#worklifebalance

Posts mentioning hashtag #worklifebalance

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Mental Health

With constant reorgs, reshuffling of managers every 1-2 years, people moving out of the company, and now asking to RTO 5 days in a different state, my mental health has taken a toll. Unless I was in Dallas this whole time, there was no certainty what my office location will be and where to buy a home. It kept changing every 1-2 years. Now after 20 years, I have decided to relocate to Dallas, as I couldn’t land any other offer. WTF I am doing? I have no clue, but just trying to save the job for now.

#MentalHealth #Relocation #Reorganization #WorkLifeBalance

Open office a place holder for final re-organization?

Like many I am very frustrated by the hunt for a landing spot every morning, and all the noise and confusion that goes with it. Will we get offices again after the reorganization is finalized. That is, is this $hit$how just a holding pattern or is it really the permante new normal? Not sure I can live with this long term.

#Concern #Culture #Office #Reorganization #WorkLifeBalance

Anyone working on the day off (Friday)?

I try not to work on holidays when I can avoid it.

Unfortunately, I need to be prepared for the next LR.

You might ask, “Couldn’t you prepare for the next LR during normal business hours, on actual working days?”

Yes. I do that too.

In fact, that is most of what I do.

Every now and then, some pesky customer calls and interrupts my LR preparation, but I try not to let that derail the mission.

#LR #Layoff #WorkFromAnywhere #WorkLifeBalance #Workload

Benefits

since Leadership has seemed to have completely f*ck this up, what are some benefits you think would incentivize you to stay?

for me, it's the PTO policy. 18 days use it or lose it is ridiculous. and not getting another week until 8 YEARS of service?

how about 23 days to start, with flexibility to carry some time over. change the years of service requirement to earn an extra week.

and... as for the Directors and above not having a PTO bank? reel that in, 'cause my Director takes off a minimum of 8 WEEKS EVERY YEAR. clear abuse of the policy.

#Benefits #EmployeeRelations #Leadership #PTO #WorkLifeBalance

What A Cluster...

I think it's very possible that more people applied than what they anticipated.

imagine if the target was 8,000 eliminations and they received 12,000 applications... but of those 12,000 applications, only 3,000 were on the elimination list. they still need to cut the 5,000... so what do they do? maybe accept 1,000 of the VSPs and still have to cut 4,000...

now for those 8,000 VSP applications they have to reject? that's a LOT of pi---d off people who will probably be looking to leave. now they have to figure out how to retain those employees.

and for those 4,000 being cut... they will be upset too.

that is probably the clusterf*ck they have gotten themselves into.

July is about to be a headache for everyone.

#EmployeeRelations #Layoffs #Retention #VSP #WorkLifeBalance

How long before the next round?

Sad thing is, even knowing this round is over I can't truly relax or be happy I survived, since we all know there'll be more before the end of the year. Working with the constant threat of layoffs is not good for our health, mental or physical. Layoffs always happened, but they were occasional, not like now.

#Anxiety #EmployeeRelations #Layoffs #MentalHealth #WorkLifeBalance

Don't Believe the Hype

This extension isn't for you, this mass exodus just didn't fit their timeline. My guess is there will be a lot of rah-rah bullsh-t next week, and guilt tripping.

Do what's best for you, not the shareholders. Project Simplify isn't over, they just want you to forget about it right now.

#Culture #Layoffs #Management #Project #WorkLifeBalance

UK Works Council - Waste of space

The UK Works Council is only there to give a veneer of respectability to whatever DXC HR choose to do. There is no accountability. They never push back strongly just approve as they are asked to do like good pets. Try talking to them and they just say there is nothing they can do.

What they should do in all conscience is resign from the works council so HR can't say "this was approved by the works council".

#Accountability #Culture #EmployeeRelations #HR #WorkLifeBalance

Found a new job as soon as I stopped worrying about pay

I'm aware that not everybody has that luxury, but if you can afford to drop 10 to 20 percent, there are plenty of options. My new job is interesting and it provides me with a chance to diversify in my field. I've been gone for a few months and I'm satisfied. If you want to leave, you have options. Just widen your search a bit.

