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I read with interest the following article regarding relaxing of mask mandates on aircraft. Heathrow will now relax its mandate and it seems that some UK carriers are lifting restrictions on board but only when flying to a destination that doesn't have a mandate in place. Sounds mighty confusing and they state passengers MAY still be required to wear one boarding and disembarking. Meanwhile the US has extended its on board mask mandate that was to end today by another month so expectation is that they too will loosen restrictions in time.
https://www.cntraveler.com/story/air...ate-uk-flights

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WFH offers specific advantages:

- an environment better suited to work. One can control the background noise and audience when on the phone. Thus one can discuss sensitive matters, such as salary negotiations, which one might prefer not to do while shouting over a hubbub of oafs screaming about unrelated matters. It's like working in a library as opposed to a fruit and veg market.
- not commuting means a gain of two hours per day for the company and less hassle for the employee. It's better for the environment and there's no risk of death through collision.
- It's been two years now so there's hardly anyone I deal with that I have met in person. Meeting in person is likely to lead to conflict, I know for example, that I work with people on both sides of various wars around the world. That's easier managed without face-to-face interaction.
- Nearly all the people we deal with are in remote locations so driving to an office to talk to them through messaging software using a machine carried from home is just silly. Assuming "bums in seats" is the objective then even the few co-located people will have to go on different days and not see each other.
- Conference calls work better when the participants have a consistent interface. If some of the people share a room and the remainder are video-conferencing the interface is inconsistent; for this reason we always video-conference even if some people involved are at adjacent workstations. There's no point in making people spend money on clothes, drive for an hour and have to shout when they'd be more effective at home in bed.
- Lots of work is likely to be done from home anyway. If someone in Portugal or India has a technical problem in the course of their working day we don't drive to the office to deal with it. Setting up to WFH at night and from an office in the day is a bother.
- Fewer devices and interfaces are required if people stay at home. VOIP doesn't work well in cars so, in order to speak to people during their commute, they have to have a phone which is cost and creates legal exposures.
- Mental health is not a proper concern of an employer. If the work is being done at the agreed rate the company should mind its own business.

All that said, I know senior management likes to see bodies in corridors and we're working on providing that without hurting productivity too much. We don't want to expose the office tower as the white elephant it is.

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I was told, nearly a year ago, "everyone is returning to the office", even people like me who were 100% WFH long before covid existed. It was so obvious to me that this was going to lead to significant numbers of resignations that I was confident that this was a senior management strategy to achieve some downsizing of the head count. Now it turns out that management apparently genuinely believed that everyone was as excited to get back to the office as they are. :hysterical:

So now the whole return to office plan has descended into chaos because not only are people resigning in relatively large numbers, but recruiting replacements is even harder as most potential recruits lose all interest once they are told "everyone works in the corporate offices".

The current "offer" is that most people are expected to be in the office three days per week, and it looks as if I might get some sort of exemption because of the length of my commute.

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It's shocking to me how far out of touch the people running our organization are. Their desire is to see people back in the office generating a synergistic buzz but they seem not to realize that, for years before covid, we worked every day with people around the world. They seem to think it's Mad Men outside the C suite, we walk down the hall and bond with the developers who are, in fact, in Europe or India or Costa Rica. I get that running a company is about politics, influencing government policy and about investor relations but really, no one seems to have a clue how people below VP work day-to-day. It's disappointing but, of course, a retention bonus could make it all ok.

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Sounds very similar to my situation, because if I get dragged back into the office it won't help me at all, as my manager is in New York City, the project manager I am working with is in upstate New York, and with only one exception, the other people I work with are in Chicago, Florida, Minnesota, and California.

Then there is the secondary matter that my manager doesn't really know what I do, nor did the manager before him, nor the one before that .... in fact my current and the five previous managers don't understand my job, mostly because I designed it from the ground up, and they never had enough time for me to explain it to them, assuming they were interested to learn, which never seemed to be the case. :rolleyes:

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My immediate superior defined my job. I was coasting along happily enough as a contractor billing n dollars an hour doing whatever was asked when she told me to take a permanent position. Now I'm the guy who looks at failing projects, works out why they're failing and turns them around. I don't get the high hourly rate anymore but these projects have annual budgets over 10 million so there's scope for reward in un****ing them. I work for money, nothing else, so the un****ing bonuses matter to me.

