Google Will Try 'Hybrid' Work-from-Home Models, as Most Employees Don't Want To Come in Every Day (cnbc.com) 45
Google is rethinking its long-term work options for employees, as most of them say they don't want to come back to the office full-time. From a report: Sixty-two percent of Google employees want to return to their offices at some point, but not every day, according to a recent survey of employee office preferences the company released this week. So Google is working on "hybrid" models, including rearranging its offices and figuring out more long-term remote work options, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview with Time magazine on Wednesday. "I see the future as being more flexible," Pichai said in the interview. "We firmly believe that in-person, being together, having a sense of community is super important when you have to solve hard problems and create something new so we don't see that changing. But we do think we need to create more flexibility and more hybrid models."
Why not? (Score:3)
At home there's no free coffee, free massage, free...
Re:Why not? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah yes, "free". Those working from home should get a pay raise because they don't get the "free" services, don't require an office, a parking space, etc. And they also must provide internet access and electricity to work.
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That would only make sense if the employer paid the commute expenses in the first place.
No shit (Score:1)
No one wants to commute every day of the work week. No one needs to either. It would be nice to have a home office or a neighborhood coop to work from.
About the only thing I miss is the hot lunches I didn't have to make.Otherwise, I'm good working from home. Just got to make sure I actually shut down at the end of the day and that's becoming easier and easier to do.
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No one needs to either.
I mean, it would be kind of hard for Janitorial staff, food service workers, repairmen, delivery drivers, and so on and so forth to work from home...
But your point stands for office workers for the most part.
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If the office workers worked from home many of the other roles you mentioned would be out of the job.
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Not only that, but the beginning time of the work day keeps going up and the shut down at the end of the day keeps going down! I'm down to five hours a day! Thanks, pornhub!
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Everyone I know does. You work more effectively by FAR (work from home was proven to be a HUGE productivity loss), you get out, you talk to people. Only the anti-social losers on /. seem to like it.
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With home office, I can start to work 1.5 hours earlier and I can do something fun in the early afternoon, like hitting the gym or going to the local climbing hall. I am going to ask my employer for some flexibility regarding working
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You've got an interesting definition of "no one". I'd love to find an employer who's willing to buy each of their Hardware engineers whole racks of equipment (each costing tens to hundreds or thousands of dollars) so that they can all work from home. Even if I had the equipment, I don't know how to work out a way to split the power bill associated with keeping a multi-kilowatt prototype powered up at home, much less find room for the 48V inverter rack.
Commute (Score:3)
Considering Google is one of those companies that provides shuttle buses, this should be a fairly easy decision. There have been complaints from neighborhoods about traffic and even vandalism and attacks on shuttles in the past.
Letting Bay-area employees work 100% remote would be a quick resolution to the Bay-area housing cost crisis. Pick one of them Google-Fiber cities to live in.
In My Experience... (Score:5, Insightful)
In my experience, every place that I have worked that opened up the option for people to be in the office on their own schedule has seen productivity increase dramatically.
Give people options and trust them and most will do a great job.
Re:In My Experience... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think that's what people are finding. The work from home is great, but a lot of people miss the office. However, most of those people don't relish the thought of resuming working from the office all the time either.
Sure there are plenty of folks who love working remotely all the time. Good on them. And I know a few people who love working at the office all the time too.
But it turns out for the vast majority of people, neither wants either extreme - a balance is what's desired. They miss the social chit-chat or impromptu meetings and social stuff that happens in the office, but also desire to eliminate the commute or handle family or other things.
Outside of very few jobs, there can be a lot of flexibility in working arrangements, and the pandemic has shown that the world doesn't stop spinning when people do start working from home.
This can even be a long term study since it's gone on for months - so the initial honeymoon period is over, and more people are realizing that working from home is not a panacea, but something to be balanced - you'll have people who work part of the week from home and part of the week in the office. And it turns out, not everyone wants extended weekends - some will enjoy working from home on Tuesdays, or Wednesdays or Thursdays as well. Some may want a Tuesday-Thursday from home arragement, others might want TWTh, others MWF, etc.
