This page is a portal to articles on Remote Work and Remote Attendance, the single most immediate improvement we can make to aviation noise, pollution and climate impacts.
| Don’t turn back the clock on work-from-home flexibility | By Gleb Tsipursky Special to The Times A recent survey of more than 10,000 global knowledge workers and their leaders shows the current concern of executives is over hybrid and remote work schedules, and something called “proximity bias,” a fear that those who choose to return to offices will get ahead, while those who stay | 2022-02-11 |
| Viewpoint: Why many return-to-office plans are facing resistance | By Ty West – Editor-in-Chief, The Playbook, Jun 20, 2022 For many companies, the long-awaited return to the office isn’t going quite as expected. Employers are facing pushback from workers. Covid-19 cases have been on an upswing, which is contributing to the resistance. Employees still have unprecedented leverage. That’s not stopping prominent CEOs like Tesla Inc.’s Elon Musk from making bold declarations calling | 2022-06-22 |
| Apple employees push back on latest return-to-office plan | Apple delayed full implementation of a return-to-office plan in the spring because of another Covid-19 surge. The company’s office in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood is pictured here. ANTHONY BOLANTE | PSBJ By J. Jennings Moss – Editor-in-Chief and General Manager, Silicon Valley Business Journal Aug 22, 2022 The news last week that Apple Inc. would, once again, fully | 2022-08-22 |
| Microsoft Says ‘Productivity Paranoia’ Can Hurt Hybrid Workplaces | Employees think they’re being just as productive as ever. Bosses aren’t buying it. New data from Microsoft’s Work Trend Index, which surveyed 20,000 employees across 11 countries, finds that despite early signs of a productivity boom during the pandemic—when many workers traded commuting time for more hours of working from home—there’s a steep divide between how | 2022-09-15 |
| Only one major city ranks higher than Seattle for remote work | An empty office floor in the Olympic Tower in downtown Seattle, September of 2020. (Amanda Snyder / The Seattle Times) by Gene Balk Seattle Times columnist Driving is no longer the dominant way Seattle residents get to work — and all it took was a pandemic. Census data released Thursday shows from 2019-2021, the number of Seattle | 2022-09-15 |
| Microsoft’s plans to slash Eastside leases signal troubling trend for Bellevue | Broderick Group described Microsoft’s possible move out of Bellevue as a “catastrophic blow” to the market. Anthony Bolante | PSBJ Microsoft Corp. is gradually confirming its plans to relinquish office space on the Eastside, putting Bellevue’s real estate market on an unhealthy trend. The Redmond-based software maker doesn’t plan to renew leases on 1.1 million | 2022-10-11 |
| Fewer drivers in Seattle’s Highway 99 tunnel could create need for bailout | 1 of 2 | Downtown Seattle looms behind the south portal of the Highway 99 tunnel, which isn’t generating enough toll income to pay for maintenance and $200 million in construction debt. (Ken Lambert / The Seattle Times) By Mike Lindblom Seattle Times staff reporter Washington state’s new Highway 99 tunnel lost so much traffic because | 2022-10-15 |
| Many bosses plan to clamp down on hybrid workers | Enlarge Many bosses are planning to step up efforts to get employees into the office. NUTHAWUT SOMSUK VIA GETTY IMAGES IN THIS ARTICLE Professional ServicesIndustry PlaybookTopic By Andy Medici – Senior Reporter, The Playbook, Nov 8, 2022 Updated Nov 8, 2022, 11:45pm PST Listen to this article 6 min Many employees remain reluctant to return to the office — even | 2022-11-08 |
| Playbook for 2023: How to make your hybrid office better | Enlarge With economic worries mounting, it’s likely 2023 will be a critical year for the future of hybrid offices. ALEUTIE IN THIS ARTICLE PlaybookTopic NationalTopic Jan LehmanPerson Maureen Jules-PerezPerson Micah RemleyPerson By Ty West – Editor-in-Chief, The Playbook, Jan 3, 2023 Updated Jan 3, 2023, 10:29pm PST Listen to this article 4 min Editor’s Note: This story is part of our | 2023-01-03 |
| Getting rid of remote work will take more than a downturn | As the economy slows, a handful of prominent CEOs have tried to put an end to remote work. But some economists say that even in a cooler labor market, working from home is likely to remain common. (Jared Oriel/The New York Times) By Sarah Kessler The New York Times During the nearly three years since | 2023-01-27 |
| Seattle’s 5 largest tech employers agree: It’s return-to-office time | When several hundred Seattle Amazon.com Inc. employees staged a walkout on May 31, it was in part over the company’s stricter return-to-office policy that went into effect at the beginning of May. Its requirement that employees work in the office three days a week meant Amazon’s 65,000-employee local corporate and tech workforce have had to resume | 2023-06-05 |