I find the important thing when taking over a project is to dump the deadwood and motivate the important players. I don't need any trouble with that, if a person works well wherever he or she is and doesn't want to be moved, I don't want to move them. All I care about is delivering the work, I'm good with personal eccentricity, strange working hours, all kinds of people and domestic circumstances,. We've rescued two large projects during covid, recurring savings of about $8m/yr, so I'd say we've worked effectively.

It is a great irritation to me when abstract considerations such as HR policies or a desire to see people in an office get in the way of delivering the project work. "Do a good job get paid lots of money" is my idea of an employment contract, not "look good at a desk 9-5 Monday to Friday, embrace our values and sing the company song on demand".

I guess I'm not a very corporate person and I shouldn't expect a long career in middle management.

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In the current chapter of my employment history, my job is very much to ensure that contracts don't get f-ed up in the first place, though that has been to varying degrees the defining characteristic of most of my jobs. ... Some years ago someone at one of my employers in London didn't listen to my extremely explicit advice on what was wrong, how it would unravel, what the consequence would be, and who would inflict the pian. I was correct on all counts, and the pain inflicted was $80million! :blink:

Anyway I was told five years ago "review these contract files". "Review them for what?" I asked. "Just review them and approve them!" My manager snapped back. :blink:

I set about reviewing them, wrote myself some procedures, and drafted some standards, which resulted in me somehow setting corporate policy without any participation from the legal department, or the involvement of any the six managers I had over the following five years. :rofl:

And I also decided that being told to "approve files" implied that I had the power to reject them too. So when a contract proposal landed on my desk that didn't meet the standards that I myself had set, I rejected it. :D

Occasionally someone has tried to call my bluff, but although my managers never really understood my job, they have always backed my decision. As one of my upstream colleagues told me once, everyone knows you're the person they have to get the file past. :o

It's a shame that "everyone" doesn't just do their d*mn job properly. :frown: It would make my job easier, though not as interesting.

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Interesting Twitter thread below regarding WFH.

Twitter

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Yes that sounds right. If there is a need to be "in office" because of certain factors of the job then that's how it should be and if employees who were all doing this prior to COVID are now complaining and want to stay out now then they need to accept they could be let go, but conversely forcing employees back to a building just because "we used to do it this way" but with no real reasoning behind the decision is plainly not in the interests of anyone. Working from home needs to be in the interests of everyone though, the firm, the employee and the customer.

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Isn't it always in the interests of the firm, no need to provide a building, and the employee, no need to commute?

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Yes if the building and its equipment as such is not necessary to provide a quality service then absolutely. However if the firm can no longer offer the same level of quality service to its clients then this surely becomes a problem and clients may decide to jump ship. I'm sure there are many examples of positive and negative WFH scenarios. My old boss used to work from home 20 years ago and she had pretty much her whole office duplicated at home and of course a mobile laptop and phone. She still used to spend too much time checking in with various employees about things getting done and when she was in she would complain that things didn't get done properly unless she was watching over people. I'm not sure in her case it was particularly beneficial, in fact probably more stressful except there was no commute!

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but now the laptop and phone is the office. If you carry it to a building owned by the firm you're not doing anything differently, not interacting with people in any other way, than you would be at home or, for that matter, in Hawaii where one of my guys has been for a month.

The customer interface in most businesses is through a website of some form, banking, financial services, retail, don't need physical premises anymore so it's weird for the customers to be at home and the workers not.

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Yes it is weird... and its how see it, voluntary lockdown! I find the days are long and solitary, and can be hard on me, with zero interaction with other people. No desire from me for this voluntary lockdown!

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If only politicians could incorporate the same logic. Think of the money that could be saved. No need to have two residences, no need to take entourages all over the world and stay in expensive hotels, no need for POTUS to have to fly an entire convoy of vehicles to a summit to talk about reducing carbon.

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When I used to go to the office, most of the people I came into contact with were people that either [1] I didn't actually work with, and nodding as I pass them in a hallway, or standing by the coffee machine next to them, didn't add any value to my mental well being, or [2] were not colleagues but other people such as bus passengers or people on the street, etc, who I would prefer not to have come into contact with at all anyway.

