What's your company's back to office plan?

[idahome]

We have 4 groups at work (essentially, departments). My group is required to be in the office Tuesday-Thursday each week. The other groups have to be in 2 days each week.

I typically come in every day because I have a small house and my parents live there (in addition to my husband and our dogs). There simply isn’t room for me to have a dedicated spaces.

I enjoy the commute and alone time for that. It’s like I can transition “to” the office and then “home.”

[tacom]

I never had the option to work remotely so this is an N/A for me. My husband started going back 1 day a week last month but just gave notice today as he’s accepted a fully remote (WFH or establish your own office position). He’s never seen that offered before for this kind of role, so I suspect we have the pandemic to credit for that?

[smock]

I can't speak to cost because it's our first summer doing summer camp (cancelled last year whaaa), but the program we found for our 7 yr old is $$$ and open from 8-4. We did have a few less expensive options with longer hours.

This might be a school-age thing, too, where once they had 20 kids with one adult but because of restrictions they're using smaller group sizes. Most daycares already have much smaller class sizes to fit ratios. So it's definitely possible school-aged care it's more expensive and less flexible than before.

[ellipses84]

Jun 8, 2021 18:15:53 GMT -5 @kar said:

Not all, but many summer camps I've looked at have gone up 25-50% this year and most are now operating with reduced hours...instead of 8-6 they're 9-4 or maybe 8-5 and have significantly reduced activities. There was no after care available around us. It's obviously been very dependent on area, but here it would be very difficult to be expected to be back on any sort of typical schedule. I don't know into what daycare was like.

That’s a good point. Our preschool is still on reduced hours from 8-4 and IDK if they’ll even go back to normal hours of 7-6 in the fall. Kids can only be there a max of 10 hours in normal times but the issue is teachers and trying to keep the kids in stable, smaller classroom groups per licensing guidelines. Usually there is an early and later group of teachers with all of them there during core hours so they can break each other and combine all the kids once half of them are gone. The one time our school shut down was because both directors had been exposed to siblings in different classes and you can’t operate without a director on site.

Our elementary school has aftercare (starting when they went back in April) but no before care this year and the school day dropoffs / pickups are staggered by grade.

I know a company requiring everyone to come back the day after public schools let out. There are camp options here but they are pricey and many are not the extended hours they used to be. I feel bad for their employees. Like, could you at least give them a few days to adjust and transition since it’s mid-week?

[simpsongal]

We were wfh 2x’s prepandemic. Waiting on Biden admin to announce wfh initiatives. HR is pushing for 4-5 times per week. Some have gone full time remote (special dispensation) but then they get reduced locality pay.

Dh goes back after Labor Day. They upped wfh from once to twice weekly.

Re daycare - they cut 2 hrs in the pandemic and the 2021-2022 school year and raised rates (we paid through the closure too). The shorter hours are hard - most people have long commutes here, it’ll be interesting to see how that works throughout next year. Before and after care are also not open yet.

[sillygoosegirl]

Our plan is to sell our building (if we can find anyone who wants to buy an office building), and keep everyone WFH permanently. We are a software as a service company, so this makes a lot of sense for us. Also, our building only held ~200 people before COVID and we now have around 500 employees. Even before COVID we were starting to let more and more people work from home full or part time to avoid acquiring more office space and to attract/retain talent that didn't want to live here.

I have mixed feelings about it. I think it's smart from a business perspective. The office space is expensive and most of my coworkers seem to want to work from home anyway. And productivity has been fine. But I do miss being there in person. On the other hand, most of the people I actually work with and used to hang out with in the office had already opted for full time WFH before the pandemic... so even before the pandemic, it was already starting to feel kind of pointless to go in.

I assume they will eventually reinstate the childcare requirement we had for WFH before COVID, but haven't heard a peep about it yet. I really hope they don't do that before kids can be vaccinated. Considering that productivity has been good this past year, I actually hope they realize they don't need it.

[tripleshot]

We had to come back 6/1. However they now seem open to WFH hybrid schedules which they were strictly against pre-Covid. My supervisor has a meeting Monday to see if she can get our boss to agree to let us wfh 2 days a week of our choosing. I’m thinking about choosing Th/F.

[Deleted]

My company officially reopened all offices effective 5/24 with a 3/2 wfo/wfh schedule. That is with the exception of my office which apparently has a mouse infestation and is currently scheduled to open on 6/28. Originally the 3/2 schedule was only supposed to be until July with a permanent 4/1 schedule after that, but the 3/2 has been extended indefinitely. My company was traditionally very anti-wfh so this is a good change, but still not as good as it could be imho. 99.9999% of my job and the jobs of everyone in my department can be done from home, and we have worked extremely well from home over the last 15 months. It's still a work in progress I guess.

[ny96]

My organization has a mixture of positions that can work from home and those that can’. As far as I know they haven’t required anyone to return who didn’t want and need to, but we have a vaccine requirement as of 7/15 so that may change, soon.

I’m mainly in the office because I’m more productive there, but I have to leave the office at 3pm to pick up my kids from camp and preschool neither of which have extended hours right now. I don’t know how we are going to keep going like this. My son’s main camp offers neither extended hours nor transportation this summer and it’s pretty far away. This means that we signed up for a few different options that are closer and will be juggling. I’m nervous that preschool won’t offer extended day next year and we really need it. My work has been really accommodating, but I’m not sure how long that will last.

[covergirl82]

So far my company has no official date when employees have to return to the office. (As of June 1, employees had the option to go into the office.) It's more dependent on the type of job (if it can easily be remote), and agreement between the manager and employee. My manager is very flexible and is fine that we continue to WFH for the time being as it's been going well for our team for the past 15+ months. He said maybe we'll go in once a month as more of a social opportunity (e.g., plan to take a long lunch as a team and eat together or leave early and go to a happy hour), and maybe go in for important meetings as desired by our client groups.