And people who work from the office spend their time distracted, using a gross shared keyboard at some hoteled workstation, while they sit in Zoom calls with someone on another continent.
I actually like working in an office, but only if I'm co-located with my coworkers and I have my own, relatively-private space work in.
As if people can only slack off at home. My unpopular opinion on this topic is that unproductive people in an open office space cause more harm to overall output than productive people spending some of their time unproductively at home.
The acts of a lazy few ruining it for the many again.
Being forced back into the office because your coworker is pulling themselves off instead of pulling their weight should be dealt with on a case by case basis.
These people were just pretending to work in the office. I'd rather someone take a nap at home than chat about TV in the disgusting shared kitchen while I try to work between meetings that have been scheduled for no reason than for people to look busy.
Removing the forced optics of "work" is one of the best part of WFH.
I've seen a slight majority of managers have a huge appetite for solving specific problems with generic solutions. I never quite understood where that's coming from. The programming equivalent would be a full rewrite because someone found a bug.
I guess that's because it's lazy and the least amount of effort for the management, but most amount of effort for the numerous staff under them.
That makes it your problem instead of management's problem, it's basically telling staff they don't care about their social/personal wellbeing indirectly and they don't mind making problems for many people if it solves 1 of their own.
This would be reading between the lines on a job spec:
"company has a great work from home ethic, but requires you to be in 3 days a week"
I manage a large software team (developers, analysts, PMs, support, writers)... The actual work we accomplish as a team increased with remote working. No more time wasted fighting our way through traffic, or in the case of people in India, fighting monsoons, to get into an office.
This does make my job harder. The reason for this is that a great deal of my work happens in 30-minute increments, making decisions, in meetings. But that is not how software gets built. Developers work in half-day increments. Flow matters, extended concentration matters (I was a software developer for over two decades). Making my job easier at the expense of my people would be utterly foolish. I think most software-oriented tech companies (or departments) will hold to this. The real challenge, as always, is to find people driven to work hard and who delight in solving problems.
I don't know how this dichotomy of time-boxing translates to other businesses that aren't about crafting software or extended periods of what is essentially thought-work. Restaurateurs must go to the restaurant, factory workers to the factory, but if your job is crafting text in digital form, you can be located anywhere.
Employment, depending on the job, should be about what the employer pays to get from the employee. And most of the time (ahem), it shouldn't be time that is traded. Naturally it takes time to accomplish things and fulfill your obligations, but the amount of time is rarely fixed. Instead, things like training, experience, skill set, tools, contextual information, and especially energy contribute to fulfillment.
Damn. People having sex at home? How dare you! haha. STFU with this shit already. Orgs that embraced WFH are better than ever. What people do at home, is none of your god damn business. You can have a say, after you start paying 90% of the rent, at least from my perspective.
People who work from home have the opportunity to nap, DIY, or have sex, interspersed with work. That's a good thing. Most jobs, especially in tech, have a certain ebb and flow as things - builds, deploys, reviews - must be waited for. Yes, you can multitask to some extent, but science tells us there's a limit. The cost of using a "blocked" period to take care of non-work things (I'd also include exercise BTW) is absolutely dwarfed by the positive effect on workers' mental health. The OP does nobody any favors by using "spend their time" to paint a more prejudicial picture.
Having a healthy work life balance like this makes it less likely that someone will quit and more likely that you'll be able to attract top talent. Some of the best people I've ever worked with were religious nappers!
...and? As long as the job is being done, let them have sex 5 times a day if they want! But if it's not, they should be fired no matter if they work from home or an office.
Pretty soon, this sort of FUD will fade into "OK Boomer" territory.
WFH won't go away, because children are being raised with FaceTime and Zoom as normalcy for them. Especially college students, most of their classes are "distance learning"; in fact, I found it difficult to register for in-person classes because most of them were going online only. This was in the before-times, but as late as 2018.
I had a professor say "don't try to do your laundry while you are working on a class assignment" and I chuckled, because I had done exactly that. It wasn't optimal for my attention, but my AFK times were less than 5 minutes.
My schedule is really flexible. They do measure my productivity in terms of the end results, and they look for me on Slack. But I can clock in/out whenever, throughout the week. And I do have problems with my sleep schedule. So if I feel drowsy then I will take a nap in the middle of the day, and if I wake up at 2am, then I clock in for 4 hours and I'm productive.
My employer receives my best efforts, and we trust each other, so I don't goof around while I'm on the clock, and I stay mindful of that time, because it belongs completely to them.
I actually like working in an office, but only if I'm co-located with my coworkers and I have my own, relatively-private space work in.