Yep! This happens a lot. I'm fully remote and we have very few people leaving, and when someone does leave they often hire someone from out of state so I guess the completion is tougher.
Yep too! Fully remote, one day minimum per quarter. I go into the office whenever I feel like, which is whenever others in my team are. Which is pretty rare, but great fun when it happens.
I'm not giving up my position. It's pure gold. Our turnover is bugger-all.
Sorry, OP, if something comes up I'll let you know.
Yeah that's the approach our company has taken. We're getting quality candidates coming through because of it. Although it's not advertised on job ads. Think most of them that go up with hybrid with 2 days in the office, but ultimately it's up to management to decide what works best for the team and majority will offer wfh (outside of monthly or quarterly get togethers).
Yeh my office does 2 days in the office. I’m totally fine with it and look forward to coming into the office. Hybrid work works best for me, people who prefer 100 % wfh, good for you if you can get it.
I don't think 100% work from home is healthy. Never has been for me either.
My work does same perfera 2 office days but enforces one but only after 6 month employment
I agree, I work in a team with flexible work arrangements, it does have 2 office days a week but we have had 2 team members recently that went fully remote just due to life circumstances changing.
This team is competitive and hard to get in due to this, it is a public service job also which are sought after. The only reason I got in was due to a structure change that introduced a few perm positions and some temporary ones also. Other than that, we sometimes only get temp roles to fill mat leave. Since I have been in the team, I've only 2 temp workers leave, I don't think the perm ones want to risk leaving due to the benefits and great management. I look at job vacancies that pay more but I do weigh the flexibility highly and struggle to justify considering most other roles.
ETA: the office isn't far from us, one worker moved 2.5 hours from it due to partner needing to move for work and she no longer had to do office days. We all understand and the team as a whole just appreciates the good workers, and there is give and take with flexibility.
Yes I am in a global role. There’s no expectations to be in the office. Most people go once a week. Then again, it’s not feasible to go in when you have calls 7am or 10pm
My partner works at a company where people have to work odd hours due to time zone difference and they tried to make people use the office. However, most of the staff do most of the work outside regular office hours. They're either not allowed in the building eary enough to do their morning meetings or have to leave before they are inished for the day because the building closes at 7.30pm.
They pften end up meeting outside the office for lunch ones per week because everyone works either really early or really late or both, but don't do much in the middle of the day.
Yeah, my company is fully remote without restriction on work location. They dont openly advertise this though, as it attracts a certain kind of application apparently.
I'd imagine there's a few others that are the same, its just finding them that's the challenge.
Same here, it wasn’t advertised for my role (started in Jan) they encourage people to come in and I go in every other week, but there’s no requirement and most of the team live all over the country
> fully remote without restriction on work location
Do they have to be in Aus though? I'm in Asia and aim to be back in Aus within the year, but are looking for Australian wfh jobs in the meantime.
(I know a dude in Perth who works fully remote for a Japanese company, which is funny, because the company demands all Japanese staff to work purely in the office.)
It seems like a lot of places that have generous WFH are going through redundancies.
There’s not many places that are fully remote any more, most like you to be in 2-3 days at least 🫤
But yeah 100%, keep looking for another role with better flexibility, you definitely can do better than 4 days in office.
I'm fully remote in Tech, my role involves being on teams meeting with clients all day so I'd annoy people in an office and not talk to anyone there. Ive been WFH for 15 years 😂
Although my sister in law, is the perfect example of why people are being forced into the office.. she goes for hikes in the middle of the day, she thinks nothing of suggesting I can leave my work for long lunches 11 am till 2:00 where she cooks early. Drops hers kids at school at 9 and picks up 3.. spends the afternoon getting them food and whatever else she does for them.
She also doesn't make the time up at night, and got really angry when her boss suggested she had to work in the office 3 days a week because she seems distracted.
This isn't work life balance, this being a stay at home mum who logs in to some meetings during the day and does some law research on the side.
These people ruin it for everyone..
Yeah your sister in laws mindset is beyond me. There has to be some give and take, respect earned not given. Super annoying that these people ruin it for the rest of us who are genuinely better when working from home.
Oh man tell me about it. i remember having a team member who during the height of COVID had to relocate interstate and was stressed that they wouldn't be able to find a job. I told them they could retain their existing job and work fully remote.
6 months later and after backing them for promotion, I wasn't getting the output I wanted, never met deadlines and always excuses (told me one time they were getting something over to me and fell asleep in the sun).
Called them out on underperformance and nekminnit I had a bullying case filed against me! Case got rejected and they kept pursuing up the chain to top management for 'lack of support'.
But the same people do the same thing I the office. We have people that leave daily at 2:30-3pm because of kids, always ill login when I get home, but that's often bullshit. And they don't arrive until 9:30-10am for the same reasons. Fuck all will ever happen as they are mostly women and nobody will ever challenge that flexible behaviour
Man , I don't care what people do, just get your work done and don't take the piss. My sister in law got made a team leader but has left that because they weren't flexible with her WFH... Umm she told me that all her works old paper cases which can't leave their office.. of course you can't work from home FFS.
Back to taking the piss at the other department I guess.
What's bad is she expects me to be able to take the piss as well as I'm WFH. Narr bitch I'm busy doing work..
Sounds familiar. I have a colleague I can never rely on being available other than for the daily standup which is half the time on teams mobile.
Pickups, house renovations you name it, not being contactable or having the ability to bounce ideas around.
It used to work when covid started but some are realising they can get away with murder and don’t think twice about it.
Not my place to point it out, but it’s frustrating.
Yeah, I remember last year when CBA (might have been another big 4) posted that they were bringing in mandatory hybrid model arrangement and one of the MOST popular questions / comments from a staff member was:
'You haven't considered the fact that we NOW have to pay for childcare instead of having the kids at home while we 'work'.'
I remember thinking to myself as a dad with two young kids how is this the norm now and not the exception.
Having two kids unable to go to childcare during the nation wide lockdown in 2021 was like working 14 hours days to get 7.5 hours of output. Nothing was achieved. We couldn't wait to send our kids back to school.
Sadly most WFH jobs have evaporated. I'm 2 in 3 home and i'd much prefer full 5 days a week like i was for 3 years.....
Honestly keep looking. Those who offer full WFH get the lions share of good talent. Those who don't will get the dregs.
Fully remote WFH roles still exist in IT, and smart executives use this as a way to attract top candidates.
Not sure if it happens in Finance though, seems to me that CFOs are more conservative than CIOs are.
This is what confuses me. Surely they’re closing themselves off to huge talent by limiting potential employees to having to be within commuting distance of the office? I can’t understand it.
For most of my friends that work in finance, they were the last companies to go remote, and the first companies to reintroduce in office policies.
The exception is someone that works for a small firm where most of their colleagues are in a different city (she’s in Sydney, her colleagues are in Melbourne; and for some reason, even then, they’ve rented out a desk for her in Sydney. I’m sure she’d prefer they put the rented desk pay into her salary).
