Just 1 In 10 Companies Expect All Employees To Return To the Office (nbcnews.com) 98
An anonymous reader writes: Only about 1 in 10 companies expect all employees to return to their pre-pandemic work arrangements, according to a new survey. The National Association for Business Economics found that just 11 percent of survey respondents expect all staff members at their companies to return eventually. Around 65 percent of companies have allowed "most" or "all" of their staff members to work from home during the pandemic, and about half of respondents said they plan to continue the policies until the second half of the year.
"For the most part, companies that are able to provide work-from-home are doing so and are continuing to do so," said Andrew Challenger, vice president of the executive outplacement and coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Challenger said his conversations with human resources executives indicated a reluctance to mandate a return to the office while the virus is still circulating and parts of the country face surges. In some cases, local or state lockdowns, school and day care closings or restrictions on building capacities also limit employers' options. According to another recent survey, 31% of professionals from 42 tech companies said they're only putting in between three and four hours a day. However, the survey did not ask the workers to self-report productivity.
"For the most part, companies that are able to provide work-from-home are doing so and are continuing to do so," said Andrew Challenger, vice president of the executive outplacement and coaching firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. Challenger said his conversations with human resources executives indicated a reluctance to mandate a return to the office while the virus is still circulating and parts of the country face surges. In some cases, local or state lockdowns, school and day care closings or restrictions on building capacities also limit employers' options. According to another recent survey, 31% of professionals from 42 tech companies said they're only putting in between three and four hours a day. However, the survey did not ask the workers to self-report productivity.
at this point it's a money saver (Score:5, Insightful)
office space is expensive, especially in NYC and SF. WFH has been proven to work
Re:at this point it's a money saver (Score:5, Insightful)
WFH has been proven to work
Its been proven to work in the short term. I look at my own company / team. We have not hired anyone since last February. We all know each other we know the culture we have a developed set of shared expectation form having worked together. Everyone posses institutional knowledge or at least knowledge what resources to go to for things they might not know.
I am not at all confident we could add people, particularly junior people who don't have a lot of professional experience to draw on successfully. My guess is attrition during the pandemic has been lower at most orgs too with less hiring, and more uncertainty I expect people who might want to move on are not doing so or not finding the opportunity to do so.
A lot of other parts of corporate life have been in a weird stasis too from both my personal observation and speaking with friends and family. At some point though there has to be a 'thaw' in terms of things like personnel changes, engaging in new projects, exploring new business lines. It will be interesting to see how or if WFH really works as business leads shift back to long term strategic efforts rather than more tactical response to the pandemic economy.
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I bet HR just loves you - but I don't know if that is sarcastically or literally
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Unless they're a sex worker, in which case the CFO is probably more concerned about their reduced revenue generation.
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Company cultures are... more similar than they are dissimilar outside of super-corporate giant corporations
I have worked at orgs big and small and that has not been my experience at all.
People generally slip from one company to another, aware of what's expected of them,
I'll buy that. The range of 'corporate culture' isnt like moving to the other side of the world or something. I am more thinking about Jr people. I have little doubt experienced professionals can adapt. I am less certain that wet behind the ears recent college or high school grand will be so successful.
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My company hired one person remotely, though he was not a junior level, so I do wonder how developing the skills of inexperienced workers would work remotely. I believe it could be done, but it would be a different challenge than in the office.
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My company hired one person remotely, though he was not a junior level, so I do wonder how developing the skills of inexperienced workers would work remotely. I believe it could be done, but it would be a different challenge than in the office.
(should pay more attention to "preview")
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Re: at this point it's a money saver (Score:2)
I started a new job in December. It is mostly WFH, which is a change for me as my last job had me in office.
I have been working for a long time and have held a lot of different jobs, and this transition definitely has an unusual feel to it, but it is not nearly as hard as I had imagined.
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I would add that I see a 'drift' in how relevant peoples work is to the real stakeholders in the pure work from home world.
The longer people aren't seeing their stakeholders in person/having just casual contact without specific reason, the more and more I see work happen on weird stuff that doesn't really matter, and the products being more and more out of touch with what people actually care about. People are being more speculative about what would be important to someone else and as time goes on their ima
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This isn't because of any fundamental issue with working from home, but because all we're used to is working at the office. We don't have good support for training people remotely, for mentoring them and making sure documentation is good. It's easy to teach someone at the office because if something doesn't work, you walk over and do it for them and they learn while they watch you. But maybe if our systems weren't so broken and the documentation on getting up and running wasn't so bad, we wouldn't need it.
