Yesterday’s Detroit Free Press Article titled “Ford CEO Farley reflects on 5 years in the job and what he needs to do next” mentions a “cultural change” mandated by CEO Jim Farley himself. “The new policy [requires] salaried employees to show up four days a week in the office,” the interview reads. “It comes as the company prepares to move leadership, designers and engineers into a new world headquarters building starting later this year. It’s a move Farley has said will improve efficiency and product development.” I don’t know if this will actually markedly improve efficiency and development, but I can tell you: At least one person is seriously upset about it. Seriously.
In what has to be the cleverest bit of trolling I’ve seen in along time, someone with access to Ford Motor Company’s internal meeting-room screens has configured many of them to include the words “F**ck RTO” over top of an image showing CEO Jim Farley with a “NO” symbol over his face (that’s the big circle with a slash made famous by No Smoking campaigns).
Here is one of the hacked screens in question:
This was sent my way by an anonymous Ford employee, whom I asked about how the vibes were within the company in regards to the new mandate. “Upset level varies,” the person told me. “Some people bought homes farther away. Some people had a child, some people got a dog.”
The employee went on: “We were promised that remote work is here to stay and people built their lives around that. An about face has real negative consequences for real people.”
A Reddit post titled “Ford’s Dearborn meeting rooms hacked with anti-RTO image” states that it received the screen image from an employee and that “all panels in the building were affected.” A Redditor named Summoners_Rift says they were “Just told by a friend that Ford Racing and Roush were hit too.”
It seems screens throughout Ford have been changed over. Now that’s dedication.
But I get it! That’s a massive, massive change for employees to now have to live within ~30 miles of their office. I bet folks are having to sell homes, losing time with their families, etc etc. On the other hand, Automakers are facing press to produce, especially in the uncertain modern era where EV mandates come and go and China’s electric car-prowess looms overhead. Not to mention, Ford has spent so much money on its new headquarters; you have to wonder how big of a role that plays in the new policy.
As someone who used to engineer cars for a major automaker, my view is: I think in-person time is deeply valuable for vehicle development, but five or even four days a week is likely not necessary for most employees. Obviously, if you’re running a dyno cell or you’re a technician, you have to be near the hardware. But if I’m sitting in CAD packaging meetings all day, I can do that from home. I recall so many times the vast majority of engineers being on their laptops during meetings, barely paying attention. I bet three days a week would be enough for plenty of engineers, though again, I understand where companies like Ford are coming from. This is a tough situation that involves considerations around real estate, employee productivity, human livelihoods, talent acquisition/retention, and on and on.
Ford didn’t just suddenly make this change — the transition has been, at least on some level, gradual, as Carscoops mentioned earlier this year. From Carscoops:
Ford adopted its current hybrid model in April 2022 and has gradually increased the requirement for employees to work from the office three days a week. By increasing this to four, it believes it can improve performance.
While some employees (like the one I spoke with) may feel they were promised remote work indefinitely, to high-ups at Ford, it was likely always temporary. It’s a really tricky situation, and though I can chuckle at the brazenness of this hack, I want to emphasize that a slash through the CEO above is not funny and could be perceived by some as a threat (though it’s the “No” symbol, so I personally read it as “No Farley”). This, of course, is not in any way funny or cool, and, on a personal level, I’ve always enjoyed chatting with Farley; he seems like a smart and truly enthusiastic car-guy. Put a funny hat on him or something! The slash is not even creative. The hack (which I’m hearing might have affected Ford monitors globally), though, was.
Given that Ford can’t manage to build a reliable product, that they have a non-stop rolling list of recalls, have- like all of the other American automakers- eliminated their lineups except giganto-sized trucks and SUVs they should be glad they have jobs.
RTO is just a way for corporate America to justify purchasing and making money off the land they own. I have a feeling that Jim Farley and many of the execs at Ford aren’t in the office 4 times a week, don’t have to manage daily activities(taking care of kids, cooking, laundry…etc), and get driven to work from a home nearby.
Another reason there are many entities against going fully remote?
