The ironic part of this in my experience is that the employers that want you in the office 100% are also the ones willing to pay less.
Problem solved, I’ll earn more from a company that treats employees with respect and the other companies will go out of business. Labour shortage in Australia is real right now, so it’s literally going to be impossible for these places to hire soon.
Is that strictly true? I mean it makes sense that the average fast food worker (who must be present) makes less than a software engineer (who may not need to be present), but does that translate across the whole job market?
For software engineering, anecdotally the companies pushing for 100% in office are the more traditional enterprise organisations, that haven't embraced technology and agile practices.
While remuneration might be similar, there is a lot of red tape and working people willing to put up with bureaucracy are generally not as passionate and therefore try and palm off work or engage in politics.
I agree in principle that 100% in office roles are a red flag and not worth the hassle.
Yeah at my current company it's at leadership discretion. My group is permanent remote, but some of my companion groups are being forced back to the office.
Our pay across the board is dogshit though, and we're bleeding devs but the company won't let management pay what's needed to retain people.
On that note, if anyone's looking for a senior/staff full stack swe with 5 years of react plus a whole bunch of other stuff, let me know. Please.
Data set seems off as the sampling heavily biases to Tech, Law and consulting and away from Retail, Logistics and Primary Industries all of which are a higher proportion of the Australian workforce. Additionally companies such as Coles and Woolworths (Supermarket chains) are listed as 100% Remote, where as this is only going to be for a small proportion of their workforce.
The change is happening, and I work for an energy company where they literally do not have the office space for 100% of staff to be back in the office (currently target 50%). So the change is happening, but I don’t think its as far along as this data states. I can say from a recruitment perspective there are many candidates who want a significant pay bump to go back to 100% office.
I could see demanding more. Being in an open office bullpen and commuting are both wastes of my time, on balance.
If they're willing to freely waste my time, then they must also be willing to freely waste their payroll budget. May as well demand more, as I'll clearly value the money more than my employer.
Also, quality of life matters. I want an office with a closable, opaque door and adequate ventilation. I'll provide it for free, or my employer can. If I don't have it, then I want hazard pay.
Might be anecdotal data, but from what I have seen, the amount of people that are working from home with proper equipment and dedicated space is really small.
People work with their residential internet connection, which sometimes works well, and sometimes doesn't. They work on their kitchen counter on the 13" laptop screen on a hard stool. They work while their children are watching TV or doming homework in the same room on wednesday afternoon. They work while the maid is doing the vacuum cleaning. I could go on, but you get the idea.
If the offices where half as bad as those working conditions, there (rightfully) would be an uproar among the worker explaining how unproductive they are because of the bad conditions. But somehow all these problem magically have no effect anymore when they happen at home.
So business choose to provide a free place with premium computer screens so you can juggle all these windows, ergonomic chairs so your back won't hurt, both quiet and more social places depending on your mood, fiber internet connection with mesh wifi and redundant connection so your call don't look like a 3 FPS 640x480 GIF . And they'll ask that employees spend at least a bit of time in those.
Other than my home internet sucking, all of the things you mention are worse at the office.
I pay daycare to keep the kids in a separate location. Good luck trying that with coworkers.
We were a partially remote team pre-pandemic, but there aren't enough meeting rooms / phonebooths in the office buildings. I'd miss an hour or so of meetings / work per week trying to find a meeting space for a zoom call. My home internet craps out of a meeting about once a month. It's clearly superior than the in-office situation, with triple redundant 10-9s internet, but no chairs.
My 30 year old, $100 office chair is better for my back than the uber expensive and stylish chair that I lifted from the office. The expensive chair broke mid pandemic, fwiw.
I work in a gilded crown jewels office building, so it's not a budget issue. It's a facilities / management failure, but pointing that out is forbidden.
It has been like that in most of the companies I've worked in. The only exceptions were office buildings that hadn't been "upgraded" yet.
There is an uproar among the employees!
It is always ignored because the decision makers would have to admit complete incompetence before listening to feedback.
Industry-wide, the vast majority of employees are saying they'd prefer renting / buying a home office on their own dime (and would even take $10K's in pay cuts, on average for permission to do it!)
However, industry-wide, management still thinks cube farms are providing positive value.
>My home internet craps out of a meeting about once a month.
In all seriousness, look into Ethernet (over Cat6, not powerline).
We went from multiple disruptive dropouts a day to almost zero just by moving away from WiFi.
I think this is one of those "YMMV" things. For us, in an 60-ish year-old 4br house, we'd get occasional drop-outs, as well as relatively poor (~25MBps) performance.
For my BIL, in a newer house with his Xbox and the router on the same circuit, it's rock solid.
Yeah, I loved my Power line in my last rental accomodation, but it's way less effective in the house we bought, as the wiring is older. I may just end up running Ethernet cables.
