Buckle up. It’s about to get really weird and dark.
I hope a lot of industries realize that they don’t need to have everybody in the office just for the sake of having everybody in the office. My former boss was that way, but luckily he didn’t enforce that on me. Why would I waste 1.5-2 hours commuting every day, have constant distractions, and spend 8-9 hours finishing what would take me 3-4 hours to do at home then be on call? Whenever I was at the office, being at the office was considered working. If I’m at home, I have to actually be producing results, because that’s the only way anyone knew I wasn’t just slacking off. That old boomer style of business needs to fade away sooner than later.
Depends on the industry of course. At my company we switched to Google cloud products about a year ago and now everyone in the company is working from home so the switch was just in time. It makes setting up a new laptop much easier and the sharing apps are pretty cool. I am an old MS guy so it took some learning on my part but I really like google mail, docs, and hangouts more than I thought I would. As for working remotely we were all for it since out offices in ATL were pretty overloaded. When new management came in they stopped that and wanted everyone in the office at least 3 days a week...even though there were many people sharing desks. Fortunately that rule didn't apply to me.
Most companies aren’t getting 40 hours of actual work out of someone per week. I have tons of friends in corporate America and very few of them put in more than 2-4 hours of actual work per day. Like I said, being at the office is considered work, even if you’re not working.
I’m a sales manager and my former employer used to be very hands off. In the last couple years they got very concerned with us logging everything we did on our iPad. At the end of the day, as a sales manager, there’s really only one metric that counts and that my objective. My job was to grow sales. Am I growing sales? If yes, then that should be all that matters.
Yeah I know what you mean. I never minded documenting what I was doing but at the same time, they’d stick me in a hotel for months in another state to help out a different market then ask why I wasn’t getting my boxes checked in my market. It inevitably happened every year because I was knowledgeable of the three different business units and flexed a lot. They still didn’t make exceptions for my market when they put me in another one though. VERY frustrating to be told you’re not doing your job when you’re going insane in a hotel away from your wife, family, fish tank, etc all while going above and beyond to help out the “team”.
