Regarding return to office policy, I hear many speculations and reasons hypothesized. Mostly by employees who don’t really know and who had no choice in it.
I would like to know is if there are any lemmings out there who have been involved in these talks.
What was discussed?
How is something like this coordinated amongst others businesses even rivals.
What are the high level factors that have gone into the decision?
Bonus points: is it even possible for employees to prevent or reverse these policies at this point?
I really dislike that a handful of people who can’t get their shit together to communicate over zoom are dragging everyone else (and the environment) down.
I’d also wager that some of those people also communicate badly in person, but at least do communication shaped activities so it gets a pass.
Like at my old job, there’d be long meetings both in person and over zoom where nothing would be accomplished. The problem is not if we’re in the same room or not. It’s that people don’t know what the fuck they’re doing at any level of this task. They don’t understand the system, and they don’t know how to run a meeting. The few times I just seized control and ran it like a D&D session went better. eg: "It’s not your turn. Please wait to speak. That’s an interesting idea but the
game we set out to playmeeting is about [topic], so we’re going to stay on topic. No,the rules say you can’t do thatthat’s not an option in a web browser.That worked fine in person and on zoom. The problem isn’t the medium. The problem is people.
Yeah, but the problem of management is people. And I’ve pointed out that management aren’t always the people who don’t communicate. And issues with communication are made worse when everything is pushed to text where nuance is lost and everything is archived which can be used against you.
There are probably some teams that can work well remotely, but a lot of teams can’t. I generally find the best people who work remotely are highly competent at their job. Most people aren’t highly competent at their jobs.
There’s some truth to this, but also video chat is commonplace now. That can be recorded too, but so can anything. Some of my coworkers started using Signal for out of band communication even though zoom/slack said they didn’t retain any recordings.
If they can’t work remotely, they should be leveled up. Stop dragging everyone else down.
And again, if you can only communicate in person you’re probably bad at communicating in person, too, without realizing it. I think a lot of CEO types think they’re amazing because they walk into a room and everyone’s like “yeah boss got it that’s great feedback”, and they don’t realize they just said a bunch of garbage and people just agreed because he’s the boss.
I bet. I also wouldn’t be surprised if the CEO gives direction, hears “can do, boss!”, but it doesn’t actually get done because there isn’t a triggered deliverable to verify. You may have junior staff doing what they’re being told, but it isn’t what the CEO wants because it is going through several layers of telephone and, because everyone is remote, it is harder to identify where the problem is.
When I worked an old job in the office, the game of telephone from the CEO down was so bad. People would get in their head that some things were MUST HAVE, but if I sneakily just asked the CEO directly he’d be like “no that’s not important”. But the designer thought he wanted it so she told the product lead it was important so our team product guy was told this was “straight from the top”.
Sooooo the highly competent people will go work at remote offices and the ones that force in office work will have the others?
Except there are problems with training. Companies are going to need to train more competent staff. How do companies train competent staff without competent staff in the first place?
That’s not “except”, that’s “and”.
Sounds fair to me.