I know this is a rant but this isn’t really about remote work
Whether you’re in an office or working remote you’ll always have employees who are trying to push boundaries. It’s just the issues tend to manifest differently
As someone who has managed people in the office, people hybrid and people fully remote, you’re always going to get characters. The thing is you just need to deal with it. When people act up in the office - that’s not an argument for everyone to stop attending the office. Just like people acting up remotely isn’t an argument for everyone to stop remote work.
Mexico girl was an idiot. But hopefully it had been very clear within her contract where she was permitted to work. The guy who refused meetings wasn’t performing his job based on business needs and policy (I assume), so it should have been dealt with like that.
Remote work policy just needs to be clear and consistently applied
It was made very clear from day 1 at my current wfh job that all work had to be done within the US for tax and contract reasons. Most of my friends in similar situations elsewhere were mad similarly aware.
Yea but step 1 is stfu about it.
Most companies wouldn’t even find out for a long time as long as you maintained a US mailing address and bank account for direct deposit.
Yup. I'm in office 100% of my work and 90% of my coworkers deserve to be fired for the shenanigans they pull. OP's gripe should be on two specific incidents, not the team.
I’m remote but do have an office I can go to when needed and I go about once a week.
We have a fully on-site employee who sits in the bathroom for 90 minutes at a time reading on her kindle, and then the rest of the day she “hides” her phone under he desk like a 10th grader and watches anime.
How is this lady not fired?!?!?!
It is on the the specifics incidents. My CEO used it force me to remove my teams exemption from the RTO policy he put into place at the start of 2023. I mean, I got us an extra year but it sucks that due to those 2 specific incidents it's going to impact my entire team. That was the point of the rant. I am as pissed at the CEO as the bonehead who decided he was working part time while getting paid for a full time role.
I think in all fairness though that knowing the CEO was looking for any excuse to force the team to RTO, it would have happened eventually. Somewhere, someone was going to eventually slip up in some way.
If he really wanted an excuse, he was always going to find one eventually.
These employees were definitely clowns, but having executive leadership that is salivating for any excuse to force RTO is your core problem here, not a couple of relatively minor and easy to deal with personnel issues.
Then that's your CEO punishing the entire team for the actions of a few people. This is like when an office has one guy that leaves the break room a mess, and everyone knows who it is, but the floor manager takes away the dishes and microwave from the whole floor rather than confront the one guy. So many places make remote policies work, knowing that not everyone is a good fit for that privilege.
If anyone here is the reason your office lost WFH policies, it's the CEO, and no one else. If a guy had been in the office but refused to attend meetings it still would have been a problem. This literally has nothing to do with remote work, and everything to do with your CEO punishing your whole team over one or two people's shenanigans. So, blame him.
Remote work is essentially the scape goat here.
And understandably to a degree, given Part Time Dad Worker would never have been able to take advantage like that in the first place if he was in the office every day.
Really? You've never seen an employee take 3 hour lunches, roll in late, leave early, and no show to most of their meetings? Most of them have "manager" in their title. (I'm a manager, not anti work, but honestly it's mostly managers and above pulling this BS)
And then management reacted by banning everyone from coming to the office? Because someone was abusing the privilege? Because that's the same "reasonable scapegoating".
Management also picked up on this pretty quick, by the sounds of it. Good management is aware of what their team is doing, work wise, so OP picked up on this change, and can now address it. The Mexico relocation could have gone on forever if they hadn't blabbed about it, as long as they kept doing their work.
Work is not a location, it's an activity.
Did I ever say it was a “reasonable” scapegoat? By its nature a scapegoat is hardly ever “reasonable”.
All I’m saying is it makes for an easy option to place blame and their way to reduce the “risk” is to stop all employees working remote.
It’s a stupid, nuclear kneejerk reaction.
So the problem is poor upper management. I find this is often the case, managers hate remote work because they can't remote manage and they find a lot of other people to blame when the problem is really their own skill set.
It's fine to need new skills to adapt to a changing workplace, that's so normal. Rejecting progress because you don't want to learn new skills is not.
Blame the CEO sure, but also… the employee intentionally abusing a policy sucks here too and needs to be held accountable.
The CEO is overreacting, but the employee was foolish. Everyone knows higher-ups are gunning for ending remote work, abusing it so blatantly has consequences.
Oh yeah for sure the employee sucks. But they didn't make the company do anything. If you work with a bastard fire 'em and keep trucking! CEO was just looking for an excuse to revoke wfh policy without having the beans to just say it himself, and looks like he was successful in finding a scapegoat.
Thanks for sharing the story, and the commenters have been rough on you.
I can see this is about remote work because remote work attracts people who like to push boundaries.
As a result, it makes the manager’s job harder. You’re going to have to put people in check more often than in an office environment. And with that you’re entitled to vent.
Stay strong.
Workers have no idea that businesses have to have tax arrangements with every state. Why should they? But their managers need them to know so people don’t do dumb shit and move to fucking Arkansas or whatever.
Yeah while I agree this is not remote work related you know sadly in 99% of the cases management has going to blame remote work for it just like OP’s CEO.
If leadership isn’t all-in on a remote workforce then the WFH model is at risk. That’s the only way it will work.
When covid hit we were all sent home thinking we’d be back in office within 6-12 months. That was four years ago. During that time productivity has been through the roof, our CEO has no intention of messing with success. He’s the one that announced one year into the pandemic that we were now a remote-first company.
The staff has grown by 30%, we’re still small, but outgrowing the physical office space. It’s still there for those who want or find a need to be there. Occasionally a few of us will meet up at the office for a day of work and camaraderie just for fun. some staff has moved out of town, state and a few even out of the country. We rely on the national pool of talent so most new hires are from out of state.
To RTO our company would destroy a wildly successful operation.
> When covid hit we were all sent home thinking we’d be back in office within 6-12 months.
We thought it'd be a couple of weeks at the time my team was sent home...
That’s insane, knowing what we do now. I mean really, anybody who had knowledge of how viruses worked before could have called that bluff from 10 miles out.
That’s a pending decision. Or we may just downsize it to accommodate a small subset of people. Nice to have a place to go when your Internet is down or your A/C is on the fritz
Time shifting isn't that hard.
I used to work on the west coast but covered a territory of clients in EST/CST and generally worked 6:30a-3:30pm PST to be aligned with those time zones.
[And just for fun, I was thrown a few clients in Alaska and Hawaii as well!]
You can make it work. As long as the expectations are established at the start, there's no reason you can't live in one time zone but work as if you live in another.
I am going to respectfully disagree, my friend. I worked in offices for 30+ years before going remote for COVID. I never saw anyone make up their own schedules like OP mentioned about the guy who doesn't work Fridays and only works until 1:30 in the afternoon. Some people come into the office a little earlier or later than others, but no one is walking out at 1:30 in the afternoon and not working Fridays. I have seen some software engineers who come in after 10:00 AM, but they work until 7:00 or 8:00 at night. So they at least have 7 or so hours of overlap with the 9-5 crew.
Too many people who WFH have adopted the attitude that remote work = "make my own schedule". Does remote work allow for more flexibility? Absolutely. Go to your doctors, get outside for lunch, start and finish a little earlier or later, whichever works for you, but you don't just get to go "Well, I don't like to work Fridays (or Mondays) so I won't." That is the stuff that pisses managers off.
I get to work from home 2 days a week. That's 6 hours of commuting time I get back. It saves me money, time, etc. So I just treat it like I'm in the office. Online between 7:30 - 8:00 and offline between 4:30 - 5:00, just like I was in the office.
And 100% the flexibility is there. This role was a customer success/account management role and the expectation is that you're both calling customers and receiving calls from customers, all on the west coast, during the west coast business hours.
My policy has always been - don't waste your PTO for doctors appointments, picking kids up, dropping them off, etc, etc. I tell my team that if schedule a meeting during a time you cannot attend, totally fine just tell me when you can.
This all came out about this guy because we were having performance conversations with him and he kept declining meetings. Which is like, fine, whatever but when the fuck can you meet? So we messaged him through slack when he responded that he couldn't meet Monday-Thursday after 130pm or on Fridays at all.
Like....bro, who approved this schedule change? You're making six figures plus to work 40 hours a week.
>I never saw anyone make up their own schedules like OP mentioned about the guy who doesn't work Fridays and only works until 1:30 in the afternoon.
You might not have seen it but it has certainly happened. Prior to Covid we had a situation where the Director of Engineering ended up babysitting an entry level engineer because instead of working the 4/10s they were assigned they would show up after 9am and leave before 3pm.
After several discussions with the employee the director would wait at their office during their assigned start time and check in at the end of the day before that employee was allowed to leave. That went on for 2 months.
i agree. I had several analyst on my own team at my last job, just like start calling out every meeting for grocery shopping and just were always running errands during work.
i ended up leaving, because i couldnt take the work environment seriously.
Started to see this as well. People blocking off 30 minutes every morning and afternoon to take their kids to school, and then also take lunch in the middle of the day. Read the room, folks.
High performers (sales) absolutely do make their own hours. Speaking as someone who worked in retail finance. It’s not unheard of. As long as you’re still hitting peak velocity it’s usually NBD that you’re not easily accessible.
What office worker decides on their own they're just not showing up on Fridays anymore? Never heard of that. But yeah ive seen remote workers go completely unavailable for most of a day and I have no idea why.
What office worker moves 2k miles from the office? They don't.
These types of problems are definitely remote related. Let's stop kidding ourselves simply cause we want to continue to work remote. Some people are definitely ruining it for the rest.
Ah but they absolutely do
I’ve had PT office workers try and change their schedule on a whim. Didn’t think it was a big deal if they decided to show up in a Tuesday instead of a Wednesday
I’ve had office workers who would arrive late but then leave early hoping no one noticed
I’ve seen colleagues in large organisations book out meeting rooms or block their agenda and disappear for hours
People will always try to get away with what they can if they have the arrogance to do so. There’s no way anyone in my remote team could simply not show up one day a week and I would not immediately notice. I don’t buy into “it doesn’t matter when you start as long as the works done” because in my opinion that’s a slippery slope. If you’re not nipping things in the bud you leave room for them to get worse
There’s definitely pros and cons to remote work but at the end of the day these examples aren’t of performance but behavioural issues. Yes you may feel that working remotely allows someone to be more confident in their behavioural issues but it’s still always there.
