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Working in the office 5 days/week to build company culture is a myth: PwC report

166 points by ivewonyoung 2y ago

gamesbrainiac 2y ago
"Office culture" has been used as an excuse for many bad decisions for a very long time.
- downrightmike 2y ago
  Cube Crawls is a thing because of culture
- majke 2y ago
  Dont forget the invention of open spaces! Open spaces is proven to be inferior to closed offices, but cost cutting and flexibility in layout is most important for HR.
SV_BubbleTime 2y ago
Let me know when you can find a work from home advocate that admits it is rife with abuse. Until then, it all sounds like game to me.
- crummy 2y ago
  Like, people working multiple jobs at once? Doesn't that become pretty obvious?
  - mozman 2y ago
    I worked 4 remote jobs for years long ago - I found companies with the same problem and resold my work. I probably put in 60-80 hours a week but made a killing. Now ADP and similar companies offer monitoring services to HR to weed these people out. You might get caught now.
- iends 2y ago
  You’re right. I work far more from home on average. When I worked from the office I had so many interruptions. We’d also take Wednesday and Friday afternoons to play table-top games. There was table tennis and foosball. Sometimes we’d all go out for lunch and it’d take 60-90 minutes. Now I just eat lunch at my computer, I don’t table top game or socialize. I just code and zoom all day. The abuse is real, but since I’m not commuting it’s a great trade off of an hour wasted each way.
  - robwwilliams 2y ago
    What a great response. And don‘t forget the 2 x 30 minute commute you converted to a solid hour of real work. Yes, the abuse is real ;-)
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    It might be workplace specific. Most co-workers I know who went remote are 25-50% as productive as before. Only one or two did I suspect had a 2nd job. The rest were spending most of their workdays hiking, sailing, or playing with their kids. Given the choice, I would rather lead an in office team 10/10 times.
    - theideaofcoffee 2y ago
      Anecdote for exactly the other side: most co-workers I know who went remote are 50% more productive as before. They don’t have to waste their preciously short lives in pointless office drama, pointless meetings that could have been emails, waste their lives in cars commuting to a soulless office complex because an incompetent manager thinks that butts-in-seat time makes for a productive workforce. I would 100% lead a full remote team, and have done so, and will never go back.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        Im not surprised. Like I said, it is likely workplace specific based on culture, management, and hiring. Some places you can coast for years working 10 hours a week.
- MBCook 2y ago
  Yeah, some will. If managers are incapable of detecting and handling that unless people are in their eye line in the office then the company has bigger problems. I don’t think remote work encourages bad behavior on the whole. It may make what was already happening more obvious. But I think there are few good workers who become bad when remote. And they can stay in the office. I think it makes poor management more obvious and bad techniques like enforcing butts-in-seats as a your main way of enforcing productivity. I’ve seen plenty of people in my career do nothing or next to nothing all day. But they were in their seat clicking on things or typing so they must be “productive”. Instead of forcing everyone to be in office, how about getting better managers through training or hiring?
- shahbaby 2y ago
  Do you want to optimize for output or optics? If output, WFH. If optics, WFO. If WFH is being abused then that's a problem with who you're hiring.
  - mozman 2y ago
    Comment of the year. Know your requirements and find a match.
- FridgeSeal 2y ago
  What are you calling abuse? Not showing up for “company mandated fun time o’clock”? Also, I hate to break it to you, but the employees that are “genuinely” abusing WFH and shirking work responsibilities are doing the same thing in the office.
  - hunter-gatherer 2y ago
    Absolutely. In the WFH vs Office debate people seem to forget that time-abusing employees always exsisted. I've had coworkers at past jobs who sat next to me and nobody on the team coukd come up with anything they did for a year besides browse the internet and plan vacations.
- WoodenChair 2y ago
  Anecdotally, knowing many people that work from home, there is definitely abuse of the system. And those people are ruining it for the rest of us! But it would be absurd to think that if everyone was really more productive at-home, companies would still be forcing everyone back in the office. I don't believe the conspiracies—most workplaces really do want collaboration and productivity. The only bit I'll buy is that some are doing it as a form of soft layoffs. But I find it hard to believe that every company doing this would act against its own interests in terms of productivity.
  - 000ooo000 2y ago
    >But I find it hard to believe that every company doing this would act against its own interests in terms of productivity Ever worked in a company?
    - WoodenChair 2y ago
      Are you actually going to reply to the substance of my comment or just do a Reddit like sarcastic reply? Yes, I am middle age and have worked for multiple companies. I've seen co-workers, friends, and even family abuse the opportunity to work from home. Which as I said is unfortunate because it hurts everyone who uses it wisely. Show me or gp that there is no evidence of abuse. Anecdotally, I've seen it.
      - ITB 2y ago
