Office Based Roles in a Post Pandemic World

Peanuts20

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I know in the case of my own employer (tech firm), our starting point now is that no-one needs to be in the office, ever. We're shutting most offices world wide, moving to home working and will retain some office space for things like client meetings, workshops etc but that is it. The joy of a multi-national means we're well used to working with teams around the world and people we never meet in real life and it works fine. Basically staff working from home have been told to order what they need, (desk, screens, chairs etc) from a prescribed list and set themselves up properly.

We're also doing a bit of a culling exercise and exiting people who clearly took the mickey during lockdown. It really did expose some lazy people who were adding no benefit to the organisation or the culture so bye bye to them.

It does require a whole raft of new HR policies and those are still being worked through. I also expect there will be a litany of employment tribunal etc cases which will occur. A simple one, an employer insists staff must be vaccinated, an employee takes a case claiming "discrimination" and wins it and then his colleagues take a case over having to work with someone who is potentially endangering their lives. Some fun times ahead I see for employment solicitors.
 
and exiting people who clearly took the mickey during lockdown. It really did expose some lazy people who were adding no benefit to the organisation or the culture so bye bye to them.
I'm curious as to how working from home exposed these more so than in the office ? Or are you saying people who used other events in lockdown to excuse them from carrying out their work ?
 
I'm curious as to how working from home exposed these more so than in the office ? Or are you saying people who used other events in lockdown to excuse them from carrying out their work ?

Firstly, some good software can tell you if they are logged in or not. Secondly, we really moved from the standard 9-5 approach and more to an output approach and these people simply were not delivering anything. In hindsight, I can think of one or 2 who would be at meetings in the office, looking earnestly at their laptops and were probably managing their fantasy football team. Working from home actually gave people fewer places to hide and made it harder for them to "look busy"
 
Firstly, some good software can tell you if they are logged in or not. Secondly, we really moved from the standard 9-5 approach and more to an output approach and these people simply were not delivering anything. In hindsight, I can think of one or 2 who would be at meetings in the office, looking earnestly at their laptops and were probably managing their fantasy football team. Working from home actually gave people fewer places to hide and made it harder for them to "look busy"
Part of the reason that I'm leaving my current job after a very successful decade and a half is because of the amount of electronic spying that they (the most recent company to take over) now do on employees. In fact their policies are such that the computers provided spend so much resources on this snooping that they're arguably useless for doing the actual job in hand, and some people end up using non company hardware just to get their job done and to avoid being spied on. The company has just had a hugely successful quarter and year in spite of (and perhaps because of?) most people globally working from home but are gung ho about getting people back to the office in spite of local guidance/ordinances against that here and in other jurisdictions. And of course this has resulted in the introduction of yet another bureaucratic policy that needs to be followed where somebody wants to WFH for some reason. The soul destroying bureaucracy is another reason for my decision to call it a day.
 
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I know in the case of my own employer (tech firm) ....

We're also doing a bit of a culling exercise and exiting people who clearly took the mickey during lockdown. It really did expose some lazy people who were adding no benefit to the organisation or the culture so bye bye to them.
Firstly, some good software can tell you if they are logged in or not. Secondly, we really moved from the standard 9-5 approach and more to an output approach and these people simply were not delivering anything. In hindsight, I can think of one or 2 who would be at meetings in the office, looking earnestly at their laptops and were probably managing their fantasy football team. Working from home actually gave people fewer places to hide and made it harder for them to "look busy"

I'm sorry but this is hilarious. Good software, "moving from a 9-5 approach", if your mangers weren't monitoring output before, what exactly were they doing? The people who weren't delivering during Covid, were the same people not delivering before Covid. Sounds more like some people are happy to have the awkward conversation over Zoom than face-to-face.

It looks like your managers aren't performing to be honest.
 
Interesting thoughts in this article. WFH has caught out some people who survive by looking busy rather than actually being busy. Some managers still judge productivity by hours put in rather than actual output.

 
Unusual that wfh has exposed underperformance. Surely it would have been much more evident in the workplace itself.

As Itchy has alluded to, how was performance measured pre-pandemic? If people can get away with looking earnestly at their laptops, it would seem that performance is based on perceived work rather than actual work.

The reason they’re being dumped now is that the perception of what they’re doing has changed, not their output. Doesn’t reflect well on anyone.
 
I split these posts off the 'Asked to come back to office' thread.
I had a post that disappeared after I posted it on the "asked to work in office thread" , did you delete it instead of moving it, it was definitely posted though but now it's gone ?
 
The people who weren't delivering during Covid, were the same people not delivering before Covid.
Well this will be true for some people, it might not be true for others. Lockdown is going to have affected some people fairly negatively, also working from home is not easy for a lot of people, especially if they don't do it the right way - keep a set schedule, have a dedicated office space etc. How you do it will affect whether you feel you're working from home, or living in your office.

People in shared accommodation where their only private room is their bedroom, or people stuck in small apartments with young kids can have had a really challenging work environment during lockdowns.
 
In hindsight, I can think of one or 2 who would be at meetings in the office, looking earnestly at their laptops and were probably managing their fantasy football team.
Alternatively, they got a lightbulb moment and saw that life may be better outside their office and just moved on to a job they had an interest in. Clearly they didn't like what they were doing.
 
I had a post that disappeared after I posted it on the "asked to work in office thread" , did you delete it instead of moving it, it was definitely posted though but now it's gone ?
Just looked at that one, but it seemed to mainly reference Google wanting staff back in the country for tax purposes, so not related to either thread. Feel free to report here if you think it does speak to the future of office based work.
 
Well Google is a technology company and it wants most of its 8000 workforce back in Dublin by October 18, it delayed this until October because of the delta variant, initially it wanted them back earlier. I think this is relevant as Google one of the biggest technology companies in the world sees the future of its workforce as being site based rather than home based.
I just think intensive technology development will always be site based
 
Well Google is a technology company and it wants most of its 8000 workforce back in Dublin by October 18, it delayed this until October because of the delta variant, initially it wanted them back earlier.
It wants them back ion the country due to taxation issues related to working for an Irish legal entity from abroad. They can continue to work remotely. The multi-national I work for have enforced the same 'must be in-country' rules while at the same time shutting down office space and moving to a model where desk space will be < 50% of workforce.

Google relaxed some of their policies earlier in the year to facilitate more remote work. One of their SVPs even announced they will be working remotely from New Zealand full time.
 
I think this is relevant as Google one of the biggest technology companies in the world sees the future of its workforce as being site based rather than home based.
Your take sounds different to their public announcements on their new Hybrid working model:

 
Alternatively, they got a lightbulb moment and saw that life may be better outside their office and just moved on to a job they had an interest in. Clearly they didn't like what they were doing.
true, but in some cases they were quite happy to take the pay cheque and had not made an effort to move on to anything else. And they haven't moved on, we're doing the moving for them.
 
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