Because of the multi-faceted business connections that are interwoven everywhere. Consider what happens to the commercial real estate market when they realize they built too much capacity. All of those office buildings are superfluous. Worthless. All those property owners, management companies, commercial loans, office furniture and equipment supplier, janitorial services, all-of-that.
That’s a big potential dent in the economy. I think there’s pressure being exerted in the business world to prevent full remote.
It is a dent in the pocketbooks of the CEOs and their buddies for sure. The economy would be fine with the higher overall efficiency of more remote work.
is this ‘but think of the landlords!’ but with more words?
I do not have a job that allows WFH, but for an employer to institute it for eligible employees and then unceremoniously yank it away a few years later in order to justify a fancy new building would certainly piss me off. Will Ford be assisting with relocation expenses in the event an employee moved further from the office and now needs to move back?
Fucking corporate America.
I’ve been doing design, engineering, marketing, and product development for 30 years, and the easiest way to spot bad management these days is when they make these types of decisions. The fact is that when remote work started, the managers with the biggest issues were the most incompetent in managing. They are the types of managers who believe that everything revolves around making them look good rather than realizing that their job is to support their team. Often, these are managers who are in over their heads and can only manage by force of personality. They don’t want to have an email record of how they are giving directions since it would expose their incompetence. They need an environment with less accountability and where they can schmooze their boss over lunch or a casual chat.
I used to be on the road around 50% of the time and was forced to learn how to manage remote teams that were spread across the country. It made me far better at my job. My counterpart, who didn’t travel much, managed their staff through undocumented meetings and side conversations to avoid accountability. They were also a bit of a bully and had a high turnover rate. Over ten years I never had a team member quit.
Creativity and innovation benefit from open, honest collaboration. Being remote doesn’t need to be a barrier to that. The team I work with now might see each other in person 4 or 5 times a year. I have never met 90% of my clients in person. The issue is with bad managers who don’t want to learn how to do things a bit differently.
Pretty much. My job is 100% remote as is almost every job at my company barring a tiny handful of staff. We collaborate every day and tackle major projects without any hiccups and I’ve never met even one of my coworkers in person. It really just comes down to what kind of culture the managers have created.
Most companies past a certain size end up having multiple offices and people collaborating from multiple locations.
Most outside sales people are on the road the majority of the time.
Working remotely is *normal* for a lot of white collar workers. And it works.
The only reason for RTO is a power play. It’s never based on actual data.
Fuck RTO managers.
I think one of the most idiotic things that a large company can do right now is demand RTO for the roles which will help them leapfrog the competition and can 100% be done remotely.
I do think that there should possibly a 2nd NDA for certain remote workers, which basically says something like “If we find out that you are doing shady shit like sending screenshots of designs, IP, etc.. through your personal phone, we will ruin your life.”
But things like mechanical engineers spinning around Catia all day, or software/controls engineers, etc.. you can find some extremely talented people that live in places they want to be. It doesn’t matter if they are in a cabin deep in the wilderness of the rocky mountains. If their quality and timeliness of work is good enough, why wouldn’t you?
I’ve been working a mix of remote/hybrid for over a decade, and there are definitely cons associated with it at times. But I wouldn’t hesitate to get good talent for remote work if they are good enough.
Sure there are roles that really can’t be done remotely, but we shouldn’t paint with a broad brush on this topic.
I have missed out on opportunities that wanted me to move to Detroit or other places, but I don’t want to do that. I moved where I wanted to be, and that’s how it’s going to stay.
There are some jobs where WFH is not really feasible, but my hot take is that if your job can be done remotely, then it should be done remotely. The trouble is that widespread WFH became a thing too late – companies have already invested billions in tacky office buildings that they need to fill and as usual, the little people are the ones who have to pay for their bosses’ short-sighted decision-making.
This! 🙂
Exactly. The commercial real estate market in North America alone is worth something like $24 TRILLION; there is no way in hell that the money guys were ever going to let that kind of money evaporate, no matter what studies say about the effectiveness of WFH, or how anti-RTO the workers are.
To me the whole WFM thing is touchy I for one wouldn’t really want to fully WFM as there would be to many distractions for me to be productive then again all jobs I have had required me to be on site as most the work required physical labor of some sort. My current job I have taken a few WFM days here and there if needed because I had doctors appointments or what not which has been nice.
