Spies are everywhere. (So glad I'm out of the fray.)

A few weeks ago, my sister Trish retired. A week before her big day, she turned 67. Since she always had a part-time job in high school, and throughout college, she figures she'd been working pretty much steadily for 50+ years. She'd spent 30 of those years with the company she retired from, and might have been convinced to stay on a while longer if it had not been for the company's mean-spirited decision to totally do away with work from home a few days a week and return to a full five-days in the office mandate.

Interestingly, a number of her colleagues of similar age and tenure with the company are retiring for much the same reason - even though most employees worked fully from home without any productivity issues. 

You won't get any argument here - or from my sister Trish - that being in the office at least some of the time is important for a lot of reasons - including, for many, the desire to have the in-person camaraderie and social-life-at-work aspects. (A positive for both me and my sister during our careers.) But Trish had an onerous commute and once she got to the office (which had even done away with cubicles - let alone offices - for the masses - for a fully open concept approach) none of the members of her team were there. The people she worked most closely with were in NY, London, Atlanta...

The pay, bonus plan, and benefits were pretty good at Trish's company (where, as it happens, I had worked many years ago when it was pretty much the same entity, but as part of a much smaller corporation and with different ownership). And Trish's work over the decades had been reasonably interesting and challenging, and she had some terrific colleagues. But there were reasons beyond the WFH fatwa to want out of this company, of course. The pressure to deploy AI. The Trumpian senior management. (A former executive, who is also the spouse of the company's CEO, holds a senior position in the Trump administration.) And the creepy electronic surveillance. Badge swipe to use the bathroom, anyone?

But as far as I know, Trish's former place of employ was not using emotion AI (alternate term, affective computing) to analyze the personality types of its employees:

Some products analyze video of meetings or job interviews or focus groups; others listen to audio for pitch, tone, and word choice; still others can scan chat transcripts or emails and spit out a report about worker sentiment. Sometimes, the emotion AI is baked in as a feature in multiuse software, or sold as part of an expensive analytics package marketed to businesses. But it’s also available as a stand-alone product, and the barrier to entry is shin-high. (Source: The Atlantic)

There is nothing new about using software to monitor employees. For a long while, there have been apps that measure how many keystrokes someone sitting at a computer is making to assess whether they're working. Or at least pecking at the keys. On the emotion tracking side, call centers have long (notoriously) "listened in" on customer service reps to track tone of voice and word choice. 

What's changing is who's being monitored.

In 2022, the writer Cory Doctorow theorized about what he called the “Shitty Technology Adoption Curve”: Extractive technologies, he wrote, come first to people in precarious circumstances—like, say, low-wage jobs—before they are refined and normalized and brought to people in greater positions of power. “Each disciplinary technology,” he later wrote, “starts with people way down on the ladder, then ascends the ladder, rung by rung.”

And so emotion AI is working it's way to the top, and has stepped onto the white-collar rung.  

Shitty Technlogy galore!

The Slack integration Aware advertises its ability to continuously monitor messages for “sentiment and toxicity”; Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-computing software, also allows employers to, theoretically, use AI to batch-analyze workers’ chat messages. MorphCast’s Zoom extension tracks, in real time, meeting participants’ attention, excitement, and positivity. The emotion-AI company Imentiv advises clients on applying emotional analysis to the job-interview process, promising employers detailed analysis of candidates’ emotional engagement, intensity, and valence, as well as personality type. A number of HR companies are turning toward AI that applies sentiment analysis to employee surveys. Framery, which makes soundproof phone pods and sells them to companies such as Microsoft and L’Oreal, has tested outfitting its chairs with biosensors capable of measuring heart rate, breathing rate, and nervousness.

Years ago, I had a colleague who was criticized by his (jerk of a) boss for his terrible body language at a meeting. What he had been doing was leaning in, nodding when he agreed with something, and offering positive input. Trouble was, the meeting was with his boss's enemy, who was presenting the plan for a new product, and she felt he should have been leaning back and glowering with his arms crossed. (Although I've had a few exchanges and, early on, a couple of lunches, with my former colleague over the years - make that decades - since we last worked together, I hadn't thought about this incident, or this idiotic boss, in years. She's still out there, only now she's out West selling insurance.) 

Of course, there's nothing new about personality typing in the workplace, either. Forty years ago, when I was working at Wang Labs - of all awful places - my team had an offsite in which we all took the Myers-Briggs assessment. (INTJ, baby.) It was supposed to help us figure out how to get along with folks with different personality types. Turns out most of us were brainy, analytical introverts, and we all got along just fine, thank you.

This was by no means the only personality-typing test I took part in over the years. It must have been a big corporate off-site dealio in the 1980's and 1990's. 

So people have been reading employee emotions for eons. But the software spying is something new.

But, blessedly, none of it was emotion AI. 

When it comes to emotion AI, there are plenty of skeptics. Unless there are safety or health reasons for it, the EU has banned workplace use of emotion AI. 

Good for the EU!

Needless to say, we won't see any similar pushback in the States anytime soon. That said, I can see some states trying to regulate it.

But it's gut wrenching to see the dignity, privacy, and autonomy of workers so eroded by the masters of the universe buying into whatever the tech bros are selling.

Spies are indeed everywhere. I'm so glad I'm out of the fray, and delighted for my sister Trish that she is, too. Who wants AI capturing every grimace and eye-roll. 

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Image Source: MadIsMadFunny

Who's that again in the next cubicle?

I'm all in favor of work from home (WFH), with an ultra-strong preference for a hybrid model - either 3 days in, 2 days WFH, or 2 WFH, 3 days in the office. A hybrid model gives employees some breathing room: no commute, throw a load of wash in, catch up with the kiddos after school and catch up on the work after the kiddos are down for the night. And having time in the office also gives employees the opportunity to get to know their colleagues, to have impromptu meetings where problems are solved and ideas brainstormed, to read the room in a way you just plain can't on Zoom, to have genuine human contact in an increasingly isolated world. Time in the office also makes it a lot easier to onboard new employees. 

So Hybrid WFH, yay! Best of both worlds. BIG YAY!

The downside of full WFH is, of course, the opposite of the above. 

And, apparently, the empty offices that accompany WFH may be a matter of life and death.

As happened in August when a Wells Fargo employee had  "scanned into her office on a Friday morning and was found dead at her desk four days later."

According to local outlets, authorities said 60-year-old Denise Prudhomme entered her Wells Fargo office building located on the 1100 block of West Washington Street in Tempe, Arizona, at 7am on 16 August. (Source: The Guardian)

Prudhomme's body was discovered when a fellow employee who was just strolling around the building noticed something amiss in her cubicle, which was in a somewhat isolated space off the main aisle. Other employees had smelled a noxious odor, but chalked it up to bad plumbing. Oh.

Obviously, this can't all be laid at the door of WFH. 

