Be honest, for those partaking in personal attacking. How many of YOU are directly benefiting from a spouse, doing WFH and being home so much that 1. You’re used to it, 2. Kids are used to it, 3. And you realize they’d quit that job as opposed to go back to the office full time, 4. Saving that gas and lunch money, while STILL demanding the equivalent salary of going to work in a large city, whereas you don’t live in that large city/downtown location.
My FIL loves WFH. Everytime I see him though, he comes downstairs a lot. “It’s a break.” Dang, you get a lot of breaks!
But he works for Ford. And Ford has been cleaning shop and wreaking havoc on employees every 6 months. Mass layoffs. So far he’s survived. But weird…. He goes to the office 5 times a week now. It’s almost as if he’s doing all he can to survive a future cut. I’ll be honest, if I was a boss, I’d keep the guys I can actually physically see and physically work with. That guy insisting on 4-5 days home remote, would be the one cut.
If you’re accusing me of a personal attack on you then you’re incorrect.
My wife works for the same company that she had been at for years at the start of the pandemic. Yes, my wife works from home two days a week now and the others she is in the office, during the first two years of the pandemic she working from home 100%, her workload was dramatically increased because of her productivity while working from home ( free from distractions, interruptions from co-workers, bosses, having to sit in on many unnecessary meetings just in case someone might have a question about one of the proposals she was working on, time wasting team building exercises, etc). Then they started back to one day a week in the office, not so bad when I’m at home, but quite a bit more on her plate when I’m on the road, so on her office days she would get up really early, do an hour or two of work, then get herself and our daughter ready, drop the kid at school, commute in work a full day, go pick the kid up from her after school STEM program and head home. Now that it is two days in the office her workload has increased yet again and she spends a couple more hours of working from home after picking our daughter up to make up for the inefficiencies of the commuting and dealing with family life due to the extra workload added when she was able to dedicate her entire work day to work.
My wife’s office is in the exact same location it was in at the beginning of the COVID lockdowns and our address is the same as it was then, I know it is easy to assume that other people’s reasons for resistance to more days in a commercial building are not only all the same, but the same as your reasons would be, but that is a lazy way of analyzing the situation.
If executives and managers want to wax nostalgic about the days they were able to drive efficiencies and productivity ( at least as far as their opinion goes ) due to being able to see and be seen by their subordinates then fine, I guess they need that emotionally or something.
If companies need to justify real estate holdings, leases, etc… fine, say so!
If companies are trying to poke people with a stick to get them on the road more, buying gas, eating at restaurants or the company cafeteria, driving car sales, interstate and intrastate travel by air, train, car, hotel revenue increases , etc then say so.
But the short simple “ they’re just lazy “ talk is absolutely BS for the majority of work from home employees.
In the event of TL/DR I’ll break it down.
In many cases such as my wife’s,
Many companies were more respectful of their peoples time away from the office and had an accepted and expected productivity level. Many people had their workload added to while working from home because they lost a lot of commuting, lunchtime, unnecessary time sink issues that go with being in the office, now there is pushback because they will expect the same productivity from people that you were getting when they could wake up, grab a cup of coffee and get right to working.
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