Surprising no one but the mgmt teams…
Unispace found that nearly half (42%) of companies with return-to-office mandates witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated. And almost a third (29%) of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment. In other words, employers knew the mandates would cause some attrition, but they weren’t ready for the serious problems that would result.
Meanwhile, a staggering 76% of employees stand ready to jump ship if their companies decide to pull the plug on flexible work schedules, according to the Greenhouse report. Moreover, employees from historically underrepresented groups are 22% more likely to consider other options if flexibility comes to an end.
In the SHED survey, the gravity of this situation becomes more evident. The survey equates the displeasure of shifting from a flexible work model to a traditional one to that of experiencing a 2% to 3% pay cut.
My company has been full remote since before the pandemic. It’s been fantastic. I hang out and chat with my coworkers all the time in Slack huddles. We have a remote-first culture and it’s far better than an office ever was.
If you’re getting depressed from working at home, tbh that sounds to me like you live to work rather than work to live. It’s important to have a rich life outside of work, especially when working remotely.
Not OP, but yes and no. I work as customer service/tech support. We get abused by customers harshly every day. Work from home, for me, was great at first, but the isolation combined with the daily abuse or other trauma (worked in telephone porting for a while, and old people who can’t keep their phone numbers or have to be with no phone service for a while get legit traumatized, and I felt I was causing it) caused me to become depressed, overeat, develop a heavy alcohol habit, and basically not move around much. I gained 100 pounds from 2019-2022. I am still struggling to lose it.
RTO for me was not a thing I wanted to do, but I needed to.
Also, I am thankfully no longer answering phone calls anymore, just taking chats. People are still assholes, but they cannot yell at you or use their voice to emotionally manipulate you.
I’m certainly sympathetic as I too have faced terrible abuse when working in customer service. TBH to me that says more about the job (which sounds pretty awful) than working from home. But perhaps that kind of job makes it more difficult since it sounds pretty “solo” to begin with, and I can see how WFH can at least exacerbate that, especially if your workplace isn’t set up for it. It’s probably a pretty isolating job no matter if you are WFH or not, though.
“Rich life outside of work” isn’t always possible. Most employers in the states don’t give you much PTO. On top of that, if you are a parent, you have no free time. Its just work work work 20 hours a day with 4 hours of sleep crammed in.
Sure, I guess the presumption is that you’re working someplace where you can have good work-life balance. If you don’t, then you’re probably gonna be pretty miserable no matter what, WFH or not.
How do you know that someone on slack is not busy ATM and is available to chat?
How do you deal with pings from slack discussion in some channel when you can’t chat and have to focus on a meeting?
With WFH I’m additional at least 30 mins of commute from all places I’d just pick my stuff and go when working from the office.
And everyone is spread around the city making it hard to choose the venue we go to
It can take a while to get people trained and into the habit of communicating with tools like Slack, and to develop a style that works for your office.
At a previous company we were 100% remote since about 2013. We had meetings to develop a set of practices around how to use remote tools to figure out what worked best for us. We encouraged people to use their status indicators to show when they were open for chats, set DND if they wanted quite time, maintain core hours (we were distributed world-wide, so core hours were zoned), encouraged people to use named channels rather than ad-hoc groups or DMs whenever possible, and always when discussing anything work related (absolutely no private chats about work projects, everything work-related went in a project channel).
We also were careful to adopt an ‘if anyone is remote, everyone is remote’ attitude. This means that if any team member is remote, then all team activities are conducted with remote access. For example, if the remote tools for a meeting are not working, then the meeting is rescheduled rather than being conducted without the remote people.
At my current job most of us are flex, sometimes in the office, sometimes not, and they’ve only supported WFH at all since covid lockdowns started. Previously they were 100% in-office. As a result their remote work habits are relatively primitive, with lots of ad-hoc group chats, private messages, and occasional meetings that don’t include the whole team (it doesn’t help that they use Teams, which is relatively shitty compared to Slack). I’ve pushed for a better remote-work culture, but it’s an uphill battle.
If you are running into communications issues with remote work it might be worth initiating a discussion about how you, as a collective, use the tools. Getting everybody on-board with a common set of practices that mostly works for everyone is important, especially if you have a lot of people who haven’t already spent a great deal of time using remote communication tools (a lot of us IT folks have spent a great deal of our lives using these tools and can overlook the unfamiliarity some others have with them and the usage habits that make them effective).