[Spooky23]

It’s not that simple - it’s a stupid control thing.

When you have these top down mandates with measurements, now you’re introducing new surveillance and metrics that are both disruptive and counter-productive.

I’m not a remote zealot - I probably average two days a week, sometimes half days. I live a 20 minute walk/5 minute drive from work in a central business district. I’m a senior leader with hundreds of employees.

Personally, I’d prefer smaller offices with hotel space and generously equipped collaboration space. Require that people live or be available at regional hubs monthly or quarterly. My aunt had an arrangement like this for a airline in the late 90s - they setup a router and PC in her basement and would have meeting or two a month at the office.

For me, top down dictates that remove business unit autonomy and don’t understand reality are always a net negative. WFH flexibility reduced sick and family sick absences by 60%. People who’d take an hour off to go to the doctor now take a half day.

Now, I have two employees reporting on this stuff instead of doing something productive. So I’m losing thousands of man-hours to absences and spending 3000-4000 more to figure out how many asses are in chairs in dozens of facilties across the world. Managing professionals like fast food employees is dumb. The only winners are the CRE and banking people.

[cool_dude85]

>Personally, I’d prefer smaller offices with hotel space and generously equipped collaboration space.

Doesn't everyone, you know, hate this kind of stuff? I know I do.

[ajmurmann]

I had a lot of people excited about having a space where we could deliberately meet for collaboration. Even more so about bringing everyone into a shared space for a week. However, the collaboration spaces never worked out in practice because you were always missing someone and now had to call in to a Zoom meeting regardless. This lead to the thing quickly dying because there so little was real value from coming in. That might be a company culture thing one could correct though.

[pxc]

It's also potentially a team size issue. If you have small teams of 2-3 people, you can more easily have enough meet for useful collaboration.

[monknomo]

I don't know, the hotel+collab spaces is pretty good (from my perspective) when you come into the office once or twice a month and have a group of people you want to meet with and an agenda you want to accomplish.

For more mundane day-to-day work I don't care for it, but I think it can be a handy supplement to mostly remote work.

[Spooky23]

People hate reporting to work every day where you need to fight for a chair. If you're WFH, you can gather adhoc, do your thing with the team and get out.

[snotrockets]

Fast food employees are professionals as well (have you ever worked a fast food job? It's hard, and requires practice to excel at)

[redwall_hp]

That's not what professional means. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Profession

Even skilled laborers, like plumbers and electricians, are not in a profession. They're members of a trade.

[hotnfresh]

“Professional” has a meaning in the context of employment that’s not just “good at a thing that is not easy”.