Remote workers report the highest well-being in study of 7,700 employees: while those who worked entirely onsite reported the lowest.
a day ago by eicker to c/technology
And 7,600 of them discover that aside from micromanaging and degrading the well-being of their employees, they have no other substantive job duties, and their employment is completely pointless.
I became a manager about a year ago. Now that I'm part of the "inner circle", I can see firsthand what I suspected for the past 20 years.
There are 2 types of managers.
There are cunts bosses who treat their employees as property for their personal gain and advancement. They demand productivity at all costs (see: LLM-cogsuckers), punish for mistakes and pressure people into responsibilities they should take. They are the ones who want RTO to exert control on their employees. They are the ones who "joke" you must take a half-day leave if you need to go before 6PM. They are the ones who openly shit on their employees (or other teams employees FWIW) because they're not benefiting them enough. They are not part of the team, they feel and act above everyone in it.
The second type, which I strive to be and most of my closest "manager friend" are, are servant-leaders. They want to get shit done by easing roadblocks and making technologically informed decisions. They understand that productivity is a consequence of a functional team and happy employees. They take on responsibility for mistakes and push the team towards finding solutions to prevent them. They understand that Life^TM^ is more important than work. They are an integral part of the team, they're not the boss but a full member with a different role and different responsibilities, like a PO or a data analyst.
As a tech lead first and a trained Scrum Master second, I feel much more comfortable in the second role. I help the team internally and report and manage external roadblocks with other teams. It's what I already know. I hate the hierarchical part of the job.
This guy manages and gets it.
Most of my managers have been the second type, although how effective they are at it has varied a lot. Some are very passive and that has been good and bad, being left alone is great when things are going well. But when you need help they are useless.
The best have been the ones that know a decent amount about the job, they can either help you directly or know exactly where to point you for it. That or they understand the pain and you can both cry together for 4 days with a SQL database and increasingly vague error messages.
Keep at the good stuff, managers with a functional brain are rare. Best of luck keeping sane with all the dumb politicking and other "inner circle" BS.
I fucking hate politics so much...
There's a guy in my team. I need to push him into a more advanced role. Because he deserves it, and because otherwise I might lose him. I brought him in from another team where things were going bad. Real bad. Turns out, all he needed was a human working with another human, not an type 1 cunt demanding output from a walking, breathing toolset. He already fits and fills that role within the team, but I need to make it official. Better pay, more perspectives. I know I'm gonna get cockblocked by the fuckers who still hate him for the wrong reasons. Career reviews are at the end of the year and I already dread it. I need to get involved in politics and I'm terrified of it.
Good job. You're one of the 100 out of that 7,700 managers who actually do something productive and manage properly.
Obviously, that number of 100 is arbitrary to make a wider point. To be fair, it's probably a significantly higher percentage than I provided in my hypothetical. But holy shit are there waaaaay too many of the type 1 and far too few of the type 2 that you outlined.
Of course. In this case productivity is a shorthand for obedience. If you do everything I tell you to do, when I tell you to do it and have it done before I need it so I can look good to my managers, then I will deem you productive. Meanwhile, their requirements are completely fucked up and impossible to implement as is, and the deadline is impossible to achieve.
But then who will ask you for a pointless status update during a daily sync up everyday
I'm about to support a satellite launch later this month. Guess what, I have supported the development from my house for the last 5 years. Surprise surprise, butts in seats aren't necessary.
RTO work often is about control and not about cost or efficiency.
Quit my last job over being asked in once a week. It was the commute rather than the office that I really wanted to avoid but it was also an awful open plan hotdesk office for a company of hundreds of people I didn't know or care about.
New role is office based but I don't need to drive or take public transport and teams have their own rooms to work in. Much smaller company too, under 30 people. Banter is far better here and that helps quite a bit.
Lack of commute is the only reason I took an in office job again too. I've spent like 7 out of 8 years of my career working from home and I really didn't think I'd ever be convinced to go back but my new job's office is under 10 minutes away by bike and I get at least one day a week to work from home. It's officially 4 days a week in office but my manager is really relaxed about that requirement if my work is getting done
they got tired of RTO, since people dint quit fast enough, htey just did layoffs after layoffs.
Also because commercial landlords demanded it. In Canada the biggest push for it was from Oxford Properties. They even managed to get the Mayor of Toronto, Olivia Chow, who is about as liberal as we're gonna get up here to push for it. Never voting for that corporate shill again.
Here's the actual study if anyone cares to read it.
Skimming it, a couple things I noticed: This was a study of over 7,000 people across all departments at a large healthcare system. They found on-site workers skewed younger with shorter tenure and remote workers skewed older with longer tenure.