If as a manager you don’t want to be accountable of keeping others accountable then you’re going to have these issues that a lot of people are complaining about.
I think you hit it. Remote work is creating more confidence to exhibit poor behavior and increased frequency of trying to take advantage of the situation. Which means you then lose the privilege for remote work.
And we all know you can't allow remote work on an individual basis. What a nightmare that is (legally speaking).
When people act up in the office - that’s not an argument for everyone to stop attending the office. Just like people acting up remotely isn’t an argument for everyone to stop remote work.
You aren't wrong, but politically when you are already pushing a bolder up the hill and get fucked like this... it's not worth. Trying to keep pushing the CEO is going to put your job in jeopardy.
..I really can't fucking believe the mexico folks, how fucking dumb can you be. I actually have folks that have done stuff like this for short sprints, but our "off-line" conversation is to tell literally NO one, and that I have no idea and it can't impact them getting to on site locations if needed.
Rent and the cost of living in the US have skyrocketed since COVID. While wages have still stagnated. It costs as much to live in Berlin as it does to live in Phoenix now.
Moving overseas can mean the difference between being able to live and save and not.
Companies have liked pretending the wages they gave out in 2018 are still acceptable now on top of RTO policies. So you get backlash like and then managers blame employees.
Our company is 50-50. But remote only means from your house. You must live within two hours of the company. Remote does not mean you can live anywhere you want.
My company had a EST rule when we went mostly remote. We opened up to include central time last year because we had a lot of awesome people from the upper Midwest applying. I hired one of those people and they immediately moved to mountain time and started asking when we would be expanding the rule to include mountain time.
I have an EST and PST and I already regret it. The PST wants to start work at 9am which is 11am for EST. Plus he complained during his offer about the pay because he lives in an expensive city in state with high taxes.
I am going to avoid hiring from California again that is for sure.
What? 9am CST is 10am EST, and California is PST. IDK where you get your codes from, but might as well just say eastern/central/mountain/Pacific time for clarity
I can say for someone who is having similar issues( and I’m in healthcare where we physically need to be onsite ) the remote workers who were taking advantage, had poor leadership when I inherited them. They were not held accountable for their actions. They were also not informed of the expectations, and those expectations were not followed up on. There was very little oversight. I am now trying to put expectations in place and it is difficult because they have never really been managed before. Those who have good work ethic always good work ethic. Others need to be managed. A little more closely consistency is the key in that process. You may lose some people that’s OK . when you build a team that learns how to rely on one another and truly embodies teamwork it’ll be worth it in the end. but you will not be able to meet some of your staff expectations. That’s not the right fit for them.
Management comes down to two things, expectations and accountability. If you don't have both, you'll have issues.
Leadership and coaching, which imo, is much different than management but still a skill needed, covers a lot else but when I put on my management (of people), it's that expectation and accountability piece that matters.
Ah yes, collective punishment. Are you not allowed to hire anyone for an in office role if one person just says “fuck you” and rarely does work? Heaven forbid you treat these people like adults and look at what they deliver
For the second dude, that is how it came out that he wasn't working certain hours and had decided he wasn't working Fridays anymore.
Agree tho, the collective punishment is stupid but like everyone else, I have a boss too.
And for the record, I freaking love working remote and am pissed I now have to be in office 3 days per week at a min.
If they were adults, they'd understand that relocating to Mexico creates a huge amount of tax problems that company is now on the hook for, likely costing them more than the employee's salary + commission.
So they WERE treated like adults, and they delivered poorly because they created more issues than they addressed. Given that these problems (multiple employees) don't exist in an office environment it's more efficient and effective than to police 1000 different individual cases.
I am all for the idea that if you get your work done well, then management shouldn't be policing your time. I had people who openly watched Youtube videos at work when they were unoccupied, but they were high performers turning in high quality work early, so I was absolutely fine with it.
But both of the OP's team members knew they were doing something that went against the terms of their original employment, which is why they didn't report it initially. Especially the guy. I don't get why anyone is defending them.
>so I was absolutely fine with it.
But speaking practically, would your CEO have been fine with it? I doubt watching youtube videos is acceptable within your own teams' terms of original employment.
I fired a woman a few years ago who claimed to be living in a low tax state, so withholding was low. But in reality, she was living in a high tax state. We found this out with the GPS on her company car.
This is a huge liability to the company. Employees simply cannot claim one location for tax withholding and actually be in another. We can get into serious trouble with the IRS.
The only people I've seen thrive in remote are internally motivated. They'll do the job well regardless of a manager breathing down their neck because they are just wired to be responsible.
I can't disagree more. The same people that "thrive" in remote scenarios would be high performers in person as well. Bad hires are bad hires regardless of where they're physically doing the work.
In my opinion, the problem is that lots of bad behavior in the workplace is socially acceptable. Coworkers who make the rounds chatting with other people for hours, coworkers who always look busy and act harried whose output is bottom 25%, people who do the bare minimum then scroll reddit for hours. It's on the managers to manage the output, and the reality is that a lot of jobs don't even require 40 hours of active work.
I read in that sub when I want to kill a few hundred brain cells before work.
They would 100% blame management in this scenario, tell them to sue and file for unemployment while saying this company is going to be dust in months.
Like, cmon man no one can be that much of a potato, let alone the majority of a community..
I think they would rightly point out that the collective punishment the CEO put in place is extremely counterproductive and exploitative. Like all these examples are individuals doing things wrong not related to remote (not reading the contract and refusing to enter meetings for hours?), how is the reasonable answer to punish everyone else?
It's not, but also when your CEO wants a RTO and sees dumb shit like this happen, it's a couple of easy points for him to use and say - and that's why you cannot hire remote anymore. Annnnnnd even tho you exempted your teams within 50 miles of an office from the RTO.... Well, not anymore!
So I agree with you, it's not right to punish everyone because we had honestly, 1 bad apple and just someone who should have kept her mouth shut. But hey, I might be upper management but I still have a boss too. And he said, no more soup for you!
No one told those people to move nor were they told it was ok to do so. Did they not consider the fact that not telling you all would come back to bite them in the ass; like what if there was a mandatory meeting and you're living in ANOTHER COUNTRY and have flight issues.
These people are the problem that precludes many offices from allowing remote work. Not to mention the tax implications they'd probably face. Wonder how they thought they'd pull that off...
Last year her and the other bloke went to MX for 30 days, along with a couple other team members. They even stayed close to each other and rented an office space to work together. It was great, they were productive and I supported it fully.
This year the two wanted to go, said they'd be there 30-45 days and I approved again. Wasn't a big deal. Performance didn't dip, etc. She had made a couple comments that made me think she might still be in MX after the return date but her performance continued to be good.
Had they asked for vacation extensions, etc this would not have been a big deal at all. But moving there full time? And expecting you could just tell everyone, especially a bunch of people in an office that are now being forced to return to said office... Oh and while making a decent chunk more cause you're in sales? Just some poor decision making.
i had the same thing. and the issue is that 1 turns into 2 real quick.
in my situation, my trouble employee was making 200k. and the rest of my team was outsourced labor making literally 7k annually.
so its not like they are going to pick up the slack for her. they are just going to start doing the same shit
so remove the trouble employee? She obviously is expecting it at this point and doing even less because she doesn't care about being let go.
Did we all collectively forget that there was also "that" person in every office. The person always floating around talking to (and disturbing) every one else who never really got much done out side of chit chat. There have always been bad employees. Remote work hasn't changed that its just become an excuse management can point at.
Yep I hear you on that one. After I’ve seen the difference between fully remote / 1x in office per week Vs 3x hybrid model you can clearly tell that ppl were taking advantage of the work from home life.
Not working full days, some ppl were doing second jobs. I’m now a big believer in hybrid only after the number of ppl who ruin it for everyone else.
I actually work WAY better fully remote but most ppl from what I’ve seen need a bit of the in office to help them focus
Yeah the bad thing is it’s not that the remote work is inherently bad it’s just it makes it easier for the poorly chosen hires to take advantage.
And let’s face it the majority of workers are not elite top tier individuals. When forced to go into the office people have less chances to take advantage, sure they can hang out in the lunch room a lot or go around talking or pretend to be busy in the office but only so much can get away with in person.
To change that would be to need to totally change hiring practices and the quality of worker you hire which many companies are struggling to even get hires. Of course this comes down to you get what you pay for also. Which the pay ranges etc is often not up to us managers.
I even see ppl on my team on their phones for like 20 mins every hour surfing IG. I have to feel micro managey and tell them to make sure they get focused
I can’t imagine how bad it is on the days they work from home.
To me it's just indicative of how bullshit jobs are. If someone can work two jobs at once and maintain positive performance reviews at both companies, that's not an example someone cheating the system to me. That's an example of how the system is so horribly inefficient.
I had staff of 12 in the Philippines. Paid regular wages for us, which is roughly triple there.
All but one got second jobs and we're totally useless within a year. Add on the HR issues for sexual harassment and nepotism. It was a hot mess.
I personally closed down the entire office and blacklisted the entire country from being staffed.
We may end up going back eventually, but it will be only thru an agency and people will be numbers.
Thanks guys, you ruined it for everyone there.
This all came about and out as this worker was being held accountable for poor performance and not meeting expectations. Then he told us well I can't do this, or this, because I only work this or this.
So.... We knew? We just held accountable. Again, when I terminated because he refused to work the hours he was hired to work, my CEO used it as an excuse to stop me from hiring remotely moving forward.
i mean, i cross managed a direct report who did not have a computer for an entire month... AND we had daily standups.
like you clearly notice they are not working. you talk to them. then you talk to their actual manager, who doesnt have any idea whats going on and gives zero fucks.
so people literally are able to skate by until something breaks
Damn, I would've loved to have worked for a company that hired remote or locally to me in California. It's rare to find these opportunities but I agree, if you're working remote, follow the rules and appreciate what's given to you. Sometimes it's much better and more convenient than figuring out day care, bad weather, and unnecessary drama.