The smart employers will realize that most employees will probably want anywhere from 1-4 days at the office - few want 0 (full work from home) and few 5 (full work in the office).
And maybe it changes, too depending on time of year.
Re:In My Experience... (Score:5, Insightful)
And maybe it changes, too depending on time of year.
As someone who lives in the snow-belt I 100% concur. Now that we have proven we can be effective from home there is no need for us to risk our lives slogging an hour and a half through a blizzard to sit in a cubicle.
Re:In My Experience... (Score:5, Interesting)
I love this 3000.
Years ago I worked at a place that was 80 minutes away from my home. While that doesn't sound like a huge distance, it was far enough (most of the commute was open, rural highway) that the weather at home didn't always match the weather at work. Some days in winter I would get up and immediately let my supervisor know I wasn't going to make it in due to the depth of snow and he would, every time, give me hell about it if there was less snow at the workplace. On the flipside, there were quite a few times where I would head out for work on clear, dry roads only to end up in some Snow Miser's wet dream the closer I got to work.
My supervisor never could wrap his head around the fact that yes, weather conditions can be COMPLETELY DIFFERENT in areas that are just 70 miles apart.
Re:In My Experience... (Score:4, Insightful)
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Ha, it can be different within a few miles!
Re:In My Experience... (Score:5, Insightful)
Or at all. Aside from these insane workaholics who seem to love hanging out in the office instead of with their family and friends, possibly getting back an average of 10-20hrs unpaid time a week between commute and breaks at home I can't imagine why anyone wants to go back.
The best part is that you aren't tethered to the location of the physical office. You can actually move out and live on a piece of land and not have eyes on you everytime you open a blind, walk out a door, or even take a walk.
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Why would anyone want to go in the office? You have to spend extra unpaid time getting dressed, commuting, you socialize with your family rather than random jerks you happen to work wit... oh you mean sad people who actually like work because their lives are so sad they enjoy an experience so bad people have to be paid to do it.
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trust the
I always assume that I give people the chance to be lazy, they will.
Re:In My Experience... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In My Experience... (Score:4, Insightful)
Lazy people are relaxed people and relaxed minds produce superior solutions more efficiently. You don't actually get anything out of having someone work twice as much to produce something 3/4 as well in twice the time.
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> In my experience, every place that I have worked that opened up the option for people to be in the office on their own schedule has seen productivity increase dramatically.
In my experience you are confusing productivity with other things. Productivity dropped with increased remote work. Survey asks people who are working from home about their productivity. It is not checking how those people are performing.
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In my experience, every place that I have worked that opened up the option for people to be in the office on their own schedule has seen productivity increase dramatically.
Give people options and trust them and most will do a great job.
I think people generally do something because it needs doing. If today's work is mostly at a computer, there's no need to go anywhere. If tomorrow's work needs an intense face to face negotiation, then one needs to travel. Or if you have to go on site to inspect something, you need to travel.
I still think people need face to face interaction, but for office work that's not every day. It could be once a week, or once a fortnight.
Re:GooglePlex doesn't interest 38% _at_all_? (Score:5, Insightful)
Traffic is a soul-sucking time-sinking affair.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Re:GooglePlex doesn't interest 38% _at_all_? (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems strange,
that 38% of Google employees don't ever want to interact with the Google campus. Are the perks not enough for even once-a-week visits? What's going on?
If you have to go to the office once per week, you have to live close enough to the office to make that commute reasonable. Certainly you can live further away than if you had to go daily, but it still tethers you to the office. Remove that requirement and you can live almost anywhere you want.
FWIW, I work for Google and live 500 miles from the nearest office, 1000 miles from the office where my team sits. I've been doing this for years. Many of my colleagues are see the attraction of my situation, but most would like to go back to the office at least once in a while.
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^ This. Definitely this.
