I've seen several of my clients mandate a return to office policy.
And every single time it starts, even with vaccination plus antigen test policies in place and enforced, a wave of infections sweeps through taking out team members for the week at least. This shakes up even some of the managers who themselves opt out and informally let it be known to their teams it is okay to WFH so the team can have a shot at hitting deadlines.
And that is an angle I don't see covered much in these discussions. Pre-pandemic teams were already running fairly lean, but the environment now is more extreme with many open positions going unfilled for months and years at a time. Regardless of the reasons why they go unfilled, the ground truth is one bad flu or COVID will disrupt many a finely-tuned project plan now, whereas a decade ago there was enough people with enough willingness to temporarily pull more hours above and beyond their normal hours compensated with comp time that someone(s) could cover enough to soften the blow to the project.
Now "above and beyond" is normal in many of my clients. You can tell by how many managers and people are still chatting online after hours and even weekends. There are no more hours to sneak from somewhere, and people are pushing back on the chronic use of these hours, setting boundaries because sneaking these hours is not worth comp time when it becomes a regular feature of everyday work, and with more employees increasingly becoming aware of the poor odds of winning enough with equity to make up for those hours.
We've JIT optimized our workforce alongside our supply chains. Why is it surprising it is brittle to exogenous shocks?
I am a firm believer in that having slack increases effeciency. Running at 100% makes every misstep a planning cathastrophy and leads to panic solutions witch cost more and wastes more time.
forcing people to be in an office for arbitrary reasons is cruel. it is a manifestation of the "i own you" subtext between employer employee. whatever euphemism they might spin up cannot mask this obvious.
If you don’t like that manifestation, you can work for another company that does not do it, or start your own. We are still a freeish market fortunately. So we’ll get to know which one is better thankfully soon.
Or unionize. Only takes a majority to vote for it, and attempting to do so is protected by US labor law in the US. You then have the leverage to negotiate for remote work as a locked in benefit.
Workers have other options than simply accepting management shenanigans or leaving.
And every single time it starts, even with vaccination plus antigen test policies in place and enforced, a wave of infections sweeps through taking out team members for the week at least. This shakes up even some of the managers who themselves opt out and informally let it be known to their teams it is okay to WFH so the team can have a shot at hitting deadlines.
And that is an angle I don't see covered much in these discussions. Pre-pandemic teams were already running fairly lean, but the environment now is more extreme with many open positions going unfilled for months and years at a time. Regardless of the reasons why they go unfilled, the ground truth is one bad flu or COVID will disrupt many a finely-tuned project plan now, whereas a decade ago there was enough people with enough willingness to temporarily pull more hours above and beyond their normal hours compensated with comp time that someone(s) could cover enough to soften the blow to the project.
Now "above and beyond" is normal in many of my clients. You can tell by how many managers and people are still chatting online after hours and even weekends. There are no more hours to sneak from somewhere, and people are pushing back on the chronic use of these hours, setting boundaries because sneaking these hours is not worth comp time when it becomes a regular feature of everyday work, and with more employees increasingly becoming aware of the poor odds of winning enough with equity to make up for those hours.
We've JIT optimized our workforce alongside our supply chains. Why is it surprising it is brittle to exogenous shocks?