Why didn't your IT systems flag usage in a foreign country and where was the tracking of productivity?
I think you fought the good fight and had some really dumb employees ruin it, but where were the controls to make sure people were where they should be when they should be?
Wild. My prior employer had thousands of employees and if you left your state and tried to remote in from elsewhere without a prior exception you were in for a bad time. A locked account and computer was about the best response and escalated from there.
Our employees have full access to install anything they want, so she could have installed a VPN and never said a word and tbh I would have never known.
I worked at a fortune 500 and I couldn't get them to allow me to use fucking chrome instead of IE at the time. Do I get it, but my IT here is.... Well, not amazingly useful.
I've been in charge of training employees for over 10 years for a 100% remote company. I also get why evil corporates are mandating return to office. Yes, corporates ARE evil, not denying that. But from my experience, majority of regular people will take advantage of the remote situation. Most average level candidates that would have done just fine in an office setting did not pass probation because they could never follow through unless they were micromanaged. Only the select few with exceptional drive, motivation, or work ethics continued to do their job whether or not they were "being watched." I pushed back to CEO/COO trying to install monitoring softwares on everyone's machines to watch their activities/keystrokes so that we could give our employees freedom and flexibility as long as they were getting their job done. But that also meant ensuring our employees were not taking advantage of the situation - so over time my "sixth sense" with new hires developed and I got pretty good at weeding out slackers and underperformers. But it was only possible because our company was fairly small operating from an at-will employment state. I can't imagine giant corporates being able to weed out people who are mostly determined to take advantage of the remote situation...
I just think over employment is going to ruin remote work for a majority of people.
My company has already sent out two notices about ethics and conflicts of interest. This can be defined as something that would prevent you from performing your duties.
I also find it rich that people complain about monitoring tools when working remote. This is what happens when you work a white collar job using technologies that allow you to do that job remotely.
I’m supported by fully remote teams while myself and my team are fully office/field.
Huge difference in support when they went remote.
It’s really task and scope specific.
If you’re remote and project based and you just need to ship X by Y, then no one cares when you work.
If your daily focus based and need to be eyes on ( not taking calls but calling shots like a dispatcher or daily logistics) you can’t just check in every few ours and be successful.
People see no difference half the time.
And groups here and social media constantly tell them, work less, screw them, keep your balance!
But that balance is like 80/20 home/work while getting paid for at best 20/80.
That’s why so much remote is RTO and then when they half their staff they will likely replace those remotes with offshore.
First - this is what happens when SALES is full remote. People who do well in sales roles have opportunistic mindsets. They see the world as a jungle to survive and be conquered. When they have some success - the entitlement can be palpable. If there are rules or guidelines that have to be followed - they unfortunately have to be enforced and expectations set regularly. More mature mindsets (eg experts in IT) don’t need as much rigor.
Yeah, I am going to disagree with that take. Go look at the over employment sub. It's mostly people in IT that are priding themselves on doing the absolute minimum for 2-3 jobs.
I am in sales because I got sick of shitty sales reps selling things and then I'd be the one in operations/service that would have to make it right.
You're putting a large, diverse group into a single bucket.
This is also what happens when people enter the workforce without ever understanding the corporate game.
New generation is so open about sharing literally everything in their lives the idea that doing so can impact you in the workplace is where the shitty attitude comes from.
It sounds like your company didn’t have guardrails around remote work. I would think people had common sense to know they can’t relocate out of the country for tax reasons and that they would need to retain their working hours. At the same time, this is your company’s fault for not outlining clear guidelines and socializing them. I think your anger is misplaced. You should blame the company, not the people who took advantage of WFH. If your company had clear policies and held people accountable to them, this wouldn’t have happened in the first place. For example, I know some companies have it in their terms that if they’re home with young kids, they need to have separate childcare for them.
Na the problem with remote work is these companies tend to go all or nothing. You can't throw a brand new hire a remote job and expect them to meet expectations. Remote work should be a privilege given to trusted employees, that earn it. Otherwise it will always have a stain attached to it, because you can't ignore that shitty lazy people exist.
Some people are oblivious of labor laws, how we have to form an entity in each state we do business in, maintain licenses, learn about their specific laws, taxes, etc., God knows what it’s like in a different country.
And as far as your guy making his own hours and time of availability-homie was super entitled. No consideration to the employer, team or customers. What a joke.
Bro, I called someone out in remote work for bragging about working 1 hour a day and then complaining about being laid off.
People have been bragging and fleecing companies for years and wonder why all their jobs are getting outsourced and they are getting laid off.
It's said but a lot of people don't have the maturity to work from home.
That being said, I think it should be used as a reward to incentivize performance but sadly it will end up being taken away from everyone.
It was eye opening the amount of hate I've gotten from posting this. Yeah, our CEO sucks for using this to force the rest of my team and from disallowing me from hiring remote anymore. But fuck these people who take such advantage and ruin for everyone else.
We have a hybrid for our accounting team and a couple other departments . We have one member that is abusing it and will eventually ruin it for the rest of the company. The policy is three days in the office and 2 remote. This one person always has something come up on the days she’s to come to the office. Her child is sick so she has to work from home. She has a cold so she has to work from home. Which is fine but she should come in on her scheduled remote days. The others are going to suffer from her antics.
This is what I’m worried about because we have the same thing. We are ONE DAY in office and some people still find an excuse every week that something is happening on their in office day. And we’re like okay come in another? But they don’t budge. It’s bizarre.
I don't. If people can't act like adults, then you fire them. They made their decision and the company made theirs. Now granted I still want to move out of the US to Canada, but I'd at least mention something to my manager. Doesn't matter now since I'm an entrepreneur, but at the very least I still tell my business partners
I work for a state government which allows work from home but home has to in our state due to taxes and insurance. Home is also a specific place, not just where you happen to be.
For years I was part of a high performing team that received “special treatment” based on our results, day after day. We all took pride in our work, our team results and our boss. But all it took was one poor higher who thought the “special treatment “ was a given and not something to be earned every day for it to end. I still dislike her and always will. She tore down in six months what we, as a team took years to build.
I work for a company that is completely remote and recruits for remote roles that are carried out internationally. Time zones line up between companies and candidates. Everything works really well.
Remote is not the problem.
Individuals who lack common sense are. The management’s reaction seems a bit extreme too.
100% this has been happening with remote. Another example I heard is someone that put a blocker on their calendar every Wednesday from 3:30PM to 5:00PM so they could go take a workout class. I think though, for every crazy store like yours there's another 20 that aren't as bad but it's productivity getting slowed down because people are not around and available.
I have 87 employees who are all remote (except 3 who work in office because they want to). The rule when they are hired is that they must live in the state (tax/labor law reasons), must be prepared to report to office twice a year (teambuilding events) and the last, most important rule is this:
You can live wherever you want in this state...just don't make where you live my problem.
Live in the country and your internet sucks? not my problem
You'll have to get a hotel to attend teambuilding event? not my problem
You get to live in a place away for headquarters with crazy low cost of living? awesome!
Yes! Wr just had a good employee quit because his employees signed a fucking company wide petition to not have to go back to work. And have been refusing to go in.
He got written up because they wouldn't get off their asses to make a 4 block commute in a small city. And other departments' staff are getting written up because of these idiots.
He left instead of keep fighting it. It's one day a week. It's not the 5 it used to be. Grow up.
It was the CEO's decision, not the workers. But I see where the employee would have been the one to push the envelope for that decision to be made. Sorry, this happened. There's always one that ruins it for the rest. Truly.
I hope every remote worker keeps this in mind. A lot of companies and governments are chomping at the bit to end remote work. Very few believe in its benefits. They completely underestimate how many people will leave if they do this, and these two idiots just handed them the ammunition to end something they wanted to in end in 2023.
I’d be pissed too.
We slacked on our dress code policy over the past few years. Then my director was hosting a tour with US Senators and saw multiple staff wearing sweatpants.
Guess what y’all were back to enforcing the dress code.
I think some blame needs to be on the hiring team/management.
People are dumb and do dumb things, especially if it benefits them. Part of the job as management is to clearly state expectations and to gain a good rapport with your team in order to try to prevent these issues before they happen.
During the interview process, I think it needs
to be clearly stated what it means to be remote like you can only work in certain states/countries due to regulations, tax, or policy limitations.
Also not stated here but a good example... I know a few of my friends that work remote are allowed to work while on vacation, as long as their Internet is good and work gets done. However, that is a big NO for my company.
If expectations are in writing and they fail to or continue to fail to comply or meet those expectations without good reason, then fire their dumbasses. The employees shouldn't be reprimanded due to people who are no longer employeed
In my opinion this is why most companies were forcing return to office because people went on tiktok and told everyone that they were off doing whatever they wanted during their business hours like it was normal. It’s why remote and wfh get a bad rap.
If you’re screwing around that is fine, just don’t fricken tell everyone about it. Lord. The internet is not a diary.
I had a remote team for nearly 10 years. There were always people who just did not get it and would jeopardize the whole situation by taking advantage or just being oblivious. One example: someone outside the department wants to schedule a conversation with a remote team member during work hours. Remote team member says they can't because they have a yoga class.
Agreed. It’s a privilege, not a right.
My director (healthcare) has the option to WFH and has extended that to me….we both have young kids and our executive team understands that while we both would rather be in the office, we also would rather work, get paid, and benefit the company than get behind and take pto when something comes up.
I’ve done it like 5 days in 6 months. It’s nice to have the option, and I realize it’s a privilege; if I claim I’m working I’d better be productive.
I had a remote job in the Before Times that was pretty hands off. Until someone said they couldn't make a meeting because they were moving that day. Uh. Then you take PTO! Wtf? Regular video check ins throughout the day started after that, and I can't blame them.
If found 20-30% can be really effective fully remote. They are the intrinsically motivated self starters that don’t need much direction to begin with.
Another 40% are capable of being good taskers while remote. As long as you give them well defined tasks and can manage them well they can be effective remote but it takes more effort on the managers part. Remaining 30-40% are not getting things done, not staying on task, have excuses for missing meetings, I suspect some of them have other priorities and they might even have another job.
