“We have been clear from the start: there simply isn’t enough office space or available workstations to support a four-day in-office mandate,” the Public Service Alliance of Canada said in an emailed statement, adding that under the current three-day policy, shared desks are already fully booked in many departments.
This was a pet peave for me as a union rep during the pandemic. Our workplace introduced a WFH on a “voluntary” basis scheme over night with no commitments from the employer. Meanwhile the employer cancelled leases for office spaces. In effect, the employer saved a bunch of money on the backs (homes turned into free workspaces) of the employees while giving nothing in return. People working from home got no promise they’d get to keep doing it, people who had to come in to the office had to deal with a lack of space.
Not a single union colleague wanted to talk about this, never mind raise it with the employer. Reaping: sowing.
Weird they wouldn’t talk about it. I would have. If I ever have to work in an office again I would quit.
I gain far too much to ever let that go. I get back at least 6 hours a week I would have wasted in commute and work nonsense. Lunch is when I want, work is finally asynchronous, and my car insurance is way down, and the money saved on insurance, gas, and wear and tear is crazy.
Around here the employers selling their real estate turned out to be helpful: they can’t have people back there is no room.
In any case, one of the first things we did was document productivity. It went up. Way up. So we made sure we wrote it down, got executives to read it, and put it at the beginning of the work from home manual.
A lot of people considered the vagueness — eg not having a WFH manual – of the setup a gift and didn’t want to stare a gift horse in the mouth. Irresponsible, IMO, but not my problem any more.
Its crazy to me they wouldn’t have that discussion. That would have been frustrating.
We immediately got to work having discussions on how to do it, and how to make it last.