Sure, Prudhomme was in the office on a Friday, a day on which many WFH-ers WFH. And her body wasn't found until the end of the workday on Monday, another popular WFH day. But maybe her job was one in which she didn't interact regularly with others, virtually or in person. Or maybe she died late in the workday on that Friday, after her virtual meetings were over. And who was going to discover her body over the weekend? I'm guessing that one thing that WFH has done is radically decrease the amount of time folks spend coming into the office on weekends. 

And it looks like she may have lived alone, given that no one reported her missing. Even my often-oblivious husband would have noticed if I didn't make it home from work on a Friday evening. So, if she lived at home and didn't have any plans for the weekend - which I entirely get: when I worked full time, I had plenty of weekends where I craved my "white space"; introverts be like that - no one would have noticed that she wasn't around

Still, hard not to believe that, in a full(er) office, someone would have passed by Denise Prudhomme's cubicle and noticed that something had gone terribly wrong. Maybe even saved her life. As of this writing, the cause of her death wasn't known. Foul play is not suspected. But maybe she choked on something, and someone in the next cubicle might have known the Heimlich maneuver. Maybe she had a heart attack, and could have been CPR'd back to life if someone nearby had heard her head hit the desk. 

People do die at work. When I worked at Wang Labs, we had layoffs all the time. And in the run up to one of the worst layoffs - in early Octobe one year, they'd announced that there'd be a major reduction by December 1st, and damned if they didn't wait until December 1st - a fellow who, as it turned out, was on the pink slip list, had a heart attack and died. 

But the people who worked in the cubes surrounding his knew what had happened. They just weren't able to save his life.

Anyway, hard not to read about Denise Prudhomme and think that, if there'd been more people around, she may not still be alive. But her final story wouldn't be worldwide, tsk tsk news. And fodder for bloggers. Sigh.

No tension in THIS workplace...

Just like pretty much everyone else who's worked more than, say, forty-five minutes in their life, I've been in workplaces where there is tension.

Someone takes credit for another's work. An undeserving nincompoop gets promoted. A guaranteed-to-fail deal is signed. An unpopular and/or strategic decision is announced. A backstabs B. There's a lay-off coming. The lay-off occurs. There's another lay-off coming. 

Sometimes the tension is of a more personal nature. C has a crush on D, who doesn't know C exists. E's screwing around on his wife with F, and then they break up. Etc.

The workplace is a compilation of human beings. Of course there's tension. 

But there's tension and then there's TENSION. And I can only imagine that what's happening in the Plymouth Fire Department is TENSION. 

Here's the sitch.

A firefighter has been charged with installing spy cameras in the house he had shared with his girlfriend, who post-breakup stayed put for a while, renting the house he owned for a few months after they'd split. 

While his GF was still in residence, Richard Pimental slipped her a couple of spy cams mickies. One was in a clock that he'd gifted her with, along with an apologetic note. (Awwww....) She then found another cam "disguised to look like an outlet plug."

Pimental stopped by, supposedly to set some mousetraps, but, no, it was to setup a storage device for the videos from the spy cams.

After the couple split, the GF had started seeing another fellow. As luck and circumstance would have it, the new BF was a fellow firefighter of Pimental.

So the videos Pimental made were of the exGF and a current colleague getting it on.

Morons being morons:

Pimental allegedly shared what he was doing with the cameras with at least one firefighter and another first responder. In one text, Pimental allegedly acknowledged that installing the cameras and recording the people inside the home was illegal.

“She found out it seems,” Pimental texted the first responder, adding that he had recorded the woman “which was illegal...”, according to court records. (Source: Boston Globe)

And morons being morons, Pimental is apparently unaware that the authorities can figure out exactly what you've searched on. 

Based on a court-authorized search of Pimental’s phone, investigators located Google searches including “Top 7 Best Hidden Cameras That Look Like Everyday Objects” and “Massachusetts law about hidden cameras in house,” according to police.

And scorned lover morons being scorned lover morons, Pimental shared a 10 second cut of the exGF and the new fellow firefighter BF with yet another firefighter and an EMT.

What a colossal a-hole!!!

As for now, Pimental's a colossal a-hole who's been "released on personal recognizance."

He was ordered to stay away from his former girlfriend and her new boyfriend, who is also a Plymouth firefighter, unless they need to work together, according to court records.

Plymouth FD is not NYFD or even Boston FD. Plymouth is a small city with a handful of fire stations and 120 firefighters. Sure, it's large enough that it's possible to set up schedules so that Pimental and the new BF aren't working together. But what if there's a major fire or some sort of incident that requires all hands on? And what about friends of Pimental and friends of the new BF who work together? This is a small fire department in a small city. I'm guessing that most Plymouth fire fighters at least vaguely know all the other guys in the department. 

Sure, I'm guessing that there will be plenty of awful humor about this situation. But I'm also guessing that there will be plenty of TENSION in that workplace.

And firefighters are pretty rugged guys. When they're not fighting fires, which is most of the time, a lot of them are working out. I sure wouldn't want to get into it with one of them. Not to mention that fire stations are full of firefighting equipment that could be used to fight more than fires. Surely, a halligan can be weaponized.

Maybe I'm reading this all wrong. Maybe the entire situation will be passed off as a small embarassment, a bad joke, an opportunity for commentary on buff-hot bods (or not). Maybe Pimental's buddies think that the revenge porn is justified. Maybe the exGF and the new BF really don't care all that much.

But no one wants to spied on by an ex or anyone else.

TENSION levels at Plymouth FD have got to be running plenty high.

Come on and zooma, zooma, zooma zoom

Remember the truly prehistoric days of conferencing?

You sat around the conference table staring at the Polycom SoundStation - which looked like some sort of supersonic drone - while the person setting up the con call - generally an admin, back in the days when there were admins -  tried several times to get things to work and then, each time there was a "ping," had to ask "Who just joined?"

During the conference, the person running the meeting had to keep asking those attending remotely whether they had anything to say.

While the meeting was in full swing, there was always at least one incident of background noise, often one of the folks on the phone having a convo with someone who wasn't in the meeting. And we'd all have to yell "turn on your mute."

Back in the day when we were Polycoming, I worked for a company that was meeting-mad. You could literally run from one meeting to the next from 7:30 a.m. to 6:30 p.m. It felt like high school, minus the bells on five-minutes before the hour. You picked up your notebook (paper based), a phone the size of a walkie-talkie, and your PDA and marched down the corridor to your next meeting.

Because we had people all over the map, meetings frequently involved remote folks. But sometimes, even those who were in our building chose to call in to a meeting. 

One notorious in-the-building caller-in was a colleague named Sam who would be loudly thumping away on this desktop throughout the meeting, while we all kept reminding him to stop typing or turn on mute. 

Anyway, those audio-only meeting systems weren't great. Remote people never really felt that they were part of it. And the worst thing about having them was that, all of sudden, there was an expectation that, even if you were on vacation, you could call into an "important" (as if!) meeting. 

And then there were video conferencing systems.

Sure, they'd been around forever - when they'd been low function and high cost - but, with the Internet, they came up in function and down in cost.

