re: Working from home is counter-productive

Early in the pandemic, I tired to get what office staff that could work from home to work from home. They all wanted to come back in to the office after a couple weeks. Granted they were all boomers.

My office has a broken coffee pot

When I worked in an office environment the good workers were looking for something to make them look busy 80% of the time. The bad workers nearly 100% of their time was just trying to look busy.

Honestly, there wasn't much to do in the office, all the work was done in the field but we only hit the field maybe once a week, the rest of the time was scheduling between external auditors and whoever we needed to audit to stay right with the SEC. It maybe took 2 hours of scheduling, 2 hours of report writing, 6 hours in the field and the rest was sitting and waiting.

I’m a firm believer in that a person can only make so many good decisions in a given period of time so judging someone by arse-in-chair time purely is limited if you ask me.

i have been on the work from home when needed for about ten years. All my staff gets duel screens, docking station, and laptop.

Before COVID we all worked from home at least Fridays. Also, here in Houston its almost a standard. I would have someone come into the office at 7:30 and then they have to leave at 10 to make a Dr appt. or take kid to the dentist, then maybe not make it back till like 2 then leave at 4:30 to bear horrendous traffic. I would just tell them to work from home that day, go to appointment as lunch break, and get back to work. Productivity didn't slow down.

Since COVID myself and maybe four other guys come in 2 to 3 times a week because we want to. The other 6 or so work full time from home. This is way that I find people will not chase another couple of bucks to leave you if you offer them this opportunity and actually save them tons of money in gas, day care, lunch, dry cleaning, and anything else you can think of.

I was also able to down size office space and setup cubicles for the random folk that may show up and ultimately have saved company about 100K a year just in rent.

As long as you are manage peoples work flow and you know they are sending you or filing whatever their job scope is, then it really isnt a big deal as long as you communicate with each other.

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Collaboration creates value that is difficult to quantify, and there is no doubt that there is something about being in person that, if done right, you just don’t get anywhere else. You don’t know when the creative process will come into play, but you have to allow for it and a loose WFH environment prevents that in a lot of cases.

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Most of those that WFH are not creating anything, they are punching data into spreadsheets, compiling reports, and responding to Emails that usually didn’t need to be sent. I worked in middle management for a Fortune 4 corporation for a while, and did a lot of it remotely . It was mind numbing work, and it is hard for me to believe there are people that spend their entire career doing this kind of stuff.