I have a full time employee that does WFH for the state. He makes $90k a year for them, and is done with his work by lunch on Tuesday every week. He said the rest of his coworkers are total slugs that stretch that 12 hours of work over the course of a week. It's a total scam and he planned to quit if the WFH was taken away.

malibucharles said:

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the most cool guy said:

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BrazosDog02 said:

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Yikes. The olds and the "ya gotta be at work to be productive" crowd are not going to be happy about this.

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It makes no difference to me. But the idea that, on average, people are equally productive at home as they are in the office is so obviously false it is absolutely ****ing laughable.

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It depends on the work ethic of the person. In my work environment (before I retired) my co-workers and I took ownership of our responsibilities and put in however much time was required to get the work done. This often included staying late at the office or taking a briefcase full of work home at night or the weekends. I can visualize a dedicated person taking this approach whether working at the office or at home. The question is what percentage of today's workers have that kind of work ethic.

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What I said was "on average." Some people have really good work ethics and they are fine working at home. On average, however, that is not the case, in any profession. Most people have a ****ty work ethic in this country.

Over_ed said:

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This discussion is so COVID era. High performers will be able to work where they want. Low and many medium performers will not be working at all --> AI.

Unfortunately, the last place that AI will replace jobs will generally be governmental jobs.

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This is very true. If it wasn't for bloated agencies there'd be no need for those in leadership.

When it comes to bloat in government, it's not those at the bottom that benefit the most from it, it's those who have six-figure salaries that truly benefit from it, for if not for bloat, there'd be less "leaders," and they can't have that.

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You need constant communication. You need to hear conversations over the wall.

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This is lunacy

Screen sharing, snips of actual design process, and quick to the point communication through Teams has been far more efficient and effective than in person meetings and collaboration. Especially with younger workers. It's just how they are wired now.

Adapt or die.

Ag87H2O said:

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Teslag said:

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the most cool guy said:

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BrazosDog02 said:

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Yikes. The olds and the "ya gotta be at work to be productive" crowd are not going to be happy about this.

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It makes no difference to me. But the idea that, on average, people are equally productive at home as they are in the office is so obviously false it is absolutely ****ing laughable.

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It depends on the industry. In some people are far more productive at home.

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Government isn't one of them.

I'm on an advisory council for a state agency and up until the back to the office mandate, we had one in-person meeting in 2 years, mostly because the staff wouldn't trouble themselves to come in to the office for a meeting. Absolutely nothing was getting done.

IMO, this is a bad move for Abbott. Forcing government employees to come to work is one of the few ways to hold them accountable for their performance or lack thereof. Otherwise, I guarantee you they are slacking off at home or holding second jobs on the taxpayer dime.

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Government was already inefficient and ineffective prior to COVID. WFH just amplified it. I have to send a lot of stuff for regulatory approval. It was already slow, and when people started working from home it just got slower. At first they blamed it on the technology, but as the technology kinks got ironed out you could tell the WFH folks were just being slow. It seemed like the shorter they had been with the agency, the slower they were. Part of that was the Gen Z mentality and part of it was they were not interacting with other staff to learn their jobs. Without the hive mind they were simply sitting idle.

I strongly disagree about engineering being fine working from home. I understand the office interruptions are disruptive to productivity, but that is a result of poor staff training and bad management style. Engineering requires a healthy amount of collaboration and mentorship (this is why ABET requires four years of experience before licensure). PEs and EITs being in separate environments puts a severe bottleneck on this aspect of engineering.

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I strongly disagree about engineering being fine working from home. I understand the office interruptions are disruptive to productivity, but that is a result of poor staff training and bad management style. Engineering requires a healthy amount of collaboration and mentorship (this is why ABET requires four years of experience before licensure). PEs and EITs being in separate environments puts a severe bottleneck on this aspect of engineering.

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Laughably absurd

I've seen younger engineers solve more problems and collaborate online than a group of older engineers in a conference room. It's the way it's going and nothing will really stop it.

I've been in those bloated long running conference rooms in a 30 year career and they are expensive, cumbersome, and often cause more problems.

