Working from home-Hows that going?

[aGDevil2k]

Whew I had to break out the laptop to reply to this....

I have worked remotely for almost 9 years. "White collar" job. I have no idea what it would take for me to ever work in an office again, but I would take a pay cut before I would be forced to do that. Thankfully, with about 12 years until I could retire, I feel positive that I should be able to WFH from here on out.

1. As for "how you monitor" work, apologies but that is a very old school and disproven concept. You should be monitoring output instead of time spent staring at your machine. I tell my team that I dont care if they get their work done in 4 hours versus 40, but they are expected to get a done what would be reasonable for a typical work week. And they should be responsive on Teams/Slack for any questions or whatever. Outside of that, I dont care what they are doing.

2. I threw up a little when I was reading about "conversations around the coffee pot." That's something CEOs of old school companies love to say....that innovation happens around the water cooler. You know what happens around the water cooler? NOTHING. Gossip about how bad management is. Meanwhile those CEOs and boards are just trying to justify their long-term commercial office leases (until they run out).

3. For communication and being available? Much easier to slack/Teams someone or do a quick call. And you dont want to walk around a building to do it. And you dont have to "wait to see if this or that conference room is available" - and my team (or any team) can ping me much easier.

4. Face to face? Dont miss it at all. I dont need to see your face and smell your cologne. Video is fine. I dont need your germs or deal with your microaggressions.

I am so much more productive and exponentially happier working from home. My life is tremendously better in every single way. I am able to be there for my kid, my dogs are happier, and I can coach youth sports because I don't commute. My auto insurance is less (because I dont use it for commuting) and I save money from dressing up to sit in a damn cube or office.

The old way of mandatory office-based work for every employee can go to Hell.

 

[CFordUNC]

Whew I had to break out the laptop to reply to this....

I have worked remotely for almost 9 years. "White collar" job. I have no idea what it would take for me to ever work in an office again, but I would take a pay cut before I would be forced to do that. Thankfully, with about 12 years until I could retire, I feel positive that I should be able to WFH from here on out.

1. As for "how you monitor" work, apologies but that is a very old school and disproven concept. You should be monitoring output instead of time spent staring at your machine. I tell my team that I dont care if they get their work done in 4 hours versus 40, but they are expected to get a done what would be reasonable for a typical work week. And they should be responsive on Teams/Slack for any questions or whatever. Outside of that, I dont care what they are doing.

2. I threw up a little when I was reading about "conversations around the coffee pot." That's something CEOs of old school companies love to say....that innovation happens around the water cooler. You know what happens around the water cooler? NOTHING. Gossip about how bad management is. Meanwhile those CEOs and boards are just trying to justify their long-term commercial office leases (until they run out).

3. For communication and being available? Much easier to slack/Teams someone or do a quick call. And you dont want to walk around a building to do it. And you dont have to "wait to see if this or that conference room is available" - and my team (or any team) can ping me much easier.

4. Face to face? Dont miss it at all. I dont need to see your face and smell your cologne. Video is fine. I dont need your germs or deal with your microaggressions.

I am so much more productive and exponentially happier working from home. My life is tremendously better in every single way. I am able to be there for my kid, my dogs are happier, and I can coach youth sports because I don't commute. My auto insurance is less (because I dont use it for commuting) and I save money from dressing up to sit in a damn cube or office.

The old way of mandatory office-based work for every employee can go to Hell.

Agree with literally every single word you said here.

 

[mpaer]

Whew I had to break out the laptop to reply to this....

I have worked remotely for almost 9 years. "White collar" job. I have no idea what it would take for me to ever work in an office again, but I would take a pay cut before I would be forced to do that. Thankfully, with about 12 years until I could retire, I feel positive that I should be able to WFH from here on out.

1. As for "how you monitor" work, apologies but that is a very old school and disproven concept. You should be monitoring output instead of time spent staring at your machine. I tell my team that I dont care if they get their work done in 4 hours versus 40, but they are expected to get a done what would be reasonable for a typical work week. And they should be responsive on Teams/Slack for any questions or whatever. Outside of that, I dont care what they are doing.

