WHITE COLLAR WORK
ByPaul Wallis
June 10, 2023
Google and other US tech giants have been under intense scrutiny in Europe over their business practices - Copyright AFP Philip FONG
There’s a huge thing recently on the subject of in-office attendance. Google made headlines out of including office attendance as part of performance reviews. Elon Musk said working remotely was “immoral”. It’s a sort of last stand of totally obsolete business models.
It also happens to be the exact opposite of what most employees want. No great surprise there. Whoever heard of “employer comprehension”, anyway?
I worked in the employment sector for years in Europe and the US – Remotely. Other staff were in India, Belgium, etc. It worked seamlessly.
During that time I saw people on two continents relating the pure hell of the modern workplace in every imaginable form. This was particularly the case in the US where I had the excruciating privilege of doing some time working in the nursing sector.
…From which you may gather that I do have some insights into “office attendance” as well as my own additional 20 years of in-house customer relations.
Let’s start with the economics of office attendance for employees. Employees are the people who actually do something. This is the breakdown:It costs time and money to come into the office.
You lose money out of whatever pittance you’re paid in the process.
It can easily add 4 hours in unpaid and totally unproductive commuting time.
You can be seriously stressed, killed, or injured commuting if you drive to work.
Upon arrival at work, you are instantly immersed in the blissful rhapsody of the modern workplace. You can catch up on the latest workplace psychoses.
At some point, you get a performance review. A performance review is based on Key Productivity Indicators, and whatever gossip middle management has heard about you. It has little or nothing to do with actual in-person management and evaluation. Many modern managers think performance reviews are absurd.
On the positive side you can tell your managerial dinosaur to go to hell in person, but that’s about all.
From the employer’s side, the outlook is equally rosy:You can pay an actual fortune to operate a workplace if you have those newfangled things like water and electricity.
You can pay top dollar for all statutory employee support services with no legal options whatsoever.
You can catch and spread any pandemics going around.
You can surround yourself with resentful, underappreciated people who make nothing a year and sycophantic, untrustworthy, vermin.
You can watch CCTV and make sure nobody’s using the bathroom or otherwise threatening to be hygienic. This is also illegal in most countries, so you can grab some of that sweet employer’s six-digit legal liability while you’re at it.
You can incur any amount of OH&S liabilities in the form of anyone on the premises. That’s per day.
You can referee fistfights with customers and staff or, just for a refreshing change, dodge a few bullets.
Are you out of your brain-dead allegedly business-qualified minds?
There is absolutely nothing to be said for office attendance, even by yourself. Any office can be replaced by a phone. The expression “office in your pocket” is now at least 20 years old.
The costs to employers and staff vastly outweigh the benefits. Consider risking your life and using up a lot of time going to work as a busboy on the other side of town. Consider doing the same thing working as a consultant. The pay scales and relative costs are different; the risks and wastage are the same.
You are paying for the privilege of spending two to four hours of your life commuting. The employer is paying for roughly the cost equivalent of a hotel for all staff in attendance, per day.
Then there’s the added advantage of looking at people you may or may not be able to stand the sight of, for at least eight hours. No stress there. You get the equivalent of a live Zoom call, and that’s it, for all this effort.
Remote workers can manage their time much more efficiently. In the office, you have constant interruptions. Remote workers often work outside office hours to stay on schedule. In the office, that costs overtime and more in-house resources.
Friction between people is the norm in any workplace. Remote work reduces those interactions. Your next job vacancy with a remote job probably won’t be as a result of a workplace murder, too.
Modern workplaces are basically stress factories. Between office politics, nutcase supervisors, and personality clashes, it’s a part war zone, most of the time.
This is the last gasp of “The Office” as a workplace. When AI and proper automation come in, the workplace of the past will be in a museum, along with “in-office attendance”, KPIs, and out-of-touch employers.
__________________________________________________
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed in this Op-Ed are those of the author. They do not purport to reflect the opinions or views of the Digital Journal or its members.