        I think your original comment is entirely valid. It seems anyone who questions WFH gets downvoted. I’m involved with several startups, and I can assure you there are clear advantages to people spending time together. WFH or not, people meeting and strategizing in person is incredibly valuable. I also think people need to make a better distinction between remote and distributed teams. Because of the above opportunity to meet in person from time to time, and also because of the additional communication challenges of a distributed team with multiple time zones. There’s an assumption that all work can be perfectly partitioned and assigned to people. But more often than not, innovation requires constant exploration of ideas and negotiation of resources being invested. more cohesive teams are way more likely to innovate.
- bayarearefugee 2y ago
  You'll have to define "abuse" more concretely for this to have any meaning. Do most knowledge workers actually put in exactly 8 full hours a day on work tasks working from home? Probably not. But as a professional software developer since the 1990s the same was true for myself and virtually everyone I know when I worked in an office. The way I 'waste' time is different now, but arguably a lot better (eg. me taking a nap just before or just after lunch improves my productivity in the afternoon a lot more than me fucking off on slashdot for extended periods of time in the office did back in the day.) (And whether or not this not-directly-related-to-work downtime is really a time waste is extremely debatable, as switching thorny problems into the subconscious realm often turns out to be one of the best ways to actually power through them in my experience).
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    What I consider abuse is Lying and padding resources. I know people who will turn an 8 hour task into a 40 hour task, and spend the difference hiking. The other grift is when people have multiple projects to tell each manager that the workload is high on the other project right now.
    - redserk 2y ago
      This isn’t an exclusively remote problem though. This happens in-office, too. It’s extremely easy to pad a week with meetings, “I’m checking/organizing my email”, “I need to double check code from last week”, etc… if you wanted to burn time. Sure the remote worker has the opportunity to go hiking, but the business impact is the same. Except at least the hiking wastes less time from others.
      - s1artibartfast 2y ago
        Sure, lots of people waste time in office too. I just see it a lot worse from friends and colleges who are hybrid and WFH.
        kkfx 2y ago
- BigParm 2y ago
  [flagged]
- icehawk 2y ago
  Define "abuse" first. Bonus if you add how its different from all the abuse you can do when working in an office. (I'll define "abuse" in my post after you define yours, I asked you first.)
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
Everyone knows this is a way to do a silent layoff without a WARN notice or severance. Or a way to discriminate against older workers with families, who don’t live in city cores. Everything else used to justify RTO policies is a lie.
flappyeagle 2y ago
No “research” that PwC publishes is worth the digital ink it’s printed on. It’s motivated by whoever is paying them to get the result that they want Whether you are into remote work or not, this is meaningless
- MBCook 2y ago
  That’s why I’m surprised to see this. If this was bunk shouldn’t this reinforce what their clients what to hear?
  - bluGill 2y ago
    Which clients? Generally you should have several with different interests.
  - hammock 2y ago
    This is an internally-funded whitepaper. PWC accounting and consulting practices are both historically built on lots of travel to client sites. If they can make excuses to travel less, they can charge the same amount for their services but save a LOT of money on flights, hotels and meals. (just an idea)
    - jdlshore 2y ago
      Eh, unlikely. Consultancies usually charge for travel and expenses (or a per diem).
      - Attummm 2y ago
        The thought process is as follows: The customer seems satisfied with the overall cost.But if travel expenses could be lowered, we have the opportunity to reduce the bill slightly while increasing our profit margin. Thus, it can be construed as a win-win.
        jdlshore 2y ago
thelastparadise 2y ago
I definitely trust PwC on matters of "culture."
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
karaterobot 2y ago
It seems a consultancy has done some research, only to discover that the thing their customers want to be true is true. What a novel development! I'd always understood that hybrid was the worst of both worlds. Companies still have to pay for real estate, can't recruit from neighboring cities, let alone internationally, and employees have to commute to work and live in expensive cities, just so they can work in loud offices and be micromanaged.
- repeekad 2y ago
  Hybrid is exclusively a stop gap to stop people for quitting, no company wants to pay for an office downtown used 2-3 out of 7 days a week, S.F. vacancy rates seem to be leveling off and not improving around 40% (officially)
- tyre 2y ago
  We do hybrid with people in office 3-4 days of the week (and no one on Friday.) Feels like a good balance. As a manager, it’s absolutely not to micromanage. People build bonds in person in a different way than online. I can give reasons why that helps with work, but also it’s nice to be around humans? As for commute, NYC subways are great (or at least as good as America’s got…). We have people in NJ, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Everything has trade-offs, but it’s common for engineers to mention in the interview process that they’re looking for something at least partly in person.
  - dmitrygr 2y ago
    > As a manager [...] it’s nice to be around humans? And there is your bias
    - tyre 2y ago
      when your ellipsis elides whole sentences and glues together phrases that weren’t tied together in text, that’s bad faith
  - viraptor 2y ago
