the ‘return to office’ lies
Edit: Sorry for the people seeing it on HackerNews, didn’t post it there and it wasn’t intended for that audience 🤷🏻♀️ yes, it’s an “immature rant”, because it starts with “I have to rant about the home office situation […] specifically at my place of employment”. This is not a professional article, it’s a personal blog; it was written after I was on the phone with the disability rep, talking to each other about these matters. I fear since this isn’t the US private sector I’m talking about, it may not match your experiences.
I have to rant about the home office situation in general, but also specifically at my place of employment and similar places.
I cannot stand the fake positivity and cute-sounding arguments for returning to the office. It falls flat for so many and it’s trying to make it sound more legitimate by evoking this image of collaboration, being social, kindness, having a good time together when that’s not the point. The point is micromanagement and needing to justify the large office spaces they invested into. Very rarely are there positions or departments who truly need to collab in person, and then they can just do that for the occasion, not a fixed amount of days per week or month where they need to go in at all times.
It’s a joke. At my place, we don’t innovate, we don’t develop new products for a mass market; we do lots of data entry, emails, and writing reports in SharePoint or with comments and track changes in Word. Excel spreadsheets and databases. Absolutely everything is digitized, we send auto-emails and all communication is via Teams or Mail and very rarely over phone. Documents arrive digitally. All the collaboration is already online and there is no need for an office presence. Even when you are in office, you don’t even see the people for the work since it’s all online!
But they’ll look at FAANG and be like: “Ooh, they’re asking everyone to be back at the office because of better collaboration!” You clown, the collaboration happens the same regardless where my ass sits and we are not designers or knowledge workers solving issues, we handle data! We are not pioneers or a Silicon Valley tech firm!
Asking everyone back to the office for the supposed social aspect is truly the fruit-bowl-ification of it all. It’s about as convincing to work for you as the mention of the kicker table in your job listings. I like my coworkers, and I call them often just to talk, or create Teams meetings just to catch up in private matters and not a work meeting. But asking people back into the office to be more social and combat supposed isolation is dumb! The people who need this are not prevented to come in and do just that anyway. But you’re asking people to waste fuel and time commuting there, tired, sitting their ass off at a table for that? You’re asking me as an immunocompromised and chronically ill person in pain and dealing with fatigue to show up and do the same stuff I do at home so others can play family at work?
Babes, I am less social with the office than without. When I come home from the office I lie in bed and that’s it. I am drained. I haven’t had the time or energy to see the people I truly care about much. This isolates me more. When I get sick from it (like last year at the Christmas function when someone brought Covid!) I am isolated at home. And for what, so people who insist on office time have someone they see in the hallway on the way to the toilet?
They haven’t taken it away yet, but the threat seems to always be there and often serves as a way to enact pressure or as a bargaining chip. Behave or we can’t do that anymore, it’s a privilege not a right, we do this out of goodwill, some people abuse this and so on.
Home office is the only way for many people to have a decent work output because family, household, caretaking, further education, illness and free time activities are better taken care of this way and people can work focused in silence without noise and interruption. It lessens stress and burnout and allows people to see more of their loved ones - much more meaningful socially than office interactions.
If I hadn’t had home office possibilities, I would’ve been gone from work for 8 months minimum due to my illness. But this way, I was still able to do the daily work, launch new features needed in our database, sign stuff as a representative and more. Home office is so important for disabled and chronically ill people to get and retain employment, and team members and coworkers deserve it as well to not have to take over someone else’s work for so long just because of a refusal to let people work from home. You cannot dangle what people need to effectively work in front of them like a carrot and subtly threaten to take it away. It’s ableist. You wouldn’t dare to do that with elevators or other accessibility features at the office, so don’t do it with that either.
And that’s also what I sent the staff council and our disability representative at work. So far, I received positive feedback for that.
The past few years but especially this year, I saw my coworkers bust their ass to make it all work. More work, more responsibilities, no extra hires, no pay increase. I busted my ass to make it all work despite my illness. Twice in a row in my three years in that spot, I got a performance bonus for my great work. Well, they told us all this year there won’t be any for anyone despite it all.
If they take away or severely limit home office too, I’m throwing, man. Then do your shit alone and drive all the young capable people away, in the place where like 50% of the work force will retire in the next 5 years. Fuck around and find out.
Published 22 Nov, 2024