a defensive executive, work-from-home is being revoked but there’s a baby, and more

by Alison Green on August 28, 2024

It’s five answers to five questions. Here we go…

1. Exec’s imposter syndrome makes her defensive

I chair a board of a mid-size community organization and as part of that role I line manage the chief exec, Flora. She’s a phenomenally smart, talented person with a real depth of experience in the work of the people she leads and a wonderful vision for how to make the organization better for the communities it serves. She can also tend … tetchy if she feels attacked or on the defensive. During a recent conversation about this where I noted the pattern of defensiveness and asked what’s going on, she indicated that part of the problem is she’s really struggling with impostor syndrome, especially when working with other board members who have expertise in related fields. This makes her feel defensive and less open to hearing other people’s views, and turns into a bit of a negative spiral.

I’m going to see if we can get her some career coaching, and of course I make sure to tell her both at formal and informal feedback moments what specifically she’s doing well. But is there anything I’m missing as a manager? What can I do to help Flora feel more confident and thus open to other people’s views? This isn’t a case of someone new to the workplace with no track record, this is a senior leader with lots of evidence of her value, which she is struggling to see!

A coach is a good idea. Look for a management coach, not a career coach, and make sure you or she specifically identifies this issue to them as a main one to work on.

But also: you’re approaching this in a very supportive way (“what can I do to help her feel more confident?”) but you’ve got to approach it as a fairly serious performance issue too. Flora needs to hear clearly from you that it’s not okay to be defensive or shut out other viewpoints — in any job but especially as the ED. As the ED, that behavior will have a massive negative effect on her staff — on morale, on initiative, and eventually on retention. Right now your approach sounds fairly soft — basically, “work on this as best as you can and we want to support you in feeling capable” — but it needs to include that this is a big deal and needs to change quickly.

Flora’s feelings of imposter syndrome may take longer to overcome, but her actual actions need to change now. You can work on building up her confidence too, but don’t soft-pedal how seriously she needs to take this.

2. My daughter’s work-from-home is being revoked, but she has a baby at home

My daughter has worked from home since 2020. She was just appointed a new supervisor who does not like her. This supervisor just told her that she is part of their team and needs to work in the office on Mondays and Fridays. Normally this wouldn’t be an issue, but she now has a three-year-old at home and a three-month-old baby who she breast feeds. What rights does my daughter have, if any?

None, really. Employers are allowed to require employees to work from the office. (There can be exceptions made for disability accommodations required under the Americans with Disabilities Act, but that wouldn’t come into play here since breast-feeding isn’t a considered a disability.)

It’s possible that she could argue working remotely was a condition of her hire (if it was; the fact that it started in 2020 says it might have been a pandemic measure, rather than something she specially negotiated when hired). Even then, though, employers have the right to change those arrangements, and indeed many of them have been calling workers back to the office, even people who were promised they could work from home permanently. Employers are allowed to change those conditions, as much as it sucks for people who planned around different arrangements.

However, does your daughter have child care for the kids and this is just an issue of breastfeeding? I’m hoping yes since most people can’t care for young children while simultaneously working, and it’s very common for employers to require remote employees with young kids to have separate child care arrangements for that reason. But if she’s doing both jobs herself, there’s an additional risk to pushing this — because if her employer realizes she’s doing that the other three days a week, she risks them pulling those days too.

She doesn’t really have much recourse here, I’m sorry. We don’t have good systems for working parents in this country (or support for parents in general, for that matter).

3. How to email people who are dealing with crises

I struggle with how to email work colleagues when I know they are dealing with family crises or other emergencies. There’s stuff I know my boss wants to be kept in the loop on, but it feels so cold to send a bland work email when I know she’s out taking care of a sick relative. I expressed sympathy when she told us about the crisis, but now I’m drafting regular emails days later and wondering if I need to put in even more sympathy, or if that risks bringing things up/being too emotional about normal work. She’s generally pretty private, too, though has shared about this relative’s condition regularly. It’s such a fine line to walk — any general tips?

