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I don't understand the headline. What's the 'worst part of working from home' in this context? In my case, my employer isn't forcing anyone to come back to the
by null_object 4y ago
I don't understand the headline. What's the 'worst part of working from home' in this context?
In my case, my employer isn't forcing anyone to come back to the office, but there's definitely an unspoken understanding that 'collaboration' and 'team feeling' will improve if we're at the office more often.
But when I go to the office it perfectly reflects the experiences described in the article: I'm almost always the only person from my team in the office at the time, or otherwise the only other team-member has their work to do, and I have mine, so we sit next to each other on the considerably less comfortable office chairs than I have at home, and work 'side-by-side' with our headphones on, and pretty much don't speak to each other any more than we usually do in Meet or on Slack.
I tend to use the days for wondering around and chatting randomly with other people at the office: hang with the Sales people, mosey past the Support team, spend half an hour in the office kitchen.
I guess this is ok if the idea is to be a more socially cohesive group, but it's disastrous for my productivity, and I always have to work twice as hard for the following days at home - even though it takes a while to regain my focus afterwards, so the rest of the week is often a little bit disrupted by the wasted day at the office.
I don't want to only work at home for the rest of my life though - but it feels like we haven't worked-out what the new situation should be just yet. And in the meantime, managers are just thinking in outdated terms of getting everything back to 'normal'.
- Freak_NL 4y ago> […] and I always have to work twice as hard for the following days at home […] Why? If socializing in the office is part of your job now (explicitly or implicitly), you're working your hours either way. If that leaves you with too little time to get things done, address it with your manager.
- watwut 4y ago> If that leaves you with too little time to get things done, address it with your manager. While there definitely are exceptions, addressing something like this with an average manager is useless to contra-productive.
- chaircher 4y agoThis is really interesting - I wonder how much the set-up of someone's compensation package correlates with how much someone is willing to go back to the office. Mine's almost exclusively performance based and so I tend to want to work from home. The people going into work getting antsy about other people not being there are people who treat work more like a hobby or have a more basic pay structure. I actually prefer being in the office but we're in a sort of death spiral of the place having turned into a social hub and me feeling like I'm being left to babysit people at my own expense.