Here’s a bit of a contrarian view (I’M SO EDGY) but I think it’s at least a little interesting.
I 100% agree that most “back to the office” stuff is just misguided / stupid / self service nonsense from senior leaders.
But one interesting data point from my company. We rate performance on a scale of 1-5. 1 is “you’re in danger of getting fired” and 4-5 is where the good performers settle. Before the pandemic something like 3/4 of our new hires got 3 or 4 on the performance rating, a few would get 5s, a few would get 2s, and practically no one got a 1. A person getting a 1 in their first year was likely to get fired before they even got to their first formal rating review.
Anyway, since COVID and WFH the performance ratings for new hires has PLUMMETED. Lots of 1s and 2s, where we used to have hardly any. Almost no 4s. This is a real problem for the business and it seems unlikely that all of a sudden our new hires just got dumber in 2020. There are only really two paths forward.
I suppose option 3 (or 2b) is the wishy washy partial back to the office approach and we all pray that this just so happens to generate precisely the amount of attention that the new hires need on those days.
This isn’t an easy thing to solve for. I am on board with the LOL MANAGEMENT stuff for most of the arguments against WFH, but this one I must admit confounds me. I have some sympathy for new hires that need development in the workplace and aren’t getting it. It would be great to see companies crack the case on option 1 above and break on through to a fully operational WFH model, but that’s pretty speculative.
Your policy sounds reasonable and this isn’t intended as a knock, but aren’t you basically saying the only reason you make employees come in is your lease?
I would be very surprised if this isn’t the exception that proves the rule. Ill have to do some looking today, but I believe a majority of the studies are showing increased productivity (and not by a little bit) since the pandemic hit and for companies that have switched to WFH. The same is happening for companies testing 4 day work weeks. Much higher productivity/hour scores.
It isn’t just LOL MANAGEMENT I don’t think. Those being forced back into the office after three years WFH are seeing it as a direct announcement that your company doesn’t trust you. My company has improved their monthly close times (accounting) by two days since 2020, our quarterly close by nearly 4 days, and our yearly close this year finished almost 2 full weeks better than our last. Why on earth would a company see that kind of improvement in this department and decide “clearly this isn’t working, we need them back in office to monitor them.” When discussed with my coworkers it comes back to the same thing. The company doesn’t trust you to work 40 hours a week (because who the fuck actually has 40 hours per week of work to do?) and they want to see you doing busy bullshit to justify your place in the company.
If we had been able to get rid of the office we’d have gotten something at WeWork or similar so we could have a conference room once a week. We have two new/newer employees who definitely need/benefit from that little bit of irl face time imo. We just wouldn’t have kept the 3000 square feet we’ve got.
Im not sure what field you are in Mos, but I’m curious what the difference would be between performance and productivity scoring at your company.
It’s very possible that new hires are just as productive as they’ve always been but they are terribly underrated by their managers. It’s also possible that productivity is way up for people that already had their skills well developed before the pandemic, and way down for people that need to be shown how to do the work.
I have 20+ years of experience in my field and I’m damned good at my work, if I do say so myself. I joined my company mid-pandemic and I have had no problem adapting to the WFH model and I’ve gotten good performance reviews. We are a big company so I expect we will see some trends like this when we’re able to parse the data and analyze more.
My company said it was requiring in office work 2x a week … then said anyone who wanted to be 100% remote could be … also said B was not a reversal of A, but it came after a lot of protest.
The most compelling argument imo was that the company was requiring folks to come in but not requiring vaccinations.
I think like most companies measuring productivity by person is extremely hard outside of things like sales, so there’s all kinds of inconsistencies between productivity, ratings, and rewards. I don’t think that’s unique to my company.
The only option is 1. Or at least a hybrid model.
It’s really a “you want it to be one way. It’s the other way” moment for companies
There is no full work from office world to come back to, or even close to it. To be successful today, you need to be effective in WFH and hybrid.
I think we all know this, but some jobs are really difficult to learn without going into the office surrounded by seasoned veterans. Architecture and engineering I think are one of those. I just don’t think an engineer or architect coming out of school is going to be able to learn without the collaboration that happens in the office.
I’m sure there are other jobs like that too that would be almost impossible to learn without in person, hands on mentoring.
Engineer here. Onboarding new employees is 100% the biggest challenge of a remote/hybrid model, but it can be done. We hired a new guy 1 week before the initial COVID shut down where we were shut out of our facilities for 6 weeks.
It’s tough. Obviously that was a unique situation, and we didn’t really have high expectations for him getting much done other than being trained, but we made it work.
I work for a large company, and the rumor early on was that there was some infighting in the C-Suite. Some wanted primarily return to office, some wanted more flexibility. They settled on a 30/70 In office/WFH, that local management said they basically have no intentions on enforcing. We agreed we’ll all work at the office on Wednesdays, and I’d say attendance has been in the 50-75% range. How we get the other 10% weekly in us up to us.
The nature of most engineering jobs that involve manufacturing or hands on product development means that 100% WFH is likely impossible. I live 10 minutes from our facility, and it’s not uncommon for me to go in for a few hours on a random day when I have stuff that needs to get done, then go home. But sitting in a cubicle is a thing of the past IMO.
As for the original point about training people being challenging, you’re right. But again, it can be done. The important thing is to be honest about the specifics of the job and what can be done from home. If they are being hired into an engineering position that can be done mostly remotely, then there needs to be very structured training and collaboration via Zoom on a regular basis. Communication is key. We have been good about this and we’ve hired a few people since the pandemic started and have had no issues with new hire performance.
The emphasis on these types of jobs should always have been “here’s the work we expect you to get done, and the resources to do it, and these people are available to help you. Now get to it.” Requiring 8 hours of sitting in a chair is silly. Giving people reasonable deliverables and the flexibility to get them done has worked out just fine for us in this pandemic.
Side note, in some ways I see it helping. I work for a car company. There are thousands of different engineers all working on their piece of the car. Each person is just a cog in the machine. Maybe that’s a grotesque analogy but I don’t know any other way to say it. If everyone gets their part of it done, things go smoothly. One issue we had pre pandemic, when you had hundreds of engineers all occupying an office space but working on their unique part, was guys getting distracted by stuff outside of their immediate area. You had people spending time in meetings they didn’t need to be in. Chasing around information that wasn’t important to their job, rather than focusing on their deliverables. Remote work has in some ways tamped this down, because you just don’t have the same ease of access to other departments the way you’d used to. Some may see this as a problem, but I always had issues with people worrying too much about what other people were doing and not enough about making sure they get their own shit together.
Pretty hard to do laboratory work remote. My clients have been letting folks WFH for data analysis and writing. But a lot of fermentation work requires someone there all five days- so if anyone wants to WFH they have to coordinate amongst the team.
Your models are based upon an assumption that the current employee review process since COVID is as reliable and bias-limited as the pre-WFH review process.
If you don’t personally care, then why is this your policy? Can’t you change it? Is the problem that your partners do care?