B
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All true. The counter argument is there has not been a needed for it until now. In a lot of cases information is out of date the moment you write it down. There is a huge cost to keep that kind of stuff current.
Its also hard to find an appropriate place to capture little details like "wait until the last possible moment to schedule the technicians if the client is EXAMPLE corp because they frequently cancel appointments."
Does that stack up in comparison to real-estate, heating, air, etc; that probably c
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My company is huge, and I can't tell you how many things are just known because they're a sort of oral tradition now. Nothing is written down. You find the experts and ask them to show you, rather than have them codify their knowledge. We have no tech writers to clean up our documentation, because for some reason we think documenting code and APIs is less valuable when it comes to our colleagues.
Yep, same thing happened at my company. Then we had a major office move and lost a bunch of people. That knowledge went with them. We learned our lesson and now have people write stuff down. As a result, training new people remotely has been going just fine.
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Exactly.
A lot of office culture is the tribal knowledge that people carried. WFH has basically exposed to many workplaces how much information is carried in the head and not documented anywhere where it should be.
It also allowed a lot of "we always did it this way" to set in without any reasons to why.
One reason we have CRM systems is so that customer-specific notes can be taken, but few people actually use it for that, often it's used as a glorified order tracking system over something that tracks customer
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That's my most significant concern. It's one thing to have trained staff sent home with a laptop and access to the phone system. But training new staff scares the shit out of me. You can hand people the company manual, but so much of most organizations' institutional knowledge is not likely to be written down, and is imparted through trainers and mentoring, which becomes so much harder over hone and video conferencing. Existing relationships can be maintained to some degree, but building new ones will be pr
Lagging Indicator + RedHat's example (Score:2)
WFH has been proven to work
Its been proven to work in the short term. I look at my own company / team.
If you want a more long-term view, look at RedHat. I used to contribute to one of their teams. The entire middleware division was virtual...top talent, but scattered globally, has been that way for over 15 years, from what I can tell. There was no office. People worked from home and then once a year, had summits in vacation areas for planning purposes. My last company did similar summits to sync up employees in our sister office in another state.
I lost contact with my collaborators at RedHat. To b
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All those things can also be said for presence work. The argument roughly runs like this:
Presence builds prima-donnas, because then their bragging will crowd out less verbose employees. The virtual space allows for more equality, as you can't just dominate a room as easily without other people muting you. Presence makes you more competetive for the very same reason, as the bragging is much more visceral. And best practices are much easier to convey when people are forced to RTFM instead of everything being
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[Work from home has] been proven to work in the short term.
Remember, having people come to a mandatory shared space to work was invented by the East India Trading company. They didn't do it because they thought it was efficient (they didn't care either way), but rather as a demonstration of how much control they had over their peasants. Working from the office continues to this day for the same reason, though most people have been fooled into believing it's necessary in order to get work done.
Re:at this point it's a money saver (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't think that a lot of businesses have started selling their office space, though. If they did, I'd imagine that they wouldn't get much for it unless they converted it into "luxury" apartment space with a home office.
Re:at this point it's a money saver (Score:4, Insightful)
A huge number of companies, probably most of them don't actually own their office space but rather lease it. It's these leasing companies that are going to be hurting if they aren't already.
Re:at this point it's a money saver (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:at this point it's a money saver (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:at this point it's a money saver (Score:5, Informative)
For ~40 employees we pay $25k in rent per month in Southern California, including a smaller space in a Class C building to help with commutes and our main office in a Class A building. We have been full WFH since March, with a short stint of 40% in-office time. Rent constitutes about 5% of revenue. While completely eliminating that cost would have a meaningful impact on profit, it would not be viable. The best we could do is drop it to 2% of revenue for more of a co-working strategy, which would add back about 2% of revenue in annual IT costs.
Recruiting and training costs are close to 5% of revenue. We have had years where that cost jumps to 10% just due to attrition cycles (which is complete hell). Any business decision that might increase attrition has to be looked at quite seriously, and abandoning physical offices fits that category. There is really no business incentive to do so.
