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posted by hubie on Tuesday May 10 2022, @12:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the nobody's-business-but-my-own dept.

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)?


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Wednesday May 11 2022, @01:22PM (1 child)

    by pdfernhout (5984) on Wednesday May 11 2022, @01:22PM (#1244032) Homepage

    Thanks for sharing your experience. Seems to me like your experience (excessive meetings, too many levels of approval needed, working 14-15 hour days, and on top of that getting reprimanded for missing things while working while sick) reflects poor management practices more than anything about remote/non-remote (at least, when management is reasonably enlightened).

    That said, I can see from what you wrote that *if* you already work in a company with poor management practices (management unwilling to reflect deeply on current needs and processes and make adjustments, and also organizations that don't have some healthy balance of distributed meshwork and centralized hierarchy in decision making), then the stress of any challenge or opportunity -- like changing how people work to mostly remote -- may produce increasing dysfunction. But I can wonder if that might also be true for any other workplace challenge too -- like changing customer needs, moving into a new line of business, taking on a new project, changing government regulations, financial challenges, a logistics issue, being short handed and needing to prioritize, some deeply problematical workplace social issues related to dysfunctional interpersonal styles of key people, and so on.

    And of course, if the company you were working for had been managing OK-enough pre-pandemic, then maybe without the pandemic-induced work stresses, then maybe there would never have been an exploitative situation emerging like you described and you will still be working there and enjoying your job there however much you enjoyed it before the pandemic (not having gone through what you did).

    I don't want to blame the victim here, but part of this also was you not setting limits. Consider reading this thread where someone who is overworking and unappreciated considers quitting and people suggest the same thing may happen at the next place they go unless they change their response to such situations by setting limits (which kind of reminds me of the "Bullies to Buddies" approach to dealing with people crossing healthy boundaries):
    "Quitting job with no plan- Please help assess my situation"
    https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=349041 [bogleheads.org]

    An example response there from "KlangFool": "In any reasonable size organization, 20% of the folks are doing 80% of the works. So, if you are any good, you will be overwork if you do not learn to say "no". And, the horrible part of this is if you are overwork, the quality of your work will go down and/or you will be burn out. Aka, you would not last long. A) Not everything is worth doing. B) If you say "yes" to everyone, you are a pushover. No one will think highly of you. C) If you willing to work for free (weekend, vacation time, and so on), your time must not be very valuable to you. Hence, by extension, you are not that valuable too. Set a priority. Do whatever can be done with good quality within your office hour. Or else, face burn out and disappointment."

    Lots more similar discussions on what is a common issue with people who care about their work:
    https://www.google.com/search?q=setting+limits+work+job+burnout+site%3Abogleheads.org [google.com]

    For example: "What Causes Burnout at Work?" https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=337025 [bogleheads.org]

    That said, it is much easier to become a victim when you are surrounded by a dysfunctional company -- with managers and executives who aren't emphasizing work/life balance and who are willing to exploit whatever weaknesses they find in their employees rather than supporting people in being healthy and reasonably productive over the long haul (including setting limits for them if they can't set them themselves, like requiring mandatory vacation or limiting work hours and communications in various ways).

    Setting limits can be hard when you are in a culture that does not encourage that -- especially one that has "PTO shaming" when people take time off, which is common in the USA. For example, people in Germany have a *minimum* required 30 days of annual vacation mandated by the government whereas in the USA it is literally 0.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_minimum_annual_leave_by_country [wikipedia.org]

    Also on that theme: https://www.salon.com/2010/08/25/german_usa_working_life_ext2010/ [salon.com]
    "How did Germany become such a great place to work in the first place? The Allies did it. This whole European model came, to some extent, from the New Deal. Our real history and tradition is what we created in Europe. Occupying Germany after WWII, the 1945 European constitutions, the UN Charter of Human Rights all came from Eleanor Roosevelt and the New Dealers. All of it got worked into the constitutions of Europe and helped shape their social democracies. It came from us. The papal encyclicals on labor, it came from the Americans."

    What was done to you with overwork would be breaking the law in many other countries (sames as in, say Switzerland, where it is illegal to place employees in offices without windows and natural sunlight).

