Google Employees to Return to Offices on April 4, Will Apple Follow?

[Ethosik]

The key is, mandatory vs optional. Your mileage may vary.

My commute time turns into more meeting time and increased productivity.
Working in the office was 0800 to 1700, plus at least half hour each way.
Working from home now is 0700 to 1800 if not later. In additional to that, meeting during lunch time become a daily occurrence. Perhaps we shall all come back into the office to reduce the work hours.

This has been my experience as well. Along with the open office space that is highly distracting. Working in an isolated room at home for an office, I can spend 8 hours and not get distracted at my physical location. Its not like I need to deal with someone next to me on a daily basis talking loudly "HEY JIM YOU WATCH THE GAME LAST NIGHT?!?!"

There are people on this site that severely advocate the "watercooler talk" but in a large workspace half your day is pretty much gone by distractions running into people in the hall, bathroom, break room, going to your desk, people next to you being loud and more. I have been stopped in the hall 8 times in one day for 15 minutes each time just talking about real life stuff and NOT work. All that time now is spent on my actual work tasks and I feel less pressured and less stressed because others are not taking up a lot of my time away from my own workload.

 

[4jasontv]

At this point, everyone should be required to go back to work.

Vaccines work
Masks work

COVID is going to be here forever, so you might as well learn to coexist with it like we did with flu.

Imagine telling someone they have to work at a specific place after working from home for years. It has nothing to do with COVID anymore. Employers can pound sand if they think they can dictate where employees work.

 

[swester]

At this point, everyone should be required to go back to work.

Vaccines work
Masks work

COVID is going to be here forever, so you might as well learn to coexist with it like we did with flu.

Covid is hardly the primary reason that a hybrid remote model makes sense in the modern corporate environment. The pandemic merely forced more employers to cooperate with a change that was going to happen - and should - at some point anyway.

The technology and infrastructure didn't really exist even as recently as 10 years ago to pull this off, but we have it now. It makes sense from so many perspectives: environmental, traffic, employee safety and health, productivity, commercial real estate, to name a few.

 

[4jasontv]

This has been my experience as well. Along with the open office space that is highly distracting. Working in an isolated room at home for an office, I can spend 8 hours and not get distracted at my physical location. Its not like I need to deal with someone next to me on a daily basis talking loudly "HEY JIM YOU WATCH THE GAME LAST NIGHT?!?!"

There are people on this site that severely advocate the "watercooler talk" but in a large workspace half your day is pretty much gone by distractions running into people in the hall, bathroom, break room, going to your desk, people next to you being loud and more. I have been stopped in the hall 8 times in one day for 15 minutes each time just talking about real life stuff and NOT work. All that time now is spent on my actual work tasks and I feel less pressured and less stressed because others are not taking up a lot of my time away from my own workload.

Exactly. I can more than twice as much done in half the time working from home. I’ll go in, but I’m working 10 hour weeks for the same pay, even if my productive decreases.

 

[Mr. Awesome]

In some industries it’s still incredibly necessary. No idea in Apple’s case, but WFH = good is not one size fits all.

Exactly. Working from home was exhausting for me. I need more separation between personal and work lives.

 

[bpeeps]

Imagine telling someone they have to work at a specific place after working from home for years. It has nothing to do with COVID anymore. Employers can pound sand if they think they can dictate where employees work.

I know too many people that quit and found new remote jobs after companies forced them back into the office. I'm in the middle of applying for a remote job as well. There is zero need for me to be an in office from 8 to 5 in my line of work.

 

[Ethosik]

Exactly. Working from home was exhausting for me. I need more separation between personal and work lives.

It certainly isn't for everyone. That is why I advocate for choice, not force. Have people return to office if they want to. If they are effective and work better working from home, let them do that too.

 

[kerplunknet]

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[urnotl33t]

Wrong way to look at it IMHO, the pandemic offered a time savings and pay raise because you had to work from home but people were hired, pre-pandemic, with the expectation of working onsite, not from home.