    > People build bonds in person in a different way than online I see you said "different", which I agree with. But you didn't say "better" - and I do feel that's a mix that goes both sides.
martin_henk 2y ago
WFH only is low quality experience for me. No close bonding. Just zoom calls. Hybrid/Flex is the way to go I think. No need to be in the office 100%, but show up if you can.
- the_gorilla 2y ago
  I can't imagine having to get close bonding from the office. One of the benefits of WFH is that you spend less time around people who happen to get paid at the same job as you, less time commuting, and more time with people you choose to be around.
  - cflewis 2y ago
    I think most people would see not interacting with coworkers in any sociable way aside from video conferences as a net negative. You can’t form relationships that way. I think this is a key difference between people in this conundrum: some WFH advocates just see no value in building relationships with workers past the screen. It just doesn’t matter to them at some core level, and they don’t understand why it does for others (who I think are the silent majority). You have more time for relationships outside of work, but for myself I find it much easier to work with others if I have some meaningful concept of who they are, and they have some meaningful concept of who I am.
    - 46Bit 2y ago
      > You can’t form relationships that way Plenty of millenials and Gen Z can We've been building groups online ever since we were little
      - hanniabu 2y ago
        They think they can, but it's not the same
        the_gorilla 2y ago
        It's primarily some mental blocker in the old that prevents them from connecting things online to their real-life counterparts. It's like being illiterate and insisting that no one else can read those strange symbols. I'll offer in advance that younger people need to learn to separate the two sometimes.
j45 2y ago
Default being remote or in person doesn't create company culture. Businesses in person or remote both have to learn to do what it takes to build company culture.
Swizec 2y ago
Let me share some recent experience. After 4 years of working remote, I changed to a new company that’s doing hybrid. Didn’t need to move or anything like that. The commute sucks just by virtue of existing. You can’t beat the ease of swapping laptops. But I feel more onboarded into the company after a month of hybrid than I did after maybe 6 months at the old job. Kvetching over lunch is just nice. Getting to hear about the aches and pains of the codebase and various processes without having to schedule a bunch of 1on1s and polluting my calendar with meetings is fantastic. It’s my job to solve these things systemically and just being around to see the painpoints when people drop their guard and don’t feel like their words are recorded forever in a slack channel is freaking amazing. It makes my job so much easier and less forced. The best part is that my day is no longer full of meetings because we can resolve a lot of things informally. And yes I absolutely need the flexibility to work from home when it’s time for heads down focus mode.
- downrightmike 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - lazide 2y ago
    So, apparently, do you?
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  It sounds like you started very recently. I would be interested in your thoughts after working like this for 6 months - a year.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- Agingcoder 2y ago
  I second this.
ergonaught 2y ago
Weird comments. There's no major reported difference between hybrid and fully on-site in most categories, and the only thing they say about culture is that "[90%] of hybrid employees say that the culture at their companies promotes community, collaboration, inclusion and belonging", without bothering to report the statistic for fully on-site or fully remote employees. That may support their assertion ("the idea that being on-site all day every day is necessary to establish and sustain a strong culture is a myth"), but if the other categories were in the same range as with the other questions, it's not really saying much more than that.
anonymysz 2y ago
Apologies for the throwaway account, I just don't want this comment 'on the record': I've worked nearly 100% from home for the last 5 years. My wife works for a major bank, and has had a hybrid work arrangement for all that time. Employees there are required to spend 5 days in the office per fortnight. This requirement is strictly enforced. For whatever reason, we spend about 3 months of every year battling viruses that spread around her office. Every few months someone brings COVID to her office. Flu season is an absolute nightmare. I'm not sure what has changed in the wider human biome, but I don't remember respiratory viruses being something I needed to worry about prior to COVID. I'd only ever had the flu once before in my life, but now we get it multiple times a year. I've had three severe respiratory viruses this year alone, and I'm a healthy, fit, non-immunocompromised person. Anecdotally, other people are experiencing the same thing. Is this something that affects other people here?
- stackghost 2y ago
  I get a flu and COVID vaccine once a year and essentially never get anything worse than a cold. I have young school-aged kids, and kids are cesspools of filth and pestilence.
- jiggawatts 2y ago
  Yes, there was a “rebound” effect where isolation during COVID reduced herd immunity to other respiratory viruses. When people were brought back into close contact, the result was a “speed run” through three years of viruses in the space of one year. It’s a bit more complex than that but you get the gist.
  - s1artibartfast 2y ago
    I think the majority of the effect is that and confirmation bias, but I think there could be some marginal effect. Im hybrid with days in office counted and a performance consideration. When I have used by WFH days then get sick, I 100% take it to the office. I dont know if this surpasses the effect of fewer people in the office, but I think it is possible.
