Google and JPMorgan have each told staff that office attendance will be factored into performance evaluations. The US law firm Davis Polk informed employees that fewer days in the office would result in lower bonuses. And Meta and Amazon both told employees they’re now monitoring badge swipes, with potential consequences for workers who don’t comply with attendance policies – including job loss. Increasingly, workers across many jobs and sectors appear to be barrelling towards the same fate.
In some ways, it’s unsurprising bosses are turning back to attendance as a standard. After all, we’ve long been conditioned to believe showing up is vital to success, from some of our earliest days. In school, perfect attendance is often still seen a badge of honour. The obsession with attendance has also been a mainstay of workplace culture for decades; pre-pandemic, remote work was largely unheard of, and employees were expected to be physically present at their desks throughout the workday.
Yet after the success of flexible arrangements during the pandemic, attendance is still entrenched as a core metric. What’s the point?
During the pandemic, when we were all forced to work from home, one of my coworkers would incessantly bitch and moan about how he missed being back at the office.
He is the kind of person who pulls all sorts of bullshit out of his ass and starts treating it as if it’s true. At some point he started going around saying that “productivity when WFH is ok but everybody is complaining that they can’t make plans for future projects without face to face time”. When our director got curious and asked him where he had heard about this, he changed the topic.
Basically this is a person who doesn’t want to do anything and makes a career out of going around and pretending to be working and calling meetings when they’re not needed. For this kind of person, WFH is deadly as it clearly shows that their “skills” are not needed for the company’s success.