As you saw in last week’s posts, I recently attended the Oasis Labor Day Spanking Party. This meant I was out of the office on Monday (which was a holiday anyway) and Tuesday. My company’s WFH policy states that you have to be in the office three days a week, so if you’re off for two days (even if one is a holiday) you are still required to be in for the other three days. So, even though I usually telecommute on Thursday and Friday, I came into the office. 

But I don’t see the point. 

I had 19 meetings on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Two of them were only in-person because I happened to be here, but normally they’re remote. The other 17 were all remote, as they always are. So why did I have to come into the office? (And on Tuesday I had two meetings scheduled that I missed due to being out, but again, both are always done remotely.) 

What are these meetings? 

• A weekly meeting with the global team of my peers to discuss happenings — cannot be had in-person due to geographic constraints. 
• A project meeting with members of my project team — usually cannot be held in person because they’re on-site, although this week they were all in the office (or at least they were supposed to be). 
• An alignment call with a colleague — we usually do this on Monday, which is his WFH day. 
• Two interviews with potential new team members — cannot be done in-person. 
• Eight 1:1 meetings with my team members, one of which was done in-person because the person happened to be here, instead of on-site. 
• A project meeting with a member of our team from overseas — impossible to do in-person. 
• An alignment call with a project manager — this could have been done in-person I suppose but most people telecommute on Fridays and anyway all these alignment calls are remote regardless of where we all are. 
• A weekly scheduling meeting — again, usually remote, due to most people telecommuting on Fridays. 

For the sake of argument, I went through my calendar for the rest of the year and, other than my in-person off-site training sessions next month, didn’t find a single meeting that couldn’t be held remotely. 

I admit that I’m lucky in that my commute is only 15 minutes each way. Most people in Atlanta commute 45 minutes or more. But what’s the point of coming into the office when you can do everything remotely? Sure, some people will say “working together increases team morale”, and that’s all well and good, but the only discussion I had in-person that week that was actually useful was with another manager who was able to answer a policy question for me. That said, if either of us hadn’t been in the office, we could’ve used Teams and it would’ve been just as effective. 

I feel like team morale is generally lowered by having to go into the office. People are happier and more productive when they’re at home, and sometimes they work longer hours. The main reason return-to-office mandates exist is to prop up the corporate real estate market, followed by the concept of (usually) old (usually) white (usually) men who had to come into the office every day so that means everyone else has to as well. 

I would say most white-collar jobs these days can be done remotely with little to no negative impact, and a great deal of positive impact, especially on morale. Just imagine how much more you could get done if you didn’t have to commute every day; just imagine how much less you’d have to spend on gas and car maintenance. Hell, how many people wouldn’t need cars at all if they could telecommute every day? 

I’m still looking for a new job, and I refuse to even consider anything with more than two days in the office, especially since most of the jobs I apply for are 45-60 minutes away in rush hour traffic. A fully-remote job would be great, but those are hard to find and all seem to go to the overemployed people (I’m not sure how, given that they don’t have LinkedIn pages because that would give away what they’re doing, but that’s another story altogether). In the meantime, my 15-minute commute isn’t so bad, but it would be even better if I didn’t have to come into the office three days a week just to have online meetings.