2. I threw up a little when I was reading about "conversations around the coffee pot." That's something CEOs of old school companies love to say....that innovation happens around the water cooler. You know what happens around the water cooler? NOTHING. Gossip about how bad management is. Meanwhile those CEOs and boards are just trying to justify their long-term commercial office leases (until they run out).

3. For communication and being available? Much easier to slack/Teams someone or do a quick call. And you dont want to walk around a building to do it. And you dont have to "wait to see if this or that conference room is available" - and my team (or any team) can ping me much easier.

4. Face to face? Dont miss it at all. I dont need to see your face and smell your cologne. Video is fine. I dont need your germs or deal with your microaggressions.

I am so much more productive and exponentially happier working from home. My life is tremendously better in every single way. I am able to be there for my kid, my dogs are happier, and I can coach youth sports because I don't commute. My auto insurance is less (because I dont use it for commuting) and I save money from dressing up to sit in a damn cube or office.

The old way of mandatory office-based work for every employee can go to Hell.

How do you really feel? Lol The 40 ish types I know would universally agree with you

 

[donbosco]

I bet awkward Office romances are down. I mean they use to seriously get in the way I am not trying to be funny

Jesucristo! Academic romances are so so quirky and potentially disastrous.

But I married an academic librarian just the same.

 

[HeelYeah2012]

I would argue that I am able to get my “must do” stuff complete much faster and therefore make myself MORE available for team discussion and problem solving time through the rest of the day.

My team is implementing a new information system for our state university system (13 different institutions). So we have questions/tickets etc flying at us from all sides. The best way for me to stay ahead of the flow is to focus on the must do items and then make myself available the rest of the time to answer the other questions as they come. My whole team being remote people who work all across the state (and even a few now outside the state) forces us to schedule time for the bigger issues rather than just pop into each other’s offices - and that structure helps me a ton.

Makes perfect sense. Little bit different than my world.

I oversee the accounting/finance department of a publicly-traded company, and we have about 35 total people in our department. Our deadlines and priorities in accounting are a little more predictable. For instance, we are swamped just after quarter-end and leading up to our quarterly earnings release etc - so on my team, there are certain time periods when I have to bear down and handle the time-sensitive stuff. And then there are other periods of the year where my main priority is helping my team, and I can slow down a little and focus on process improvement and other things.

The challenge for me is that on my team of 35, some of them have been at the organization for 20-25 years doing somewhat mundane tasks like accounts payable and accounts receivable, and these people could easily work from home no problem since they rarely have any questions. And then there are other people who are a little more dynamic and have more challenging roles but they’ve only been at the company for 0-2 years, so they’re highly dependent upon getting on the job training and bouncing ideas off of me on a daily basis. Makes it really hard to develop and enforce a “fair” WFH policy. And ultimately, our WFH policy is set by the C-suite anyway.

 

[ronjon]

I started full time remote since Covid. I had another remote job about 10 years ago that lasted about a year.

I don't miss the commute, and now use that time for exercise which has been great.

I miss being in the office. However, I work for a huge company that has offices across the US and a good % of remote workers on top of that. My team of 20+ is located in about 12 states, so not much point in being in the office to be with my team. I do miss the social interactions.

Honestly, I can keep up with my workload in 2-3 hours a day and am in meetings another 4-5 hours a day. The leftover hour that was social time has converted to posting on message boards. Go figure.

I moved during Covid so I'm not near an office anymore. I'd probably start going a few times a week if I was near an office.

 

[donbosco]

Whew I had to break out the laptop to reply to this....

I have worked remotely for almost 9 years. "White collar" job. I have no idea what it would take for me to ever work in an office again, but I would take a pay cut before I would be forced to do that. Thankfully, with about 12 years until I could retire, I feel positive that I should be able to WFH from here on out.

1. As for "how you monitor" work, apologies but that is a very old school and disproven concept. You should be monitoring output instead of time spent staring at your machine. I tell my team that I dont care if they get their work done in 4 hours versus 40, but they are expected to get a done what would be reasonable for a typical work week. And they should be responsive on Teams/Slack for any questions or whatever. Outside of that, I dont care what they are doing.