We hired 3 people in the past 10 months, and lost 6. Recruiting, onboarding, training, and project integration are hard now (in reverse order of complexity). We are only functioning now, not excelling. If some of our clients return their focus to in-person meetings (looking to be about 20-30% in 2022), WFH as the rule and not the exception looks very difficult to pull off.
Schools (Score:5, Insightful)
With schools still closed to in person learning its nearly impossible for those with kids under 10. So many people have had to leave the work-force for jobs not conducive to remote work, due to remote learning, it is more of a detriment to the economy than reduced capacities. The Washington Post ran an article the other day highlighting how teachers jumped to the front of the line for vaccinations, teachers unions across the US are refusing to allow in person learning despite labeling themselves as heroic front-line workers and despite newly acquired immunity. Its one thing to want to be selfish, crash the economy, and not go back to classroom learning in a world of 2-3 income households. Its entirely another to demand preferential treatment and skip to the head of the line by citing risks you never had any intention of taking in the first place.
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yea mate - good luck with home schooling...
here in Victoria, Australia - when we had our second lockdown homeschooling was a cunt and my missus had a break down more than once, and I was working 4am - 7am simply to get the bulk of work done so I could keep an eye on the daughter while she did her remote thing.
Then once her school was over for the day - back I went to work till 7pm.
Did that for 6 months. Lucky I brew my own beer, and had a bloody production line going.
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I feel for you. I have started counseling during the period to handle depression and a feeling of burn-out which are both very uncharacteristic for me. My work has luckily been very accommodating with my workload being cut by at least 25% while my kids are doing remote learning, without impacting my salary of even my yearly bonus. While things have been very hard to deal with, I have had a lot of advantages helping to get my family through this. I have been very surprised that my alcohol intact never signif
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...when we had our second lockdown homeschooling was a cunt and my missus had a break down more than once....
The biggest mistake I see new homeschooling parents make is to try replicating the classroom at home. That is a recipe for disaster from the very start, for reasons far too numerous to list here. I feel for you, though, because the public school model has been ingrained into most of us from a very young age. It's just a very bad model for learning.
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The school situation is really getting out of hand. I'm on the side of the debate where my family is upset at how strict my wife and I are with social distancing, but the science has been showing for a while that schools for young children are not a high risk activity if decent safety measures are in place. We should have had almost all kids at the grade school level back in school at least at the start of the new year, if not in the middle of the fall semester. Rates of infection were bad at both times, bu
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so apparently in Europe they put kids back in schools and discovered it did not increase the positivity rate. Apparently kids were not asymptomatic super spreaders. Quite the opposite to how schools play a role in the flu. The biggest factor in rising rates is fatigue. People of all demographics are just letting their guard down. Hypervigilance gets exhausting and even where lockdowns were drastically sustained (such as CA) are still suffering infection rates. You cant just blame trump supporters. CA has wh
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so apparently in Europe they put kids back in schools and discovered it did not increase the positivity rate
Not sure where in Europe that is. In the UK, teachers were getting infected at 200%-300% of the rate of the general population with only 30%-50% of the children in school.
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i read this article in november, then a few others that suggested the same things
https://www.npr.org/2020/11/13... [npr.org]
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When my kids were going to school, they went
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As to your first point, you could have just googled it yourself. Here are some of the top results:
CDC finds scant spread of coronavirus in schools with precautions in place [washingtonpost.com]
Why schools probably aren’t COVID hotspots [nature.com]
As to your second point, it is quite clear that students do not get the same quality of instruction via remote learning. Most of the gap is being filled in by parents doing more, often to the detriment of their own careers (gains for women in the workplace have been evaporating quickly). My
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You might want to take a dive into the details on that CDC report before leaning on it too hard. Their headline is correct, but not in the way you might assume. A better one would be, "CDC doesn't look very hard to find coronavirus spread in schools in a rural area; surprisingly doesn't find much."
They note that kids tend to be asymptomatic, and also note that they only tested people who were sick. They also note that they didn't do any contract tracing.
So it's entirely possible that the kids were responsib
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Every parent who discovered how hard teaching is thinks that schools are low risk.
