However, our research found that returning to an office often is a major disruption to one’s routine, foundational work, and overall life experience.
Damn work. Disrupting their routine and life experience.
Yes. Get used to it corpo shill, or we’ll unionize.
My heartfelt condolences to all those affected. Having to drive to work is certainly very cruel and completely unexpected. Life is one of the hardest.
You joke, but my quality of life nosedived significantly when an accident caused my commute to become 2-2.5 hours total each day for like a full month.
Which repeated like 6 months later because of another accident.
I hope whatever hardship you’re going through passes soon.
I don’t even have a driver’s license lmao, nobody I know does either. Cry harder, corpo shill.
What you would say with irony, I say with conviction.
You are free not to work and live the life you’re dreaming of.
What? It’s a return to the office, not work. It’s not the 8 hours; it’s the additional hour (if you’re lucky) getting there and back which, for some jobs, brings no discernable benefit.
Well, the office is obviously the place where the work takes place. It was probably relatively okay for you when you started the job, then the pandemic hit and now you think it should be different. But it’s not up to you to decide whether it makes sense to go to the office, that’s for your employer to decide - you know, the guys who pay your salary.
Yep, but it’s up to me to decide to fuck those execs and leave. And guess what? Almost all of my coworkers who were the same age left too. Within 2 years, my cohort was largely gone.
I took a mild pay cut to live closer to home and work remotely in a field that I feel more passionately about. My only regret is that I miss the people I work with, but half of them are gone or reassigned anyway.
But hey, the people who paid my salary are more than welcome for investing in my early career training. All in all, they spent more money on me than I earned for them.
Joke’s on you – I started work during the pandemic. And, more to the point, my company was doing flexitime and WFH long before I joined, because their employees like it and because they’re the kind of employer that values the input of their workforce.
Also, I could flip your last argument. It’s the workers that turn up and generate value for the business. Salaries aren’t paid out of the goodness of the employer’s heart. It’s a transaction, selling labour, and as with any transaction there has to be good will on both sides for the relationship to function.
“OH no. Those poor white collar employees”
So anyways, here I was breaking my body doing a job that has to be done in person but earns less pay and benefits when al…
“I can’t work from home, so nobody should!!!”
Look, when people who don’t not need to be present at an office can stay at home, it frees up the streets/trains etc for all the people who do. WFH benefits everyone, except owners of office buildings I guess, but fuck them lol
With a large increase in the number of office workers working from home, cafes opened in the suburban centres near me. Though the cafe workers have to work from work, it’s certainly a benefit for them to be able to work walking distance from home instead of an hour bus commute away with expensive parking when they had to work in cafes near the offices
WFH moves the support jobs closer to home
Sure it doesn’t help if you’re in construction, but it’s a net good for many people
Good. Sounds like you’re a jealous asshole who gets what you deserve
We’re the same 99%. They’ve tricked you into misdirection of your resentment.
Lol. I remember when Mark Shields said in one of his last appearances on the PBS News Hour something like “The democratic party used to party of the PBR and a whiskey shot, but now it’s the party of Sauvignon Blanc.” I guess I’m technically a tech bro, but I think you are spot on pointing out this conversation about “work” ignoring very important work that can’t be done remote.
And you know what? I think you should be earning more and have better benefits. Better than me, probably.
We have no quarry with each other. All of us deserve better.
So you are someone who will pull down others to your own level of misery? What a jealous piece of shit you are.
You think Execs and Managers come in to the office daily?
The most challenging aspect of returning to the office is the commute. This isn’t surprising because commutes of only 30 minutes are linked to higher stress and anger, while 45 minutes or more is linked to poorer overall well-being, daily mood, and health.
That explains a lot actually, damn. Is that cumulative, or just one way?
Most recently, I merged into the left lane as there was a spot open. Traffic was going slow (20mph) on the freeway. The guy behind the spot aggressively sped up and laid on the horn. Maybe he expected me to be scared and jump back. I didn’t and committed to my move as was expected. I will confess I gave him the bird after his outburst, but that’s how I vent. I’m not perfect.
He was very upset at this on top of my lane change and tailgated me for a while until I disappeared ahead shifting lanes again following the lack of cars ahead and flow.