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I think these are the results they're talking about:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EijTddMUMAEqhm7?format=jpg&name=large [twimg.com]
It doesn't ask whether they want to go into the office, it asks how often they need to be there to do their work well (I'm sure how much they like it will factor into that but some honest ones may even be thinking 'the massages are amazing but I'd be more focused on my work if I wasn't going for massages').
The percentage in July (the month when 'some days' was at 62%) for 'not at all' was
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Regardless of perks, why would anyone ever want to go into work? Especially for the purpose of working.
This just in (Score:3, Insightful)
Hard problems (Score:1)
That's actually surprising (Score:3)
I'm kind of surprised. I thought Google and all the other tech companies got their people to spend 80+ hours a week "on campus" because of the perks. I guess having your time back and not having to pay more than $2M for a house within a 2 hour commute wins out over all that?
It's going to be interesting to see what happens long-term. Managers have been sold the "turn my workplace into Google" digital transformation package for years. It's basically the only reason companies have put in preschool office furniture and removed any privacy. Anyone questioning this has been branded a heretic for years. So what happens when the office matters less?
Personally I hope more companies embrace at least some remote work permanently. I live far enough away from NYC to be able to do a miserable commute if I had to, and unfortunately the more interesting jobs are in the city. However, for me, enjoying 3 hours of my day as my own time means having to settle for a less exciting position locally. If that barrier could get removed, I and a lot of others would be a big addition to the labor pool for tech companies. 1 or 2 days at work is fine for me...but life's too short to waste it on a slow train or in miserable traffic.
Re:That's actually surprising (Score:4, Interesting)
I thought Google and all the other tech companies got their people to spend 80+ hours a week "on campus" because of the perks.
That has never been true in the 10 years I've worked for Google. It varies a bit from office to office, but in general people don't work long hours. In the Silicon Valley offices you'll see a small percentage of employees, mostly young and without families, who put in a lot of hours because they like what they're working on and want to, but no one tells them to, ever, and they frequently get told to go home. For some of them it's apparently so bad that Google made it an official policy that employees must go home at night, because some were trying to live in the office, but I never actually met anyone like that. When I worked in the Boulder office, the place was a ghost town by 4:30 PM, and most people didn't arrive before 9 AM. In the New York offices, I often saw people working very late, but most also didn't come in until quite late, to match the working hours of the mothership in California.
I'd estimate that most US Google employees work a little more than 40 hours per week, but not much more. I know many who work significantly less than 40 hours per week. One very senior and brilliant engineer I know told me "Google pays me to think, and I can only think effectively for maximum six hours per day. When my brain is done, I go home."
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one of my buddies lived in the engineering lab in MTV-1250 for a few weeks when his wife divorced him, we set him up with a couch to sleep on and he showered on campus
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one of my buddies lived in the engineering lab in MTV-1250 for a few weeks when his wife divorced him, we set him up with a couch to sleep on and he showered on campus
Yeah, I'm sure there are plenty of short-term exceptions like that. I spent the night in a sleep pod one time. I had flown out to the Googleplex on a Monday morning, then that evening realized that I had screwed up my hotel reservation dates and didn't have a place to sleep. The hotels nearby were all either full or ridiculously expensive (I had the Trips credits to pay the exorbitant rates, but I just refuse to do that, and anyway I'd rather save the credits for when I can get more use out of them), so I j
I thought (Score:1)
I thought the point of not wanting to come in to work was not wanting to work but to do other things.,
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The point is being able to work with diaherria, mildly supervise a child so your spouse can run an errand, spend no time getting dressed and commuting, avoiding the temptation to pay for expensive lunches out, and enabling you to move to far more reasonable, private, and beautiful locations which aren't in commute range of the office. Also, instead of acting busy or hammy 'office socialization' for 30% of the day you can just get up and enjoy a microvisit with your family between tasks/calls and be a presen
home and office workplace responsibilities (Score:2)
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You've got to provide a laptop and monitor either way. Let them cover any other expenses instead of commute and they still win thanks to the tax deduction.
Subject line (Score:2)
FTFY.