That being said WFH has its place and employers will need to weigh if it is worth losing talent over return to office/WFH flexibility and new hires will be looking for employers to offer WFH or hybrid offers.

Each and every company is different and will have different approaches to the WFH or Office conundrum.

Interesting thought, actually. Monetarily, WFH/hybrid only benefits the employee, not employer.

That made me think of the next logical outcome: reduced starting wages for future hires who WFH-only, and slower/lower wage growth for all the "legacy" hires (and possibly lower/slower wage growth for new/WFH hires; a double-whammy).

Ironically, this whole ordeal could could end up being much worse than we expected. Extrapolating further, hypothetically, this could result in a massive and protracted recessionary environment leading to another "lost decade", or more, of wage and economic growth.

The FOMC just might be staring down the barrel of a very very bad economic cycle and not know it yet.

 

[Darth Tulhu]

I'm sure there will be a lot of whining and complaining.

Talk about self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

I'm glad we had more intelligent leadership in our organization that saw covid as the opportunity we needed to shut down our stupid expensive DC office and put everyone on WFH. People have been free to move cross-country in the time since and are now closer to the areas they represent, and are happier & more efficient employees. If for any reason our org got the hair brained idea to backslide into the miserable inefficiency of a condensed office environment, we'd lose the best of our staff overnight, and they'd be right to go bc we'd have all surely lost our minds.

 

[ThunderSkunk]

Interesting thought, actually. Monetarily, WFH/hybrid only benefits the employee, not employer.

That made me think of the next logical outcome: reduced starting wages for future hires who WFH-only, and slower/lower wage growth for all the "legacy" hires (and possibly lower/slower wage growth for new/WFH hires; a double-whammy).

On the contrary, it reduced our overhead considerably and we get higher quality work out of our people. If that doesn't benefit us, I don't know why we're in business.

But I like your idea of penalizing people for that success. Maybe we could tell them that meeting performance goals will be inversely proportional to health benefits and their 401k too. Really grind em down.

 

[Darth Tulhu]

Interesting thought, actually. Monetarily, WFH/hybrid only benefits the employee, not employer.

In what way? WFH has yielded WAY more hours of work out of employees, and the Internet access, power, water, and A/C & heating costs are all passed to them.

That said WFH/Hybrid does not fit all scenarios, but in my tech company we have embraced, er, tech and have become even more productive in the organizations that do not require face-to-face at all times. Zoom meetings are more than sufficient in our case.

The company building is now a huge waste of money, because it sits empty most of the time. Instead of leasing 12 floors they could've leased 5 (server farms and IT infrastructure for in-person teams).

That made me think of the next logical outcome: reduced starting wages for future hires who WFH-only, and slower/lower wage growth for all the "legacy" hires (and possibly lower/slower wage growth for new/WFH hires; a double-whammy).

Good luck with that type of thinking. Managers/directors need to communicate, adapt, and lead properly; those that cannot are the ones to be left in the dust because of their poor communication/task dissemination and supervision skills.

Ironically, this whole ordeal could could end up being much worse than we expected. Extrapolating further, hypothetically, this could result in a massive and protracted recessionary environment leading to another "lost decade", or more, of wage and economic growth.

The FOMC just might be staring down the barrel of a very very bad economic cycle and not know it yet.

Perhaps, although this is pessimistic in outlook. We won't really know for sure, but one thing's clear: for the last 2 and a half or so years the corporate world didn't end, and depending on the company, it grew.

 

[Darth Tulhu]

Then why have the apple campus at all?

Because they commissioned, designed, and built it before the pandemic, and now they "have" to justify its expense.

That plus Apple is secretive as hell...

In hindsight they probably could have built something half as big and half as expensive.

Old-think needs to go. Ironic for a company who's tagline was: "Think different".