I can't remember the name of the first video conferencing system I ever used - PictureTel, maybe - but I do remember that the latency was terrible, with lots of juddering jittering. 

Time marched on, and there were any number of new and improved video conferencing systems, the most prominent being WebEx.

Not that WebEx didn't have some competition. In fact, I did some marketing consulting for one of them, a small software company in NY State, run by a bunch of genius emigres from Poland who had created a highly secure system used by the defense department, and who were now trying to commercialize it. The Polish geniuses were great, but unfortunately you needed to be a genius (just not a Polish one) to understand how to use the product. But we had us some fun. 

Blessedly, I rarely ever had to use their system. But while most folks used WebEx, there were enough other systems out there that I'd run into. And have to learn a new UI: where's the mute? how do I chat? 

And then there was Zoom.

Was there Zoom before covid? I'm too lazy to look it up, but once covid hit, Zoom was everywhere. 

That first Covid Christmas, I hosted a smaller-than-usual Christmas Eve for family, and spent Christmas Day zooming with friends in Dallas, and friends in Maine. 

The first year or so of covid, I was still working - very part time, but pretty regularly - and client meetings were all zoomed, even with local clients where I used to go in.

My writing groups started to meet on zoom. Board meetings at St. Francis House were zoomed as well. 

Throughout that first scary, pre-vaccine year, I zoomed with family and friends. 

And people pretty much got used to it.

These days, I'm only in one writing group, which is hybrid. It meets just up the street at the Boston Athenaeum, so I go in person. But more than half the members zoom in. I would definitely prefer fully in-person sessions, but time marches on.

These days, I only have one client, and we never meet. So I don't zoom with them.

These days, I'm off the St. Francis House board, and I volunteer on site, up close and personal. But I'm active in another nonprofit and we meet every couple of weeks via Zoom.

These days, I mostly see friends and family in person. Thankfully. (Although we're more likely to phone, I occasionally zoom with remote f&f. We know what each other look like, plus most of those calls are one on one.)

The pandemic was very good for Zoom.

Zoom enabled millions of people to do their jobs, take classes and socialize remotely during the height of the pandemic. (Source: Washington Post)

No surprise that among those millions of homeworkers were Zoom's employees.  

But in recent months, the company joins a growing number of tech companies that have told employees to return to the office after promoting flexible and remote policies. Companies say office work increases collaboration, a sense of culture and ultimately promotes collaboration and innovation. Some executives have even threatened termination for employees who don’t follow the new policies. But many workers are pushing back on the office policies with some going as far as quitting their jobs over the change.

Zoom calls its plan a “structured hybrid” policy, which requires employees who live in a 50 mile radius of an office to return two days a week. The two days are determined by each team. But Zoom said even with the policy in place, 65 percent of workers are still remote because many don’t live near an office. The company also said it’s not focused on how it plans to enforce the policy, rather it’s dealing with employee issues on a case-by-case basis.

I'm with Zoom on hybrid. If I were working, I'd have preferred a 3 office/2 home model, but anything that gives employees some flexibility - and release from the burden of onerous commuting - would be just fine. And I say this even though, as a city girl, I see what happens to downtowns when there are fewer workers coming in everyday. Shops and restaurants that relied on those workers go out of business. And that's in Boston, which hasn't been as ghost-towned as some other cities. 

Zoom says that it will continue to try to make accommodations for those who can't/won't come into the office at all. 

And some folks are definitely aggrieved by the back-to-the-office mandates. 

My guess is that employees who are the most highly valued, the most highly productive, will be cut plenty of slack, as well as those with disabilities that just plain make it easier to work remotely, while others may have to just suck it up and come in as required.

It'll be interested to see how this works out over the next few years. 

I'll be watching remotely...

Back to the workplace

Remote work has been around for a good long time, and even prior to covid many companies were allowing working from home (WFH) for all of their employees some of the time, or some of their employees some of the time, or some of their employees all of the time. But all of their employees all of the time? It took covid to turn that into a reality.

WFH was never without controversy. It destroys morale. People don't actually work, they're just goldbricking from home. It destroys downtown areas, and kills convenience stores and sandwich shops. WFH is just not productive. 

For years, I did freelance work for a company which provided WFH technology. During my years working for them, I wrote white papers, blog posts, brochures, web copy, customer stories, webinar scripts, etc. touting the joys and benefits of remote work. (I haven't thought of this outfit in years, but just glanced at their website and saw that a customer story I wrote nearly eight years ago is still featured on their home page. Which kind of cracked me up. Too bad I didn't get paid for content longevity!)

The company, itself, frowned on working from own except on rare occasions, for rare exceptions. (I did check things out and it looks like they've changed their tune.)

Anyway, covid proved that, for many positions, in many companies, working remotely worked out just fine when it came to productivity and employee satisfaction. 

But just fine wasn't perfect.

The executives of corporate America are stepping up efforts to get workers back into the office, using a combination of threats and incentives to get employees to give up the work-from-home lifestyle they adopted in the first years of the covid-19 pandemic. (Source: Washington Post)

Some big names are getting in on the push to bring workers back into the office.

Martha Stewart has gotten in on the act, arguing for a return to the office. So is Kevin O'Leary, one of the business gang on Shark Tank. 

Then there are the big name companies. Google's one of them, and they sound suspiciously like that company I did freelance writing for in the wayback. 

Google has pitched its video conferencing and cloud services to other companies as ways to enable remote work, recreation and education. But it’s also been one of the biggest companies pushing for a return to the office.

They're requesting that employees start coming into the office three days a week. They're using a carrot and stick approach: lots of perks (like free food), and the stick of stating that noncompliance would be considered in performance reviews.  

Salesforce is wooing workers back, promising to make donations to local charities for "each day workers come in to the office."

Amazon. Disney. Farmer's Insurance. Starbucks. AT&T. All are among the ranks of companies segueing from fully remote to hybrid. 

Three days a week seems to be a magic number for many of the back-to-the-office schemes.

That's true for my sister Trish's company.

She's been working home 100% of the time since covid began - and loving it. Working from home, she's been able to avoid a rotten commute, and stay in bed later. But she's heading back to the office for three days a week.

Trish is the type of employee you can 100% trust to do her job remotely. 

But she's also the type of employee that a company might want to have around up close and personal. She's been with her company forever, knows all the ropes, the history of everything, who-does-what-to-whom. However much a drag it is for her, for the company to have her around in person so that younger and newer employees can tap her experience and wisdom is a good thing.

Fortunately, she'll still be able to avoid the two worst commuting days: Monday and Friday.

I'm a believer that there's a lot of good to be had when people work together. 

Some argue that it's better for collaboration and innovation. Maybe. Maybe not. 

Some flat out state their belief that working from home = not working at all. (If that's the case, it's a management problem.)

But part of a successful workplace is built on the relationships forged among employees. And that's just plain more likely (and easier) if employees get to see each other face to face at least some of the time.