    All that said, I can see the argument that if your original (potentially dysfunctional, poorly managed) company had not gone remote, then even with some new different stresses, maybe face-to-face interactions somehow might have made it less likely you would end up exploited and eventually burned out working long hours -- like either you would have felt more comfortable pushing back face-to-face, your colleagues might have felt more guilty seeing you exploited and stepped up, or your managers might have been more aware of the issue?

    One other context issue is that this is about non-remote companies going remote in the middle of a pandemic (where stress is everywhere, especially for working parents with small children). That level of social stress faced by employees day-after-day for years makes everything much harder even for the best managed companies. And I can see from what you wrote that becoming suddenly remote -- in the absence of a healthy remote work culture -- then makes it harder for an organization to deal with the added stresses in the ways it previously might have done like casually chatting about them over lunch or in the hallways.

    It sounds like that failure to create a healthy workplace is spreading in the company you left -- as these things often do, where good people leave due to dysfunction, the workload gets bigger per person for those who remain, and then more leave, and it becomes a cascading failure across the organization (possibly leading to the company shutting down or getting bought out, unless it has some monopoly or similar moat).

    In your previous job, given the company is crashing and burning without you, would that company have been better off if you had set a limit of eight hour days and taking sick time when sick -- but still were working there reasonably healthily doing quality work?

    And of course there are better companies out there that don't force employees to make such difficult choices and pushback like that, and it sounds like you found one. If your better company now went mostly remote, would it do remote work much better than your last one and be less likely to exploit you? Hopefully the answer there is yes.

    Anyway, I wrote more on the tradeoffs of remote working, but the lameness filter says this post is too long with that.

    Here is a reading list I put together that people at your previous company might have benefited from (not that it sounds like the managers there might be likely to read anything on it, but one can always hope):
    https://github.com/pdfernhout/High-Performance-Organizations-Reading-List [github.com]

    --
    The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.
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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by pdfernhout on Wednesday May 11 2022, @02:11PM

    by pdfernhout (5984) on Wednesday May 11 2022, @02:11PM (#1244045) Homepage

    (Continued from above) I've worked from home as a programmer most (but not all) of my career spanning decades. And I've liked that situation overall (ignoring the issue of what I work on sometimes). I don't like commuting. And I do like working without too many interruptions in my own quiet space.

    But I can see how working from home poses challenges for people not used to it, or who don't have a separate home office, or who don't have a spouse to handle childcare issues, or who live alone (especially during a pandemic when you can't go out), or who do different sorts of work, or who have different personalities. Or also unmarried people who are at a different stage in their life where they want to be meeting potential partners at work or school.

    So I think overall you are right that remote work does not work well for everyone (even if I think it can work well for more people than were doing it pre-pandemic -- especially with the right support and a remote-friendly work culture).

    And I can also admit that sometimes over the years I have yearned for more social times like when I was managing labs at universities (with a lot of autonomy and yet also interesting social interactions) or when I worked at a research lab and had interesting lunch conversations with coworkers. Even as I don't miss some of the other aspects of being onsite especially at some other jobs (like working in noisy places or a manager literally staring at my back all day in one situation). That said, I can wonder if nowadays I would still overall like such an on-site role as much as I did back in my twenties (even ignoring that I would have to move to make one feasible). The internet makes interesting chats (like on Soylent News) much more available than in the 1980s (although there was Usenet even then). But it's true that repeated face-to-face chats with the same people can develop more social rapport.

    Related: "How our housing choices make adult friendships more difficult: We can refuse to accept the status quo of default isolation."
    https://www.vox.com/2015/10/28/9622920/housing-adult-friendship [vox.com]
    "Why do we form such strong friendships in high school and college and form comparatively fewer as the years go on? I read a study many years ago that I have thought about many times since, though hours of effort have failed to track it down. The gist was that the key ingredient for the formation of friendships is repeated spontaneous contact. That's why we make friends in school — because we are forced into regular contact with the same people. It is the natural soil out of which friendship grows. ... This kind of spontaneous social mixing doesn't disappear in post-collegiate life. We bond with co-workers, especially in those scrappy early jobs, and the people who share our rented homes and apartments. But when we marry and start a family, we are pushed, by custom, policy, and expectation, to move into our own houses. And when we have kids, we find ourselves tied to those houses. ... Those of you who are married with kids: When was the last time you ran into a friend or "dropped by" a friend's house without planning it? When was the last time you had a unplanned encounter with anyone other than a clerk or a barista, someone serving you? Where would it happen? The mall? Walmart? There are so few noncommercial public spaces where we mix and mingle freely with people on a regular basis. ..."

