Retirees, Do You Believe People are Really Working From Home? (salary, family)

[moguldreamer]

Originally Posted by lottamoxie

Working remote is not a new thing. People who are pushing 70 and older might think it is, but no, it isn't.

I remember regularly working remote once a week starting in 1997. The technology has been in place to connect to corp networks 25+ years, and that was years before broadband.

There's a certain manager type who believes if they can't see butts in seats every day in the office, it means the person simply is not working. They tend to be the micromanagers, bean counters, time clock types. Flexibility is not something they deal well with. They don't think in terms of results, they think in terms of hours spent at the office.

In my mind, some types of jobs lend themselves very well to full-time remote work because the jobs are very results-oriented and are quite independent of collaboration and informal water-cooler conversations & collaboration.

One classic example is a patent attorney engaged in patent prosecution (the process of turning an invention disclosure into a patent application and ultimately an issued patent). We had in-house patent attorneys who came in to the office about once per quarter and that was it. In very simplistic terms, the job was to take an invention disclosure form from their "in-box", and read it, then spend time researching the field and what makes the invention novel, and then one or more telephone interviews with the principal inventor on details of the invention. That's followed up by research of the already issued patents, published articles in technical journals, etc etc etc. Finally, the attorney spends a week or two actually writing the patent application - a series of horrible run-on sentences - and supervising a graphic artist to create any drawings required to support the application. Then, they file it with the USPTO.

In the above scenario, collaboration on teams isn't really a thing, and being in the office is largely irrelevant. Indeed, the job is very solitary.

I contrast that with a patent attorney who is part of a litigation team suing another company for patent infringement. That is very team-based and collaboration, including informal communication is quite important. I find that type of team based collaboration works better with at least some face to face office time - perhaps a couple days/week, and during crunch times, probably 7 days/week.

[ChristineVA]

My neighbor just went to 100% remote work, unexpectedly for him. He works for a major, nationally known insurance company and they've essentially been all remote since March 2020. Then he was supposed to go back last summer/fall but Delta hit so they backed off, then he was supposed to go back in the Winter, but Omicron came. They finally came back into the office a few months ago. He just got notification that the company had looked at the productivity metrics for his particular office within the major company and they found that his team was way more productive at home. So they've now switched them over to full-time remote work.

In his particular function, he gets assignments sent to his team daily through the insurer's internal system. They generally have a 24 hour due date. They get the assignments, work on them, submit, and move on to the next. Apparently with the lack of commute, workers were taking on more assigments at the end of the day and completing them early as they weren't prepping to pack up, commute etc. He said that he had just got an assignment in late yesterday, around 4:00PM. His quitting time is 5PM and the assignment was due the next morning. Normally he wouldn't start it knowing he had to get ready to leave and they don't like to half-work them. He would have saved the assignment for when he got in during the morning. Still would have been on time, but this way, he does it early and there's more time to take on new things.

If he gets all his assignments for the day done at, say, 2:30, he can do other things he needs to do as long as he is near the phone and can quicky access the internal system (which is on his phone also). So yeah, maybe you'd see him at the grocery store picking up a few things during "retiree" hours.

[Bette]

I work in the mortgage industry. Even though I have an office, people are able to work remotely in this industry and some have been doing this for years.

Underwriters are often working remotely.

Others that I've seen continue to work remotely are insurance agents and their staff, title companies and their employees, some law offices, appraisers and the list goes on.

We are in a busy area - restaurants usually have a wait and even our mall is always busy!

[HB2HSV]

Originally Posted by North Beach Person

But the work location presumes your residence there. Locality pay is designed to be a supplement to base pay for employees living in a high COL area (EX: a Social Security employee in Annapolis is paid more through locality pay than one in Pittsburgh). Don't think for a minute that if it's found that employees have moved to low COL areas from ones with a high COL to do work from home that Congress won't start to look at salary adjustments.

Businesses already do it.

Nothing is perfect in the government system.

Business doesn't do it. The salary is based on negotiation and largely based on the market rate.

Imagine a particular agency tracking individual employee location, then relaying that information to OPM for payroll processing. In addition, for budgetary purposes, each agency needed to figure out its overhead rate based on individual employee location. You will need to overhaul the OPM payroll software and that will be a multi-year, multi-billion dollars project. When you factor in the % of employees that lives far away from cost center, that makes the change a non-starter. Then what if an employee lives in a significant higher cost locality? Will you increase his/her pay? For example, live in DC but work in Annapolis?