Meanwhile, actual research shows the opposite, which is what you'd expect from prior experience as well. Children are petrie dishes, "appropriate precautions" are pretty much impossible, and although the kids themselves are pretty safe, they're still vectors.
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I understand what you're saying, but how many schools actually have "decent safety measures are in place"? Most don't even have well filtered ventilation.
There are certainly schools which struggle more than others to meet safety standards, but I can assure you that school districts which have plenty of money are still keeping themselves in remote or at best hybrid learning environments.
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new anecdotal evidence is showing that kids are not spreaders. Apparently, in addition to not actually getting covid or being asymptomatic, they also are not a huge risk factor to contraction. So if the adults are all immune, and the kids typically dont even get it, let alone spread it, then they can restart schools the minute all teachers get their second dose. It should not matter than in your town the daily new infection rates are high... when that number going up or down has no bearing on what kids are
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after 9/11 there were a small handful of letters sent out with weaponized anthrax. The risk factors were really really low and most deaths were due to not putting people on antibiotics despite the letter specifically stating the very cure. That did not stop then Senator Leahy and Senator Daschle from hiding under their desks figuratively. The whole country saw it and called them out for blatant cowardice.
Teachers fail to grasp the big picture of how critical their jobs are. It would be like wanting to remot
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Not a popular idea but schools are the root of the pandemic problem. The virus is spread like wildfire in the school and redistributed throughout the community each night. Because no one has their shit together, we have overt political pressure to open schools no matter what.
It isn't a popular idea because those not paying attention to the science think everything should be opened up and those paying attention to the science know schools aren't the root of the pandemic problem. There is a very small subset of the population who happen to believe what you do regardless of what any of the facts say.
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The reality is that they are not super spreaders, but definitely are spreaders. There is a great article on this but it does not get widely circulated as it does not support either opinion at all, and people want their free daycare. I reference it here:
https://www.nationalge [nationalgeographic.com]
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then they need to back off receiving the vaccine. its not a mega millions lottery. If you get an early vaccine its because you are a) essential or b) high risk. Sitting at home in your PJs while teaching kids on zoom is hardly high risk or in essential need of vaccine. The entire basis of giving teachers head-of-the-line access is getting them back into the classrooms, not so that they can go to exclusive venues with their immunity.
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I agree.
Just wondering what really are the causes that can be behind this ...
If one assumes the worst, then it can be the union trying to get as much benefits for its members in a climate that is mostly adversarial and individualistic.
If we are charitable or perhaps even rational, it may be genuine concern by teachers about governments pushing for in person schooling regardless of consequences, and therefore the union trying to minimize the risk for its members.
Not enough information for me to make a conclu
Where are these companies (Score:3)
Subject says it all. Where are these companies? I would love to have a WFH position, with only occasional travel (covid notwithstanding).
$current_company has been rather inconsistent and horrible with their covid response, we're all in the office, no masks, and let's just say some company leaders have opinions that they're welcome to have, should keep to themselves if they are company officers. Right or wrong, what they say reflects on the company.
If I do find a new position, the exit interview will be interesting. I don't want more money, vacation, etc. I want something that they probably cannot give. I want behavior change.
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They are out there.
At the nameless company I've worked for in Australia, we've been able to work from no issues for the last 6 years...
hell, we have been using zoom for so many years, 2020 was nothing to us using zoom and online chatting - we've been doing it so long.
My boss is now OK for me to honestly come into for once or twice a week, but I like coming in as I deal with our vehicle fleet.
Keep looking - its quite enjoyable not to waste hours in pointless small talk :)
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What would be the point of being forthcoming in an exit interview?
OP likely has friends within the company that will be staying with the company for the foreseeable future and would like their friends to be able to experience the benefit of the changes alluded to. But as OP said, they probably cannot do it...
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You can find these companies. If you are using a job recruiter (which I recommend anyway so you don't waste time with employers you wouldn't consider) just let them know it is part of your criteria. You will probably see lower salary offers from these jobs, or at least that has been my experience. It is treated like a perk so most businesses feel justified in offering less compensation for it.
My suggestions which only comes from anecdotal experience is look for companies where remote work is part of their c
The rest will just lay you off (Score:1)
Now that they don't want/need to see you anymore.
