To let people work from home.
Oh, wait! NO!
THat would mean treating full grown adults, like....um...adults!
And corporate America, no matter how much better than public sector America, is still pretty effed up and obsessed with petty politics and control instead of genuine progress and profitability.
Ergo, let's nuke the globe and unnecessarily force millions of people to commute billions of hours per year in jammed highways so we can still wield control over them all the while claiming we're "going green" for marketing purposes to eek out that extra .0004% of "idiotic hippie loser brainwashed lefties who believe in global warming because it makes them feel good" in market share.
(PS- I looked into that "working from home thing" being a technological infeasibility given people's work habits and I found out it's a bunch of bull. You CAN set up a remote office and remote access pretty much anywhere on the freaking planet and be pretty secure, ergo, why in EF's NAME are we still commuting and forcing millions of people into cubicles?" - Oh, that's right, we're not American's any more. Anything that is possible is impossible because of political correctness, corporate BS politics and just a general crappy attitude amongst demoralized Americans)
Enjoy the decline!
That was hilarious!
ReplyDeleteI hate working at home. I usually start work at 6:30am and work straight through until 2pm. Then I take a shower and get lunch when my forearms begin to cramp. After my late lunch, I work an hour until my wife gets home and then I'm not hungry for dinner.
I actually spend more time working at home than I do at work, but it's less productive. The internet connection is slow, I don't have a copy machine, and sitting on my couch is worse for my back than my desk.
The only thing I hate about work is the commute to work. I wish I had a teleporter.
But, generally, people who work at home get very little done. It's a scam. The government encourages telework to save energy. But all it does is push their energy bill onto your home energy bill. It saves commuting time and energy, but I'm sure the benefits are lost somewhere in there.
I have a relative who teleworked every day. They just laid him off. Out of sight, out of job.
I'm traveling for work, and I spent my afternoon working out of my hotel room. It took me four hours to do what would have taken me one hour to do at my desk.
I work from home as I've been self-employed for 16 years. I fill my gas tank maybe once a month, I don't have to have a closet full of clothes since I meet clients only occasionally, my office is outfitted with second hand/clearance office furniture - I could go on. The downside is that Christmas parties are a bummer and people are amazed that you actually keep a schedule - I'm at my desk at 7:30, have a lunch break at noon, back at my desk by 1 and then done by 4 p.m.
ReplyDeleteBut I know lots of people who would never be able to work from home because they cannot focus and are easily distracted - but those people are the same at a workplace and are the bain of supervisors.
Good point. Another solution; leave off giving people incentives to live and work in large cities. I'm now living in Waseca and driving about a tenth as much as I did when living in Chaska. If I'd owned a Prius in Chaska and a Freightliner tractor here, I'd STILL be burning less fuel here.
ReplyDeleteI'm an analytical chemist. To work at home, I would need several 30 to 50 thousand dollar instruments in my home. Just doesn't work for me.
ReplyDeleteNick Rowe - I agree with you somewhat in the productivity of paid employees working from home. Obviously not all jobs can be done from home. But the key is to rethink the performance management systems - moving away from being present to actually setting concrete and visual goals that are completed within a specific time frame (not unlike piecework, which will drive some people interested in working from home crazy). The advantage to this - many people can become more productive away from the office and can get jobs done in less time - they should then be rewarded with not having to 'look busy' by sitting at their desks.
ReplyDeleteHowever any work from home program is full of problems and employers are vary wary of getting scammed by employees - usually employees that are not terribly productive to begin with.
The also applies to post secondary education. A large part of the cost, is the room and board cost of living on campus. Now a days, sitting in a lecture hall with hundreds of students is not very interactive. An online education would save thousands of dollars.
ReplyDeleteIs it just me, or are all of Nick's problems self-inflicted? With a broadband connection and a $100 printer-scanner-copier combination unit (use them for work and not porn and you might even get a tax writeoff), set up at a desk would solve all of the technical problems. Furthermore, the better posture of sitting at a desk (instead of slouching over on the couch) would probably take the strain off his arms, and probably give him the energy to actually get his job done (I'm sorry, but anyone sitting on a couch automatically loses any right to complain about lack of productivity in my book). And the energy costs of running a computer in your own home versus your employer running a computer in your office are not only negligible, but in fact probably better to work it off the home grid, because you can buy a modern, Energy Star-rated computer with an LCD monitor, instead of the twenty year-old 286es with CRTs that your boss won't spend the money to upgrade (my last job made us use these fine pieces of Yankee ingenuity, and which trust me, use a hell of a lot more power than anything built in this decade.
ReplyDeleteI will concede the relative part, as the fat, middle-aged women running corporate America today totally do so on a political basis, and indeed the fact that I was doing six times the production of some of my cow-orkers -- because I was on the clock and figured I was supposed to be working instead of hanging out at the ole' gossip cube', was pretty much why I was let go from the aforementioned job. But someone like Nick, who apparently can't work without supervision, and would rather bitch out excuses for his own lack of productivity -- and pompously assume that the employees keeping the place afloat are as inept as him -- would actually fit in well there. So adjust your tampon and go back to the office with the other hens, but please, just leave us in the productive fraction of America alone!
There's something to be said for people who are working on the same thing to be in the same place. It's a lot easier to bounce ideas of a co-worker at the office than a roommate/relative/yourself at your home. Or if you run into a problem with your product, the people in charge of supporting it can get together right then and figure out a solution quicker and with less effort at the office than remotely.
ReplyDeleteEvery office should at least support the ability to work from home, but getting everyone in 1 place isn't that bad either.
I have worked at a couple of places where people work from home on occasion. No issues from what I could see. In the last place I worked one woman worked (part time) from home for the last ten years. She was very productive.
ReplyDeleteI like working from home for fixed price work. I set my own hours and as long as I hit my deadlines everybody is happy.
While I can do some of my work from home, much of my work requires my presence onsite.
ReplyDeleteSecond, my internet connection is too slow for many of my tasks. It's fast enough for some tasks, but not most of them.
Third, if your job can be done from home, it also could be done by some cheaper labor source in India or other low cost country.
However, when I occasionally plan to work a day from home and fill up the day with with tasks that don't need high bandwidth or need intense concentration, I'm very productive from home.
But that's not true of all people - we had some gold-brickers who abused the privilege and who have caught ire from management accordingly.