  - laserlight 2y ago
quacked 2y ago
I think that the adverse effects of allowing WFH pale in comparison to moving up and down the spectrum of strengths of companies within certain industries, to the point that WFH/WFO seems like an irrelevant question unless you're currently at the top of your industry. Here's my example: I work in the space industry, and the difference between SpaceX and every other vehicle provider is insane. The speed, quality, and average performance of people working within SpaceX's culture cannot be matched by anyone else flying hardware right now. It's gotten to the point where spaceflight feels like an elaborate farce, or a welfare program for aerospace engineers, unless you're working on a SpaceX project. I'm almost embarrassed to collect a paycheck, and I'm considered a pretty decently high performer at my own company. So--if my company chooses to WFH or WFO, so what? Maybe we lose some competitive edge with WFH, but all the employees are happier and retention may improve a little bit. We're not going to compete with SpaceX. We don't have the intellect or experience necessary. My guess is that this is how it is across all industries. There are a handful of companies competing for the "top dog" spot, and at these companies, WFO/WFH is a relevant question. If WFH causes you to lose competitive edge, it's worth disallowing in favor of retaining only hustlers who are willing to go for the throat and win, and thus either make insane profits or redefine technological standards for the next decade. For most of the other companies within the industry, it doesn't matter. You're not the top dog, and your corporation doesn't have the DNA necessary to get there. By definition 50% of employees are worse than the median quality employee, and yet they're still employed; how many are at your company? You may as well allow WFH to keep your people happy. Sure, you can eke out another 5-30% performance increase by mandating them back to the office, and that's the equivalent of 0.001% performance increase at whatever company is currently truly dominating in your industry. Is it worth it? Life is short.
- thfuran 2y ago
  The notion that a 25% across the board performance increase isn't a huge deal just because supposedly there's some other company in the same industry that's better makes no sense.
  - quacked 2y ago
    Sorry, I should have been more specific in my last paragraph. I was talking about individual employee performance, not an across-the-board increase in performance across all company metrics like gross profit, etc. A 25% across the board performance increase would be a huge deal. If you know someone at work that doesn't really make much of a difference, there's not rally a big difference between him at 100% capacity and him at 70% capacity. Either way, he's not affecting the company baseline that much. That's how I feel about most companies I've interacted with so far. From what I've seen, your average lifer at a subcontractor for NASA doing 30% better on his monthly performance is about the same as your average SpaceXer doing 0.001% better.
tapanjk 2y ago
Research shows us statistical trends but what we care about most is what works for us. That can be answered only by an individual. In my case, I went from "hurray! work from home!" at the start of Covid lock-downs, to "I miss the white-board discussions at office". Fortunately, the tech industry is now large and diverse enough that you can find work that suites your style.
- iancmceachern 2y ago
  This is the key thing for employers to understand. Be flexible to your employees style, and you'll have an easier time attracting and keeping happier , better performing employees. The employees desired style is what matters, not the employers.
sahmeepee 2y ago
> These may seem like marginal differences Yep. A difference of a couple of percentage points even with a sample size of 20,000 is tiny. While they have taken it to mean that hybrid is "better" than in-office, I would take it to mean that they are essentially identical across the breadth of the survey. For your particular industry or organisation there may be significant variation, but you'll need to find that out for yourself.
animal531 2y ago
What employers haven't considered is that when employees come in they spend the majority of time with each other. That means that the culture they are building is one of us against them, where them is management and the upper echelons of the company (or any other group that doesn't seem to have their best interest at heart). Once they start working from home they are effectively isolated and not spending that time with each other. So I think we could argue that working from home is working in favour of the employer.
MichaelRo 2y ago
To the people complaining that they can't make friends or maintain meaningful relationships outside of physical in-office contact, I wanna point them out to the classic SNL sketch "Romano Tours" where Adam Sandler is a tourism operator selling trips to Italy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbwlC2B-BIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbwlC2B-BIg Me, I have zero issues bonding with remote colleagues but then again, I have local friends too with whom I connect mostly through telecommunication tools (like WhatsApp) and occasionally meet in person. Quoting from the SNL sketch, and I can't stress this enough: "If you are sad where you are and then you get on a plane to Italy, in Italy there will be the same sad you from before".
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
joeyagreco 2y ago
> The researchers found that over three-quarters of hybrid workers feel like they belong, compared to 74% of fully on-site workers lol
SarahParker 2y ago
[dead]

