I don’t know about you guys, but my company just mandated RTO a few months ago.
As expected, we now spend waste 8 hours: Commuting, Walking to and from meeting rooms, etc.
And the meetings, and the “collaboration”, which are basically non stop all day long now, are just us talking round and round about all the things we need to do and how to do them for the 8th time, without actually doing them. But we sure LOOK really productive and busy. And I guess that’s what management wants? Who knows.
With remote work I would do my job for 8+ hours per workday in pure focus mode. Knocking out solution after solution. You want XYZ to happen? Already done, here’s a link to it. Have a meeting? Click join Teams call 1 minute early, listen and talk, while continuing to working on XYZ. You think we should try ABC for the XYZ project? Ok, I’ll have it ready by tomorrow.
In office work is now spent walking from meeting to meeting, and you gotta leave 15 minutes before and it takes 15 minutes to get back and settled and you did not work on anything during. And they ask “so, how is project XYZ going?”
“Good, good. Should be done in a few more weeks.”
And you maybe work on XYZ for 30 minutes uninterrupted that entire day, decide to skip any testing or QC, skip those extra features, skip checking with other teams if it will impact them, you have to skip all that to get it done on time. And it takes 3 weeks to do a 5 minute task. And it’s inferior. And you talk about XYZ every meeting of every day, time after time, updates and statuses and comments on the ticket. And you finally announce you got XYZ completed and it’s “yay good job” and management asks how the RTO is going and everyone is terrified to say “this is stupid and a gigantic waste of everyone’s time and your money to put us in a giant expensive building just to not work on work, but to talk about working on work and we are getting only 10% done vs remote work”. So we say “oh, fine” and management puts a little golden star on their report they made for themselves and they feel all warm and fuzzy that work is going great.
And thus, project XYZ was finally completed. A task that would have taken 1 person a few hours to do remotely, has now taken 8 people, 3 weeks of in office meetings and status updates and endless interruptions and discussions over every aspect of the project over and over again to finally complete. But we all LOOKED super busy doing it. And that’s the important thing.
I’m personally, loving the RTO. I thought I would hate it, but I get to talk with friends all day and sit in meetings and daydream and the day flies by and I barely turned my brain on.
I’m happy to just do my job at home uninterrupted at my desk, but they sure don’t seem to want that, so fine. Hope that works out.
IT has (left over from waterfall) some skills stronger in some states, so IT teams were reshuffled to get people from all over to balance them
So when we were allowed to return to the office, we were required to be there 3 days a week
With the spread out teams we had no in person meetings, we rarely saw team members even if they were on the same site
So we felt very much like the difference was to commute to do MS Teams meetings in the office on small screens three times a week, and have no commute and do MS Teams meetings on our own screens twice a week
We are lucky enough now to have full time work from home
Edit to add: management aren’t on the same agreement as the rest of us, they have individual contracts. Very few of them have access to remote work
I didn’t even mention it in my main post, but half my team is out of state and exempt from RTO.
So half of us commute into an overcrowded office and walk to a meeting room just to join a damn teams call. I hate being in person without a headset and having to yell at a room microphone and look at a smaller screen than I have at home.
Everything about it is inferior than what we had at home. It is harder to hear, harder to see, harder to communicate, takes longer to commute, longer to have to walk to meetings vs click join.
All the RTO seems like execs playing “everyone else is doing it, don’t want to be left behind” or something.
Remote work just makes it crystal clear that competent people can do their jobs with nearly no management. It’s perfectly natural for management to be opposed to it.
My team just had a super productive in office day. I thought “wow I can see why people think in office is more productive” and then I realized my entire team was remote that day but me so it was more like a fully remote day for the team.
A task that would have taken 1 person a few hours to do remotely, has now taken 8 people, 3 weeks of in office meetings and status updates and endless interruptions and discussions over every aspect of the project over and over again to finally complete.
You’re loving the RTO now, but then half a year later the management decides to fire dozens of people and replace them with this flashy new thing called AI, which gets the job done in 6 hours instead, even if buggy, and causing even more problems with unnoticed misinterpretations, but hey, 6 hours is so much less than 3 weeks, and we saved a lot of money!
And then the reduced staff will have to do even more work, get swamped, then gets replaced by AI (which still leads to inferior product), and by that point the management won’t even consider RTO being the reason for all that inefficiency.
You could have done the job at home in 3-4 hours, but instead they shot themselves in the foot and still considered it a win.
Oh, and the office that they are renting and that is now half empty because of the reduced staff…? Suddenly it’s not a problem like it was with remote working.
Oh that’s encouraging. Good to know I’m on a sinking ship. I sorta assumed as much already though. The RTO mandates so many companies are doing almost feels like a desperate attempt to stay afloat and relevant, but is actually going to hasten the sinking.
It’s all the middle managers and Business Idiots who think they’re so goddamn smart and effective at their jobs, wasting everyone’s time because they’re actually incompetent.
I cannot express how pleased I am that the company I work for went all-in on remote work during the pandemic and allowed the lease to lapse on most of their office space while sub-letting the rest.
RTO is a literal impossibility for us now. We simply don’t all fit in the remaining office space we have, and assuming new leases on more office space obviously looks terrible on quarterly reports.
There are many other ways that the company I work for is miserable, but I take the small victories where I can.
And then they blindsided us with a RTO mandate. And we do not all fit in the buildings. There isn’t enough room by some thousand people and they don’t seem to care.
The part that’s even more insulting is that half my team live so far away (several US states away) they are exempt. So now half of us are forces to commute into a crowded building TO JOIN A TEAMS CALL! Ahhhhhh!
I don’t know about you guys, but my company just mandated RTO a few months ago.