One potential pitfall: They didn't control in any way for department or role, and so floor nurses and housekeeping staff who must work fully on-site are being compared to tenured nurses working utilization review or revenue cycle staff whose job is billing/coding and who don't have to interact with anyone in their roles. In-person and remote jobs in healthcare tend to be very different jobs. I don't know how well this study could be generalized to other types of job settings based on this info
Thank you, this was exactly what I was wondering. I’m all for remote work, however it’s not really fair to compare completely different roles.
Job satisfaction has so many variables, I don’t envy the difficulty of designing an accurate study of this.
I can’t believe how much more I get done when I’m left alone and focused on the task at hand.
I don’t feel particularly isolated. Everybody is different but a once-week team chat and seasonal social lunches fill my cup.
Turns out when you can do errands and meet non-work friends for coffee as you please you don’t need to lean on your office family so much for connection and purpose.
I have daily voice calls, usually several times a day.
Seems like my country has mostly moved back to offices now though and finding remote contracts is tough. Man I miss the pandemic. Not the death and suffering, just the compassion some people showed others. Sure there was a lot of people who just lost their minds entirely, but I feel like the overall sense of community was better back then.
Yeah not a problem at all for many. The ineffective remote workers are the same ones ineffective in the office, the ones on 15-minute side chats in the cube rows (loud of course) every hour. Great collaboration on the latest sportsball match, glad we were able to bring that back.
We actually have the recommendation too: oif you need to do something like sign for a package, let a contractor in for an hour to fix something, etc, then use a vacation day (with 2 weeks prior notice, of course). The flexibility goes both ways though, "can you do this quick thing Wednesday night"?now gets escalated to find approval for after hours work. Payroll/HR is not very flexible or responsive.
Who TF is using up an entire PTO day so they can sign off on a package when they are literally already home?
It takes me longer to take a shit than it does to sign for a package.
And It definitely takes Debra in Product Management longer to get to the point than it does for me to let a plumber in, and out.
This honestly doesn't sound like much flexibility at all. If you need time to take ahit - you use your 4 days of PTO. If the company needs time to take a shit on your head - you work late.
Sorry I mean in the new RTO mandate, that is what is now done. Not allowed to WFH for one of those days, to take care of a ~15 minute interruption. Now it costs a PTO day (and the resulting delays of business stuff by an employee off for a day, doing 0 work).
It absolutely is not flexible. And it will harm the business as a result.
Ah okay it makes sense now. Sorry read it wrong.
Yeah they shoot their own foot a bit
If they're going to be pedantic about every little penny, every second. Well... Two can play that game.
Sorry you're dealing with that.
Yeah. COVID lockdown was my golden era.
I secretly despised people at my company that wanted to demolish remote working completely after COVID on the pretence that people are traumaticed by the solitude and need to get back on the horse 100%.
Eventually only max. 30% remote was allowed and became company norm.
Even then some of these pieces of shit actually forbid remote working from their subordinates.
Those subordinates then gave them absolutely garbage employee reviews and made their worklife hell. Now they are in some other company torturing some other poor souls.
As an extrovert, please let me work from home. It'll save me a commute so I can spend more time with people I like
Whether it's a mix of control or egos, I think it is mostly about the fallacy that they are leaving unspent productivity on the table. Yet, COVID proved that people can be effective at home. It's nonsense to assume that you won't do the job and then somehow get paid for it. It's a strawman.
That is why, after all logical arguments were made, and bad faith responses dispelled, they chose to say it was about culture. That undefinable metric exist solely in the validation of HR and management. Pizza lunches, recognition events, and captive audiences.
Yes, and...
those in upper management need us to see them there, in front of us, IN CHARGE.
That's all it's about. They need you to kneel and scrape and fucking bow, and for that, you gotta sit in a car ten hours a week and work in an uncomfortable open-space cubicle where you can hear everything, including Betty from finance chewing.
All day, every day, so that Brent the VP can feed off your collective energy admiring him like he's a big shot. That's why he's the only asshole who wears a tie to an office of business casual colleagues.
I’m all for as much remote work as possible, but I would love a study to include commute length and mode of transport. When I lived a 20 min walk from my office it was great and didn’t mind being at the office full time.
I moved away and it’s now a 30 min car drive which I really hate, a 1 hr bus journey, or 45 min bike ride.
I wouldn’t mind the bus journey so much, as I can read a book on my way, but the unreliability makes it feel so much worse.
And despite being longer than the drive, I much prefer to cycle into work, and I’ll usually do extra days in the office during the summer as an “excuse” to be on the bike.
I‘ve read a study somewhere that compared car and bike commutes. I turned out that people were much happier riding bike and have real life interactions with people at the streets than sitting alone in an iron box and drive a car.