All my coworkers have better rigs at home.
I have a motorized sit/stand desk, aeron chair, climate control, ultra wide monitor, mechanical keyboard etc.
Decade of back pain has completely vanished since working from home.
The vast majority of people, even in the tech industry, do not have these privileges, so the scale is not nearly weighted as much in favor of home work.
> All of the things you listed are extremely privileged... The vast majority of people, even in the tech industry, do not have these privileges.
This is so deliberately myopic as to make me question whether your argument is in good faith.
A "$xx000+ climate control" is something _literally anyone who's employed_ would have as a furnace (or, slightly less commonly, as a/c, but still very prevalent[1]) and is not a unique expense to WFH. The perk is being able to set it where I want (vs. my employer setting it for me), not simply "having it." And if a $100 mechanical keyboard is a truly unobtainable indulgence for budget reasons, surely a $100 car repair to facilitate commuting to the office is, too.
As an Australian tech worker, that list certainly doesn't seem that privileged. Excluding the Aeron, none of those would be surprising for any of my colleagues - and a few do have Aerons (all have decent chairs).
We spend a lot of time at our desk and so spending a few thousand dollars to create a comfortable workspace is far from exorbitant.
"They work on their kitchen counter on the 13" laptop screen on a hard stool... They work while the maid is doing the vacuum cleaning."
Thats not the case for any of 20 friends and coleaguea I know.
Every colleague I know (not counting interns, etc) has a equal or better setup than what we get in the office, from display to office chair.
I can understand how this was an issue early in the pandemic, when change was sudden. I can also understand how this could be an issue for some junior staff, who aren't paid enough to rent a home with enough space. However if we are talking well-paid bracket, working from home is cheaper than commuting, dining, etc. Especially if they can afford a maid.
It is fundamentally idiotic and wastefull to move millions of people every day into the office and then back out, through traffic jams, wasting resources, causing pollution and deaths through accidents. So much for capitalism being efficient.
Even for the junior ones, rule of thumb is that employees cost 2x their salaries on average.
Other than taxes, most of that is mostly fixed cost (desk, insurance, hr paper shuffling).
Companies could pay junior staff significantly more if they eliminated facilitates costs and in-office perks for those employees.
I'd wager that upgrading from an N bedroom to an N+1 bedroom apartment would be much cheaper than providing an office for the vast majority of junior employees.
> Companies could pay junior staff significantly more if they eliminated facilitates costs and in-office perks for those employees.
Those number seem weird to me. In my company, the office space amounts to roughly 10 to 15% of the wage cost. IE: if we completely cut offices, and replaced it with absolutely nothing, we could only afford to offer a one time 10% salary bump across the board. This is less that the average yearly salary bump we have offered on average over the past 5 years.
This means that we could give a one year "leap" in salaires if we moved to fully remote, forever, assuming that fully remote has absolutely 0 cost (which is not true).
> I'd wager that upgrading from an N bedroom to an N+1 bedroom apartment would be much cheaper than providing an office for the vast majority of junior employees
You are saying that you think it's more expensive to have an office space able to accommodate 50 workers, rather than paying for the difference in rent between an N bedroom and an N+1 bedroom for 50 families ? Again, this does not really match my perception of the real estate market.
You can't put a price tag on how nice it is never having to poop next to your coworkers or how nice it is dressing up in whatever makes you feel great (presuming minimal video chat presence, which is even then just the torso).
Different market, but Zone2-1 (a perfectly common commute) is £5.80 return = AU$10.18 in London.
Considering Zone2 is aspirational for many, not to mention those who'd rather live in the home counties (i.e. 'suburbs' I suppose) and get a certainly much more expensive train in (and then the tube) I don't find $12 questionable at all. But markets do differ! Interested to hear if that really is outrageous sounding in Australia.
Hah. East SF Bay to South Bay is $38 for one day, or $320 per month (Berkeley to San Jose on Amtrak).
Also, it takes 1.5 hours on the train each way. This is only 42 miles platform to platform. Also, no public transit syncs with the train on either end.
In Stockholm a 70km distance by train is about 1h20m, 8.5 USD for two trips in one day or 100 USD per month. On the old commuter trains that makes about 18 stops.
For me that’s right on the money. $6 each way for me to visit the city on the train. I’m at the end of the line though, but not super far out of the city.
No, but if you read the original article, it describes the policies by companies. Obviously a company has many different type of roles, however when you describe office workers, comparatively there are a significant proportion who work for organizations in industries that are not represented. Retail companies have huge office staff to organize new products, marketing, purchasing, logistics and finance. Should they not count because the company also runs a supermarket or boutique?
I was simply saying that the figures may be overrepresented. The original title when I posted heavily focused on the 7.2% of companies who say they will force 100% in office. That number seems very low to me and looking through the data I noticed that the sample doesn't represent many of the largest employers in the country. The new title rectifies that.
