goofytinkerbell
Tinkerbell
- Joined
- Jul 5, 2009
We're also fighting, because we find productivity is lower in the office. We have jobs that require concentration, and interruptions reset that. When we're at home, we can ignore messages until we finish what we're in the middle of and then check them. It's the same thing for us, we're being brought back in just because someone in upper management equates butts in seats with productivity. That's absolutely not the case in a software environment. They're used to a manufacturing environment, when if you're not meeting sales targets you just crank out more product. It doesn't work that way for us at all. We do NOT get paid well, but most of us are long term employees. We don't want to start over somewhere else, we want to make the work environment better. They want to go backwards.Wow, that's rough. I'm sorry. When we got notice we had to be back in the office at least 3 days a week I think they at least gave us a few weeks notice. A lot of us are still fighting being back in the office since it's not fair throughout our business. Some departments are still working fully remote. Some people in some departments are only in the office 1 day week. While some of us still have to be there 3-days for absolutely no good reason at all other than "because I said so." I'm unfortunately in a department that has to be in 3-days a week and i'm definitely not happy about it. Granted I haven't been happy with my company/job as a whole in awhile. My issue is that I get paid really well and I have a crap ton of time off which makes it really difficult to want to actually leave. We're currently in the middle of negotiations for raises (among other things) so we'll see what happens with that. I haven't taken finding a new job completely off the table though.
As an aside, we worked from home all during covid and were more productive and made more money than pre-covid.
Pre-covid, our environment had some remote, some hybrid and some in-office. Now they want everyone in the office full time except for the ones who don't have an office within a 3-hour commute (excluding traffic, just driving time). They're also pushing everyone with doctors notes to get new ones, in an attempt to force them back too.The inconsistency must be quite frustrating. Something I've wondered with our offering of fully remote, which I am fully remote now, is our quality of candidates. Maybe it's just a coincidence, but I swear it seems like our last batches of hires even though remote are not lasting, or questionable in some cases on work priorities, or perhaps just didn't turn out to be the right fit. I'm not the supervisor, and will never do that again been in plenty of those positions, and don't need that stress anymore. But I do hear in meetings questions about items due and it seems to be the newer individuals, why they aren't done, or finding out a person that just came on 6 weeks ago is leaving already, and that's not just one person but has been several. I think some people came in thinking remote as the best of circumstances, yes it's absolutely great I have no commute, but we still have a massive workload and some hires don't seem to understand that coming in. I work over alot. Even my DH says to me he'd be watching Netflix all day, I say yeah right, not a chance. I'm shackled to my computer answering people all day, calls, meetings or Teams chat on questions. When I get up and come back, I've got messages waiting and missed calls. When I was in the office, I felt way less of this. Maybe because it's easier to just walk down the hall. That all being said, I think someone that's been in the company and is a good producer and understands the organization, if they can be productive at home, it should be a consideration.
We work hard, and there's always someone to answer. But we can ignore them when we're in the middle of a task that requires a lot of concentration, which is something you can't do in the office.
In your case, if you have new people quitting because of the workload, that indicates an issue with how much work you're putting on people. Our office also puts unrealistic expectations on people and we're now hitting the point that it's hard to keep new hires. The longer term employees had it happen more slowly, kind of like the frog who sits in the water as it heats up. By the time the frog realizes he's being boiled alive, it's too late, but the new frog dumped into the already boiling water tries to get away. If you're working too much, you should be scaling back and setting the expectation that they need to hire more people. I'm guilty of it as well, but we're quickly learning that the company will just take advantage of the wage savings and burn through their employees, eventually replacing us with cheaper new hires who don't have the same level of knowledge.