There are a lot of news articles about “back to the office”, but they recirculate the same bad ideas. Let’s provide some new ideas for the media to circulate. It may also have the effect of making the office less terrible.
I would like my work computer to do Windows updates lightning quick in the office. It currently takes weeks, in or out of the office. Stopping in for a day makes no difference, so there is no point. Now, if there was a point, I would go in.
What would get you in the office?
Honestly, a much much higher salary. There are lots of things I’m going to have to deal with if I were to go back to the office; namely heavy traffic, transportation expenses, added stress, clothes (I mean, I’d have to use office-appropriate clothes whereas nowadays I have to be presentable only when I have meetings), food, waking up and preparing earlier than usual (sometimes up to 3 hours earlier!) and getting home late which gives me less free time, etc.
They’re going to have to offer a really lucrative salary for me to even consider returning to the office.
A higher salary would be of help to cover additional expeses related to coming to the office.
However, we also need a nice office to come to that needs to be as comfy as the one home.
You know what? I never even thought about that. I agree 100%. That’s gonna be a tall order for companies, though. I mean, different people probably have different requirements to be comfortable.
That’s why the whole open office and/or cubicle farm office needs to die. Yes, it will take more investment, but go back to everyone actually having their own small office that they can make their own and make comfortable. This isn’t hard.
I currently have a pretty nice salary as a senior engineer. I make waaaay more than the average and I work remotely. But even then… I still wonder what it’ll take. Because right now, there are positions that double/triples that AND is remote.
Like a job that’s 200k remote versus 250k in-office? Pretty easy to pick.
Some quick maths suggest that the average citizen in Western countries spends an hour commuting a day. Which is 260 hours a year for a 5 day a week job, or about a month’s worth of 8 hour days.
So, in addition to all that other pointless crap you mentioned, add on enough salary to bring you one month closer to retirement every year.
Nothing. Quality of life of working from home cannot be replicated. Or the office would have to be in my street, which is pretty unrealistic
Nothing for me also.
The flexibility to do things when you have a few minutes (like breaks) is worth a lot to me, it makes me more productive and less stressed about time management.
Plus I have cats and no other humans here so it’s a quiet, comfortable, loving environment, and no job can provide that for me.
Plus I have cats and no other humans here so it’s a quiet, comfortable, loving environment, and no job can provide that for me.
Looks like someone just needs some more team bonding activities and pizza parties with their team! Nothing builds a loving environment like a strong team!
I used to work in an office which was doen the street once. It still sucked.
I was talking to my wife the other day, my company would have to basically double my salary to get me to go into the office. Work life balance during WFH is actually balanced, I actually like my job and the company I’m at, I like the people I work with, I’m more productive and less distracted at home, I get to spend time with my daughter and take care of her, there’s really no downside to WFH for employees that want to WFH.
Working in the office? In addition to the normal costs (clothes, food, transportation, etc), losing 2-3 hours per day commuting, paying for childcare or having my wife not work, getting a second car or my wife not having a way to get to work or take our daughter to appointments, and plenty of other inconveniences and big changes.
Working in an office is an outdated concept for most office jobs now. 100% of my job can and is done remote, even if I had colleagues in my office, a quick teams call or message is just as easy as pulling them away from their work with a question in person. It would take a very very large raise to get me to go into an office, and I would likely be looking for a remote job asap using that newly inflated salary.
It would have to be a massive raise. At least double my current salary. Nothing else would have me even consider it.
Agree, people here in their high horse acting like wfm is their standing ground to the company. All big companies have to do is dangle a carrot like up the compensation for the year they want everyone back and amortize the comp for the next few years and boom everyone is back.
Absolutely nothing. No amount of money or threats or “perks”. I work in software and my entire career has been built on flexible, mostly-remote work; particularly creating & leading remote, geographically distributed teams. I get the best talent no matter where they are, and use tools like Slack to work seamlessly in real-time and asynchronously across many disparate time zones. This wasn’t some new thing for me when COVID hit, this is how I’ve operated for more than 20 years.
