A simple Microsoft 365 Roadmap update will now generate a raft of unhappy headlines. The idea is simple. “When users connect to their organization’s Wi-Fi, Teams will automatically set their work location to reflect the building they are working in.”
Forget the locational anonymity of a Teams virtual background. Teams will update your location when connected to your company’s WiFi. On video, you may have your usual background complete with company logo. But your boss will know you’re not in work.
Jokes on them! My company made everyone remote during COVID. It worked so well that they sold the corporate office buildings. We are all remote permanently! As long as I work my scheduled hours, they don’t care where in the world I am.
I’ve gone through two companies that embraced Work From Home, a lot of companies saw no drop in productivity or results from having their employees comfortable and able to get to work on time.
One company didn’t go down without a fight, it took all the employees including myself, a manager, to speak up and talk to corporate and the CEO’s and say that my team and I oppose returning to the office, we don’t see a reason for it, and many of us will consider alternatives. They key point here is I backed it up with data, showing we only gained productivity and revenue since moving to WFH.
Despite all the hyped headlines out there about “Covid is over, time to go back to work!” we’ve seen for the last couple years, a lot of the changes it ushered in have become permanent. I know a lot of companies yanked the choke-chain around their employee’s necks, but not all.
The second company I moved to was already about 50% WFH, a much larger company too, and they made it totally optional, and they benefited a lot from being able to recruit talent from basically anywhere in the world.
Can I work at your workplace? Do they need an IT guy?
We JUST did this. I work in commercial real estate and we talked about it in 2018 but management chickened out. After the Pandemic, they forced us to go back for a year but moral fell to the lowest point ever and we couldn’t hire anyone.
Finally, it was time to decide on renewing our lease again and we switched back to remote. It’s been awesome and we’ve hired tons of people from our competitors who are pushing in office mandates.
I hope everyone keeps pushing their office to change. It’s possible.
Lucky bastard
This is definitely a step in the right direction, but why stop there? They should be paying you for getting work done to some agreed-upon standard, regardless of whether that takes 40 hours a week or far less.