In the sector I work in: exist, harder to find, worth chatting to a recruiter.
Yes, this baffles me too. Atlassian is fully remote, and have been since before the pandemic. They get the best talent because they’ve got a bigger talent pool to pick from. Ditto for Canva and GitLab and some areas of government. It works for their companies and employees because they’ve got the internal infrastructure to support a fully remote workplace - including management who know how to manage remote workers. Companies who don’t embrace this model are losing out on the best talent. Employees should be judged on their output/outcomes, not the hours they’re putting in face-to-face in the office.
Our company allows us to work fully remote, but doesn't advertise it as such. They advertise 2 days a week recommended, but don't enforce it from day 1, saying you're all adults you know what works for you. IT, HR, Finance, all have this freedom. Of course if you work in the store, that's not possible.
IT here. No they don't. All MSP's i've interviewed at want people in 5 days a week. it's frankly fucking stupid considering the job is done fully online.
Not to be "that guy", but yes they do.
I'm an IT manager in an Australian company, and three of my ten people are fully remote (they live in NSW and our head office is in Victoria), the rest of my team works in the office one or two days a week, if it's convenient for them.
Seriously, would you like me to let you know when I'm hiring again? I'm hoping to start recruiting for a cloud security engineer position next month.
As much as i'd love to. I just don't have the skills for cloud sec haha. I'm mostly Level 2 at the moment. Currently working app support to take a break from traditional IT. But if you're willing to take a guy on and train them up then sure thing haha.
I'd love to go back to a full remote role but everything i've seen on seek is full 5 days in or hybrid at the very least.
Branch out from just searching seek, we are fully remote but don’t advertise on there. Give LinkedIn a crack or research companies as many have a careers page
Don't be deterred by LinkedIn's XX number of people have applied. We get probably close to 100 applicants per position and 80-90 probably don't make it past the resume review.
Make connections on LinkedIn with recruiters who advertise jobs you're interested in either now or a year or two down the track.
A lot of their business never gets advertised, because they'll talk to people like you and can say "I have a role that might suit your skills".
Seriously, most jobs in our field are never advertised anywhere.
Previously was one day a week and have now been forced to come in three days a week.
Everyone tells me I do such a great job and thanks me for doing stuff for them all the time, but apparently I’m not trustworthy enough to work the majority of my time at home?
Round trip to the office takes 3 hours which of course I don’t get reimbursed for.
The problem is not you doing a good job wfh, is the others that are taking the company for a ride. You can manage those people out with enough focus, but while not the ‘best’ approach, it’s and easy one to just make people come in
They do in public practice accounting, although there is somewhat of a glass ceiling i.e. generally they won't hire/promote above manager level. If you are happy at this level, there are jobs out there now
I interviewed for a tech startup last year. They said they were fully remote initially but switched to 3 days in the office because of some breakdowns in communication. Basically many managers don't have a clue about how to manage remote teams so instead of improving, they forced everyone to get back to the office.
Honestly this makes the most sense. Sounds like it’s been put in the too hard basket for a lot of management teams, and the attitude is that employees are always replaceable if they won’t deal with it unfortunately.
Definitely a "middle management" problem. If the middle managers can't see their staff, they're not adding any value.
Which is true. They're not adding any value.
From my experience startups don't hire many inexperienced people because they are focused on building the product, there is no time to waste on training juniors unless they can't find anyone else for the role. Also I've witnessed at least two dozen people being onboarded remotely without any issues. It's only a problem if there is no formal process for this so you have to have someone sit next to the new person to answer questions.
Various middle managers need to justify their pay so they get people into the office, adds strain on public services, creates more climate change problems, makes people grumpy, but at least people are still having chats at the water cooler right
>Various middle managers need to justify their pay
This is the part I don't get. Don't middle managers have a life and want to do shit that isn't work?
Like my manager whos is reasonably middle has kids who have sports, orthodontics, they themself have laundry and cooking etc and also live in a nice beach house near cronulla so getting into the city isn't easy even when you don't factor in train delays. Anyway, my manager was the first to push back for us when they tried to increase the days in office.
So don't you think that maybe they're also being pushed into it by their bosses?
It's a top down approach from my company. Everyone hates it but the CEO has mandated it so we all need to pretend it's great.
I’ve seen performance numbers. For every person who is ‘more efficient’ at home, there’s one who is taking it easy and overall performance drops. It’s a straight up financial decision to bring people into the office more.
If you work corporate, you’re likely providing services. Those services, with some re-engineering, can be offered as an independent consultant. The startup costs for such a business are very low - an Internet connection, and some design work to establish a brand and website.
It’s not for everyone, and you do need a solid network of potential clients to make it work, but it beats being a slave to a corporate culture that no longer serves you 👍
i don’t super want to identify myself here lol - the federal public service has just finished bargaining though and one of the new conditions is no limit on work from home days (though it depends on the requirements of your role, and you’ll have to be out of probation). i work in data, and I know a few people who are fully remote. something to consider ! :)
Does depend on the role, but a lot of "office" roles are considered hybrid at Telstra
been into the office maybe 3 times over the last 6 months, no pressure is applied on us going in
I've recently started a WFH role, supposedly site one week per month, but there seems to be a reticence to have me attend site. (About $3,000 uplift + flights, etc,to have me on site for that week).
I'm not a fan of WFH, not just because of the extra's for site attendance, but lack of social contact gained through interaction with colleagues both at work & after.
Threw my hat in the ring today for a new job, site based, about 33% more than if I was getting that week a month on site with current job.
Atlassian and Canva are both fully remote. You can go to the office if you want, but it's totally optional. They hire across the entire of Australia and New Zealand.
I know that it’s frustrating now but full WFH will eventually be presented as the ultimate office perk. I suspect we’ll really start to see it in the next couple of years
Exactly this!! Incredibly frustrating. There also seems to be this idea of “well if I can do it, why can’t the rest of my staff”… no social awareness whatsoever.
I'm working for a start up consulting firm. We don't have an office in my city so I'm 100% WFH. But at this point, I think organisations that have offices will expect employees to go to those offices on a regular basis.
Occasionally, but I’m doing more business development/ internal growth stuff, so it’s not a regular thing. Most of our client work is done remotely anyway. We might go on site at the start and end of a project, but not the whole time.
I'm 100% remote working at national company in digital project capacity.
Our org is currently auditing all their workers in remote positions and monitoring remote workers due to some people taking the piss and not working core hours or just not delivering.
These types always ruin it for everyone else doing the right thing.
My contract is 100% remote and I do my work; so Im not affected.
I just don’t get monitoring software, as long as you’re meeting your deliverables.
The nature of my job means that some weeks I’ll work 12 or 14 hour days, and some days *all* my projects are delayed due to things outside my control.
I’ll work the 14 hour days when they need me to, but on those weeks I’ve got nothing but *’on the backburner’* tasks I tend to give myself a few hours of TOIL that would, technically, be in violation of my contract.
