During COVID my workplace had to go fully remote

IT has (left over from waterfall) some skills stronger in some states, so IT teams were reshuffled to get people from all over to balance them

So when we were allowed to return to the office, we were required to be there 3 days a week

With the spread out teams we had no in person meetings, we rarely saw team members even if they were on the same site

So we felt very much like the difference was to commute to do MS Teams meetings in the office on small screens three times a week, and have no commute and do MS Teams meetings on our own screens twice a week

We are lucky enough now to have full time work from home

Edit to add: management aren’t on the same agreement as the rest of us, they have individual contracts. Very few of them have access to remote work

Office Space. But also, Been in all those. It’s weird to remember that your employer doesn’t actually want you to be productive and fix the problems to be profitable. They want to appear to be doing that. You’ll go further in your career by playing those games rather than working. I, unfortunately, like doing the work to keep the company going instead of the games, which is not as profitable for myself, but it keeps the company from dying even though they don’t realize it, and keeps them rich. Win? I’d rather be planting corn at this point.

A task that would have taken 1 person a few hours to do remotely, has now taken 8 people, 3 weeks of in office meetings and status updates and endless interruptions and discussions over every aspect of the project over and over again to finally complete.

You’re loving the RTO now, but then half a year later the management decides to fire dozens of people and replace them with this flashy new thing called AI, which gets the job done in 6 hours instead, even if buggy, and causing even more problems with unnoticed misinterpretations, but hey, 6 hours is so much less than 3 weeks, and we saved a lot of money!

And then the reduced staff will have to do even more work, get swamped, then gets replaced by AI (which still leads to inferior product), and by that point the management won’t even consider RTO being the reason for all that inefficiency.

You could have done the job at home in 3-4 hours, but instead they shot themselves in the foot and still considered it a win.

Oh, and the office that they are renting and that is now half empty because of the reduced staff…? Suddenly it’s not a problem like it was with remote working.

you gotta leave 15 minutes before and it takes 15 minutes to get back and settled and you did not work on anything during.

I forgot about that. Also, where is Meeting Room X again? Is it upstairs, in the other building, or is it the weird one down the hall and two lefts two floors down?

I cannot express how pleased I am that the company I work for went all-in on remote work during the pandemic and allowed the lease to lapse on most of their office space while sub-letting the rest. RTO is a literal impossibility for us now. We simply don’t all fit in the remaining office space we have, and assuming new leases on more office space obviously looks terrible on quarterly reports.

There are many other ways that the company I work for is miserable, but I take the small victories where I can.

It’s frustrating because management are so colossally, transparently, stupid but they get the big paychecks and the workers get fucked. And then like half the workers sit there going “Well this is just and fair. this is a good world. If the people actually doing the work had more of a say, that’s communism and thus axiomatically bad”

We started doing all this stuff. For this and several other, similar reasons - our competitors are passing us by, quickly.

My team just had a super productive in office day. I thought “wow I can see why people think in office is more productive” and then I realized my entire team was remote that day but me so it was more like a fully remote day for the team.

Also:

Gotta keep the commercial real estate market from imploding.

Whole lotta corpo money and financing tied up in that, sure would be a shame if most office space just wasn’t actually needed for most office work.

Also also:

Most managers just personally need the ability to neg employees in-person, even if it is detrimental to actual output, that doesn’t matter, what matters is sating their need to feel powerful and important.

Anyway, Zoom did basically the same thing either earlier this year or last year… yep, Zoom employees, the people who make and sell business oriented virtual collaboration software… all need to RTO.

Found it: https://fortune.com/2024/07/09/remote-work-outlook-zoom-return-to-office-chief-people-officer/

Wait till you hear about Word!

I blame people more than Microsoft. People were either duped or too lazy to say “Microsoft Teams” in full. It’s not too crazy to have services like “Apple Music” because people aren’t allowing Apple to control the word by just saying “Music” casually. People need to go back to saying “Microsoft Teams.” Alas, it will never happen. 😒

If being proficient at using teams means people can work from where they prefer, it’s my opinion that it’s your duty to do it, so everyone has better choices.

Obviously that isn’t the opinion held here, but that is more indicative of companies trying to reduce headcount because their growth has slowed. Growing companies are meeting people where they are. Broadly speaking of course.

Teams isn’t really designed to do anything, it’s mostly just a conferencing app but it’s absolute rubbish at collaboration work because it essentially doesn’t have any tools in that area. Why Microsoft have never bothered to create their own version of slack I do not know.

Microsoft also owns Github which is the best asynchronous remote workplace tool on the market imo. Yet here we are.