I would say my main issue with the whole WFM for management and engineers it has lead to communication not always being the greatest as people are not always there to be contacted when you need them because instead of being in the office at their computer they are at home doing who knows what. It has also led to some disconnection also because you cannot just walk over to an engineer or manager and show them the issues you are having sure you can call them and show them pictures but that isn’t always as good as showing them in person. Then again I run into these issues constantly as most our engineers work a state over and are about 100 miles away from my work location.
I can get behind remote work for individuals in a vacuum–do your computing wherever you want. But the real scourge of WFH is the responsiveness: what I used to be able to resolve in five minutes by popping over to your desk now takes a day if I’m lucky, because I have to wait for you to finish your gardening before you see my email, and as you pointed out, god help me if you need clarification–now I have to schedule a call, and just like that, the clock is up to a week.
I think the teams meetings have also led into this. I have had managers and engineers I work with that are in like 10+ team meetings a day. How the hell do you expect anyone to work when you are just in meeting after meeting? I have had some days like that (I am not currently an engineer but people act like I am) and yeah it makes me so bore and also insane at the same time because it will be complaints about things not getting done or done correctly but how can they when all it is is meetings?
I’ll walk into certain departmental offices, and I’ll hear talking. They’ll all be at their desks, with headsets on, having a Teams meeting with EACH OTHER.
Haha yup I have that where I am at a team (6+ people) in the same trailer as me most of their team is here but their boss and a few other guys are at our world headquarters instead of going to a meeting room they will all sit on their own computers talking to each other just so weird.
Thing is, sharing screen and collaborative editing tools exist now that just didn’t work until just about covid hit (and thank goodness for that!). A conference table face to face meeting just means I don’t have my 3 screen set up with research on one screen (right), email and teams on another (left), and the actual key document on the third (center). Even if covid had never happened, I think we’d all be in our offices/cubicles most of the day, because a virtual team meeting is just straight up better. And once you get to that point, you realize coming in is just for the supposed higher level of communication and collaboration is not worth it. But of course the only thing that will pressure CEOs is market forces. And many great employees will self select to remote/hybrid opportunities, and many are willing to take a bit of a pay cut to do that.
I recently found out google meet lets you scribble on a screen share. Just drag your mouse over an area with the left button down, and it will draw the shape over the screen, which will then disappear on its own a few seconds later. You don’t need to turn anything on or select a special tool. It’s cool.
I still haven’t found a decent remote white boarding tool. If anyone had any recommendations, I’ll gratefully accept them.
Good point, I actually DO prefer teams meetings for that reason. Much better to easily share screens and see the relevant info. Or, if people are talking about things that don’t concern me, I can work on other things while in the meeting.
Side note, once we went to teasm and all most office people were WFH in 2020, I found it much easier to get in touch with people when I needed them. When everyone is in the office, it was wild how many times I’d go to the main office and see a group of 4 or 5 peole just hanging around the front desk chatting.
I had a cool PM once who asked about the status of an accelerated build request on the daily pointless con call. I told her I could get that finished that day in a sarcastic way and she finished the thought: “if you weren’t on a call?” “Yup.” She replied something like, “OK, talk to you later.” Most of the content of those calls were discussing talking about it again later rather than making a damn decision at that time.
“Sorry, but I haven’t even thought about your problem since the last time we had this recurring meeting because I’ve been too busy calling into other people’s recurring meetings to tell them I haven’t thought about their problems since the last time we had THAT recurring meeting.”
I once once did the above for 2 solid weeks before my management took the hint. I was scheduled 3-5 meetings deep from 8 am to 6 pm.
I fucking HATE when people just “pop over” to my desk to ask me about something. 9 out of 10 times I’m right in the middle of something, and I need to stop what I’m doing to listen to them and look into what they want. It’s especially distracting with some coworkers who also think this entitles them to a 15-minute chat session about their cat or the weekend or whatever.
Send me an email and I’ll look at it when I can 100% focus on it.
