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To me that seems wasteful to have people literally get on a plane to fly somewhere for a meeting. I could see if it was an event or conference. I would think people would prefer to stay home rather than fly to another city on a whim and be there for a week. Again if it's something that only happens a few times a year then ok...to me this is just wasting money and creating pollution.
I can't stress how productive such things end up being, usually. It happens at least quarterly, but more usually monthly. Nothing quite replaces the efficiency of having the entire brain trust in the same room so that there's no 'let me go check with X' follow-ups needed. Things get figured out and decisions made right there, right now.
Doing so also allows people the remainder of their month to live and work in a place they like. The alternative is hiring an entire team in one location and herding them all into an office there, which is how some companies do run things.
How is flying somewhere once a month for these kinds of sessions any different than the hybrid model of going into the office 1-2 days a week? People local to that office are commuting in and people not local to it are flying in. If your employer had an office in San Francisco, would you rather live anywhere you like and fly to SF once a month or relocate to SF so you didn't waste their money and create pollution?
I can't stress how productive such things end up being, usually. It happens at least quarterly, but more usually monthly. Nothing quite replaces the efficiency of having the entire brain trust in the same room so that there's no 'let me go check with X' follow-ups needed. Things get figured out and decisions made right there, right now.
Doing so also allows people the remainder of their month to live and work in a place they like. The alternative is hiring an entire team in one location and herding them all into an office there, which is how some companies do run things.
How is flying somewhere once a month for these kinds of sessions any different than the hybrid model of going into the office 1-2 days a week? People local to that office are commuting in and people not local to it are flying in. If your employer had an office in San Francisco, would you rather live anywhere you like and fly to SF once a month or relocate to SF so you didn't waste their money and create pollution?
Flying somewhere once a month and staying in a hotel and expensing meals is a lot more costly than going into the office 1-2 times a week. Also I wasn't assuming that these folks are just working from home...i figured they had another office somewhere that they are going into...but I guess not. Are you saying they are part of your company but live in another state? Most of the people I see fly in for meetings are people from other companies who have their own office space elsewhere.
I again dont doubt that face to face is important. My experience has been that leadership teams are already mostly in the same space at least that's been the case at places I work. At a place like Pfizer I guess people are scattered throughout the world, but they dont all necessarily work together. The biogen meeting was an example of people coming together from all over the world but it seemed to be a leadership meeting that didn't happen often... like once a year.
I am not sure that i'd want a job where i had to fly somewhere once a month and stay in a hotel.
Flying somewhere once a month and staying in a hotel and expensing meals is a lot more costly than going into the office 1-2 times a week. Also I wasn't assuming that these folks are just working from home...i figured they had another office somewhere that they are going into...but I guess not. Are you saying they are part of your company but live in another state? Most of the people I see fly in for meetings are people from other companies who have their own office space elsewhere.
I again dont doubt that face to face is important. My experience has been that leadership teams are already mostly in the same space at least that's been the case at places I work. At a place like Pfizer I guess people are scattered throughout the world, but they dont all necessarily work together. The biogen meeting was an example of people coming together from all over the world but it seemed to be a leadership meeting that didn't happen often... like once a year.
I am not sure that i'd want a job where i had to fly somewhere once a month and stay in a hotel.
It's a mix of both. Most of us have an 'office' locally but rarely/never go to it because none of our team is local. Going in is basically a way to socialize with other people in my company or run some errands out in the suburbs that day, but I'll almost never have a meeting or collaborate on a project face to face with someone else in the local office. There are some who do have teams locally they work with, and the flying for them is from a leadership position or to represent their group in a larger cross-functional session.
Some are purely remote when not in attendance of one of the in-person conferences. Their only face-to-face contact with coworkers is when they fly in. They tend to be somewhere where there's no office nearby, like Montana.
It's rarely what one would consider base-level employees doing this sort of thing, but it's not exclusively executives either. That is, we're not going to fly IT support people around monthly or gather up HR workers for a conference, but key engineers, architects, product managers, and those types of roles will routinely travel and conference on upcoming projects.
Travel is an acquired taste, and I'm sure some don't like it and will seek out employment that doesn't require it. For others it's quite enjoyable as long as one isn't living out of their suitcase all the time.
Unless you work in an office with no windows, how would this change with WFH? You're still sitting in your office, putting in 8-10 hours a day with a break or two to step outside or to walk your dog.
Sitting in a tiny cubicle within an inside room. Being in meetings in interior rooms with no windows.
At home my desk is next to the door out to the deck. Even if the weather is bad, I have the blinds open (the door is mostly glass) or the door open w/ the storm door closed. If the weather is fine (like today) the door is completely open so the dogs can come and go and I get some fresh air.
Either way I have natural light all day long. I also don't have any florescent lighting anywhere in my house, so there's that too.
I guess I can cite a few other examples. Why the members of management where I am actually live about an hour away. He hardly ever went in the office. Another one I met briefly who works a bit related to what I do stormed into my office. It's actually his office too and he's a very large man it didn't even knock, I thought it was hilarious
I think we're going to see some places that really don't open. In some businesses like retail course you're going to have face-to-face and you can have some pick up some online orders that makes sense. I don't think a lot of local governments have to open to the general public anymore. Anything that you could ever ask would be in the form of an email and any form of payment would be online anyway or you could just drop off a check if you still use those. With the state government I think it's going to be very interesting to see what governor Baker's study shows. Spade system should be open to be used in the cloud. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense to mandate that people have to go in the State offices fully known that many of these are being rented to the state for sky-high rates. There's been some interesting discussions in the past before covid about what if the state move the capital out of Boston. The state can save significant amounts of money traffic with lower and Boston the cost of living would lower in Boston and I think that there could be the opportunity to have just Regional Offices for state employees so the default of going in the Boston no longer exists.
