Google and JPMorgan have each told staff that office attendance will be factored into performance evaluations. The US law firm Davis Polk informed employees that fewer days in the office would result in lower bonuses. And Meta and Amazon both told employees they’re now monitoring badge swipes, with potential consequences for workers who don’t comply with attendance policies – including job loss. Increasingly, workers across many jobs and sectors appear to be barrelling towards the same fate.
In some ways, it’s unsurprising bosses are turning back to attendance as a standard. After all, we’ve long been conditioned to believe showing up is vital to success, from some of our earliest days. In school, perfect attendance is often still seen a badge of honour. The obsession with attendance has also been a mainstay of workplace culture for decades; pre-pandemic, remote work was largely unheard of, and employees were expected to be physically present at their desks throughout the workday.
Yet after the success of flexible arrangements during the pandemic, attendance is still entrenched as a core metric. What’s the point?
If you manage professionals and can’t tell how well your team is doing unless you see them in person daily, you’re a terrible manager.
Alternatively, If I have to bring the people who report to me into the office for them to get their shit together, they’re a lost cause anyway.
Some of my coworkers love going into the office. They’re also really bad at responding to slack. I wonder if these are related.
Anyway, we should all unionize and push back against this kind of nonsense
During the pandemic, when we were all forced to work from home, one of my coworkers would incessantly bitch and moan about how he missed being back at the office.
He is the kind of person who pulls all sorts of bullshit out of his ass and starts treating it as if it’s true. At some point he started going around saying that “productivity when WFH is ok but everybody is complaining that they can’t make plans for future projects without face to face time”. When our director got curious and asked him where he had heard about this, he changed the topic.
Basically this is a person who doesn’t want to do anything and makes a career out of going around and pretending to be working and calling meetings when they’re not needed. For this kind of person, WFH is deadly as it clearly shows that their “skills” are not needed for the company’s success.
I dunno man, if those people played it right, WFH would be the best. Still getting nothing done, but now you get to stay home every day.
Yeah, for people like me that finish the asigned tasks in very little time, Office culture is torture since yeah, we shouldn’t show how fast we work since it will only end up with our workload increasing, but having to pretend to work or working slower than would like is the worst. At home I just prepare partial commits or simply commit once at the end of the day, or do whatever whenever and people don’t monitor when were those lambda functions edited, when was the pipeline launched… etc. They only care if it’s done for the next day. And it is, and they are happy. They don’t need to know I spent 6 out of 8 work hours playing Baldurs Gate 3, do they?
Exactly. Which I think is the reason these executives are so gung ho about RTO. They realize people aren’t spending 100% of their time and attention on their work every day, and that’s what they want and expect. I’m not sure if they realize people will do the same thing in the office, except they’ll drag it out and make it seem like it took longer as you described. They probably don’t care.
I think part of it is this corporate mindset that they own you if you work there. And you should be grateful for the job they’ve provided, and that means working every minute of every work day. No amount of data showing that’s less productive/efficient will ever get those people to change their minds. Because in this case, for these people, it’s about feeling superior and showing “dominance”.
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And they will love it, OR ELSE!!
There was a time when I would have jumped at the chance to work for one of these companies.
Hell, I even interviewed with Google 17 years ago (for a position that I was thoroughly overqualified for).
But, these days I don’t think they could offer me enough money to convince me it would be worth it… Unless there was a HUGE upfront signing bonus that wouldn’t need to be repaid no matter what happens.
They’re shooting themselves in the foot by drastically reducing the talent pool available to them.
It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see how it works out for them.
To be fair working there 17 years ago would’ve probably been ok. Like, hard work for sure, but very well compensated and still had the famous company culture. These days it’d be like willingly stepping into a meat grinder.
Thanks
If I remember correctly, didn’t Google offer lots of staff facilities and benefits?
…oh right, now they also care about office attendance… welp there goes the “don’t be evil” motto
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Control freak management as the article says
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The two or three out of a hundred employees that get given an inch and take a mile, ruining it for everyone else that isn’t taking the piss
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It doesn’t have to be unprofitable. They just don’t need to “maximize their return”. They want tax credits and subsidies for low income housing so they can make the same profit as a bidding war for a luxury condo. It’s greed.