Everything you describe is the worst (I picture Bill Lumberg just sidling up and launching into it), but if I’ve emailed twice and called once, the ability for a gentle, respectful, patient interruption goes a long way toward closing a task. I’m not promoting the pop-in but it’s less (d)icky than CCing a supervisor, which is the only recourse when everybody’s virtual.
I haven’t experienced this at all. Between slack, teams, texting, calling, people are extremely reachable regardless of where they’re located. I spend most of my workday talking to people in different buildings (usually different states, sometimes different countries) anyway.
Sounds like your place of business has either a better work ethic or more accountability. I wish my place were more like yours!
Meh, I worked from the road 50% of the time for many years and figured it out. My team is now fully remote, and we never have any issues. The thing is that the team needs to have a shared understanding of expectations on availability. Generally, if you need something in 5 minutes, that is your bad planning and not the fault of the other person. That other person might have been in a meeting or needed to be focused for an hour or two to hit a deadline, even if they were sitting next to you.
The issue is that remote work requires doing things slightly differently, and most people don’t want to bother. Even if doing so would be best for everyone.
“I need it right now” is never acceptable, but I said it takes five minutes. Yes, it’s all about expectations, and I’ve been frustrated by my inability to follow up with remote workers. If everybody everywhere is consistently and reliably producing and responsive, then mazel tov!
Counterpoint: Before the pandemic and WFM, I had to hunt for people that weren’t picking up the phone/responding to IMs. When most everyone was working from home, it was much, much easier to reach people.
Understandable I guess it really depends on the people, place of work and the culture there. My boss I had at my previous job actually loved the WFM during the pandemic because he didn’t have to spend time driving to work and it gave him more time to work but he also loved his work (hr was a physicist at a National Lab working on a particle accelerator so makes sense it is his life’s work haha). Where currently working though when people WFM it is near impossible to get in contact with most of them.
Your experience is polar opposite from mine. At least pre-pandemic I knew where to hunt. More power to your job!
I’ve run into both types of people. Some couldn’t be contacted when they were at home, and others were more responsive at home than when parked in a cubicle outside my office. The one thing I noticed though was, in general terms, those who were high performers performed every bit as highly at home and those who were marginal performers dropped further when working at home.
Early in the Musk/DOGE purge I heard them stating that bridge inspectors need to be in the office 5 days a week.
…that’s a very obviously field-based job…
Further proof they had no idea what they were doing. Not that we needed more, of course.
Not defending Doge, but I’m pretty sure the “field” you’re referring to is not located on a beach in the Bahamas, or anywhere near the dock at the inspectors cottage lol
Looking at the condition of so many US bridges, they have probably always been work from office.
I’m sure I’m in the minority of workers (though perhaps in the majority of the kinds of people who become CEOs) in that I think creative leaps are far more likely to happen when people work next to people. As a smart expert once told me “We’re primates: we’re wired that way.”
While many routine process jobs, in which we’re performing the same task many times, can easily be done remotely, the development of new ideas and processes happens when people see each other at the copier or sit together around the conference table. As many of my own coworkers say, it’s “the meeting after the meeting” at which important stuff gets done and emergent things happen. It’s got nothing at all to do with my ability to lead my team. It is about establishing relationships and inculcating culture in new employees.
I just also think that insisting upon that means that many of the kinds of valuable workers who have options won’t agree to that. It’s a losing battle that will generally make companies less competitive.
I agree with you. I don’t like it and I would prefer to be fully remote, but too much is missed in certain types of companies. I think 2-3 days per week in office is all that is necessary though.
Totally agree. I dislike when people keep focusing on productivity when discussing remote work. Creativity and innovation are the real losses.
As a creative, its very very hard to concentrate in the typical open office arrangement when you need quiet. And cutting video and audio mixing need dedicated soaces, not laptops and headphones, but nobody ever seems to care when you bring it up.
Oh, open offices are terrible, and aren’t for collaboration but for surveillance. You can’t even have a conversation because you’ll disturb everyone.
No, everyone needs their own space, but folks need to be able to connect without scheduling, have places to draw and talk and so on. Not saying everyone calls folks back for the right reasons… most don’t. Point is that I feel like most folks miss the right reasons.