I'd hate to make this a bit about class but I think those that tend to push for reopening and doing more things face-to-face tend to be for more lower ended work and demographics. My parents live in the South Shore and Banks were totally closed during the pandemic take and yet in Springfield where I live there too loud some people in only a handful. Maybe it's a stereotype and I don't wish to open up a Pandora's box but there's a lot of people at least before the pandemic that assumed that poor people either didn't have access to technology or didn't know how to use it.
I used to travel for work in the way of training seminars sometimes it lasts a few days at a time and some people if they thought it was too far I would just stay in a hotel. That all moved on line I really don't think it's going to change back.
With respect of flying back in the day my father is out of company and one of his bosses found out that an employee in the midwest was stealing gasoline. That's all he had to fly all the way I think the Colorado and gave him a warning. Months later he did the same thing and had to flt all the way there just to fire him.
Well if we're going to make it a class thing plenty of people don't have an office job where it is possible to work from home. If someone works in retail, front desk at a hotel or at a restaurant they have to go in.
I noticed a lot of law offices stayed open. Not sure why. We bought a house during the pandemic last spring and had to go into the lawyers office to sign paperwork. I was thinking isn't this what docusign is for but we had to go in. The lawyers were there along with their admin staff. This was in a suburb so im guessing no one there had to take public transportation to get there which helps.
Librarians and people working in libraries are back now too.
I'm another one who is working far more hours and have more meetings while working remotely. The former is because I work on the digital team at a university and while everything (events, lectures, communication) has shifted digitally, we have not been able to increase staff. My job has always been treated as "on call" with occasional nights and weekends, but it's become routine to have to work 50-60 hours a week with last minute urgent messaging that needs to go out on a Friday evening or Sunday afternoon. I haven't taken more than a few days off since last February, and even when I've taken a day off I almost always have to deal with email or some crisis or another. I have to use more than 25 vacation days in the next few months or I'll lose them (no opportunity for payout) and that's just not going to be possible. The only real days "off" I've had was for religious observance or when I had to move my grandmother into assisted living and was physically not able to come to the computer, but even then I was working late the night before on messaging that I was told after 5 would need to go the next day.
Meetings have taken the place of popping into someone's office or having a quick chat around a cube. We need to have far more meetings for basic collaboration. I tried to implement Slack to replace that, but a lot of people in my office were resistant and it died in the water. Where I might have been able to pop into someone's office to check on the status of something or review content, now it becomes a scheduled meeting with screensharing. Throw in the extraverts who put meetings on the calendar just to have meetings, and there are some days where I spent 6 hours on Zoom straight.
One thing I notice, too, is that working hours are less respected as well. I am one of a handful of people who work 10-6 in my office, but I routinely have meetings scheduled at 9 (which we previously avoided as an office so people who got in at 9 would have time to get settled and people who came in at 10 wouldn't have to come in early). At one point, I was having daily half hour 8 AM check ins. I currently have 3 standing 9 AM meetings and regularly have check-ins put on my calendar for 8:30. I have a lot of concerns about how that will shift back once we're back in the office.
The head of my department is very against work from home and is rallying against us working from home at all. He lives roughly an hour away, too, but has been very clear that working through what our normal commute would be is not an excuse. The next level of management is all very pro-work from home to the extent that it makes sense, with the hope that there will be one day a week that everyone who may need to regularly collaborate will be in to ease the facilitation of spontaneous brainstorming. But if the head of the department has his way, we'll all be back 5 days a week ASAP.
Add me to the list of people whose hours have increased significantly since WFH. The day starts earlier and ends later to the point where I'm sometimes still wrapping up meetings or finishing emails while I start dinner. Then the evening/night routine starts with no downtime at all and I'm often trying to squeeze in a bit of work when the kids are in bed.
Prior to the pandemic, we were in the office 5 days/week, but had a pretty solid 8:30am - 5pm culture. We all left the office at the same time and it wasn't expected that we'd be checking emails at night.
In my ideal world, we could still WFH 1 - 2 days/week, but enough people would be in the office on a rotating schedule to go back to the 8:30 - 5pm culture. Not sure what will happen.
I'm interested to see what happens with meetings as we start to trickle back into the office. We are all so used to using Teams that I wouldn't be surprised if we continue to go that route, even when in the office. Some meetings with a working session component might be more face-to-face, but I can see most of our meetings still being conducted over Teams, especially if some of us are in the office and some are out.
One thing I notice, too, is that working hours are less respected as well. I am one of a handful of people who work 10-6 in my office, but I routinely have meetings scheduled at 9 (which we previously avoided as an office so people who got in at 9 would have time to get settled and people who came in at 10 wouldn't have to come in early). At one point, I was having daily half hour 8 AM check ins. I currently have 3 standing 9 AM meetings and regularly have check-ins put on my calendar for 8:30. I have a lot of concerns about how that will shift back once we're back in the office.
I have a coworker with a similar arrangement, but her hours are 7am - 3pm. She used to leave the office at 3pm and everybody made sure to schedule meetings prior to 3pm if they wanted her there. I still respect her schedule, but often see her booked until 5 or even 6pm at night. Now that we are all remote, everybody just assumes others are working the same long hours.
Unless you work in an office with no windows, how would this change with WFH? You're still sitting in your office, putting in 8-10 hours a day with a break or two to step outside or to walk your dog.
If anyone polls dogs, I am sure that remote work for their human will be getting two paws up from virtually all of them. More company, more petting, more walks - what's not to like?
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