Entrepreneur

The 4 choices you gave are pretty telling of your bias. Remote work is good for customer service/call center jobs but is bad for collaborative jobs is my take. Zoom meetings and emails don’t create the same environment that being stuck in the same office does.

Super simple situation that occurs. Employee finishes task in two weeks at home and one week in the office. Knee jerk reaction is fire them but in reality you can’t just fire everyone who isn’t as fast at home than in the office.

Honestly, the problem with the remote/office discussion is how many delusional people there are on both sides. We all know the old school micro managers who just won’t adapt to remote but the new delusional breed are people who can’t see any downside to remote. So much so they come up with conspiracy theories as the only reason offices exists is a corporate real estate scam.

I’m a big proponent of work from home for no other reason than the vast majority of workplaces are extraordinarily uncomfortable.

Open Concept offices are common and studies continually show they reduce productivity by up to 40%. Half your productivity goes to the wind because someone honestly thought having a giant room with desks for “collaboration” was good idea.

Then there’s “culture”. The biggest myth of work is the notion that workplaces have culture. There is no culture, there’s just what management wants you to value. Which is what they value. That’s what work culture is. The adoption of the values and dispositions of the people who own the company. Who do not care about you and would pay you less if they could. Most companies would employ slaves if they were legal, which tells you all you need to know about “work culture” and the values companies want you to adopt.

Then there’s just the useless politicking and interpersonal bs. People get harassed less and are far away from actual harassment and harm.

Something like 1/4 women get harassed IN the workplace… so there’s that…

Give me remote any day. Once I went remote I never went back. The positives just don’t outweigh the negatives.

It’s just the haves controlling the have nots.

From my experience, main driver has been that a few bad actors exploited it and our company lost trust in the model and now wants to see people in office doing work.

The last few years have indeed been interesting with WFH experiments. Obviously different jobs and positions have various results... there's no one size fits all answer. For company culture and collaboration, I tend to think positions allowing a hybrid schedule is the biggest win.

I love the idea and dream of having a job that I could literally jump on my car and work from anywhere... but in reality the remote work culture (in MY nimrod opinion) is another wedge between the haves and have nots of society. The "I'm sitting on a beach making cash" people are looked at very differently than the "I work in trades and have to show up at 8 everyday" people...and it's simply a sad reality that it happens (I happen to be in the trades, and work in peoples homes while they treat us poorly for disrupting their utopia WFH home and lifestyle for a few days). We're asked constantly to work around people's "we're going to go remote work in vacation wonderland for a week in July, can you make sure to do this project then" which is just a bizarre feeling if I'm honest.

All that said, I'm sure there's jealousy in my opinion, but I do tend to think some form of hybrid work environment with schedule flexibility would be my utopia. One where I don't need to beg borrow and beg more to leave 20 minutes early to make sure I can pickup my kids from school on occasion (yeah, try telling people working from home that you're going to stop working on their kitchen remodel an hour early today to go to your child's baseball game...they LOVE that...). But there's reality in working that I get...there's a privilege in many careers to have flexible lives that are easy to get accustomed to and it's super easy to fall into the haves vs have nots mentality... I'm blessed with a good life currently even if it's not perfect!

The last few years have indeed been interesting with WFH experiments. Obviously different jobs and positions have various results... there's no one size fits all answer. For company culture and collaboration, I tend to think positions allowing a hybrid schedule is the biggest win.

I love the idea and dream of having a job that I could literally jump on my car and work from anywhere... but in reality the remote work culture (in MY nimrod opinion) is another wedge between the haves and have nots of society. The "I'm sitting on a beach making cash" people are looked at very differently than the "I work in trades and have to show up at 8 everyday" people...and it's simply a sad reality that it happens (I happen to be in the trades, and work in peoples homes while they treat us poorly for disrupting their utopia WFH home and lifestyle for a few days). We're asked constantly to work around people's "we're going to go remote work in vacation wonderland for a week in July, can you make sure to do this project then" which is just a bizarre feeling if I'm honest.

All that said, I'm sure there's jealousy in my opinion, but I do tend to think some form of hybrid work environment with schedule flexibility would be my utopia. One where I don't need to beg borrow and beg more to leave 20 minutes early to make sure I can pickup my kids from school on occasion (yeah, try telling people working from home that you're going to stop working on their kitchen remodel an hour early today to go to your child's baseball game...they LOVE that...). But there's reality in working that I get...there's a privilege in many careers to have flexible lives that are easy to get accustomed to and it's super easy to fall into the haves vs have nots mentality... I'm blessed with a good life currently even if it's not perfect!

We could work remotely, but it's not going to happen.

People and businesses work best together. We have fun, we bounce ideas around, we motivate each other.

We have a big building that is 30% office and 70% recreation, kitchen etc. We move desks close together and everything is open plan and noisy and brilliant.

We never have meetings, everyone knows everything and everyone knows who is doing what. We all see the whole business and understand it.

Yeh, we could work remotely.

But it'd be really shit and you're going to have to kill me first.

We could work remotely, but it's not going to happen.

People and businesses work best together. We have fun, we bounce ideas around, we motivate each other.

We have a big building that is 30% office and 70% recreation, kitchen etc. We move desks close together and everything is open plan and noisy and brilliant.

We never have meetings, everyone knows everything and everyone knows who is doing what. We all see the whole business and understand it.

Yeh, we could work remotely.

But it'd be really shit and you're going to have to kill me first.

Maybe the problem isn’t WFH/WFO but rather that the whole employment model is not a right fit for today. People should be more like contractors than employees and be more invested in their own success

Maybe the problem isn’t WFH/WFO but rather that the whole employment model is not a right fit for today. People should be more like contractors than employees and be more invested in their own success