In my last full time job, I had two colleagues I became good friends with.

The company was an agglomeration of a dozen of so smaller companies in like spaces. I worked at the official headquarters, but my friend Sean worked in Syracuse, while John worked in the DC-area. 

We stayed connected daily via phone and early versions of text, but what cemented our relationship was when Sean and John blew into HQ every month or so for a meeting. We'd have lunch together. Take breaks to meander around the parking lot. Go out to dinner. We got to really know each other. 

I don't believe that if our experiences had all been virtual they would have turned into true friendships. And making friendships is an important aspect of working in the office, from the employee  - as opposed to the employer - perspective.

I've made lifelong friendships in two places: school and work. Hell, I met my husband at work.

Not everyone wants to make friends or meet husbands or wives at work. By the time you're further along in your career, or even at the tail end (like my sister Trish), you've made your friends, met your spouse, etc. You'd be happier to work remotely full time. And maybe even more productive.

But I think that, especially for younger folks, just starting out, people should think twice before fully digging in their heels when it comes to going back to the office - as many are threatening to do.

I think I've heard all the arguments, pro and con. 

And, as much as I think my sister Trish has earned the right to work fully from home, I'm on the side of those arguing for a return to the office. Three days a week sounds about right to me. We'll see how it goes. 

Simplify!

Even though I'm no longer a working stiff, I still occasionally - okay, rarely - enjoy (kinda sorta) reading about what's cookin' in the good old work world. And this includes what the academics have to say. Especially if the academic is Professor Bob Sutton of Stanford.

I don't know Bob but, in the past, I've reviewed his works, or keyed posts off of them. (Among other books, Bob wrote The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn't. As you can imagine, I had plenty to say about that one.) We also had a bit of an e-mail correspondence back in the day. 

Bob is a wonderful writer: interesting, witty, and humane, and - who doesn't like flattery - back in the day (long, long ago) when we were blog-pals, Bob recommended Pink Slip to his readers.

Anyway, the latest I've seen by him is an article of his that appeared recently in The Wall Street Journal, which - miraculously - Bob managed to get in front of the paywall.

In "Why Bosses Should Ask Employees to Do Less—Not More," Bob argues that rather than piling on more of everything organizations should think about simplifying. 

It isn’t that addition is inherently bad. But when leaders are undisciplined about piling on staff, gizmos, software, meetings, rules, training and management fads, organizations become too complicated, their people get overwhelmed and exhausted, and their resources are spread so thin that all their work suffers.

Been there, experienced that. All of it.

I worked for one company that was, admittedly, completely undisciplined and supremely dysfunctional. I might even say that this one place put the dys in dysfunctional. I have never seen anything that could quite compare to the crazy little Cambridge place where I spent the longest block (over 9 years) of time during my corporate career. It goes without saying that I loved working there, even though it was spectacularly nuts. (My sister Kath long maintained that I sought out dysfunctional workplaces because I didn't have enough dysfunction in my own life.)

Anyway, at one point, Dysfunctional Software, Inc. (or, as I referred to it in All Worked Up (in which I wrote about the Charismatic Asshole) The Next Billion Dollar Software Company. [Aside to the reader: it wasn't.]) brought in a retired admiral to instill some discipline and turn things around. [Aside to the reader: he didn't.]

One thing that The Admiral tried to do was put some processes in place. And the first place he started was having the retired Chief Petty Office he brought in with him create a manual for how to order office supplies. A 17-page manual complete with flow charts. 

Prior to joining Dysfunctional Software, Inc., I'd spent a few grim years at Wang Labs, which had insane processes for everything. Even Wang didn't have a 17-page manual detailing how to order a pencil.

Bob's article included an interactive component, asking readers "which time-wasting activity most needs to be cut back in your organization?" The choices: Meetings, Emails, Documentation/Record Keeping, Hiring Processes, Socializing, Training, Performance Reviews. 

I do have one question - by Socializing, does Bob mean "obligatory fun" corporate functions, or hanging around BS-ing with colleagues - but for the most part, the choices are good ones. I will observe that I never worked for any place where we spent too much time on Performance Reviews. I often went years without giving or receiving one. 

Anyway, although I don't work, and thus don't have an organization, I voted anyway. (Hope this doesn't constitute voter fraud.)

And I voted for Meetings.

One (needless to say, dysfunctional) place I worked - it dysfunctioned its way into bankruptcy and dissolution - was completely meeting-crazy.

You could literally spend your entire day in meetings, from 7:30 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. Other than the absence of the bell ringing alerting us to change classes, I often felt as if I were back in high school. Five minutes before the hour, pick up your notebooks and move onto your next class meeting. 

Some folks brought their laptops and did work during the meetings, which I was never bold enough to do. Of course, when the meetings were blessedly on a conference bridge - this was before meeting technology was advanced enough for Zoom-like video meetings - we could turn on mute and work away.

A prominent feature of meetings in this company was that we were often fed at them, generally that meant a full breakfast at an early a.m. meeting, and - of course - a full lunch for noon gatherings. 

After a while, I figured out which meetings I could delegate someone else in my group to attend. This often meant that the meeting organizer was pissed off. It was deemed insulting to send someone junior. But everyone did it, and enough was enough. I made it okay for the people who I dispatched in my stead by giving them opportunities to attend and, if possible, have a real role at, meetings where there were more senior people they could gain some visibility, strut their stuff, network...

In his article, Bob includes a lot of good examples - far better than my personal experiences: his are actually researched. So since the piece isn't behind the WSJ paywall, go forth and read. 

Here's his bottom line on why more isn't necessarily more.

For so many companies, the opposite—less, less, less—is the key to success. Subtraction clears our minds and gives us time to focus on what really counts. It sets the stage for creative work, giving us the space to fail, fret, discuss, argue about and experiment with seemingly crazy ideas—the ideas that can transform a company, and make employees happier and more productive.

Addition by subtraction. Not that I have any skin in this particular game, but I'm all for it. 

The stressful workplace: it's killing us

When I worked at Wang Labs during the late 1980's, the company was spiraling downward. In what was a stressful environment to begin with - overly bureaucratic, insanely hierarchical, incredibly cheap (when you traveled on business, you had to do so on your own time and you had to take the cheapest flight, even if it involved multiple stops and flying you 1,000 miles out of your way) - the lack of clear direction, the cost cutting measures, the habitual layoffs layered more stress onto an already dire situation.

To cut costs, they unscrewed one-third of the overhead lights. I guess that move had an upside: it was harder to see how dirty and rundown the place was. They also cut back on cleaning, which meant that they no longer emptied your wastepaper basket daily. Which might of been okay if it hadn't also meant not emptying the oversized, unlidded trash containers they had on each floor near the coffee machine. So each floor had a colossal garbage pail, overflowing with coffee grounds and lunch refuse like banana peels. Because none of us wanted garbage to accumulate in our cubicles, we emptied ours out in the communal bin.