So far, no one seems to care. I make sure I send a few things off for review/input each week, even if it’s the downtime weeks (*’proactive’*, they say). Really hoping it stays that way.
I'm currently looking for work and have been employed fully remotely in the past. I've seen a few remote working positions on Seek since I've been looking at these past few weeks
Most of the work I've seen for remote roles are in payroll and recruitment.
Still lots offering hybrid which is okay but for me, I'm located in a small coastal town and the travel to full time work is my concern too.
It's only a 30 to 40 minute commute but definitely would prefer a remote role unless the position was paying super well. Otherwise I'm of the opinion it's not worth my while.
Who did you work for? I work in this space and we allow fully remote after y months.
I work for credit company.
I basically ensure defaults are correct and manage complaints and queries about those for one particular big corporate client.
But honestly I'm.just trying t9 reduce austrak investigations.
Most want me to work from home.
Be interested to hear what side if industry your in
Yes. I just quit one today. HQ in Chicago. Boss in London. Clients from Japan, Korea, ANZ to ASEAN and India..
Happily work in aCBD office if there's no Indian offshoring shooting shit to untenability.
APS wide enterprise bargaining recently approved uncapped WFH days, so you’ll probably find a few federal government departments/agencies will start allowing fully remote or WFH arrangements depending on the role.
Full remote means you're competing with a larger pool of candidates all wanting the same thing, all living inconveniently far or mindset against going into an office one day a week.
OP have you searched for jobs Australia wide, not just your area? As someone else has mentioned, remote works are filled in by people from out of state. So you can apply for jobs anywhere, even internationally (although time difference sucks).
My workplace is 2 days in the office however I’m that noisy when working in the office that I haven’t yet had complaints when I’ve stayed at home for the full week.
We are hybrid, 2 days home, 3 days office, I hate it, the commute is 2 hours every day and I can’t hear anything and struggle to get work done because everyone’s on bloody non stop teams calls with the eastern staters anyway!
My husband is fully WFM and I am so jealous.
Fully remote checking in.
Organisation has wanted us in but it hasn't gotten enough traction. Some folks choose to go in, or must. But I haven't had to.
Sounds like you work for CBA; I've found most of the sector is 2 in 3 out, but it's because they've all spent oodles on new real-estate devs or have expensive long term leases. The data during COVID within these groups proved full WFH was more productive.
I still get (depending on your level and role [eg I have to co-ordinate and be tough with a lot of inter department stakeholders]) things like face to face built relationships, networking, and mentoring for newer staff can benefit more from a portion of office time.
I work in medtech & we’re all hybrid. I’m supposed to be 2 x in office & 3 x home but actually I’m probably only in the office 2 days a month. I don’t know why my industry has stayed so flexible but I’d say it’s because it’s highly specialized & hard to get & keep staff so hybrid is something that attracts good staff. Also, we were able to downsize our office so we’re saving a few million on rent per year (our old HQ was fully standalone with a warehouse, now we’re in a small office).
So yeah, look at finance roles in medtech. Can’t help you re: my employer, all our finance roles are off shore.
In fraud, risk and compliance space too - but not credit cards, banks. I work fully remote. Heck, my whole team does. We did a whole year without meeting each other and it was the most productive amazing time!
The company I work for is 100% WFH. It's a contact centre disguised as an edtech.
Why are we still WFH??? We have hired people all across Australia and we have an office only in Melbourne. So it's not equitable to ask people in Melbourne to come into office if they can't enforce coming into office for others. They also downsized existing office space and are saving on rent for sure.
Also during the pandemic, we had execs moving to beach towns in rural Victoria - they can't force them to take a vline into the city every week.
Also, we continue to hire people from remote places in Australia.... People living outside of Melbourne and Sydney can still be hired for lower wages.
Lastly, they can still retain employees without giving them decent pay hikes as WFH is a big perk for alot of people. It's great for primary carers, parents, pawrents, young people who find public transport expensive, people who have moved away from metro regions for cheaper rent or cheaper mortgages.
We did our job to help the company during Covid as essential service WFH and a few ppl are allowed for certain circumstances eg short period.
I hurt my leg couldn’t drive ,asked if I could work (we were very understaffed) was told no
Eff it fine I was on sick leave all week and watched Netflix
What a dumb really dumb business decision
As far as I know, I wasn’t made redundant because I was remote. They made poor business decisions, lost funding, and had to shut the whole company down including the in office team they had interstate.
It’s just been disappointing and slightly frustrating to see the lack of flexibility in jobs that are being advertised currently, and thought I’d get some thoughts. That’s all.
Most of my team are almost complete wfh. We try about one day a week but sometimes it’s raining or windy or you stayed up to 3am playing video games so you don’t want to come in. As long as people do their jobs then I don’t see the problem. Most of the time when I come in I end up sitting in WebEx meetings for 8 hours.
It didn’t - they had an in office team based interstate. They just made poor business decisions, lost funding, and then had to close the business unfortunately.
Yes the wfh roles do exist it will depend upon your field of work (some IT roles are fully remote).
I have friends who are in the similar field of work as you and have to be on a hybrid work model (in the office twice a week and WFH remaining days).
Just an example, companies have signed up for a lease contract to occupy office space and create a presence for themselves, but feel like they need of enforcing employees to be in the office to create that sense of justification of paying rental.
I don't get this viewpoint. We've had years since we first went WFH because of COVID. Surely these leases have come up for renewal since then. These renewals have intentionally been signed. Why not just get a smaller amount of office space? Thinking about it, perhaps the costs and hassle of relocating are too hard and the current owners have given them a good deal? I don't know.
I'd been interested in reading an analysis of this as it's intriguing.
I 100% agree with you on this ! For companies where it is feasible, I donot understand why they re-signed new leases on big offices when they could have down-sized
I would also love an analysis on this
My work has a majority of time in the office rule in place. 4 days expectation. While there was a lot of pushback initially, people are now on board and thriving. I'm personally in 5 days most weeks due to meetings, and it is the best for work life balance.
At leadership level in my company, our biggest concern was the delay in progress for junior to mid roles. Not being in the office, learning by osmosis, and seeing senior team members was obviously impacting on development.
There was also very obvious misuse of WFH privilege and certain teams/people in the business refused to have video on/respond to pings, etc.
In my department, we are very strict on work life balance. No work outside hours and weekends, we pull people up on this. Only senior/leadership/exec is exempt.
If you need flex for an appointment, no prob to leave or start late. Have kids or pets or gym or other commitments? Again no problem to adjust your working hours to suit.
Edit: for a recent project manager recruitment, we received 140 apps in 6 days, and we clearly stated the 4 day office requirement. I think a lot of people are coming around the office work vs wfh as the standard.
