There are a lot of news articles about “back to the office”, but they recirculate the same bad ideas. Let’s provide some new ideas for the media to circulate. It may also have the effect of making the office less terrible.
I would like my work computer to do Windows updates lightning quick in the office. It currently takes weeks, in or out of the office. Stopping in for a day makes no difference, so there is no point. Now, if there was a point, I would go in.
What would get you in the office?
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Honestly, a much much higher salary. There are lots of things I’m going to have to deal with if I were to go back to the office; namely heavy traffic, transportation expenses, added stress, clothes (I mean, I’d have to use office-appropriate clothes whereas nowadays I have to be presentable only when I have meetings), food, waking up and preparing earlier than usual (sometimes up to 3 hours earlier!) and getting home late which gives me less free time, etc.
They’re going to have to offer a really lucrative salary for me to even consider returning to the office.
A higher salary would be of help to cover additional expeses related to coming to the office.
However, we also need a nice office to come to that needs to be as comfy as the one home.
You know what? I never even thought about that. I agree 100%. That’s gonna be a tall order for companies, though. I mean, different people probably have different requirements to be comfortable.
That’s why the whole open office and/or cubicle farm office needs to die. Yes, it will take more investment, but go back to everyone actually having their own small office that they can make their own and make comfortable. This isn’t hard.
Not to disagree with your sentiment, but the economics of space and construction costs would be a hard sell here. Plus, many managers don’t think employees deserve comfort and privacy thus the push to return to the office.
Oh, I agree entirely. I didn’t mean to insinuate that what I was suggesting was reasonable and/or something they would choose to invest in. Just sharting out ideas over here. Cheers.
Yep. This is the answer.
And by much higher, I mean on the order of 100% raise as in double my current salary. Even then it’s be a hard decision.
I currently have a pretty nice salary as a senior engineer. I make waaaay more than the average and I work remotely. But even then… I still wonder what it’ll take. Because right now, there are positions that double/triples that AND is remote.
Like a job that’s 200k remote versus 250k in-office? Pretty easy to pick.
Some quick maths suggest that the average citizen in Western countries spends an hour commuting a day. Which is 260 hours a year for a 5 day a week job, or about a month’s worth of 8 hour days.
So, in addition to all that other pointless crap you mentioned, add on enough salary to bring you one month closer to retirement every year.
Adding onto this, the ability to choose to not come in and/or come and go as needed. In 5 years I haven’t had my kids in day care and it’s important for me to be able to take them to school and pick them up.
Nothing. Quality of life of working from home cannot be replicated. Or the office would have to be in my street, which is pretty unrealistic
Nothing for me also.
The flexibility to do things when you have a few minutes (like breaks) is worth a lot to me, it makes me more productive and less stressed about time management.
Plus I have cats and no other humans here so it’s a quiet, comfortable, loving environment, and no job can provide that for me.
Plus I have cats and no other humans here so it’s a quiet, comfortable, loving environment, and no job can provide that for me.
Looks like someone just needs some more team bonding activities and pizza parties with their team! Nothing builds a loving environment like a strong team!
Team? I believe you mean family
🤮
Sorry I’ve been offline for a bit and came back to this and couldn’t help myself.
Haha thanks friend have a great day!
I used to work in an office which was doen the street once. It still sucked.
It does not solve every other issue that work environment can bring, that’s for sure
Or the office would have to be in my street,
Could become a road sweeper?
How about a raise?
I was talking to my wife the other day, my company would have to basically double my salary to get me to go into the office. Work life balance during WFH is actually balanced, I actually like my job and the company I’m at, I like the people I work with, I’m more productive and less distracted at home, I get to spend time with my daughter and take care of her, there’s really no downside to WFH for employees that want to WFH.
Working in the office? In addition to the normal costs (clothes, food, transportation, etc), losing 2-3 hours per day commuting, paying for childcare or having my wife not work, getting a second car or my wife not having a way to get to work or take our daughter to appointments, and plenty of other inconveniences and big changes.
Working in an office is an outdated concept for most office jobs now. 100% of my job can and is done remote, even if I had colleagues in my office, a quick teams call or message is just as easy as pulling them away from their work with a question in person. It would take a very very large raise to get me to go into an office, and I would likely be looking for a remote job asap using that newly inflated salary.
There ya go everyone has a price.
Oh, definitely. Pay me enough to offset the purely monetary costs, plus more for the stress of having to get business dressed every day, drive on my own time to get there and pack, time needed for additional preparations like making lunch, and the need for another car or have my wife stay at home? I would do it in that case, not having to worry about paying for things would make my wife and my lives so much easier even with me driving to the office every day.
The problem is, the amount needed to do that is too high for most employers to want to pay and want to pay the minimum needed in most cases. That worked for a long time since very few companies had full WFH jobs so people didn’t really have a choice, now we do
It would have to be a massive raise. At least double my current salary. Nothing else would have me even consider it.
Agree, people here in their high horse acting like wfm is their standing ground to the company. All big companies have to do is dangle a carrot like up the compensation for the year they want everyone back and amortize the comp for the next few years and boom everyone is back.