Re:The rest will just lay you off (Score:4, Insightful)
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Not a useful metric (Score:2)
A much better metric would be what percentage of employees these employers expect to return to their pre-pandemic work arrangement. This metric would look at a company with 1000 employees who will have 4 of them change their working arrangement and lump them in the 90% who won't return to pre-pandemic levels.
A survey that says 90% of employees will not return to pre-pandemic working arrangements would be a big deal. But this metric doesn't really say too much.
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I think an even better metric is what fraction of work hours the employers expect to revert to on-site work. There is a big difference between a company where 90% are WFH one day a week (so 18% remote work) and where 60% are WFH nine days out of ten (54% remote work), but the former looks more flexible based on fraction of employees.
Meanwhile... (Score:2)
...The other nine will weigh the return on investment of a work-from-home digital-collaboration model, determine whether it's more profitable than a brick-and-mortar centralized-work model, then offer economic incentives to their employees to influence which decision they prefer employees make. And those that don't accept the offer will eventually be reassigned or let go.
Because that's how capitalism works. It's really no different than the assembly line; whatever makes a bigger profit is what eventually
I work for a large company... (Score:5, Interesting)
...and they where positively surprised by the efforts made by the staff working from home.
Our company are very transparent on how things are going internally, so they often report back to us about how we are doing, one of the company's previous policies was that staff should only work from home under permitted exceptions, such as being relocated, sickness, care for children or other circumstances.
The company has written an official statement now that changes everything, their findings is that our staff is doing exceptionally well working from home, beyond all expectations (exactly what they wrote, several times now) - so in light of this new finding, the company has officially decided that everyone who can and want to work from home, will be able to do so - even after the pandemic. Teams video communication, meetings etc. has worked beyond expectations, and people often communicate in multiple-video-participant meetings even during their breaks just to "mingle and hang out", in fact - some has become even more social than usual due to the freedom of voluntarily hanging out with colleages from all over the world, via video.
Worker efficiency hasn't dropped, on the contrary it has increased. People commute less, feel fresher during the entire workday, the company's expenses on coffee machines, free lunches, cleaning, office equipment etc. has dropped beyond their wildest imagination.
The company still have a full view of each co-workers efficiency though, because as an IT-Support co-worker you have stats that shows your effort, your time available on phone, customer satisfaction levels, numbers of tickets handled, numbers of tickets actually solved. People seem to have more time to focus and concentrate on getting the issues solved. Everything is visible in the statistics, we can see if people are online, see the number of tickets they are handling, see when someone is live in chat-support, not a minute is missed.
In the office, this was not as easy as the manager often had to run around the various offices and desks to sit next to each employee to have a "pep talk" or see how things where going, now the team managers can watch it all live - in real time statistics, and both co-workers found this more relaxing as they don't have the pressure of a manager constantly breathing down their necks, and the managers feel more at ease as they can quickly get teams together in a video meeting and don't have to look for a meeting room, prepare for hours - but immediately reach everyone, and have a discussion if there's a potential issue on the way.
This could not have been spotted so easily before, and it often took long talks with a lot of individuals. People are also more inclined to report issues when working from home, as they don't have the pressure of all the talks in the office, and have a more calm, focused relaxed work environment - this made them work faster while feeling more relaxed.
So - it's a blessing in disguise.
I'd like a comparative statistic with jails (Score:2)
Just out of curiosity.
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I think there are additional complicating factors as well.
One of the very positive changes I made in my current position was going through the absolute pain in the ass that is documentation and detailed project planning, then made sure that those things were available to everyone who needed them. It was about a two year process to create that sort of structure, but once I did it my time freed up immensely. It took a couple of months to train everyone where to look and how to use the communication tools I ma
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Why point out 3 - 4 hours / day? (Score:3)
My productivity has at least doubled since I transitioned to working form home, mostly because the office was a distracting, busy, noisy place that overloaded your ability to focus even with noise cancelling / blocking headphones.
We had one employee who had a serious BO problem and what ever room he sat in would cause every other employee to feel sick, the worse part about his BO was it's was self caused because due to religious tolerance he was allowed to not shower and go without pitstick simply because it was against some BS in the Qur'an. That's one example of a problem that caused at least a 20% drop in productivity, because you'd leave the room every 20 minutes to get some fresh air, whereas in the home office, I can easily go 6 hours without a break.