Being together in person has value sometimes for some purposes. So does being remote. But an edict from the too ofa 200K person company is really ham fisted and out of touch.
Unless it’s a very small company, it’s not the folks making $200k making these decisions. That shit rolls downhill from way higher than that.
I’m also unconvinced by the claims about productivity. Those samples must be dominated by cultures, relationships and job experiences that were formed before there was much remote work. I think progressively those strengths will get watered down. I’m also pretty confident that while I can manage a team remotely, my ability to lead is degraded. When someone is in trouble I need to the ability to sit with them, read their micro-expressions and have them read mine. Again, we’re primates with wiring that goes back 50 million years. New advances in technology and the ability to work over Teams (which I think is really, really useful) isn’t close to the same as what I can do when we’re drinking coffee together. I’m already seeing that their are increasing numbers of people who just won’t pick up a phone, and text is not an equivalent substitute. That’s going to become more common, not less.
That’s a valid point, however times change and new generations of workers have different working and social interaction styles. Leadership styles need to adapt to meet the challenge. Some people don’t respond well to f2f meetings over coffee, which can be anxiety-inducing (“am I getting fired?”).
Relationships at work are evolving, and established managers/leaders/executives need to evolve as well. Much of the RTO bs is being mandated by older, well-paid execs who haven’t had to deal with child care or the cost of finding housing for decades (their kids are grown, their homes are near the campus and largely paid off).
While it entirely may be that “That’s how I came up” I think that anxiety response to a face to face meeting is exactly the kind of thing that lots of young employees face, and that they need to learn to overcome. Otherwise they won’t be able to really excel when, we hope and expect, they sit at the other side of the table or the other end of the phone.
This.
Edit: I didn’t mean they won’t pick up the phone when I call them. I mean they won’t pick up the phone when they should be calling each other.
Yeah, as both fully remote and a manager, I agree. The problem with that is you need folks in the office on the same days to make that collaboration happen. That means it’s challenging to have enough space to have people on site all the same days. That’s when you get executives wanting people in the office 4-5 days a week – if they’re paying for office space, they want it being used.
I work for a not-for-profit healthcare company (but in IT) and we are fully remote because we were able to save a ton of money basically mothballing an entire office building. We own our main offices, as opposed to leasing, and I suspect the plan is to eventually reopen the building either to lease out ourselves, or move folks from our other campuses into there when there isn’t so much turmoil in healthcare.
We have enough open space in another building for some of the teams to come in at once, but not all of them. Complicating matters is that they made the call pretty early on that saving money made it worth saying remote work was permanent. In our case, leadership has stuck to it.
Where I think it’s pretty unconscionable is when people were told it was permanent and could move elsewhere, and people made big life changes that aren’t easily unwound in response. In my case, since my wife and I both work for the same division of the company, we have no intention of moving out of our house 25 minutes from the office until we are ready to semi-retire and go into contract work.
Boy I can’t tell you how my creative juices just FLOW when there’s six fucking people standing in the middle of my office talking about football.
If you are any sort of company that forces your employees to schlep into some cube-farm office just to stare at a computer all day, you are in the Dark Ages.
Did you see how many times Ford mentioned “collaboration”? This new setup is 100% going to be the open concept bullshit that makes people yearn for the comfort of a cubicle.
If I’m on an interview and see an open concept office, I’m doing an abrupt 180 and heading for the door.
I was open office for 7 years. I’m an attorney, which means I spent half the day in “focus rooms” (closets) having calls that were too confidential to have at my desk. And all of my deep thinking work had to be outside of working hours, because there was no way to focus during the work day.
I was just by their new HQ the other day and it is absolutely giving edgy tech startup vibes. At least the people stuck there get to look out at the Henry Ford Museum and yearn for the days of decent architecture and logical floor plans.
I like my little box, sitting alongside the team I lead. Frankly, if your employees are actually ONLY staring at a screen all day, never interacting with other departments, never making decisions that impact other employees in any way, then maybe you are right. But after many years in an average corporate world, I haven’t actually seen many people who really fit that. And so the interactions that occur, the value of personal relationships built, all do make a difference in how things get done.