Anyway, that’s all stress. And it adds up. That’s why I gave the finger as it eliminates some of it right then and there. You have to let it wash away from you when you get home in some positive way. This is all extra wear and tear on you that would be gone when you work from home.
When I was going to the office, parking downtown was $21 a day.
So $105 a week just to park to go to work.
Now, I COULD have taken a bus/train for $5.60 a day… But that would mean adding an extra hour to my commute in the morning and an extra hour and a half at night.
$21 - $5.60 = Saving $15.40 a day, but losing 2.5 hours.
My time is worth more than $6.16 an hour.
WFH I save ALL $21, plus gas money, plus not eating out for lunch or dinner.
After doing that for 3 years, I had $30,000 in the bank and bought a house.
Demand better of your trasit system. they can do it but if people don’t demand it they won’t. Don’t forget the proplem is often those elected not the tranit agency
There are other benefits aside from money that you enjoy when riding a train/bus compared to driving.
Buses/trains have drivers themselves, so you don’t have to engage with traffic to and from work - and during rush hour when the most people are on the road during the day.
Then, when you ride a bus/train, you lower the impacts and demands on the natural world, like reducing GHG potential per capital, reducing the vehicle waste from oil leaks, tire dust, smog, etc. per capita, and reducing the fuel demand per capita needed to get you where you need to go.
Downside with public transit is that people don’t like to be around other people in that kind of setting (for reasons like increased social contact for illness transmission, people might smell bad, might be loud, might pose a threat to others, etc.).
This being said, remote work is a wonderful alternative to even public transit. Agree with you there for jobs that don’t need to commute. Some jobs still do, and public transit would be my next best choice. Still, some jobs need to travel more than a fixed route, so hybrids or EVs would be better than ICE cars for that. Etc etc
Same here brother. I went from almost a decade of 1.5 hour or more commutes to feeling healthier and happier than I had ever been. It was sad when we were kicked out of our apartment at the end of 2021, but we moved in with my parents temporarily and ended up buying a house in the spring using all the money we saved as a down payment. Thinking back, we saved far more than we had ever anticipated without even trying. We saved on gas, train fare, car maintenance, a dog walker, coffee or eating lunch at work. And then we also saved on just not going anywhere due to the pandemic like not vacationing or going out with friends. Even with all that, we definitely spent more money at the time on delivery orders, alcohol, and investing in home entertainment. But we still saved a shit ton and I wish every day that we could all just work from home if possible. Even aside from all the savings, think of how much less wasteful people were and how much less pollution we put into the air. Think of the extra sleep and the time spent with family instead of commuting. Having kids seemed so much more possible for the future working from home. But naw you gotta have that in-person interaction there isn’t any other way except over the last 2-3 years but just forget that ever happened.
I mean, I account for $10k salary increase for in office work compared to what I’d take 100% remote.
And even that’s low balling yourself …
That’s based on an offer with a 15 minute commute and free parking. It scales up and I’ve had this conversation when being offered a job.
Yes, please ask me to effectively take a pay cut to pay to drive across town so I can sit at a non-customizable hot desk to join virtual meetings with resources all over the globe. But it’s ok because in return I get to be interrupted constantly by people physically bothering me with a question in the name of “collaboration” instead of opening a ticket or sending an email like a normal person. Genius. I can’t understand why everyone’s complaining. (/s in case it wasn’t obvious).
Also I have to pay for parking and lunch
Is this really the norm in the USA? In the Netherlands most office lots have free designated parking and virtually everyome brings their own lunch.
My white-collar arse has never had to pay for parking while at work. But it probably depends a bit on occupation and location.
Everywhere I’ve worked has had free parking, but when I interviewed at Amazon I noticed they didn’t.
We had a skip-level with a director today who told us our 3 day in office is going to become a 5 day. When asked why, he couldn’t articulate a single good reason. It was a “management decision” made by a bunch of tone-deaf fucks who never go to the office or get paid so much money that the cost is trivial. It’s time to start unionizing everywhere. Fuck these class traitors.
I wish there was a union for office workers who were forced back into the office
We need to start founding them on our own, it isn’t just going to happen. These fucking CEOs and investors need to be put in their place. They’re deliberately flexing on us, deliberately increasing our stress levels and impacting our lives and health. These fucking leeches would be nothing without us doing the real work for them.
