I have no idea how i used to manage with five days in office.
I am currently using myunch hour to see a doctor. A few weeks back I needed to see a plumber, and before that an electrician. Its five seconds out of the work day let them in and send them on their way but I guess we're looking at burning annual leave if I was stuck in office.
I think before that, we just postpone making this appointments until our home issue became much worse ( health, house maintenance, child-care, etc... ). I notice my house smelling much nicer just due to weekly cleaning instead of every 2-3 weeks.
>I have no idea how i used to manage with five days in office
The quality of offices was also much better in the past like a single office for for 2 to Max 6 people. Now it's crowded open space hot desks offices with 40+ people.
Maybe it's for the best. If you work fully remote now then you you haven't missed much but if you go to a shitty office now the you missed a period where workers had some value.
To add to that, we had almost no free time during the week to ourselves. Commute, dinner, shower, bed. So what did we do? We borrowed personal time from our sleep time, always feeling foggy and tired. I would wake up and go "eh, nothing that a cup of coffee won't fix", and off I went.
I am the same way - 3 days I actually find invigorating. It cures that cabin fever. But back to back, five days, after the pandemic, it just feels like straight up abuse. And it's what it really is. We just TOOK it.
My father once pointed out that salary should be normalized against total work required time, commute included.
At 40 hours & 5 days / week in the office, even a 15 minute one-way commute is a -5.8% change in comp-per-work-time. 30 min is -11.1%. 45 min is -15.8%.
If that happens, or management is operating in response to fear, management is incompetent.
I am a manager of a fully remote team, and if people are not getting their job done they are replaced no matter if they are in office or remote.
Meeting goals? All is well. Missing goals, find out why, and adjust dates or resources.
In most cases those who abuse WFH for us have been staff augmentation contractors. I have a theory they may be working multiple contracts, but it does not matter because things were not getting done, and the solution is simple.
The team members who are performing the best with remote work are FTEs, who understand that the benefits of the situation come with responsibility. In fact, sometimes I have to encourage them to _not_ work as much because it is convenient. Unless there is a fire drill, close the laptop at the end of a normal business day.
I wonder how many managers realise working from the office doesn't mean working 100% of the time either... The real number is so much lower on average.
Heh. I worked remotely for most of my career (~20 of 25 years). In that time I frequently worked 50+ hours a week because I actually enjoy the work that I do (application security, including security testing, and the joy of popping a shell never gets old). RTO has impacted the amount of hours I work because I head to the office, and then when my work day is done, I pack up my computer and head home. Unless I am paged or have a meeting to support someone outside of normal working hours, I don't crack my work computer, it's easier to just sit at my home workstation. When I WFH my home workstation had my work computer set up, and I would default to logging into that, unless I was playing a video game or other working on explicitly personal stuff.
There are folks who abuse WFH/remote work (see the overemployed groups on reddit and other places), but companies are losing access to alot of extra, effectively unpaid, time by imposing an arbitrary start and stop time for people based on physical location.
I am currently using myunch hour to see a doctor. A few weeks back I needed to see a plumber, and before that an electrician. Its five seconds out of the work day let them in and send them on their way but I guess we're looking at burning annual leave if I was stuck in office.