Generally people are fine with being in work mode when dealing with work, even when they’re also dealing with a family crisis. You don’t need to acknowledge the crisis in each communication; it’s fine to just send the emails you normally would. That said, if you don’t have a ton of communication with your boss and some time has passed since the last time you spoke, it doesn’t hurt to open with something like, “I hope your mom is doing okay” or similar.

4. Can I reject someone for a job because their age means we wouldn’t get a return on our investment?

I have been attempting to hire a machinist. After getting very little response from online ads, I am now considering using a recruiter and paying a fee: 25% of the first year’s salary. The first two resumes the recruiter sent to me were both very good but one machinist started working in 1984 which would make him close to 60 years old. Is it legal for me to tell the recruiter I won’t consider him because we wouldn’t get a return on our investment, considering the recruiter’s $30,000 – $40,000 fee, before the candidate retires? If this person had applied directly to us, I would be open to hiring him.

It’s illegal to make a candidate’s age a factor in a hiring decision (if they’re 40 or older) so you could not legally do that.

But for what it’s worth, there’s no guarantee that you’ll get a return on your investment in hiring younger candidates either since people leave, move, etc. So you might consider whether there are ways to beef up your recruitment efforts on your own without using a recruiter. For example, advertise in places you haven’t tried previously, reach out to local technical schools, offer apprenticeships, and/or use some of the money you’d pay the recruiter to raise the salary instead.

5. Songs about HR and accounting

My office is doing a fiscal year-end trivia event this Thursday and we’re looking for ideas about work-related songs to include in the trivia, ideally HR and accounting songs since we’re an IT group that supports applications for those areas. For example, someone has suggested Taxman by the Beatles. I thought your readers might have some fun suggestions!

“Ideally HR and accounting songs” makes this a lot more challenging than just work-related songs. But I feel we’ll come through. Have at it in the comments!

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    1. Daria grace*

      #5, Keith Juluka’s Kind Regards about ignoring your email because you’re going on leave is fun. It’s not entirely in English so you may wanna use the YouTube version with translations

      1. SRB*

        Similarly Jimmy Ate My Yoghurt by We Are Lady Parts is about responding to emails out of hours. I think the song may also be called Villain Era.

        We are Lady Parts is a British Comedy about a band of the same name. I don’t know if it’s available outside the UK but the songs are on most platforms and very funny.

    2. Suni*

      “Closing Time” that they sing in that Office episode when everyone is super happy to leave at 5 pm. The only time Stanley smiles

        1. Steve for Work Purposes*

          The Money song from Cabaret would also go well!
          Other ideas:
          “Brotherhood of Man” from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
          “9 to 5” might be a bit of a stretch but is a classic

          1. Former HTS Secretary*

            Even more on the HR-related side of things from HTS: “A Secretary is Not a Toy”

            1. cosmicgorilla*

              I had a cassette (a cassette!) from a cast recording of HTS from (obviously) years ago. The character that sings Secretary was played by the man who was the voice of Jafar. There are parts of the song where he drawls out “a to-o-oyyyy”, and you can hear Jafar coming through.

          2. LadyAmalthea*

            Money or Money Makes the world Go Around or both?

            5 Zeroes from On the Twentieth Century

            Rothschild and Sons from Rothschilds

            For Queen and Country – Warchild -Jethro Tull

            1. linger*

              Or indeed, “Money Money Money”.
              And if considering “Money (That’s What I Want)”: never mind the Beatles, you need the deranged cover by the Flying Lizards.

          3. Skippy*

            We had karaoke at work once, and based on that I do *not* recommend 9 to 5 or Dirty Work in the office. Super awkward.

    4. ENFP in Texas*

      I suppose “Take This Job and Shove It” by Johnny Paycheck considered an HR song, but I don’t think it’s the tone you’re looking for! =)

        1. Irish Teacher.*

          If ye are open to a somewhat critical typed tone, maybe Conal Gallen’s “The Builders and the Banksters.” It’s an Irish parody song about the banking crash and recession, but it references somewhat “creative accountancy” and so on.

          1. LW #5*

            Ooh, “creative accounting” is a term I try to avoid (oddly the accountants don’t like it) but it sounds fun!

      2. kicking-k*

        I was thinking “You’ll Never Work In This Town Again” by the Divine Comedy also wouldn’t be quite right. It’s from a concept album called Office Politics!