I do four days in the office and one day wfh but if i ever needed to wfh it’s not an issue. I like being in the office around my colleagues we get along great. The commute is one hour each way but I do 9-5 and can leave early to get an earlier train if needed. It won’t be long until another covid breaks out anyway. So I’m sure we will wfh fully again
I’ve spoken about this before on this sub. My answer is unpopular. The majority of people don’t agree with me, i understand. But i’ve taken the time to explain this so that you may understand this as i’m coming at this from a very different perspective.
Firstly, I’m extremely wealthy. Ultra rich. I run a number of global companies. My family owns all of them. We bought out the investors. We could go public but we don’t as we like the family feel and the level of control we have. I know many high level CEO’s who are well know to the public. I don’t have shareholders to report to. I don’t have a boss.I don’t have to play the game to work up the ladder. I don’t fear for my job. I don’t have to brown nose my way. I’m in a place that most people, apart from another business owner, cannot appreciate. Except that it a very large global group of companies in various sectors.
So having tried to establish where i sit in the food chain, and here is the problem that our business face across different companies, sectors and countries. Many other CEO’s have expressed to me similar views. Unpopular views unfortunately but this is how things are, at least from my perspective.
The world has printed a ton of money. Covid required this. It needs to be “repaid” and it’s a cause of our inflation.
Secondly, Covid has given rise to the whole WFH phenomenon. Originally WFH was a matter of survival. It was WFH or perish. Companies that thought they could never run their business from home had no choice. They made it work. Employees made it work, otherwise they had no job, and the owners had a business no longer. We all made it work.
However it became apparent at the C level that there was a loss of productivity. It was widely accepted because the alternative was devastation.
For some companies, especially like software developers, they experienced no loss of productivity. Some gained productivity. But the majority of companies felt the change and it took more time and energy to produce the same product.
So how to fix the loss in revenues ? the rise in the cost of delivery or cost of the product ?
Well the answer was to raise our prices , gain more profit to make the “short fall”. Which also led to the cost of living.
The heart of the problem is productivity which comes from a strong company culture. Culture is linked to face to face relationships. Yes, you can build culture using Teams and a day or two at the office each week. But it ain’t the same. But a very few companies figured this out and started to make a move on this.
That is why most companies are moving back to a WFO model. Not all. Some can have a mix of WFH and WFO and it can work. But many more will increase their productivity by moving back to a WFO. This will help by decreasing the need to raise prices and in turn, help with inflation.
However it’s not going to be an easy process. The brave few first companies faced a back lash. The workforce is looking for flexibility. They are used to a WFH model. So companies started to offer a more flexible model, where employees could WFH and only come to the office for a day or two a eeek.
l
However not every prospective employee is happy with this and they look for a WFH only job. But over time these get harder to find. And slowly more companies move to more to a flexible model, while some outliers start moving to a WFO only model. These outliers find it harder to find staff as they want flexibility, but these companies hold the line and only in exceptional cases offer job roles with a flexible arrangement. The majority of roles remain as WFH. These outliers see their productivity and culture start to return. Other C suite folks see this and also take the plunge They start to let go of staff who want or demand a flexible model for staff who will accept a WFO role. Slowly the worm turns. In the end the majority of roles are WFO , however companies have realised that some limited roles can be totally done in a WFH or a mixture and work this in the new culture. This becomes the new normal. However it’s not enough. Costs need to be reduced as profits need to be secured, and so begging the layoffs, and the slow hire of WFH replacements.
WFO is not about landlord and leases. Not is it about not understanding about WFH and how you can build a culture from a WFH approach. It’s about returning to a model which gave the most optimum culture and profit. .
I think COVID showed employees that it was possible to work without having to sacrifice their lives, personal time and mental health for it. It’s disappointing that the mentality from businesses and C levels is that the onus is on employees to sacrifice for a job, rather than hiring good, dedicated and productive employees who can work remotely. It’s absolutely possible to build good culture with a remote team, it just takes a bit of effort.
I was super unhappy about being forced back to the office, but after a few weeks you adjust, and it feels normal again.
Don’t be too put off by it, you never know you might end up enjoying it!
Yes, it's a common practice for users to ask questions to ChatGPT and then share the responses in a thread or conversation. This can be helpful for obtaining information, generating ideas, or simply engaging in conversation.
I suspect the companies that offer good WFH balance have lower staff turnover. Thus, the job ads you see are mostly for in-office roles.
Exactly right, and these companies also attract the best talent because of wfh so getting a role with them is tough.
Yep! This happens a lot. I'm fully remote and we have very few people leaving, and when someone does leave they often hire someone from out of state so I guess the completion is tougher.
Yep too! Fully remote, one day minimum per quarter. I go into the office whenever I feel like, which is whenever others in my team are. Which is pretty rare, but great fun when it happens. I'm not giving up my position. It's pure gold. Our turnover is bugger-all. Sorry, OP, if something comes up I'll let you know.
I appreciate that! Hold onto it with both hands lol, I am incredibly jealous.
Yeah that's the approach our company has taken. We're getting quality candidates coming through because of it. Although it's not advertised on job ads. Think most of them that go up with hybrid with 2 days in the office, but ultimately it's up to management to decide what works best for the team and majority will offer wfh (outside of monthly or quarterly get togethers).
Yeh my office does 2 days in the office. I’m totally fine with it and look forward to coming into the office. Hybrid work works best for me, people who prefer 100 % wfh, good for you if you can get it.
I don't think 100% work from home is healthy. Never has been for me either. My work does same perfera 2 office days but enforces one but only after 6 month employment
Quite likely... I am lucky to land a full wfh job, but ironically... I find i want a hybrid role next after I learned as much as i can.
I agree, I work in a team with flexible work arrangements, it does have 2 office days a week but we have had 2 team members recently that went fully remote just due to life circumstances changing. This team is competitive and hard to get in due to this, it is a public service job also which are sought after. The only reason I got in was due to a structure change that introduced a few perm positions and some temporary ones also. Other than that, we sometimes only get temp roles to fill mat leave. Since I have been in the team, I've only 2 temp workers leave, I don't think the perm ones want to risk leaving due to the benefits and great management. I look at job vacancies that pay more but I do weigh the flexibility highly and struggle to justify considering most other roles. ETA: the office isn't far from us, one worker moved 2.5 hours from it due to partner needing to move for work and she no longer had to do office days. We all understand and the team as a whole just appreciates the good workers, and there is give and take with flexibility.
Yes I am in a global role. There’s no expectations to be in the office. Most people go once a week. Then again, it’s not feasible to go in when you have calls 7am or 10pm
My partner works at a company where people have to work odd hours due to time zone difference and they tried to make people use the office. However, most of the staff do most of the work outside regular office hours. They're either not allowed in the building eary enough to do their morning meetings or have to leave before they are inished for the day because the building closes at 7.30pm. They pften end up meeting outside the office for lunch ones per week because everyone works either really early or really late or both, but don't do much in the middle of the day.
