Work Reform

I get along perfectly fine in an office setting with almost everyone. It's the people who feel overly welcome to just come up and completely alter your day... and I don't mean the boss with a priority shift, nor do I mean some critical incident that needs urgent response to fix. How best to explain it to you... In my team of 25 people, only one is a problem. Insists that not only does he need to be in the office, but that he works best if everyone else is at the office, too. When that happens, or as it consistently was before Covid, he was never at his desk. Where's Mark? He has that xyz deployment today and no announcements have gone out. "I dunno, I last saw him upstairs chatting with Alex." Great, he's upstairs with the dev he bullies into doing everything for him again... Ok, I'll send him a slack and an email reminding him we need his deployment outage announcement or the customer is going to cancel. ... Nothing happens still. No one can find him. He shows up at my desk, hasn't read the slack or email, "Hey, can you send out a notification for the deployment?" Where have you been? "Got side tracked talking with Han in sales." Um, Han is on the automotive product, you're on the ships product... "Yeah, I just saw him and we ended up talking and... and... and..." Meanwhile, I get an email from both Han and Alex asking us to try and keep Mark from bothering them today, they have too much to do. Alex's email asks why he's having to do Mark's deployment.

That is what I'm talking about. If a person needs to be in the office to do the job everyone else on the team can do remotely, this is likely why they like the office. Now I get it, some people can't get away from wife, kids, or other home stuff while working from home and an office gives them the space they need. Those people are happy to go in on their own and don't try demanding everyone else return to the office to support them. Then there are those who feel they need the commute to shift gears. I get it, I use to be that way a long time ago. It just took getting use to the change and some open honest communication with the family that I'd like 30 minutes or so after work to switch into family time mode and why. That works well.