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An interesting article over at PCMag that is worth the read as this brief summary cannot do the topics justice. It discusses the issues with getting employees back into the office after two years of working remotely.
[...] The 2022 Microsoft Work Trend Index reported that 50% of mid-level managers said their companies are making plans to return to in-person work five days a week in the year ahead, but 52% of employees are considering going hybrid or remote.
[...] While the pandemic has exposed the many challenges of working remotely, it has also made the benefits clear. People are unwilling to lose hours of their day to the things they find most frustrating about work, such as commuting and the drudgery of office life. [...]
[...] While offices are a collective place of work, they're experienced individually. And for some individuals, that experience is not as welcoming as it is for others. This is reflected in women, people of color, members of the LGBTQIA+ community, and those with disabilities being less inclined to want to return to the office than others.
[...] In-office employees have found themselves spending time commuting only to sit in an office and spend the day not interacting with anyone there and having a Zoom meeting or two. Meanwhile, those still working remote can feel ignored when they're logged on to a Zoom meeting and see their colleagues in a conference room having side conversations that they're not a part of.
[...] There have been some unpleasant new realities faced by those returning to the office. Lots of workplace perks have disappeared in the pandemic. Fully stocked kitchens are a lot barer since they have to feed a much smaller fraction of a workforce. Free gym memberships didn't make much sense when gyms were closed and the benefit at some companies didn't return when their doors reopened.
[...] But there are some perks that have evolved into ones more suited to remote work. Companies, particularly at the beginning of the pandemic, set up stipends to outfit home offices. Childcare, which has always been a concern for working parents, became more of one. And benefits have expanded to include longer paid leave for parents, more flexible schedules, backup childcare services, and even tutoring stipends. [...]
[...] Companies would do well to set up an outreach system for employees of all levels to really check in on their individual needs and concerns. Forego formal surveys for a more human touch of a one-on-one chat by phone or Slack. Because no matter how remote we might be from one another in our workplaces at present, we've all lived through a trying time and could benefit from some connection.
Have your working environments changed, and if so, has it been for the better or worse (or neither)?
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday May 10 2022, @01:11PM (3 children)
Did they finally catch on? That we go into their online meetings where these narcissistic space wasters drone on for hours and put the headphones down so we can actually do some work?
That's by the way part of the productivity surge you saw during the work-from-home times, because we could appease the narcissists without having to waste time on it.
But yeah, the snail-mail is still a problem. Here's an idea, that middle-manager could go fetch my mail, that way he'd finally do something useful.
(Score: 2) by looorg on Tuesday May 10 2022, @01:32PM (2 children)
I have been wondering why the postal dude at work can't just put all the mail that come to me in a bigger envelope and snail-mail it to me. Snail-mail-forward. If they did that it would actually save some time. Since all our mail comes to a central post office and is then delivered out to the various departments and then once again there sorted into numbered boxes (such as mine). One wonders if they couldn't just skip that delivery thing since nobody, or very few are actually in the office so they don't visit the local copy-mail-room to check their box on a daily anymore. They could optimize their work to.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Tuesday May 10 2022, @02:16PM
I used to get paper mail in the 1990s - it was mostly trade magazines and junk. In the 2000s there was a trickle of inter-office paper and I shut off the trade rags because it was all available better online, on demand. By the 2010s I didn't have a work mailbox anymore, but I would get the occasional package with prototype supplies in it. Today anything I order for work just goes straight to my house, there are a few middle managers who still freak out about that, but mostly they get over themselves when they see that I have been in the job for 10 years and go years at a time without ordering anything at all (plus, the few things they did audit me on in the mid 2010s were slam-dunk in-your-face here-it-is-doing-company-work GTFO-my-cube-suckah!)
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Tuesday May 10 2022, @02:44PM
Or just open it, scan it and mail it. We're talking about work mail and a person who already has signed NDAs and security agreements up the ass because he has to handle highly sensitive documents.