Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Amazon to fire workers who won't go to work

This is a frequent topic of discussion at our house. My wife’s side gig is with a firm that doesn’t require anyone to be in the office at any particular time. She does some work for them from home, but prefers being in the office. The current situation is very disruptive of the work flow. It also, as a previous poster mentioned, not in the best interests of developing the new talent.

One of my grandsons is a software analyst for a big midwestern financial firm. When covid hit, they all started working remotely. They met occasionally online. After a period of time, the company required them to log off the company servers at noon on Friday because they were getting so much more work done working remotely. I have to believe that was a product of recruiting the right people in the first place. Most of the problems companies face can be tied back to poor recruitment practices and/or failure of management to effectively hold people accountable.

My older stepson just started work for one of the “big four” accounting firms. He’s got an apartment 15 minutes walk from the office and almost never goes there, working almost entirely remotely.

I think we’re in a time of great transition as to how we view work. Our paradigms will change. We’ll keep what works and the rest will fall by the wayside.

This. My departments productivity went up since we started working from home.

we've had year over year growth since covid, and because of the WFH approach, meeting customers online, etc our costs dropped significantly

now that they are requiring we come back into the office, they haven't changed their mentality about costs being so low, so we're seeing them canceling company meeting events, clamp down on travel and move offices to lower rent parts of town. So you have to be in the office but instead of flying you to wherever for a company event, we're going to do a Xoom call with 1500 people - its a bad look.

one bright spot is they had to give everyone big raises to be competitive due to inflation and no one wanting to work.

so while its possible you are very productive working from home, the challenge is going to be, what happens when all your boomers age out in a few years and you lose 30% of your work force to retirement , replacing them with guys who have never been part of a office environment and have no informal network? That may not be true for everyone but that is what is scaring our management now.

Hmmmm- - - - -I'd like to see plumbers, electricians, auto mechanics, HVAC technicians, and surgeons work from home!

Small businesses are the ones to suffer the most as they’ll likely adhere to old norms more rigidly while larger firms won’t care.

It also depends on your profession and skills. Finance and accounting don’t need to be at the office. IT is probably a blend depending on industry and operations.

At my company it’s the shop workers that bitch about people working from home.

In today’s world, people need to get over office camaraderie, team building and that family-like environment [bleep]. You pay me to do a job, not be you’re family.

KFWA is hitting the nail on the head with hiring trends. I’ve told countless recruiters to piss off with their office jobs. I’ve had candidates tell me the same because my GM is devoted to the old way, yet we have a hard time competing for talent.

Millennials are as useless as tits on a boar hog!!

It is unreal that people are required to labor just to get a paycheck.

Bring on Socialism...

Everything will be FREE... and no one will ever have to work again.

The Internet says.

"work" from home is destroying what was left of rural America.

The great liberal distribution.

I like the verse when he's singing about the silver spoon. Great song way ahead of it's time.

What stops companies that have work from home employees from hiring work from India or Bangladesh employees? It would be cheaper and there would be no benefits to pay.

certainly that will happen but similar problems - plus turnover and a 12 hour time difference. Two weeks ago it was Prasun working on your issue, this week its Rajeev

we have a sizeable group of employees in India - quality control is a major issue for us

I'm an engineer and the arguement to be in the office to supervise and mentor the junior engineers is utter crap. Young people live in a fully connected digital world and don't really need that much physical presence to pass on learnings.

The beauty of online communications is that they can record the conversations and replay what they may not have fully understood the first time although they don't hesitate to make contact in the first instance. I set them tasks with required outputs and deadlines and they are discliplined enough to meet their commitments. It's more beneficial for them to be in the office for the social benefits of the activities with their peers. We meet when required at site inspections when you do need site presence but we are otherwise in constant communication.

It's only the dogmatic management that try and dictate the in house presence but they don't understand that they have a dinosaur mentality. I think there's an element of cost overhead and they don't want to pay for under-utilised office space which is a valid point. If they were smart they could work out economic arrangements to suit the new working arrangements rather than try and force something less than optimal.