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"Don't you want to go back to the office so you can drink with colleagues and have lots of affairs?" an ex-wife asked me, pointedly. Alas, we're being offered return to office, not return to 1980s. I'm in the same boat as Pulaski now, water cooler acquaintances with whom I share no cultural points of reference, I've no need to see them.

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I choose to work a hybrid pattern, generally Monday & Friday WFH and Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday in the office. For me, this breaks the week up nicely, and my commute to work is a very pleasant 30 minute walk through the park. If I had a ghastly commute I would feel very differently.

As work travel restrictions have relaxed, I've enjoyed the opportunity to visit colleagues down in the London office for a few days away - aaah, who doesn't like combining work with a nice jolly and hotels & restaurants on expenses! - and soon will be able to visit our European sites again.

We have proven that we can deliver multi-billion projects via remote working so there is no suggestion that people might be slacking from home, because they're not. As others have said, for many, WFH makes them more productive. If employers want people in offices, they're going to have to attract them back - flexible hours, the good biscuits or whatever - otherwise they will lose good people who just don't want (need) to commute.

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Oh - masks,

Last week we had a road trip down to England to visit the kids at their universities. Mask wearing was, I reckon, less than 1%. Virtually non-existent. Here in Scotland it's still very high in indoor public spaces.

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In your case I can see why it doesn't make any difference if you are in or not. It does all depend on the job you do and the company's structure. I work in engineering and there has always been a need to communicate closely with your colleagues, as you working on something that will directly affect their work and vice a versa, there is only so much you can explain over a shared screen, it becomes exhausting after a while trying to navigate back and forth between multiple drawings on the screen and trying to explain why or how you want to design something.

Added to that I have always got along well with the people I work with that do the same job as me. Its where most of my close friends have originated from to this day, UK and Canada. So to suddenly have the interaction cut off has been hard going for me personally. As I said though I could live with a hybrid arrangement going forward. Monday and Friday at home and Tues Wed Thurs in office, I think that compromise would satisfy all needs for everyone.

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I think I've posted this before, but the pandemic and working from home was a levelling experience for me. My employer has an office here, with around 150 people based here. Most of the people I work with (I'd use the term stakeholders but I know it would irritate dbd....) however are not based here but rather in London, DC, Saskatoon, Toulouse, Perth and other far flung places. With youngish kids, I'd found the flexibility of working from home outweighed the need to be in an office to talk to people on teams etc. and got used to being the one on teams when everyone else was in a meeting room in London. With Covid, we all were remote, all equal!

We've proved that can work very effectively and our working model has thus changed pretty much everywhere. People are no longer required to work in the office M-F with a few exceptions, so most work a hybrid model, from home part of the week, in the office a day or two. Different teams set different rules - my colleagues in London for example have to be in once a week for a team meeting. It seems to be working for most, particularly those with extended commutes. As an aside, in London, the division seems to be between those who can walk or cycle to the office, so are happy to go in frequently and those who have to spend hours on trains and tubes and would rather not inhale everyone else's omicron breath.

Here in St John's, I had cause to go into the office yesterday and there were.....three people there. I think our need for a building to house 150 people has passed. I do believe its useful to get together with colleagues every now and then & see the benefit of going to an office. Personally, whats more significant is when we allow international travel again so I can make a quarterly trip to UK to meet the rest of my team and other colleagues. Our CFO is happy that we're not spending so many travel dollars so that's not yet possible.

By the way on masking, all restrictions were dropped last Monday here in Nfld. Mask use in stores, however, remains high - >75% in my experience. Schools are keeping masks until Easter at least and you still have to mask in any healthcare facility. I'm still masking because, apart from the rampant nature of omicron, I'm recovering from surgery and that would only be complicated by a dose of covid.

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on masks, my offspring have reported that - despite the mandate being dropped from yesterday in Ontario schools - more than half the kids in the upper grades of elementary school (so roughly 10-13 years old) were masked in the corridors but not in the classrooms "because the hallways are crowded and nobody wants to breathe in each other's germs." I wonder how gradually that proportion will decrease. Teachers were almost universally still masked in the classroom, we heard. Fewer masks in high school, but they spend less time in the common areas.