Note these numbers are specifically about returning to the office so it's expected numbers for workplaces like supermarkets and such will differ wildly from looking at where a typical employee in these sectors will be as the vast majority are not office workers.
The companies behind the supermarkets have large back office complexes. The size of the back office tends to be proportional to the turnover of the companies. I’m Australia retail and primary industries make a substantial proportion of that.
I don't think there's anything particularly insightful in including the data of traditional retail workers. There's no scenario where they would be working from home, so it's the same as not including them.
A data point from my world, which is in Canberra (our capital) government world where security says that if you’re doing admin work - basically you’re using your elevated privilege account - you must be in the office.
8 of the 9 people in our database support team left because they just didn’t want to do this. They easily found other jobs without this requirement. We basically can’t hire anyone else because when they learn that they must come to the office, they lose interest.
And Canberra is fairly small and we don’t have a traffic problem worth mentioning. Getting to work is easy. People just don’t want to now that they know that they can work from home.
At least they tried to spin it as security related. The word from most federal departments has been “hey, time to come back to the office because… that’s how it was before.”
Compare to, for example, ACT Government, which announced months ago that they’re permanently moving to flexible working arrangements.
It’ll be interesting to see over the next ~12 months how much federal government talent is lost as a result.
Is this standard government admin or something involving sensitive information where this requirement may be valid?
I assume the outcome will be no one wants to do this work as an employee and they’ll end up filling the holes with expensive contractors (who may even be made exempt from this requirement).
Interestingly, that’s not a problem that the US government faces unless you’re doing work with confidential military secrets. I wonder why the different policies worked out like that.
I work for an Australian company, where half of the ownership is a large company with massive exposure to commercial real estate. I find myself wondering if we are paying lip service to returning to the office, till everyone figures out what to do with the huge investment in real estate. Once the border becomes more permeable, perhaps the inner city apartment sales will pick up again and companies will become more open about plans to off load them
I'd agree with the lip service, but there won't really be a final end to the commercial real estate because the sector has had a lot of problems for a long time and they haven't put effort into fixing it even post 2008. So it needs to implode to be fixed. The current players are just forcing status quo, but the world snuck up and digitalized. whoops.
I’ve said this before, but I feel it needs to be said again: working from home should be one of our top priorities when it comes to climate mitigation strategies. In addition to helping individual workers use less energy for commuting for work, we should also be helping existing commercial real estate weather the cost to transitioning to remote work by converting their massive roofs, in areas where it is possible, to solar farms.
I hate to get all soap-boxy, but this seems like the right time.
Corporations are responsible for something like 70% of global emissions. It's nice that you want to help, and I do too.
But bottom line, it has been an absolute failure of journalism and our regulatory bodies that the solution to climate change is somehow up to citizens driving and consuming less.
Corporations can feed themselves regularly, but there are 730 million people on earth without access to clean water. Enough is enough!
Consider the perspective that those corporations are almost uniformly dedicated to providing goods and services for citizens to consume, with a few outliers. The parts that nominally aren't are generally part of the control structures that anticipate what people are going to want to consume in the future and make it available.
Corporations producing less emissions is equivalent to consumers consuming less.
This depends... there are whole subreddits (eg: https://old.reddit.com/r/NonFunctionSlackFill/top/?sort=top&... ) dedicated just to slack filled items, to make them look bigger (thus increasing the amount of packaging and waste, and increasing transportation emisions).
Right, but filling that slack fill would consume the same amount of volume, and more mass. So filling in the slack fill is strictly worse for transportation emissions. And crucially, the manufacturer would have to produce more of the actual product which in turn means more emissions from raw materials and refining those materials into goods.
I think, in a way, that subreddit really reinforces what the parent comment is saying: people don't like it when their consumption decreases. When we see this [1] our thought isn't "how great it is that the company didn't spend emissions on building a full set of crayons", it's "this sucks, I didn't get a full set of crayons".
It's not just the impact of the commute. There's also the impact of all that office space which just sits empty ~14 hours out of the day. Of course not everyone has an office space at home, but rooms in a home can easily serve dual purpose.
"The report found that more than half of global industrial emissions since 1988 – the year the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established – can be traced to just 25 corporate and state-owned entities."
Yeah it turns out oil companies produce emissions, news at 11. The problem with that study is that it puts all of the emissions on to the producer, when a consumer focused approach makes more sense.
> Corporations are responsible for something like 70% of global emissions.
Corporations produce goods and services that people consume. I think it is intellectually lazy to attribute all the blame of pollution to the producer side of the economic relationship rather than the consumer side. The people consuming the polluting goods and services usually derive most of the economic benefits, the producers and people along the value chain capture some value, and everyone not involved in the transaction (especially future generations) get to suffer the externalities without having the chance to prevent the transaction between producer and consumer.
