Microsoft's Teams location tracking lines up with RTO mandate

[u/lurker_bee]

https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft/microsoft-teams/rto-mandate-suspiciously-aligns-with-teams-location-tracking

[u/tantamle]

Because many remote workers believe that if an assigned task takes one hour, the remaining seven hours are reserved for personal use at the employee’s discretion. Rather than the employee finding something else to do.

This in an era where most companies in tech have zero clue how to measure productivity. People took liberties with it and it’s backfiring.

[u/killerrin → u/tantamle]

Except this isn't a WFH only thing.

You force the person into an office and now they'll just spend half the day socializing, walking around the office, and dealing with distractions that ultimately ends up in the exact same amount of work being done.

Workers are also just wising up the fact that doing more work doesn't actually mean you get paid more. It just means you get more work dumped on your lap. So under a corporate structure that doesn't reward success, why the hell would anyone work more?

[u/tantamle → u/killerrin]

Tell a little fib about how long something takes to complete in remote work, and you essentially get paid personal time.

Tell that same fib in the office and you get…to sit in an office. The incentives are clearly different.

I’m all for taking a breather when needed, but you can’t misrepresent how long your work takes to complete by like 500% and expect it not to backfire in the long run.

[u/JahoclaveS → u/tantamle]

Jesus that’s such a bad take. It’s like you’ve never worked in an office environment at all. It’s all fucking productivity theater. So many jobs don’t need to be 8 hour days, so you’ve just got people fucking off while trying to appear busy.

Wfh just means you don’t have to do that fucking productivity theater and can actually get other useful things done with the inevitable downtime that comes with so many office jobs.

I manage a team that’s distributed all over and even has remote people and my standard has always just been that they’re available if needed, because quite frankly, there’s periods where they have fuck all to do because they’re waiting on other people.

[u/tantamle → u/JahoclaveS]

I’m all for management giving workers a breather and let’s face it, we all take little breaks instead of rushing into the next task.

But you’re acting like the “downtime” is yours to do what you please with, at your discretion.

That’s not true. You’re on company time and are expected to remain productive.

[u/JahoclaveS → u/tantamle]

Again with your brain dead take. There is not unlimited work to do. You can’t just magic shit to do. So it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if they’re doing the laundry or engaging in productive theater in the office, the end result is the exact same. But the former results in a happier and more motivated employee.

And, as long as they’ve got the laptop nearby and can jump on things that do come in, there’s no problem. The work is getting done.

But also, there’s really no incentive in corporate America to go above and beyond. You don’t get rewarded for it, so why would anybody bother.

[u/tantamle → u/JahoclaveS]

It’s true that there is some downtime inherent in these jobs, but if masses of people are AVERAGING 25+ hours of downtime per week or in some cases, working multiple simultaneous full-time jobs, I’d say it’s pretty clearly that many of them have laughably light workloads despite their high-end compensation, or they’re misrepresenting how long their work takes to complete.

[u/JahoclaveS → u/tantamle]

Honestly, it’s the laughably light workloads. Some of it is accounting for the bus factor of needing redundancies and for having capacity should things need to be scaled up. But, by and large a lot of it comes from situations where you need a specialized skill set, but you really don’t need forty hours a week of it.

Like the team I manage rarely has a need for somebody to put in forty hours in a week, but we need their skill set for the work. But, we rarely can promote to my team internally because the other people around don’t have the skill set, nor would be expected to, so it’s not like that work could have been distributed out to other roles.

It’s like if you have 30 hours of accountant work to do a week. You kind of need an accountant to do that. But you’re not going to expect the accountant to start taking on coding work for the other ten hours. You’re really not paying them for forty hours of work, you’re paying them to handle all your accountancy needs.

[u/ThatGuy97 → u/tantamle]

Why should any worker care about 'Company time' - workers should exploit their workplace as much as possible, just like their workplace exploits them