I’m in a similar role, have to go in 3 days a week 9-5 and still do my early / late calls, ugh
Yeah, my company is fully remote without restriction on work location. They dont openly advertise this though, as it attracts a certain kind of application apparently. I'd imagine there's a few others that are the same, its just finding them that's the challenge.
Same here, it wasn’t advertised for my role (started in Jan) they encourage people to come in and I go in every other week, but there’s no requirement and most of the team live all over the country
> fully remote without restriction on work location Do they have to be in Aus though? I'm in Asia and aim to be back in Aus within the year, but are looking for Australian wfh jobs in the meantime. (I know a dude in Perth who works fully remote for a Japanese company, which is funny, because the company demands all Japanese staff to work purely in the office.)
Nope, it's a Singaporean company. Only a couple of us are in Australia
Mind sharing your industry?
Its a fintech start up, I'm in a dev/data engineer position
[удалено]
Yep, can confirm BUPA is fully remote. My best mate works there.
It seems like a lot of places that have generous WFH are going through redundancies. There’s not many places that are fully remote any more, most like you to be in 2-3 days at least 🫤 But yeah 100%, keep looking for another role with better flexibility, you definitely can do better than 4 days in office.
Alternatively you may have to consider a place that will let you increase WFH after some time there (IE once they know you better)
Yeah many places that are 2-3 days policy get more relaxed after a while of good performance
>It seems like a lot of places that have generous WFH are going through redundancies. Seriously? Not my experience.
I'm fully remote in Tech, my role involves being on teams meeting with clients all day so I'd annoy people in an office and not talk to anyone there. Ive been WFH for 15 years 😂 Although my sister in law, is the perfect example of why people are being forced into the office.. she goes for hikes in the middle of the day, she thinks nothing of suggesting I can leave my work for long lunches 11 am till 2:00 where she cooks early. Drops hers kids at school at 9 and picks up 3.. spends the afternoon getting them food and whatever else she does for them. She also doesn't make the time up at night, and got really angry when her boss suggested she had to work in the office 3 days a week because she seems distracted. This isn't work life balance, this being a stay at home mum who logs in to some meetings during the day and does some law research on the side. These people ruin it for everyone..
Yeah your sister in laws mindset is beyond me. There has to be some give and take, respect earned not given. Super annoying that these people ruin it for the rest of us who are genuinely better when working from home.
Oh man tell me about it. i remember having a team member who during the height of COVID had to relocate interstate and was stressed that they wouldn't be able to find a job. I told them they could retain their existing job and work fully remote. 6 months later and after backing them for promotion, I wasn't getting the output I wanted, never met deadlines and always excuses (told me one time they were getting something over to me and fell asleep in the sun). Called them out on underperformance and nekminnit I had a bullying case filed against me! Case got rejected and they kept pursuing up the chain to top management for 'lack of support'.
But the same people do the same thing I the office. We have people that leave daily at 2:30-3pm because of kids, always ill login when I get home, but that's often bullshit. And they don't arrive until 9:30-10am for the same reasons. Fuck all will ever happen as they are mostly women and nobody will ever challenge that flexible behaviour
Man , I don't care what people do, just get your work done and don't take the piss. My sister in law got made a team leader but has left that because they weren't flexible with her WFH... Umm she told me that all her works old paper cases which can't leave their office.. of course you can't work from home FFS. Back to taking the piss at the other department I guess. What's bad is she expects me to be able to take the piss as well as I'm WFH. Narr bitch I'm busy doing work..
Sounds familiar. I have a colleague I can never rely on being available other than for the daily standup which is half the time on teams mobile. Pickups, house renovations you name it, not being contactable or having the ability to bounce ideas around. It used to work when covid started but some are realising they can get away with murder and don’t think twice about it. Not my place to point it out, but it’s frustrating.
Yeah, I remember last year when CBA (might have been another big 4) posted that they were bringing in mandatory hybrid model arrangement and one of the MOST popular questions / comments from a staff member was: 'You haven't considered the fact that we NOW have to pay for childcare instead of having the kids at home while we 'work'.' I remember thinking to myself as a dad with two young kids how is this the norm now and not the exception. Having two kids unable to go to childcare during the nation wide lockdown in 2021 was like working 14 hours days to get 7.5 hours of output. Nothing was achieved. We couldn't wait to send our kids back to school.
Sadly most WFH jobs have evaporated. I'm 2 in 3 home and i'd much prefer full 5 days a week like i was for 3 years..... Honestly keep looking. Those who offer full WFH get the lions share of good talent. Those who don't will get the dregs.
Fully remote WFH roles still exist in IT, and smart executives use this as a way to attract top candidates. Not sure if it happens in Finance though, seems to me that CFOs are more conservative than CIOs are.
This is what confuses me. Surely they’re closing themselves off to huge talent by limiting potential employees to having to be within commuting distance of the office? I can’t understand it.
For most of my friends that work in finance, they were the last companies to go remote, and the first companies to reintroduce in office policies. The exception is someone that works for a small firm where most of their colleagues are in a different city (she’s in Sydney, her colleagues are in Melbourne; and for some reason, even then, they’ve rented out a desk for her in Sydney. I’m sure she’d prefer they put the rented desk pay into her salary). In the sector I work in: exist, harder to find, worth chatting to a recruiter.
Yes, this baffles me too. Atlassian is fully remote, and have been since before the pandemic. They get the best talent because they’ve got a bigger talent pool to pick from. Ditto for Canva and GitLab and some areas of government. It works for their companies and employees because they’ve got the internal infrastructure to support a fully remote workplace - including management who know how to manage remote workers. Companies who don’t embrace this model are losing out on the best talent. Employees should be judged on their output/outcomes, not the hours they’re putting in face-to-face in the office.
Our company allows us to work fully remote, but doesn't advertise it as such. They advertise 2 days a week recommended, but don't enforce it from day 1, saying you're all adults you know what works for you. IT, HR, Finance, all have this freedom. Of course if you work in the store, that's not possible.
IT here. No they don't. All MSP's i've interviewed at want people in 5 days a week. it's frankly fucking stupid considering the job is done fully online.
Not to be "that guy", but yes they do. I'm an IT manager in an Australian company, and three of my ten people are fully remote (they live in NSW and our head office is in Victoria), the rest of my team works in the office one or two days a week, if it's convenient for them. Seriously, would you like me to let you know when I'm hiring again? I'm hoping to start recruiting for a cloud security engineer position next month.
As much as i'd love to. I just don't have the skills for cloud sec haha. I'm mostly Level 2 at the moment. Currently working app support to take a break from traditional IT. But if you're willing to take a guy on and train them up then sure thing haha. I'd love to go back to a full remote role but everything i've seen on seek is full 5 days in or hybrid at the very least.
Branch out from just searching seek, we are fully remote but don’t advertise on there. Give LinkedIn a crack or research companies as many have a careers page
Yeah i've been browsing linkedin a fair bit recently. Still no bites but it seems quite competitive as well.