And don't get me going on the bathrooms. We used to joke about contracting typhus. A (male) colleague reported that he'd gone into a men's room stall and found a row of dried boogers above the toilet paper dispenser. No surprise. When you neglect the physical environment, people treat it badly and make things worse. Broken windows theory writ large. One time, I found a desiccated tea bag, shriveled up in a corridor. Another time, while walking between floors, I had to step around a giant loogie that someone had hawked in the stairwell.

But even worse than the physical decay was the continuous fear of being pink-slipped. 

Before one massive scale and particularly gruesome lay-off - they had announced in October that the lay-off would be conducted and done with by December 1st, and, of course, they waited until December 1st to put it in motion - a guy on my floor dropped dead in his cubicle of a heart attack. He was about my age - late thirties/early forties - and had a couple of small kids. Financial speaking, his family was probably better off, given he likely had life insurance and the Wang severance packages were not all that great.

Wang was by no means the only stressful environment I've worked in. I've worked under undeniably incompetent and often malevolent senior management. I've reported to narcissistic aholes. I've had toxic colleagues, and toxic folks reporting to me. (It happens.) 

I've written about it plenty of times, going back to Pink Slip's early days. (All Worked Up, December 2006). In fact, Pink Slip started out mostly being about lay-offs and generally lousy working conditions. 

All jobs, I've come to believe, can be stressful. (Hell, pretty much everything in life can be stressful.) Working in a factory. Waitressing. Customer complaint taker. Every one of the jobs I've held has had their moments. But what made those moments and jobs survivable was knowing that it wasn't going to be forever. A crappy summer job? You can make it until September. A crappy professional job? The two most beautiful words in the English language are "I" and "quit." First runners up: "head" and "hunter."

Finding a new job is a common response to being in a terrible, terribly stressful job situation. You leave thinking and hoping that the next place you land will somehow be better. More functional than dysfunctional. Which, as we all know, is not always (seldom?) the case. The solution, it seems, is that there's no solution.

And we do need a solution, one Stanford B School professor says. He claims that stressful work environments - not just rat-race blue collar jobs like the Amazon warehouse and delivery positions have employees peeing in bottles since there's no time for a break - are killing people:

Jeffrey Pfeffer, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford School of Business, argues that work is exacting an even greater price than we realize. More than 100,000 Americans die each year from adverse workplace conditions, he says. And many more become sick. (Source: Boston Globe)

We're not talking OSHA type deaths and illnesses - the kind of accidental deaths that happen to lumberjacks and chicken pluckers. 

It’s a much broader phenomenon ― encompassing office workers, as well as traditionally high-stress jobs like nurses and first responders. Pfeffer estimates that “workplace management” was, as of 2018, the fifth leading cause of death in the United States.

“I think we are on an unsustainable path. I think we were on an unsustainable path pre-pandemic. The pandemic’s made everything worse, and something’s got to give,” he says.

Pfeffer says it's time to stop blaming the workers for not being able to cope with stress in any way other than quitting or dropping dead. Time to start making employers accountable for the terrible, horrible, no good, very bad working conditions in their companies. 

That sort of blame is absolutely backwards. The onus should be on employers.

What's causing all this death and destruction?  

People are working longer hours. They're under pressure to become more and more productive. (C.f., peeing in a bottle so they can work more.) The expectation that, in return for some flexibility - working from home, taking an hour off here and there to take the kid to the dentist - employers expect employees to be always on. Three a.m. e-mail? Where ARE you???

“The economic toll, in terms of lost productivity, lost good years of life, lost days, increased medical expenses,” Pfeffer says, “is on an unsustainable path, and it needs to be stopped. And therefore you need some combination of legislation, regulation, and litigation.”

...According to Pfeffer, the answer is to make employers take better care of the people who work for them.

He says that there are lots of reliable, tested, scientific measurements that could gauge employee wellbeing. And he makes a provocative argument: We should hold companies responsible “for the mental and physical health and the wellbeing of their employees. As you would do for the environment.”

“And if you make them ill, we’re going to fine you... If you dump a bunch of crap into the water, we’re going to hold you responsible for that damage. Same parallel. We should treat human sustainability exactly the same way as we treat environmental sustainability,” he says. 

...If, as a culture, we agree that the cost of workplace stress has gotten too high, Pfeffer believes that action will have to come from both citizens and government leaders.

“If you wait for companies to do this on their own,” he says, “good luck.” 

 Good luck is right. 

I know that Wang Labs was a long time ago, but they wouldn't even clean up a loogie in the stairwell or wipe the dried boogers off the wall.

Hope things have improved, but I have my doubts that companies, for all their lip service about employee wellbeing, will do all that much about it.

Hope I'm wrong...

LogMeIn goes all-in on the remote-centric workplace

The other day, I saw an article in The Boston Globe about a local tech company that's transitioning to a hybrid work culture, and that's leaning its balance more towards remote than in-person. One way in which this is being manifest at the company profiled is that, when they're now hiring new executives, they're no longer asking them to move to Boston. 

The company is LogMeIn, and I know them well.

For eight-and-a-half years (2008-2016), I did a ton of writing projects for them. Customer stories, web copy, brochures, data sheets, white papers, ebooks, webinar presentations. Lots of stuff, including vetting (and coaching) their customers to present at webinars. For a few years, they were the anchor tenant of my business, the client I could most rely on for a steady income stream as opposed to working on ad hoc projects. I had an @logmein email address I used to communicate with their customers, and at one point I was told that I personally knew more clients than anyone else in marketing. 

There were a few things I didn't like about LogMeIn, but mostly working with them was a terrific experience. The folks I worked with were great - I'm doing a project now at another company for someone I met at LogMeIn - and their customers loved them. Finding customers to kvell over them was easy. One of my first projects there was doing an extensive win-loss analysis that involved interviewing those both who chose LogMeIn and those who went with another vendor. Even those who'd gone with the competition were exceedingly positive about LogMeIn. I think we gave those who'd gone with us a LogMeIn shirt. But as an incentive to survey participants who had not picked us, we offered the option of an Apple Music Card or a free subscription to the home, consumer version of what at that time was LogMeIn's core product. Pretty much every one of those losses picked the LogMeIn product.

And I must, of course, mention that for years, LogMeIn kept my husband supplied in very nice logo'd polo shirts. I think he ended up with about a half dozen of them. Not to get too morbid, Jim was wearing a navy blue LogMeIn polo shirt when he died.

Originally, when I saw my clients up close and personal, which I did pretty regularly, I had to schlepp out to the suburbs. But then LogMeIn decided that they'd have more appeal to potential employees if they came in town. Now I could walk to their hip and happening offices in Boston's Fort Point (the old Leather District). Yay!

About five years ago, I called it quits there.

LogMeIn had merged with another company and was now requiring contractors to jump through all sorts of hoops, including dropping your fees by 15%. Whether your work is project or hourly based - and I worked on both bases - there's a pretty easy workaround for this. I.e., agree, ignore, adjust. But I wasn't interested in doing that. Plus I couldn't be bothered with the other hoops. And the person I was working with most closely had left the company. So I moved on, too.

