I was a fed lawyer. But our clients - other non lawyer fed staff were on site and in person discussions and meetings were daily and easy to set up. The other lawyers on staff had it easy to brain pick and otherwise share experience. The people we dealt with from the public we could have and did for the most part do by phone and at the end do by zoom sort of conferencing. I guess office morale is a thing of the past for better or worse.
A little over stated, but i agree, it is all part of the trend toward isolation and diminished social interaction. Some people handle it better than others. The original idea was to allow people to balance home responsibilities, especially child care, with work. That doesn’t figure in any more and the golf courses are way busier than they used to be.
If an employer has micromanaging policies like this I would never agree to work with them in the first place. And believe me, that's very much their loss.
I don’t work for a public facing organization, and our clients are located all over the world due to the nature of the organization. My speciality, Government contracts, has clients that have not returned to work and will never return to work, contracting officers and financial managers. There is an abundance of these jobs (open and available) across the Government, so agency leadership makes exception to the return to work policy for them so as to retain and attract talent. Agency leadership would make an exception for us as well, if attorney leadership would allow it.
I've had several 2-3 month stints of pure wfh and you find other ways to interact with people. Do you really want to talk to Becky from accounting while you're heating up your lunch in the break room? Or would you rather meet your friend that also wfh for lunch once or twice a week?
Or do what I do and head to happy hour once a week and chat somebody up at the bar.
The answer is there is zero chance people who were just starting their careers when Covid and telecommuting hit will be mentored as much as prior generations, and thus will be as good as senior leaders in 30 years as prior generations. If you don’t need leaders, and everyone doing their job is enough in a business, great, but most companies need not just workers but leaders. Law firms certainly do.
Exactly! Anything else is poor management.
No. Just that they won’t have picked up as much mentorship as workers who work together in an office, and that as a group they therefore will not be as good at running organizations.
That is me but I'm not at the desk but with my computer in my bed. Lol! I wander over to my desk later when fully awake.