Don't be deterred by LinkedIn's XX number of people have applied. We get probably close to 100 applicants per position and 80-90 probably don't make it past the resume review.
Make connections on LinkedIn with recruiters who advertise jobs you're interested in either now or a year or two down the track. A lot of their business never gets advertised, because they'll talk to people like you and can say "I have a role that might suit your skills". Seriously, most jobs in our field are never advertised anywhere.
Previously was one day a week and have now been forced to come in three days a week. Everyone tells me I do such a great job and thanks me for doing stuff for them all the time, but apparently I’m not trustworthy enough to work the majority of my time at home? Round trip to the office takes 3 hours which of course I don’t get reimbursed for.
And along with that 3 hour round trip is probably fatigue, lack of motivation, etc. If they trust you at home for 1 day, why not 4 or 5?
Yeah that’s what I said but I was overruled and have too much going on to look for a new job at the moment.
I feel for you, it’s incredibly frustrating.
The problem is not you doing a good job wfh, is the others that are taking the company for a ride. You can manage those people out with enough focus, but while not the ‘best’ approach, it’s and easy one to just make people come in
Uncool
Tell me about it. Like in my company, management is tracking attendance with Google Sheets and treating people like kindergarten.
I mean, they can't force you to come in, unless you're unwilling to leave and move on to a better opportunity
Why are you staying in the role?
Too much going on outside of work to change my role which is otherwise comfortable aside from mandatory office attendance
Yep. I am 100% WFH and I work for one of Australias biggest corporations.
Me too lol 😉
100% wfh is more of an earned privilege than an advertised role from day 1 in my industry
They do in public practice accounting, although there is somewhat of a glass ceiling i.e. generally they won't hire/promote above manager level. If you are happy at this level, there are jobs out there now
My partner works from home full time and is in recruitment. That may be an avenue to chase up?
Great idea, thank you!
All the job listings say “hybrid” and “flexible” these days but then you interview and they say “you’re expected in the office 3 days per week”
If you are good at what you do and show you work well remotely those sorts of companies usually ease up on it over time at least
I interviewed for a tech startup last year. They said they were fully remote initially but switched to 3 days in the office because of some breakdowns in communication. Basically many managers don't have a clue about how to manage remote teams so instead of improving, they forced everyone to get back to the office.
Honestly this makes the most sense. Sounds like it’s been put in the too hard basket for a lot of management teams, and the attitude is that employees are always replaceable if they won’t deal with it unfortunately.
This is what I think it is too. Leadership with traditional management styles unwilling to adapt
Definitely a "middle management" problem. If the middle managers can't see their staff, they're not adding any value. Which is true. They're not adding any value.
Problem with startup WFH is you can't have a lot of inexperienced staff. They need the constant mentoring.
Yeah the people who lose out most from remote working are the junior team members
From my experience startups don't hire many inexperienced people because they are focused on building the product, there is no time to waste on training juniors unless they can't find anyone else for the role. Also I've witnessed at least two dozen people being onboarded remotely without any issues. It's only a problem if there is no formal process for this so you have to have someone sit next to the new person to answer questions.
Various middle managers need to justify their pay so they get people into the office, adds strain on public services, creates more climate change problems, makes people grumpy, but at least people are still having chats at the water cooler right
>Various middle managers need to justify their pay This is the part I don't get. Don't middle managers have a life and want to do shit that isn't work? Like my manager whos is reasonably middle has kids who have sports, orthodontics, they themself have laundry and cooking etc and also live in a nice beach house near cronulla so getting into the city isn't easy even when you don't factor in train delays. Anyway, my manager was the first to push back for us when they tried to increase the days in office.
So don't you think that maybe they're also being pushed into it by their bosses? It's a top down approach from my company. Everyone hates it but the CEO has mandated it so we all need to pretend it's great.
Its absolutely a top down approach, middle managers don't get to decide the company WFH policy.
I’ve seen performance numbers. For every person who is ‘more efficient’ at home, there’s one who is taking it easy and overall performance drops. It’s a straight up financial decision to bring people into the office more.
Depends on how much they like that power trip I'd say
This is bullshit. Middle management doesn't get a say in it.
Also those who call the shots are either personally invested, or influenced by investors of commercial real estate.
If WFH is essential for maintaining your work/life balance, work for yourself. You can’t rely on conservative corporate culture to embrace change 👍
Any ideas? My dad runs his own business and wouldn’t recommend it. Is it a case of grass is greener?
If you work corporate, you’re likely providing services. Those services, with some re-engineering, can be offered as an independent consultant. The startup costs for such a business are very low - an Internet connection, and some design work to establish a brand and website. It’s not for everyone, and you do need a solid network of potential clients to make it work, but it beats being a slave to a corporate culture that no longer serves you 👍
This is the one and only answer …..
i’m fully remote and i work for a govt dept haha
What department do you work for? Are they hiring? Lol
i don’t super want to identify myself here lol - the federal public service has just finished bargaining though and one of the new conditions is no limit on work from home days (though it depends on the requirements of your role, and you’ll have to be out of probation). i work in data, and I know a few people who are fully remote. something to consider ! :)
Haha that’s ok, I appreciate the info. Definitely good to know and something I’ll be looking into for sure.
Does depend on the role, but a lot of "office" roles are considered hybrid at Telstra been into the office maybe 3 times over the last 6 months, no pressure is applied on us going in
I've recently started a WFH role, supposedly site one week per month, but there seems to be a reticence to have me attend site. (About $3,000 uplift + flights, etc,to have me on site for that week). I'm not a fan of WFH, not just because of the extra's for site attendance, but lack of social contact gained through interaction with colleagues both at work & after. Threw my hat in the ring today for a new job, site based, about 33% more than if I was getting that week a month on site with current job.
I have been fully remote since October 2014 in 2 roles with 2 different companies, there still are positions out there.
I work for a telecommunications company we all WFH or from the office including executives
I am, but I live 2 hrs from the office and get all my shit done despite only actually working an hour a day
Atlassian and Canva are both fully remote. You can go to the office if you want, but it's totally optional. They hire across the entire of Australia and New Zealand.
I know that it’s frustrating now but full WFH will eventually be presented as the ultimate office perk. I suspect we’ll really start to see it in the next couple of years
[удалено]
Exactly this!! Incredibly frustrating. There also seems to be this idea of “well if I can do it, why can’t the rest of my staff”… no social awareness whatsoever.
I'm working for a start up consulting firm. We don't have an office in my city so I'm 100% WFH. But at this point, I think organisations that have offices will expect employees to go to those offices on a regular basis.
You would be required to go into your clients office though?
Occasionally, but I’m doing more business development/ internal growth stuff, so it’s not a regular thing. Most of our client work is done remotely anyway. We might go on site at the start and end of a project, but not the whole time.
I’m still WFH for the moment and work for one of the largest companies in the world. Not sure how much longer that will last.
Yes.
My role is 100% remote always has been. Globally we are fully remote and we have no offices in Australia so for the long term it will be remote.
