Return to office - but I want to remain fully remote

The problem is we more mature people have less to gain by going in, the company needs us to but hasn’t worked out how to incentivise us.
I’m not getting promoted, so I don’t need face time with the CEO. My pay and conditions are fine. No extra cash is really going to be put on the table. The trendy stuff that the tech companies are doing like pizza and ping pong Fridays aren’t my thing, I’ve kids to collect etc.

To my mind the answer is clear, the main incentive of interest to middle aged middle managers is time off. So build in some TOIL or similar into the rewards scheme. If I can work up time off, or a few hours here and there in return for a regular presence in the office that might work.

For other people cash bonuses might be an advantage, but surely a package can be put in place.

Many years ago a company I worked for employed a consultant to devise new incentive programs, staff were able to pick a certain amount, some wanted cash, others time off, others flexibility.. others access to training and education… the company set the parameters and we worked around it. Everyone felt they had some input and autonomy which boosted morale a lot.
 
Our company has gradually creeped back up from 40% to 50% to 60%, insisting that the individual manager police it and do ….something to those not coming in. But no one will say what the something is. HR are pushing the fact that everyone is happier back in the office. I enjoy being at work and working from home. It is the commute I cannot stand, the time wasted doing that, getting up earlier.

The comments on the onboarding of new staff just demonstrated how little effort companies put into training or on boarding. In my team we have seriously upgraded how we train newcomers, how we interact and supervise them and how we fully train them in the first few months. I tell their direct line manager that both they and the trainee need to be in together for the first few weeks. Some thought that was just the first few days but that was insufficient.

I find my days in the office are dictated by visitors or events and days at home by family commitments, so I rarely get to pick and choose. And I agree, almost every meeting has someone online so it makes a joke of all being here together. It never works out perfectly. There have been days I turn up in person for the important meeting and I could have stayed in bed, and other days where I chose to dial in and it would have been more beneficial to be there in person.
 

That is a complete fallacy these days. The days of sitting at a desk beside someone for a week are well gone. That is not how young people learn or want to learn these days.
They way people work now compared to even 10 years is completely different and so are training needs. Nearly everything now is done through online collaberation where you have much more fflexibility. If I asked a new graduate to come in and watch me how I do things for hours on end, they would be out the door within a week.

Even on the building of relationships, that companies talk so much about. They don't really care about that. They care that people are seen to join various groups around inclusion and equality etc that make them sound like great employers but that's lip service. People build relationships by spending time with people outside a work situation. That's why tech companies put in pool tables, game machines, chill out rooms etc etc but no traditional company has ever embraced that. Indeed they were laughed at because 'people should be at the desk'...

Building a culture doesn't depend on me or any of the people in my team being in the office 5 days a week or partaking in extra curricular activities. We build our goals and objectives around what the executive committee tells us are the values of the company e.g. protect the customer every single day. We deliver on that and it can be measured. None of that has to be done in the office but nobody can tell us that we don't align to the company's culture.
 
A lot of our staff have moved to live some distance from the office, that makes a difference too. Several are now miles away and don’t ever plan on doing more than a day a week in the office, we’ll probably lose them if we push it.

Difference between teams and real/perceived differences in treatment cause friction.
 
Relying on a sort of a work shadow was grand in the past but now we have to document procedures and actually train people! Much better I think. And I think that aspect of onboarding works better for most new people,

Not all new joiners are new to the workforce. You don’t have a single learning style, we often hire 50+ age group and also 20 year olds…
 
One of my kids visited one of the cool US tech giants a while back as part of a school trip. she said it was amazing, they had loads of restaurants, a hairdresser, a gym etc etc. Myself and my wife both laughed and asked her did she realise why all these things were there? No she answered and we said, it's so you never have to leave the office.

Reminds my back in the 90's when I worked in the City in London, a number of banks had their own pubs in the basement on the basis that if people were going out drinking at lunchtime or early evening (very much the culture) then at least they would still be in the building if needed.
 
Annieindublin said:
Not all new joiners are new to the workforce. You don’t have a single learning style, we often hire 50+ age group and also 20 year olds…
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True but the idea that knowledge transfer only comes from being beside someone is way out of date. I started a new role during covid. Spent 18 months without ever meeting one colleague in person. Yes it was hard but starting every new role is hard and onboarding new people is hard and time consuming. Everyone being in the office doesn't make that easier.

The one thing that has changed for the worse in my mind is that there genuinely doesn't seem to any interest in building real friendships in the workplace. Whether that is due to remote working or some other reason, i dont know. Some of my best friends now are from places I worked 25 years ago. Times have changed and but we used to work hard and play hard and have great fun doing it. Doesn't appear to be the case anymore but I think that had changed before covid to be fair.

Actually I miss work from 20 years ago..! Now I am getting emails from a guy called Stephen telling me that they are a he/him........am too old for this....
 
