I know this will vary a lot, so hypothetically let’s say you currently WFH/work remotely at least 3 days a week. Your commute to work takes an hour max (door to door) each way. If you were given the choice of a 4 day week working onsite, or a 5 day week WFH (or as many days as you’d like) for the same pay, which would you choose?
5 days WFH hands down.
And it’s not even close. Been wfh since 2014. “Life changing” is an understatement.
WFH. Unless I also get paid for commute time. Then, still WFH. Fuck traffic. This way, I’m neither dealing with it nor contributing to it.
I can go to the store or get some cleaning done on my lunch break, and I don’t have to spend time driving to do it. Fuck traffic.
I’m pretty good on commute time. It was a 5-10 minute drive or a 25-30 minute walk. I’ve stuck there for years because working for any of their competitors are in the area and I’d have to go straight to an hour each way minimum.
I wouldn’t mind going back in part time, if the hybrid office environment itself wasn’t so hostile to actually working, with sterile hot desks and everyone having loud overlapping conversations in their respective virtual meetings.Same for me. Time spend getting to work is basically also work time, which is usually not paid.
For a “fun” experiment just calculate how many hours you are on the way to work every year:
daily_travel_minutes * days_on_site / 60
Divide this by 8 to see how many holidays you get by switching to a fully/mostly remote job.
Don’t just count the actual journey time either - you have to factor in any extra time needed to get ready, parking, getting to or from the train and bus station, and any delays or traffic. If google maps tells you your commute takes 30 mins, it’s taking you 45 at least.
Yes, I described that unprecisely. You basically have to calc the difference between a full remote day and an on site day.
I would waste more time going to work four times in a week than I would get back by dropping Fridays. I’m never going back to the office.
Not even a question for me: full remote or bust. The extra day off wouldn’t make up for all the time wasted just from the pageantry of going to and being at an office.
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I work from home so that I don’t have to go to the office.
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I don’t have to go to the office.
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Let me work fewer days. 4x10 days would be nice. From home. So I don’t have to go to the office.
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I don’t want to go to the office just to be on Zoom all day anyway. It’s a waste of time, a waste of carbon, and a waste of company money on the office space.
I’m sensing you don’t like going to the office…
Yes it’s true. Why go to the office just to be on Zoom all day? I can do that at home and save myself some money. More importantly: I can do that from home and save myself the time it would take to drive to or from the office. Not to mention that I could be on Zoom all day from home and save myself the stress of driving around maniacs. Last, but not least, I could do it all from home and the company could save money by not paying for an office.
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4 days…WFH! 😅
Would you do that for a 20% pay cut?
I just did. I’m lucky that I can afford it. Although, because of tax, it affects my take home way less than 20%.
It’s wild really. I’m lucky, and most of my career I’ve been in the maximum tax bracket in my country. Also cause I’m lucky, I kept getting raises and bonuses, because I work damn hard and I’m pretty good at what I do.
The thing is though, I’m no better off in terms of my life quality for all that money. I live in a small semi-detached in a nowhere town. I’m incredibly grateful to have been able to buy rather than rent, but I’d still like to strive for a little more space, a little more privacy or a little more excitement. But the way property is, even though I’m earning well, it seems impossible. I’ve tried unsuccessfully 3 times in the last 5 years to move , and come to the conclusion without earning a considerable amount more than I am it’s impossible.
My basic needs were met long ago. I find ways to waste money here and there, but nothing to really work towards. I guess I could have kids, but this place is too small for a dog, let alone a couple of sprogs, and I wouldn’t wish this world on another generation. The only good reason to be earning more for me is to maybe protect the quality of life I have should I lose my job or the situation gets worse in general (inflation, climate change etc), and again it doesn’t seem like it’s much protection. I believe in the important of tax, I’d pay even more if I thought it’d be used for good, but with this circus in charge, it’d hard to imagine much of my considerable tax bill going to help people rather than ending up in the pocket of some corpo with a government contract.
Add to that, jobs seem to get worse and worse. I swear everyone I know, across multiple sectors, is burning out. Corpos and governments alike are treating people like garbage, working them to death then discarding them as reward. Profits go up. Nothing of value gets made. Everyone but the bosses gets fucked.
As for my job, I worked hard and gave it a lot. I’ve seen the company mistreat and discarded good people for years, while outsourcing to halfwits and grifters (and I can’t even be that angry at the grifters given what they’re paid regionally). It’s impossible to make a positive change, although I still try. But I hate it. The job grinds me down and takes everything.
I plan to work as little as possible, even if it means cutting back. I live in hope that it’ll mean I recover a little, maybe find some joy again. Not much hope, but worth 20%.
(Sorry for that becoming antiwork tirade. It’s been a shitty few years.)
Not to feed into the bosses’ paranoia, but I’d say WFH 5-days (on paper) and bunk off, which is a lot easier to do WFH anyway.
I don’t actually think the employer misses out here, even if most companies already take far more than they’re owed from their employees to begin with.