I’d join in a heartbeat
Same, now if only one existed…
Time to brush up that resume, WFH or hybrid is the new norm.
Fully remote is the only way. In my experience hybrid workplaces are just as toxic. It could turn into full time office out of the blue like mentioned here or generally the ones showing up to the office get a bit of a preferential treatment if the boss also regularly shows up at the office.
Hybrid work only works if you actually coordinate what happens in the office.
My employer softly demanded everyone return for 3 days a week to “collaborate”, but I work with customers all day so coming to the office just meant taking Zoom calls on my laptop in the middle of a barebones open floorplan office, instead of in the quiet of my well-equipped home office. Thanks to my sane managers, I’m getting away with only one day a week right now, but that’s my least productive day.
If I’m ever demanded to be present the majority of the time, I intend to haul the mountain of IT equipment my employer doesn’t understand that I need for my job into the office to make a point. I’m doing them a favor by running that shit at home, really. I’d probably blow a breaker plugging it all in, knowing the state of the office wiring. Sorry, looks like I need my own office for all this if you want me here.
LOL My employer wants us to come in at least two days every pay period (every two weeks). But, of course, we’re not all going to go in the same day - we can’t, there’s literally not enough space - so instead of calling in to meetings from home on those days, we’ll be calling into meetings from a cubicle.
WHAT IS THE POINT? They’re having a difficult time convincing us this is a good idea.
A little more backstory: We’ve been fully work-from-home since the pandemic began. They decided to renovate the building, so we all brought our stuff home and archived or destroyed stuff we no longer needed. So we’ve been work from home for almost four years now and things are rolling along nicely. It’s really difficult to argue that we somehow need to be in the office now.
Not all jobs can be remote, while some can. Not all remote jobs can be 100% remote. That’s great if you can, but someone has to go swap out failed disks or see things hands-on because of whatever reason. And there are isolated networks too.
Our hybrid situation works and the manager knows it. He’s in the office all the time because he’s trying to be available to everyone, but we are scattered around that and other campuses. He feels it’s part of his job while understanding other jobs can be remote or hybrid. He only cares about the end result. Not saying upper management might say something stupid, but not likely as we’ve had a flexible work environment for ages. Since the Before Time.
Not all jobs can be remote, while some can. Not all remote jobs can be 100% remote. That’s great if you can, but someone has to go swap out failed disks or see things hands-on because of whatever reason. And there are isolated networks too.
I’m curious why even bring that up? No one is suggesting jobs that physically require your presences in a geographic location to be Fully Remote. When people are saying things like “all jobs should be fully remote” they’re referring to all jobs that can be fully remote should be fully remote.
Yes I agree. I probably lost some of the context in my reply, but I was just saying there are degrees of remote work that aren’t 100% and that’s fine. We do have some 100% staff, but I sometimes want to go in. I get reconnected with a good group of people. I could hand off some of these mundane duties to others, but I choose to do them and go in. I get to help some of the younger folks on the team that do go in all the time as they are trying to learn.
Anyhow, I hope that made sense.
I enjoy hybrid…
I hate online meetings, so i go to the office 2x a week on days i schedule a lot of meetings
It also helps that i’m a very quick subway ride to the office, and i understand not everyone has that luxury. But that’s a choice i made to live in the city instead of a 1hr drive to work
People should unionise anyway. Even if ots a good place to work
Does anyone have knowledge and or experience with forming a union in the US? After doing some mild research I failed to find a union that represents telework / work from home employees, specifically those who are facing return to office mandates from their corporate overlords
Are people forgetting that the salaries were high in high cost of living areas to account for this cost. In the new normal, should employees expect pay cuts, or should employees that opt in to in office expect higher pay or stipends?
I expect to be paid based on the value of my work, not based on how much my boss personally thinks I need. If I ever got a pay cut that was justified by my own low cost-of-living, I would quit on the spot. Don’t punish me for being frugal. I’m saving for as early of a retirement as I can afford.