I don’t mind going places for specific purposes: visiting clients, classified/sensitive discussions that can’t be transmitted, on-site work (like installations, research, etc), or team-building events like lunches, dinners, etc… but under no circumstances will I waste my time commuting to some specific ”office” daily just because. I am an efficiency expert and I will not tolerate having my time or my teams time wasted by incompetent, out-of-touch multi-millionaires that don’t realize the 80s ended 30 years ago.
I agree 1,000%. I have been remote for the last five-ish years; I can count the amount of times I’ve actually needed to go into an office on one hand. At home I have: a giant ultrawide monitor; a quiet, private, office; gigabit internet; dog. How would I be more productive commuting to an office to listen to sales people banging gongs and ringing bells all day while I work in a cubicle on a single 19" monitor? All my teammates are in other cities and states, my code is checked into GitHub and mostly deployed to IaaS - and even our “on-prem” infrastructure is in another state.
Absolutely nothing. I don’t think even money could do it for me at this point. Aside from all the obvious reasons to hate commuting and then sitting for 8 hours doing maybe 2 hours of work, I have never been healthier.
I have chronic migraines. Well, I used to(?). I haven’t had a single bad migraine in years. Yeah, I’ve still had a couple in the last few years, but they didn’t put functioning at a complete standstill. I wasn’t stuck in bed, hoping for death. The lack of artificial light is a big deal. The not having to stress myself out by commuting, then being stuck there is also another
On top of that, I eat 1000% better, easier. I can exercise instead of commuting. There’s literally no benefit to working in an office for me, but it has a metric fuckton of drawbacks.
sitting for 8 hours doing maybe 2 hours of work
This is funny, and something I’ve thought about and talked about with coworkers a lot. When I first started permanent WFH at the beginning of COVID, I used to feel really guilty about doing random chores and stuff around the house during the workday. I felt like I always had to be “on” trying to busy myself or whatever, even if there wasn’t really work to do.
Over time as we have done a partial return to office and I realized I do even less work on the days we go in, I have done a lot of reflection on the way we used to work when we were 100% in the office pre-covid. My conclusion is that on any given day most people were doing between 1-4 hours of actual work, and the rest of the time was spent wandering around, bullshitting, taking walks, browsing the Internet, etc. And everyone thought that was just fine. But a solid half of most days was literally wasted doing nothing productive at all.
So these days I have shifted my attitude to one that is focused on getting my assigned work done, and being somewhat flexible on meeting times and when I can accomplish things. In return I don’t feel guilty if I need to mow the lawn or do some laundry during the day. I have a smartphone and I get notifications. If there is something urgent I’ll drop what I’m doing to handle it. If it can wait, I finish up then take care of it. It’s greatly helped my sanity and I think it’s improved my work, too. We do go to the office once a week or so but I honestly plan to get almost nothing accomplished on those days and consider it a bonus if we do get work done.
I typed out a long reply, and idk where it went but the highlights are
I saw the bullshit of it back in the 90s when I started working. I had MANY arguments with my boomer mother about it. Of course her opinion was shut up, put my head down, and do whatever they say, to keep my job. My opinion was fuck that fire me.
I have never had a job (for someone else) where I couldn’t 100% complete it, accurately in 2 hours a day, max. Often less.
I’m self employed now, and I have never been healthier, happier, or more mentally stable. I have two chronic conditions, that can be/are debilitating, which have never been better controlled. I know I can’t be alone on that.
WFH is 100% better for everyone, and those that WANT to go back to the office, should work that out with their employer. WFH has shown to improve ever metric on the workers lives, and not to mention the reduction in pollution and road congestion.
Read my second sentence. I literally couldn’t have spoon fed it to you any more.
Trying to make people understand all perspective to avoid echo chambers. Reading this thread you’d think everyone will March hand in hand to wfm when reality is that everyone will cave at some point which is exactly what the post is asking( the answer is mostly for money though)
A couple of things:
- commute time counts as work time
- no open plan landscape office
- no ‘clean desk’ policy but the ability to personalise your workplace
- dishwasher and general kitchen stuff not being a ‘shared responsibility’ but someone’s job.
- office being in a nice neighborhood with fun things to do after work or during lunch
My employer spent the past ~10 years de-personalising our offices, and now they wonder why people don’t like to hang out in their sterile ‘clean’ building.
