This just sounds like a tech office. You're judged if you use the amenities btw
Okay so here’s the idea. Open floor plan, barely a doorway to separate the different areas. In this room, a loud air hockey table and a kitchenette to encourage people to socialize. And then over here, like 10 feet away, we put a bunch of cubicles full of people who are going to struggle with constant interruptions even before we put the loud social stuff in. Oh, and next week I’m presenting an idea for libraries with miniature basketball courts in the center where reference desk would usually go.
Christ I wish there were even some cubicles. Just not constantly seeing one of my 200 coworkers walking around or standing up would help concentration a bit. Like aren't these guys really into evopsych? There's gotta be some evopsych stuff about how motion at the corner of your vision keeps you on edge.
They like the part of evopsych that says women wear makeup because it makes them look horny
Yeah that was the case for the various ping pong / foosball tables / gaming systems / etc in every tech office that had them that I ever worked in
Sometimes the marketing bros would get to play on Friday afternoons or something but that was the extent of it
Not really amenities then are they? Just literally window dressing to make the job look more attractive
They’ve run out of unincorporated land and trading the same properties back and forth while gradually accumulating single-family residences into the hands of private equity hasn’t been growing quite fast enough, so it’s time to expand into our very concept of “home” again and see what they can hollow out
Why are bosses so intent on getting you back to the office?? Some people said that it's because they rent office space which they want to use, but that seems too simple an explanation.
I think it's just about being able to control you and they feel you can't slack off at work, but it also seems weird. Idk why they fixate on office presence so much.
Also it's just backwards. We're not in the 50s anymore and proof that will make sense to a boss is that management styles have changed drastically. In the 50s you had a college educated boss barking orders at you. Nowadays, they kindly ask you to do something and ask for your input.
When workers say they're actually more productive when working from home, maybe you should listen to them??
I think commercial real estate interests invested heavily into all of the magazines that rich people read and they're too dumb to notice they're being played.
Consistent with my CEOs back to office orders containing an accidental admission that we've never been more successful or efficient than during WFH.
They always retreat back to “we’re not innovating”
Meanwhile points at record earnings scoreboard
commercial real estate interests
i think that is a key thing which is easy to overlook. rents in "hot" zoned commercial spaces are wild. add in parking infrastructure rentiers and the landlords of those captive situations in office parks where some landlord can command an insane price point for the one smoothie place or coffee joint that serves the workers on breaks and lunches, and you've got a group of people with a fuckload of passive money existentially threatened by a shift to WFH.
I posted this elsewhere but it’s because they know when you WFH you can get one over on them. Instead of wasting downtime pretending to work you can now use that time to do things you find fulfilling. They hate that they have to pay you to take walks or work in your garden. It’s purely a control thing.
They want full control over the labor power they're buying; if your workers can WFH what's to stop them from drawing multiple paychecks??
Edit: :porky-scared-flipped:
Did I mention I hate this shit (real)
I currently work 3 jobs, 1 of which is wfh and done entirely during the downtime of my weekend / evening job. As a result I'm able to pull a middle class income.
This is purely about the structure and justification of management. WFH removes the ability of management to monitor a human in a room, which is basically their whole job. Middle and upper management seek to justify their jobs.
In addition to the psychology here, the ability to monitor a workforce is also the ability to discipline it. How do you keep tabs on who's trying to form a union? How do you keep people distracted from real wage cuts with pizza parties and shit? In-person interaction with a petty dictator is perceived as having a moderating effect and the ability to steer the "culture" and "direction" of the company. Filling up a company with middle managers is a fairly common anti-union technique in France.
Everyone knows it is against the immediate bottom line, they just care about these other things more and capitalism gives them feudal lord powers over their little fiefdom.
Filling up a company with middle managers is a fairly common anti-union technique in France.
And in America. Every retail store I've worked at has been 1/3rd managers who make a dollar or two more but aren't in the bargaining unit.
Absolitely. And if it's retail or food service or similar, they also have to do basically the same work as everyone else but take all of the flak for scheduling that was actually determined 3 levels up.
Because they're also landlords and they need number to go up.