2. I threw up a little when I was reading about "conversations around the coffee pot." That's something CEOs of old school companies love to say....that innovation happens around the water cooler. You know what happens around the water cooler? NOTHING. Gossip about how bad management is. Meanwhile those CEOs and boards are just trying to justify their long-term commercial office leases (until they run out).

3. For communication and being available? Much easier to slack/Teams someone or do a quick call. And you dont want to walk around a building to do it. And you dont have to "wait to see if this or that conference room is available" - and my team (or any team) can ping me much easier.

4. Face to face? Dont miss it at all. I dont need to see your face and smell your cologne. Video is fine. I dont need your germs or deal with your microaggressions.

I am so much more productive and exponentially happier working from home. My life is tremendously better in every single way. I am able to be there for my kid, my dogs are happier, and I can coach youth sports because I don't commute. My auto insurance is less (because I dont use it for commuting) and I save money from dressing up to sit in a damn cube or office.

The old way of mandatory office-based work for every employee can go to Hell.

Much agreement here.

An aside…I’ve used Slack but not since pre-pandemic in a large group - how do you imagine it might work with a class of, say, 20 students?

 

[tonman]

I married my wife. She sat over the wall from me.

Meetings. Big Companies don't understand that having a meeting for non-colocated folks take people's time to make the meeting in person. I would have to drive from one site 20 min and find a parking spot and walk to the conference. 2 hours spent for one meeting. With Zoom or TEAMs I can have two meetings in 2 hours.

 

[mpaer]

. And then there are other people who are a little more dynamic and have more challenging roles but they’ve only been at the company for 0-2 years,

I can not imagine how I would train a new employee on Zoom

 

[HeelInTheOzarks]

1. As for "how you monitor" work, apologies but that is a very old school and disproven concept. You should be monitoring output instead of time spent staring at your machine. I tell my team that I dont care if they get their work done in 4 hours versus 40, but they are expected to get a done what would be reasonable for a typical work week. And they should be responsive on Teams/Slack for any questions or whatever. Outside of that, I dont care what they are doing.

This is 100% true.

Some of our management have old-school mindsets (the project I'm on is a new team that's only about 2 years old) and after a while they wanted us to log our time spent on each task so they could "do analytics" aka see who was spending 40 hours a week doing stuff. That lasted a few months and then they stopped making us do that because it obviously didn't matter.

Then they would want each department to make a status slide to management to show what all we accomplished each week. We would put the main things we did - and then after a while we were told to include EVERYTHING on the slide so I'd have to add "we had such and such standing meeting" or "we had our weekly testing/training call." Now recently we got told to remove the things management knows we do weekly so go back to just the high points. I just laugh knowing that this whole silly thing is also on the way out...eventually they will get tired of this as well.

As long as we are accomplishing our tasks and we are always available during business hours for any questions that arise, why should I have to write down everything that I do?

 

[CRHeel94]

I have transitioned from a full time office job to a consulting role in the past few years.

The last place where I worked went full remote during COVID. Some people went in...think that had an outsized impact on office politics. people who went in more had the general manager's attention, people who didn't, less so. When a drastic round of restructuring came around, the "high visibility" people were all safe.

Now that Im working with different clients I get to see different work cultures. Think its more of a Latin American thing, but I'm shocked how many companies still have a butt in seats mentality (a client wants to have me on location for their engagement, even though 80% of the sessions could be done remote). I do see some value in face to face meetings occasionally, but most meetings can be held online (also thin that most companies/teams aren't great at running online meetings). There are some type of meetings Ive felt go smoother in person: brainstorming/idea iteration, performance reviews, meeting a client for the first time.

I tend to advise new (as well as young) employees to go into the office a bit more than what's required. Think its really hard to pick up on cultural cues only online.

Finally, in something that as a manager brings me horror, I've seen some cases of fully remote employees who will have two jobs. Totally unprofessional and unethical.

 

[Centerpiece]

Like Coach Walz, I was a high school teacher and a coach (football, baseball and basketball - at various times in career) but I taught Culinary Arts - hands on, career-oriented curriculum. Almost impossible to do via zoom. Had to be in the kitchen, and then on the ball field. Loved it. Now I'm a PT jazz musician... that's also hard to do from home, other than practice...