166 points by ivewonyoung 2y ago

gamesbrainiac 2y ago

"Office culture" has been used as an excuse for many bad decisions for a very long time.

downrightmike 2y ago
Cube Crawls is a thing because of culture
majke 2y ago
Dont forget the invention of open spaces! Open spaces is proven to be inferior to closed offices, but cost cutting and flexibility in layout is most important for HR.

SV_BubbleTime 2y ago

Let me know when you can find a work from home advocate that admits it is rife with abuse. Until then, it all sounds like game to me.

crummy 2y ago
Like, people working multiple jobs at once? Doesn't that become pretty obvious?
- mozman 2y ago
  I worked 4 remote jobs for years long ago - I found companies with the same problem and resold my work. I probably put in 60-80 hours a week but made a killing. Now ADP and similar companies offer monitoring services to HR to weed these people out. You might get caught now.
iends 2y ago
You’re right. I work far more from home on average. When I worked from the office I had so many interruptions. We’d also take Wednesday and Friday afternoons to play table-top games. There was table tennis and foosball. Sometimes we’d all go out for lunch and it’d take 60-90 minutes. Now I just eat lunch at my computer, I don’t table top game or socialize. I just code and zoom all day. The abuse is real, but since I’m not commuting it’s a great trade off of an hour wasted each way.
- robwwilliams 2y ago
  What a great response. And don‘t forget the 2 x 30 minute commute you converted to a solid hour of real work. Yes, the abuse is real ;-)
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  It might be workplace specific. Most co-workers I know who went remote are 25-50% as productive as before. Only one or two did I suspect had a 2nd job. The rest were spending most of their workdays hiking, sailing, or playing with their kids. Given the choice, I would rather lead an in office team 10/10 times.
  - theideaofcoffee 2y ago
    Anecdote for exactly the other side: most co-workers I know who went remote are 50% more productive as before. They don’t have to waste their preciously short lives in pointless office drama, pointless meetings that could have been emails, waste their lives in cars commuting to a soulless office complex because an incompetent manager thinks that butts-in-seat time makes for a productive workforce. I would 100% lead a full remote team, and have done so, and will never go back.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Im not surprised. Like I said, it is likely workplace specific based on culture, management, and hiring. Some places you can coast for years working 10 hours a week.
MBCook 2y ago
Yeah, some will. If managers are incapable of detecting and handling that unless people are in their eye line in the office then the company has bigger problems. I don’t think remote work encourages bad behavior on the whole. It may make what was already happening more obvious. But I think there are few good workers who become bad when remote. And they can stay in the office. I think it makes poor management more obvious and bad techniques like enforcing butts-in-seats as a your main way of enforcing productivity. I’ve seen plenty of people in my career do nothing or next to nothing all day. But they were in their seat clicking on things or typing so they must be “productive”. Instead of forcing everyone to be in office, how about getting better managers through training or hiring?
shahbaby 2y ago
Do you want to optimize for output or optics? If output, WFH. If optics, WFO. If WFH is being abused then that's a problem with who you're hiring.
- mozman 2y ago
  Comment of the year. Know your requirements and find a match.
FridgeSeal 2y ago
What are you calling abuse? Not showing up for “company mandated fun time o’clock”? Also, I hate to break it to you, but the employees that are “genuinely” abusing WFH and shirking work responsibilities are doing the same thing in the office.
- hunter-gatherer 2y ago
  Absolutely. In the WFH vs Office debate people seem to forget that time-abusing employees always exsisted. I've had coworkers at past jobs who sat next to me and nobody on the team coukd come up with anything they did for a year besides browse the internet and plan vacations.
WoodenChair 2y ago
Anecdotally, knowing many people that work from home, there is definitely abuse of the system. And those people are ruining it for the rest of us! But it would be absurd to think that if everyone was really more productive at-home, companies would still be forcing everyone back in the office. I don't believe the conspiracies—most workplaces really do want collaboration and productivity. The only bit I'll buy is that some are doing it as a form of soft layoffs. But I find it hard to believe that every company doing this would act against its own interests in terms of productivity.
- 000ooo000 2y ago
  >But I find it hard to believe that every company doing this would act against its own interests in terms of productivity Ever worked in a company?
  - WoodenChair 2y ago
    Are you actually going to reply to the substance of my comment or just do a Reddit like sarcastic reply? Yes, I am middle age and have worked for multiple companies. I've seen co-workers, friends, and even family abuse the opportunity to work from home. Which as I said is unfortunate because it hurts everyone who uses it wisely. Show me or gp that there is no evidence of abuse. Anecdotally, I've seen it.
    - ITB 2y ago
      I think your original comment is entirely valid. It seems anyone who questions WFH gets downvoted. I’m involved with several startups, and I can assure you there are clear advantages to people spending time together. WFH or not, people meeting and strategizing in person is incredibly valuable. I also think people need to make a better distinction between remote and distributed teams. Because of the above opportunity to meet in person from time to time, and also because of the additional communication challenges of a distributed team with multiple time zones. There’s an assumption that all work can be perfectly partitioned and assigned to people. But more often than not, innovation requires constant exploration of ideas and negotiation of resources being invested. more cohesive teams are way more likely to innovate.
bayarearefugee 2y ago
You'll have to define "abuse" more concretely for this to have any meaning. Do most knowledge workers actually put in exactly 8 full hours a day on work tasks working from home? Probably not. But as a professional software developer since the 1990s the same was true for myself and virtually everyone I know when I worked in an office. The way I 'waste' time is different now, but arguably a lot better (eg. me taking a nap just before or just after lunch improves my productivity in the afternoon a lot more than me fucking off on slashdot for extended periods of time in the office did back in the day.) (And whether or not this not-directly-related-to-work downtime is really a time waste is extremely debatable, as switching thorny problems into the subconscious realm often turns out to be one of the best ways to actually power through them in my experience).
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  What I consider abuse is Lying and padding resources. I know people who will turn an 8 hour task into a 40 hour task, and spend the difference hiking. The other grift is when people have multiple projects to tell each manager that the workload is high on the other project right now.
  - redserk 2y ago
    This isn’t an exclusively remote problem though. This happens in-office, too. It’s extremely easy to pad a week with meetings, “I’m checking/organizing my email”, “I need to double check code from last week”, etc… if you wanted to burn time. Sure the remote worker has the opportunity to go hiking, but the business impact is the same. Except at least the hiking wastes less time from others.
    - s1artibartfast 2y ago
      Sure, lots of people waste time in office too. I just see it a lot worse from friends and colleges who are hybrid and WFH.
      - kkfx 2y ago
BigParm 2y ago
[flagged]
icehawk 2y ago
Define "abuse" first. Bonus if you add how its different from all the abuse you can do when working in an office. (I'll define "abuse" in my post after you define yours, I asked you first.)

