This is a paywalled article. But I can speak from my own experience.
I started as a grad when covid hit and now I’m in a more senior position training and mentoring younger ones.
There’s absolutely no way a grad straight from college can learn fully remotely. He or she needs in person learning from a senior member of staff.
I’m not saying they need to be in 5 days a week now. I think it’s a bit unfair that upper senior levels work at home while mid to junior come in. This mainly goes for professional services firms, consultants auditing, law. Not sure about tech sales where most of the action happens on calls.
Aside from the above there is also a social element. Especially If you’re someone who has just moved to a new city.
Also office rents are actually quite a small proportion of businesses expenditure so it isn’t that. I see those quiet a lot.
I won’t bother with the benefits of WFH or negatives of the office. As I’m sure the majority of comments will point this out.
[deleted]
It seems the two biggest factors as to why people are being asked to return to the office is to justify the existence of some management positions and the rent they pay. Perhaps I’m missing something.
My place is still trying to find the balance between giving freedoms but getting the most from people (which so far has been from when they’re in the office).
There’s a bit of a disconnect from recent grads in my opinion in terms of the difference between getting a task done and getting a task done correctly which is creating a “I get my work done fine remotely”. We found having them in a lot more in first year or so of contracts allowed for better remote working. Obviously that impacts wider team as they have to be in more to coach them.
I work in the office 5 days per week Monday to Friday. My quality of life (especially during winter) on these days can be basically non existent
I fucking hate this nonsense though. When we were sent on work from home, we had no expectation it would stay or even work.
It did work, we had record years. Then the company said fine and offered us hybrid. I was still able to do all my work from home and didn’t want to rock the boat so went with it. We made commitments based on this extra time we would have. Some people reduced child minding down, others signed up to the gym or just made more arrangements to meet people.
Suddenly it was we need you back to the office because the manager likes the business to look alive and busy.
We got reasons like our team manager felt she could not control the team and some people need to see others for their mental health etc etc.
So now I am back in the office, wasting two hours of my day getting to and from the office at my own expense.
My big issue here is people are being told it’s fine, it’s here to stay etc etc but they can’t bank on it or build a life around it and most are just waiting to be told they are going back. They are able to do most of the work at home and want to do this.
Instead they are out clogging up
Roads in cars and clogging up buses to needlessly sit at a desk in an office doing exactly what we did at home.
Most of my team now wear AirPods or other headphones and don’t talk in the office. They say it’s to loud when they are there.
The manager said he wants us all talking and collaborating but then spent about a month telling us to keep it down and then not speak at all because people are on phones.
It’s all fucking nonsense really.
This whole RTO thing bugs me so much.
I’ve worked remote since pre-pandemic and as a single parent who needs to be in the vacinity of my pre-teen and teen kids it is a life-saver for random school holidays and things like that.
My last contract ended a while ago and for neither love nor money can I now get a WFH position.
Everything hybrid/RTO is not as rosey as business paint it. They block out a great many candidates/ employees who have disabilites/ caring for other roles/ parents like me.
A commute of 1 hour each way daily means 10 hours of “extra” time weekly, that’s laundry, batch cooking, family time that is wasted just sitting in a car/ or on public transport.
The RTO push that’s being driven by American companies who provide their employees with no rights and demand the utmost of everything from the employees is wrong IMO.
Companies need to see the big picture and realise they’re locking out lots of people, plus returning women (mainly) back into gender typical roles that had become more balanced during the pandemic.
Just my 2 cents on the whole thing 🤷🏻♀️
Some multinational companies are dressing this all up as collaboration and flexibility with mandating return to office. Most of the time it’s tax break related (especially in the US) or to do with commercial real estate.
I do one week a month in the office, and I like it tbh. You get to be seen doing “office things” by senior management on the week your in the office and then can relax the other 3 weeks of the month with out any expectations of you being going in!
Also my company has a really nice office and the expectation is your productivity drops during the week in the office as they want you to socialise and have ” fun” and then the 3 weeks out of the office the expectation is your productivity boosts. Which it almost always does.
As much as I love WFH, we humans are social creatures, and WFH is not good for our social lives. It’s good to have a happy balance IMO!