Many of the juniors I supervise are in other states anyway, as are our clients. Using staff from our overseas offices can be problematic though - that's usually a cost decision though and provides technical work quality issues which defeats the purpose.

We've used our offices in the Phillipnes, Romania and India mostly with poor outcomes. They offer low costs but it's more miss than hit. I did have a win with one of our Phillipine groups but I got lucky with a talented competent group for that one project.

I don't agree, there is just too much for someone new to learn, not just the specifics of their job but how to communicate, how to use tools and the ability to just reach out to someone isn't there - you have to track them down, hope they are online or have their cell phone on or schedule a meeting. The ad-hoc nature of communication you get working side by side someone isn't there.

We do a training program where we bring them in for 5 months, about 40 new college hires and then last year let them go to offices or work remote. We brought them all back for a group event 4 months later and they were asked some questions about work. Almost all, like maybe all but 2 wanted to be back in the office with a group of people. They said they just didn't know what was going on with projects or what their co-workers were working on. All they knew was what was assigned to them. They had so few people available to them for problem solving or mentoring they didn't feel like they were able to grow in their job.

There is something lost when a person is silo'd at home and only knows their boss or a few people on their project team, they'll never have that conversation in the hallway with the director of another division telling them about a contract they just won or a new job opportunity that may be coming up, they won't talk to the HR person who will let them know about new a company benefit, or track down the IT guy that will fix their computer problem in 10 minutes instead of waiting for him to video conference them 8 hours later. They won't find out the new way that cuts 4 hours off setting up a product demo that the someone in R&D figured out. If you want to get that information to them, then they end up spending half their day in video conference calls and staff meetings.

As I said, I'm certain veteran employees, who already have the network of people, knows who to call and is secure in developing needed skills is fine with remote, but they are also the person that needs to be in the office to help the new people out. You could say, yea all they have to do is call me and I will help them over video conference or a phone call, but the problem is they may not know who you are or what you do. What might take them 20 minutes in an office to find out takes them 3 days remotely.

There is also the economic reason, in a hybrid environment, you're still paying for the office space, but you're also paying for a cleaning crew, a cafeteria, security and maintenance staff, the equipment rental and a host of other costs associated with keeping an office up and going. The executives are trying to balance all this out, and many of them are coming to the realization you can't have your most productive, knowledgeable employees at home

I think alot of these executives early on in the pandemic were ok with working remote - everyone figured out how to do it, with their existing work force, then 1/3 of their staff quit or retired and now they are struggling to find people that can work remotely and be productive because they just didn't realize how much working in an office daily developed their staff prior to the pandemic.

just as a side note.

Zoom, the company that more or less pioneered the ability to work remote with their video conference software

has multiple office buildings and is now requiring their employees that live within 50 miles of an office to come in at least 2 days a week.

You talk about your wife's job frequently? You poor man.

We know bud. We know.

I look back on my lifetime of working and realize there is a huge difference between the way things were and the way they have become. Working in a sawmill, you pretty well had to be at the mill. Cutting trees meant you had to be there, saw in hand. Pouring concrete didn't happen if you didn't show up to build the forms and set the re-bar. Hay bales couldn't be stacked remotely. Today, I do work from home, but I still do real work. I don't always put in a full day, but at 74, I shouldn't have to!
I have known people who could work from home, and in some cases, they did valuable work. If most of them were honest though, what they did was siphon off value of the work which was done by those of us who actually did it!
When I worked as a machinist, we had an engineer who could easily have worked from home. He could have sent in drawings for us to correct, accompanied by text which we could decipher after correcting all of the spelling errors, and he could have done that from home. Ultimately, the shop owner realized this and did send him home, but not to work. At that same shop, we had six machinists, a couple welders and three mechanics. We carried eight office staff on our backs. In fairness, the salesmen were valuable because they sold our work. Others of the office staff essentially ran interference so we were able to work, without interruption. So they did have value to us, and therefor, to the company. GD

Not I nor any of my family except 1 son have had jobs that could be done from home. That 1 son headed a fraud department for a large auto insurance company. The whole department was handled by WAH agents. Another son is a registered nurse and a daughter is a dentist. Try either one of those from home.