Despite this, having the same times as you, I enjoy riding bike more because the commute time is always the same. Nobody can stop you on a bike. No traffic jams, no accidents that blocks a road, no rush hour stress.
I enjoy riding bike more because the commute time is always the same. Nobody can stop you on a bike. No traffic jams, no accidents that blocks a road, no rush hour stress.
At a previous job, I used to commute on the Atlanta Beltline Eastside Trail. Because Atlanta is so starved for bike and pedestrian infrastructure, it was actually popular enough that it managed to slow me down with foot traffic sometimes. (And that was on weekday afternoons; it's even busier on the weekend.)
Still infinitely better than driving, of course.
Pedestrians in the US? Are you kidding?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q-yz0KhZJHI
Not my video and I don't know what day of the week it was filmed, but it's pretty representative of 'medium' weekday afternoon traffic (even though the video title calls it "heavy"). Like I said in my previous comment, weekends are worse.
(I don't endorse trying to ride as aggressively as they're doing in the video, BTW.)
"I think flexibility is here to stay," she said.
This is the problem with academics. They do a study, find something is logically better, then assume humans will act logically.
Unfortunately, most CEOs don't give a shit if their employees are more happy, productive, and less likely to quit if they work remotely. They just want to feel like they have control over people's lives, which is why we're seeing more return to office initiatives.
As the other reader says, the point of studies is to develop objective truth.
After one generation, this new objective truth starts getting ingrained in people's minds. That's usually because after one generation the people who held old beliefs are out of the scene and new young people who believe in obvious things come to be part of the scene.
That's how society changes over time. Not people changing their minds, but new people with a different way of seeing the same things.
Yep
When we got a new CEO one of the first things he mandated was RTO. He said the alternative was to shut the office down, and that he was fine with that (I highly doubt that) but a decision had to be made. And so RTO it was, because that had better vibes or something. It's fascinating, the leadership has during several meetings mentioned how much nicer it is now that people are in the office, but none of the "grunts" I've spoken to like it.
HR drone always talks about how nice it is to see everyone collaborating in the office when we come in for quarterly meetings.
Nobody is getting work done. We’re all “collaborating” about sportsball or coffee machines or whatever it is, or just trying to tune it out. It’s a full day of productivity lost for nearly everyone there. Not to mention the early rise for a commute, cost of the commute, missed workouts, and exhaustion on the return home.
Yeah, we're in a similar boat with new CEO, RTO, etc. The increased collaboration is amazing: now instead of video calls, we have in-person in a cubical video calls because our team and department is scattered across multiple physical locations. Additionally, the increased collaboration from non-team "pop-ins" is a much-needed break from doing the work we're brought in to do. Not tomention, all of the systems we manage are now much closer in case of emergency: colocated the same 50+ miles away or "cloud". Maybe /s maybe I'm pro-CEO.
we have in-person in a cubical video calls because our team and department is scattered across multiple physical locations.
You've got to insist everybody be at the same location for collaboration. Demand management to arrange conference room, flights or travel and hotel rooms. It might cost a pretty penny and effort but think of the synergy created.
Even before COVID/WFH, this was the case of being spread out. CEO basically eviscerated on town halls, with a dead-eye blank stare in reaponse, then continues to champion RTO in the face of direct conflicts of their own words.
There aren't enough cubes for the full timers, there aren't enough conf rooms or other reservable meeting spaces, there isn't distribution of needed equipment (headsets with ANC, decent mics or computers that can do noise supression without making the computer uselessly slow.
Mentioning these things are ignored though. The CEO and others continue on. Performing remote work for maintenace, patching, etc. outside business hours got a lot more obnoxious to "the business people", now that we seek approval for outages during business hours to do the work inthe office, as mandated.
There aren't enough cubes for the full timers, there aren't enough conf rooms or other reservable meeting spaces, there isn't distribution of needed equipment (headsets with ANC, decent mics or computers that can do noise supression without making the computer uselessly slow.
This is a feature not a bug to the CEO
Our CEO started talking of RTO while he himself was at home, not even a Teams background to try and hide it. Haven't seen him in any office during any of the subsequent townhall meetings either. He's just one twunt in a massive circlejerk
I'm very fortunate to have a job with a very small company (literally 4 people) where we get to set the rules.
It is funny to see the ingrained notion we (collective "we") once had that working from home could never work. I started this job in 2018, and I often suggested we do a work from home day each week since we all had laptops. My bosses (co-owners of this company) always shot it down. "Oh we'd never get any work done!"
Then, of course, COVID. And while I certainly would rather COVID not have happened, it did convince them that working from actually works. And, of course, they loved it as well. So since 2020 I have not had to go back to the office. We still have office space for some minor things, and once in a blue moon we might gather there. But in six years I've probably spent six days in the office.