Cost of living adjustments are real. The value of your work is based in part of market rate. And part of that market rate is based on location due to various costs of livings, taxes, laws etc. I think the thing is the pre pandemic salaries should have accounted for those factors, but when those factors change due to people moving etc. it is reasonable to expect the question to be asked about adjustment. You’re not being punished for being frugal.
So you’re saying people should take a paycut because they are more productive?
It’s more having your cake and eating it too. When pandemic hit and you got to keep your salary and work remote, maybe move to a cheaper area, no one complained that they kept all the benefit of the in office pay. But now that you got to keep the same pay, and are asked to come back into the office, you aren’t suddenly making less money. You’re just paying for the cost that was always expected as an employee that was hopefully accounted for in giving you a reasonable salary.
And some of these costs that add up to “a month of groceries” can be mitigated by having flexible in office policy. It’s not that transport takes a month of groceries. The cost is transport + childcare + pet care. For some childless and petless workers the cost of in office transport isnt that bad, and might be tax free if you have programs for it. And child care and pet care can be reduced with flexible in office requirements. Some companies used to let people bring their dogs to the office, for example.
Seems like everyone in this thread is okay with pay cuts as it is less than the benefit.
This article is saying the average is ~$500 a month. Imagine pre pandemic work norms. If your employer offered you $500 less a month, but the trade off was you got to work fully remote, would you take it?
Yep. I took a larger one because I changed industries and location too.
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Many large companies that support wfh, set pay scales based on where you live, not where they are. If you live in a low cost of living area you get paid less. Live in a high cost of living area get paid more.
Before you start jabbering about how companies don’t do that… They do. Just because you don’t work for one, or don’t know about your own companies policies you should look it up. Most companies are pretty discreet about it and people don’t talk about taking pay cuts to move to low cost of living area but it is common.
Yep. The way I’ve heard of it actually happening to folks where I work is when they moved during the pandemic their pay didn’t immediately change. But when they got their promotion, they got a 0% percent increase because that was when they recalculated the cost of living adjustment. So maybe they got a 12% raise, but moved to a place with a 15% lower cost of living. So they weren’t going to piss off the employee by rewarding with a pay cut, but use that as the time to reset compensation leveling.
Love WFH for taking care of animals, stress free guilt free breaks, all my home comforts, but I do feel extra sedative when working for hours and do get a bit lonely wishing I could make more coworker friends, but they’re on the other side of the continent
Yeah, that’s what’s crazy about some of the back-to-the-office pushes: come sit in this cubicle and speak to people online who are sitting in similar cubicles in an other city or country…
Me too. I miss my chill office culture where everyone showed up, but the norm was roll in anytime before 1030 or 11am and leave early if you need to. And expected to work from home a day or maybe 2 a week if needed. As long as you showed up for the important meetings in person and attended had a known presence in the office while you were there, it was all good. And being in the office felt good because it was a good collaborative environment. Now I can opt in to go to the office, and have all the sedative isolation of home without the comforts.
You’re the first person I’ve seen to describe my experience too, I feel like I’m the sole crazy person who wouldn’t mind more in office time. But I’m also lucky in that my office is a 15 minute bike ride away, I’d drive off a bridge if I had to commute an hour by car every day
New yorker here. Sometimes the MTA sucked, but my 40m door to door gave me time to listen to a podcast in the subway and decompress from work before stepping in my front door. I also read the news a lot more. I don’t do those things nearly as much now. Also beers in the office and happy hours where team workers forced me to stop working at a reasonable hour were helpful to make me turn off the workaholic side of me.
Curious. Are you fully remote or do you still have an office to go into? Is there any culture left in your office if you do go in?
Public transport is a huge benefit; it is sadly non-existent here although we have alternatives.
Cities are expensive if your time is free. All the bullshit really adds up.
Of course Fortune can’t close an article about how stupid RTO is without turning around and advising the (probably employee rather than employer) reader of all the good things they can do back in the office.
So what can you do if your employer mandates your return-to-office? First, focus on maximizing the benefits of this life change…
Office jobs are BS in the internet era. You go to work to look at a screen. You come home to look at a screen. You go to bed, you look at a screen.
Your bosses are taking calls from their hot tubs while smoking big spliffs and making fun of you for not being as smart as them. They figured it out and they’ll be retiring any day now. I’m not even being facetious, I know these people. They’re the Pakleds of the human race.