| Return to Office Enters the Desperation Phase | The next stage of getting workers back at their desks includes incentives like $10 to the charity of their choice — and consequences like poor performance evaluations if they don’t make the trek in. For 10 days, Salesforce is giving a $10 charitable donation per day on behalf of any employee who comes into the | 2023-06-20 |
| Workers resisting the office grind are suddenly lonely at home | By Irina Anghel Bloomberg Three years after the pandemic closed down offices around the world, the remote-work revolution has morphed into a tug of war between frustrated bosses and fed-up staff. While workers don’t want to give up flexibility, leaders want teams back to boost collaboration and avoid a productivity slump. The impasse is the | 2023-06-28 |
| Amazon is wrong — a return-to-work mandate is about control | Heather Snavely Special to The Seattle Times Recently, The Seattle Times reported that an Amazon executive said that it was serendipitous to return to the office but had no data to back that up, even going so far as to say “actual data … it’s very hard to come by” and especially “any data that […] would | 2023-08-31 |
| As office returns ramp up, workers are commuting more — and it’s costing them | By Andy Medici – Senior Reporter, The Playbook, The Business Journals Aug 31, 2023 If time is money, then commutes cost the average U.S. worker thousands of dollars a year. As the back-and-forth over a return to the office continues, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce calculated the cities with the costliest commutes by comparing the average commute time in each | 2023-08-31 |
| Return-to-office is a $1.3 trillion problem few have figured out | By Matthew Boyle Bloomberg News In the emerging post-pandemic era, most aspects of life have returned to normal. Moviegoers are flocking to cinemas, vacationers jammed airports for summer travel and kids are returning to classrooms. The one thing that has remained stubbornly fraught: the world of work. Three and a half years after millions of | 2023-09-10 |
| Letting people work from home is good for companies’ revenue growth | By Matthew Boyle Bloomberg Companies that allow remote work have experienced revenue growth that’s four times faster than those that are more stringent about office attendance, a new survey shows, adding fuel to the debate over productivity and performance in today’s workplaces. The analysis of 554 public companies that employ a collective 26.7 million people | 2023-11-19 |
| Remote-work options are rapidly disappearing | Bethany Bickley / ACBJ; Getty Images Marq Burnett – Associate Editor, The Playbook, The Business Journals Sep 2, 2024 The days of widespread, fully remote work may be coming to a close. That’s according to a new survey from ResumeBuilder, which found 87% of companies that had been fully remote will return to the office by 2025. | 2024-09-02 |
| One reason that most companies won’t admit is driving new RTO requirements | Marq Burnett – Associate Editor, The Playbook, The Business Journals Oct 9, 2024 Many organizations have championed better connectivity and collaboration as reasons for implementing more return-to-office policies. But new data suggests there may be a more nefarious reason, at least for some companies. A recent survey from ResumeTemplates found 1 in 10 companies are increasing in-office | 2024-10-09 |
| Microsoft reportedly clarifies in-office policy amid campus expansion | By Nick Pasion – Reporter, Puget Sound Business Journal Oct 9, 2024 Microsoft, the third largest employer in Washington, reportedly has no plans to call its employees back to the office five days per week. The company’s commitment to a flexible work policy, which was first reported by Business Insider, is somewhat surprising considering it’s nearly six years | 2024-10-09 |
| Companies that mandate RTO see slower workforce growth, studies show | Fresh analysis from Revelio Labs echoes research showing that office mandates cost companies hard-to-replace workers and hamper hiring. December 18, 2024 Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman defended the company’s return-to-office policy during an October all-hands meeting, saying that if employees didn’t feel they could work well in that environment, “there are other companies | 2024-12-18 |
| Seattle, the remote work capital of the U.S., is in denial about its effects | By Danny Westneat The struggles of Seattle’s downtown to recover after the pandemic have rightly been blamed on some key factors, such as the inability of the city to get control of public safety there. But new data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows just how much the change in how we work has affected | 2024-12-21 |
