re: Trump says that federal workers who don't want to work in the office will be fired

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My answer is that if you are an adequate manager you can manage folks regardless of your location. Believe me, I do it every day.

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Agree that’s the case if you have seasoned employees. Managing/training new hires can be a challenge.

One could also argue that many federal employees are not as motivated as their private industry counterparts.

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Agree that’s the case if you have seasoned employees.

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He and I were discussing problem employees, and under no circumstances is it the case that managing a lazy employee is just as easy to do when they're working from home. That's especially true when you've essentially taken firing them off the table.

This is clown world shite.

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If you're overseeing a remote workforce, you aren't leading and managing.

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I might split that in half depending on the job. You can manage remotely but you can't lead. And I could see where the decreased efficiency might be offset by commercial real estate costs, so if it makes monetary sense I see why a private business might do it. My son works for a guy who's made a fortune in software/web development and his team is scattered all over the country.

But we were specifically talking about problem federal employees and he's STILL trying to claim there's no difference managing them remotely vs in the office. That's laughable bullshite for any employee, but it's particularly absurd for one that's nearly impossible to fire.

I have both Tricare Prime and the VA. I'm in BFE, so believe it or not, the VA is more useful than Tricare because my Tricare PCM is in Plano or Frisco which is over an hour and a half away.

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A second scenario is that the employee DOES NOT have a duty location in a federal office space so they 100% remote work from home.

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The home office IS the duty location on the paperwork if I had to guess. So when you tell people they have to come in then come into where?

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No I don't think you do

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Then tell me.

Everybody who "works" from home claims it's no different than working in the office. But every one of y'all would quit rather than go back, just like I said.

So why?

There must be some difference or you wouldn't be so militant about it.

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Managing/training new hires can be a challenge.

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Not to mention coaching employees who are performing marginally.

There are too many things you can't do effectively when people are not in the same space that affect the entire team.

And that's the thing. The WFHers are always focusing on their individual production. But the company is made up of teams, not individuals.

Lower functioning employees can learn a lot from high functioning employees and managers...if they are in the same space. I would have new or under-functioning employees shadow my top producers on a regular basis.

Just telling the A employee, "Tell employee B what you do and how you do it to be so successful" isn't nearly as productive b/c there are so many things that A does unconsciously that /she doesn't think to tell B.

Not to mention, those of you who claim that it's just as easy to monitor an employee's production out of the office may have special circumstances, but I didn't find that to be the case at all. My experience is that it took so much longer to monitor their output when they "worked" from home (never had a single employee whose production at home was as good as it was in the office) that I might as well have just done the job myself.

I suppose that is industry/job specific, but it's definitely not always the case either way.

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I think people are going to be surprised by how many people don't quit.

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We'll see.

I think most of these federal employees literally don't do anything, or very little. So what will happen if they don't quit is that it's going to be quickly revealed that they don't have anything to do anyway.

I don't know what will happen then. But however it plays out I don't think they'll get to keep their "jobs."

This is silly. If they fired people for not wanting to be at the office, I’d have been fired from every office job I’ve had

Well some of us are working and work well from home and can't very well go back into the office because our office space(s) were turned into a data center. So, I don't think he's talking about all of us who work from home.