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.

meara- Sorry, late May, not April. Time is very ephemeral this year. The products we sell include PPE and cleaning supplies so we were technically an essential business. But pretty much as soon as our state supreme court overruled the governor's stay at home order they started pulling people back into the office.

Dang. Do you feel like that has worked out ok for you personally, Kalshane? Are people following guidelines and whatnot?

A friend of mine was ordered back to the office every third week, for no good reason (she works in higher ed doing financial aid for an online program -- she never sees students in person anyway!), and she got out of it for a medical reason, which was her BMI, which seems crazy to me, but apparently is a high-risk marker.

Just a possible arrow for some to keep in their quiver if you're looking for a reason to stay out of the office.

Also, msbelle, I thought of you as it took me 1000 emails to get paperwork submitted to the City, but half of it was my issue. And they took scanned paperwork!!