This is some thoughts I’ve been having about my own employer’s COVID response and their friction with remote work
I got hired in January 2020, a couple of months before COVID was intense enough to send us all home. Definitely a pretty bizarre start to my career at this place, but I was able to adapt quickly to remote work and I appreciated the extra flexibility in my hours for things like “taking a walk” and “not wasting time and money on a commute.”
Over the next year and a half, we started hearing rumblings and surveys about a new office space. We previously split our staff between two buildings a block away from each other, I assume due to the vagaries of leasing suites in a city. The new space was being hyped up as a modern and unified place for the entire company to come in to work together. Collaboration Collaboration Collaboration. Tons of exhausting buzzwords being tossed around. Rumors were that the board only barely approved the purchase of the space, and that was primarily discussed after the lockdown happened. Truly boneheaded corporate politicking.
Now, cut to 2022, we’re moved into the space. I have my own cubicle, complete with air vent overhead that makes the place too warm or too hot, depending on the day. We’re required to come into the office two days a week - this was the result of a company wide survey where 60% of staff said they didn’t want to come in at all. There were some really pointed questions which were extremely obviously dodged at the all-staff meetings where we discussed this. There’s ongoing background radiation about in-office days. You may be surprised to hear that we have had some staff turnover in the last year.
Anyway, all of this is to talk about one thing which I feel is most emblematic of the approach to the Back To Office push. Sure, we have complimentary snacks and other stuff sometimes to entice us to be physically at large meetings. There’s mandatory department team building days. But the thing that I feel like is a complete admission of the futility of a return to Business as Usual is the coffee maker. Coffee Makers, technically.
There’s a main lunchroom with fridges, tables, etc, and that has one touchscreen coffee maker. On the floor below that, there’s another of the same model. To my knowledge, those are the only two coffee makers in an office that’s supposed to have capacity for a few hundred people. Right now we’re probably operating with like 10-20% physically in the space.
Now, if the C-suite gets their wish and we’re all forced back in simultaneously: how the fuck are we supposed to get our coffee? There’s not enough room to just add more machines reasonably. Each of the machines takes a minute or two to make your selection. The bottleneck would be intense.
Like, this sounds like such a minor thing (“oh just go buy your own”), but the inability for the company to fully accommodate its staff for such a minor thing puts the lie to its dreams of a return to the old normal. I don’t have evidence across other companies but I expect it’s much the same.