But I've kept vague tabs on them, and they've come across my radar as supporters of St. Francis House, the day shelter I've been involved with for decades. (For many years, I was a board member. I recently left the board, but have continued my volunteer work there. Couldn't find a picture of a LogMeIn polo shirt, but did find a pic of some employees volunteering in the clothing department at St. Francis House.)

LogMeIn is well positioned for hybrid/working from home (WFH) they're makers of remote collaboration software. 

Funny, though, when I was working with them, even though their products supported it, and even though I wrote plenty of copy about how it was the wave of the future, they pretty much frowned on their employees WFH. An LOL if ever.

But now they're all in on - even when it comes to their most senior executives. 

Their just hired head of global sales is staying put in Chicago. Their chief revenue officer lives in George. Their chief marketing officer is in California; the head of information security is in Houston. And once the work-from-wherever policy clicked in big time during the pandemic, the head of human resources upped stakes and moved to California. The CFO is in New Jersey.

It's not just the bigwigs who are remote. Even when the pandemic dies out, LogMeIn will remain primarily a remote workplace. Very few employees are coming into the office five days a week, and the company wants to keep it that way. 

Even CEO Bill Wagner decided he hated the commute. He'll be coming in only two days a week. The company subleasing half of their workspace in Fort Point. (Wagner swears that this is not purely for cost savings reasons. It's actually what his employees want. And I believe him. If I were still working full time, I'd want some level of in-person - maybe two, maybe three days a week - but would be delighted to have work from home days the rest of the time.) 

Wagner acknowledges that a remote-centric workplace isn't 100% grand and glorious.

Sure, working remotely has its downsides, as anyone who has sat through a day’s worth of Zoom meetings knows. Wagner has to work harder to build relationships with new employees, regardless of where they sit in the corporate hierarchy. He makes it a point to talk with his five direct reports, all C-level executives, on a daily basis. Only one of them, chief product officer Paddy Srinivasan, lives in the Boston area. (Source: Boston Globe)

WFH will, of course, be good for the body and soul of commuters, not to mention the environment, if people aren't sitting in traffic hours a day every day of the week, cursing the ghost of Henry Ford. But it's not that great (as Wagner notes) when it comes to bringing new employees on board. Or for those who want to get out of the house, or who view in-person working as an important component of their social life. (I always did - up to a point.) Management by walking around is also important - and harder to do when you're in California and your reports are in Boston. I also think those who come into the office at least some of the time will find it easier to get recognition/promotion.

Still, working from home sure is where a lot of the white collar, professional-knowledge worker workplace is moving to. 

It'll be interesting to see what happens with the commercial real estate market. And even to the residential real estate market, especially in high cost areas like Boston, when people can live someplace cheaper and still "work in Boston." Not to mention the lunch places that are supported by office workers.

We really are in the brave new world on so many different fronts...

The workplace isn't really going to get back to the way we were

Step by step, discarded mask by discarded mask, people are starting to come back to the office. Or starting to think about starting to come back to the office. Most of the people I know will be heading in after Labor Day, and most of them don't yet know exactly what it all means.

Sample of four (all scheduled for some type of September
return):

• Small tech consulting company: work from home (WFH) policy is up to individual managers. If you've got a manager who wants to be in the office 5 days a week, and wants you to be in the office 5 days a week - and you don't - you're in a tough spot. Negotiations ongoing with face-to-face craving manager about doing at least some WFH days. 
• Mid-sized law firm: lawyers can work from home - yay! support staff needs to start coming back in - boo! Support staff are trying to negotiate some flexibility. There may be some give in the system, at least for those who demonstrated that they were productive WFH. 
• Larger tech firm: Still working out what the model will be. People hoping for either 2 in/3 home or 3 in/2 home. It will likely be one or the other. Many employees are high-level, highly-experienced professionals, and had already been working virtually with colleagues in other locations.
• Corporate training firm: Generally looking at a flexible schedule, with 2 days of WFH. Maybe more, depending. Global organization, with employees/offices - not to mention clients - all over the place. 

In each of these situations, WFH seems to work out just fine, so no real reason to insist that everyone come in full-time. 

But the stories are all over the map.

I saw an article on folks who are now living and working out of vans. Not souped up RV's, mind you, that are as large as my condo and come with splosh kitchens and king-sized beds. Nope. We're talking regular old mini-ish vans that have been tricked out so you can Eat-Pray-Love, and get your work done, while driving around. Many of these workplace vans even have toilets and showers. But others are more like the go-in-a-bucket van Frances McDormand lived in in Nomadland. 

Most of those quoted in the article were freelancers, doing project-based work, rather than traditional 9-to-5ers. For those who need to keep regular hours, the need to stay in one place with good Internet access for 8 hours a day removes some of the romance of the road. And whether you have a "real" toilet in your van or not, maintenance is not trivial. 

Then there's the Boston-based tech startup that's giving up on a having office space entirely. But, knowing that people actually do benefit from seeing each other up close and personal on occasion, they've been renting space in a nightclub every few weeks. Obviously, the space is available during the day - they don't call them nightclubs for nothing - but I can't imagine the lighting is great, even if we're not talking strobe or disco ball. Plus I'm trying to picture a nightclub with windows... And working at high tops or banquettes doesn't seem all that conducive to productivity, either. But, hey, if you find yourself in need of mouthwash or a condom during the workday, you'll find what you need in the rest room. So I guess that's a perk. Plus just rolling right from work to a drink after work...

I did freelance work for many years for a tech outfit that specialized in software that enabled folks to WFH. Despite this, the company was very down on their employees telecommuting. They thought everyone should be around. And to make the place more hip and happening for everyone to be around in, they moved a while back from the boring old standard cubicle environment suburban office park thang to open floor plan, standing desks, etc. in the Seaport District of Boston.

Since the pandemic forced their workforce into WFH mode, they've embraced it. They're setting up for a post-pandemic world in which employees can pretty much work things out on an individual basis with respect to how often they'll come into a central office, starting with the CEO (an excellent one, by the way) who says he only plans to be in the office once or twice a week. They're not sure how much office space they'll be hanging on to, but it will be retrofitted to have minimal personal space and more places to collaborate and hang out.

It'll be interesting to see what things look like a year from now. 

I'm betting that most folks who've been working from home will be coming into the office 2-3 days a week, which seems like the most common number I'm hearing. Companies that force people back in full time, or let each manager decide for their team (which will raise all sorts of internal equity issues) will lose employees. 

I'm all for it. 

Cuts down on commuting wear-and-tear. Makes it a lot easier to take care of "stuff." Just in general contributes to a better work-life-balance and quality o' life. While also recognizing that facetime is important - for everyone, but especially for newer employees, especially for more junior new employees. 

