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I personally had more of an office job back in the day.  The lab was just outside my office, and I'd wander around in it seeing if anyone needed any advice (they generally didn't, or had already asked me if they did).  More a show the flag, I'm interested.  I had one really bad technician for a while, he got dumped on me, I asked the other folks to "keep an eye on him", which turned out to be necessary.  Eventually I just told him to stop working, he was a menace, he left in a few weeks for law school.  Somebody else hired him, and when he didn't work out for them, the managers decided I could use more "help".  Ha.

Otherwise, I had really good technicians, maybe one or two were "OK".  One had a degree in archeology but was really quick at learning stuff, he operated most of our eequipment.

There are also plenty of studies that show that in-person relationships and experiences make workers many times more likely to help one another, compared to entirely online/email/telephone/zoom relationships.  Even meeting a person once in-person, compared to entirely online, increases this cooperational correlation.

There's no doubt there's a lot of value to being in-person for many types of jobs.  And sometimes the interactive elements might come at the expense of efficiency, but some really smart and wealthy tech giants are making bets that the incremental value in innovation and fast-tracking due to personal interactions, will offset the efficiency deficits and even increase total value.

I don't think folks need to be in-office 5 days per week to obtain those benefits.  But they DO need to be in-office at the same time, which a hybrid schedule where some people come in MWTh and some people come in TThF, isn't really going to achieve the desired results.

I buy a lot of that, although I wonder about drastically reducing your labor pool. 

The thing I realized with my office's setup is you need to create reasons for people to be places. As you pointed out, a lot of jobs require being in a place. My thought was you should design days with 10 am meetings and 2 or 3 PM meetings. And meetings that get value from people seeing each other and conversing. You get lunch time and chat time, you avoid rush hour inefficiencies. 

But if you have a lot of people with irritating drives who come in and sit on Zoom meetings, you're chasing your tail. Granted, this reflects a lot of knowledge work that exists purely in a digital space. 

don't poke the bear

ICE arrests Palestinian activist who led Columbia University protests - CBS New York

This feels ... dicey, at best. 

See, this is why we need a water cooler to talk around (metaphorically).

You're jumping to people who don't want to come into offices. I'm describing people who live more than 50 miles from an office (and really less than that in a lot of cases).

There are obviously gigs where the entire company is geographically distributed and there was never any plan to have employees share a communal office, nor any need for it, based on the type of work being performed.

And there are cases of companies that, even before the pandemic and certainly since then, have decided that they don't place high value on personal employee interaction, so they've allowed employees to move further away from corporate HQs and engaged in hiring practices where they've hired large amounts of remote workers without ever having the intention of expecting them to come into any office whatsoever.

But there are also a very large number of fortune 500 companies, and a lot of government jobs, where WFH flexibility that was once allowed, either because of the pandemic or because of a move toward cutting overhead and opex or even because of the expectations of the labor pool, is now being rescinded, and those employees are being recalled to the office.  During the intervening years, many of them have moved far away from corporate offices.  They're now being asked either to absorb the commute no matter how long, or move.  The alternative beyond that, is almost certainly eventual termination.

The last batch is the one I'm primarily focusing on, and indeed is the category in which I find myself at this point.

As I've said, before the pandemic I was already 95% WFH and my employer was pushing more and more employees toward that end.  Now, post-pandemic, there's a 5-day work-from-office policy.  My remote status was revoked and I am now 100% in-office.  There are some advantages and some disadvantaged to this, and I'm not really making any statement regarding the relative merits of this policy, but rather just observing that this is a major trend right now, and the labor pool is going to be forced to adjust to it.

But if you have a lot of people with irritating drives who come in and sit on Zoom meetings, you're chasing your tail. Granted, this reflects a lot of knowledge work that exists purely in a digital space.

There's also a problem when you have a physical office but a ton of the people you need to interact with are in different offices across the country. 

My previous role was a VERY geographically diverse role because it was a field role. I happened to be stationed in one of our main offices, but I had peers all across the country. My boss lived in Boston. I had two peers that were also in SoCal, but one was VERY local yet came to us in an acquisition and retained his remote worker status, and another lived in north LA County (we're in mid-Orange County) and it'd be 2 hours each way to come to the office so he was always a remote worker too. So I literally saw the other peers who lived "near" me at most 1-2 times a year. 

Even now, despite working at one of our major corporate offices, it doesn't mean that the people I need to work "with" are located here. And even if it's a group call and maybe it's 2-3 people from Irvine, 3-5 people from San Jose, and a handful of people from "other", you're still on video calls. And many people take the video calls from their desks. 

The biggest issue I have with WFH vs RTO is that it's a very asymmetric concept. I've been at this company 17+ years. I know my stuff. I don't gain very much from being in an office. YET, I also remember when I was much younger and more green in my career. I benefited tremendously from having access to people who were then in the same position where I am now. I benefited from mentors much more than I'm benefiting mentees today. I think that's hard to have those sort of organic interactions when it requires putting a meeting on a calendar or asking to talk over Zoom, rather than just popping over to someone's office and asking a question and shooting the breeze. 

Been there done that
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