 

[farce©]

I still do, I can just wait to respond to them for a bit on zoom or email until I complete what I'm doing instead of someone in my door who I can't ignore or wave away.

I don’t want to leave the impression that I am opposed to WFH. The last 13 years of my career my “office” was in Vermont and I lived in LA and Cleveland. Originally I agreed to spend one week per month in the office, but as the scope of my responsibilities increased it wasn't enough. So I took an apartment in the area, kept a car there, and flew back and forth every other week. So I was working from home for many years before the pandemic and understand the benefits (I just did it week to week rather than day to day.) I was one of the few senior people in our organization who allowed my employees to work from home pretty much anytime they asked for whatever reason, whether personal or just a need for isolation to get work done.

But I still think the face to face interaction is important and that a lot of collaboration doesn’t happen on a schedule but bubbles up organically and it is helpful when team members have more than a strictly professional relationship. I understand I am old, but I think it’s hard to get to know people just using email, Zoom, Teams and Slack.

 

[CFordUNC]

Something neat that my company that once per month they host a “collaboration day” where they will pay (flight, hotel, rental car, meal per diem) for all remote employees to come to the home office, and they hold programming, trainings, etc. that are a really neat opportunity for everyone to get together in person. It’s not mandatory, so I usually do it once ever 2-3 months. And then twice per year, they host a week-long “conference” at the home office that is mandatory, but it is packed full of useful programming, trainings, seminars, discussions and meetings with leadership, etc. It’s a really neat model that works really well.

 

[mpaer]

This is 100% true.

Some of our management have old-school mindsets (the project I'm on is a new team that's only about 2 years old) and after a while they wanted us to log our time spent on each task so they could "do analytics" aka see who was spending 40 hours a week doing stuff. That lasted a few months and then they stopped making us do that because it obviously didn't matter.

Then they would want each department to make a status slide to management to show what all we accomplished each week. We would put the main things we did - and then after a while we were told to include EVERYTHING on the slide so I'd have to add "we had such and such standing meeting" or "we had our weekly testing/training call." Now recently we got told to remove the things management knows we do weekly so go back to just the high points. I just laugh knowing that this whole silly thing is also on the way out...eventually they will get tired of this as well.

As long as we are accomplishing our tasks and we are always available during business hours for any questions that arise, why should I have to write down everything that I do?

I am positive IBM or some consulting firm is working on an AI type thingy where each employees work computer is monitored and all strokes are "categorized"..Then some report gets generated on each employee to measure productivity

 

[HeelInTheOzarks]

I don’t want to leave the impression that I am opposed to WFH. The last 13 years of my career my “office” was in Vermont and I lived in LA and Cleveland. Originally I agreed to spend one week per month in the office, but as the scope of my responsibilities increased it wasn't enough. So I took an apartment in the area, kept a car there, and flew back and forth every other week. So I was working from home for many years before the pandemic and understand the benefits (I just did it week to week rather than day to day.) I was one of the few senior people in our organization who allowed my employees to work from home pretty much anytime they asked for whatever reason, whether personal or just a need for isolation to get work done.

But I still think the face to face interaction is important and that a lot of collaboration doesn’t happen on a schedule but bubbles up organically and it is helpful when team members have more than a strictly professional relationship. I understand I am old, but I think it’s hard to get to know people just using email, Zoom, Teams and Slack.

For what it’s worth, our team “co locates” normally one week per month/2 months depending on other demands. So we still see each other in person some.

 

[CFordUNC]

I am positive IBM or some consulting firm is working on an AI type thingy where each employees work computer is monitored and all strokes are "categorized"..Then some report gets generated on each employee to measure productivity

The moment that any company for which I would ever work would implement something like that would be the moment I tender my resignation.

 

[Carolyn225]

I’m a teacher. Before the pandemic I had taught an ‘experimental’ class in which 14 students from 7 campuses around the country (3 time zones), in pairs did local history projects. Digital was a major focus and we met via Zoom and they created websites that showcased their work. It was a great experience.

