“Return to office” demands may have peaked, with employers accepting remote, work-from-home and hybrid working, research from the Australian HR Institute has found.
A survey of human resources professionals shows employers’ demands for full-time staff to be in the office between three to five days are falling.
What’s next?
More than 80 per cent of survey respondents expect that hybrid working levels will increase or stay the same in the coming two years.
I listened to one of these c-suite apes give a whole discussion justifying bringing people back to work. His points were that having an amazing work culture and 75k a year is more than enough to get people back. When it came to why people didn’t want to return there was no mention of having more free time, avoiding commutes, etc.
These fucks are unbelievably out of touch.
Who on earth wants more people on the road?
Everyone should be against mandatory rto especially those that cannot work remotely and have to commute, such as labourers.
Wealthy corporations want you to spend money (car, bus, train, real estate). How is this still not obvious to you?
Yes, obviously there are vested interests as you mentioned that would like things as they were, the question is why would you think it’s in your interest to publicly declare it as a vote winning talking point?
Republicans hate WFH.
But why?
Because their constituents are all blue collar workers who can’t work from home, who already resent people who work from home.
Seriously, that’s how every blue collar worker I know of has acted when hearing about RTO.
I switched companies to avoid RTO. I happened to move closer to my mom during this time and not a month later they released Hybrid. Thank God I was out of range, but people were pissed. Funny enough, my company offered full WFH as long as metrics were being met, so there were some people who hadn’t been to the office in years that were now told to go. And the limit was “50 miles as the crow flies,” so people were going to have nice commutes. 🙃
I’ve had meetings where literally only one person is in the office (and it’ll be empty behind them), while the entire rest of the team is remote. How can you tell people hybrid is necessary when the rest of their team is at home? We had people who were just hired, who came to my company specifically for the remote work, that had the rug pulled from out of them. When they complained, they were just told they agreed to work for the company under their terms and the terms had changed. Every single survey since then says the same thing: We what WFH.
Yeah i’m definitely in team “flexibility”. I really don’t mind going to the office, tbh, even mostly, but rush hour commuting can go fuck itself and I’m just not subjecting myself to that anymore. I can start up at home and then move to the office when less people are moving themselves around.
Wake up 9am, get a cup of joe, some pastry, take a mandatory shit, work for two hours, arrive to office just in time for lunch with colleagues, four hours of work, go back home, work some more if needed.
And still be more efficient than being forced to work on site and being watched by your boss all the time.
This, entirely. Although I dont even wake up later. In fact I’m ready to act on things earlier than I would be had I immediately gone to the office, because I’m already looking at mail and tasks when I would normally leave.
Hybrid working is only a problem to people stuck in the eighties.
Maybe we finally showed them enough times how quickly the team it took you years to assemble can evaporate into nothing.
Doesn’t matter to them. But hey, I’ll gladly see them burn to the fucking ground or re-hire for 20% higher while having to give a month or two for people to find out all the hidden gems in the software with noone to explain it to them.
This article is megacorp paid bullshit.
Literally nobody I know, nobody I work with across multiple contracts with multiple companies and none of my friends or their coworkers want hybrid work or full RTO.
Now, in full disclosure, I did run into someone the other day at a cafe that 100% misses going to an office and commuting and social lunches and whatever. But…that’s just one person.
Eh there are legitimately those that want hybrid. My husband is one of them, he needs the physical work/home divide.
Me? I’ve been wfh full time since 2015, get fucked.
Your sample size seems skewed, or at least it doesn’t match my experience.
Mostly my younger colleagues, those in their 20’s and early 30’s, miss the office and actually go voluntarily about 2-3x a week. They enjoy the flexibility of choosing when to go, but they need to meet new people around their age, bond, go out for drinks, all the “normal” things we old timers used to do before COVID.
Nowadays I don’t care for all that, I have my own family and social circles, but I totally understand their point. I just don’t want to be dragged back to the office because of that.
Same here. I do 100% remote but many of our customers have hybrid models or even total freedom and some people choose to go tue-thu to the office. Especially younger people, without family, and living in smaller apartments in city centers (bad wfh setup, not enough space, roommates).
Add another one person to the list. I am a software engineer, I have ADHD and I go to the office 3 days of the week instead of the mandated 1 day. It’s just much easier for my brain to focus when I’m in a work environment than at home. Part of it might be how my working space at home is set up, but at home, I have never matched my productivity at the office. Plus, commuting to work is a large majority of my outside time and social time. I touch grass and attend social events relatively rarely and I know I need to work on that, but the fact remains that commuting to work is good for my sanity.
EDIT: Regardless, I understand why people don’t want to commute to the office and when given the opportunity, I will always advocate for people’s right to choose one, the other, or anything in between.
Interesting! I also have ADHD and find working in an office impossible due to random noises and distracting visuals.
That said, I hyper focus when working from a busy diner or a bar. Is your workplace bustling?
I love diversity in the ND community! 🙂
Is your workplace bustling?
Not really, it’s actually pretty quiet even though it’s open space. But I am at my most productive when I have my headphones on and I listen either to instrumental music (post-rock or post-metal works great) or rainycafe.com
This. Headphones and instrumental - anything with lyrics is too distracting - but classical works best for me. Give me some Tchaikovsky and I’ll pump code like a good monkey.
Fuck. I just had a really promising interview, but it was three days in office, three days remote (5 days a week, so the days gradually rotate). I’ve worked remote for 15 years, not including three months in a terrible office job that I promptly quit.
I’m making a mistake considering this, aren’t I?
Depends on how good the offer is I suppose.