Absolutely nothing. No amount of money or threats or “perks”. I work in software and my entire career has been built on flexible, mostly-remote work; particularly creating & leading remote, geographically distributed teams. I get the best talent no matter where they are, and use tools like Slack to work seamlessly in real-time and asynchronously across many disparate time zones. This wasn’t some new thing for me when COVID hit, this is how I’ve operated for more than 20 years.
I don’t mind going places for specific purposes: visiting clients, classified/sensitive discussions that can’t be transmitted, on-site work (like installations, research, etc), or team-building events like lunches, dinners, etc… but under no circumstances will I waste my time commuting to some specific ”office” daily just because. I am an efficiency expert and I will not tolerate having my time or my teams time wasted by incompetent, out-of-touch multi-millionaires that don’t realize the 80s ended 30 years ago.
I agree 1,000%. I have been remote for the last five-ish years; I can count the amount of times I’ve actually needed to go into an office on one hand. At home I have: a giant ultrawide monitor; a quiet, private, office; gigabit internet; dog. How would I be more productive commuting to an office to listen to sales people banging gongs and ringing bells all day while I work in a cubicle on a single 19" monitor? All my teammates are in other cities and states, my code is checked into GitHub and mostly deployed to IaaS - and even our “on-prem” infrastructure is in another state.
Preach it brother. I’m also in software and I started looking for a new job the minute I got the email calling us 100% back to the office. Fuck you Alan and your milion dollar office
preach!
Absolutely nothing. I don’t think even money could do it for me at this point. Aside from all the obvious reasons to hate commuting and then sitting for 8 hours doing maybe 2 hours of work, I have never been healthier.
I have chronic migraines. Well, I used to(?). I haven’t had a single bad migraine in years. Yeah, I’ve still had a couple in the last few years, but they didn’t put functioning at a complete standstill. I wasn’t stuck in bed, hoping for death. The lack of artificial light is a big deal. The not having to stress myself out by commuting, then being stuck there is also another
On top of that, I eat 1000% better, easier. I can exercise instead of commuting. There’s literally no benefit to working in an office for me, but it has a metric fuckton of drawbacks.
sitting for 8 hours doing maybe 2 hours of work
This is funny, and something I’ve thought about and talked about with coworkers a lot. When I first started permanent WFH at the beginning of COVID, I used to feel really guilty about doing random chores and stuff around the house during the workday. I felt like I always had to be “on” trying to busy myself or whatever, even if there wasn’t really work to do.
Over time as we have done a partial return to office and I realized I do even less work on the days we go in, I have done a lot of reflection on the way we used to work when we were 100% in the office pre-covid. My conclusion is that on any given day most people were doing between 1-4 hours of actual work, and the rest of the time was spent wandering around, bullshitting, taking walks, browsing the Internet, etc. And everyone thought that was just fine. But a solid half of most days was literally wasted doing nothing productive at all.
So these days I have shifted my attitude to one that is focused on getting my assigned work done, and being somewhat flexible on meeting times and when I can accomplish things. In return I don’t feel guilty if I need to mow the lawn or do some laundry during the day. I have a smartphone and I get notifications. If there is something urgent I’ll drop what I’m doing to handle it. If it can wait, I finish up then take care of it. It’s greatly helped my sanity and I think it’s improved my work, too. We do go to the office once a week or so but I honestly plan to get almost nothing accomplished on those days and consider it a bonus if we do get work done.
I typed out a long reply, and idk where it went but the highlights are
I saw the bullshit of it back in the 90s when I started working. I had MANY arguments with my boomer mother about it. Of course her opinion was shut up, put my head down, and do whatever they say, to keep my job. My opinion was fuck that fire me.
I have never had a job (for someone else) where I couldn’t 100% complete it, accurately in 2 hours a day, max. Often less.
I’m self employed now, and I have never been healthier, happier, or more mentally stable. I have two chronic conditions, that can be/are debilitating, which have never been better controlled. I know I can’t be alone on that.
WFH is 100% better for everyone, and those that WANT to go back to the office, should work that out with their employer. WFH has shown to improve ever metric on the workers lives, and not to mention the reduction in pollution and road congestion.
How about a raise?
Read my second sentence. I literally couldn’t have spoon fed it to you any more.
That bunny attack though
Why do you have such a hard on for people going back to the office?
A couple of things:
- commute time counts as work time
- no open plan landscape office
- no ‘clean desk’ policy but the ability to personalise your workplace
- dishwasher and general kitchen stuff not being a ‘shared responsibility’ but someone’s job.
- office being in a nice neighborhood with fun things to do after work or during lunch
My employer spent the past ~10 years de-personalising our offices, and now they wonder why people don’t like to hang out in their sterile ‘clean’ building.
Ha the shared kitchen responsibilities is such a good call.
Damn we were putting up with so much bullshit in the office
32 hr work week, a dedicated office with a door and all my Mac peripherals, a big pay increase, and benefits to cover child care.