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That's just your personal perspective but it's not what companies in general think, because you personally want to WFH and it works for you personally you are trying to extrapolate that to be the general case, but that is a fallacy. So you would fire a new graduate based on the fact that they were not able to pick up the job based on your preferred remote learning method. Is that not bullying? and that is the reason why companies are mandating partial return for all staff. It's a whole lot easier to learn by watching a colleague beside you, trying to suggest otherwise is false
 
What on earth are you talking about? Fire a graduate and bullying comes into it how? I said they walk out the door. Not throw them out the door. Its not my opinion. Its how we run graduate programmes in a company of 3000 people. It's how induction programmes are run. It's how we onboard people at all levels. There are some jobs that require close mentoring but they are in the minority and certainly not in the area I work in.
I can work better and more productively with an new employee online than I can by having them sit beside me. I can use teams calls, instant messaging. I can share screens, take and give control of computer. I can share files instantly and ask them to try. I can schedule time where they are my sole focus rather being at my desk and having other people interrupt by coming over asking me things.

There is no on size fits all but the days of shadow learning for vast majority of office jobs are gone. It's simply not effective having someone sit beside you while you click a mouse and fill a spreadsheet or write some code or do up a project plan. Most of us after years of working are well capable of going into a new role and figuring out the majority of it ourselves. That's why we get paid for our experience. And my experience of young people is that they have no longer any interest in getting prescriptive training on routine tasks. They are just as interested in why you are doing something as to how you are doing it and are not afraid to question it. Again, that doesn't require in person training.

People should be encouraged to go into the office. The benefits of it should be clear. People aren't stupid and the vast majority aren't lazy. If companies are having to mandate people to come in, they have clearly failed to make a convincing argument as to why they need to be there. And rubbish about collaboration and mentoring etc isn't going to cut it.
 
This is definitely a thing. The craic we had in and out of the office was great and strong friendships were built. I would love my young adult kids to experience that.

I'm not too sure it had changed pre covid. I think it is very much age dependent.
 
By shadow learning I didn’t mean sitting watching you. Maybe that’s what works in some jobs but in a professional environment new people come to meeting to listen, meet people and learn how the business works. They listen to discussions and hear interactions between colleagues and learn a lot that way.

I find that wfh calls are more task oriented that they might have been previously. That’s good in some respects but it doesn’t help with the team building aspects
 
It changed long before Covid. Unfortunately people are too afraid to get sloshed on company do's now because they get the book thrown at them if anyone gets offended, probably generational. The anti-smoking brigade means we are very anti social (to smokers) now. As mentioned previously, I used to go out on smoke breaks all the time even though I didn't smoke. It was a great place for work related chats/collaboration be in gossip or problem solving.
 
My young adult children have no interest in going into the office, they are keen to do the work, and are not afraid of it, but they have no interest in sitting in an office. They do see the benefit of socialising with staff but they want this off site at events, where they can mingle. They all have plenty of friends and with social media they find someone in any corner of the country they knew already.

I have a young non-national on my team and she has a better social life than me already. WhatsApp groups etc., allowed her to connect with others immediately rather than hoping to make a friend at work.

I find the young staff want to work from home days before and after they take time off, when they have personal events on, when the weather is poor, when they go home to visit family, etc, etc.
 
Are people not concerned that if a job can be fully remote that these jobs overtime will be relocated to other cheaper locations…think of all the IT/HR/payrole/tech eng support roles that have been been lost in many Pharma/Med device companies?
 
Y'all on here posting all day, ye must be working from home

The problem is there are people watching judge Judy, and staring into the fridge, and procrastinating in whatever other way they can find. People will struggle to acknowledge they do this, maybe only calling themselves out on the really bad days.

The subject matter of this forum will also attract a certain clientele, people who probably do take their responsibilities a bit more serious than most, hence why they found the website - unfortunately such mentality is a minority mentality, and employers are likely seeing more time in office as a way of generating a greater sense of who is delivering output versus waffling on the odd zoom call.
 
Bluefin said:
Are people not concerned that if a job can be fully remote that these jobs overtime will be relocated to other cheaper locations…think of all the IT/HR/payrole/tech eng support roles that have been been lost in many Pharma/Med device companies?
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Bullseye! But for too many of today's employees it's all about them, so they don't bother to carry out that kind of SWOT analysis! After all, there are plenty of other jobs around, so if the job doesn't meet their lifestyle requirements, then they can simply walk - at the moment!
 
If you are of a certain vintage, you will have experienced a couple of recessions or downturns already. I suspect that a lot of younger people have not, the times have been good for a very long time and the jobs market continues to be very buoyant. So it is natural to think that it will always be like this and that they can dictate their terms of employment. And housing being so awful, a lot of them are living places far away from work. So I get it.

I find though that in my workplace, the younger people are way more keen to work in person....things like lack of workspace in their home, keen to socialise with colleagues, change to mingle with more experienced colleagues etc. And the new grads who did a couple of years of remote college are very happy to be in person. We are all humans and all working as teams and I think most people do value the opportunity to meet in person and yes it is all chat and not v productive but we are not making widgets. I have what would have been considered a very task oriented role but at all levels it has evolved into a role that involves teamwork, relationships etc and the actual work we do it a small proportion of it as IT, AI etc improves that side of it.
 
There are all sorts of ways to learn through observing others, being beside someone isnt the only thing, watching how people interact with others, how they influence people etc.

This craic of graduates deciding they dont need to be in the office is an absolute nonsense, for one thing how the hell would they know!
 
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