Teslag said:

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Quote:

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You need constant communication. You need to hear conversations over the wall.

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This is lunacy

Screen sharing, snips of actual design process, and quick to the point communication through Teams has been far more efficient and effective than in person meetings and collaboration. Especially with younger workers. It's just how they are wired now.

Adapt or die.

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TEAMS is a great tool, not only for communication but also for keeping tabs on your employees.

Also, there are plenty of systems that employees use that can monitor their productivity every minute of the day. The one that's used at my place will show when an employee was using their system to do their job, what they did on it, and how long they were on it.

The "But I have to see my employee at his desk in the office to know they're doing work," is about as antiquated a way of thinking as there is.

Teslag said:

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the most cool guy said:

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Teslag said:

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the most cool guy said:

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BrazosDog02 said:

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Yikes. The olds and the "ya gotta be at work to be productive" crowd are not going to be happy about this.

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It makes no difference to me. But the idea that, on average, people are equally productive at home as they are in the office is so obviously false it is absolutely ****ing laughable.

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It depends on the industry. In some people are far more productive at home.

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if the industry is homemaking, I agree.

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Engineering and design. Seen it at multiple firms. The design staff work far better alone without interruption they are constantly subject to in an office setting.

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I have to agree.

If work from home is a problem then so is "management from Houston/DFW/Austin".


When I'm in office I'm interrupted because of 1) genuine crisis 2) dumbass crap because "remote management" is worthless and I'm the next best option for decisions and 3) office and workplace shenanigans

Being in office makes management feel better. Yet there is very little actual daily management going on.

Same management that is eager to go HAM on work from home are the same ones who recoil at the thought of having to relocate to a tiny ****hole oil field town in W. Texas to manage their employees.

Exactly that. The engineering firms that have excelled at hybrid/wfh have taken advantage of the technology to further sharpen their management skills. Everything is cohesive and meshed together. Accountability is in real time, and rather than 2 people standing over the shoulder of a designer or cad tech, you can now have the entire team working virtually on the same workstation analyzing a solution. And the young engineers absolutely love it because they get this style and they have constant input and feedback at any moment.

The dinosaurs hate it, because tech makes them pee their pants

Teslag said:

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Exactly that. The engineering firms that have excelled at hybrid/wfh have taken advantage of the technology to further sharpen their management skills. Everything is cohesive and meshed together. Accountability is in real time, and rather than 2 people standing over the shoulder of a designer or cad tech, you can now have the entire team working virtually on the same workstation analyzing a solution. And the young engineers absolutely love it because they get this style and they have constant input and feedback at any moment.

The dinosaurs hate it, because tech makes them pee their pants

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There's a reason their dinosaurs.

Like you said, "Adapt or die," and it's very obvious which people need to go the way (figuratively) of the dinosaur. The sooner they do the better off more businesses will be.

Ag87H2O said:

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Teslag said:

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the most cool guy said:

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BrazosDog02 said:

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Yikes. The olds and the "ya gotta be at work to be productive" crowd are not going to be happy about this.

---

It makes no difference to me. But the idea that, on average, people are equally productive at home as they are in the office is so obviously false it is absolutely ****ing laughable.

---

It depends on the industry. In some people are far more productive at home.

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Government isn't one of them.

I'm on an advisory council for a state agency and up until the back to the office mandate, we had one in-person meeting in 2 years, mostly because the staff wouldn't trouble themselves to come in to the office for a meeting. Absolutely nothing was getting done.

IMO, this is a bad move for Abbott. Forcing government employees to come to work is one of the few ways to hold them accountable for their performance or lack thereof. Otherwise, I guarantee you they are slacking off at home or holding second jobs on the taxpayer dime.

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Most meetings are a waste of time. That's why they didn't want to come in.

Unforgiven94 said:

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This bill just provided a framework that state agencies have to abide by to allow work from home. State law already allowed for it. This bill added some specific requirements for uniformity. There is nothing in it that says agencies have to allow remote work. if the governor tells agency commissioners no work from home then they just won't allow it.

If a manager can only determine employee productivity when they are physically in the office then they shouldn't be managing. I have a large team of safety consultants that work in the field full time. I talk with my people and assess their performance all the time. None of them are in the office. I still know when they are being productive or not.

