My company had a push to get everyone in “strategic offices” several years before Covid. As far as I could tell it was also a layoff tactic. I think they learned it from IBM.
It didn’t matter what office a person was at, as long as they were at an office. So the idea of “spontaneous cross functional collaboration at the water cooler,” they talked about never actually happened, as people were in offices with people who they had no common ground with (professionally speaking), and everyone was tethered to their desk all day. For myself, I was on a team with people spread across 5 states, 3 countries, and 2 continents… but at least everyone had an office, right… I was on the phone for 6-7 hours per day. I’m not sure when I was supposed to chat it up at the water cooler, or who I was supposed to talk with.
Covid kind of saved me in this respect, but they are pushing RTO now. It seems those near offices are resisting a lot. I hope that goes on for quite a while so the focus remains there and doesn’t shift to those who officially work from home now.
I worked at IBM and my office was like this after the original product was EOL. There were several in-house teams that worked for entirely different divisions of IBM. In hindsight, it does seem odd since you - if lucky - at least had 2-3 other people on the same team at the office.
I wasn't aware of any minimum per team or any other weird metrics. Every team was always distributed geographically anyway. Kind of crazy to think about now to be honest.
I hadn't even considered how this affected middle management either. It seemed less common, at least in our case, to have an off site first line manager. So we might have even had multiple managers per team that way but someone who was there would have to correct me. It should be no surprise the company has its own unique brand of dysfunction.
It didn’t matter what office a person was at, as long as they were at an office. So the idea of “spontaneous cross functional collaboration at the water cooler,” they talked about never actually happened, as people were in offices with people who they had no common ground with (professionally speaking), and everyone was tethered to their desk all day. For myself, I was on a team with people spread across 5 states, 3 countries, and 2 continents… but at least everyone had an office, right… I was on the phone for 6-7 hours per day. I’m not sure when I was supposed to chat it up at the water cooler, or who I was supposed to talk with.
Covid kind of saved me in this respect, but they are pushing RTO now. It seems those near offices are resisting a lot. I hope that goes on for quite a while so the focus remains there and doesn’t shift to those who officially work from home now.