| We work at a small company in south San Jose. I personally live in SF, along with 4 of the 5 other non-owners, the fifth being even farther north. The three owners live in the Belmont/San Carlos/Palo Alto area (halfway of the 1 hour drive to the SJ office on a good day). The job is engaging, meaningful, and the company is successful. Yet all of the non-owners, including myself, constantly gripe about the commute times (101 can be awful). The commute into the office can ruin your day. You could be excited for the day's itinerary, have a bad travel experience, and arrive with little to no motivation. You consciously know your productivity is diminished. You dread the drive (or public transit) home. Your negativity, even if you try to hide it, is evident and contagious. Your bosses sympathize so much as to allow you to work in accordance with off-rush hours (arrive 10/11am leave 6/7pm), but this just hurts your ability to socialize normally during the week. They try to compromise with work-from-home Fridays, which 50% of the time become a rescinded privilege due to the necessity of face-to-face interactions. The team comes together and suggests a move to a "middle ground" that does not impact the owners' commute time but drastically reduces the totality of employee commute times. The owners are hesitant because they believe that proximity to clients (SV proper) is crucial in terms of business development and contract procurement, despite nearly all interactions being made over phone and email. HN community, we implore you, what hard evidence can we provide to business owners that the success of their business is directly related to the happiness of their employees? What arguments can we make to convince the owners that their business does not rely on an office in the same general zip code as their perspective employees? |
Moving business addresses is not trivial, and real estate in S. San Jose, though also insanely expensive, is going to be substantially cheaper than mid-peninsula. Not sure adding the equivalent of one FTE in increased rent (which is how some may see it) is going to sell to your founders, though if you're going to make the case, point out they're already burning more than one full-time equivalent in added commute times.
Your curtailed ability to socialize can be seen as a feature, not a bug, even if that's pretty cynical. A lot of people are also what you might call "pathological commuters" whereby they enjoy staring at brake lights on the 101, which gives them what they consider a respite from chaotic home and work environments, and a chance to listen to radio or books on tape, or catch up on phone calls. I'd say the evidence lends itself pretty strongly that that's the kind of people you're working for.
Unless you've already asked and asked and the owners are getting testy from all the asking, try putting together a proposal as a group effort. Get lots of colleagues and coworkers to put their names on the proposal, and focus on the owners' upside and how you've figured out all the details- new location can be up in running by such date, new address is bigger and cheaper and in a better location, etc.
In the end though, it's their company, and it's your life, and the former seldom budges an inch for the latter.