I get 5 times more work done at home and have a better quality of life, so do companies want me to go to the office to do less work?
You cant trust people for 2 years to wfh and then tell them they need to come back into the office. Productivity didn’t drop. You can’t meet climate goals and ask everyone to commute to the office. This is about commercial real estate.
Everyone write a message to your party reps that more protections are needed for WFH.
I did last week.
WHF has positive impacts on
Health
Housing
Rural
Environment
Transport
By now, in 2023, we have heard absolutely every perspective and opinion on WFH v Office Work v Hybrid. It is so, so boring at this point. To summarize every single thread: One way works for some people, the other way works for others, and there will never be consensus. Please, no more.
You want me back in the office then I want my transport costs covered, you can also drop this open plan, hot desk bullshit. I can’t believe I’m demanding a return to cubes but here we are. Also, either be prepared for me quitting during a P1 because it’s quitting time, or start paying us fucking overtime.
They want us all to reduce our emmisions yet want us all to get back into emmision gridlock so they can control the population and force us to be submissive to our employers
I work in software. And I’d have no issue leaving for another position to make sure I never have to go fulltime in office again.
What a wierd article, gave no reasoning on why they want people back in the office nor where the pressure is coming from.
Yeah fuck that. No amount of money you can pay that will get the same life balance and quality of life I’d get working from home. 3 days in Dublin, 2 days and weekend in the west swimming/surfing. Fuck slaving away in the office, sitting on the bus, waiting in traffic, wasting time getting ready, pointless hours, needless conversations at the office, drama, spending more time than I required to because some stupid contract.
These articles are becoming increasingly desperate to prove that spending 1-2 hours commuting every time you have to go into the office is a worthwhile endeavour and not a mostly pointless soul destroying wast of time.
Also proximity to management being a key factor in promotion is a poor argument to get people in the office, maybe fix THAT problem rather than drag people into offices so the higher-ups can see the worker bees.
It would be good to see some counter argument where we can just be straight about the fact that commuting into offices regularly is a gigantic time drain on your life and maybe staying in the same position with a better quality of home life is a fair trade.
I fucking hate the office.
Where is the pressure coming from?
This is just another his masters voice article.
Tried it in our place, we just made sure a return was a disaster. Everyone walked around with sour faces on them, people would actually use the other flexible working arrangements to leave early to beat traffic etc. Eventually decided to return to hybrid to “improve morale”. When KPIs in the office are worse than wfh it becomes very hard for management to justify the office return with wishy washy reasons
Heard a great line in a video about company culture that sums up all these nonsensical “culture and collaboration” lines we keep getting fed.
“It’s not about building a company culture, it’s about building a company cult”
Started my first ever WFH job this February. Already I notice that the quality and quantity of work I do is greater when I WFH than when I go to the office. I go into the office one a week to be social and be seen, but I get significantly less done and what I do get down takes more out of me.
Who’s paying for these articles to be written? Leave it at hybrid and if someone wants to come in they can.
I’ve a feeling work is going to try to push it on us, had a recent survey and the questions were very telling. Have my CV updated and ready to bolt.
I’d actually like to be in the office a bit but it’s just not feasible. Plus there’s no real interaction outside of lunch break and maybe a pint afterwards.
I would leave a job before going full time in an office again. Let the pressure build, I’ll go and take all my experience and knowledge with me.
As a single person, I’ll be honest that staying inside a poor quality rental “box” is not sustainable for me, and I go to the office as much as I can, However, I like the flexibility that I can choose and I hope it stays that way.
Wake up babe, new Irish Times article paid by MNCs about workers coming back to the office just dropped
Company that sells software for designing and managing offices says people should go back to the office… no conflict of interest there. Great reporting!
Our company went in the opposite direction. They made office attendance optional, and almost no one came in anymore. Performance has been up since work from home was introduced, so they decided to scrap the office entirely this year. Those who want it can get access to use a WeWork office
Pressure from who exactly?
Lol. A lot of software companies noted increased productivity, increased revenue, decreased costs. Not to mention no emissions generated during commute to and from work. People already forgot the clean rivers, less smog, no traffic congestion? I thought the idea of company is to generate profit. So why decrease it by forcing people returning to the office cage?
