But think of the billions of dollars of now unused office space. That's horrible for real estate pricing, which is where many of these fucks are invested.
It's not even a real estate issue sometimes. I worked in an office in an industrial facility- printing custom boxes. Everyone in an office job was on a hybrid schedule. No one's job required them to be at the office. All conversations were by Slack, all meetings were by Zoom even if we were all in the office. They could have knocked down the office space and put in at least two more industrial printers. Considering how backed up we got around Christmas, that would have helped them.
Some of this is just old assholes who think people need to be in the office all the time so they can watch them or something. I don't know.
My last job was highly similar. It honestly would have been more tolerable (the stress) if I’d just been able to work from home.. I mean it’s not the sort of job you could pretend to do if not being monitored, it was metric-driven and triggered by customer contact.. so what’s the point?
They said “we want to foster communication so having people in the office does that!” Umm my department is the only one in the company that is chained to our desk..? We can’t get up because we have to be available for contacts.. and when people come by to talk to us, it’s usually a bad thing because they are interrupting actual real work. To top it off, our cube cell thing was right next to the door where everyone hung out waiting for each other to go to lunch, and because we were the only department that did external contact, they didn’t even think to shut the fuck up.
I’ll never willingly work in an office again. Not just because my disability makes commuting difficult sometimes, but because the environment is just -bad-.
Yeah, it's miserable. I wasn't kidding about the tie part either. Pretty much the only thing I liked about that job is that no one cared if I showed up in a T-shirt and sweatpants.
they already said it themselves: "Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome"
so no, it was never about efficiency. at all.
Agreed 100%. I used to work a hybrid schedule and I was much more efficient when I was at home and could be both relaxed and not distracted or annoyed by coworkers.
They are about more efficiency in enriching themselves. Forcing people back into inefficient office-based work is just a tool to fire huge chunks of them while filtering for those easier exploited.