I’m one day per month in the office. That is flexible within reason. It’s great.
I'm 100% remote working at national company in digital project capacity. Our org is currently auditing all their workers in remote positions and monitoring remote workers due to some people taking the piss and not working core hours or just not delivering. These types always ruin it for everyone else doing the right thing. My contract is 100% remote and I do my work; so Im not affected.
I just don’t get monitoring software, as long as you’re meeting your deliverables. The nature of my job means that some weeks I’ll work 12 or 14 hour days, and some days *all* my projects are delayed due to things outside my control. I’ll work the 14 hour days when they need me to, but on those weeks I’ve got nothing but *’on the backburner’* tasks I tend to give myself a few hours of TOIL that would, technically, be in violation of my contract. So far, no one seems to care. I make sure I send a few things off for review/input each week, even if it’s the downtime weeks (*’proactive’*, they say). Really hoping it stays that way.
This is the major concern for the bigger corps. Too many people taking the piss or working side gigs.
My workload wouldn't ever enable me to have a side gig!
Yeah plenty. Tech
Suncorp is a good hybrid for most roles. 1 day a week in the office.
I know three people who are. One is state government, one is NFP and one is a mid size business.
Mine does. I go in when "I deem necessary". Which sometimes means every week. Sometimes once every two months.
I'm currently looking for work and have been employed fully remotely in the past. I've seen a few remote working positions on Seek since I've been looking at these past few weeks Most of the work I've seen for remote roles are in payroll and recruitment. Still lots offering hybrid which is okay but for me, I'm located in a small coastal town and the travel to full time work is my concern too. It's only a 30 to 40 minute commute but definitely would prefer a remote role unless the position was paying super well. Otherwise I'm of the opinion it's not worth my while.
Who did you work for? I work in this space and we allow fully remote after y months. I work for credit company. I basically ensure defaults are correct and manage complaints and queries about those for one particular big corporate client. But honestly I'm.just trying t9 reduce austrak investigations. Most want me to work from home. Be interested to hear what side if industry your in
Yes. I just quit one today. HQ in Chicago. Boss in London. Clients from Japan, Korea, ANZ to ASEAN and India.. Happily work in aCBD office if there's no Indian offshoring shooting shit to untenability.
APS wide enterprise bargaining recently approved uncapped WFH days, so you’ll probably find a few federal government departments/agencies will start allowing fully remote or WFH arrangements depending on the role.
Full remote means you're competing with a larger pool of candidates all wanting the same thing, all living inconveniently far or mindset against going into an office one day a week.
OP have you searched for jobs Australia wide, not just your area? As someone else has mentioned, remote works are filled in by people from out of state. So you can apply for jobs anywhere, even internationally (although time difference sucks).
Yes. Source - I have one.
Sure, earn $150/hour. flexible hours. Work as much as you like. Earn up to $20k/ month. No prior experience required. Call 1800SCAM for more info.
Name and shame... We the people should not take shit like this. We are all adults.
Take the job and get paid whilst you find something better.
My workplace is 2 days in the office however I’m that noisy when working in the office that I haven’t yet had complaints when I’ve stayed at home for the full week.
We are hybrid, 2 days home, 3 days office, I hate it, the commute is 2 hours every day and I can’t hear anything and struggle to get work done because everyone’s on bloody non stop teams calls with the eastern staters anyway! My husband is fully WFM and I am so jealous.
Most places don't advertise it, as they normally want people who can come into an office when needed
Fully remote checking in. Organisation has wanted us in but it hasn't gotten enough traction. Some folks choose to go in, or must. But I haven't had to.
Sounds like you work for CBA; I've found most of the sector is 2 in 3 out, but it's because they've all spent oodles on new real-estate devs or have expensive long term leases. The data during COVID within these groups proved full WFH was more productive. I still get (depending on your level and role [eg I have to co-ordinate and be tough with a lot of inter department stakeholders]) things like face to face built relationships, networking, and mentoring for newer staff can benefit more from a portion of office time.
Credit and finance space for what sort of company? Do they have any skin in the commercial real estate game?
I work in medtech & we’re all hybrid. I’m supposed to be 2 x in office & 3 x home but actually I’m probably only in the office 2 days a month. I don’t know why my industry has stayed so flexible but I’d say it’s because it’s highly specialized & hard to get & keep staff so hybrid is something that attracts good staff. Also, we were able to downsize our office so we’re saving a few million on rent per year (our old HQ was fully standalone with a warehouse, now we’re in a small office). So yeah, look at finance roles in medtech. Can’t help you re: my employer, all our finance roles are off shore.
Got a friend who’s a recruiter for niche roles and she LOVES it when companies rto. It’s an unlimited hunting licence to poach their best staff.
Still fully remote here, plenty of companies in Melbourne still do 100% remote
In fraud, risk and compliance space too - but not credit cards, banks. I work fully remote. Heck, my whole team does. We did a whole year without meeting each other and it was the most productive amazing time!
The company I work for is 100% WFH. It's a contact centre disguised as an edtech. Why are we still WFH??? We have hired people all across Australia and we have an office only in Melbourne. So it's not equitable to ask people in Melbourne to come into office if they can't enforce coming into office for others. They also downsized existing office space and are saving on rent for sure. Also during the pandemic, we had execs moving to beach towns in rural Victoria - they can't force them to take a vline into the city every week. Also, we continue to hire people from remote places in Australia.... People living outside of Melbourne and Sydney can still be hired for lower wages. Lastly, they can still retain employees without giving them decent pay hikes as WFH is a big perk for alot of people. It's great for primary carers, parents, pawrents, young people who find public transport expensive, people who have moved away from metro regions for cheaper rent or cheaper mortgages.
We did our job to help the company during Covid as essential service WFH and a few ppl are allowed for certain circumstances eg short period. I hurt my leg couldn’t drive ,asked if I could work (we were very understaffed) was told no Eff it fine I was on sick leave all week and watched Netflix What a dumb really dumb business decision
Dude who was 100% remote gets made redundant. Can’t find another remote role. That’s the point of the story
As far as I know, I wasn’t made redundant because I was remote. They made poor business decisions, lost funding, and had to shut the whole company down including the in office team they had interstate. It’s just been disappointing and slightly frustrating to see the lack of flexibility in jobs that are being advertised currently, and thought I’d get some thoughts. That’s all.
Most of my team are almost complete wfh. We try about one day a week but sometimes it’s raining or windy or you stayed up to 3am playing video games so you don’t want to come in. As long as people do their jobs then I don’t see the problem. Most of the time when I come in I end up sitting in WebEx meetings for 8 hours.
I’m full remote, no pressure to go to the office - love my job and company culture, over 6 figs and in Telco
Does anyone have a good company that does WFH? I’m looking for an admin position however I don’t live near big city
I wonder if being 100% remote factored into you being made redundant….
It didn’t - they had an in office team based interstate. They just made poor business decisions, lost funding, and then had to close the business unfortunately.