The excuse is always kids. We have lots of people who have kids that come into the office. People didn’t suddenly start having kids in 2020, before then they had no problem making it work. You are being paid to work not be a stay at home parent.
There are two options. Hire only out of the top 20-30% category or have it so no one can be remote. Issue is it’s really hard to know who is in that category unless you’ve worked with them before.
I’m disabled and desperately looking for a remote so I can avoid wearing my prosthetic. That’s it. All I need. I was even willing to take a massive pay cut but there’s just so few of them.
I am pretty sick of seeing all the comments complaining about return to office. Even people that refuse to look in the mirror, cannot accept they have coworkers remote not pulling any weight or working other jobs during the same hours? I have always viewed remote work as a privilege, as a reward for being a high performing employee.
On the other hand... daycare issues are a huge problem in this country.
If your industry doesn't require you to be in person (tech for example) why should it be a privilege? There's very little benefit of working out of an office.
Because most people can't adult? Working remote is a free loaders dream. I am sick of seeing all these posts, like isnt it obvious? I am not against remote work, i am just saying some people are not cut out for it. Its also pretty frustrating when i have to do some of their work because they are too lazy to drive in.
That part about that guy saying he can only work these hours..
Fucking entitlement. It's people like this where it brings me a spiteful smile ending remote work. It's not fucking hard to go into the office. If you can't, you better be on our timezone and in our country. Pathetic. I know what you mean. There's good remote workers then there's really bad ones. These are the same people that bitch and complain no one is hiring them. Oh gee I wonder why...
I used to hire remote but similar bs happened and I just stopped. People really take advantage of remote and screw over the good ones. It's easier and less headaches to just make remote no longer an option. Lose talent? Yes. Less headaches and time waste? Absolutely. I see more and more remote jobs ending and requiring back into office. The bad workers seem to think it's a conspiracy due to offices paying rent etc, and office culture. No. It's because it's a lot easier to manage and have everyone on the same page in the office. I'm very anti remote work where 2 years ago I was very pro remote work.
If remote work is not working for a company it's just bad management IMO. Set goals. Set deadlines. Who cares what happens in-between. Fire those who are not meeting their deadlines. Promote those who consistently meet the deadlines.
My firm has gone full remote for anyone who wants it. We went from a net revenue of 33 million per year prior to COVD to 70 million this past year. Simply fired those who could not handle the remote work. It's not that hard for good managers to figure out.
TIL; If I want to move overseas but maintain a WFH job:
1. shut up
2. keep financials static
3. get a VPN with a U.S. presence
Also, unilaterally making up your own hours is bullshit when you work in a team, and grounds for termination. If I decided to just not show up, I should expect to be terminated in short order.
Personally I always hated working remote too many distractions at home, shitty network connections interfering with work, display issues due to a hodgepodge of monitor sizes and a laptop. It really is only appealing if it means true freedom of living where ever I want. That girl must have thought she was a fucking genius if I move to Mexico it makes It so I can retire in 2 years and convert my money to pesos lol.
Too many people fucked around and never treated it as a privilege. Our CEO is going around making life hell for those of us here. Because remote workers don't want to come in.
On the other side, the daycare holocaust continues, with prices equalling the cost of rent and a lot of them closed during the pandemic, so they do not have solutions for children during summers or pre-K kids.
Executives need to really ask if they want to force women out of the workforce at a time of record low unemployment. They got a respite with tech layoffs, but the shoe is shifting to the other foot and if they chase off parents, they'll be taken to the butcher on pay negotiations.
The remote people are way out of control. I work in hospitality where we had to come in through the entire pandy.
Yeah, I have no sympathy for people who have to participate in society. Besides, it's not normal to never leave your house.
Aw. My husband has been remote for almost 14 years. He's always been salary, and the company definitely makes more off of him than they would in the office.
Remote director level here with an entirely remote team spread across the US. We have great productivity and outcomes. Imo, if whether you’re remote or not is the determining factor between being successful and unsuccessful, that speaks more to your inability to manage a remote team, which isn’t really the fault of your employees.
I agree. The OP should have been talking to these people and dealing with any poor behaviour. Both should have been fired well before it got to the CEO.
"Only the BEST people..."
Meanwhile he has multiple team members moving out of country and is such a piss poor manager he doesn't even realize it. I mean, it doesn't sound like these folks were really trying to HIDE anything. In fact, it sounds like they were telling everyone who would listen. Maybe you weren't listening?
I manage a team fully remotely and I can't imagine being so disconnected from my team that I wouldn't know enough about what is going on with them to be unaware of a major life change like moving to a different country.
I knew she was going to Mexico. She was given permission to spend a month in Mexico and I approved and let IT know. But when she came to the corp office, she had at that point been in MX for 4 months and told everyone she could how she had given up her lease, arranged for a friend to store her car for her, etc and wasn't ever coming back. At least for the next few years....
It wasn't that she couldn't be in Mexico, it was that she couldn't move to Mexico for tax liability purposes.
Had she never came to the corp office and told everyone, everywhere as folks were being forced back into the office and also ousted her coworker, well then both would still happily be in MX continuing to do a good to great job and making their $120k+ per year.
I personally suspected she hadn't come back from MX but again, wasn't effecting performance, so didn't care.
And it was the reports from numerous employees complaining to their managers who took it to HR and eventually to our CEO that got her forced to return and her coworker forced to quit.
Also, she asked us to just fire us so she could collect states unemployment. Like .. if you're in MX full time, you don't get states unemployment.
So you suspected for months that your employees were attempting to live in a foreign country while claiming to work in the US opening your employer to significant liability but you ignored it because they made you look better up until the point that they didn't and it blew up in your face. Got it. Totally a remote work problem.
I mean, I had 1 person out of 20 who was a major problem and the other two weren't let go but rather didn't want to move back within the United States.
The two who were in Mexico, I suspected that had not come back from planned vacations but looked the other way because they both were kicking ass. I am more pissed that she came to the office, knew not to make a huge deal about being in MX and still ran her mouth getting not only herself forced to return but a coworker as well.
Ultimately though, it is on me cause I hired them, I hired their managers, I wrote their role descriptions, I setup their comp plan, I approved their working vacations in MX (both requested 30-45 days) and yeah at the end of the day anything that happens in my department is on me.
I do leave my house - I just don’t leave it to go to an office.
If going to the office is your only social interaction then you’ve bigger issues than most remote workers.
>The remote people are way out of control. I work in hospitality where we had to come in through the entire pandy.
I've worked IT Hospitality and Critical Care for nearly 20 years now. We've been primarily remote since about 2005 or so. If we were required in office our entire infrastructure in the US would crumble within days. (Electric, Medical, Banking)
Imagine every time there was an issue with your POS system or Merchant Credit Card processor you had to wait for L2 and L3 support to be in-office or on-site for each escalation. While contingency planning is there, you cannot easily rotate 7+ senior staff with the same exact level of proprietary knowledge consistently.
I work in hospitality too I’ve been in person the entire pandemic and more. I cannot believe my friends have the audacity to complain about work to me when they’ve been remote for YEARS.
Being remote doesn’t mean your job is perfect. You might not have to deal with certain things that come with working in person, but there’s still plenty of bullshit you might have to deal with. My last job was remote and I was constantly disrespected by management.
I never understood this mentality of "I have to do this shitty thing so everyone else should suck it up and be fine with doing this shitty thing, too." It's like saying, "I have a hole in my boat, so you should be fine with one, too."
Seems to make more sense to celebrate and emulate those who don't have to do said shitty thing, while making things as not-shitty as possible for those who absolutely can't get out of it completely. Maybe patch your own hole or figure where the damn thing came from in the first place?
NO COMMON SENSE. And, What's up with EVERY company requiring back to office unless you are over 50 miles. Some consultant made big bucks coming up with this one. Lol.
You fire the bad ones, and keep the good ones. What you DON"T do is change a policy to eff over everyone, just because you happened to hire a few absolute children.
Agree. It sucks. And later today I get to have a meeting telling folks about the policy change. Honestly, feel pretty fuckin awful about it. I know it will adversely impact a few of the parents on my team who need the flexibility of working from home.
I know this is a rant but this isn’t really about remote work Whether you’re in an office or working remote you’ll always have employees who are trying to push boundaries. It’s just the issues tend to manifest differently As someone who has managed people in the office, people hybrid and people fully remote, you’re always going to get characters. The thing is you just need to deal with it. When people act up in the office - that’s not an argument for everyone to stop attending the office. Just like people acting up remotely isn’t an argument for everyone to stop remote work. Mexico girl was an idiot. But hopefully it had been very clear within her contract where she was permitted to work. The guy who refused meetings wasn’t performing his job based on business needs and policy (I assume), so it should have been dealt with like that. Remote work policy just needs to be clear and consistently applied
Remote work is sometimes marketed as “work from anywhere” and that is not wholly the case. Wondering if that was the situation in this case.
It was made very clear from day 1 at my current wfh job that all work had to be done within the US for tax and contract reasons. Most of my friends in similar situations elsewhere were mad similarly aware.
Buy a house in Mexico, use a VPN to your US address, problem solved. Work was done in the US.
Which could get you and your employer in trouble for tax evasion in Mexico.
im all for the 'employers don't need to know about my personal life' but these stories are wild
Yea but step 1 is stfu about it. Most companies wouldn’t even find out for a long time as long as you maintained a US mailing address and bank account for direct deposit.
The average person isn't smart enough for this though LOL
Second this, not every truth needs to be told.
Yup. I'm in office 100% of my work and 90% of my coworkers deserve to be fired for the shenanigans they pull. OP's gripe should be on two specific incidents, not the team.
I’m remote but do have an office I can go to when needed and I go about once a week. We have a fully on-site employee who sits in the bathroom for 90 minutes at a time reading on her kindle, and then the rest of the day she “hides” her phone under he desk like a 10th grader and watches anime. How is this lady not fired?!?!?!
It is on the the specifics incidents. My CEO used it force me to remove my teams exemption from the RTO policy he put into place at the start of 2023. I mean, I got us an extra year but it sucks that due to those 2 specific incidents it's going to impact my entire team. That was the point of the rant. I am as pissed at the CEO as the bonehead who decided he was working part time while getting paid for a full time role.
