this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
610 points (98.9% liked)
Technology
59589 readers
3077 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Any kind of mandate that tells employees where they need to sit to be effective at their job is misguided. The office should be a place where people can meet to share ideas and work on things together and socialize. They should be available to employees to use when they need them. Not everyone has a quiet space to work at home and some people enjoy the separation between their home and work lives of going to the office. Some people need quiet time to focus on their job without interruption and can do that better at home. Some people need a bit of both and the flexibility to enjoy both makes them more productive.
I don’t get why this conversation is so binary. Why not just focus on flexibility? Create spaces in the office that are appealing and productive and focus on shared work and team projects. People will use offices if they are useful. Put some walls back up in the office and create good focus spaces so even if someone is in the office for a team meeting they can still get their quiet time.
I am on zoom all day with coworkers around the world. I’m not going to go to an office and sit in a 2‘ x 2‘ phone booth all day just for the one meeting I have that’s in person. But if I had a comfortable private office with walls and a little space to pace around and some natural light where I didn’t have to wear headphones all day and fight distractions, I might actually go to the office for that one in-person meeting and spend the rest of the day there being productive. 
You make great points, and basically make my argument for me.
One thing I'd add is there are some of us (me included) who resist the social angle of work. It's how I'm wired, and it's taken me a long time to acknowledge and support the efforts to make teams cohesive.
Building great teams is probably the hardest thing in business - the technical stuff can be figured out. And I say this as someone who'd rather work with the technical stuff, and I schedule meetings in my calendar, and reserve small meeting rooms, just to have quiet time to get work done.
It's incredibly difficult to foster great teams, build connectivity between people, when you're not in-person. Being in-person is also where those spontaneous conversations happen that do things like bring people together, or come up with solutions to troublesome issues.
Motivating someone like me to actually be in the office is sometimes necessary.
You nailed it that finding the balance point is the answer. I've been fortunate to work in businesses that understood this, and trusted everyone to do what was needed.
Yeah it's down to the individual really. A guy I worked with did WFH 99% of the time. Only saw him in the office maybe 3 times a year. That dude got a lot of shit done, it was crazy.
Personally I found during the pandemic when I was WFH for many months I found it difficult to keep motivated. After a while the concept of work became abstract. But if I'm going into work once per week, that seems to avoid that.
Other people just can't work at all from home at all. Too many distractions.
Then there's cases like someone I know who WFH all the time and gets a lot done, but simply doesn't like. She wants to come into the office to talk with people sometimes. But the company she works for doesn't want that.
But I think it's simply management doesn't want to think of people as individuals. Instead they just want a blanket policy so they can just say "the rules are the rules" and not have to think about what works for the individual. They don't want to, you know... manage people.
If I had a job where I could work from home I think I'd rather be in the office most of the time but I would appreciate the flexibility. I just really hate zoom meetings. I find most in person meetings can be done a little more spur of the moment and you are in and out in 5-15 minutes where the scheduled zoom meetings are an hour of some upper manager droning on in an attempt to justify their existence.
I'm much happier that 99% of the time I'm physically working on machines and not in face to face or zoom meetings but that's just been my experience.
Yeah but when you're trying to get some work done, do you like having people interrupting you for 5-15 minutes?
There are days when I go into the office and the bosses aren't there. On those days I think "good, I can actually get some work done today."
I suppose it depends on the kind of work you do, but for many kinds of work, any kind of meeting represents a loss in productivity. Impromptu meetings, even if shorter, can be worse because it interrupts what I'm doing.