As expected, we now
spendwaste 8 hours: Commuting, Walking to and from meeting rooms, etc.And the meetings, and the “collaboration”, which are basically non stop all day long now, are just us talking round and round about all the things we need to do and how to do them for the 8th time, without actually doing them. But we sure LOOK really productive and busy. And I guess that’s what management wants? Who knows.
With remote work I would do my job for 8+ hours per workday in pure focus mode. Knocking out solution after solution. You want XYZ to happen? Already done, here’s a link to it. Have a meeting? Click join Teams call 1 minute early, listen and talk, while continuing to working on XYZ. You think we should try ABC for the XYZ project? Ok, I’ll have it ready by tomorrow.
In office work is now spent walking from meeting to meeting, and you gotta leave 15 minutes before and it takes 15 minutes to get back and settled and you did not work on anything during. And they ask “so, how is project XYZ going?” “Good, good. Should be done in a few more weeks.” And you maybe work on XYZ for 30 minutes uninterrupted that entire day, decide to skip any testing or QC, skip those extra features, skip checking with other teams if it will impact them, you have to skip all that to get it done on time. And it takes 3 weeks to do a 5 minute task. And it’s inferior. And you talk about XYZ every meeting of every day, time after time, updates and statuses and comments on the ticket. And you finally announce you got XYZ completed and it’s “yay good job” and management asks how the RTO is going and everyone is terrified to say “this is stupid and a gigantic waste of everyone’s time and your money to put us in a giant expensive building just to not work on work, but to talk about working on work and we are getting only 10% done vs remote work”. So we say “oh, fine” and management puts a little golden star on their report they made for themselves and they feel all warm and fuzzy that work is going great.
And thus, project XYZ was finally completed. A task that would have taken 1 person a few hours to do remotely, has now taken 8 people, 3 weeks of in office meetings and status updates and endless interruptions and discussions over every aspect of the project over and over again to finally complete. But we all LOOKED super busy doing it. And that’s the important thing.
I’m personally, loving the RTO. I thought I would hate it, but I get to talk with friends all day and sit in meetings and daydream and the day flies by and I barely turned my brain on.
I’m happy to just do my job at home uninterrupted at my desk, but they sure don’t seem to want that, so fine. Hope that works out.
During COVID my workplace had to go fully remote
IT has (left over from waterfall) some skills stronger in some states, so IT teams were reshuffled to get people from all over to balance them
So when we were allowed to return to the office, we were required to be there 3 days a week
With the spread out teams we had no in person meetings, we rarely saw team members even if they were on the same site
So we felt very much like the difference was to commute to do MS Teams meetings in the office on small screens three times a week, and have no commute and do MS Teams meetings on our own screens twice a week
We are lucky enough now to have full time work from home
Edit to add: management aren’t on the same agreement as the rest of us, they have individual contracts. Very few of them have access to remote work
OMG right!?
I didn’t even mention it in my main post, but half my team is out of state and exempt from RTO.
So half of us commute into an overcrowded office and walk to a meeting room just to join a damn teams call. I hate being in person without a headset and having to yell at a room microphone and look at a smaller screen than I have at home.
Everything about it is inferior than what we had at home. It is harder to hear, harder to see, harder to communicate, takes longer to commute, longer to have to walk to meetings vs click join.
All the RTO seems like execs playing “everyone else is doing it, don’t want to be left behind” or something.
Remote work just makes it crystal clear that competent people can do their jobs with nearly no management. It’s perfectly natural for management to be opposed to it.
deleted by creator
I’ll never understand this. I was born in a city. I never worked in a field. I hate physical exertion. Planting corn would be my definition of hell.
My team just had a super productive in office day. I thought “wow I can see why people think in office is more productive” and then I realized my entire team was remote that day but me so it was more like a fully remote day for the team.
You’re loving the RTO now, but then half a year later the management decides to fire dozens of people and replace them with this flashy new thing called AI, which gets the job done in 6 hours instead, even if buggy, and causing even more problems with unnoticed misinterpretations, but hey, 6 hours is so much less than 3 weeks, and we saved a lot of money!
And then the reduced staff will have to do even more work, get swamped, then gets replaced by AI (which still leads to inferior product), and by that point the management won’t even consider RTO being the reason for all that inefficiency.
You could have done the job at home in 3-4 hours, but instead they shot themselves in the foot and still considered it a win.
Oh, and the office that they are renting and that is now half empty because of the reduced staff…? Suddenly it’s not a problem like it was with remote working.
We started doing all this stuff. For this and several other, similar reasons - our competitors are passing us by, quickly.
Oh that’s encouraging. Good to know I’m on a sinking ship. I sorta assumed as much already though. The RTO mandates so many companies are doing almost feels like a desperate attempt to stay afloat and relevant, but is actually going to hasten the sinking.
It’s all the middle managers and Business Idiots who think they’re so goddamn smart and effective at their jobs, wasting everyone’s time because they’re actually incompetent.
I cannot express how pleased I am that the company I work for went all-in on remote work during the pandemic and allowed the lease to lapse on most of their office space while sub-letting the rest. RTO is a literal impossibility for us now. We simply don’t all fit in the remaining office space we have, and assuming new leases on more office space obviously looks terrible on quarterly reports.
There are many other ways that the company I work for is miserable, but I take the small victories where I can.
What’s crazy is, so did mine.
Sold multiple office buildings.
Told us all, WFH is here to stay!
And then they blindsided us with a RTO mandate. And we do not all fit in the buildings. There isn’t enough room by some thousand people and they don’t seem to care.
The part that’s even more insulting is that half my team live so far away (several US states away) they are exempt. So now half of us are forces to commute into a crowded building TO JOIN A TEAMS CALL! Ahhhhhh!