WebMD’s parent company, Internet Brands, released a cringey and abusive internal video threatening their employees to #returnToOffice. “We aren’t asking or negotiating at this point”, the CEO says. “Don’t mess with us”, the video reads at the end. The video features employees dancing and celebrating RTO (at gunpoint? or at least under threat of firing by HR?).
I know corporate videos are all kinda crappy, but this one is…spouse-beating levels of terrible.
@drahardja Ignoring the fact that people are happier and just as productive working from home. There’s zero reason to return to long, unhealthy commutes. Maybe we need laws than require employers to pay people for their commuting time.
Remote work isn't the issue; it's outdated managers. It offers benefits like no commute and more time with family. It also allows young people to enter the job market without needing to live in expensive areas. I've personally witnessed this, and it's great to see new careers starting without the high cost of living in DC.
@drahardja the comment added to the updated Vimeo video is 👌🏻
(Essentially: “we’re getting a ton of bad press for that one, and we absolutely we don’t give 💩”)
@drahardja COVID could reduce the critical thinking capacity of a critical mass of people in liberal democracies around the world enabling the rise of neofascists in most democratic countries who decide to go to war, the thing fascists love most in the whole world, but in the nuclear age it leads to a thermonuclear war wiping out 90-99% of all life on the planet. Or something.
(I always wear a mask indoors everywhere but my house)
@drahardja Feel bad for those 'dancing' at the end of the video - pretending to be happy to be 'back to the office'. "Have debts and mortgages to pay, must dance and show how happy I am to be back to office and 'collaborate'. Perhaps I might get 'visibility' and get a raise?"
But why? Working From Home (WFH) is better for me environment, saves employers various overheads, and may improve worker happiness and hence productivity.
Researching and publishing about medicine is all about data and wouldn't seem to have any hands-on aspect that requires RTO. Is this just tyranny for its own sake?
I don't get the financial incentive for companies to do this? Isn't it proven like backwards and forwards 1000 times that work from home is more efficient and saves employers $?
I don't trust companies to do much...but one thing I do trust is they'll do whatever it takes to make as much money as possible. So why waste money on expensive offices and the like? Especially for a web based company? Makes no damn sense at all.
First, they (directly or indirectly) have investment in commercial real estate. If workers don’t come to the office, there would be no reason for office-building CRE to exist. Leases will terminate, rental income would stop, bank loans would default, lots of money will be lost.
Second, many companies are counting on getting financial benefits from cities and states for hiring local people who will occupy buildings in certain districts and bring their cash with them. Failing to meet those numbers would mean a loss of their rewards.
Third, companies are run by people who became successful during the “management by wandering around” heyday before the turn of the century. These folks experienced a profound loss of control over their workers when they could no longer observe them at work. They can’t tell whether employees are working or slacking off, and it terrifies them.
@drahardja@PersistentDreamer It may be that the mid-managers can’t tell if their most productive workers are also the happiest and most comfortable and how they can put a stop to that.
@skip_lacaze@PersistentDreamer I find that first- and second-level managers generally do not care whether their reports come into the office or not. Almost universally (there are always exceptions), these managers are quietly helping their reports fight for the right to work remotely and constantly turning a blind eye to RTO violations until forced to stop by upper management.
This is very likely because they already have other ways to track worker productivity. In the software world, they’d be watching email/messaging chatter, watching bug burn rate, running sprints and tracking results, looking at QA test runs, running daily builds, and so on. They know who’s working and who’s slacking off.
I find the real proponents of RTO are at the level where workers turn into goal reports with nebulous green/yellow/red statuses, i.e. the VP level and up. They are the ones who need to see people working, otherwise they’re terrified that everyone is slacking off.
@drahardja@skip_lacaze@PersistentDreamer One of the strategies that I developed in my career is “make work visible”. In the last two teams I ran we had a weekly internal email newsletter that summarized what we were doing and what was going on across the company that aligned with our team. It is a pain to keep writing it every week, but it works. Of course, that means you are actually doing less real work, but you get more impact and support…
@mariani1@skip_lacaze@PersistentDreamer Despite my vocal support of remote and flexible work, I actually love face-to-face communication and collaboration, and I think it’s the highest bandwidth available for powering through tough problems, and also the best way to make friends and socialize.
Having said that, it’s like meetings: It’s good when used in small, purposeful amounts, but bad if it just happens all the time. I don’t have to be face-to-face all the time to be productive. In fact, that would be very bad for productivity.
Office design has evolved over the century to facilitate in-person work (though the open-office trends of late seem to have forgotten all the important lessons), but we are still trying to discover how to best work remotely. I think tools and culture need to continue to evolve to accommodate remote work, but the result can be far better than what we had with in-office work.
@mariani1@drahardja some of my fondest work memories came from il2. i could hear what was going on by listening to the conversations that happened outside of my shared office, catch up with friends at the core os espresso machine, and knew people from all over. the place had a certain energy and i did some of my best work then, but more importantly i felt good. remote work was not a good fit for those times, but after the company grew like 4x bigger in 5 years, it made a lot more sense.
@raytraced@mariani1 Mine as well. IL2 was amazing, especially in the iPhone hallway. I had a private office with a door I could close back then, and it was fantastic. The camaraderie of a small group of people working under tight deadlines to make a groundbreaking product was great.
I do think that online tools are better now. I think we do need to keep working on the social aspect of remote working. We have scheduled social hours among peers but I agree the chances that we overhear something or bump into someone completely unrelated to our work is less with remote.
@drahardja@PersistentDreamer The work of exec management is traditionally all done via in-person meetings. They also get value from the informal between meetings chats. That works for a small company but doesn’t scale for international operations. However it’s what they know and they need to actively invest in cultural change to make hybrid/remote work properly.
@adrianco@drahardja@PersistentDreamer I think there’s also a strong asymmetry; companies spend a huge amount on real estate, facilities, and infrastructure to support in-office work, build processes and cultural norms that apply to in-person meetings, spend nothing on enabling remote work (“here’s a free Teams licence, buy your own monitor”) and then declare that remote work is less effective. Given the discrepency, in many ways it is remarkable that hybrid/remote is as productive and effective for employee wellbeing as it is.
If people were willing to step back and look at the cost/benefit balance and apply a few percent of the in-office spend to enhancing tools, business processes, and culture for hybrid-first or remote-first working, I think it would be a very different picture.
@bwr@drahardja@PersistentDreamer I’m seeing hybrid work very well at Nubank, where I’m an advisor. Slack based, not email, mixture of zoom and hangouts. Senior managers working remotely. Miro boards, lots of web based internal tools, and a very participatory fun multi-lingual culture. It can be done.
Long story short: Cities are listening to capitalists and small business owners who are desperate to get commuters back, more than their residents, and certainly more than mental health or environmental experts who see benefits to WFH.
@drahardja@PersistentDreamer On the reverse, I’m spending my money where I live instead of where the office used to be. So it has to be good for other cities, if that makes sense.
@breadbin@PersistentDreamer It does make sense, but San Francisco city government (and their local business backers) aren’t going to be too happy to see people spend their money in Mountain View instead of their downtown shops.
@lonespelunker It’s more about exerting control than extraversion. The CEO isn’t talking to anyone; he just wants to survey his domain to see a thousand minions laboring away.
@drahardja Also has anyone noticed everyone was on GREEN SCREEN?! So... it literally did not matter that they were in office or not, they could have been at home!
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