re: Forbes - CEOs Will Be Clamping Down On Employees

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I think there are studies that prove companies made record profits over the past 2 years when WFH was strongest in their companies.

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shite ton of money given out to the public and businesses.

If WFH was as feasible as many workers hoped, they'd fire you all and hire foreigners who work for 1/4th the wage.

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most jobs aren't doing tasks in a silo/vacuum. you're being paid to be available to co-workers and management during business hours. purely anecdotally, i think a lot of lower level corporate employees don't realize this.

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100% agree with this observation.

I’ve seen too many young engineers, designers, etc. who view their entire job as a to-do list of cranking out work product, while viewing any sort of ad-hoc conversations/requests as “interruptions.”

Sometimes they are interruptions. But sometimes that’s just a perception people get when they either don’t understand or don’t care about the company’s larger business.

So while people are indeed being paid for their tasks, they’re often also being paid for their availability. That’s a big factor affecting the viability of WFH for many organizations. I do think it’s primarily lower-level employees that don’t get it - because they might only get an urgent question/request once in a blue moon. But when you extrapolate that across an entire company it can quickly turn into dysfunction that hurts the bottom line if people aren’t available.

We are on a hybrid schedule, which works pretty well now. It was a royal pain in the arse for anybody who actually interfaced directly with customers at first, because people would work whatever hours they pleased during their WFH days. We now have (mostly) everybody on the same page with regards to “business hours” and it’s a lot better.

None of the above is applicable to every job or even every company, which should be obvious but you never know.

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If WFH was as feasible as many workers hoped, they'd fire you all and hire foreigners who work for 1/4th the wage.

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Exactly.

As stated earlier in this thread, my brother actually works from home directing a team of Eastern Euros. He's one of the few IT managers the company has while the programmers are overseas.