Commute no more: US employees embrace telework
By AFP
June 10, 2023
Amy Whetzel works in her boat, Miranda, anchored in Mayo, Maryland, about an hour's drive form the US capital -
Julie CHABANAS
Commuting to and from the office five times a week?
“It’s just not what I want for my life,” said Claire, a consultant in her thirties living in Washington.
Like Claire, millions of employees across the United States have grown fond of telework since the Covid-19 lockdown and now companies are struggling to bring them back to the office.
Before Covid-19, Americans workers had grown used to less-than-friendly job conditions, such as short vacations and little or no maternity leave, but the experience of working from home left them wanting more.
“All of these practices that workers had become accustomed to in the US before have now then kind of disrupted by the pandemic,” chief economist Nela Richardson with the ADP Research Institute told AFP.
American offices are still half-empty compared to February 2020, according to a weekly average calculated by Kastle, which manages the entry badges of 40,000 companies around the country.
– ‘The world is changing’ –
There are also wide disparities between different regions and cities: offices in California’s Silicon Valley, for example, have only recovered a third of their pre-pandemic occupants, compared with around half in New York and Washington, and as much as two-thirds in the Texas cities of Austin and Houston.
“Collaborating and inventing is easier and more effective when we’re in person,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a memo to the company’s vast workforce back in February, ordering them to return to the office for at least three days a week.
Many Amazon employees disagreed so strongly with the in-person working requirements that they took to the streets in front of the company’s Seattle headquarters last month to protest the move.
“The world is changing, and Amazon needs to embrace the new reality of remote and flexible work,” the organizers of the demonstration said in a statement.
Elon Musk, the billionaire boss of Tesla and Twitter, went a step further than Jassy, banning telework in the name of productivity and morality.
“You’re going to (tell) the people who make your food that gets delivered, that they can’t work from home, the people that come fix your house, they can’t work from home, but you can?” he said in a recent interview.
– Half-empty offices –
A third of employees in the United States currently have complete freedom about where they work, compared with just 18 percent in France, according to a recent ADP study of 17 countries.
“If I worked for an employer that required five days a week, I just don’t think that would be on the table for me,” Claire, the Washington-based consultant, told AFP.
Claire, who requested anonymity to discuss her employment, goes to the office irregularly, usually once every two weeks, sometimes more often. And, given the upsides, she can’t see herself going back full-time.
She has replaced the metro to work with a walk around the block, no longer wastes time dressing for the office, and sits outside with her laptop whenever the sun shines.
Claire said she sometimes misses conversations with colleagues, but she also realizes the small talk led her to be less productive.
– A challenge –
Despite the headlines made by chief executives like Elon Musk, not all managers are opposed to telework.
Questions about “quality and lifestyle efficiency” have emerged, said Gayle Smith, chief executive of the Washington-based anti-poverty NGO One, which has offices in cities around the world.
“Raising kids became a bit easier if you didn’t have to commute every morning,” she told AFP.
Since the onset of the pandemic, some of her employees have left the Washington area in order to be closer to their aging parents, or to follow a spouse who relocates for work.
Gayle has seen no decline in efficiency but regrets the loss of the positive dynamic that comes from face-to-face work.
The question now, she says, is how to replicate this dynamic while preserving the lifestyle improvements for her employees.
“If we can regain that, at least in part, it’ll put us in a very good place,” she said.
Teleworking has become “part of a cluster of benefits and options that companies can choose to offer workers,” said Nela Richardson from ADP.
For potential employees, “it’s a choice of whether or not you are willing to negotiate that or look for that in your job search,” she added.
But what employees really want, according to Richardson, is the flexibility to choose when they work.
“It’s not necessarily (that) I want to work from home, I want to be surrounded by dirty dishes and unmade beds,” she said.
“It’s the fact that I can choose what hours I work.”