In addition, one could debate a particular locality rate. For example, here in SoCal where Edwards AFB is located in Kern County, 100+ miles north of downtown LA, and the Naval Weapons Center in even more remote in Ridgecrest (closer to Nevada than it is to LA), yet both were included in the LA/ Long Beach locality pay scale, the 2nd highest locality pay in the nation. One could argue the civil service pay is already below the industry average, one needs them to be included in a higher locality pay to attract employees to come to work in the remote desert.

[MadManofBethesda]

Originally Posted by HB2HSV

Why should they give up locality pay? The "locality cost of living" does not change and in fact, has increased due to inflation.

Originally Posted by North Beach Person

What about locality pay if the employee moves to a lower cost of living area due to work from home? Pay based on their previous location or their new one?

Originally Posted by North Beach Person

But the work location presumes your residence there. Locality pay is designed to be a supplement to base pay for employees living in a high COL area (EX: a Social Security employee in Annapolis is paid more through locality pay than one in Pittsburgh). Don't think for a minute that if it's found that employees have moved to low COL areas from ones with a high COL to do work from home that Congress won't start to look at salary adjustments.

Businesses already do it.

FWIW, locality pay has nothing to do with the cost of living in a particular area; it has to do with the cost of employment in that area. It is not based on changes to the CPI-W like COLAs are; it is based on the ECI, which is the Employment Cost Index for a particular area. For example, I haven't checked lately but while I was employed, Houston was always a high locality pay area even though it was a relatively low cost-of-living area due to the nature of the work force there (a mix of oil, gas, and aerospace engineering). Federal employees doing the same work at the same pay grade in Houston were paid more than those in D.C., even though D.C. is a much higher cost-of-living area.

[HB2HSV]

Originally Posted by MadManofBethesda

FWIW, locality pay has nothing to do with the cost of living in a particular area; it has to do with the cost of employment in that area. It is not based on changes to the CPI-W like COLAs are; it is based on the ECI, which is the Employment Cost Index for a particular area. For example, I haven't checked lately but while I was employed, Houston was always a high locality pay area even though it was a relatively low cost-of-living area due to the nature of the work force there (a mix of oil, gas, and aerospace engineering). Federal employees doing the same work at the same pay grade in Houston were paid more than those in D.C., even though D.C. is a much higher cost-of-living area.

So you're saying it's politically driven

[otowi]

Kind of weird to be policing other people's work schedules by hours they're in the store, etc. Work from Home is often flexible in its hours and days, allowing people to pick kids up from school or run errands as long as they're getting their work done. What matters is that the job gets done, not that someone is sitting at home at a certain time, in many cases.

[Mikala43]

Originally Posted by otowi

Kind of weird to be policing other people's work schedules by hours they're in the store, etc. Work from Home is often flexible in its hours and days, allowing people to pick kids up from school or run errands as long as they're getting their work done. What matters is that the job gets done, not that someone is sitting at home at a certain time, in many cases.

There are hundreds of reasons a working age person may be at the store between 9-5: work from home, picking up lunch/breakfast on way to job, works a different shift, student, SAHP, works weekends.....

[Metlakatla]

Originally Posted by DubbleT

I don't get why people act like the OP is some sort of hater because she isn't fond of the change.

No, it's not about how she doesn't like the change. That's understandable enough in itself. It's the odd and subtly hostile rhetoric about how people aren't "really" working and are "getting away with something" that's elicited the responses here — especially after some of us took the time to share our own situations with her and she just came back with more of the same.

[Serious Conversation]

Originally Posted by Threestep2

This may sound harsh but you too that job recently.

It is basically like this everywhere. This new company is a bit better than where I was before, but it's mostly because of superior benefits and a bit of an improvement in corporate culture. It's certainly not heaven.

People have brought up companies paying for the WFH employee's internet and things like that. I've never seen anything like this. We aren't given physical phones either. What WFH has meant for me is basically 8-5 with extra hours as needed.

I was working two Saturdays ago to implement some changes. I had to drive somewhere early this morning to reset a physical server in a datacenter that was not responsive. Sure, there are times that I do have some availability during business hours. I'll probably be leaving at 4:30 instead of 5 to do some errands and beat the dinner rush.

With that said, I'd never want to go back to full-time in the office. The 5+ hours a week commuting are significant. Gas is so high right now that the commute is just an unnecessary added expense.