Subconscious knowledge that if your workers are comfortable, you can’t use misery as a leverage e.g. reserve army for labor
Oh, you like working from home? Well, why don't you just move into the office then
I mean, that's sort of the joke with working from home. All that extra productivity and improved moral boils down to eliminating the commute and giving you home amenities in your "office". Also, incidentally, makes slacking off way easier which reduces stress and (somewhat paradoxically) improves work performance.
If corporate offices were side-by-side with residential units, or we had better mass transit, or we had some kind of space where working/living/recreation/child-care/etc bled into each other (call it... idk... a commune), that would be fucking awesome. But this aesthetics shit is ten years late and woefully short of the mark.
(call it… idk… a commune)
sounds like a 5minute gulag no thank you i love my freedom (2 hour commute)
Not any of this “sitting on a train and having time to yourself” nonsense either, I wanna be fighting other exhausted workers for my life.
I need the risk of killing myself or others to bookend my workday or I'm not free
When the work is provably doable at home the office seems generally unnecessary. The one improvement I'd make is add coworking spaces near each residential areas so people can socialize during the work day, but not make it mandatory they're on the same task.
Yeah, I like seeing people that aren't my immediate family with regularity, it's the 5+ hours a week that I spend trying to not get killed by angry motorists that made me love WFH. If they stuck the building next to my house I'd have no major problem going in every day (if we weren't in a pandemic).
take a shower four times a day?
- How is your skin not dry af? 2) wanna chat about soap?
My eczema: if you ever shower on consecutive days i will hurt you :blob-stabby:
Dousing myself in hot water as an eczema version of a flagellant
Ah, the short lukewarm showers. I do one a day, but like it hot and maybe like 5ish minutes. Use good soap, but no lotion unless I just got some ink.
4 is a bit much and probably an exaggeration, but I’m hear to defend whatever type of skin/sweat me and this guy have.
Bit idea: an office where you can do that. Everybody who gets hired has to be chill as fuck. The product: communism
CEOs be like: it's just like your house, but worse in every way possible
Wasting millions of dollars in renovations instead of saving it by letting your workers stay home
You know what's really odd to me? The fact that they all just try to recreate nice area. Like renovating swaths of office area to include fucking fireplaces can't be cheap, right? But it's still at best gonna feel like a hotel room.
Why wouldn't you just use the money for services? Yeah we do office laundry now, guy comes to pick it up monday and drops it back off thursday. Here's free or heavily subsidized food. Got a guy washing your car like once per month. Large Scale office grocery order getting delivered, pick via webshop.
You know, things that people kind of need to do anyways and that don't actually distract from work all that much. Google says a home fireplace installation runs you like $5000, I gotta imagine this gets way higher if you do it in commercial estate. If I put down like $10 per laundry run per employee down this shit'd pay for like 500 runs
Listen just see even your average peon as middle management as they have a lower caste of workers to take care of their needs, still. Just gotta adjust your mindset slightly
That's what I'm saying, let them pay for that shit! :capitalist-laugh:
with a bit of enterpreneurial mindset I'm sure you could get together with your laundry industry titan guy and figure out a way to solve the whole thing as a charity and save even more money. ceos these days have no vision
I mean your service idea is arguably what tech corpos like Microsoft and Google came up with.
buy a representative, if I remember the whole SOPA / PIPA thing correctly they come at like $10k a pop and you could probably count it against taxes
The reason unions pivoted from ballot initiatives to lobbying is that its literally cheaper to buy the vote than to hire 6 volunteer coordinators to get something on the ballot
Business owners can't relate: they only have to commute if/when they feel like it.
What if we put the workers in a vivarium with a wood chip substrate and a salt lick :eco-porky:
Sign me up for the terrarium plan office. I want to enter my isopod era
I like working from home because I get to hang out with my wife and daughter all day. It’s not for the furniture
Seriously. Honestly they should be glad I can go immediately bitch to my wife about dumb shit that management just said instead of simmering on it for the rest of the day
Sounds like you're complaining to your wife instead of your co workers. Wfh as an anti union tactic is working
I'm sure that's true for a lot of people, but I make sure to air my grievances with my coworkers too — venting to my wife just lets me refine my gripes so I have more concrete stuff to talk to my coworkers about
Oh can I bring my newborn to this newly designed office?
No?
Then suck my girldick.
Me: tired, exhausted from traveling over an hour
My boss: did you see this new couch I got that you can't sit on?