I started a new job in January, fully WFH with the expectation that we'd move to some kind of hybrid model at some unspecified future point. There's a vague plan that the few of us in my team who are based in Toronto will head into the office on Thursday, so that we can meet each other in person and do our bit of a team meeting in a shared space, while a bunch of other people in the Montreal office do the same. The one or two in each of the other locations around the country (I think there are people in Halifax, Quebec, Ottawa, Edmonton and Victoria) won't be bothering as there's no point in joining the same Teams meeting from the office that you could join from home. My boss is very much of the opinion that there's no point in going in to the office for the sake of being in the office, but when there's a specific opportunity to collaborate in person then the office is available and we should consider using it. I haven't met any of my colleagues in person, nor do I yet have an access pass for the office. I think I may end up going in on average one day a week, but it'll depend on what I'm up to on that day and whether people I need to talk to will also be in the office. IMO there's something to be gained from in-person discussions, but it's not always worth the hassle of getting to the same physical location as the person you're having that discussion with.

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I went to the dentist and a grocery store in Guelph this morning. Everyone I saw was wearing a mask. The dental hygienist said that, at her child's school in Mississauga mask wearing is still at around 80%

An email arrived asking if, in light of hybrid working, a subsidized parking space at $300/month with an implied taxable benefit of $100 would be wanted. Not very much, thank you.

Oakvillian's post prompts me to think that very few of our team have access passes for the office. I'll let that sit for the time being. Also that, before covid, my boss who lives in Oakville, almost never came to the building in Guelph, instead she usually went to an office in Burlington. I suppose that arrangement will resume with hybrid working making the whole thing slightly more bonkers.

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On the mask front, the only mandates remaining are the ones I agree with.... hospitals, long term care homes, public transport etc. or any other place where you have a gathering of elderly or vunerable people.

Everywhere else, I think the virus has come to a stage now where everyone should be free to make their own decision... and importantly we should respect each others decision, it should not be judged either way.

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Does that include an at risk person making a choice to use a cattle prod on you if you get too close? :rofl:

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i wish! people seem to have given up on the 2m distance thing.
At the hygienist this morning everyone was masked then off to meet a friend for lunch in a bistro/caff type place. Servers weren't masked so i wanted that cattle prod then. Everyone else came in masked. a couple of shops later and everyone was masked. I wonder how long this will last.

Obviously i can be retired just as easily from home as out in the wild and my previous occupation just can't be done at home. However I once had a mostly office based job and everyone now and then we could work from home, it was really useful for getting a report finished on time with no distractions - part from minesweeper, I played a lot of minesweeper. This was in the 90s so video calls and slow webthingy so waste away the hours.

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https://cimg9.ibsrv.net/gimg/british...4332454936.jpg

This was enough scraping of the screen to get me rolling this morning. Return to office means five months per year of driving like this (at least for the first ten miles). Ugh!

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I wish. We have an unvaxxed neighbour I would like to cattle prod. No thought for anyone but herself.

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Well we all have our own opinions, and this is what is important respect for each other's opinions. My opinion is that there comes a time when we have to get out there move on and try and live a normal life again, we can't live like this for eternity, if not now, when is the right time?

As I have mentioned before I have done everything thats been asked of me for the last two years, triple vaccinated, even isolated for over a week when I had covid, had to rely on my freezer supplies for food! To the majority of average people with an average bill of health, covid is now nothing more than a cold. that is all I and a friend experienced who caught it at the same time, I am sure my vaccinations helped, which is what we were encouraged to get them for.

So now I want to be back at work, take a flight if need be, and not have the worry about getting back into the country, enjoy going to a restaurant or pub and go to music concerts without having to worry about a mask, the two don't go hand in hand!. .... just a normal life again, I think we all need that



.

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That's a point. I know of people who are unvaxxed and have not been fired because they've been working remotely. I suppose the return to office will entail forgiving them. That'll be a can of worms if those who were disengaged find out.