blackeyeblitzar 2y ago

Everyone knows this is a way to do a silent layoff without a WARN notice or severance. Or a way to discriminate against older workers with families, who don’t live in city cores. Everything else used to justify RTO policies is a lie.

flappyeagle 2y ago

No “research” that PwC publishes is worth the digital ink it’s printed on. It’s motivated by whoever is paying them to get the result that they want Whether you are into remote work or not, this is meaningless

MBCook 2y ago
That’s why I’m surprised to see this. If this was bunk shouldn’t this reinforce what their clients what to hear?
- bluGill 2y ago
  Which clients? Generally you should have several with different interests.
- hammock 2y ago
  This is an internally-funded whitepaper. PWC accounting and consulting practices are both historically built on lots of travel to client sites. If they can make excuses to travel less, they can charge the same amount for their services but save a LOT of money on flights, hotels and meals. (just an idea)
  - jdlshore 2y ago
    Eh, unlikely. Consultancies usually charge for travel and expenses (or a per diem).
    - Attummm 2y ago
      The thought process is as follows: The customer seems satisfied with the overall cost.But if travel expenses could be lowered, we have the opportunity to reduce the bill slightly while increasing our profit margin. Thus, it can be construed as a win-win.
      - jdlshore 2y ago

thelastparadise 2y ago

I definitely trust PwC on matters of "culture."

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

karaterobot 2y ago

It seems a consultancy has done some research, only to discover that the thing their customers want to be true is true. What a novel development! I'd always understood that hybrid was the worst of both worlds. Companies still have to pay for real estate, can't recruit from neighboring cities, let alone internationally, and employees have to commute to work and live in expensive cities, just so they can work in loud offices and be micromanaged.

repeekad 2y ago
Hybrid is exclusively a stop gap to stop people for quitting, no company wants to pay for an office downtown used 2-3 out of 7 days a week, S.F. vacancy rates seem to be leveling off and not improving around 40% (officially)
tyre 2y ago
We do hybrid with people in office 3-4 days of the week (and no one on Friday.) Feels like a good balance. As a manager, it’s absolutely not to micromanage. People build bonds in person in a different way than online. I can give reasons why that helps with work, but also it’s nice to be around humans? As for commute, NYC subways are great (or at least as good as America’s got…). We have people in NJ, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens. Everything has trade-offs, but it’s common for engineers to mention in the interview process that they’re looking for something at least partly in person.
- dmitrygr 2y ago
  > As a manager [...] it’s nice to be around humans? And there is your bias
  - tyre 2y ago
    when your ellipsis elides whole sentences and glues together phrases that weren’t tied together in text, that’s bad faith
- viraptor 2y ago
  > People build bonds in person in a different way than online I see you said "different", which I agree with. But you didn't say "better" - and I do feel that's a mix that goes both sides.

