I think youd be suprised how many people have jerked off at work

That is not reality. It is the new norm to accommodate wfh. Let’s start first with not wasting an hour or more on commute. Let alone not being forced to recruit employees who live less than a half hour away. Several fortune 100 companies I know have tried to bring back work in office and a small % are going back. I personally like the office a few days a week just for the networking. But I don’t have to. You can answer questions ultra fast on teams chat.

Respectfully disagree and in IT we are always troubleshooting stuff in real time. There is now technologies for this like Teams, Slack, Zoom. :)

The company I work for all admin staff like HR, billing, accounting never have come back to the office. Our CEO decided smartly that he was going to lose alot of staff and they can better utilize their office space. We do have a billing team where their supervisor makes them come in 1 day a week and they all hate it and don't see a reason for it. Mind you these same people 2 years ago all came into the office everyday and worked 40 hrs.

Times have changed my man.

My company just closed two of our regional offices and turned loose of two of our four floors at HQ. It's saving us on the order of $75 million per year.

Granted, that's a drop in the bucket compared to labor costs, so there's a valid debate about productivity, but that's complex enough that no one REALLY knows the optional approach. But our turnover is super low, and all our financial metrics are still right where we want them to be. (And you can bet we're interviewing ex-Twitter folks - we need all the engineers we can find right now.)

Our CEO has declared us a "distributed" company at this point. We have an office for team meetings and such, but otherwise there's no expectation for anyone to go in. She also joked that she'll fire anyone caught sleeping in the office. ROFL

Like I said, I don't disagree that there's room for discussion about the optimal approach, but there's zero question that I'll stick with this place longer since I can work from anywhere.

I think the real key to maintaining productivity is making sure you have remote workers who have good work ethics....I have always told my team that results are the best measure and that working 60 hours a week doesn't impress me.

I still think that coming to the office occasionally has it's benefit, especially when it comes to training or special projects. But if my team is meeting and/or exceeding expectations I could care less where they work from or what they wear while they are working.

What I wouldn't tolerate would be those that are pretending to work (there again results tell the tale) or those who work a 2nd job while doing the original one from home (this is a rare event but does occur)

I sat in on an interesting demo recently. Basically a program that creates user journeys throughout enterprise applications for the purpose of anomaly detection. It’s main use cases are rooted in internal fraud prevention within financial institutions but the conversation quickly shifted to the gray area of employee monitoring in WFH settings.

That seems like a huge waste of resources but it had peoples gears turning.

I doubt that very seriously. I'm not in the market for a certified welder, but I know the local coop starts almost everybody at $15 + Benefits + Pension the last time I asked. That's entry level unskilled labor.

I think a certified welder that isn't a couple assface could get better than $18. If they're willing to do oilfield work, that's 100K easy. Probably closer to 200K.

There may be pockets of cheap ass labor in some rural areas, but it sure as hell isn't mine.

Nah, man it's out there.

On r/Accounting someone posted an Excel Macro that would move the mouse every 5 seconds so their Teams setting doesn't switch to Away.

CPA Firms are different than most everywhere else in terms of work flow, but it's out there.

Your CEO sounds awesome and she appears to actually care about her employees. I would stay there too.

I work for a "healthcare" company and we do alot of behavioral health. We have had our best years financially during the pandemic and people working from home.

We started to see this trend a few years prior to Covid where it was getting tougher to hire psychiatrists and have them work in the office but Covid accelerated that and now all of our psychiatrists work remotely and do telemedicine exclusively. They also use Teams religiously. We have been doing telemed for a decade + but nothing like we do now where it is almost exclusively all telemed.

With the WFH change we have been able to utilize our office space and expand our services into other areas like dental and primary care. Been a windfall.

People can find ways to beat the system....it all gets down to monitoring results.

Beside...all people have to do with Teams is put it on their phone and it will always show them Green/Available.

This software could potentially capture this scenario if a company cared enough to looked. The premise being an employee leaves a crumb trail within the enterprise system. So clicks in certain locations at certain times, ultimately compiling enough data to create a user journey. So anything outside of that pattern would kick out as an anomaly to look into. I guess ****ing off at the exact same time everyday might trick the software but then it would get compared to peers with the same job title/description.

That said, seems like non-productive workers should ultimately reveal themselves as non-productive through existing internal evaluation processes.

The overgeneralization that people that WFH are just GenZ cry babies that want naps and to lounge in there pajamas all day have no idea what WFH actually is or the benefits for people with families.

My wife works from home and she says it is so much more productive for her. She doesn't have to wait an hour and a half to two hours in traffic. She doesn't have people constantly distracting her by stopping in her office just to chat. And she still has close working relationships with people because she is constantly video chatting with people.

Numerous studies have shown that productively goes up with WFH. Not the opposite. Plus as soon as my wife is done she can come out and spend time with our kids because she doesn't have to sit in a car in traffic. She gets more sleep and saves money by not eating out. There really isn't much reason to actually go in.

Sounds like twitter could have really used union representation to me.

Yeah, that is a weird flex. I work and worked for fortune 100 companies. Both are seeing extremely low return to office rates. Very huge % are not gen Z. My experience has been that the main people working office jobs (where in office jobs isn’t particularly necessary) tends to be leadership and actually tends to skew to younger people who don’t have family/kids and are seeking social connection.

If you have good managers they will easily be able to sift out productive workers vs those who aren't doing anything..

You are still in constant or potential contact with your co-workers via the tools mentioned above. Get dragged into BS meetings.

This impression that its all gen-z whiners and loafers who work remotely is just not reality.