I have to rant about the home office situation in general, but also specifically at my place of employment and similar places. I cannot stand the fake

the ‘return to office’ lies | ava's blog

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2024-11-23 16:30:05

I have to rant about the home office situation in general, but also specifically at my place of employment and similar places.

I cannot stand the fake positivity and cute-sounding arguments for returning to the office. It falls flat for so many and it’s trying to make it sound more legitimate by evoking this image of collaboration, being social, kindness, having a good time together when that’s not the point. The point is micromanagement and needing to justify the large office spaces they invested into. Very rarely are there positions or departments who truly need to collab in person, and then they can just do that for the occasion, not a fixed amount of days per week or month where they need to go in at all times.

It’s a joke. At my place, we don’t innovate, we don’t develop new products for a mass market; we do lots of data entry, emails, and writing reports in SharePoint or with comments and track changes in Word. Excel spreadsheets and databases. Absolutely everything is digitized, we send auto-emails and all communication is via Teams or Mail and very rarely over phone. Documents arrive digitally. All the collaboration is already online and there is no need for an office presence. Even when you are in office, you don’t even see the people for the work since it’s all online!

But they’ll look at FAANG and be like: “Ooh, they’re asking everyone to be back at the office because of better collaboration!” You clown, the collaboration happens the same regardless where my ass sits and we are not designers or knowledge workers solving issues, we handle data! We are not pioneers or a Silicon Valley tech firm!