By AFP
June 10, 2023
Amy Whetzel works in her boat, Miranda, anchored in Mayo, Maryland, about an hour's drive form the US capital -
Copyright AFP ANDREW CABALLERO-REYNOLDS
Julie CHABANAS
Commuting to and from the office five times a week?
“It’s just not what I want for my life,” said Claire, a consultant in her thirties living in Washington.
Like Claire, millions of employees across the United States have grown fond of telework since the Covid-19 lockdown and now companies are struggling to bring them back to the office.
Before Covid-19, Americans workers had grown used to less-than-friendly job conditions, such as short vacations and little or no maternity leave, but the experience of working from home left them wanting more.
“All of these practices that workers had become accustomed to in the US before have now then kind of disrupted by the pandemic,” chief economist Nela Richardson with the ADP Research Institute told AFP.
American offices are still half-empty compared to February 2020, according to a weekly average calculated by Kastle, which manages the entry badges of 40,000 companies around the country.
– ‘The world is changing’ –
There are also wide disparities between different regions and cities: offices in California’s Silicon Valley, for example, have only recovered a third of their pre-pandemic occupants, compared with around half in New York and Washington, and as much as two-thirds in the Texas cities of Austin and Houston.
“Collaborating and inventing is easier and more effective when we’re in person,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a memo to the company’s vast workforce back in February, ordering them to return to the office for at least three days a week.
Many Amazon employees disagreed so strongly with the in-person working requirements that they took to the streets in front of the company’s Seattle headquarters last month to protest the move.
“The world is changing, and Amazon needs to embrace the new reality of remote and flexible work,” the organizers of the demonstration said in a statement.
Elon Musk, the billionaire boss of Tesla and Twitter, went a step further than Jassy, banning telework in the name of productivity and morality.
“You’re going to (tell) the people who make your food that gets delivered, that they can’t work from home, the people that come fix your house, they can’t work from home, but you can?” he said in a recent interview.
– Half-empty offices –
A third of employees in the United States currently have complete freedom about where they work, compared with just 18 percent in France, according to a recent ADP study of 17 countries.
“If I worked for an employer that required five days a week, I just don’t think that would be on the table for me,” Claire, the Washington-based consultant, told AFP.
Claire, who requested anonymity to discuss her employment, goes to the office irregularly, usually once every two weeks, sometimes more often. And, given the upsides, she can’t see herself going back full-time.
She has replaced the metro to work with a walk around the block, no longer wastes time dressing for the office, and sits outside with her laptop whenever the sun shines.
Claire said she sometimes misses conversations with colleagues, but she also realizes the small talk led her to be less productive.
– A challenge –
Despite the headlines made by chief executives like Elon Musk, not all managers are opposed to telework.
Questions about “quality and lifestyle efficiency” have emerged, said Gayle Smith, chief executive of the Washington-based anti-poverty NGO One, which has offices in cities around the world.
“Raising kids became a bit easier if you didn’t have to commute every morning,” she told AFP.
Since the onset of the pandemic, some of her employees have left the Washington area in order to be closer to their aging parents, or to follow a spouse who relocates for work.
Gayle has seen no decline in efficiency but regrets the loss of the positive dynamic that comes from face-to-face work.
The question now, she says, is how to replicate this dynamic while preserving the lifestyle improvements for her employees.
“If we can regain that, at least in part, it’ll put us in a very good place,” she said.
Teleworking has become “part of a cluster of benefits and options that companies can choose to offer workers,” said Nela Richardson from ADP.
For potential employees, “it’s a choice of whether or not you are willing to negotiate that or look for that in your job search,” she added.
But what employees really want, according to Richardson, is the flexibility to choose when they work.
“It’s not necessarily (that) I want to work from home, I want to be surrounded by dirty dishes and unmade beds,” she said.
“It’s the fact that I can choose what hours I work.”
WHITE, BLUE OR PINK
THE COLOR OF YOUR COLLAR
SHOWS YOU ARE A PROLETARIAN
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