Get fucked
Thankfully my company didn’t renew the office lease and we work from home full time. So much better
A brilliant opportunity to reduce emissions, increase happiness, increase productivity, and revive rural Ireland.
Throwing it all away because employers want to dictate people’s lives.
2 for me as well and I find that hard as is with social anxiety amped up by the pandemic.🤷♀️ if I was told 3 days I’d quit, can’t put my health at risk any more.
So you can go back and pay 20 quid for a shite sandwich and sit in traffic. Eh no thanks.
The author of this piece wrote another article about the problems people have working from home. Not bad in itself but telling that [it is linked on the website of Capella.](https://capella-ws.com/irish-times-if-youre-having-problems-working-from-home/) Which is the same org airing their views in this article. Capella provide hybrid and hot desk services, so clearly biased and using Irish Times to push their agenda.
[Here’s another article from earlier this week](https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/pb3bHL) about how working from home will “hurt careers”. According to research from a fucking office design company. Definitely no conflict of interest there…
Remote working suits many many people and jobs, doesn’t suit others. But it’s a shame to see the Irish Times printing biased garbage.
Just because an Irish Times (biggest source of income: property adverts, including commercial property!) opinion writer writes something does not mean it’s true. Nobody I know is encountering any such pressure. In fact, one friend’s office has just closed completely – 100% remote work from last month.
2 days max is all I’m going back.
I get more done remotely.
Who is paying for these articles to be written, they seem to be popping up all the time, remote working is great, write about that instead.
On top of office rents, control freaks and crazy extroverts, some boomer managers want to be in the office to escape their families. My partner was recently forced to go hybrid and was headhunted into a better paying remote job, someone jokingly said to him ‘you must really love being at home with your family’ and he was like ‘actually yeh they are all introverts and keep to themselves’.
That article is filled with unchallenged false claims made by those who have an interest in having people working in offices.
I noticed that at no point during the article does the Irish Times ask a bog standard employee for an opinion.
43 comments
This is a paywalled article. But I can speak from my own experience.
I started as a grad when covid hit and now I’m in a more senior position training and mentoring younger ones.
There’s absolutely no way a grad straight from college can learn fully remotely. He or she needs in person learning from a senior member of staff.
I’m not saying they need to be in 5 days a week now. I think it’s a bit unfair that upper senior levels work at home while mid to junior come in. This mainly goes for professional services firms, consultants auditing, law. Not sure about tech sales where most of the action happens on calls.
Aside from the above there is also a social element. Especially If you’re someone who has just moved to a new city.
Also office rents are actually quite a small proportion of businesses expenditure so it isn’t that. I see those quiet a lot.
I won’t bother with the benefits of WFH or negatives of the office. As I’m sure the majority of comments will point this out.
[deleted]
It seems the two biggest factors as to why people are being asked to return to the office is to justify the existence of some management positions and the rent they pay. Perhaps I’m missing something.
My place is still trying to find the balance between giving freedoms but getting the most from people (which so far has been from when they’re in the office).
There’s a bit of a disconnect from recent grads in my opinion in terms of the difference between getting a task done and getting a task done correctly which is creating a “I get my work done fine remotely”. We found having them in a lot more in first year or so of contracts allowed for better remote working. Obviously that impacts wider team as they have to be in more to coach them.
I work in the office 5 days per week Monday to Friday. My quality of life (especially during winter) on these days can be basically non existent
I fucking hate this nonsense though. When we were sent on work from home, we had no expectation it would stay or even work.
It did work, we had record years. Then the company said fine and offered us hybrid. I was still able to do all my work from home and didn’t want to rock the boat so went with it. We made commitments based on this extra time we would have. Some people reduced child minding down, others signed up to the gym or just made more arrangements to meet people.
Suddenly it was we need you back to the office because the manager likes the business to look alive and busy.
We got reasons like our team manager felt she could not control the team and some people need to see others for their mental health etc etc.
So now I am back in the office, wasting two hours of my day getting to and from the office at my own expense.