When things went sideways I was better prepared than most of my colleagues to teach online. I’ve managed - my preference - to continue with distance learning though it is always a negotiation semester by semester. My department supports me 100% but administration isn’t always as flexible.

Thus set-up has resulted in my teaching face-to-face in the Fall and hybrid/online in the Spring. My wife and daughter live in NYC and when I’m not with them I’m in Asheville.

I’ve been pretty creative with Zoom and students tend to respond. Some are checked out to be sure but frankly some are also that way about in-person school. There are things that can be done online much more easily or at least as effectively in different ways than in a brick and mortar classroom.

I think hybrid is probably my favorite mode these days - 25 to 50% of classes in-person - though full online works fine too. If there was one thing I’d change about distance learning is would be requiring cameras to be on. To get around that somewhat I give tiny amounts of extra credit when students make their screen icon image reflect the subject of the day. That’s somewhat better than blank screens.

WFH has permitted me to live with my wife and daughter in NYC about 9 months a year all told. I’m grateful for that.

I am now a happily retired former high school teacher. Before the pandemic I always enjoyed the relationship I had with students in person and much of that was lost once online. I taught 11th grade AP US History and a 12th grade required government course. While online, my ap students struggled more on their College Board exams and I had 5 times (approximately 25 of 100 students) who were not on track to pass a required class for graduation. Much of my time was spent tracking them down and getting them to complete the minimum expectations for a passing grade; it was brutal. The joy of teaching was gone. I thankfully retired after one and a half years of teaching online.

I was asked to come back for a semester to fill in for a teacher who unexpectedly left the profession. Standards which had been slipping were seemingly nonexistent; apparel by young female students was better suited for the beach! When asked to return the next year to fill in for another teacher who had left, I quickly declined.

For so many years I maintained academic standards that fully embraced critical thinking and analytical writing; no regrets whatsoever but I cannot imagine how much harder it must be to teach post pandemic!

 

[tallheel95]

When I was in my 20s and worked in a major city, I definitely enjoyed the social aspect of working in an office with a lot of other people. Now that I'm in my 40s, married with kids and a dog... couldn't care less if I ever stepped foot in an office again. I have a hybrid job at the moment, three days at home and two days in the office. I really only interact with the people that I am there to see and don't spend much time with my co-workers. The two days that I'm there feel like a hassle (having to commute, bring my computer, etc) and I'd jump at the chance to be fully remote. I'm only in the office because some of the clientele I work with prefer an in-person appointment.

I have some friends that work at Epic (in Wisconsin) and the company requires all employees to be on site five days a week, unless they are in the field for training or installation. They have spent insane amounts of money building the (huge, eccentric) campus and I guess they feel the need to justify the expenditure. Employee retention appears to be a problem, and I wonder how many people choose not to work there due to that policy.

The one thing that does seem sad about the WFH situation is the impact it has had on the businesses (restaurants, etc.) that depended on the traffic from nearby offices. My observation is that city downtowns seem to be suffering and are less vibrant due to the sudden remote work shift after Covid.

 

[mpaer]

I am now a happily retired former high school teacher. Before the pandemic I always enjoyed the relationship I had with students in person and much of that was lost once online. I taught 11th grade AP US History and a 12th grade required government course. While online, my ap students struggled more on their College Board exams and I had 5 times (approximately 25 of 100 students) who were not on track to pass a required class for graduation. Much of my time was spent tracking them down and getting them to complete the minimum expectations for a passing grade; it was brutal. The joy of teaching was gone. I thankfully retired after one and a half years of teaching online.

I was asked to come back for a semester to fill in for a teacher who unexpectedly left the profession. Standards which had been slipping were seemingly nonexistent; apparel by young female students was better suited for the beach! When asked to return the next year to fill in for another teacher who had left, I quickly declined.

For so many years I maintained academic standards that fully embraced critical thinking and analytical writing; no regrets whatsoever but I cannot imagine how much harder it must be to teach post pandemic!

So imagine your students interactions with their parents were only on Zoom...Yea--not good , you and fellow teachers actually have more awake time with students than their parents