I don’t know what a “Pakled” is, but yes.
I work for a FANG company and 2 years ago I willingly took a 13% pay cut on the condition I could work from home permanently. The pay cut hurt but my productivity and output jumped so high that received a promotion along with bump in pay a year later. Being a tech company, they track a lot of metrics around productivity and I know I am 28% more productive when working from home. I refuse to return to an office just because of office politics and drama that distracts me from doing my job. I’m not there to socialize.
I genuinely have no sympathy for anyone who works for these parasites.
A bit weird for those with no choice.
You have no choice but to work for these companies? Lol.
How does anyone survive without working for them?
People get tied into locations because of family and mortgages, it’s reductive to say what you did.
So there’s no way for those people to leave?
Doing so would mean death?
Or do you think the only viable solutions are easy ones?
I am not in that situation, but it would be great to not live in Indiana.
It would also be great if my mother wasn’t in her 80s and my wife’s mother wasn’t in her 70s and didn’t need our help for things.
But they do and we wouldn’t abandon them.
Don’t be silly.
They do have a choice.
I am a software developer and I would never work for say a gambling company. I’m not skilled enough for a FAANG company but I wouldn’t do it even if I was.
If you can get a job at a FAANG the you can get a job anywhere. Certainly for less money but money is meaningless after a point.
Have fun getting another job in tech in this market.
Already done.
Good for you buttmunch
Thanks, there’s no reason to be angry though.
They weren’tasking for sympathy
I am not asking for your sympathy either. You are however VERY misguided. I totally understand the perspective of “big bad company” but without people like me fighting behind the scenes, I guarantee you things would be a million times worse for everyone on planet earth. I have been targeted in the past due to my stance on privacy but I refused to cave to the pressure. Even after high level managers demanded my “obedience” I resisted and won. You can call them parasites but if all they good people leave (and we do exist) then you might as well just give up now and welcome 1984 with open arms.
Forget socializing… it’s all “hey, can you join a meeting?” that has absolutely fuck all to do with you. Slack invites? Ignore. Outlook calendar items? Delete. Much harder to dodge in person.
I feel like it’s worse virtually.
Saying “Sorry, can’t walk and chat with you, have to catch up on shit” in person vs
Hearing “saw you were free at 430pm, so I threw a zoom on there. Oh? Well you should block out you’re picking up your kid” remote
This. And those 5 minute walk and chats, although annoying at times (also they could be fun and productive at times), were less painful than the endless meeting invites I get now. Because a 5 minute walk and chat folks know you are busy. If they see you at your desk plugging away they no you’re busy. But for some reason people now think they are entitled to unscheduled time on your calendar.
The cost of it doesn’t bother me as much as the time involved. If I’m showing up and leaving at the assigned hour I’m burning 30 or 40 minutes in the car each way. Adding another 15 to 30 minutes to get ready to go in versus my just getting dressed and walking into my home office.
Driving’s always subliminally stressful. The whole time you’re driving your subconsciously watching the cars around you and looking for problems. Your heart rate goes up and whenever you get to your location It takes a little while to get back in your groove. There’s a nonzero transition period there. The last thing I want to do after driving home for 40 minutes and heavy traffic is to barrel right into chores but there I am.
what’s even worse is the facr that if they ruled transport was clock in time everywhere would magically be embracing work from home.
My last 3 jobs have had a 45-1.25 hour commute. The city is too expensive to live in, plus traffic, plus trying to find a midpoint between my job and my wife’s all kind of lead to this. I get some of my coworkers prefer to go in because they can’t work from home because the environment there isn’t conducive to working, but that doesn’t mean I should have to pay for that. I never realized how much of my time was being sucked up commuting until I the pandemic lol.
my just getting dressed
You got dressed when you worked from home?
never work naked. even partially. eventually something will happen where an emergency meeting happens or you need to get up real quick. nope not worth it. i don’t get fancy, but not pajamas 100%
I always kept my shirt on (I would be cold otherwise anyway), but I guess the way my home office is set up, you couldn’t see that I was just in my boxers even if I had to get up. I didn’t really think about it.
Pajama gang rise up! Camera on in meetings and all…
<3
