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Return to office
I heard rumors several weeks ago from Union friends that my employer was going to start enforcing the "three days a week in the office" guideline, using badge-swipes to count how often people came in physically and counting this as part of annual performance review. I asked my boss about it at the time and he said he hadn't heard anything like that, but would keep his eyes and ears open and let me know.
At Monday's weekly one-on-one meeting, he let me know. Yes, my employer wants everyone to either (a) come to the office at least three days a week, or (b) become officially "fully remote", which means you no longer have a desk, and managers are expected to address on-site frequency in performance reviews. (In some cases "fully remote" also means a pay cut to reflect the cost of living where you live rather than where you work. Doesn't affect me, because I both live and work in NYC.) The e-mail that everyone got says "If you have questions, ask your manager" -- who received the same e-mail at the same time as the rest of us, and doesn't know any more than I do.
So I went to the office yesterday. The commute wasn't bad -- a 10-minute walk to the train station, a 10-minute wait for the train, a 15-minute train ride, and a 20-minute walk mostly down the High Line on a pleasant early-summer day. But it's still most of an hour each way that I could have been doing something else. Nobody on my team commented that I was there on a Tuesday, which hasn't happened since... umm... March 2020? In fact, I exchanged about ten spoken words with anybody on my team the whole day. I communicated with them, of course, by chat or e-mail or comment-thread, the exact same ways I would have communicated with them if I'd stayed home. So what's the point?
That's not typical: usually when I'm on-site, there is at least a gaggle of teammates who invite me to go to lunch with them, and there's usually a certain amount of chitchat during the day too. But this was a good example illustrating why "fully remote" might make sense for me.
At Monday's weekly one-on-one meeting, he let me know. Yes, my employer wants everyone to either (a) come to the office at least three days a week, or (b) become officially "fully remote", which means you no longer have a desk, and managers are expected to address on-site frequency in performance reviews. (In some cases "fully remote" also means a pay cut to reflect the cost of living where you live rather than where you work. Doesn't affect me, because I both live and work in NYC.) The e-mail that everyone got says "If you have questions, ask your manager" -- who received the same e-mail at the same time as the rest of us, and doesn't know any more than I do.
So I went to the office yesterday. The commute wasn't bad -- a 10-minute walk to the train station, a 10-minute wait for the train, a 15-minute train ride, and a 20-minute walk mostly down the High Line on a pleasant early-summer day. But it's still most of an hour each way that I could have been doing something else. Nobody on my team commented that I was there on a Tuesday, which hasn't happened since... umm... March 2020? In fact, I exchanged about ten spoken words with anybody on my team the whole day. I communicated with them, of course, by chat or e-mail or comment-thread, the exact same ways I would have communicated with them if I'd stayed home. So what's the point?
That's not typical: usually when I'm on-site, there is at least a gaggle of teammates who invite me to go to lunch with them, and there's usually a certain amount of chitchat during the day too. But this was a good example illustrating why "fully remote" might make sense for me.