Heck, I'm fortunate enough to finally have convinced them we should take Fridays off, too. We piloted that program two years ago over the summer, and it, of course, stuck because everyone likes that—though we actually just take every-other Friday off. But still. Hard to beat.
Unfortunately no.
Benefits are actually kinda bad, honestly. We have insurance but insurance companies don’t want to give good insurance to really small businesses like this. No vision or dental.
Sounds like a company that somehow has no boomers dragging it down.
I worked on site for 4 months before my remote work was approved and it was literally the most unfulfilling life I had
I would work 9 to 630, come home so tired that all I could do is throw something quick to eat and watch TV (didn't process what I was watching) then later fall asleep and rinse and repeat
How anyone is able to do this lifestyle is a testament to humanity's ability to adapt
Working culture is fucked up and needs to change
They signed a 20-year lease 10 years ago so they feel like they have to use the building.
Source: wild assumptions, i know nothing about commercial real estate.
It’s more the canteen and coffee shops onsite I think.
Our place guarantees minimum revenue to the canteen.
The company has to pay extra if the staff aren’t there.
Then there’s all the other businesses in the area. I imagine they come under pressure from local government to bring workers back to save those businesses
Employers don't care if you're happy at work, they just need to lord over you.
A couple of important caveats:
Still, Johnson said face-to-face interaction can play an important role in helping coworkers build relationships, especially if they are just starting out in their careers.
"Remote works better after you know people," she said. "So there is still a benefit of having some face time."
So, it does rather beg the question, what should one do if someone is joining an existing team?
Based on two decades of experience: As a general rule, there should be regular in-person team events (around two a year and just for fun). In addition, there should be joint training sessions (also around two a year). New staff members require a great deal of attention from their team, both at these events and when working remotely, particularly at the outset.
Also if there's an option to go to the office, that works too. I'd like to have an office to go to once a month or less, just for the social, meet people irl, etc, but wouldn't give up remote work for it.
In your experience, have any online social things worked well? We're always looking out for stuff where I am.
Cooking together is brilliant: just yesterday we held our summer strategy meeting at a cookery school, where we cooked and enjoyed a three-course meal together. Basically, anything that encourages plenty of interaction and offers a completely different setting to the usual one is ideal.
A former manager had team lunches every month. It wasn’t mandatory but it was a day that we could go in and team members would be there. It was also not a day taken up with general business update meetings and the like, so we could get work done.
The key is ensuring that people know when they can go in and see other people they know, not just the marketing team.
Eh, capitalism can get bent.
A step further it should be more than twice a year I would say once a quarter would be more preferable. There should also be one day a week everyone on the team should be expected to be in the office. Beyond that max 3 days a week none of this minimum bullshit.
If more are needed, just give it a try. We’ve learned that organising more than 3-4 a year is very time-consuming, particularly when it comes to scheduling them for the whole team.
it does rather beg the question
Nope. It just raises the question.
Which is bullshit, I joined and have worked for a remote only company for over a decade now and I've never met any of my coworkers, but I chat and have calls with them daily and we all have the office banter and even talk about outside work stuff as well. You don't need to know people to magically work remote, that's just an excuse to stuff people into a building together.
I only work 25 hours a week, was that part of the study?
As someone that is bring changed from fully remote to hybrid in the next few weeks, I am already sad.
BREAKING: Water is wet.
Awesome, now all I need is a (remote) job....
I’m so grateful I can work from home. I did the whole 930-6 type day for many years. The only downside for me now is that, living where I do, limits the companies that I could apply for a job with. At least in terms of the companies that interest me.
I feel like this is a pretty useless study, this is going to be entirely subjective what you prefer. Optionality gives a lot of upside, more than either extreme.
Personally I prefer being in the office, better for my focus, my likely (undergoing diagnosis) ADHD as fuck brain, but I also have dynamic work hours so I can simply avoid peak traffic.
That being said, if I was required to be in the office everyday at a set time e.g 9 to 5 I would fucking quit.
Playing the "I need everything handed to me on a platter or I don't lift a finger" mentality is fine I guess.
Do you need assistance wiping you ass too or is that covered by your employer?
For all the gas money I've saved, I invested in my own WFH setup. Not having a dedicated space would make it a challenge
The saved time alone pays for a better office at home than at work in my case
Wat? Are you for real or bad sarcasm?
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Turns out the commute, fluorescent lighting, constant interruptions and performative desk sitting weren’t secretly essential ingredients for human happiness after all. Shocking. Next study: 7,700 managers discover that seeing someone in a chair is not actually a productivity metric.
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