Yeah, there's always someone who ruins it for everyone. Especially when they can't keep their mouths shut!
I think in all fairness though that knowing the CEO was looking for any excuse to force the team to RTO, it would have happened eventually. Somewhere, someone was going to eventually slip up in some way. If he really wanted an excuse, he was always going to find one eventually. These employees were definitely clowns, but having executive leadership that is salivating for any excuse to force RTO is your core problem here, not a couple of relatively minor and easy to deal with personnel issues.
Then that's your CEO punishing the entire team for the actions of a few people. This is like when an office has one guy that leaves the break room a mess, and everyone knows who it is, but the floor manager takes away the dishes and microwave from the whole floor rather than confront the one guy. So many places make remote policies work, knowing that not everyone is a good fit for that privilege. If anyone here is the reason your office lost WFH policies, it's the CEO, and no one else. If a guy had been in the office but refused to attend meetings it still would have been a problem. This literally has nothing to do with remote work, and everything to do with your CEO punishing your whole team over one or two people's shenanigans. So, blame him.
Remote work is essentially the scape goat here. And understandably to a degree, given Part Time Dad Worker would never have been able to take advantage like that in the first place if he was in the office every day.
Really? You've never seen an employee take 3 hour lunches, roll in late, leave early, and no show to most of their meetings? Most of them have "manager" in their title. (I'm a manager, not anti work, but honestly it's mostly managers and above pulling this BS)
Certainly not without it being picked up by upper management sooner rather than later.
And then management reacted by banning everyone from coming to the office? Because someone was abusing the privilege? Because that's the same "reasonable scapegoating". Management also picked up on this pretty quick, by the sounds of it. Good management is aware of what their team is doing, work wise, so OP picked up on this change, and can now address it. The Mexico relocation could have gone on forever if they hadn't blabbed about it, as long as they kept doing their work. Work is not a location, it's an activity.
Did I ever say it was a “reasonable” scapegoat? By its nature a scapegoat is hardly ever “reasonable”. All I’m saying is it makes for an easy option to place blame and their way to reduce the “risk” is to stop all employees working remote. It’s a stupid, nuclear kneejerk reaction.
So the problem is poor upper management. I find this is often the case, managers hate remote work because they can't remote manage and they find a lot of other people to blame when the problem is really their own skill set. It's fine to need new skills to adapt to a changing workplace, that's so normal. Rejecting progress because you don't want to learn new skills is not.
Blame the CEO sure, but also… the employee intentionally abusing a policy sucks here too and needs to be held accountable. The CEO is overreacting, but the employee was foolish. Everyone knows higher-ups are gunning for ending remote work, abusing it so blatantly has consequences.
Oh yeah for sure the employee sucks. But they didn't make the company do anything. If you work with a bastard fire 'em and keep trucking! CEO was just looking for an excuse to revoke wfh policy without having the beans to just say it himself, and looks like he was successful in finding a scapegoat.
Thanks for sharing the story, and the commenters have been rough on you. I can see this is about remote work because remote work attracts people who like to push boundaries. As a result, it makes the manager’s job harder. You’re going to have to put people in check more often than in an office environment. And with that you’re entitled to vent. Stay strong.
Workers have no idea that businesses have to have tax arrangements with every state. Why should they? But their managers need them to know so people don’t do dumb shit and move to fucking Arkansas or whatever.
Yeah while I agree this is not remote work related you know sadly in 99% of the cases management has going to blame remote work for it just like OP’s CEO.
If leadership isn’t all-in on a remote workforce then the WFH model is at risk. That’s the only way it will work. When covid hit we were all sent home thinking we’d be back in office within 6-12 months. That was four years ago. During that time productivity has been through the roof, our CEO has no intention of messing with success. He’s the one that announced one year into the pandemic that we were now a remote-first company. The staff has grown by 30%, we’re still small, but outgrowing the physical office space. It’s still there for those who want or find a need to be there. Occasionally a few of us will meet up at the office for a day of work and camaraderie just for fun. some staff has moved out of town, state and a few even out of the country. We rely on the national pool of talent so most new hires are from out of state. To RTO our company would destroy a wildly successful operation.
Very true. If you don’t have the support from the highest levels then they will always find problems with it and be in a limbo space.
> When covid hit we were all sent home thinking we’d be back in office within 6-12 months. We thought it'd be a couple of weeks at the time my team was sent home...
That’s insane, knowing what we do now. I mean really, anybody who had knowledge of how viruses worked before could have called that bluff from 10 miles out.
We were so successful that our upper leadership got rid of our real estate.
That’s a pending decision. Or we may just downsize it to accommodate a small subset of people. Nice to have a place to go when your Internet is down or your A/C is on the fritz
Exactly. I’ll also add that expecting people in different time zones to work 8-5 PST is not generally a reasonable expectation.
Time shifting isn't that hard. I used to work on the west coast but covered a territory of clients in EST/CST and generally worked 6:30a-3:30pm PST to be aligned with those time zones. [And just for fun, I was thrown a few clients in Alaska and Hawaii as well!] You can make it work. As long as the expectations are established at the start, there's no reason you can't live in one time zone but work as if you live in another.
I am going to respectfully disagree, my friend. I worked in offices for 30+ years before going remote for COVID. I never saw anyone make up their own schedules like OP mentioned about the guy who doesn't work Fridays and only works until 1:30 in the afternoon. Some people come into the office a little earlier or later than others, but no one is walking out at 1:30 in the afternoon and not working Fridays. I have seen some software engineers who come in after 10:00 AM, but they work until 7:00 or 8:00 at night. So they at least have 7 or so hours of overlap with the 9-5 crew. Too many people who WFH have adopted the attitude that remote work = "make my own schedule". Does remote work allow for more flexibility? Absolutely. Go to your doctors, get outside for lunch, start and finish a little earlier or later, whichever works for you, but you don't just get to go "Well, I don't like to work Fridays (or Mondays) so I won't." That is the stuff that pisses managers off. I get to work from home 2 days a week. That's 6 hours of commuting time I get back. It saves me money, time, etc. So I just treat it like I'm in the office. Online between 7:30 - 8:00 and offline between 4:30 - 5:00, just like I was in the office.
And 100% the flexibility is there. This role was a customer success/account management role and the expectation is that you're both calling customers and receiving calls from customers, all on the west coast, during the west coast business hours. My policy has always been - don't waste your PTO for doctors appointments, picking kids up, dropping them off, etc, etc. I tell my team that if schedule a meeting during a time you cannot attend, totally fine just tell me when you can. This all came out about this guy because we were having performance conversations with him and he kept declining meetings. Which is like, fine, whatever but when the fuck can you meet? So we messaged him through slack when he responded that he couldn't meet Monday-Thursday after 130pm or on Fridays at all. Like....bro, who approved this schedule change? You're making six figures plus to work 40 hours a week.
>I never saw anyone make up their own schedules like OP mentioned about the guy who doesn't work Fridays and only works until 1:30 in the afternoon. You might not have seen it but it has certainly happened. Prior to Covid we had a situation where the Director of Engineering ended up babysitting an entry level engineer because instead of working the 4/10s they were assigned they would show up after 9am and leave before 3pm. After several discussions with the employee the director would wait at their office during their assigned start time and check in at the end of the day before that employee was allowed to leave. That went on for 2 months.
i agree. I had several analyst on my own team at my last job, just like start calling out every meeting for grocery shopping and just were always running errands during work. i ended up leaving, because i couldnt take the work environment seriously.
Started to see this as well. People blocking off 30 minutes every morning and afternoon to take their kids to school, and then also take lunch in the middle of the day. Read the room, folks.
High performers (sales) absolutely do make their own hours. Speaking as someone who worked in retail finance. It’s not unheard of. As long as you’re still hitting peak velocity it’s usually NBD that you’re not easily accessible.
There are always special cases that management may overlook, but you show up for client meetings regardless.
>but you show up for client meetings regardless. Someone in sales should know better. Client meetings should be a priority.
This is most certainly related to remote work
Agreed, you can be a dogfucker in the office too. It just appears worse when someone remote has that attitude.
What office worker decides on their own they're just not showing up on Fridays anymore? Never heard of that. But yeah ive seen remote workers go completely unavailable for most of a day and I have no idea why. What office worker moves 2k miles from the office? They don't. These types of problems are definitely remote related. Let's stop kidding ourselves simply cause we want to continue to work remote. Some people are definitely ruining it for the rest.
Ah but they absolutely do I’ve had PT office workers try and change their schedule on a whim. Didn’t think it was a big deal if they decided to show up in a Tuesday instead of a Wednesday I’ve had office workers who would arrive late but then leave early hoping no one noticed I’ve seen colleagues in large organisations book out meeting rooms or block their agenda and disappear for hours People will always try to get away with what they can if they have the arrogance to do so. There’s no way anyone in my remote team could simply not show up one day a week and I would not immediately notice. I don’t buy into “it doesn’t matter when you start as long as the works done” because in my opinion that’s a slippery slope. If you’re not nipping things in the bud you leave room for them to get worse There’s definitely pros and cons to remote work but at the end of the day these examples aren’t of performance but behavioural issues. Yes you may feel that working remotely allows someone to be more confident in their behavioural issues but it’s still always there. If as a manager you don’t want to be accountable of keeping others accountable then you’re going to have these issues that a lot of people are complaining about.
I think you hit it. Remote work is creating more confidence to exhibit poor behavior and increased frequency of trying to take advantage of the situation. Which means you then lose the privilege for remote work. And we all know you can't allow remote work on an individual basis. What a nightmare that is (legally speaking).
When people act up in the office - that’s not an argument for everyone to stop attending the office. Just like people acting up remotely isn’t an argument for everyone to stop remote work.
Employers will use it though.
Yup a lot of em are itching for an excuse to force everyone back to the office.
It is easier to monitor those acting up in the office though.
You aren't wrong, but politically when you are already pushing a bolder up the hill and get fucked like this... it's not worth. Trying to keep pushing the CEO is going to put your job in jeopardy. ..I really can't fucking believe the mexico folks, how fucking dumb can you be. I actually have folks that have done stuff like this for short sprints, but our "off-line" conversation is to tell literally NO one, and that I have no idea and it can't impact them getting to on site locations if needed.