#Career #JobSearch #JobSecurity #WorkLifeBalance

Fatigued with showing my worth

I don’t know about you all but I’m so tired of having to prove what I do day in and out. I have been asked for accomplishments from this year on a couple of different occasions and for different audiences and I need to map them back to my goals. I also must do a formal documented development plan in workday.

I don’t know what they are being used for, probably to stack rank us and for conversations about our futures. Either way they have created this environment where every little thing makes a person feel like they need to prove and be thankful for a job. Last time I checked doing my job day to day sufficiently should be enough. I don’t know why I typed this. It’s feeling heavy today I guess.

#Burnout #Culture #EmployeeEngagement #Morale #WorkLifeBalance

WFH NY Times article

When the pandemic came to an end, many people who had been working from home assumed they would be allowed to maintain that habit at least a few days a week. But today in the U.S., a third of companies have forced everyone back to the office full time and have banned remote and hybrid work.

Some leaders say they insist on full-time in-person work because it boosts productivity, despite clear evidence that it does not. Others claim it’s about collaboration, creativity or culture. Our new research reveals that the objection to any work from home is more likely to be driven by something else entirely: ego.

Case by case, there may be good reasons for teams to work together in person. As a general rule, though, it turns out that ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.

Over the past six years, we’ve studied why some leaders continue to support remote work, while others resist it. We surveyed thousands of executives, middle managers and frontline supervisors on a host of personality traits. When we later asked them about their stances on hybrid and remote work, their answers didn’t correlate with how much they trusted their employees or how much they loved being around people. The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism — the tendency to be self-centered and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status — and the more they favored return-to-office mandates.
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That pattern held for chief executives of Fortune 500 companies. Since we couldn’t directly measure the size of their egos, we measured factors that many previous studies have identified as reliable proxies for narcissism: the sizes of their pay packages, their signatures and their photos in their company reports. (No, the chief executives probably aren’t directly overseeing the page layout, but their underlings have to figure out what will and won’t please the boss.) Commanding outsize compensation and projecting an outsize image sends a message right out of Ron Burgundy’s playbook: I’m kind of a big deal. We found that the higher chief executives scored on this index, the more likely they were to seek power and status by becoming chairmen of their own companies and joining the boards of other companies. These were the chief executives who made the most negative statements about remote and hybrid work during the first two years of the pandemic.

The connection between narcissistic personality traits and wanting people in the office full time is not coincidental — it’s causal. In one experiment, we got leaders to reflect on the role that a bold, assertive ego played in the success of Steve Jobs as Apple’s chief executive and Larry Ellison as Oracle’s. After participating in that exercise, leaders were more likely to oppose remote work.

None of this is to say that individual leaders who reject remote work are necessarily egomaniacs. Many factors influence workplace policies around flexibility. But our data does show that overall, self-centered leaders tend to struggle with the idea of employees making independent choices about where to work. Psychologists have long suggested that narcissism is like a dr-g — it leaves people craving a regular supply of attention and validation. Remote work deprives leaders of access to that supply.

When people aren’t in the office, it’s harder to command and control. Leaders can’t intimidate by hovering over cubicle desks and slamming doors. They can’t establish their dominance by summoning people to a conference room and pounding their fists on the table. They can’t even make direct eye contact to stare people down.

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Remote work also prevents leaders from basking in the glow of employee reverence. Instead of standing out in the corner office, leaders are lost in a sea of equal squares on a screen. Instead of rapt attention, they’re met online with boredom, fatigue and interruptions from partners, children and pets. Instead of being showered with immediate gratification, they get glitchy facial expressions and delayed replies. Sycophantic reassurances from employees just don’t have the same effect if they’re on Slack.
Self-centered leaders often respond to these threats by tightening their grip. They declare that people are shirking from home instead of working from home. They threaten to fire people who aren’t on site five days a week.

