Forced back to the office?

If your employer demanded your return to the office...

  • I'd go back to the office

    Votes: 185 50.1%

  • I'd resign

    Votes: 71 19.2%

  • I cannot speculate

    Votes: 46 12.5%

  • Other

    Votes: 67 18.2%
  • Total voters
    369
NarrowBandFtw said:
already happening, among the usual LinkedIn recruiter spam I've been sent lately at least two were explicitly dangling the "full remote" and "US dollar salary" carrots

I suspect local talent is about to become expensive ...
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I gladly chomped one such dangling carrot. I are very very happy now.
 
Brian_G said:
I guess so, but there will always be slackers so if I was a boss I might feel the same.
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If a manager truly believes they can prevent slacking off by having people in the office then I would have to question their sanity or intelligence. And the bigger the company the easier it is to do minimal work and get away with it.

Rather having people in sight is only about creating the illusion of control.
 
noxibox said:
If a manager truly believes they can prevent slacking off by having people in the office then I would have to question their sanity or intelligence. And the bigger the company the easier it is to do minimal work and get away with it.

Rather having people in sight is only about creating the illusion of control.
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Lol. You think there's more control if they're at home? Wow.
 
BuckRogers said:
We're asking our less trustable employees to come back while leaving the others alone.
Read into that what you want.
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I get this and I have seen this personally. Not everyone has the capability to focus and actually get stuff done. Even with monitoring, you spend more effort in getting output from them.

What irks me is that to keep up the illusion of 'fairness', a wide brush is painted on everyone.

Why must performant and responsible individuals be curtailed because some bad apples need to be watched? Get the bad apples in and tell them the truth. If they're such dismal performers, why this grand facade to keep them in the first place?
 
saor said:
I don't understand the issue. Most people worked from an office all the time. If the company wants you back at the office - then go?
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I don't understand the issue. Most people worked the land for 16-hours a day. If the feudal lord wants you at the farm - then go?

I don't understand the issue. Most people worked in factories for 15-hours a day. If the industrial revolutionist wants you in the factory - then go?

See where I am going here? The way we work has constantly changed and often as a result of a major shake-up. Covid was one of these shake-ups and it has indeed changed the way we (can) work. In competitive industries/economies, inflexible companies will start losing out on the best candidates. The latter has resulted in what America calls the ''Great Resignation''. People realised it is possible to work better than to sit in traffic and pull 9-hours in the office 5-days a week.

The world changed. The way of doing business changed. I can see it first hand as my industry was heavily affected by the way businesses now do things, specifically because people are going online and moving away from occupied offices.
 
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Have to go in 2-3 times a week - which is fine I guess
 
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r4nd0m said:
It's a choice to work for that company too and there are many companies out there (job type dependent).

Don't get me wrong, not everyone is well positioned, but for those who are, we get to choose who we want to work for.
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Everyone has a choice of who they want to work for. Unless someone's holding a gun to their head :eek:
 
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ShaunSA said:
No if's or but's. You work for the company. They don't work for you.
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Loads of ifs and buts, "if" I'm forced, I'll resign, "but" I do have a choice and I am not only just able to work for "the company".
 
Brian_G said:
Lol. You think there's more control if they're at home? Wow.
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If you're worried about whether your employees can be trusted when working from home then you have the wrong employees. They should be put on performance improvement plans and fired if they can't perform at home.

If someone doesn't work properly from home I honestly don't want them in my team working from the office either.
 
saor said:
Ja look I agree. I'm just not sure how to realistically deal with a company that wants you back at work. Smaller company it's easier to have a conversation with your boss and come to an agreement, larger corporate they don't really care about different rules for different people.
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Keeping quiet doesn't help either. The reason we have an agreement to a hybrid model where each team figures out their own rules, and the top management will only step in if there is some obvious problem like a team no longer delivering, is because individuals spoke up. I'd bet there are a lot of unhappy people just keeping quiet. We and colleagues all over the world would have been amongst that unhappy lot if we hadn't spoken up. Turned out there were significant numbers of people who did not want to go back to being stuck in the office every day. We'd also proven that the company continued to thrive in spite of everyone being away from the office. Of course we are lucky that the CEO puts empirical data before his own preferences and biases. The latter would have had us all forced back into the office.

Of course you know your employer. If they're simply old school, refuse to change, don't care about data, and you don't have any other employment options then even if you'd rather not work in the office you're going to be stuck with it.
 
Skankhunt said:
But anyway, silly to argue Office vs Remote cause things are changing fast.

In 5 years time most knowledge work will be remote, absolutely no doubt about it.
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Yeah, they said that a long, long time ago and it never happened. Most companies were afraid to really try it. The pandemic simply forced a real world test. Some have taken the data to heart. Others have decided to ignore the data because it failed to confirm that the way of working before was not actually required.
 
Back to the office is not bad, just travelling is a bummer. But it gives me variety and at last I do not have to battle understanding someone on the phone or try to make out what they are saying on the screen. Face to face is better. Also the amount of people not actually working at home is staggering. Most streaming/watching movies or playing games on Steam and Xbox live etc. There is people that can work without someone looking over their shoulder, but is in the minority.
 
The_Ogre said:
A silly thing they put in our new contracts was that we are not allow to work from other provinces. I do not know what the logic behind that decision was.
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Maybe so you are on hand in case you are needed to quickly get to a site? Assume that's what you do? Support customers?
 
noxibox said:
A lot of it is driven by pigheadedly clinging to what was done before. We're talking about companies increasing their costs and damaging productivity just so they can see everyone at a desk everyday.


We never stopped working. This has nothing to do with returning to work for all the people who have been working remotely for two years.
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A business cannot have its building empty/sparely occupied when they're required to pay monthly lease with all the HVAV/Electricity/Insurance/etc costs.
 
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