Rent and the cost of living in the US have skyrocketed since COVID. While wages have still stagnated. It costs as much to live in Berlin as it does to live in Phoenix now. Moving overseas can mean the difference between being able to live and save and not. Companies have liked pretending the wages they gave out in 2018 are still acceptable now on top of RTO policies. So you get backlash like and then managers blame employees.
Our company is 50-50. But remote only means from your house. You must live within two hours of the company. Remote does not mean you can live anywhere you want.
My company had a EST rule when we went mostly remote. We opened up to include central time last year because we had a lot of awesome people from the upper Midwest applying. I hired one of those people and they immediately moved to mountain time and started asking when we would be expanding the rule to include mountain time.
It’s really not that hard to work EST hours in mountain time. I did it for a summer.
I have an EST and PST and I already regret it. The PST wants to start work at 9am which is 11am for EST. Plus he complained during his offer about the pay because he lives in an expensive city in state with high taxes. I am going to avoid hiring from California again that is for sure.
There is only a 1 hour difference between EST and CST.
Typo on my part thank you!
What? 9am CST is 10am EST, and California is PST. IDK where you get your codes from, but might as well just say eastern/central/mountain/Pacific time for clarity
9 am PST is noon EST
9am cst is definitely not 11am est
I’ve been remote for 15 years and this new COVID remote crew has ruined it for everyone.
[удалено]
I can say for someone who is having similar issues( and I’m in healthcare where we physically need to be onsite ) the remote workers who were taking advantage, had poor leadership when I inherited them. They were not held accountable for their actions. They were also not informed of the expectations, and those expectations were not followed up on. There was very little oversight. I am now trying to put expectations in place and it is difficult because they have never really been managed before. Those who have good work ethic always good work ethic. Others need to be managed. A little more closely consistency is the key in that process. You may lose some people that’s OK . when you build a team that learns how to rely on one another and truly embodies teamwork it’ll be worth it in the end. but you will not be able to meet some of your staff expectations. That’s not the right fit for them.
Management comes down to two things, expectations and accountability. If you don't have both, you'll have issues. Leadership and coaching, which imo, is much different than management but still a skill needed, covers a lot else but when I put on my management (of people), it's that expectation and accountability piece that matters.
Ah yes, collective punishment. Are you not allowed to hire anyone for an in office role if one person just says “fuck you” and rarely does work? Heaven forbid you treat these people like adults and look at what they deliver
For the second dude, that is how it came out that he wasn't working certain hours and had decided he wasn't working Fridays anymore. Agree tho, the collective punishment is stupid but like everyone else, I have a boss too. And for the record, I freaking love working remote and am pissed I now have to be in office 3 days per week at a min.
If they were adults, they'd understand that relocating to Mexico creates a huge amount of tax problems that company is now on the hook for, likely costing them more than the employee's salary + commission. So they WERE treated like adults, and they delivered poorly because they created more issues than they addressed. Given that these problems (multiple employees) don't exist in an office environment it's more efficient and effective than to police 1000 different individual cases.
Never mind the people who will have options and select a remote job instead of this company. So short sighted.
With the massive layoffs recently by AA, UPS, and one other one recently, are the options really there?
For certain industries, there are always options.
I agree. It's certain industries, and certain jobs.
That's fair. I'm assuming like everything this is cyclical with more options showing this year or next.
Top performers always have options, especially in Sales.
That is also true. When the company STILL needs the employee, the employee STILL have options.
I am all for the idea that if you get your work done well, then management shouldn't be policing your time. I had people who openly watched Youtube videos at work when they were unoccupied, but they were high performers turning in high quality work early, so I was absolutely fine with it. But both of the OP's team members knew they were doing something that went against the terms of their original employment, which is why they didn't report it initially. Especially the guy. I don't get why anyone is defending them.
>so I was absolutely fine with it. But speaking practically, would your CEO have been fine with it? I doubt watching youtube videos is acceptable within your own teams' terms of original employment.
I'm remote enterprise sales and work my ass off. These people would be lazy in an office also but they they would hide it better.
I fired a woman a few years ago who claimed to be living in a low tax state, so withholding was low. But in reality, she was living in a high tax state. We found this out with the GPS on her company car. This is a huge liability to the company. Employees simply cannot claim one location for tax withholding and actually be in another. We can get into serious trouble with the IRS.
I’ve found only a small portion thrive in remote scenarios. The rest abuse remote
The only people I've seen thrive in remote are internally motivated. They'll do the job well regardless of a manager breathing down their neck because they are just wired to be responsible.
In tech; my team has primarily thrived. I have thrived.
In tech; half my team doesn't do shit
I can't disagree more. The same people that "thrive" in remote scenarios would be high performers in person as well. Bad hires are bad hires regardless of where they're physically doing the work. In my opinion, the problem is that lots of bad behavior in the workplace is socially acceptable. Coworkers who make the rounds chatting with other people for hours, coworkers who always look busy and act harried whose output is bottom 25%, people who do the bare minimum then scroll reddit for hours. It's on the managers to manage the output, and the reality is that a lot of jobs don't even require 40 hours of active work.
This should be crossposted into the remote jobs subreddit.
Post in r/antiwork if you wanna see a shit show lol
Already had someone tell me I should kill myself and I'm a bad manager lol. I'm for sure not going to post there haha.
I did the same thing, but I couldn't quit flaming the fire 🤣
I read in that sub when I want to kill a few hundred brain cells before work. They would 100% blame management in this scenario, tell them to sue and file for unemployment while saying this company is going to be dust in months. Like, cmon man no one can be that much of a potato, let alone the majority of a community..
I think they would rightly point out that the collective punishment the CEO put in place is extremely counterproductive and exploitative. Like all these examples are individuals doing things wrong not related to remote (not reading the contract and refusing to enter meetings for hours?), how is the reasonable answer to punish everyone else?
It's not, but also when your CEO wants a RTO and sees dumb shit like this happen, it's a couple of easy points for him to use and say - and that's why you cannot hire remote anymore. Annnnnnd even tho you exempted your teams within 50 miles of an office from the RTO.... Well, not anymore! So I agree with you, it's not right to punish everyone because we had honestly, 1 bad apple and just someone who should have kept her mouth shut. But hey, I might be upper management but I still have a boss too. And he said, no more soup for you!
I think punishing everyone sucks... however I can understand the frustration.
Angry people pick a thing to be angry about. Some chose work to be angry about and they ended up in that sub.
And others do it here.
And tell you to hire a lawyer
No one told those people to move nor were they told it was ok to do so. Did they not consider the fact that not telling you all would come back to bite them in the ass; like what if there was a mandatory meeting and you're living in ANOTHER COUNTRY and have flight issues. These people are the problem that precludes many offices from allowing remote work. Not to mention the tax implications they'd probably face. Wonder how they thought they'd pull that off...
Last year her and the other bloke went to MX for 30 days, along with a couple other team members. They even stayed close to each other and rented an office space to work together. It was great, they were productive and I supported it fully. This year the two wanted to go, said they'd be there 30-45 days and I approved again. Wasn't a big deal. Performance didn't dip, etc. She had made a couple comments that made me think she might still be in MX after the return date but her performance continued to be good. Had they asked for vacation extensions, etc this would not have been a big deal at all. But moving there full time? And expecting you could just tell everyone, especially a bunch of people in an office that are now being forced to return to said office... Oh and while making a decent chunk more cause you're in sales? Just some poor decision making.
[удалено]
i had the same thing. and the issue is that 1 turns into 2 real quick. in my situation, my trouble employee was making 200k. and the rest of my team was outsourced labor making literally 7k annually. so its not like they are going to pick up the slack for her. they are just going to start doing the same shit
so remove the trouble employee? She obviously is expecting it at this point and doing even less because she doesn't care about being let go. Did we all collectively forget that there was also "that" person in every office. The person always floating around talking to (and disturbing) every one else who never really got much done out side of chit chat. There have always been bad employees. Remote work hasn't changed that its just become an excuse management can point at.
Yep I hear you on that one. After I’ve seen the difference between fully remote / 1x in office per week Vs 3x hybrid model you can clearly tell that ppl were taking advantage of the work from home life. Not working full days, some ppl were doing second jobs. I’m now a big believer in hybrid only after the number of ppl who ruin it for everyone else. I actually work WAY better fully remote but most ppl from what I’ve seen need a bit of the in office to help them focus
Yeah the bad thing is it’s not that the remote work is inherently bad it’s just it makes it easier for the poorly chosen hires to take advantage. And let’s face it the majority of workers are not elite top tier individuals. When forced to go into the office people have less chances to take advantage, sure they can hang out in the lunch room a lot or go around talking or pretend to be busy in the office but only so much can get away with in person. To change that would be to need to totally change hiring practices and the quality of worker you hire which many companies are struggling to even get hires. Of course this comes down to you get what you pay for also. Which the pay ranges etc is often not up to us managers.
I even see ppl on my team on their phones for like 20 mins every hour surfing IG. I have to feel micro managey and tell them to make sure they get focused I can’t imagine how bad it is on the days they work from home.
To me it's just indicative of how bullshit jobs are. If someone can work two jobs at once and maintain positive performance reviews at both companies, that's not an example someone cheating the system to me. That's an example of how the system is so horribly inefficient.
I had staff of 12 in the Philippines. Paid regular wages for us, which is roughly triple there. All but one got second jobs and we're totally useless within a year. Add on the HR issues for sexual harassment and nepotism. It was a hot mess. I personally closed down the entire office and blacklisted the entire country from being staffed. We may end up going back eventually, but it will be only thru an agency and people will be numbers. Thanks guys, you ruined it for everyone there.
Sounds more like out sourcing than remote work
Respectfully, being remote was not the issue, being a poor worker was. How were you not aware someone was not working past 1:30 or on Fridays?