Rigorous evidence shows that forcing people to come in every day backfires. Take it from studies of over 450 companies and over three million employees: Return-to-office mandates fail to increase financial returns. They succeed only in motivating star employees to quit, reducing the satisfaction of those who stay and discouraging new talent from joining. Experiments at tech companies and nonprofits show that letting people work from home part of the week boosts happiness and decreases turnover by a third — without any cost to performance. In many cases, those employees even get more done, because they don’t have to spend time commuting and don’t get distracted by office interruptions.

There are limits to the benefit of flexible office policies. Research suggests that working from home for more than half the week can be isolating — it’s harder to build connections and cultures. It’s also more difficult to encourage creative collisions, informal learning and mentoring. But it doesn’t take five days a week to accomplish these goals. In fact, it turns out that people are most collaborative and creative when they work remotely part of the week. They can use a day or two at home to focus on individual deep work and reserve the rest of the week for communication and collective problem-solving. It’s well documented that too much togetherness breeds groupthink (not to mention germs). When we spend some time apart, we actually generate more innovative ideas and make smarter decisions.

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Hybrid work does have its own challenges for leaders. It’s not fun to try to inspire through a recorded video message or lead a brainstorming session on a digital whiteboard. But to maintain a competitive advantage in an increasingly flexible world, it’s time for leaders to put their egos aside and master the art of managing from afar. Evidence supports a few basic guidelines.

One: Coordination counts. Teams need anchor days when everyone shows up — especially to welcome newcomers and mentor junior people. At Microsoft, new hires who spent at least a couple of days a month with their manager and their teams were more satisfied with their early experiences, which in turn meant they were more likely to stay over the next year and a half.
Two: Intensity beats frequency. The software company Atlassian has found that spending a few days with your team at a well-designed quarterly team gathering does more for connection and belonging than daily schleps to the office.

Three: Hybrid work is not one-size-fits-all. Different jobs require different amounts of time in person. So do different people; for example, flexibility proves particularly important in attracting and retaining women. And you need to gather together more if your staff operates like a basketball team passing the ball back and forth, rather than a gymnastics team whose members do their own individual events. (This explains why fully remote teams struggle to patent new technologies, but the people who examine patent applications are more productive when they can work from anywhere they like.)

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Four: Most people care more about when they work than where. If they can choose the hours, they’re more willing to let leaders pick the place.

Organizational policies shouldn’t be vanity projects. The responsibility of leaders is not to mold the world to their needs. It’s to adapt themselves to the world’s needs, even if it means learning to live without the thrill of a live audience.

#Culture #EmployeeEngagement #Leadership #RemoteWork #WorkLifeBalance

Not Sure how much longer I’m gonna last here

I’m so stressed I’m having nightmares and daymares about me dying at my desk or turning into that Brendan Fraser movie The Whale. I think I might have to look elsewhere sooner that I thought. I was gonna holdout longer but I don’t think it’s a good idea

#Anxiety #Burnout #CareerPivot #LookingToLeave #WorkLifeBalance

Another Week Looms

it’s 2am on the east coast. I’m wide awake knowing 8am will be here before I know it.

I’m dreading another week of “hey! how are you?” “I’m good! how are you?” “let me share my screeeeeeeeen.” can we just not.

I don’t want to talk to anyone and it’s not personal. I’m too much in my own head to even think about anything outside of “okay, what do I do now?” I don’t want to discuss projects, strategy or give my thoughts… NOTHING. let’s regroup mid-August.

I feel like those of us who remain should be given extra sick days ‘cause I truly am sick of this nonsense and we know it will get worse.

I hope everyone has a good week. at least it’s a short one.

#Burnout #EmployeeHappiness #Morale #SickDays #WorkLifeBalance

RTO & Not Enough Seats

Just got a RTO related email outlining ground rules which included packing up all of your stuff if you plan to be in meetings for an extended period of time. It's bad enough not to have a permanent desk, but being expected to vacate a desk during the business day is beyond ridiculous. If you want me in the office, I need an actual space to work.

#Office #OfficeCulture #RTO #WorkFromAnywhere #WorkLifeBalance