Sure, but at my company we do all that via Zoom (mandatory cameras on, which is perfectly fine). I’ve been there ten years now: the first 5 being pre-COVID, 90% in the office, and the last 5 years being 100% remote, and I have experienced zero difference in camaraderie, team building, etc. If anything, people have a better baseline overall mood, since they didn’t have to just fight Boston area traffic for an hour. Plus my ass cheeks haven’t seen the insides of a men’s room stall since (and the resultant horrors therein), which might be the biggest perk. I’m not saying you’re wrong or you shouldn’t prefer it: I am just not a people person to that degree.
Wasn’t the No symbol made famous by Ghostbusters?
At any rate, I would love to be able to work from home and reclaim an hour+ each day not commuting. Alas it is not to be.
Others have mentioned how RTO directives are so that managers can micromanage, and execs can feel powerful. While that may be true, my read on most RTO directives is, “hey, we have this massive, shiny, expensive office which is empty, we need to justify its existence somehow…” So, they demand RTO despite WFH being viable in many situations.
I have friends that love their hybrid/ remote work models. It has saved them thousands a year on commute, child care, and other “office” expenses. It’s insane to think that companies don’t understand what they get for free just letting people work from home. It also is a reminder that you can never trust a promise from a company that is not a legal contract.
I have never worked from home, my job is not capable of that, but my brother had a job a few years back where he worked from home, and when they changed their mind, he provided the work contract that said he was 100% work from home and they had to buy out the rest of his contract to replace him. he landed a hybrid job with way better pay. With the days at home in the contract.
There’s generally a combo of money tied up in real estate, executives or management not liking that they can’t harass their employees in person, and blaming any loss in sales on WFH. WFH isn’t the issue; it’s just a convenient scapegoat.
There are many reasons for mandating return to the office but productivity is not one of them. What continues to surprise me is just why all the companies are afraid of having an honest conversation about it.
Cities/Municipalities are putting pressure on companies located there because of their local economies. Without all the workers coming into the office, going out to lunch, attending happy hours at local bars etc it was having a negative effect.
Ford is putting a lot of capital into that new building. New facilities costs and maintenance on existing buildings are a heavy line item on the balance sheet. Guys like Farley don’t like answering questions from shareholders about all that cost when everyone is just working from home anyway.
I’m sure there’s plenty of other, legit reasons they’re doing it but just come out and say it. Your people don’t like hearing reasons that amount to, “because I said so.”
So again, it comes down to the working class having to atone for the sins of the company they work for.
Trickle up economics, baby!
Won’t anyone think of the billionaires??
(See you in El Salvador)
People working from home are not the “working class.”
The “working class” are the nurses, grocery workers, maintenance people, etc, that were at work every single day.
I’m sorry, but if someone signed up for a job where they have to work in the office everyday, yet they got to stay home for the last 5 years, they are one of the fortunate ones.
“Working class” is tricky with nurses; while they obviously can’t work from home, the pay scales and nature of the work can make them pretty high earners, and with some experience, often can work three twelve hour shifts a week and effectively take pretty long vacations without even dipping into PTO. I know nurses who make six figures doing this, and even more as traveling nurses.
During COVID it was all hands on deck, but if you’ve a good nurse, and willing to work night shift, you can make bank while being off (not just WFH) four days a week.
I don’t begrudge them that – hell I married one – but it’s not always obvious to people not in that field the benefits as well.
It’s true nurses have great earning potential in this job market. It’s good to see them getting ahead a little after what they had to deal with during the pandemic.
As a skilled trade worker, we worked through the lockdowns, and now we have to put in 30-60% more hours than we did pre-pandemic just to make ends meet. And I’m talking about the upper end of the pay scale here.
One advantage of skilled trades outside of nursing is more opportunity to build a business, if you want. I know it took decades of backbreaking work and business acumen, but I know the general contractor who does some projects at my house makes more than my wife and I combined.
That said, we’ve got at least two class axes in the US, income and education path, and I think a lot of dissatisfaction with capitalism over the past 15 years is coming from folks who were told a college degree would make them middle class, and for various reasons (including overproduction of those college students) it’s causing a mismatch between their educational class and income.
