My work said that childcare conflicts would be handled using the guidelines in FFCRA, but that they are complicated enough that each situation should be discussed with HR. So there's no policy. (This sets out what FFCRA provides pretty simply: [link]

We've been back in the office full time since late April (with the exception of people with a doctor's note saying they need to work from home) and we've only been told that they're going to work with people on a case-by-case basis if there's child care conflict due to schools not opening. But company ownership really, really, really hates people working from home, so it's not really surprising.

There are so many people who oppose working from home. On Ask A Manager, there are stories ... people who are required to be in Zoom meetings every day, people who have to report on what they plan to do, what they have done ... even being required to install a monitoring app/program that will report on what they've done. Not to mention the university that was requiring people, if they wanted to work from home, providing proof that they had childcare or a nanny (!) ... which was withdrawn fairly quickly. Do people knowingly hire slackers or are they so unmotivated that they assume anyone who's not being monitored will ... what? ... spend the day goofing off? My office (mostly) assumes that they've hired responsible adults who will do their work, regardless of whether they're working from home or in the office. I know I do some goofing off (hence my presence here), but everyone does it some. But as we don't have to officially take sick leave to visit the doctor or dentist, there seems to be a general assumption that as long as the work gets done, it's fine.

If I had to guess, I'd say it's because of the management/worker divide.(When in doubt, blame the MBAs.) If you're not focussing on anything except maximizing profit, any sign that people care about anything besides The Company will look like disloyalty or an attack.

That's not a universal explanation of course - my first boss at this job came up through the ranks from running a storefront office and he was paranoid as anything about what his employees might be getting away with.

Timelies all!

Yay, Dana!

My employer has always given the impression of being against working from home in the past, as a cultural thing, I guess. Like, it wasn't forbidden but it was discouraged and couldn't be done on a regular basis unless you were actually working remotely (which some people do, but they are either salespeople who have working remotely as part of their job description, practically, or exceptions) the same way that we were often told that we should call people instead of emailing (I have no idea why) or go talk to people face to face if possible (which is a nice idea but in reality seems to mean interrupting me unnecessarily). But we basically all had to when the county closed offices and the work got done so maybe minds were changed? And the Managing Director is relatively new, so maybe he always was ok with people working from home but that hadn't filtered down past the previous bias against it.

I mean, when we were in the office people were always taking smoke breaks or going for walks or standing around chatting, we weren't more disciplined workers just from being on site by any means.

Jeez Kalshane are you an essential worker??? Being back since April is nuts!

oh, as usual dear ... I have been a bit miffed that our communications team has taken over our mass emails. I had previously been responsible for them and I thought I was doing well, but they've decided they want to do them all themselves. I'm still responsible for the addresses that the vendor they use to send them out maintains - I upload addresses and I monitor the bad addresses, making sure that our membership people (who manage our database) get information about bad addresses ... which is fine with me. I am, however, taking a certain amount of, well, glee in that they're ignoring one little thing I did to make life easier for other people. Early on, when we first started using this vendor I had some "generic" email addresses set up - ones that no one else saw that would get all the bounce-backs, either from people who were out of the office or had left the company. Well, the communications team doesn't like using those ... they recently sent out a message from our CEO ... and the bounce-backs (of which there will be a lot because - hello! working remotely!) will go to a mailbox shared by our CEO, her #2 and her assistant. he he he

When my agency started allowing telework, we had to submit a work plan the day before and then report on what we had accomplished. Those requirements eventually kind of -- just went away.

Over the last couple of years, I've been teleworking pretty frequently thanks to health issues, doctor appointments, and so on. No real requirements, although my supervisors appreciate advance notice where possible. Eventually, I developed the habit of emailing my supervisory every Monday morning with my schedule for the week.

Technically, we're now on what is called "extended telework." Which means we can telework full time, no reason necessary. We've been told that we'll get 30 days advance notice before going back to regular in-office work schedules.

We just had a brief discussion on our department meeting today about our annual outlet sale - no official word yet, but I cannot imagine how it could possibly happen. I get sick after working it every year under normal circumstances. For it to be worthwhile we pretty much have to have crowds. And aside from the health and safety aspect, our inventory levels are already looking problematically low, setting aside a bunch of stuff for the sale would make that worse well into January. That aspect was a mess last year and we didn't start out in trouble.

Kind of sad, we've been doing it for 25+ years but I don't see how it's possible. Maybe people will be content with online deals.