My big issue here is people are being told it’s fine, it’s here to stay etc etc but they can’t bank on it or build a life around it and most are just waiting to be told they are going back. They are able to do most of the work at home and want to do this.
Instead they are out clogging up
Roads in cars and clogging up buses to needlessly sit at a desk in an office doing exactly what we did at home.
Most of my team now wear AirPods or other headphones and don’t talk in the office. They say it’s to loud when they are there.
The manager said he wants us all talking and collaborating but then spent about a month telling us to keep it down and then not speak at all because people are on phones.
It’s all fucking nonsense really.
This whole RTO thing bugs me so much.
I’ve worked remote since pre-pandemic and as a single parent who needs to be in the vacinity of my pre-teen and teen kids it is a life-saver for random school holidays and things like that.
My last contract ended a while ago and for neither love nor money can I now get a WFH position.
Everything hybrid/RTO is not as rosey as business paint it. They block out a great many candidates/ employees who have disabilites/ caring for other roles/ parents like me.
A commute of 1 hour each way daily means 10 hours of “extra” time weekly, that’s laundry, batch cooking, family time that is wasted just sitting in a car/ or on public transport.
The RTO push that’s being driven by American companies who provide their employees with no rights and demand the utmost of everything from the employees is wrong IMO.
Companies need to see the big picture and realise they’re locking out lots of people, plus returning women (mainly) back into gender typical roles that had become more balanced during the pandemic.
Just my 2 cents on the whole thing 🤷🏻♀️
Some multinational companies are dressing this all up as collaboration and flexibility with mandating return to office. Most of the time it’s tax break related (especially in the US) or to do with commercial real estate.
I do one week a month in the office, and I like it tbh. You get to be seen doing “office things” by senior management on the week your in the office and then can relax the other 3 weeks of the month with out any expectations of you being going in!
Also my company has a really nice office and the expectation is your productivity drops during the week in the office as they want you to socialise and have ” fun” and then the 3 weeks out of the office the expectation is your productivity boosts. Which it almost always does.
As much as I love WFH, we humans are social creatures, and WFH is not good for our social lives. It’s good to have a happy balance IMO!
I get 5 times more work done at home and have a better quality of life, so do companies want me to go to the office to do less work?
You cant trust people for 2 years to wfh and then tell them they need to come back into the office. Productivity didn’t drop. You can’t meet climate goals and ask everyone to commute to the office. This is about commercial real estate.
Everyone write a message to your party reps that more protections are needed for WFH.
I did last week.
WHF has positive impacts on
Health
Housing
Rural
Environment
Transport
By now, in 2023, we have heard absolutely every perspective and opinion on WFH v Office Work v Hybrid. It is so, so boring at this point. To summarize every single thread: One way works for some people, the other way works for others, and there will never be consensus. Please, no more.
You want me back in the office then I want my transport costs covered, you can also drop this open plan, hot desk bullshit. I can’t believe I’m demanding a return to cubes but here we are. Also, either be prepared for me quitting during a P1 because it’s quitting time, or start paying us fucking overtime.
They want us all to reduce our emmisions yet want us all to get back into emmision gridlock so they can control the population and force us to be submissive to our employers
I work in software. And I’d have no issue leaving for another position to make sure I never have to go fulltime in office again.
What a wierd article, gave no reasoning on why they want people back in the office nor where the pressure is coming from.
Yeah fuck that. No amount of money you can pay that will get the same life balance and quality of life I’d get working from home. 3 days in Dublin, 2 days and weekend in the west swimming/surfing. Fuck slaving away in the office, sitting on the bus, waiting in traffic, wasting time getting ready, pointless hours, needless conversations at the office, drama, spending more time than I required to because some stupid contract.
These articles are becoming increasingly desperate to prove that spending 1-2 hours commuting every time you have to go into the office is a worthwhile endeavour and not a mostly pointless soul destroying wast of time.
Also proximity to management being a key factor in promotion is a poor argument to get people in the office, maybe fix THAT problem rather than drag people into offices so the higher-ups can see the worker bees.
It would be good to see some counter argument where we can just be straight about the fact that commuting into offices regularly is a gigantic time drain on your life and maybe staying in the same position with a better quality of home life is a fair trade.