Once you get big enough you just fail upwards. Microsoft, Oracle, Google etc all have to get 1 thing right out of a 100 failures and will still continue to succeed.

Teams wasn’t specifically built for remote work though. It was built for internal chat/messaging, document sharing, planning, etc. It is 100% used internally at MS even when people aren’t working remotely.

I know because people at MS have been complaining about it since a few years before the pandemic.

“You want to use teams a bit? We have a session here” “I’d be happy to, actually. Not really, but it wouldn’t be bad” “Not really? If you say so, I have a teams session ready right here” “No. No. I’m not stupid” “People use it every day.” “Tell the truth” “It’s a good user experience.” “So are you ready to use it? For 5 minutes?” “No, I’m not an idiot.”

I’ve also heard that Slack get real expensive for larger enterprises.

What?

Was it Teams or Teams (New) or Teams (School & Work) or Teams…

I already knew where this link would take me XD.

I don’t think microsoft understands shit. I think their leaders are out of touch, lying, idiots. They continue to exist based on inertia and past success.

Not on Lemmy social media 😜

An RTO mandate isn’t growth. Growth would be if they mandated all hard drives containing Teams source code be thrown into a dumpster, and the dumpster lit on fire.

Found the C-Suite.

Right, so my 3 hour round trip doesn’t cut into that?

I miss so many meetings when I’m in the office.

I talk with someone away from my desk and meetings happen without me (doesn’t happen at home, no one there to talk to)

I make a coffee, in the office kitchen, and don’t notice the ding on my computer (doesn’t happen at home as the kitchen is near the study)

Last time I had to be in the office was to support new staff, so the missed meetings were due to talking to the new staff (but mostly about Minecraft)

I know I’m more productive at home, I’m pretty sure all the programmers are happier at home due to the lesser noise

I think when I was in the office with a colocated team we had some efficiencies, particularly in collaboration while planning a piece of work that doesn’t work nearly as well online, but my workplace is distributed across three timezones so we don’t get to be colocated with our teams, so there’s no productive talk to offset the recreational talk

Constantly talking to your colleagues degrades the work quality, if anything. I don’t need to hear rumors about our manager’s ex to be able to work on projects

Your point is actually what makes remote work so much more effective. When you work in an office, you get used to things working by chance - people seeing what others are doing, talking about it on coffee breaks and so on. When everybody is working remotely, you quickly realize that those things that happened by chance were actually a lot more important than it might seem at first - and then you can do the dumb thing and go back to having it happen by chance, or you can change your processes to ensure that everyone who may have anything to say about what you’re doing, know that you’re doing it.

Do you actually do work or are you one of those middle-men that add dubious value?

And, like, do you think I can read my coworker’s screen from across the room and be like “Ah yes, that is TransferProjectView.py. I should tell him that I am also planning on touching that file”?

And adults can learn to explicitly communicate. It’s not impossible. You just type into the box.

I haven’t been in an office since 2020, but the 15 years prior that I spent numerous offices taught me that much of corporate life is spent dealing with office politics instead of accomplishing anything meaningful.

Those “water cooler conversations” that executives are so keen on are mostly spent shootin’ the breeze or complaining about how Bob from marketing is a fucking moron.

Turns out when people step out for a break or head to the water cooler, they don’t want to talk about work. Shocking, I know.

I learned that I could never concentrate in the office over other people’s conversations, that the boss could and would interrupt me with trivial matters every few minutes regardless of what I’m working on, that Steve on my right was more concerned to be seen working when sick than to prevent others getting sick, that colleagues will always shout out questions they could answer themselves in a few seconds, thus prompting an hour of random chat, that Steve was always sick, and that Steve was the noisiest eater in the world of the most garlicy food in the world, which made him gassy, that the boss’s assessment of my productivity was chiefly based on hours visibly spent suffering Steve, that Steve considers shopping online to be a social activity, and that the boss can detect headphones going on your head and music starting from 50 feet away and instantly be behind you with a burning question that doesn’t make any sense. Working at home has been more productive for us all, except that the boss and Steve don’t seem to know that Teams offers chat channels other than “General”.

I miss casually bumping into people and chatting, but not because it ever helped with the work.

Downside: Many companies use open-plan offices, which means it’s too busy to concentrate. So everyone wears noise-cancelling headphones in order to be able to work at all.

The only time I actually felt that being present was a benefit was in a company that had one from for every two people.

The most brilliant ideas happen on the toilet or in the shower. Naturally- we should poop and bathe with our coworkers.

What ever value you get from chance conversations will overwhelmed by people spending significantly less time actually working.