martin_henk 2y ago

WFH only is low quality experience for me. No close bonding. Just zoom calls. Hybrid/Flex is the way to go I think. No need to be in the office 100%, but show up if you can.

the_gorilla 2y ago
I can't imagine having to get close bonding from the office. One of the benefits of WFH is that you spend less time around people who happen to get paid at the same job as you, less time commuting, and more time with people you choose to be around.
- cflewis 2y ago
  I think most people would see not interacting with coworkers in any sociable way aside from video conferences as a net negative. You can’t form relationships that way. I think this is a key difference between people in this conundrum: some WFH advocates just see no value in building relationships with workers past the screen. It just doesn’t matter to them at some core level, and they don’t understand why it does for others (who I think are the silent majority). You have more time for relationships outside of work, but for myself I find it much easier to work with others if I have some meaningful concept of who they are, and they have some meaningful concept of who I am.
  - 46Bit 2y ago
    > You can’t form relationships that way Plenty of millenials and Gen Z can We've been building groups online ever since we were little
    - hanniabu 2y ago
      They think they can, but it's not the same
      - the_gorilla 2y ago
        It's primarily some mental blocker in the old that prevents them from connecting things online to their real-life counterparts. It's like being illiterate and insisting that no one else can read those strange symbols. I'll offer in advance that younger people need to learn to separate the two sometimes.

j45 2y ago

Default being remote or in person doesn't create company culture. Businesses in person or remote both have to learn to do what it takes to build company culture.

Swizec 2y ago

Let me share some recent experience. After 4 years of working remote, I changed to a new company that’s doing hybrid. Didn’t need to move or anything like that. The commute sucks just by virtue of existing. You can’t beat the ease of swapping laptops. But I feel more onboarded into the company after a month of hybrid than I did after maybe 6 months at the old job. Kvetching over lunch is just nice. Getting to hear about the aches and pains of the codebase and various processes without having to schedule a bunch of 1on1s and polluting my calendar with meetings is fantastic. It’s my job to solve these things systemically and just being around to see the painpoints when people drop their guard and don’t feel like their words are recorded forever in a slack channel is freaking amazing. It makes my job so much easier and less forced. The best part is that my day is no longer full of meetings because we can resolve a lot of things informally. And yes I absolutely need the flexibility to work from home when it’s time for heads down focus mode.

downrightmike 2y ago
[flagged]
- lazide 2y ago
  So, apparently, do you?
candiddevmike 2y ago
It sounds like you started very recently. I would be interested in your thoughts after working like this for 6 months - a year.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
Agingcoder 2y ago
I second this.

ergonaught 2y ago

Weird comments. There's no major reported difference between hybrid and fully on-site in most categories, and the only thing they say about culture is that "[90%] of hybrid employees say that the culture at their companies promotes community, collaboration, inclusion and belonging", without bothering to report the statistic for fully on-site or fully remote employees. That may support their assertion ("the idea that being on-site all day every day is necessary to establish and sustain a strong culture is a myth"), but if the other categories were in the same range as with the other questions, it's not really saying much more than that.

anonymysz 2y ago

Apologies for the throwaway account, I just don't want this comment 'on the record': I've worked nearly 100% from home for the last 5 years. My wife works for a major bank, and has had a hybrid work arrangement for all that time. Employees there are required to spend 5 days in the office per fortnight. This requirement is strictly enforced. For whatever reason, we spend about 3 months of every year battling viruses that spread around her office. Every few months someone brings COVID to her office. Flu season is an absolute nightmare. I'm not sure what has changed in the wider human biome, but I don't remember respiratory viruses being something I needed to worry about prior to COVID. I'd only ever had the flu once before in my life, but now we get it multiple times a year. I've had three severe respiratory viruses this year alone, and I'm a healthy, fit, non-immunocompromised person. Anecdotally, other people are experiencing the same thing. Is this something that affects other people here?