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Personally I feel respect for each other's well-being is more important and while I appreciate there is a mental well-being involved too, everyone can be accommodated with the single measure of mask wearing in given situations.
All perfectly reasonable desires. But whereas you want to board a plane without a mask, others would want to board a plane without getting covid that would be worse for them than you. So I would hope you'd be willing to mask up for the flight. Ditto for a concert, library, museum or whatever.

Anywhere that makes distancing difficult, confined space and so on, masks could be required. That's all. One simple measure.

In the big supermarkets, distancing is easy. You could probably even not bother with a mask there, provided nobody leans over your shoulder to reach something and they have a single distanced line for the tills that you don't go to until electronically called. And you can guarantee there are no selfish jerks. Maybe there might be time slots for vulnerable and/or masked shopping.

But how about all those people normally able to do their shopping locally, popping in and out of the butcher, greengrocer and so on. Those premises are small and potentially busy with people very close to each other. A haven for spreading covid. Just that one measure of wearing a mask would make a huge difference allowing everyone to shop there.

How about bus rides? People will ride the bus to help get on with their lives but if they're at risk and people are not masked up it's a big problem.

Vulnerable people have also done all that's been asked of them. They need (not want) to get on the bus and/or go local shopping in small shops.

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Went to the pub last night, thought it might feel a little odd walking in without a mask, but it didn't, had the usual enjoyable evening. Was nice to actually see the full faces of the staff, some of which we'd never met pre-pandemic so we didn't actually know what they really looked like.

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Not to be too antagonistic but I find this is an amusing comparison with an alternate scenario.

During COVID times my works health and safety team decided to remove Air freshener from the toilets. One particular day someone went into the toilets and gagged from the smell (the toilet was truly sans air freshener). So obviously we all had some laughs over the scenario but eventually I said to the guy who's the face of the H+S department "why can we be subjected to smell crap, but we're not allowed to smell air freshener. His response was "One is completely natural and the other is not.

If I used his logic to the COVID debate surely the companies policy regarding vaccinations is completely flawed?

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I think there is a compromise for both sides in our current scenario. As i said in my initial post, I still have no problem with masks in long term care settings, hospital, retirement home, public transit, these are all close quarters settings and/or essential services that vunerable people cannot avoid.

But there are many other places that are not classed as essential activities, like pubs, restaurants music concerts, how can you wear a mask at a music concert? it ruins the whole experience. I don't agree with ,masks in these environments, if you don't feel safe don't go, its not an essential service to go to a pub restaurant or music concert. There are risks in everyday life, we take a risk by stepping outside the door, getting in our cars, crossing the road, we can't continually wrap ourselves in cotton wool forever.

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Masks make it difficult for me to hear as I often need to supplement my electronic ears with lipreading others. It's been a difficult two years because of that so i can see that as a very good reason not to be masked. On the other hand part way through this pandemic I was diagnosed with a serious genetic cardiac condition which places me firmly in the vulnerable category and because of that I avoid the maskless. I probably did have the lurgy and couple of months back, mild but still unpleasant. and I really don't want to risk getting it again. I'm wearing an N95 and hoping that it protects me. I appreciate it when others are considerate enough to wear a mask

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You can do it if you listen with your ears and not your mouth or nose.

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I'm happy that I don't have to worry about wearing a mask when I enter a restaurant and am going to take it off , put it on a dirty table then put it back on after. That never made sense to me. But unless I can expect the area to be reasonably uncrowded i'm keeping my mask on for now if i'm not going somewhere that involves eating or drinking.

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Teehee. Similarly the cinema and theatre.

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I came down with Covid last week and I'm 99% sure I got it either playing indoor footie or at the post game pub outing. This was pre no mask requirements in the pub. For the footie league it is mandatory to be double vacc'd but that didn't seem to stop it. Just felt like a mild cold to me but I did sleep more.

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Novel idea, not sure if it will catch on though.

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Same here, mild cold, and felt tired, that was it.

I think I caught it through a ski trip, there were 33 of us on the coach, I think 2 people wore a mask...but everyone was vaccinated.. or it could have been at the bar after the the skiing... it was still supposed to be 50% capacity in Quebec at that time, but I think it was the busiest bar I had been in since before the pandemic! Cracking atmosphere though!