For those who want to work remotely 100%, there'll be tradeoffs, and a lot of those tradeoffs will be climb-the-ladder ones. I'm guessing that, when it comes to promotions, workers will be better off if they're spending time in the office, managing up by walking around as it were. But, hey, there's nothing grand and glorious about being a "people manager." (And, yes, this is the voice of experience talking.) Individual contributors who could give a damn about clawing their way to C-level positions, or even jobs well below C-level, will be just as happy making the tradeoff. 

As for working from a nightclub, this is truly a case of glad I'm not young anymore. Or working. 

Whatever ends up happening, I really don't foresee most professionals who spend the bulk of their workday sitting in front of a screen and/or on the phone happily rat-racing back to five days a week in the office. People are going be demanding/expecting flexibility, and until "they" figure out how to replace everyone with AI and/or a robot - including those who write AI code and build robots - businesses are just going to have to accommodate these demands and expectations.

Anyway, it'll be interesting!

Work friends: gone but not forgotten

The other day in The Boston Globe there was a sweet piece by Beth Teitell, Where Have All the Work Friends Gone?

Good question.

It's been a long time since I went into the office, but one of the few things I miss about it was the work friends. 

Not the friend-friends. But the work friends.

I have a number of friend-friends, some of my dearest life friends, that I made at work. (Hi, V!) Right before the pandemic hit, I lost one of them. Nanni and I had been close friends for nearly forty years. She was old enough to be my mother, but we'd forged a friendship at work that stood the test of time. I'm eternally grateful for her friendship, and my friendships with other colleagues who've become friends over the years. Some I get together with regularly - or did, pre-COVID - others I see or email or text or call every once in a while. But there's no doubt in my mind that I'll cherish these friendships until I'm in my grave.

Even after these friends, like Nanni, are gone.

2019 and 2020 were tough years for true friends I made at work.

I wasn't as close to Scott as I was to Nanni, but we stayed in close-enough touch over the years, and when we would get together, we would be on the floor laughing about the crazy place we worked together. Scott was in sales and I was in marketing, and we had our share of adventures. What a good guy. We had been planning to get together for lunch that he had had to keep postponing. Multiple myeloma. Stem cell transplant. Didn't make it. He died right after the lockdown, so no wake, no funeral, no sharing laughs with the other colleagues, work friends, who would have been there. 

And lest I forget: I met my husband at work forty-five years ago (yikes!).

But there's another layer of work friends, and that's who Beth Teitell was talking about in her sweet piece: the folks you see regularly while you work together who make work a far more enjoyable and interesting place to be.

How many early evening hours, when every once else had pretty much gone home, did I spend hanging out chatting with Frank? He was one of the smartest and nicest guys I ever 
worked with, and we spent an awful lot of time chewing the work fat and just generally. I really enjoyed working with Frank although, in truth, it's been so long since I've seen him that I only barely remember what he looked like. Glasses, dirty blond hair... 

Paul had the office after mine, and for years he hosted an informal salon on Friday's at 5 p.m., where a bunch of us directors and VPs would gather to catchup and trade rumors.

And Ed. He was a wild man, but, boy, was he fun to work with. 

Tony was another one. Hysterically funny, right down to the Venus fly trap he kept in his office. 

Tom. Jon. Joe. Kevin.

Folks I enjoyed shooting the shit with, having lunch with. 

I liked hearing about their wives, their kids, their families, their new house, their old car, their vacation plans, their tennis game...

If it sounds like I was just work buds with guys, that's not the case. But I worked in tech, and men outnumbered women by a long shot.

Still, plenty of my work friends were women.

I haven't heard from Joan in years, but while we worked together, we had a cup of tea together pretty much every morning. We were both early-to-workers, and it was very pleasant to sit in her office of mine, at 7:30 a.m., before anyone else showed up, sipping our tea and catching up.

Donna. I miss Donna. Noelle. Susan. Liz. Christina. And Cathy. Cathy and I worked together at Wang and at lunch each day we took a long walk, airing our work grievances and yucking up a storm about how awful Wang was. One day, we even found ourselves lost and had to flag down a police car to guide us back to the Wang Towers. 

And my work husbands. 

Like many women I know, I always had one guy I was particularly tight with Bill. George. Ted. Steve.

George I'm still friendly with. But not as friendly as when we began each day on the phone, me at work, him calling from his commute. He even called me from the hospital when his wife was in labor. I told him to get back to his wife and hung up on him.

But Bill? Ted? Steve? I lost track of them years ago.

Work friends - the ones you chat with, lunch with, walk with, hang out at corporate meetings with, eat sheet cake with, roll your eyes at the same stupid things with, just get it. You can talk to them about things that have no meaning to outsiders: the idiot decisions made, the sneaky co-workers, the office politics, the fiascos. Your spouse, your family, your non-work friends really don't want to hear about the moronic email your boss just sent out, the blowup between the crazy VP and the not-so-crazy VP, the big win (or the big loss), the missed (or hit) deadline. 

You work friends are there for the scuttlebutt. And it's more than that. In the process of scuttlebutting, you learn about people's pasts, present, and future. 

No doubt about it, work friends make work a lot more enjoyable. And apparently, all those work friendships have a corporate upside. 

Studies show that people who have friends at work make more loyal and engaged employees. In human resources circles, friendship is considered an important retention factor. 

I know that work friends are seeing each other for Zoom meetings. They're texting each other. They may be enjoying a virtual Happy Hour. 

But it's not the same.

Post-pandemic, the work world will look like a different place, and word is that an awful lot of workers won't be going back to the office full-time. But if work becomes all virtual, there'll be something missing. And that's work friends. Hope it never happens. 

And the word of the day is CONCRETION

Samuel Bellamy was something of the Jeff Bezos of pirates. During a relatively short career - he was just 28 when he died, and had only been pirating for a bit over a year - he managed to capture over 50 ships and amass a booty fortune worth $145M by today's measure. Sure, that's not much by Bezos standards, but Bellamy was considered the wealthiest pirate on record.

A "pirate among pirates" from the Golden Age of Pirates (18th century), Bellamy had a good reputation for practicing shipboard democracy:

The New England Historical Society notes that the captain treated all crew members equally, allowing them to vote on significant decisions. Bellamy, who nicknamed himself “Robin Hood of the Sea,” viewed his piracy as a form of vigilante justice against wealthy merchants who “rob[ed] the poor under the cover of law.” To retaliate, he once declared in a speech, “[W]e plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage.” (Source: The Smithsonian)

Plus the Whydah was a model of inclusivity: freed slaves from African, native South and North Americans, Europeans, North American settlers with European roots. The Whydah Gally, had been a state-of-the-art slave ship. Bellamy converted it to a pirate ship. Definitely an upgrade!

They're still exploring the Whydah, and recently recovered six skeletons.

The Whydah went down off of Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, blown over in a wild nor'easter, and sinking quickly because it was weighted down by all the looty booty stored on board. (Among other things that have been found on the Wyhdah since it was discovered in 1984 was a cannon stuffed with gold and jewels.)

