With the recent Accenture move this week, seeing how many empty desks there are across the country in person and via Zoom… they can easily make everyone go back to 5 days in the office. Which isn’t kind of scary to be honest.
While this isn’t an issue for most. My (and many others) issue with it is pre covid lockdown, when the 5 days a week was the norm we weren’t badge checked like we’re incompetent peasants. Whereas kids in school from K-12 get an absence for not showing up an employee could still be working just in a different place at their hours. Most people especially salaried/exempt from overtime who work from home tend to put in more than 8 hours.
Managers had no reason to micromanage or throw their direct reports under a bus, if they were working from home because of being were sick or had to take care of someone at home that day. They didn’t care if ICs weren’t working in office for a full 8+ hours or half a day or less. They didn’t track you like a dog with an AirTag to make sure you were here a whole day.
So the fear is that if the company goes back to RTO for 5 days, management will keep checking badge ins and folks can be terminated for not meeting their metric that we were historically never forced to meet in the past.
Don’t get me started on Covid, the bird flu, TB and other diseases and outbreaks out there now or that will come to light in the future.
So in closing if a full 5 day RTO is implemented - they need to stop badge check ins and tracking metrics… OR at the very least be more transparent with our checking than some silly undisclosed average done today. We have a PTO calendar all you need to do is add RTO to that calendar to see the days we checked in because the current average is still incorrect for most and hasn’t been right since they started tracking or has issues and they don’t know until someone complains the numbers are incorrect.
Thanks for attending my ted talk.