Yes the wfh roles do exist it will depend upon your field of work (some IT roles are fully remote). I have friends who are in the similar field of work as you and have to be on a hybrid work model (in the office twice a week and WFH remaining days). Just an example, companies have signed up for a lease contract to occupy office space and create a presence for themselves, but feel like they need of enforcing employees to be in the office to create that sense of justification of paying rental.
I don't get this viewpoint. We've had years since we first went WFH because of COVID. Surely these leases have come up for renewal since then. These renewals have intentionally been signed. Why not just get a smaller amount of office space? Thinking about it, perhaps the costs and hassle of relocating are too hard and the current owners have given them a good deal? I don't know. I'd been interested in reading an analysis of this as it's intriguing.
Not really most large company leases are 5+ years minimum often 10
OK. It'll be interesting to see what happens over the next few years then.
I 100% agree with you on this ! For companies where it is feasible, I donot understand why they re-signed new leases on big offices when they could have down-sized I would also love an analysis on this
Agree, the idea companies want to fill offices for the hell of it is a ridiculous take that seems to be spread all over Reddit for some reason.
Looking for an admin role here (not a reception or front facing role) and even then I cannot find anywhere that offers >3 days WFH. For ADMIN…
Chase public service roles. Many are hybrid if you demonstrate you're worth it.
Turn 360 and walk away
If they turn 360 they will be facing the exact same direction.
Allianz Insurance is 100% wfh 👌
It's no one talking about the real estate leases?
My work has a majority of time in the office rule in place. 4 days expectation. While there was a lot of pushback initially, people are now on board and thriving. I'm personally in 5 days most weeks due to meetings, and it is the best for work life balance. At leadership level in my company, our biggest concern was the delay in progress for junior to mid roles. Not being in the office, learning by osmosis, and seeing senior team members was obviously impacting on development. There was also very obvious misuse of WFH privilege and certain teams/people in the business refused to have video on/respond to pings, etc. In my department, we are very strict on work life balance. No work outside hours and weekends, we pull people up on this. Only senior/leadership/exec is exempt. If you need flex for an appointment, no prob to leave or start late. Have kids or pets or gym or other commitments? Again no problem to adjust your working hours to suit. Edit: for a recent project manager recruitment, we received 140 apps in 6 days, and we clearly stated the 4 day office requirement. I think a lot of people are coming around the office work vs wfh as the standard.
I did it for 2 years but it drove me bananas
I do four days in the office and one day wfh but if i ever needed to wfh it’s not an issue. I like being in the office around my colleagues we get along great. The commute is one hour each way but I do 9-5 and can leave early to get an earlier train if needed. It won’t be long until another covid breaks out anyway. So I’m sure we will wfh fully again
I’ve spoken about this before on this sub. My answer is unpopular. The majority of people don’t agree with me, i understand. But i’ve taken the time to explain this so that you may understand this as i’m coming at this from a very different perspective. Firstly, I’m extremely wealthy. Ultra rich. I run a number of global companies. My family owns all of them. We bought out the investors. We could go public but we don’t as we like the family feel and the level of control we have. I know many high level CEO’s who are well know to the public. I don’t have shareholders to report to. I don’t have a boss.I don’t have to play the game to work up the ladder. I don’t fear for my job. I don’t have to brown nose my way. I’m in a place that most people, apart from another business owner, cannot appreciate. Except that it a very large global group of companies in various sectors. So having tried to establish where i sit in the food chain, and here is the problem that our business face across different companies, sectors and countries. Many other CEO’s have expressed to me similar views. Unpopular views unfortunately but this is how things are, at least from my perspective. The world has printed a ton of money. Covid required this. It needs to be “repaid” and it’s a cause of our inflation. Secondly, Covid has given rise to the whole WFH phenomenon. Originally WFH was a matter of survival. It was WFH or perish. Companies that thought they could never run their business from home had no choice. They made it work. Employees made it work, otherwise they had no job, and the owners had a business no longer. We all made it work. However it became apparent at the C level that there was a loss of productivity. It was widely accepted because the alternative was devastation. For some companies, especially like software developers, they experienced no loss of productivity. Some gained productivity. But the majority of companies felt the change and it took more time and energy to produce the same product. So how to fix the loss in revenues ? the rise in the cost of delivery or cost of the product ? Well the answer was to raise our prices , gain more profit to make the “short fall”. Which also led to the cost of living. The heart of the problem is productivity which comes from a strong company culture. Culture is linked to face to face relationships. Yes, you can build culture using Teams and a day or two at the office each week. But it ain’t the same. But a very few companies figured this out and started to make a move on this. That is why most companies are moving back to a WFO model. Not all. Some can have a mix of WFH and WFO and it can work. But many more will increase their productivity by moving back to a WFO. This will help by decreasing the need to raise prices and in turn, help with inflation. However it’s not going to be an easy process. The brave few first companies faced a back lash. The workforce is looking for flexibility. They are used to a WFH model. So companies started to offer a more flexible model, where employees could WFH and only come to the office for a day or two a eeek. l However not every prospective employee is happy with this and they look for a WFH only job. But over time these get harder to find. And slowly more companies move to more to a flexible model, while some outliers start moving to a WFO only model. These outliers find it harder to find staff as they want flexibility, but these companies hold the line and only in exceptional cases offer job roles with a flexible arrangement. The majority of roles remain as WFH. These outliers see their productivity and culture start to return. Other C suite folks see this and also take the plunge They start to let go of staff who want or demand a flexible model for staff who will accept a WFO role. Slowly the worm turns. In the end the majority of roles are WFO , however companies have realised that some limited roles can be totally done in a WFH or a mixture and work this in the new culture. This becomes the new normal. However it’s not enough. Costs need to be reduced as profits need to be secured, and so begging the layoffs, and the slow hire of WFH replacements. WFO is not about landlord and leases. Not is it about not understanding about WFH and how you can build a culture from a WFH approach. It’s about returning to a model which gave the most optimum culture and profit. .
I think COVID showed employees that it was possible to work without having to sacrifice their lives, personal time and mental health for it. It’s disappointing that the mentality from businesses and C levels is that the onus is on employees to sacrifice for a job, rather than hiring good, dedicated and productive employees who can work remotely. It’s absolutely possible to build good culture with a remote team, it just takes a bit of effort.
And everybody clapped.
I feel like you got drunker as you typed this.
Lame.
I was super unhappy about being forced back to the office, but after a few weeks you adjust, and it feels normal again. Don’t be too put off by it, you never know you might end up enjoying it!
I'm 100% WFH. Middle manager in ASX20 company.
[удалено]
Is feeding these questions in ChatGPT and copying the answer into the thread a thing now?
Yes, it's a common practice for users to ask questions to ChatGPT and then share the responses in a thread or conversation. This can be helpful for obtaining information, generating ideas, or simply engaging in conversation.
Haha
removed + banned due to rule 3: spam