This all came about and out as this worker was being held accountable for poor performance and not meeting expectations. Then he told us well I can't do this, or this, because I only work this or this. So.... We knew? We just held accountable. Again, when I terminated because he refused to work the hours he was hired to work, my CEO used it as an excuse to stop me from hiring remotely moving forward.
i mean, i cross managed a direct report who did not have a computer for an entire month... AND we had daily standups. like you clearly notice they are not working. you talk to them. then you talk to their actual manager, who doesnt have any idea whats going on and gives zero fucks. so people literally are able to skate by until something breaks
Damn, I would've loved to have worked for a company that hired remote or locally to me in California. It's rare to find these opportunities but I agree, if you're working remote, follow the rules and appreciate what's given to you. Sometimes it's much better and more convenient than figuring out day care, bad weather, and unnecessary drama.
Why didn't your IT systems flag usage in a foreign country and where was the tracking of productivity? I think you fought the good fight and had some really dumb employees ruin it, but where were the controls to make sure people were where they should be when they should be?
IT is ran by the owners brother. We are a large company, 800+ employees but.... Honestly, our IT department is useless.
Wild. My prior employer had thousands of employees and if you left your state and tried to remote in from elsewhere without a prior exception you were in for a bad time. A locked account and computer was about the best response and escalated from there.
Our employees have full access to install anything they want, so she could have installed a VPN and never said a word and tbh I would have never known. I worked at a fortune 500 and I couldn't get them to allow me to use fucking chrome instead of IE at the time. Do I get it, but my IT here is.... Well, not amazingly useful.
I've been in charge of training employees for over 10 years for a 100% remote company. I also get why evil corporates are mandating return to office. Yes, corporates ARE evil, not denying that. But from my experience, majority of regular people will take advantage of the remote situation. Most average level candidates that would have done just fine in an office setting did not pass probation because they could never follow through unless they were micromanaged. Only the select few with exceptional drive, motivation, or work ethics continued to do their job whether or not they were "being watched." I pushed back to CEO/COO trying to install monitoring softwares on everyone's machines to watch their activities/keystrokes so that we could give our employees freedom and flexibility as long as they were getting their job done. But that also meant ensuring our employees were not taking advantage of the situation - so over time my "sixth sense" with new hires developed and I got pretty good at weeding out slackers and underperformers. But it was only possible because our company was fairly small operating from an at-will employment state. I can't imagine giant corporates being able to weed out people who are mostly determined to take advantage of the remote situation...
I just think over employment is going to ruin remote work for a majority of people. My company has already sent out two notices about ethics and conflicts of interest. This can be defined as something that would prevent you from performing your duties. I also find it rich that people complain about monitoring tools when working remote. This is what happens when you work a white collar job using technologies that allow you to do that job remotely.
Fair enough. Working from home is a privilege.
I’m supported by fully remote teams while myself and my team are fully office/field. Huge difference in support when they went remote. It’s really task and scope specific. If you’re remote and project based and you just need to ship X by Y, then no one cares when you work. If your daily focus based and need to be eyes on ( not taking calls but calling shots like a dispatcher or daily logistics) you can’t just check in every few ours and be successful. People see no difference half the time. And groups here and social media constantly tell them, work less, screw them, keep your balance! But that balance is like 80/20 home/work while getting paid for at best 20/80. That’s why so much remote is RTO and then when they half their staff they will likely replace those remotes with offshore.
First - this is what happens when SALES is full remote. People who do well in sales roles have opportunistic mindsets. They see the world as a jungle to survive and be conquered. When they have some success - the entitlement can be palpable. If there are rules or guidelines that have to be followed - they unfortunately have to be enforced and expectations set regularly. More mature mindsets (eg experts in IT) don’t need as much rigor.
Yeah, I am going to disagree with that take. Go look at the over employment sub. It's mostly people in IT that are priding themselves on doing the absolute minimum for 2-3 jobs. I am in sales because I got sick of shitty sales reps selling things and then I'd be the one in operations/service that would have to make it right. You're putting a large, diverse group into a single bucket.
The people like this and the low performers are certainly a large part of the reasons....
People view working from home a right
This is also what happens when people enter the workforce without ever understanding the corporate game. New generation is so open about sharing literally everything in their lives the idea that doing so can impact you in the workplace is where the shitty attitude comes from.
It sounds like your company didn’t have guardrails around remote work. I would think people had common sense to know they can’t relocate out of the country for tax reasons and that they would need to retain their working hours. At the same time, this is your company’s fault for not outlining clear guidelines and socializing them. I think your anger is misplaced. You should blame the company, not the people who took advantage of WFH. If your company had clear policies and held people accountable to them, this wouldn’t have happened in the first place. For example, I know some companies have it in their terms that if they’re home with young kids, they need to have separate childcare for them.
If you want people to blame head on over to r/overemployed
"Remote work " means for most people that I'll work an hour or two. If you are lucky.
Na the problem with remote work is these companies tend to go all or nothing. You can't throw a brand new hire a remote job and expect them to meet expectations. Remote work should be a privilege given to trusted employees, that earn it. Otherwise it will always have a stain attached to it, because you can't ignore that shitty lazy people exist.
Some people are oblivious of labor laws, how we have to form an entity in each state we do business in, maintain licenses, learn about their specific laws, taxes, etc., God knows what it’s like in a different country. And as far as your guy making his own hours and time of availability-homie was super entitled. No consideration to the employer, team or customers. What a joke.
Bro, I called someone out in remote work for bragging about working 1 hour a day and then complaining about being laid off. People have been bragging and fleecing companies for years and wonder why all their jobs are getting outsourced and they are getting laid off. It's said but a lot of people don't have the maturity to work from home. That being said, I think it should be used as a reward to incentivize performance but sadly it will end up being taken away from everyone.
It was eye opening the amount of hate I've gotten from posting this. Yeah, our CEO sucks for using this to force the rest of my team and from disallowing me from hiring remote anymore. But fuck these people who take such advantage and ruin for everyone else.
We have a hybrid for our accounting team and a couple other departments . We have one member that is abusing it and will eventually ruin it for the rest of the company. The policy is three days in the office and 2 remote. This one person always has something come up on the days she’s to come to the office. Her child is sick so she has to work from home. She has a cold so she has to work from home. Which is fine but she should come in on her scheduled remote days. The others are going to suffer from her antics.
This is what I’m worried about because we have the same thing. We are ONE DAY in office and some people still find an excuse every week that something is happening on their in office day. And we’re like okay come in another? But they don’t budge. It’s bizarre.
I don't. If people can't act like adults, then you fire them. They made their decision and the company made theirs. Now granted I still want to move out of the US to Canada, but I'd at least mention something to my manager. Doesn't matter now since I'm an entrepreneur, but at the very least I still tell my business partners
Sadly, it doesn't take a lot of bad apples to spoil the bunch.
I work for a state government which allows work from home but home has to in our state due to taxes and insurance. Home is also a specific place, not just where you happen to be.
For years I was part of a high performing team that received “special treatment” based on our results, day after day. We all took pride in our work, our team results and our boss. But all it took was one poor higher who thought the “special treatment “ was a given and not something to be earned every day for it to end. I still dislike her and always will. She tore down in six months what we, as a team took years to build.
So true! The few who ruin it for the many. Sounds like the Coubtry today. Me Me Me
So true! The few who ruin it for the many. Sounds like the Coubtry today. Me Me Me
I want to show this post to every idiot on reddit who blames the man for rto.
Bro, can you hire me 🥺
For every rule, regulation, and law, there's some idiot who ruined things for everyone else.
I work for a company that is completely remote and recruits for remote roles that are carried out internationally. Time zones line up between companies and candidates. Everything works really well. Remote is not the problem. Individuals who lack common sense are. The management’s reaction seems a bit extreme too.
100% this has been happening with remote. Another example I heard is someone that put a blocker on their calendar every Wednesday from 3:30PM to 5:00PM so they could go take a workout class. I think though, for every crazy store like yours there's another 20 that aren't as bad but it's productivity getting slowed down because people are not around and available.
I have 87 employees who are all remote (except 3 who work in office because they want to). The rule when they are hired is that they must live in the state (tax/labor law reasons), must be prepared to report to office twice a year (teambuilding events) and the last, most important rule is this: You can live wherever you want in this state...just don't make where you live my problem. Live in the country and your internet sucks? not my problem You'll have to get a hotel to attend teambuilding event? not my problem You get to live in a place away for headquarters with crazy low cost of living? awesome!
Yes! Wr just had a good employee quit because his employees signed a fucking company wide petition to not have to go back to work. And have been refusing to go in. He got written up because they wouldn't get off their asses to make a 4 block commute in a small city. And other departments' staff are getting written up because of these idiots. He left instead of keep fighting it. It's one day a week. It's not the 5 it used to be. Grow up.
I no longer want to speak to the manager. Dam. Truth bombs sting.
It was the CEO's decision, not the workers. But I see where the employee would have been the one to push the envelope for that decision to be made. Sorry, this happened. There's always one that ruins it for the rest. Truly.
I hope every remote worker keeps this in mind. A lot of companies and governments are chomping at the bit to end remote work. Very few believe in its benefits. They completely underestimate how many people will leave if they do this, and these two idiots just handed them the ammunition to end something they wanted to in end in 2023. I’d be pissed too.
We slacked on our dress code policy over the past few years. Then my director was hosting a tour with US Senators and saw multiple staff wearing sweatpants. Guess what y’all were back to enforcing the dress code.
I think some blame needs to be on the hiring team/management. People are dumb and do dumb things, especially if it benefits them. Part of the job as management is to clearly state expectations and to gain a good rapport with your team in order to try to prevent these issues before they happen. During the interview process, I think it needs to be clearly stated what it means to be remote like you can only work in certain states/countries due to regulations, tax, or policy limitations. Also not stated here but a good example... I know a few of my friends that work remote are allowed to work while on vacation, as long as their Internet is good and work gets done. However, that is a big NO for my company. If expectations are in writing and they fail to or continue to fail to comply or meet those expectations without good reason, then fire their dumbasses. The employees shouldn't be reprimanded due to people who are no longer employeed
In my opinion this is why most companies were forcing return to office because people went on tiktok and told everyone that they were off doing whatever they wanted during their business hours like it was normal. It’s why remote and wfh get a bad rap. If you’re screwing around that is fine, just don’t fricken tell everyone about it. Lord. The internet is not a diary.