As someone mentioned above, work from home doesn't apply for every job type but it is a valuable tool, especially if you are trying to recruit talent in areas with terrible traffic, or in the case of a state government job are at a disadvantage in terms of compensation.

It should never be a right of the job though, but rather a privilege that can be instantly removed if abused.

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Austin.

ts5641 said:

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Anything that keeps less people on the roads is a good thing.

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fewer

BrazosDog02 said:

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Yikes. The olds and the "ya gotta be at work to be productive" crowd are not going to be happy about this.

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What do "olds" have to do with it? I know plenty of "olds" that think WFH is fine.

It's a general assumption and often valid. Where I've seen hybrid/wfh work best is when you have total buy in from upper management. And believe it or not, they can foster a culture in that setting.

I work for a state education/research institution and feel that the vast majority of my co-workers are equally or often more productive at home. WFH is good for days when you need to crush a narrative for a grant or paper, etc without distractions, or if you have a day of just Teams meetings.

For me I am more productive in the office and it is a "me" thing I know about myself so I am ok with it.

The most distracting, chatty person in the office went full remote, so my office environment is really peaceful and good these days.

There are 2 sides to the coin. Some folks may be more productive at home after learning skills, establishing a career, and doing something fairly solo. But from what I see, those new in their career tend to really struggle with development in WFH. That crew that went straight from college to WFH were very inconsistent until they got more time in office. It doesn't need to be 5 days, but 3 days really seemed to do them a service. This is my assessment as a VP at a Fortune 50 and seeing a variety of teams/orgs/roles operate

I think people really underestimate how much knowledge absorption and impromptu coaching happens in person. That said, if you are in a stage of your career and role where you don't need it, good for you. But many do.

I have been an AP exam reader (scoring free-response questions) for just over a decade now and we have moved from all of us reading on-site to about 40% of us in my subject reading on-site and the rest reading from home.

We all score responses that have been scanned from paper booklets and we have benchmark papers provided for reference, so theoretically we have identical levels of training, but what the at-home readers do not get is the regular interaction with other readers and being able to consult with a table leader in person immediately if there is a response that is tricky to score. Teamwork and multiple sources of input are invaluable and I believe it makes us more accurate.

If an at-home reader wants feedback, a response is placed in a temporary hold and then hope the table leader gets back to you in a reasonable length of time (sometimes the at-home readers and their assigned table leaders are 2-3 time zones apart).

Validity papers are slipped into our queue on occasion to ensure that we are staying on rubric and scoring responses as they should be scored, and the at-home readers for the question I scored this year were doing significantly worse with those than the on-site readers, so much so that those of us on-site had two separate brief meetings with a member of the rubric team about one part of the question, and we all looked at each other like "we aren't the ones screwing this up...our validity paper scores are excellent." They were talking to the only people they could, but it was misdirected frustration.

Our at-home readers were also performing at about 1/3 of what they were expected to do in terms of getting responses scored, which was an immense source of annoyance for those of us on-site. The screening process for who reads from home must be improved. I am sure there were at-home readers who were not yet finished with their school year (we scored papers during the first week of June) and waited until the weekend (the last two days of scoring) before doing any serious work. That is not acceptable.

All of that to say that I think that, on the whole, the quality of scoring of our questions has suffered because of the change to an at-home/on-site hybrid model, but it is not going away. I know there are readers who do a tremendous job from home, but they are in a distinct minority. If College Board had their druthers, we would all score remotely. I will never score from home again, so if it goes 100% remote, I'm done. Apologies for the semi-vent...I'll just put this particular task as one that, in my opinion, has not seen improvement with WFH introduced.

I think a lot of the issue is that younger employees out of college are different than they were even 10 to 15 years ago. Most of their interaction is how digital and virtual. It's how they work and learn almost everything. Even much of their entertainment is derived this way.

Oddly enough, even when in the office I find it more productive and efficient to still primarily communicate and collaborate with them over Teams and video/screen sharing. They may only be 100 feet away, but still have more success over Teams/video chat. Just the way they are "wired" now.

