Just saw a really irritating anti-remote work chart crime from #Gallup making the rounds on twitter, from an article claiming that "The most worrying finding in the latest survey -- especially in a workplace that is increasingly hybrid and remote -- is that employees who can do their work remotely have an eroding connection to the mission or purpose of the organization."
@molly0xfff
How would you control for bias and fallacies when surveying that topic?
People stuck at work may over time just come to accept it and rationalise that their work and the mission are valuable, in order to keep putting up with it.
@molly0xfff it is highly possible that such erosion is justified because well companies have very shaky idea about what they should do. When you are in office you are just carried by companionship, but overall...yes, you will more critically judge overall management of company.
Change management.
@molly0xfff When I see companies pushing and actively supporting improved public transit and housing to improve commutes I will start to see these sorts of claims with less skepticism. For Amazon HQ2 one criteria which caused many cities to be removed from the running was lack of a regional transit plan which was a priority to improve commutes for everyone. Nobody savors that long commute.
In the Midwest there was a plan to connect Chicago to Minneapolis through Milwaukee and Madison which was killed due to politics. That project would have been amazing for many to commute or shop, go to concerts or attend sporting events. I challenge companies to put some weight behind these projects.
@molly0xfff They disclose the error margin but not why it’s different for each class of worker. Shouldn’t the error be in their method / question, not in the type of respondent?
@molly0xfff that steep collapse in 2023 is almost definitely a response to the erosion in trust because companies took a roughshod approach to forcing RTO
Maybe it's the steadily advancing incidence of population disconnecting from.
Capitalism pays my mortgage.
to.
Capitalism gave me my mortgage so I would work.
Capitalism helps billionaires not me.
Capitalism is ruining our planet.
Capitalism may well kill our species.
Maybe my work-life mjssion goals should be wider than just yet more capitalism.
@molly0xfff Far be it from the author to stray from the core thesis of a book he and Gallup are shilling to managers.
"The immediate danger is that most employees will now operate more like independent contractors or gig workers than employees who are loyal and committed to your organization."
Aka get them back in traffic where they don't have time to...think.
@paninid@AnnemarieBridy@icymi_law@andrew eh, at least in the context of my screenshot, I don't see the issue. Not everyone works because they "believe in the mission", and that's ok
The crime is pretending like for profit businesses give a crap about "mission" or "purpose" beyond it's utility to profit and employee control. Why should any employee care about fictions designed to fulfill the CEO's sense of control over employees?
@molly0xfff
Even setting aside that the data is fudged to make it look much more meaningful than it actually is, and the lack of further discriminating factors therewithin, the fact that remote workers feel more detached from the 'mission and purpose' should come as no surprise to anyone who's ever dealt with a living human being.
One of the boons of mainstream office culture was and is an overinflation of the sense that a person's existence is meaningful to the organization, more so than a cog doing tasks. The ability to perform feedback in person. A face to look at, if you're lucky. A badge, even! And let's not forget the pizza parties.
Investment in an aspect of one's life is a two-way street, and one shouldn't be surprised that once all the finery's stripped away, not as many people are willing to commit everything to a nude emperor -- nor to go back to pretending that the 'clothes' are magnificent.
@molly0xfff That is really irritating, in that it obviously discards any other likely reasons for eroding connection to the organization, such as not keeping pay up with inflation even remotely.
@molly0xfff I think it's interesting to note where peak NFT, Metaverse, and of course LLM are on this chart. I feel like tech management's goldfish attention span with every new vaporware beanie baby over the last several years maybe relates to how workers feel about being connected to the company's mission.
@molly0xfff when a company uses the word mission they immediately discredit themselves. There is no mission. There is positive Cashflow, dividends, stock buybacks, etc. nothing else. The rest is just for this. If google could shoot cows and make more money with a killed cow than an ad displayed, they would do it. Also… millions of “missions” and broken promises to employees make anyone feel sour.
@molly0xfff "on site remote-capable" describes anyone who is looking for a remote job while trapped in an unnecessary office job so hardly surprising their connection drops.
@molly0xfff I feel like they completely missed the whole point this actually would seem to demonstrate anyway. The question posted is "the mission or purpose of my company makes me feel my job is important." I'd like to emphasize that last part that seems to have been lost "makes me feel my job is important." To me this would include people who feel like their actual job is disappearing -- which would also include those who have been threatened to come in physically or lose their job.
@molly0xfff let’s be real here, do 99.9% of workers really care about the ‘purpose’ of the company they work at, whether they’re remote or not?
As much as companies might hate to admit it, most of their staff work there because it pays the bills and that’s it. Maybe it’d be different if the company is a tiny indie studio they’ve got a major part in or it’s a company that has a lot of die hard fans. But yeah, the numbers probably don’t look much different for in office staff either.
Having an eroding connection to nebulous self aggrandising corporate jargon like the “mission” sounds like a plus to me! I guess the brain-washing doesn’t work remotely.
@molly0xfff The managerial and owner classes just can’t handle workers having any degree of autonomy. Unsurprisingly, it’s very easy to publish anything that supports their narrative.
@molly0xfff The dip, if any exists in reality, roughly correlates with when employers began demeaning remote work & demanding remote workers appear in office buildings and without masking. At that point, the missions diverge.
@molly0xfff
I mean, my connection to my company is to make them money (IT contracting).
My experience with this, though, has been the exact opposite. I have co-workers from coast to coast. We are more connected than ever, thanks to all of us being remote.
My last project (before this one) started before COVID and ended right after. Organizational efficiency and communication (both measured) went up. Management noticed. Made a big deal how we were never going back.
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