 

[Rychiar]

I can’t even fathom how there are still companies where employees never went back to work. I’ve been back for a year and a half. This isn’t the bubonic plague …

 

[Darth Tulhu]

... return to work has nothing to do with us being over covid (thank god we are), it's more, we got to save on ****** commutes, we got to do our dishes during boring calls, we got to hang out with our SO all day instead of random coworkers, and we don't wanna give it up, simple as that.

Haha, true. But also, I wonder how many carbon emissions we reduced by NOT driving 2-4 hours 5 days a week (at least).

Everyone is bent out of shape about this... if someone wants to go back to the office full-time they can go ahead.

Personally, I find Zoom meetings WAY more efficient and effective than having to jump through hoops for half an hour (per meeting!) trying to book a room for a bunch of people, only to share a relatively tiny screen or have people looking at their laptops anyway, and have people having sideways conversations, noisy habits, and other distractions.

 

[Darth Tulhu]

They will. Cook hates paying people for sitting at home doing nothing

Then he should fire his Managers/Supervisors and get competent ones.

 

[Darth Tulhu]

I don't know anyone who was working from home, but now I'm very jealous. It sounds like a dream.

It really is.

The pandemic was the best thing to happen to my (work-based) quality of life in 30 years.

I even work in my off-hours when I'm bored. Jump in on weekends or when I cannot sleep, because I know I won't have to go in in the morning.

If my company decides to go full-tilt everyone back, that'll definitely stop and I WILL cutoff work to 40hrs, on my assigned work days.

Either we BOTH win, or we both lose.

 

[panzer06]

I haven't worked in an office for almost 12 years (IT PM) and at this point I would not accept a job that required 100% on-site work. Only my son and niece had to go in the entire time since their jobs cannot be done remotely. Most all the other family members are either 100% remote or hybrid. I see the benefits from both sides but for me I just can't do it. I'd quit and find something else if 100% office was required.

 

[Darth Tulhu]

Love all the whiners.... some of us never stopped going into the "office" (nurse here). Time to get back to work... tired of being short handed because people are crying about having to actually leave the house to earn a paycheck.

I also love all the whiners, whining about the "whiners".

Jealousy is always a bad fit. There's always room for a career change if you want to join us WFH'ers.

I did 15 years in no-days-off-16-hour-shifts-for-months-in-the-cold/heat of the flight line during the 911 wars, until my knees said enough and forced me to say goodbye to military retirement and all its benefits.

Yet I'm happier now than ever before, even prior to the Pandemic when I did have to commute.

 

[Frosties]

If true that we still allow working from home in a massive way, productivity increases but development is hurt.

 

[nsayer]

A huge percentage of the world worked remotely for 2 years. There is absolutely no justification to mandate people now have to come back into an office.

It's that simple. Discussion over.

I think, in general, your employer is allowed to mandate anything within reason that they like. That's how employment works. They get to tell you what to do in return for giving you money.

There's certainly no justification for government mandates, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.

 

[panzer06]

I think, in general, your employer is allowed to mandate anything within reason that they like. That's how employment works. They get to tell you what to do in return for giving you money.

There's certainly no justification for government mandates, but that's a whole different kettle of fish.

True, and they are also allowed to watch as positions languish unfilled because many candidates refuse to work in an office.

 

[applicious84]

Retail employees cannot perform their work from home. Software developers, HR, Tehnical communications etc. can and therefore will.

Not rocket science..

Truth! Rocket scientists cannot work from home.

 

[nsayer]

True, and they are also allowed to watch as positions languish unfilled because many candidates refuse to work in an office.

And that's a possible and perfectly acceptable outcome. It's the thing that separates employment from servitude.

Employers know from the last two years whether or not their staff productivity has been the same or not, or at least within the margin to support ceasing to pay for expensive commercial office space. Some companies no doubt will decide it is, and others won't.

Personally, I think it's more effective to have colleagues physically nearby for collaboration, but opinions are like *******s: everybody has one and it usually stinks.