I adapted to them and not the other way around. And I feel like I've extended my ability to get more out of them and those after them. Our workforce is only getting younger.

Irony: Lazy folks using the government's productivity experience to make their point about what works in the real world for productivity

I've had 27 years private, 3 years government (USACE). Recently returned private after taking the doge buyout.

They can spit out work that way. That said, i can tell you over the past 5 years that those coming in more have been on the whole distancing themselves from their peers. We are in a new ERP, we have leveraged RPA for years, and now we're pushing forward with AI (leveraging copilot). It seems that the impromptu conversations that happen from us all sitting around each other and learning from each other is really benefitting one group more. They are ahead on understanding the tools and the business.

We give our teams a lot of leeway to be creative in finding ways to do their job differently and more efficiently - we expect it. We don't want folks sitting stagnant in a role just spitting out work the same old way. I am always telling them "if you are doing your job the same way it was done 5 years ago or even 2 years ago, something is wrong". That "learning by osmosis" knowledge has been very valuable to those picking it up and then applying it to their role

Teslag said:

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I've had 27 years private, 3 years government (USACE). Recently returned private after taking the doge buyout.

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I'm not saying there aren't lazy folks in private, but most of the government is exclusively lazy

And I'm saying that they can "learn by osmosis" in a digital and virtual environment. I've seen it happen. But it takes a company culture that has embraced and adapted to it as well.

We absolutely do. There are always exceptions. But I'm speaking on the whole and also as someone who didn't spend most of the last 5 years working for the government who is on his 3rd or 4th company over the past 5 vs in position to evaluate the development of some of the same folks over a longer haul

Abbott was never against WFH for himself. Abbott and a high number of people working with him WFH for more than a year when Covid was going on. Some worked from home for more than 2 years. Seemed like a bunch of bs to me.

Here are my thoughts about WFH. I think it depends on the person. I rarely work from home, but I do travel at least once a week for work and am not in the office. Most weeks it's twice a week. I get more work done when I'm away from the office vs working in the office. The issue for me when I'm at the office is that so many people want to stop by my office to shoot the breeze. That probably wastes two hours a day of me listening to people who have come by my office to talk about things not related to work. Then at least another hour or two a day of people coming to talk to me about something work related that could have easily and quickly been taken care of via email instead. I spend an insane amount of energy trying to politely end conversations and get people out of my office so I can get work done.

Why do young people generally put old people in the stupid or Luddite category? It's intellectual laziness. There's as much disparity in old people's opinions now as there were when we were younger, and I'm pretty sure it's the same with young people today.

Being of the Ron Paul libertarian bent, I'm for letting businesses run their businesses and government not wasting our money running government. If productivity can be accurately measured, and in this scenario I know it can, I'm all for a policy of good productivity and happy employees. I know from personal experience how hard it is to keep really good employees at the State level.

And for reference, I'm Class of '75. so that puts me in the "olds" category, any way you look at it.

Teslag said:

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I've had 27 years private, 3 years government (USACE). Recently returned private after taking the doge buyout.

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This explains much about your contributions. Absurd, indeed.

Why should I have not taken it? I was growing tired of working at USACE and was about to leave anyway. I was able to take a buyout and immediately find a job in the private sector again. I took the buyout and bought a corvette.

WFH

Teslag said:

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Why should I have not taken it? I was growing tired of working at USACE and was about to leave anyway. I was able to take a buyout and immediately find a job in the private sector again. I took the buyout and bought a corvette.

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TALMBOUT!!!!!1

FIDO*98* said:

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State Employees aren't exactly known for productivity. Glad they can half-ass jobs that largely shouldn't exist in the first place from the comfort of home again

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State and federal employees both. Work from home just means they can sleep until 10am and then start their day of doing very little.

lol, I saw this coming from the day it was put in place. Abbott shot his wad too early in trying to copy Trump thinking he had an easy dunk.

I can't speak for every department, but for the one I work at, there were very clear WFH rules, structure, and expectations to make sure it wasn't abused. I know for a fact that upper management had been telling Abbott for months that he was a moron for banning it.