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this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2023
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I'm not a manager and I like working in the office. I like chatting up members of other teams in the kitchen. Being close to culture spots.
WFH was a hell to me and by the end of it I started developing depression-like symptoms.
I'm not defending RTO, the ability to say "I'll work from home next Wednesday because I have dentist appointment" is really great thing. But maybe let's not swing the other way and make it all 100% WFH, shall we?
That is definitely a you problem when office culture has caused so much mental illness and stress for the majority of people. You needing a captive audience isn't a reason to have wfo.
They're not my captive audience. If anything I more often listen than speak
In half a year of working from office (when it was finally possible) I've learned much more about what teams I don't cooperate directly with do, than in 2 years of WFH.
It's also a good way to understand what is going on in the company in general.
Some talks we had would not have happened online, as every message for sure stays saved in some form
My company has been full remote since before the pandemic. It's been fantastic. I hang out and chat with my coworkers all the time in Slack huddles. We have a remote-first culture and it's far better than an office ever was.
If you're getting depressed from working at home, tbh that sounds to me like you live to work rather than work to live. It's important to have a rich life outside of work, especially when working remotely.
Not OP, but yes and no. I work as customer service/tech support. We get abused by customers harshly every day. Work from home, for me, was great at first, but the isolation combined with the daily abuse or other trauma (worked in telephone porting for a while, and old people who can't keep their phone numbers or have to be with no phone service for a while get legit traumatized, and I felt I was causing it) caused me to become depressed, overeat, develop a heavy alcohol habit, and basically not move around much. I gained 100 pounds from 2019-2022. I am still struggling to lose it.
RTO for me was not a thing I wanted to do, but I needed to.
Also, I am thankfully no longer answering phone calls anymore, just taking chats. People are still assholes, but they cannot yell at you or use their voice to emotionally manipulate you.
I'm certainly sympathetic as I too have faced terrible abuse when working in customer service. TBH to me that says more about the job (which sounds pretty awful) than working from home. But perhaps that kind of job makes it more difficult since it sounds pretty "solo" to begin with, and I can see how WFH can at least exacerbate that, especially if your workplace isn't set up for it. It's probably a pretty isolating job no matter if you are WFH or not, though.
“Rich life outside of work” isn’t always possible. Most employers in the states don’t give you much PTO. On top of that, if you are a parent, you have no free time. Its just work work work 20 hours a day with 4 hours of sleep crammed in.
Sure, I guess the presumption is that you're working someplace where you can have good work-life balance. If you don't, then you're probably gonna be pretty miserable no matter what, WFH or not.
How do you know that someone on slack is not busy ATM and is available to chat?
How do you deal with pings from slack discussion in some channel when you can't chat and have to focus on a meeting?
With WFH I'm additional at least 30 mins of commute from all places I'd just pick my stuff and go when working from the office.
And everyone is spread around the city making it hard to choose the venue we go to
It can take a while to get people trained and into the habit of communicating with tools like Slack, and to develop a style that works for your office.
At a previous company we were 100% remote since about 2013. We had meetings to develop a set of practices around how to use remote tools to figure out what worked best for us. We encouraged people to use their status indicators to show when they were open for chats, set DND if they wanted quite time, maintain core hours (we were distributed world-wide, so core hours were zoned), encouraged people to use named channels rather than ad-hoc groups or DMs whenever possible, and always when discussing anything work related (absolutely no private chats about work projects, everything work-related went in a project channel).
We also were careful to adopt an 'if anyone is remote, everyone is remote' attitude. This means that if any team member is remote, then all team activities are conducted with remote access. For example, if the remote tools for a meeting are not working, then the meeting is rescheduled rather than being conducted without the remote people.
At my current job most of us are flex, sometimes in the office, sometimes not, and they've only supported WFH at all since covid lockdowns started. Previously they were 100% in-office. As a result their remote work habits are relatively primitive, with lots of ad-hoc group chats, private messages, and occasional meetings that don't include the whole team (it doesn't help that they use Teams, which is relatively shitty compared to Slack). I've pushed for a better remote-work culture, but it's an uphill battle.