The reality for a lot of jobs, especially those that require deep work, creativity etc, is that watching how long people are sat at their desks is not a good way to improve results anyway. Better a motivated happy workforce, and managers that are thinking in terms of how well a team is delivering useful things for the org rather than obsessing about timesheets.
If the company is happy to pay me X salary for the results I provide them, everybody wins. It’s foolish for organisations to think that getting people to work longer hours, whether it’s forcing people to work 4, 5, or 6 days, is going to get them more bang for buck.
As for remote working, I’ve worked exclusively from home for over a decade in fully remote teams. Everyone wins with WFH. There can be problems to mitigate and there’s always some subjective preference to consider, but on the whole the average employee and employer wins big from the arrangement.
All the pushback I’ve seen on WFH since the pandemic seems in large part management using it as an excuse for their own incompetence.
“How can I tell my employees are working if I can’t see them at their desks?” If you cant tell if they’re working now, then you didn’t know they were working before either!
On-boarding new people, building up young people, is just different from before. Make sure they have decent equilment for video and normalise teams sitting in video rooms when the work. Encourage buddy working at all levels. Recognise and respect the upfront cost of training. Encourage and fund opportunities for socialising both remotely and in person.
Managers don’t know what’s happening without the “water cooler effect”. They’re used to be able to shout at teams across an office, or easedrop. Again, this demonstrates a weakness in their ability to communicate and interact with the people they claim to “lead”. Good managers will be in the same video rooms and chatting shit with the people they lead while they work as a united teams. Shitty managers will sit on their hands while not even noticing their team does everything they can to avoid a unhelpful or unsupportive “leader”.
The worse one is productivity. I have no doubt things are going worse for corpos since the pandemic. This likely correlates with increase WFH. The ideas that this is proof that WFH is outrageously. During the pandemic we had teams working 17 hour days. Corpos took the opportunity to cut every corner and show contempt to the workforces, and they didn’t fix things when the COVID numbers went down. The big shots made some truly terrible strategic calls. All these things and more are seeming to lead to a kind of mass enshittification across a ton of organisations. But bosses don’t want to own their mistakes, let alone fix them , so WFH ends up the scapegoat.
(Sorry! This thread seems to have brought out the rant in me!)
Full remote.
I actually like going into the office ~2x per week. But tell me I have to and bump it to 4 days, I’m out. I also do not want my colleagues forced on site. My current ~2x/week is as productive as it is because the other people going on site now are there voluntarily and for specific reasons.
The commute time is kinda worse than work time, so the 4 days in the office are equal to 5 days WFH timewise. And I would still be missing out on benefits like cheaper lunch at home and wearing comfortable clothes, and not being tired all the time. On the other hand, I would always have 3 day weekends.
Yeah, count time getting ready and you’re easily wasting 1.5-2 hrs a day going to an office.
When we started wfh, most people picked up overtime and still spent the same amount of time devoted to work with a significant pay increase.
It’s a lot of time and effort everyone was just used to giving up for free. Why go back to it?
Especially since it’s 2023 and we’re still getting new COVID waves.
WFH for 5 days will still result in less time spent doing dumb shit I don’t want to do than RTO for 4. That doesn’t even count the pomodoro breaks I take where in the office I can’t do anything but walk in circles but at home I can start laundry or prep for dinner.
WFH every time, I’m not going back
Same. I have an interview with a cool sounding company tomorrow!
Good luck.
Thank you!
Good luck!
Thanks!!
I don’t want to go in to the office. The pay doesn’t include the extra commute time, plus getting dressed up slightly nicer.
I live alone. I don’t have kids. Home is fine.
The office is loud. Often the wrong temperature. I get interrupted a lot. I don’t get as much done on the tiny monitor they provide vs the big ass 4k ones I have home.
Some people are really not great at responding on slack though. If they could get on my level that would be nice.
I went back to 5 days a week in office in summer 2021. I hated it when I was told but now I’m glad it happened. I walk 2 miles each way to work. That walk is one of the nicest parts of my day. I get crazy paranoia when I can’t speak to people face-to-face, and I can maintain a routine. I appreciate I am lucky in my situation but I would take the 4 days and enjoy a long weekend where I can properly unwind
I will never commute again, ever. I’d rather work four days a week in my pajama pants and one day pantsless (Casual Friday) than waste my time schlepping my brain through meatspace.
I need to go into the office to be productive. I don’t begrudge anyone that wants to work from home, I wish it worked for me, but it doesn’t. During the pandemic I was 100% work-from-home and got very little done. I actually asked my boss how long it would be until we could go back to the office. Donkey-brains chose that time to upgrade the office furniture and shampoo the carpets. It was another month until the office was open. I went back, and it was heaven. There were very few people there. I could sit at my desk, listen to my music, and do whatever I needed. Don’t ask me what the difference was. Maybe I just have an affinity for flickering fluorescent tubes.
Same here. I don’t trust myself to work productively at home.