If it offsets the inconvenience and additional cost by a significant margin, or if there’s other reasons why it would be good to take it (ceiling at current job, better progression prospects at new company, other quality of life perks, …) then you shouldn’t ditch it outright.
But 15 years without going to an office, it could be a jarring experience. Consider well how this will affect your daily routines: force yourself to go to a shared workspace and work from there 3x a week, then evaluate if it works for you or not.
Sigh. Dunno. The money’s good and job market appears to be tightening up again, around west coast US anyway.
Maybe take it and negotiate an extra day remote?
My office transition from WFH to Hybrid. A lot of people quit over the last year. We’re severely understaffed and we have had trouble hiring.
We had our worst internal survey results for the entire 10 years of my employment.
Management doesn’t seem to correlate the RTO rules as the problem though. 🙃
I’ve been trying to quit too, but I haven’t be able yo find a job yet (i was trying to change careers)
Clueless execs are always the problem, ultimately. They have their real estate obligations and simply cannot fathom that social norms around working have changed.
Companies which are heavy RTO will fail. Some of the hybrids will survive. Fully remote companies are thriving.
Management doesn’t seem to correlate the RTO rules as the problem though. 🙃
It’s not that management doesn’t correlate. It’s that they planned for RTO to diminish the workforce and then they can start hiring (offshore*) remote workers for a fraction of the cost. At least that’s what my company did
Damn you’re right. We have been outsourcing more work to Accenture.
Which is twice as funny because consultants often cost more in the short term. It’s mostly to avoid those pesky things like “benefits” or “pension plans” that employers need to take care of for their own employees.
Fuck Accenture.
I see your point, and at the risk of coming off as a dick I will say I think that our next industrial revolution will be when AI replaced a large portion of work force. If you can work entirely from home, odds are what ur doing can be replaced by AI or offshore workers both at a fraction of what your being paid
I don’t understand the correlation. If you work entirely in an office the odds are no different that you can be replaced by AI or offshore workers.
The location of where you are doing work changes neither of those things.
I think a lot of office drones aren’t understanding what I’m saying here, or are not liking it. If what your doing at work is for example data entry or document management or some of the sort, your job can easily be replaced by AI or offshore workers. If you need to be somewhere to do something, for example plumbing, or human to human interaction than AI and offshore can’t replace you. Think about all the work from home people that get the mouse simulators so they can look like their working all day. You really think they can’t be replaced in an instant by AI? Can you explain to me what jobs can be worked exclusively from home, with no need to ever physically show up, that cant be replaced by AI ? I’ll wait, but I won’t hold my breath.
OK I understand now. I thought you were suggesting that if people were working from home but returned to the office they would be less likely to be replaced. In the same position.
Yea I didn’t articulate my point well in my first comment. I was drunk when I wrote it LOL. I’m just saying I predict AI will be our next industrial revolution, just as many jobs had been lost to automation, now we will loose many more to AI. At least that’s my theory! Part of me hopes it doesn’t happen so people don’t get out out of jobs the way they did with automation, part of me hopes we embrace it and maybe people won’t have to work as much. But we all know the latter won’t happen, too much greed :c
Office buildings should not be investment vehicles.
Do you even American bro?!
Cries in eagles
crying bald eagle. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fajjJrY8ab8
Wait till you hear about hospitals.
Jails too
I will never work in an office again. I will starve to death before that happens.
I will hunt and eat people before I’ll starve to death but agree with you about the office thing
Why would I waste time going to a place with a shittier keyboard and monitor than I have in my quiet private office, with my cat, and zero other annoying coughing humans.
Not everyone is so fortunate, some people have the good monitor, keyboard and chair at the office and a dining table at home.
That is totally fair
I’ve been working remote or hybrid since well before the pandemic, so I’ve had a long time to prioritize setting up my home office.
Too bad there’s a ton of bootlicker red state governor’s forcing their workforce back to the office at the taxpayer’s massive expense.just to appease the dipshit who forgot this even happened within a minute of being told about it
And to save commercial real estate values.
It had been 5 years. There was nothing left to save after that long.
I don’t even do hybrid work anymore. I just end up doing contractor roles because contractors can almost always do remote work.
Because of this I’m constantly on and off projects.
This has broken the “my work cares about me” or "I’m going to retire here"spell they put on you.
Corporate doesn’t care about you. You must be selfish at work or nobody will care about you.
This was the best thing about contract work for me. I suddenly stopped caring about downsizing, poor performance announcements at all hands meetings, annual raises, and whatnot.
At any given time I have 2-4 contracts going at once and if they want to get all demandy, IDGAF anymore. I have told managers “no”, and it’s amazing.
It’s feast or famine. But honestly, I rather have this than actually going into the office.
I’m okay with 1 day a week in office. I’d prefer every other week, but it’s good to have face to face conversations on occasion. But the office needs to understand I’m going to be much less productive those days. I’m leaving at 2 to beat rush hour, and I’m not making up that 1.5 hours of commute time after I get home (I will eat the morning commute though). I’m taking a lunch with my coworkers instead of working through it.
When everyone understands that the office days are performative rather than productive, it’s not the worst thing. That said, keep fighting, my WFH brethren. Not everyone benefits from office time, and any time not spent in meetings it’s fucking ridiculous to see people sitting in a cubicle with headphones on trying hard to emulate the peace and productivity of just working from home.
Hybrid is the worst. I mean its better than making me be there all the time, but it also lets people get away with all the bad habits: mixed in office / at home meetings, lack of documentation, unclear directives, favoritism, etc.
Hybrid means that the people are still unable to figure out how to communicate effectively, that they are going to start saying nonsense like “institutional knowledge” because they let people get away with it.
