Dry Guy wrote: ↑Sat Feb 08, 2025 5:38 pm
I just heard a radio advertisement from federal workers stating how working from home is good for the environment. This has to end. It's time to do your job or get fired.
I've run my company for 25 years, we have NEVER had an office that folks commute to. My employees have all 'worked from home' for the entire time, it's called a 'home office'. You may not like it, but, but here is some reality for you.
1 - It's far cheaper, we dont have to spend thousands of dollars each month on office space, with all the extra bills that entails.
2 - My engineers are FAR more productive than those forced to commute to a cubicle
3 - Our folks dont waste hours endlessly stuck in traffic going to/from the workplace
4 - We have no 'office politics'
We have had a phone system in place for over 20 years which allows an 'extension' to sit on a desk, anywhere there is a network connection, it's been our biggest asset over time. Over time we've added internal video conferencing for internal meetings, works great.
We have a very happy workforce, all of whom live where they want to, based on the lifestyle they want to live. Some are in downtown core of a big city, most are in more rural areas. Heck, one of them is even 'on the road' full time these days, lives in a Class A motorhome, has a beautiful office console set up inside with a starlink antenna mounted on the roof. He's currently parked in southern Arizona, and plans on parking for a month in the Yukon next summer. And you know what, I dont really care where he is, as long as he can attend some online meetings and meets his deliver deadlines, life is good.
I get it tho, for somebody who chose a job that requires you to be physically present, you resent those that chose a path which allows for remote work. Everybody made choices along the way as to what they want to do, and at present flying airplanes is one of those tasks for which you have to 'go to the workplace'.
Another aspect to this, most folks project 'what I would do' onto others, and if you are the type of person that would spend the day seducing the canine if working remotely without somebody looking over your shoulder, then you project that onto what you think everybody else will be doing. That's a personality thing, some folks need supervising, others do not.
Then there is another huge benefit to working remotely, I'll use the example of a friend that has lived in Richmond for decades. When 2020 came around, both he and his wife got shifted to 'work from home'. He is a software fella, she is inside sales for a large tech firm. After fhings died down and some companies started going 'back to the office', they were both informed that the company was going to do away with the lease on the space they were in because after folks had been home for a month and got used to the concept, company metrics showed that the majority of the employees were equally productive from home as they were in the office, so they would be staying 'at home'. They promptly sold out in Richmond and moved to a small center on Vancouver Island, sold a 3 bedroom townhouse, bought a 4 bedroom home on a small acreage and had money left over. both now work from the home office and love it.
For a job that has a reason to be at a specific workspace, ya, folks head back. But for folks that are just buried in a cubicle behind the scenes, there is no reason to force them back into a commute, and lots of reasons to leave them at home. the days of the physical call center are over, replaced by technology to route calls. Most folks working in accounting have no need to be physically present at a specific workspace, same for inside sales, tech support, much of the IT work, list goes on and on. Yes, there will always be some tasks that require folks to be at a specific place, but it surely does not apply to all of them.
you realize I can find videos of any group of people from any country being able to fail basic questions, right?