Many people do not regard climate change as a priority and do not use it to influence their voting or buying decisions. E.g. in the march 19 2022 economist yougov poll of 1500 US adult citizens, out of 14 important topics, the issue regarded as "very important" by the largest group of people is "jobs and the economy" (65%) -- tied dead last is "climate change and the environment", which only 43% of the surveyed population regard as very important.
I am not optimistic that effective public policy and regulation to seriously address global warming can be rolled out until there is relatively wide support from the voting public to regulate things like human population growth & rationing of scarce resources. Politically I don't think any politician could dream of stating that they are in favour of a policy of population control, it'd kill their political career. I don't suggest we try to debate it now in this thread, it tends to lead to incredibly toxic discussions. In western democratic capitalist societies the social contract often seems to value individual rights and freedom over the needs of the collective -- at some level this seems fundamentally incompatible with "limits to growth" where one generation might need to leave enough resources for subsequent generations.
I work four days a week from home and one day in the office as a “team day.” Seems to work for us as software developers. Team day is not mandatory but everyone makes an effort to rock up and socialise a bit.
My wife is an optometrist and will continue to work from her practice 5 days a week.
The crucial difference between your policy and a total WfH policy is the ability to recruit anyone from a ~50-mile radius versus anyone from the Australian continent. The quality of applicants you get from a total WfH policy will dwarf whatever benefits you get from one in-person day.
Absolutely. I'm based in Australia and that's exactly what the fully remote company I work for does, they fly the team over every few months... minus the tropical island.
Anyone have good numbers across the whole workforce? Doctors/Nurses, Teachers, Factory Workers, Drivers, Hotel/Restaurant workers, Retail, Security, honestly being able to work from home is a minority of people.
As shown in the comments over there, the article is very quick in drawing conclusions that jobs can be done fully remotely.
Eg: In Q17, the respondent have to say that they work outdoors every day. If the majority does only say that they works outdoors some days - or even most days - the algorithm infers that the job can be done fully from home.
>37% of jobs in the United States can be performed entirely at home
And the second top level comment from that:
>The coding used by this survey is a joke. If 40% of an occupation says they work outdoors that's below 50% so it's bucketed into the work from home category on that criterion. I think if even 20% of a job is saying they work outdoors that's pretty strong evidence you're missing some information about what the other 80% are doing in their job that prevents it from being a work from home job. The net result of their setup is obviously a vast overestimate so take the 37% number with a grain of salt.
How much of a minority matters though. There is a big social and economic difference between (number made up) 5% of jobs and 37% of jobs. Even if it never goes higher, that takes remote from a rare and exotic thing to a full third of the work force.
There is still too much confusion to draw proper conclusions. What I mean is that a lot of people who say they dislike working from home actually dislike the pandemic, the lockdowns, the lack of human interaction, and the associated stress and drama. They might be perfectly happy to work from home in normal times.
Also as a former hospitality worker, my sympathy for those whose jobs preclude WFH entirely.
It's also possible that a lot of people who say they like working from home actually just like not being exposed to COVID. You seem to think there's no rational reason anyone would want to work in person.
I agree with both arguments.
I have been working from home since March 2020. Maybe 30 days in the office since.
I do like it most days, sometime life at home gets in the way of productivity but these days exist in the office too.
I do also like to not be exposed or infected with Covid19 or sneezles.
But at the same time I do want to stress that the amount of covid Australia had is still very very little to what other countries go through and it has affected me only minor. (Yes I do consider myself lucky on that part and know that others have been affected very much so).
There's probably a lot of reasons for both points of view with different weighting for different people, and there's lot of middle ground between in office and remote too.
Personally I actually like working in person, just not every day, and I don't like commuting. If I had it my way I'd be within walking distance of work and doing something like 2-3 days a week in the office. But as long as every business is still in the city and the trains are still shithouse then I'm on team full remote, even if that's not my "true" preference.
From my limited vantage point in hiring, the overwhelming consensus among software engineering candidates is to remain remote. Even among those already in the same city as our home office.
I suggest a different anecdotal study: asking how WFH is done. I mean, on one side how the worker's home is organized (dedicated room, with proper furniture etc vs a craptop in the bathroom) on the other how the company organize the remote part (VDI vs real remote collaboration, for instance).
That's IMVHO and without tangible proof give the best feedback witch is: IF the worker have a good place (and a calm family situation) AND the company is organized for real remote work nearly 100% want to be remote. If not...
Anecdotally, that’s about the number I’d expect to be going back full time among tech workers. Maybe even a bit low. Some people just don’t like working from home, or don’t have a home that’s easy to work out of, or are doing work that’s difficult to do remotely.
Problem solved, I’ll earn more from a company that treats employees with respect and the other companies will go out of business. Labour shortage in Australia is real right now, so it’s literally going to be impossible for these places to hire soon.