Also, if you see some of the articles and movies from the 60s/70s, they were saying all this stuff about baby boomers too.
I saw somewhere where they gathered examples of “people in their 20s don’t want to work the same way the folks in their 40s did at their age” dating back to at least the mid nineteenth century.
I’ve also seen the point made that a lot of the assumptions about the boomers having it nice and easy comes from media products that strategically wanted to frame things as doing great, as they thought that’s what drove media consumption, folks wanting to feel good about the world. Now the general understanding is keeping people in an eternal state of panic and dread will keep those eyeballs glued to the product. Bad stuff happened back then too, and plenty of it should have been a more prominent source of dread by today’s standards.
Further, to the extent it was true, it was mostly a USA thing coming from a couple of phenomenon: -Every other major industrial economy had been severely impacted by World Wars I && II, with USA barely having a scratch. So for a good while, most of the economic activity favored the USA across the globe. -Factors like racism where huge swaths of the USA population ‘didn’t count’ when people were thinking how good things were going.
For me, it’s shutting out work correspondence right at 5pm. Working from home most of the time. If some life circumstance vaguely demands my time in a way that conflicts with work, the life circumstance will win.
It’s not horribly absolute. I did connect when I got a request to help some customers in Ukraine, figuring the very least I could do was help them out. Another customer that generally represents 30-40 million a year of revenue needed help off hours in December, and I obliged. In the event of a genuine emergency I’ll be flexible (but in a hurry to get it over with, even if it means “slap flex tape on it and it should hold things over” sort of approach).
Keep in mind this is grading on a curve. A close colleague works in person at the office 6 or 7 days a week, generally for 9 or 10 hours, and on top of that spends much of his home time remotely working on things too. He complains that if not everyone matches his work ethic that we won’t hit “the schedule”, and I respond if that’s the case, then there’s a problem with “the schedule”, not with people failing to work enough. Eternally poor planning with arbitrarily declared deadlines are not a legitimate source of emergency, and I won’t play along with that.
Note that a critical part of that equation is that wages are included in the inflationary trend.
But other than that explicit detail, that’s spot on. Ultimately money is a “trick” we use to influence our productive behavior. So a slightly creeping number works best to make the “money” move instead of sit still, and the whole point of the mathematical model is that the things need to move around.
Hell, even if you can afford it, a boat is a bit of a PITA.
Any boat is a PITA, but the longer the boat, the worse it gets. But it doesn’t get more ‘fun’, perhaps even getting less fun. A 20 foot boat with a decent engine can move nice and quick and manuever. Big boat is basically just a less convenient hangout that happens to be on the water.
Real estate costs that they are stuck with. For example, my employer committed to a 20 year lease shortly before the pandemic. They don’t have a good exit clause so either those office towers are going to be empty or used, but either way, my employer is paying for them, might as well get use out of them.
Managers that have such a poor understanding of the work that they can’t comfortably tell if the work output from their employees is good or slacking. At least being able to see them in person they feel more comfortable that the employee looks more likely to be engaged. It’s still possible a slacker is conning them, but at least they aren’t as obviously doing so. They may not be masochistic as much as they hired people that know more than they do, and are therefore at a severe disadvantage when evaluating an employee.
As others have pointed out, one mans annoying distraction is another employee’s great help. A new hire that needed mentorship. A colleague stuck on a little thing without going out of their way to ask for help in a remote context.
Realistically, having some work from home for morale/better work life balance, and focused individual work and some in person time is probably the most productive scenario.
b) Their WFH staff are more productive than their office staff.
This probably varies place to place, person to person. However, over the course of, say, 10 years, productivity would likely drop in a 100% WFH scenario. People retire and the new hires never really find their groove without the in person experience.
Just let those leases expire when they do
Some of these leases are absurdly long, like decades long. Some own the buildings rather than lease, so they’d need to sell, but who would be buying?
I do see significant reduction in office space and more aggressive ‘hot desking’ to size a lower occupancy rate due to increased WFH. Before pandemic, our office planned to 80% occupancy, based on measuring generally 60% occupancy (between sick days, vacations, meetings, and travel, a lot of people aren’t at their desks). I would not be surprised for them to size for, say, 50% occupancy if opportunities to exit lease for some of the buildings comes up.
One analysis suggested that a hybrid work but without specific corporate mandate seemed to see the best result.
If the business arbitrarily said “come in all the time” or “come in three days a week”, they tended to not get good results.
If the business said “ok, no more office, all remote”, they seemed to also not get good results.
The businesses that said “office is open and ready for you to use as you and your teams see fit”, they seemed to have the best result. The optimistic will ascribe that to people thriving on the flexibility and respect of their employer. My somewhat more cynical view is that peer pressure works to get people into the office, and the employee is less pissed because it’s “their choice” to come in. Just like when a company grants employees “unlimited vacation” and rejoice, as unlimited vacation tends to mean the employees take less vacation.
xkcd #2948: Electric vs Gas ( xkcd.com )
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Every damn day ( programming.dev )
Gen Z is prioritizing living over working because they've seen 'the legacy of broken promises' in corporate America, a future-of-work expert says ( www.businessinsider.com )
A future-of-work expert said Gen Zers didn't have the "promise of stability" at work, so they're putting their personal lives and well-being first.
Wreck the economy because it only works for the billionaire class. ( i.imgur.com )
Return-to-office orders look like a way for elite, work-obsessed CEOs to grab power back from employees ( www.businessinsider.com )
White-collar workers temporarily enjoyed unprecedented power during the pandemic to decide where and how they worked.