But at 3 p.m. I returned a little reluctantly for a middle managers' meeting, to hear more information about my company's new return-to-work policy. The policy is that starting at the end of February we would have to return to the office for at least 4 days per week.
It was announced to middle managers like me per hastily scheduled video call from a head of the Europe-Middle-East-and-Africa section of our parent company, on Monday morning. This was followed by a rambling email (hours later than promised) to the whole company by our CEO, and then a question-and-answer video with the CEO on Wednesday.
Of course this is better than Elon Musk's dictum that people who aren't working in the office don't belong in his company.
But my team was unexpectedly firm in not wanting to return to the office, and spent the first day after the announcement moping.
I felt more philosophical at first, but then also became annoyed by the lack of understanding from the company leadership about the worst challenges that my colleagues were facing. I also began to realize how much this ruling invades our privacy.
Is it really nice to ask teammates to detail the private pain that they often see elderly people who are seriously ill and that they are afraid of infecting them with seasonal viruses that are deadly to weakened immune systems?
Is it really fair to ask colleagues to 'out' chronic health conditions that they prefer not to mention in work contexts for the sake of not having to deal with it for at least a few hours per day, or fair to ask them to declare mental illnesses of which they may be ashamed?
— The policy is: If colleagues want an exemption from the 4-day rule, they must fill out a questionnaire. The inputs will be read and evaluated by their direct manager (e.g. me), the managers above their direct manager including people whom they have never met, and human resources personnel whom they have never met.
Moreover, although this is likely confidential information I'll spill it anyway, the human resources team expects 40-50% of employees to ask for an exemption.
Apparently a company that just fired 20% of its workforce and is not backfilling roles of people who left for other reasons before and afterward, which has been hell for the employees who are left with the larger workload and the loss of trusted workplace friends... is willing to spend massive amounts of time and personnel on processing thousands of remote work exemption applications. This is a process that adds absolutely no value to our product, for our shareholders or for any ordinary person or company who uses our services.
Which brings me to the putative justification for the 4-day work policy: Togetherness. The idea being that we will be happier, more collaborative, and have a nicer working culture if we are all together in the office, like a happy family.
One of my teammates joked that Rick Astley's late 1980s pop hit Together Forever should become the team anthem.
The problem is: the company's leadership has extremely narrow view of Togetherness. What about the needs of parents who, weirdly enough, might like to be Together with their children — their actual family? What about those of us who'd have liked to be Together with colleagues who were fired over the past year? What about those of us who would be happier spending more time Together with our friends and relatives outside of work?
I was also angry that apparently only commute times 1.5 hours or longer will be considered even remotely uncomfortable by our American superiors. As a bit of a would-be architecture and city planning nerd, I know that Berlin is laid out quite differently from many American cities. Moreover I consider a live-in-the-suburbs-and-commute model unenviable for humane reasons and for environmental reasons (consider the harm that 2 or more hours of car driving do). With this news, I've lost hope that 1 or 2 of the teammates who live quite far away from the office will get the no-fuss exemption I'd expected for them, and which would have allowed them and me to get on with our lives.
Intermittently I've done nice things yesterday and today — like go shopping in little neighbourhood shops for assorted Christmas things, and indulging in food experimentation by cooking a Mesopotamian root vegetable stew from a historical recipe book as well as sweet potato pancakes with kimchi mayonnaise. In the evening, fifteen of us had a lovely, hearty restaurant meal as a family with visitors from western Germany.
In the late afternoon, I'd gone for a walk in the snowy landscape, green grass and yellow or brown leaves scattered through or just beneath the surface of the thin layer of snow, to the allotment gardens. I had bought a beautiful bouquet of red tulips from a florist's store; and the grainy grey snow sky had the traditional wintry, blankety look.
Only two or three groups of people were walking in the gardens, so I was almost left alone to commune with nature. (And to think of Robert Frost's poem, perhaps inspired by subconscious associations via 'Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening': Two roads diverged in a wood... I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference.)
And when a wind chime rang quietly from a hidden garden nearby, I felt a moment of wonder and a vague 'memory,' and realized that it reminded me of Narnia and the White Witch's sleigh and (admittedly bewitched) hot chocolate and Turkish delight.
... But I've also been stewing in work-related anger, and the lovely vacation and weekend are not as relaxing as I'd hoped.
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