My favorite quote:
While employees in the office might kill time messaging friends or flipping through TikTok, remote workers take advantage of being far from the watchful gaze of bosses to chip away at personal to-do lists or to goof off.
Nearly half of remote workers multitask on work calls or complete household chores like unloading the dishwasher or doing a load of laundry, according to the SurveyMonkey poll of 3,117 full-time workers in the U.S.
Oh noes, people actually doing things that are useful for their families instead of even more computer time.
It’s insane that this is even considered strange or surprising. When I work from home, I take longer lunch breaks and I often stop working earlier, but I’m still three times as productive compared to sitting in an office.
At home, I actually get focused time to do something and think. At the office, this is extreamly difficult with all the distractions and noise constantly interrupting my train of thought.
It’d be cool if the media did a piece about how companies are stealing the excess labor of their employees. It will never happen though because “the media” also steals the excess labor from it’s employees.
Maybe the solution to return-to-work is manufacturing a bunch of fake news about remote workers being significantly less likely to unionize and more likely to take an ass pounding from corporate overlords?
The thing is, you don’t even need to manufacture a good story. You could tell the true story of how companies have slashed overhead by reducing the amount of office space needed or how employees working from home turn out to be just as if not more productive than those working in the offices and happier with their jobs besides.
There were companies planning to move more jobs to work from home even before the pandemic because it’s a model that just makes more sense for a lot of positions. The return to office crowd could be beaten simply by pointing out the for most positions, working on-site is a needless expense. The problem is, the media isn’t willing to tell that story.
The real estate tycoons who lease out the office buildings are the reason for the return to office push by the media. They must continue to justify their existence at all costs.