    The place I have worked for the past several years -- entirely remotely -- has a headquarters on the other side of the continent from where I live or I'd enjoy dropping in there more often (but I don't like flying or travel that much, even if they are willing to pay for it and I get to visit a relative there on the weekends). The times I have gone there for visits for a week at a time, usually at most one day involves meeting immediate coworkers for lunch, and our daily standups were mostly me alone in a conference room talking to others on my team who lived in the local area but were working remotely to avoid heavy local traffic and long commutes. And frankly, standups sound better when everyone is remote than with some people in a conference room struggling with AV issues and poor audio quality. But one advantage of those trips was random lunch conversations with other people in the company (shipping, production, marketing, other programming teams, etc) and also meeting in person people I work with outside my immediate team. I enjoyed those chats and learned some key things. Possibly there might be a law of diminishing returns on them at some point though -- or maybe not if friendships grew and new areas of discussion became available. This is in a company that was not remote-first though and has a lot of required on-site work for other non-programming roles. As a whole, it could not function remote-only (unless maybe it had Avatar-like force-feedback remote presence robots for hands-on tasks).

    At a small remote-only programming-focused company I once worked for pre-pandemic, a big effort was made to engage people in various ways. Those included text chat related to hobbies, a rotating schedule of meet-and-greet meetings with various peers across the organization, scheduled peer mentoring meetings including over-the-shoulder screenshares for new hires to watch people work, and weekly show-and-tells about technology that people were using at work or just playing with. There was also a weekly company-wide Monday-morning meeting (with scheduling assignments and priorities) where everyone also was asked to say what they did over the weekend and usually wrote up a paragraph often with pictures in a shared document. These forms of social engagement would provide some social resilience when potentially stressful things happened.

    There is also an increasing sense for many people (whether working or being online for shopping, entertainment, discussion, or education) for which potentially-liberating and empowering computer technology of abundance can also be used for extensive surveillance (even to the point of keylogging and taking screenshots on company-owned work computers). Related example:
    "How employers use technology to surveil employees"
    https://www.brookings.edu/blog/techtank/2021/01/05/how-employers-use-technology-to-surveil-employees/ [brookings.edu]

    Such fine-grained monitoring potentially can make working from home (or attending school at home) feel more like being under house arrest. This is especially true in work cultures essentially requiring an always-on presence active in a chat system on a laptop (like that remote-only company did) which makes for a sort of unconscious background vibe like being a criminal having to wear an ankle bracelet tracking your location (at least during core working hours).

    Years ago, before chat was common, and as a contractor using my own equipment (so, not an employee), where I had occasional meetings or phone calls and worked towards broad objectives related to a project, working from home as a programmer could never have such a fine-grained oppressive feel.

    And if you are working onsite or on-campus, people may just assume you are working wherever you are or whatever you are doing.

    And watercooler or hallway voice chats leave no records and so potentially can be engaged in differently about sensitive job-related topics (within limits, and for good or bad).

    And then there is the potential issue of how easily work/home boundaries can get crossed with potentially 24X7 email and chat in remote work versus clear time boundaries when you work on-site. As people have said, the good thing about "going in" for the day is that eventually you can "go out" and leave for the day.

    So, there are tradeoffs. I think the only way we are going to transcend such tradeoffs is to rethink the nature of work itself. There are books related to aspects on that reading list I mentioned. For a more radical take on rethinking "work", see for example Bob Black's "The Abolition of Work" or James P. Hogan's "Voyage from Yesteryear" or Theodore Sturgeon's "The Skills of Xanadu". Although a downside of changing (especially by automating) the nature of work can be found in the sci-fi short story "With Folded Hands" or "The World Inside" and similar dystopias.

    --
    The biggest challenge of the 21st century: the irony of technologies of abundance used by scarcity-minded people.