If you are running into communications issues with remote work it might be worth initiating a discussion about how you, as a collective, use the tools. Getting everybody on-board with a common set of practices that mostly works for everyone is important, especially if you have a lot of people who haven't already spent a great deal of time using remote communication tools (a lot of us IT folks have spent a great deal of our lives using these tools and can overlook the unfamiliarity some others have with them and the usage habits that make them effective).
I don't think many are advocating for mandated WFH, honestly. At least that isn't what I've seen.
People want the flexibility to choose what works best for them. If that means splitting time, great. If that means 90% in office, great. If that means 100% WFH, great.
I think what we are seeing is that people put real value on the ability to control this part of their lives. I'm sure there are some who would argue for full time WFH for all but I think it's a way more common sentiment to advocate simply for the ability to choose.
Precisely this. I felt reddit and now lemmy are not entirely in sync with the majority of people. I prefer a hybrid but it's the CHOICE that should be there. Some want full wfh, some want full time office. So long as everyone can choose, that's the sweet spot.
I do. 90% of job offers I see are "100% WFH, we don't even have an office". And I understand that, what's the point of renting office space if 2-3 people come in?
And in general this decoupling of jobs and location is good. You no longer need to think about which city to live in.
But in my case the current trend seems to start limiting my ability to choose
I imagine this is the case in some fields. I'd guess programming? Having no option for an office is hard.
I'm not actively searching for a job right now but I'm near a fairly large city and a pretty solid majority of what I've seen are hybrid right now. But again, near a bigger city and also largely looking at medium or larger companies.
Yes, programming. But I live in the capitol of my country, I have never had this problem before. How will the commute to work look for me was even a part of my screening process
Interesting. Well clearly it's a global conversation. I'll have to apologize for speaking only from a US standpoint.
No need to apologize, we just exchanged observations :)
And it's possible that what I see is anecdotal due to some skill-niche or something
I'm sorry, but just because you're an extrovert who doesn't seem to have a social structure outside of the office, doesn't mean that the rest of us should have to suffer.
I'm afraid you missed my point of the last paragraph
I'm not saying "let's all get back to the office". I'm saying "let's keep the offices too"
And I do have social structure outside of work. With WFH everyone is far away (offices are rather closer to the centre than the sleep districts) and have to commute before we can meet
I don't understand your argument about commuting. So you have to commute to go visit people...and this is somehow new for you? Are all your best friends at the same company? Otherwise how does that make it any different to literally anyone else? If I want to see my friends I gotta get into a vehicle or transport my body in some way to see them and vice versa. You're commuting either way.
When I work from the office I have already commuted in the morning. Wherever they want to meet I have straightforward, short commute and am dressed. Just get up and go. And when there is someone willing to go out of the house, there is smaller possibility that we'll end up on discord where only one person can speak and there's no way to have more than one topic in the group at the time
When I work from home everything becomes bleak. You have to get dressed, commute will take longer and have more changes and you start wondering if there's a point in going out (in case of for example concerts or exhibitions instead of meeting with friends). Everything stops having a point somehow. I am no longer part of the city, I'm just another body inside four walls
I work in IT. In 2020 the callcenter I worked at went fully remote and I lost a shocking amount of social skills for someone who's job it is to talk to people on the phone.
I then went back to college, snagged an internship an hour away and commuted a hundred miles a day for a year then after graduation snagged a cushy role that's hybrid and I can say I love hybrid work. You get all of the benefits of being in office for collaboration and you get all of the benefits of WFH with the comfort, freedom and flexibility it provides (plus far less interruption than in the office)
I’m in the same boat as you, although as a Project Manager I do some managing on the side. I do not directly manage people, however.
I think WFH works for older people with established careers. Imagine being say a person with zero experience in a field trying to learn the ropes while sitting at home. All of our new hires this past year say they would not be able to succeed doing WFH.
Still, our people do WFH on an as-needed basis.