Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Why Do We Still Commute? (citylab.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Over the last year, many companies have ended their liberal work-from-home policies. Firms like IBM, Honeywell, and Aetna joined a long list of others that have deemed it more profitable to force employees to commute to the city and work in a central office than give them the flexibility to work where they want. It wasn't supposed to be this way. In 1975, when personal computers were little more than glorified calculators for geeks and the Internet was an obscure project being developed by the United States government, Macrae, an influential journalist for The Economist who earned a reputation for clairvoyant prophesies -- including the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Japan -- made a radical prediction about how information technology would soon transform our lives. Macrae foretold the exact path and timeline that computers would take over the business world and then become a fixture of every American home. But he didn't stop there. The spread of this machine, he argued, would fundamentally change the economics of how most of us work. Once workers could communicate with their colleagues through instant messages and video chat, he reasoned, there would be little coherent purpose to trudge long distances to work side by side in centrally located office spaces.
From my experience, the worst workers are in management.
Well, the post is correct. For most of us the answer to why we still commute is buried in organizational resistance to change.
Old world management philosophies, equating occupied chairs and parking spaces with productivity, not wishing to let go of the ability to micromanage, etc...
Yeah, honestly I think there are a couple of types of people who think that there's no reason to actually come into the office:
* Young people severely lacking in experience.
* People who have jobs that require no physical presence, and who can work without much collaboration (email and IM are generally sufficient), and assume everyone's job is like that.
For the second item, I'm sure I'll get some people yelling at me saying, "I'm a programmer, and I collaborate all day long! There are a bunch of other programmers working on my project, and we're constantly sending IMs back and forth. We even do Hangouts." Yeah, but still, the information you get from collaboration is largely that: information. You get the information you need, and then you can go on doing fairly isolated work.
There's something else that happens when you get a bunch of people in a room together, where you can read body language, facial expressions, and tone of voice. A person's physical presence changes things. There are times where I'm having an IM or even phone conversation with someone, and the message just isn't getting across, and so I go and walk over to their office. The direct, face-to-face communication allows for something that just doesn't happen over phone or video chat. In person brainstorming sessions can be more productive than conference calls. It might be purely psychological, but if so, the psychological effect is real and not to be discounted.
Some jobs don't need that. A lot of jobs don't need that all the time, every day. But for some jobs, it's important that it happens.
Mod parent up!
Sure. Let's do that. You have never been in management, have you?
Let's say you have four workers. Let's say these employees work in the same department. Let's apply your idea. Here are the rules:
1) Any two employees will never do exactly the same job. You can' just fire the bad ones because then someone else needs to be trained to do that job. 2) Even if everyone is cross-trained to do everyone else's job employees will ALWAYS seek to specialized in order to invoke rule number 1. 3) If you manage to get everyone to document every aspect of their jobs so that everyone is performing the same way, then upper management will always seek to trim extra workers. If you as a manager have four workers doing the same thing AND those workers have vacation days that means you can operate with three workers. Need to justify keeping an employee? Invoke rule number 1. 4) It is in the best interest of every manager to expand his or her group and scope at every opportunity. If you have a $25k budget you need a $30k budget. If you have four workers you need six. You need a bigger budget and more people because... rule number 1.
As a manager, just keeping the budget and the people you have is a struggle. Firing a marginally underperforming worker constitutes insanity. Cross-training for efficiency is a form of suicide. Smart employees know this. Lazy employees know that the bare minimum they need to do is keep people from complaining to their boss's boss and they probably have a job for life.
'The Economy' is a giant Ponzi scheme whose most pitiable suckers are the youngest among us and the yet-unborn.