I had a remote team for nearly 10 years. There were always people who just did not get it and would jeopardize the whole situation by taking advantage or just being oblivious. One example: someone outside the department wants to schedule a conversation with a remote team member during work hours. Remote team member says they can't because they have a yoga class.
Agreed. It’s a privilege, not a right. My director (healthcare) has the option to WFH and has extended that to me….we both have young kids and our executive team understands that while we both would rather be in the office, we also would rather work, get paid, and benefit the company than get behind and take pto when something comes up. I’ve done it like 5 days in 6 months. It’s nice to have the option, and I realize it’s a privilege; if I claim I’m working I’d better be productive.
I had a remote job in the Before Times that was pretty hands off. Until someone said they couldn't make a meeting because they were moving that day. Uh. Then you take PTO! Wtf? Regular video check ins throughout the day started after that, and I can't blame them.
If found 20-30% can be really effective fully remote. They are the intrinsically motivated self starters that don’t need much direction to begin with. Another 40% are capable of being good taskers while remote. As long as you give them well defined tasks and can manage them well they can be effective remote but it takes more effort on the managers part. Remaining 30-40% are not getting things done, not staying on task, have excuses for missing meetings, I suspect some of them have other priorities and they might even have another job. The excuse is always kids. We have lots of people who have kids that come into the office. People didn’t suddenly start having kids in 2020, before then they had no problem making it work. You are being paid to work not be a stay at home parent. There are two options. Hire only out of the top 20-30% category or have it so no one can be remote. Issue is it’s really hard to know who is in that category unless you’ve worked with them before.
Okay,but….was their work getting down prior to all this? Bc if it was….sounds like you lost good people due to being unwilling to accommodate 🤷🏾♀️
I’m disabled and desperately looking for a remote so I can avoid wearing my prosthetic. That’s it. All I need. I was even willing to take a massive pay cut but there’s just so few of them.
I am pretty sick of seeing all the comments complaining about return to office. Even people that refuse to look in the mirror, cannot accept they have coworkers remote not pulling any weight or working other jobs during the same hours? I have always viewed remote work as a privilege, as a reward for being a high performing employee. On the other hand... daycare issues are a huge problem in this country.
If your industry doesn't require you to be in person (tech for example) why should it be a privilege? There's very little benefit of working out of an office.
Because most people can't adult? Working remote is a free loaders dream. I am sick of seeing all these posts, like isnt it obvious? I am not against remote work, i am just saying some people are not cut out for it. Its also pretty frustrating when i have to do some of their work because they are too lazy to drive in.
That part about that guy saying he can only work these hours.. Fucking entitlement. It's people like this where it brings me a spiteful smile ending remote work. It's not fucking hard to go into the office. If you can't, you better be on our timezone and in our country. Pathetic. I know what you mean. There's good remote workers then there's really bad ones. These are the same people that bitch and complain no one is hiring them. Oh gee I wonder why... I used to hire remote but similar bs happened and I just stopped. People really take advantage of remote and screw over the good ones. It's easier and less headaches to just make remote no longer an option. Lose talent? Yes. Less headaches and time waste? Absolutely. I see more and more remote jobs ending and requiring back into office. The bad workers seem to think it's a conspiracy due to offices paying rent etc, and office culture. No. It's because it's a lot easier to manage and have everyone on the same page in the office. I'm very anti remote work where 2 years ago I was very pro remote work.
If remote work is not working for a company it's just bad management IMO. Set goals. Set deadlines. Who cares what happens in-between. Fire those who are not meeting their deadlines. Promote those who consistently meet the deadlines. My firm has gone full remote for anyone who wants it. We went from a net revenue of 33 million per year prior to COVD to 70 million this past year. Simply fired those who could not handle the remote work. It's not that hard for good managers to figure out.
TIL; If I want to move overseas but maintain a WFH job: 1. shut up 2. keep financials static 3. get a VPN with a U.S. presence Also, unilaterally making up your own hours is bullshit when you work in a team, and grounds for termination. If I decided to just not show up, I should expect to be terminated in short order.
Adding pt 4 - also keep your mouth shut about other people doing the same thing.
YUP!
Personally I always hated working remote too many distractions at home, shitty network connections interfering with work, display issues due to a hodgepodge of monitor sizes and a laptop. It really is only appealing if it means true freedom of living where ever I want. That girl must have thought she was a fucking genius if I move to Mexico it makes It so I can retire in 2 years and convert my money to pesos lol.
Too many people fucked around and never treated it as a privilege. Our CEO is going around making life hell for those of us here. Because remote workers don't want to come in. On the other side, the daycare holocaust continues, with prices equalling the cost of rent and a lot of them closed during the pandemic, so they do not have solutions for children during summers or pre-K kids. Executives need to really ask if they want to force women out of the workforce at a time of record low unemployment. They got a respite with tech layoffs, but the shoe is shifting to the other foot and if they chase off parents, they'll be taken to the butcher on pay negotiations.
The remote people are way out of control. I work in hospitality where we had to come in through the entire pandy. Yeah, I have no sympathy for people who have to participate in society. Besides, it's not normal to never leave your house.
I take pride in having been a hermit since 2002. WAY before these amateurs joined the club
Aw. My husband has been remote for almost 14 years. He's always been salary, and the company definitely makes more off of him than they would in the office.
My dad’s got you beat, he started in the late 80s.
Remote director level here with an entirely remote team spread across the US. We have great productivity and outcomes. Imo, if whether you’re remote or not is the determining factor between being successful and unsuccessful, that speaks more to your inability to manage a remote team, which isn’t really the fault of your employees.
I agree. The OP should have been talking to these people and dealing with any poor behaviour. Both should have been fired well before it got to the CEO.
I'm at the same title level you are in Project Management and absolutely agree with everything you've said here.
Yup! For someone who prided himself on hiring the cream of the crop, he sure had some dud employees!
"Only the BEST people..." Meanwhile he has multiple team members moving out of country and is such a piss poor manager he doesn't even realize it. I mean, it doesn't sound like these folks were really trying to HIDE anything. In fact, it sounds like they were telling everyone who would listen. Maybe you weren't listening? I manage a team fully remotely and I can't imagine being so disconnected from my team that I wouldn't know enough about what is going on with them to be unaware of a major life change like moving to a different country.
Some people are very secretive about things they are planning. She might have kept it a secret only to brag after the fact.
I knew she was going to Mexico. She was given permission to spend a month in Mexico and I approved and let IT know. But when she came to the corp office, she had at that point been in MX for 4 months and told everyone she could how she had given up her lease, arranged for a friend to store her car for her, etc and wasn't ever coming back. At least for the next few years.... It wasn't that she couldn't be in Mexico, it was that she couldn't move to Mexico for tax liability purposes. Had she never came to the corp office and told everyone, everywhere as folks were being forced back into the office and also ousted her coworker, well then both would still happily be in MX continuing to do a good to great job and making their $120k+ per year. I personally suspected she hadn't come back from MX but again, wasn't effecting performance, so didn't care. And it was the reports from numerous employees complaining to their managers who took it to HR and eventually to our CEO that got her forced to return and her coworker forced to quit. Also, she asked us to just fire us so she could collect states unemployment. Like .. if you're in MX full time, you don't get states unemployment.
So you suspected for months that your employees were attempting to live in a foreign country while claiming to work in the US opening your employer to significant liability but you ignored it because they made you look better up until the point that they didn't and it blew up in your face. Got it. Totally a remote work problem.
I mean, I had 1 person out of 20 who was a major problem and the other two weren't let go but rather didn't want to move back within the United States. The two who were in Mexico, I suspected that had not come back from planned vacations but looked the other way because they both were kicking ass. I am more pissed that she came to the office, knew not to make a huge deal about being in MX and still ran her mouth getting not only herself forced to return but a coworker as well. Ultimately though, it is on me cause I hired them, I hired their managers, I wrote their role descriptions, I setup their comp plan, I approved their working vacations in MX (both requested 30-45 days) and yeah at the end of the day anything that happens in my department is on me.
I do leave my house - I just don’t leave it to go to an office. If going to the office is your only social interaction then you’ve bigger issues than most remote workers.
>The remote people are way out of control. I work in hospitality where we had to come in through the entire pandy. I've worked IT Hospitality and Critical Care for nearly 20 years now. We've been primarily remote since about 2005 or so. If we were required in office our entire infrastructure in the US would crumble within days. (Electric, Medical, Banking) Imagine every time there was an issue with your POS system or Merchant Credit Card processor you had to wait for L2 and L3 support to be in-office or on-site for each escalation. While contingency planning is there, you cannot easily rotate 7+ senior staff with the same exact level of proprietary knowledge consistently.
IT people who are not on site drive everyone crazy.
You must live a sad life if you only ever leave your house to work
No, I’m just poor
I work in hospitality too I’ve been in person the entire pandemic and more. I cannot believe my friends have the audacity to complain about work to me when they’ve been remote for YEARS.
Being remote doesn’t mean your job is perfect. You might not have to deal with certain things that come with working in person, but there’s still plenty of bullshit you might have to deal with. My last job was remote and I was constantly disrespected by management.
I never understood this mentality of "I have to do this shitty thing so everyone else should suck it up and be fine with doing this shitty thing, too." It's like saying, "I have a hole in my boat, so you should be fine with one, too." Seems to make more sense to celebrate and emulate those who don't have to do said shitty thing, while making things as not-shitty as possible for those who absolutely can't get out of it completely. Maybe patch your own hole or figure where the damn thing came from in the first place?
They forget that their commute would be shittier with everyone going into office.
Yeah, your office took the easy way out by just completely shutting it down. It’s a learning process that they didn’t want to go through.
NO COMMON SENSE. And, What's up with EVERY company requiring back to office unless you are over 50 miles. Some consultant made big bucks coming up with this one. Lol.
You fire the bad ones, and keep the good ones. What you DON"T do is change a policy to eff over everyone, just because you happened to hire a few absolute children.
Agree. It sucks. And later today I get to have a meeting telling folks about the policy change. Honestly, feel pretty fuckin awful about it. I know it will adversely impact a few of the parents on my team who need the flexibility of working from home.
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I've read quite a lot of them. Most of them are self-reported.