stackghost 2y ago
I get a flu and COVID vaccine once a year and essentially never get anything worse than a cold. I have young school-aged kids, and kids are cesspools of filth and pestilence.
jiggawatts 2y ago
Yes, there was a “rebound” effect where isolation during COVID reduced herd immunity to other respiratory viruses. When people were brought back into close contact, the result was a “speed run” through three years of viruses in the space of one year. It’s a bit more complex than that but you get the gist.
- s1artibartfast 2y ago
  I think the majority of the effect is that and confirmation bias, but I think there could be some marginal effect. Im hybrid with days in office counted and a performance consideration. When I have used by WFH days then get sick, I 100% take it to the office. I dont know if this surpasses the effect of fewer people in the office, but I think it is possible.
- laserlight 2y ago

quacked 2y ago

I think that the adverse effects of allowing WFH pale in comparison to moving up and down the spectrum of strengths of companies within certain industries, to the point that WFH/WFO seems like an irrelevant question unless you're currently at the top of your industry. Here's my example: I work in the space industry, and the difference between SpaceX and every other vehicle provider is insane. The speed, quality, and average performance of people working within SpaceX's culture cannot be matched by anyone else flying hardware right now. It's gotten to the point where spaceflight feels like an elaborate farce, or a welfare program for aerospace engineers, unless you're working on a SpaceX project. I'm almost embarrassed to collect a paycheck, and I'm considered a pretty decently high performer at my own company. So--if my company chooses to WFH or WFO, so what? Maybe we lose some competitive edge with WFH, but all the employees are happier and retention may improve a little bit. We're not going to compete with SpaceX. We don't have the intellect or experience necessary. My guess is that this is how it is across all industries. There are a handful of companies competing for the "top dog" spot, and at these companies, WFO/WFH is a relevant question. If WFH causes you to lose competitive edge, it's worth disallowing in favor of retaining only hustlers who are willing to go for the throat and win, and thus either make insane profits or redefine technological standards for the next decade. For most of the other companies within the industry, it doesn't matter. You're not the top dog, and your corporation doesn't have the DNA necessary to get there. By definition 50% of employees are worse than the median quality employee, and yet they're still employed; how many are at your company? You may as well allow WFH to keep your people happy. Sure, you can eke out another 5-30% performance increase by mandating them back to the office, and that's the equivalent of 0.001% performance increase at whatever company is currently truly dominating in your industry. Is it worth it? Life is short.

thfuran 2y ago
The notion that a 25% across the board performance increase isn't a huge deal just because supposedly there's some other company in the same industry that's better makes no sense.
- quacked 2y ago
  Sorry, I should have been more specific in my last paragraph. I was talking about individual employee performance, not an across-the-board increase in performance across all company metrics like gross profit, etc. A 25% across the board performance increase would be a huge deal. If you know someone at work that doesn't really make much of a difference, there's not rally a big difference between him at 100% capacity and him at 70% capacity. Either way, he's not affecting the company baseline that much. That's how I feel about most companies I've interacted with so far. From what I've seen, your average lifer at a subcontractor for NASA doing 30% better on his monthly performance is about the same as your average SpaceXer doing 0.001% better.

tapanjk 2y ago

Research shows us statistical trends but what we care about most is what works for us. That can be answered only by an individual. In my case, I went from "hurray! work from home!" at the start of Covid lock-downs, to "I miss the white-board discussions at office". Fortunately, the tech industry is now large and diverse enough that you can find work that suites your style.

iancmceachern 2y ago
This is the key thing for employers to understand. Be flexible to your employees style, and you'll have an easier time attracting and keeping happier , better performing employees. The employees desired style is what matters, not the employers.

sahmeepee 2y ago

> These may seem like marginal differences Yep. A difference of a couple of percentage points even with a sample size of 20,000 is tiny. While they have taken it to mean that hybrid is "better" than in-office, I would take it to mean that they are essentially identical across the breadth of the survey. For your particular industry or organisation there may be significant variation, but you'll need to find that out for yourself.

animal531 2y ago

What employers haven't considered is that when employees come in they spend the majority of time with each other. That means that the culture they are building is one of us against them, where them is management and the upper echelons of the company (or any other group that doesn't seem to have their best interest at heart). Once they start working from home they are effectively isolated and not spending that time with each other. So I think we could argue that working from home is working in favour of the employer.

MichaelRo 2y ago

To the people complaining that they can't make friends or maintain meaningful relationships outside of physical in-office contact, I wanna point them out to the classic SNL sketch "Romano Tours" where Adam Sandler is a tourism operator selling trips to Italy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbwlC2B-BIg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbwlC2B-BIg Me, I have zero issues bonding with remote colleagues but then again, I have local friends too with whom I connect mostly through telecommunication tools (like WhatsApp) and occasionally meet in person. Quoting from the SNL sketch, and I can't stress this enough: "If you are sad where you are and then you get on a plane to Italy, in Italy there will be the same sad you from before".

deleted 2y ago
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joeyagreco 2y ago

> The researchers found that over three-quarters of hybrid workers feel like they belong, compared to 74% of fully on-site workers lol

SarahParker 2y ago

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