I've also noticed a drop off in the number and frequency of meetings, which is a MASSIVE time savings. Meetings are the biggest single source of time waste in the office, and generally any meeting over 1 hour is a total unfocused waste of time. A team with good insight into their tasks and good monitoring software that the team can follow, coupled with good communication software, should be able to have 1 or 2 meeting a week at most that last under 1 hour, and are held to assure everyone is on the same page.
There's lots of reasons people might only be working for 3 or 4 hours a day, because maybe that's all they have to work or all they can work. It seems odd to place that statement at the bottom of the story, as it's not in context as to why.
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simply because it was against some BS in the Qur'an
Hmm. Arabs invented soap.
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I believe it has something to do with Halal,
Some of the worst B.O. I've ever encountered was due to alcoholism. But if the subject brings up religion, that shuts down the conversation right away. Rather than getting sent to treatment.
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I expect my users to bring their desktops back. (Score:2)
Middle management... (Score:3)
If I were in middle management (God forbid) I would be very worried about the WFH model. At my company it has been very successful. Nearly everyone I have spoken to loves it. We have shown that we simply don't need a supervisor watching us work all day. They add no value to the company and with us being remote this is only more apparent.
I am fairly certain that our executives have noticed this as well. Corporate real estate leases might not be so easy to get out of in the short term so they will probably have empty buildings for the short to middle term. But I think that once the final WFH strategy is finalized they will eliminate the fat.
Not everyone loves the WFH thing. If you have screaming kids running around or a really small home I can see why it wouldn't work for you so we will probably have a blended solution - some people WFH all the time, others a few days a week. What has occurred to me is that for some people their entire existance is built around being in the office. These are the people organizing the pot luck lunches and social events. Fun for some, agonizing corporate shmooze fests for others. Perhaps another group on the chopping block.
remote for 10 months - mental health (Score:4, Insightful)
How many others need the act of getting dressed and leaving the house just for their mental health and to maintain their ability to concentrate?
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I guess the number needing to have some time to leave the house is roughly equal to the number of people who suffer a lot of just having to show up to a place at a time outside their chronobiology, to run things on computers that reside in different timezones anway.
There is a lot of interindiviual variation in chronobiology, extrosversion/introversion, need for quiet/need for distraction etc., and before half of the bell curve did always get the short end. Now it's the other way round for a couple of years,
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I guess the number needing to have some time to leave the house is roughly equal to the number of people who suffer a lot of just having to show up to a place at a time outside their chronobiology, to run things on computers that reside in different timezones anway.
There is a lot of interindiviual variation in chronobiology, extrosversion/introversion, need for quiet/need for distraction etc., and before half of the bell curve did always get the short end. Now it's the other way round for a couple of years, but maybe afterwards there will be more possibilities to work in a healthy way for people across such spectra.
I did WFH many years ago. I long suspected I would do better at home, in terms of focus, productivity, general job satisfaction and overall happiness. That all proved to be true. However, it took being forced back to the office to recognize my inter-personal skills (not something I do well) suffered thanks to WFH. Also required me to acknowledge I do have a need (less than most) for some regular social inter-action, which WFH badly neglected. Those realizations led to the decision to adjust my expectation,
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Sounds like a you problem. Go rent an office and stop forcing the rest of us to conform to the needless daily shuffling of bodies because you can't control yourself.
In related news ... (Score:2)
In other news... (Score:2)
Nine out of ten companies expect to layoff some or all their employees before they return to the office""
Should be the new normal... (Score:2)
There are so many positives to be had here, I really hope it is the new normal and workers stand their ground here.
Vastly reducing office space usage is good. We haven't had offices for ages. Cubicles are bad. Open plans are worse. Workers are being more productive sitting on a couch with their kids that how bad offices are now. Dump the leases and rezone for housing and mixed usage.
Commuting is awful. So, if you don't have to, don't. Make it easier on everybody else. Treat fiber as the new roadways and inv
Ask them after the pandemic (Score:1)
It's not terribly surprising they'd say it now.
Ask the same people after the pandemic. I'd be surprised if the answer would be the same.
There is a real psychological cost to permanently working from home. Yes, yes, not to all, you are an exception and love it. Look around though, and you'll see that's not the norm - people are freaking out. We are social animals, and that won't change quickly.
It didn't over millions of years.