I fucking hate the office.
Where is the pressure coming from?
This is just another his masters voice article.
Tried it in our place, we just made sure a return was a disaster. Everyone walked around with sour faces on them, people would actually use the other flexible working arrangements to leave early to beat traffic etc. Eventually decided to return to hybrid to “improve morale”. When KPIs in the office are worse than wfh it becomes very hard for management to justify the office return with wishy washy reasons
Heard a great line in a video about company culture that sums up all these nonsensical “culture and collaboration” lines we keep getting fed.
“It’s not about building a company culture, it’s about building a company cult”
Started my first ever WFH job this February. Already I notice that the quality and quantity of work I do is greater when I WFH than when I go to the office. I go into the office one a week to be social and be seen, but I get significantly less done and what I do get down takes more out of me.
Who’s paying for these articles to be written? Leave it at hybrid and if someone wants to come in they can.
I’ve a feeling work is going to try to push it on us, had a recent survey and the questions were very telling. Have my CV updated and ready to bolt.
I’d actually like to be in the office a bit but it’s just not feasible. Plus there’s no real interaction outside of lunch break and maybe a pint afterwards.
I would leave a job before going full time in an office again. Let the pressure build, I’ll go and take all my experience and knowledge with me.
As a single person, I’ll be honest that staying inside a poor quality rental “box” is not sustainable for me, and I go to the office as much as I can, However, I like the flexibility that I can choose and I hope it stays that way.
Wake up babe, new Irish Times article paid by MNCs about workers coming back to the office just dropped
Company that sells software for designing and managing offices says people should go back to the office… no conflict of interest there. Great reporting!
Our company went in the opposite direction. They made office attendance optional, and almost no one came in anymore. Performance has been up since work from home was introduced, so they decided to scrap the office entirely this year. Those who want it can get access to use a WeWork office
Pressure from who exactly?
Lol. A lot of software companies noted increased productivity, increased revenue, decreased costs. Not to mention no emissions generated during commute to and from work. People already forgot the clean rivers, less smog, no traffic congestion? I thought the idea of company is to generate profit. So why decrease it by forcing people returning to the office cage?
Get fucked
Thankfully my company didn’t renew the office lease and we work from home full time. So much better
A brilliant opportunity to reduce emissions, increase happiness, increase productivity, and revive rural Ireland.
Throwing it all away because employers want to dictate people’s lives.
2 for me as well and I find that hard as is with social anxiety amped up by the pandemic.🤷♀️ if I was told 3 days I’d quit, can’t put my health at risk any more.
So you can go back and pay 20 quid for a shite sandwich and sit in traffic. Eh no thanks.
The author of this piece wrote another article about the problems people have working from home. Not bad in itself but telling that [it is linked on the website of Capella.](https://capella-ws.com/irish-times-if-youre-having-problems-working-from-home/) Which is the same org airing their views in this article. Capella provide hybrid and hot desk services, so clearly biased and using Irish Times to push their agenda.
[Here’s another article from earlier this week](https://www.printfriendly.com/p/g/pb3bHL) about how working from home will “hurt careers”. According to research from a fucking office design company. Definitely no conflict of interest there…
Remote working suits many many people and jobs, doesn’t suit others. But it’s a shame to see the Irish Times printing biased garbage.
Just because an Irish Times (biggest source of income: property adverts, including commercial property!) opinion writer writes something does not mean it’s true. Nobody I know is encountering any such pressure. In fact, one friend’s office has just closed completely – 100% remote work from last month.
2 days max is all I’m going back.
I get more done remotely.
Who is paying for these articles to be written, they seem to be popping up all the time, remote working is great, write about that instead.
On top of office rents, control freaks and crazy extroverts, some boomer managers want to be in the office to escape their families. My partner was recently forced to go hybrid and was headhunted into a better paying remote job, someone jokingly said to him ‘you must really love being at home with your family’ and he was like ‘actually yeh they are all introverts and keep to themselves’.
That article is filled with unchallenged false claims made by those who have an interest in having people working in offices.
I noticed that at no point during the article does the Irish Times ask a bog standard employee for an opinion.