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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.
We still commute because the Baby Boomer generation is still disproportionately represented in the C level positions. They grew up in an era where you had to physically see a worker to know they were actually working. If you did not see them, then they must be slacking. Even those who are somewhat technologically savvy grew up with that ingrained in how management worked. Even some of the early Gen-Xers, those in their early fifties now, picked up this attitude just because they started working in a time before computers were so pervasive.
I think you will see this change as the later Gen-Xers and millennials begin to take management positions, but with Gen-X likely being the first generation that will not be able to retire (in general) this may be a long time coming
Jeers at the tech industry aside, work worthy of being called such is a local phenomenon that requires your physical presence.
If you can work from home you can be replaced by someone who costs way less to employ because they live somewhere cheaper.
Working at home is what has kept me at this job when I'd think of looking elsewhere. It's one of the main perks of the gig.
I exclusively telecommuted to a job in another state for a year and a half and set foot in the office once during that period. There were several challenges. First everyone else was in the office which inhibited my ability to navigate political currents. I was cut out of a lot of that political back and forth. I am naturally an introvert, but frankly, the The Oatmeal nails the good, bad and ugly of telecommuting. I basically felt like a hermit and socially isolated. I began to get cabin fever after several months and ultimately decided for my mental health, I needed to start going into the office again. We do still have some telecommuting flexibility at my new job, but it's a once-in-a-while-because-the-plumber-is-coming kind of thing. In short, telecommuting is great and should be part of every employers tool-set, but so should meeting together in an office. It is often more efficient for collaborative tasks just as sequestering yourself at home can be. Blanket bans and usage of exclusively one style of work or the other are short sighted, limiting and ultimately unhealthy. You have to do both every once in a while.
During my time at Big Blue (prior to working from home being acceptable) we tried convincing our manager to let everyone on our team to work from home with the exception of one person rotating through the team to come in and be available for things we couldn't do remotely (swap cables, rack equipment, etc.) We were told by our manager that he could go to his manager and present the idea, but that we had to keep in mind if we were saying that our job could be done from anywhere in the world that it would become obvious to upper management that it could be done from ANYWHERE in the world....
As it happened not long after I left they outsourced almost every job anyway. So kind of surprising they later allowed people to work from home and then reversed it again.
ever since audiobooks were invented, my commute has been the high point of my day.
I don't do audiobooks, but my car stereo is by far my best quality audio equipment, and the car is the only place I can listen to music at a decent volume without pissing someone off. I enjoy my (admittedly short 25 minute) commute, and I prefer leaving the house to work. I have a very clear mental distinction between work mode and relax mode, and the commute makes a nice transition between the two.
Oh no... it's the future.
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.
I've seen this happen at HP, then again at Xerox. Many large companies starting doing this, particularly once Yahoo started doing it. It's usually combined with revamping the workspace into a "collborative" work environment (you know, the ones where they don't allow any offices or cube walls....one big open space so that everyone can collaborate.....what a load of shit that is).
The REAL reason they force folks back into the new office is:
A) they know people have come to love working from home, and many will not be able to handle a long commute after working from home for years, so they'll quit....which is much cheaper than laying them off (and paying severance) or even firing them (and potentially paying unemployment)
B) those folks who stay can now be squeezed into a smaller footprint because they've removed all the bulky cubes and offices, thus less real estate costs because they've reduced the amount of square footage they're occupying.
This is a finance exercise pure and simple.
In my experience, the Peter Principle is rooted in the culture of most companies. Promotions happen only by shifting people from production to management and the best and most productive workers are also often the worst manager.
We decided that we're better off by creating an "expert" promotion line for our technical workers where their promotion path keeps them in the technical area and away from management, their line leading to them shifting from everyday jobs to being the (now also official) go-to guys for problem or internal consultants.
That way we keep them in their technical line, can benefit from their advanced and often unique knowledge, keep them from turning from brilliant engineers to mediocre managers, and they have a career line ahead of them that isn't a dead end because they're "only" productive instead of managing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I prefer leaving the house to work. I have a very clear mental distinction between work mode and relax mode, and the commute makes a nice transition between the two.
I've known people with a similar attitude who solved it by adding a fake "commute" to their working from home. They'd get ready for work, hop in the car and drive around for 5-10 minutes. Or go pick up something from Starbucks. Something that was a similar "and now it is time to work" flag.
That doesn't explain why many companies tried telecommuting, found the results disappointing, and went back to requiring everyone to come to the office.
This seems far more likely to be the real explanation. Remote working has benefits, sometimes for both employer and employee, but it also has costs and it's possible that when companies that do it succeed it is despite the remote work rather than because of it.
The interesting questions IMHO are why some organisations seem to do much better with a lot of remote work than others. Is it about the nature of the organisation's work, so maybe some things are more amenable to being done remotely? Is it about the staff hired and their work ethic? Is it that some stages in a task require a lot of interaction that is more effective with everyone in the same place but other stages can be done just as well or even better from a distance and with fewer interruptions? Is it a case of needing the right processes and communication tools to support remote working, which some organisations have provided where others have not?
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Err... why an audio book? If you cannot make your computer read any book to you, then you have to hand back your geek card.
Have you ever listened to a real audiobook, Anonymous Coward? They're presented by skilled actors who manage the accents and cadence of the book.
Listening to a computer-read audio book is like hearing a Cylon get directions from the Imperious Leader back in1978,
There are some companies that train leaders: GE, AT&T, McDonalds.
The military puts a lot of effort into leadership training. One of their best techniques is the "reaction course". I remember doing this at Marine OCS. You take a squad of a dozen Marines, pick one guy to be the leader, and then give them a task such as moving a 55 gal drum across a 15 foot ditch in 10 minutes, using some random lumber and rope. A dozen people are too many to manage directly, so the leader needs to delegate and coordinate. After a few dozen scenarios, it becomes clear who can lead and who can't.
It is much more than just a perception. Some people will be more productive when telecommuting. Many more will see their productivity drop, in some cases to zero.
And you know this how? The only study I've seen on the subject which measured the productivity of the same workers at work and then while telecommuting showed that they were all much more productive while telecommuting, but their managers disliked it because they felt they didn't have the level of control over the employee that they did when they were in the office.
I think for many companies, that's the sticking factor. They consider their employees more like serfs, and they don't want them out where they can control their own workday no matter how much more work they get done as as result.
That sounds silly to people who have never worked from home, but it is such a good idea. I worked from home for a few years, and while it sounds great to roll out of bed in your PJs, log in, and be at work, there is a real-world downside. Work never ends. Work stress comes home. I go from work, to coming home and playing a video game -- but IM is still online. Other people in other time zones are still IMing me. I felt *guilty* having fun on my home computer, almost like I should be working. It was so easy for the boss to ask a quick favor while I'm at home, or tempting to read work email to make Monday morning easier. But then that amount of work becomes an expectation. So you have to work harder and harder to keep up. It is a bad situation.
Actually so far the results are pretty convincing. Mostly because our top echelons have no problem bumping people back down that don't perform, and people actually ask to be returned to their previous positions if they notice that their performance isn't up to speed.
This is mostly due to the way our payment system works, which is quite heavily tied to your performance. A poorly performing team manager can go home with considerably less money than a very well performing person working under him. So your incentive isn't to "climb the ladder" but to do your job well and perform at or above the required level.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.