CBC: Employees ‘upset’ about return to office and prefer flexible work

As more and more employers order their workers back to the office, employees say they like the flexibility to work from home — and some returning to corporate workplaces aren’t so happy about being forced to return.

I get particularly het up about this exact topic.

WFH’s effect on productivity is so marginal that papers struggle to prove any kind of correlation, either for or against, and its effect on employee happiness is noticeable and significantly positive, so the justification for return to office is:

• not enough people are paying attention to the executive suite
• let’s keep commercial real estate profitable
• corporate culture

Can we just hire a potemkin office of young underemployed actors to treat the CEO like a big boy so that everyone else can get work done?

that’s what executive assistants are for

What is this glorious corporate culture we’re trying so hard to preserve? I think people are overestimating the cultural cachet of low-pile grey carpet, fake plastic plants, and saying “low hanging fruit” to a room full of sweaty people in collared shirts and Dockers slacks.

what will become of the men’s loafer industry

I know, I know, the company’s extroverts need 6-8 meetings a day because if nobody speaks to them in a 30 minute span their ego will collapse like a dying star

but I work with those same people in a WFH environment and they just frantically spam the slack huddle button, they’re doing FINE

and as an introvert I don’t know why their social dysfunction should be MY problem.

I’m angry that employee happiness isn’t even apparently a factor in company decisions.

If your average company discovered that they could increase profits by half of a half of a percentage by playing a high-pitched squealing noise on loudspeakers at all time I’m sure they’d immediately adopt the squealing loudspeaker in a heartbeat.

Look, everybody who’s not competent enough with computers to thrive in a WFH situation is going to retire or die in the next 5 years, we’re going to have to work together to bury cubicles and open-office work plans where they belong: in the past.

someone at Business Insider has been banging the RTO drum for the past 4 full years, trying to convince people that RTO is good using any conceivable angle

an increasingly unhinged series of takes, no matter how ridiculous,

and I would like to wish them a very fuck right the hell off

either Business Insider’s corporate owners also own a lot of commercial real estate or some terrible middle-manager is very lonely without people to harangue

Business Insider and the NYT are the most fond of these “remote work bad” hit pieces, but they forgot to tell their illustrator about that so they just drew the standard “sad person in a cubicle”.

Former Amazon VP Ben Smith on admitting he was wrong to push for workers to return to the office several days a week: “As someone once asked me, ‘Have you ever noticed the only people in favor of RTO are people with large admin staffs and grown children?’ I had not, because that was me. Touche.”

Working from “home” - A mea culpa.

I’d like to correct a previous post, I am told by numerous technical colleagues that this is not, in fact, Kubernetes

Oh, you’d rather work from home?

What if I were to tell you that we’ve installed cry-pods at work so that you can cry without disturbing your co-workers?

My wife’s company is trying to convince people to return to the office because one of their executives thinks its embarrassing when clients come by and the offices are empty, anyways, theatre students always need some pocket money and if someone wants to join my exciting new “potemkin village as a service” startup.

seatfillr is gonna be huge

Avenue 5 nailed this, with a deck filled with attractive, well-dressed actors pretending to work on a bunch of high-tech-looking panels for the sake of the company’s image while the actual engineers worked on a bunch of regular computers in a dingy, crowded, messy office.

as a dumpy ADHD man who wears a robe for most of the day and who has built a tremendous amount of real actual software I feel like if I had to operate in a traditional corporate environment, having a productive looking actor representing me would actually be a real career boon

He could go in, look attractive, and attend all of the meetings and report back to me and I could do all of the actual work and cyrano de bergerac for him in key moments, I think we’d be a productive team.

pretty sure we’d be VP of Engineering before long

“why are you always wearing that bluetooth headset?”

Curtis’s Actor, Handsomely: “I’m very busy with all of my job.”