The office being within a 30 second walk of my home
Also no one else being there.
Also being in my home.
Also getting to work in pants.
So I guess nothing, then 👌
Free or affordable, clean, safe public transit that takes me no more than 20 minutes from the time I set foot out my front door to setting foot in the office, and a team/company that doesn’t care if I decide to work the day remotely for any reason whatsoever. I also like the other guy’s comment about the workplace being a nice, inviting place to be since my cube is barren and probably 20+ years old.
Also the rest of y’all need to stay home when you get sick instead of bringing that shit into the office.
Nothing pisses me off more than hearing some dude hacking up his lungs just across the hallway.
I’ll call in sick a few days later just because, and say there must be something going around. At least it will get me a few days away from the Sickies so I can potentially avoid getting it.
I can’t believe it’s been so many years and there still aren’t any laws regarding working in the office while sick. For office jobs it just makes zero sense, in this age they can all easily work from home more or less as seen during covid, isn’t worth it not to have a plague of common colds every damn winter?
For real, I have not gotten sick since I started working from home. I did get COVID once going to a company sponsored event with 1000 people, but I call that “going into the office”. Other than that, it’s been pretty nice being healthy every day
Some cubicle farms are just sad. Coffee stains from 20 years ago, along with old fart smells.
I love staying at home when I am “too sick for the commute, but not so sick to answer a couple emails.”
Careful what you wish for regarding cubicles. I would kill for a cubicle in our office. When companies implement these modern collaboration space ideas, it’s all about hotel desks, movable workstations, short or no dividers and open air spaces.
Having a cubicle to myself was fucking awesome. Now there is no privacy, no space to call my own, no place to simply have a phone conversation without everyone within 50 feet of me hearing every word.
Compensation for the time and cost of commuting back and forth, paid meal, free coffee and snacks, and additional sick days from using public transport and ultimately catching more sicknesses.
And even then, it doesn’t give me back the extra time I can spend with my kids.
How about 4 day work week? Would you be ok to go back to the office then?
That would help, but just that single incentive would be a no for me.
As in WFH 1 day per week, or same salary but only 4 days of working? In either case, no. The main people pushing for mandatory in-office is landlords who are freaking out because their office space is no longer in demand, and shitty managers with the mentality of “if I can’t see you working, then you’re not working.” There are also those awful people who want to go back into the office because they miss the drama and messing with people and distracting people while they work
Work 4 days a week reduced work hours same wage. But in the office.
As a minimum? Pay me for the commute. I’m only doing it because of management so they should compensate me.
I’d settle for a 4 day week of 8 hour days
A valid reason for a start.
Paid commute (time and expenses) and free lunch.
I would go one further and say commute time paid at 1.5 rates, cause of the hours it needs to be done
And the hazard! Cars are super dangerous, and odds are good that if you’re commuting, there are some nearby, even if you’re doing bus, train, or bike.
- 50% raise
- Private 12x15 office
- Free pot gummies (for Fridays, of course;)
- Free transportation to/from office
- Every day is Bring Your Dogs To Work Day
Commute is part of working hours (with a reasonable limit)
If they expect you to commute to the office every day, then you clock in when you leave your house, and clock out when you get home (assuming you’re not stopping between to do personal errands).
Let’s be real. This is unworkable. A fixed “commute” pay sure but
- the company has no way to know how long it takes to commute each day
- the company does not choose where you choose to live
- your distance from office would be a hiring factor - just a mess for discrimination lawsuits.
I am for the risk of the commute not falling entirely on the employee. But “job pays for commute” always strikes as a silly proposal.
- You can click in and out when you leave and arrive home. They absolutely can know how long it takes each way
- No but they’d fire you if you moved too far to commute, and they pay you a wage that may or likely doesn’t cover the cost of living in your area
- Hate to break it to you champ but it already is a factor for onsite workers. Despite being able to do so I was not chosen for a job because I lived too far from the office as a stated reason.
62% more pay
Oddly specific
1 million dollars every time I have to be on the highway so 2 miles per day hahaha
And if you were in one of those companies pushing hard to get people back in the office, what pay cut would you be willing to take to make your job fully remote? (I swear I’m not in HR! )
I’ve taken 3 pay cuts so far. Had 3 pay increases since covid forced wfh and each time it’s been less than inflation. I haven’t pushed for more because I’ve been left alone and am one of the last employees here still 100% wfh.
I’m on salary, I already had somewhat flexible hours when I was in the office, had to start at a specific time but could leave when the bulk of my work was done and then would log on from from at the end of the day and tidy up anything that came in after I left. It wasn’t uncommon for me to only be in the office for 3-4 hours on a typical day and my commute was 45mins to an hour, so time wise I now I spend ~50% less time at work.
An immense raise, free mass transit to the office and a free hot lunch every day would be the beginning of negotiations
Yeah I’m not even sure that’d do it for me. Like theoretically if they paid me $1M/y I’d do it, but then only until I earned enough to work at a better job or retire and just make FOSS shit