As CBS News reports, a team led by Barry Clifford, who discovered the wreck in 1984, found the remains inside huge concretions, or rigid masses that form around underwater objects. Experts at the Whydah Pirate Museum in West Yarmouth, Massachusetts, now plan to examine the skeletons in further detail.

Concretion. That's a new one on me! And here's what one looks like. More or less. This one actually looks like it's been a bit cleaned up. That is a skeleton face emerging there, is it not?

Anyway, the plan is to extract DNA from the skeletons and see it they can find direct descendants or other family member. They have some from Sam Bellamy's family, which they used to check out a skeleton they'd found in a concretion a couple of years ago. Turns out that skeleton didn't belong to Sam, but to someone with Eastern Mediterranean lineage. The pirate who became that skeleton went down hoping he had a fighting chance:

Discovered embedded in a concretion, the anonymous pirate died with a pistol in his hand and metal—likely gold—stashed in his pocket, Clifford told the Times.“It appears that this person was killed by a 400-pound roll of lead that’s encapsulated within the concretion,” the archaeologist added, “and you can see that the lead was right on top of his skeleton.”

Not a great way to go, but it was probably quick. And he did die with the hope that he was going to be able to use some of that gold that was lining his pocket.

The Whydah had 146 pirate-y souls on board when it sank. Two somehow survived; 101 bodies of crew members washed up on the beach; and the remaining 43 went down with the ship. So there may be plenty of other bodies still to recover from Davy Jones' locker.

It'll be interesting to see whether the skeletons, once freed from the concretions that have been building up and continuously encasing them over the past 300+ years, are reunited with their families. And whether the families will be looking for a doubloon or two.

I'm looking forward to hearing the tales these dead men tell. And to learning yet more new words. Concretion is not one that I'll be able to weave into many conversations, but who knows? There may be other great words I've never heard before, buried in wordy prose concretions. Bring them on!

The Office

It's been nearly twenty years since I worked full-time in an office. Even then, for the last couple of years, I only went in four days a week. My deal with my boss was that I'd work from home on Fridays, with the understanding that unless there was a meeting I had to all into during the afternoon, my work from home day ended at noonish. This worked out pretty well and got me on the glide path to freelance work that eventually put me on the glide path to retirement. 

These days, I do work a little. Very little. Last year, what I made covered charitable and political donations. I have a couple of clients I do regular writing gigs for, and a couple of clients I do (small) projects for on an ad hoc basis. For 2021, whatever happens happens. But whatever happens will be worked from home.

But for the millions who've been working from home thanks to the pandemic, 2021 will likely mean some sort of re-entry to The Office by later in the year, once the vaccine has been widely distributed. 

So what's going to happen to all those who've been commuting by rolling out of bed and shuffling from bedroom to home office (which may well be in the bedroom). Who've been working in clothing that's so casual it makes good old "business casual" and "jeans on Friday" look like white collar and cutaways for the men, and ball gowns and lorgnettes for the ladies. Who've gotten used to lunch with their kiddos, and being able to rest their feet on their puppers when they're Zooming.

Inquiring minds at the Washington Post:

...asked human resources advisers, workplace designers, employment lawyers and compensation analysts to share predictions for a year that could bring back some normalcy while returning people to workplaces that may never be the same. (Source: WaPo)

Here's what the experts are thinking about the brave new work world.  

Location, location, location

If home is where the office is, recruitment will go national, and that has salary implications. A survey done this fall by an HR advisory outfit found that a bit over one-quarter of respondents would be tying compensation for full-time work from homers to their location. 

This is going to be a tricky one. On the one hand, why pay someone working from Sheep Creek, Montana, the same amount you'd pay a worker who chooses to live in San Francisco. But for a Silicon Valley firm, those salaries got inflated by geography to begin with. And for all the hype about working remotely, face time (not FaceTime) still matters, for both employers and employees. So everyone is not going to be able to work fulltime from Sheep Creek. 

The guess is that there'll still be a location premium paid for those who work and live in the expensive areas, as there is still a perceived value to having workers work at least occasionally in person. Those who can work fully remotely and decide to decamp to lower-cost areas may get to keep their pay, but are likely to see salary increases that are lower than what their city mouse colleagues get. 

Video meetings aren't going anywhere but the technology will use AI to get, ahem, "smarter."

Some of the largest platforms will begin using artificial intelligence to recognize and track certain gestures participants make, automate to-do items and help manage the challenges of workers split between work and home.

Zoom will introduce a feature that lets everyone participating in a meeting room while sitting together in a physical conference room be depicted in their very own Zoom box so that the in-person workers and the work from homers will be, Zoom-wise, on an even playing field. 

Of course, if the person running the meeting is sitting in the physical conference room with some of the attendees, they'll still know who's there in person. And their interactions will be different. 

Cisco (WebEx) for their part will be rolling out something called "gesture recognition," doing away with the need for surveys or thumbs up/thumbs down emojis when the meeting host wants to "read the room." Wonder whether there'll be some gestures that just don't get recognized. And yes, I am thinking middle finger. For now, Cisco is focusing on gestures, but they may be moving on to facial expressions like eyerolls. Ugh.....(Where ugh = eyeroll.) 

Microsoft is concentrating on features like keeping track of to-do items attendees have signed up for. I was often the default note taker at business meetings. I like to think that's because I was a really good note taker, capable of clearly and succinctly boiling down what happened rather than reporting out verbatim. And not (just) because I was often the only woman at the meeting. But this sounds like a good feature, even though I'm betting that my notes would be just plain better than AI-derived ones.

The "hybrid" workplace will be in. And I can absolutely see this model taking hold. 

Google, for instance, is planning a “flexible workweek” starting in September 2021, when, under a pilot plan, employees would be expected to spend three “collaboration days” in the office and work from home the rest of the time.

Sounds like a plan. 

Part-time arrangements will make a comeback. I don't know how widespread these arrangements were to begin with such that putting them in place would represent a comeback. But if someone can get their job done part-time, or share it with another employee, this is an excellent idea. Why not let parents or those with other responsibilities (caregiving for their parents) or avocations or community interests or looking for a glide path to retirement work part time? I'm all for this one!

Other predictions are that, as the pandemic continues through much of 2021, employers will be more focused on worker burn out. And, when workers do start coming back in, there'll be more of an appetite for privacy. Except for the most social of employee animals, anyone who's gotten used to the privacy of working from home is not going to be entirely happy being plunked back down in the middle of an open-office environment. Bubbles will be set up, so that workers are in clusters with those they work most closely with. But the wide open office may become a thing of the past. (On behalf of workers: Yay!)

Then there's the will they/won't they question about vaccinations. Will employers be able to require their workers to get vaccination before returning to work? Or will they offer incentives to nudge them in the vaccination direction?

Whatever happens, ain't no one predicting that things will go back 100% to the way they were in the before times. 

Other than Zoom spying on employees, I say GOOD.