That said, when I graduated college 20 years ago, I made a whopping $10 an hour with no benefits in the same field I’m in now, yet I was told I wasn’t “working class.”
I will also say that nurses were doing well before the pandemic (just not during), and we all are pinched by inflation no matter what. I had more disposable income in 2019 than I do now.
I also manage tech folks which means I really don’t make that much more than my staff. My wife doesn’t report to me (obviously) but due to her nursing background, in a tech role, she makes 85% or so of what I do.
I understand this point when comparing the nature of the jobs, but one could argue that any employee that reports to anyone under the C-suite in the corporate hierarchy can be considered working class. Moreover, nursing salaries are well in the range of the bulk of white-collar office jobs.
I don’t think too many people would take kindly to me calling myself (an IT Manager) working class, but I appreciate the solidarity as opposed to lumping me in with the C-suite!
There is definitely pressure around employee spending for lunch, etc. But if I’m forced to commute to the office with no offsetting increase in pay, I’m effectively taking a cut, and lunch costs a whole lot more than before. So I, a person who normally ate lunch our, would probably start bringing food from home.
Except most of those reasons are moot points these days, because nobody can afford to go out to lunch every day or go to happy hours after work. Who TF wants to go to happy hour after work anyway? Everyone is so beaten down from the day at work they just want to get home as fast as possible.
Not everyone goes out every day but many people go out multiple times a week.
And trust me, the people working in these offices, the ones that had roles where they could work from home the past several years, can and do afford to go out for lunch every single day and happy hours often.
But I’m only pointing out the reasoning not trying to say I agree with it or not. But these are real, legit reasons for what they’re doing even if I don’t like them. I just want them to be honest about the reasoning.
I started out in office 4 days a week before COVID and I was one of these people I am describing. I have been working from home ever since making a good salary and I enjoy not driving into the city.
It is likely I will eventually have to go back into an office as most of the jobs out there in my field, at my job level, are now in-office primarily. For now I’ll appreciate what I have.
Dont want to pay severance? Try this one simple trick!
Yeah…. the general opinion around my office was that it was secretly a forced attrition program so they could reduce headcount w/o having to deal with all the severance stuff.
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The siphoning of wealth from the working and middle classes has slowedproductivity is not improving like we want it to, it must be the fact thatmany of our employees now literally never leave work because it’s now at their houseour employees aren’t in the office. After all, there’s nothing else going on that could possibly be a drag on productivity or economic gains.”Had to remember how to do this by poking around. Been decades…
So Ford likely is mostly Windows, so you’ll have Microsoft Active Directory, and lots of Group Policy. So there’s likely Group Policy Objects (GPOs) that set the “Desktop Wallpaper” The default path is User Configuration > Policies > Administrative Templates > Desktop > Desktop > Desktop Wallpaper
So from there you can set the “Wallpaper Name” which is either a local or UNC path (on a share everyone has access to), and the Wallpaper Style (such as Fill, Stretch).
So if there’s an existing GPO for Desktop Wallpaper — it’s Ford, so there probably is — this either involves overwriting the file that was in the GPOs UNC path, or copying a file locally (into a specific directory) via a Logon Script, and then using the local path that the Logon Script copied the file to. In either case, this’ll have to be applied to possibly an Organizational Unit (OU) within Active Directory that nearly all users belong to. There may be a Computer Configuration path to alternatively use to apply it to computers (possibly easier) but you’d have to know their AD setup to determine which resultant set of policy (RSoP) affects the most users/computers.
Logon Script is less likely because that likely would’ve had to go through some deployment pipeline, and the change would’ve been reviewed before it was merged. Changing a Logon Script that runs for most users would’ve had a human look at it.
That’ll work on everything from Windows 2000 through Windows 11.
Those are Crestron panels, you can see then name in the image. We use them outside all our conference/huddle rooms. I don’t think we make full use of their capability, but it shows when the room is booked or available.
These are Crestron meeting room screens. In my experience they run a built-in scheduling app that connects to a cloud management service; not a Windows OS. Anyone with access to the management portal could easily change the image that’s pushed to all devices though.
