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?
A while back someone in the know said how it could be done at a reasonable cost: each floor has small apartments built on the outside walls (one bedroom, two bedroom and family units … possibly different floors for each) with the interior centre section as a common space with a large kitchen, rec room, small kids area, etc. Bathrooms should already be on each floor, just need to tie in showers (and add more stalls if required).
There are towers doing this in a few areas, but the naysayers yell loudly when riled.
Would still be nicer to have sunlight for the communal areas, but that sounds like a working solution. Probably profit goes into the drain though, because you get less units you can rent out and people will pay less for apartments with only a shared bathroom and kitchen.
If it’s a choice between not having a place to live or apartments like that, which would you choose?
I mean Canada is accepting refugees who end up on the streets because there’s no housing for them!