Yeah, either way though, I think the “that’s dedication” bit of the article is probably overstating it. There’s a very good chance it was a single change to make it show up everywhere.
Just swap out the graphic in the October Autumn Theme template. Like literally one .JPG overwrite.
Can confirm as a former admin of Crestron units
This is such a stupid hill for corporations to die on and it’s 100% so they can control and subjugate employees. Are there people who take liberties with WFH that aren’t productive enough? Of course, but I’m sure every single one of us has a coworker or three that come into the office every day and don’t do shit. The research says that remote and hybrid work is exponentially better for the well-being of employees and that it doesn’t negatively affect productivity. IIRC it actually increases it.
Capitalists gonna capitalism. Anyway let this serve as the millionth reminder that your corporate employer does not give a shit about you. You are a number to them and they’ll have someone in your seat who’s willing to do your job for less money in worse conditions within a matter of days. You should act accordingly.
There’s also a lot of pressure from corporate real estate companies, who have a disproportionate amount of power. If people aren’t working in offices, then the office buildings lose value, and that’s unacceptable because, uhh… Next question.
Yessir, I’ve seen it right here in DC.
There’s also pressure from the other businesses surrounding corporate real estate. Here in MN the government mandated state employees return to the office because hospitality businesses were struggling in St. Paul.
I don’t know when construction on Ford’s shiny new office started, but if it were any time after 2020, I think it’s dumb of them. The future is more hybrid for jobs that don’t need to be in a cubicle, and the deciders who spend the money on real estate and then push RTO to justify said real estate are going to lose employees good enough to have other options. Unless the real goal is avoid a RIF by constructive dismissal, which is a real possibility.
They broke ground on December 2020.
As I sit here, 100% WFH, listening to my two kids fight with each other, I question if remote work is exponentially better for my well being lol. Still wouldn’t trade it for a commute though.
I’m 100% remote but my kids aren’t in the house. They’re in school. WFH does not equal parenting all day.
Watch out, according to dear leader, that type of talk is anti-American and a predictor of future violence.
Eh. I’m also not religious, which apparently has me on a list too. I’m also on an SSRI, so RFK wants me put on a work farm as well. They’ll be coming for me any minute I’m sure, hail Satan!
Right on, same. See you in the camps!
Well shit, at least we’ll all be in good company.
Don’t forget anti-capitalist is also supposedly on the list that will get you flagged as a domestic terrorist.
Yup. So glad the Republicans brought back free speech.
Exactly, which is why any and all blathering on about some supposed ‘company culture’ is a big ol’ load of bollocks.
Insanely old fashioned business model and thought…oh my god, my employees have to be in front of me so I can micromanage them. Or the usual excuse, “How do I know they’re doing their job?” Duh. If they’re generating the required spreadsheets, reports, emails, research and submitting it…well, the work is right there in front of you.
It always did strike me as a bit weird that companies designing and assembling machines for the explicit purpose of moving people around would be on the WFH bandwagon.
In that sense I guess this isn’t so surprising, but my attitude/sympathy is definitely with the vandal.
For every engineer that designs something or works with systems/hardware, there are likely dozens of support staff just doing basic clerical work.
Zero reason for accounting, planning, procurement, admin, etc people to be on site.
For instance, the procurement team where I work handles purchasing for at least a dozen locations in North America, clearly they don’t need to be at every site to do that.
Are they going from completely remote to 4 days in office or were they already working on-site a couple days?
Years ago somebody introduced me to the term “career limiting manoeuvre”.
In case anybody’s wondering what such a thing would look like, this is a great example.
Ugh, my Municipal employer has just stated RTO 5 days a week starting in January.
I’ve told them explicitly that the reason I took this temp position was the hybrid work model.
And if they take that option away, I’ll go back to my substantive position instead of taking the permanent position, as this was a lateral move pay-wise and the other position was easier/less work.
The amount of ship jumping I’ve seen is incredible.
Work life balance is important to some people.
I’ve also met people who make an ~6-8h drive Monday mornings, stay the week in the office, and drive home Friday nights to have weekends at home with the family. Every week. Not sustainable for me, but maybe being out of the house during the week is better for their relationships.