        “Step Into My Office, Baby” by Belle and Sebastian nearly does it but perhaps the innuendo is a little heavy for a professional setting? I suppose if taken literally it’s a mild cautionary tale about not sleeping with your boss…

        1. Kaitlyn*

          I would nominate “Iain and Deanna” by Flight of the Conchords, but it is WILDLY NSFW for the same reasons (although also laugh-out-loud funny).

        2. KO*

          I knew I’d find my musical kindred spirit in this thread! What about “Swivelchair” by Nothing Painted Blue? Also wayyy too innuendo-heavy, but funny nonetheless.

        3. kicking-k*

          I thought of another good/bad one: Friday by Joe Jackson. She hates her job, but thinks it’s worth it for the money… and the weekends.

    6. Ellen the Editor*

      The Broadway Musicals buff in me suggests 7 1/2 Cents from The Pajama Game for accounting.

      1. Nightengale*

        I came right here to suggest that!

        https://www.allmusicals.com/lyrics/pajamagamethe/sevenandahalfcents.htm

        The song is really funny on its own without knowing anything else about the musical – I learned the song years before I saw the show. But relevant context:

        The plot hinges on a group of pajama factory workers planning a slowdown to push for a 7 and a half cent raise. In this song, they calculate all the great things they could buy with that extra money. . . eventually. It has the lyrics, “time and a half for overtime” and Broadway aficionado teen me spent a long time puzzling over what that meant, since time was a fixed measurement. I wrote an essay once, everything I know about history I learned from musicals and. .. I’m not sure I was wrong.

        1. Freya*

          LOL this was a school musical production I performed in as part of the chorus in high school!

          I DON’T recommend the song “Once A Year Day” for the purposes of this thread, although it’s a fun, upbeat song, because it’s set at the annual company picnic and all sorts of things that should be brought up with HR are happening… But “Racing With The Clock” and “Think Of The Time I Save” might work if the management has a sense of humour and moderation

          1. Humble Schoolmarm*

            I’d vote for “Think of the Time I Save”. It’s hilarious, especially the breakfast bowl verse (I too was in the chorus for that one in high school)

        2. Ancient Llama*

          Thanks for the share. I particularly was amused by the Taj Mahal line. Whenever something like this line comes up it reminds me of when my grade school teacher showed us a picture of the outside and asked “Who wants to live in the Taj Mahal?” She used that to start a unit on critical thinking (at a grade school level): ask questions before you just jump in with a “yes.”

          1. Nightengale*

            Now I am laughing. I first heard of the Taj Mahal from a line of a play I was in when I was 10. The play was The Actor’s Nightmare and there was a line about the Taj Mahal looking like a cracker box.

            I learned a LOT from that play. . .

    9. Thepuppiesareok*

      OP #5
      I know it’s not related specifically to HR or accounting, but any playlist of work songs needs to have the classic 9 to 5 in it.

    10. Folk dj (Ret.)*

      “White Collar Holler,” by Stan Roger’s.
      Well it’s Home boys, can you code it? Program it right
      Nothing ever happens in this life of mine; I’m hauling up the data on the Xerox line…

      2. Rainy*

        Oh man, A) how have I never heard this before even though my first husband was an old programmer (like, he’d’ve been 69 this October) and B) this is going straight to my before work hype me up playlist. Thank you!!

      3. WoodswomanWrites*

        I’m so happy to see Stan Rogers and this song referenced here! I just looked on YouTube and there are multiple versions of his band performing it so you can see how it goes.

      5. RavCS*

        I love Stan Rogers song “The Mary Ellen Carter.” But the bosses don’t come off well in it:
        “Well, the owners wrote her off; not a nickel would they spend
        She gave twenty years of service, boys, then met her sorry end
        But insurance paid the loss to us, so let her rest below
        Then they laughed at us and said we had to go”

        1. Humble Schoolmarm*

          “Mary Ellen Carter” is my absolute go-to volume blasting car sing along when I’m pissed at my bosses. So glad to find some Stan Rogers love here!

      6. WantonSeedStitch*

        YES! I played this for my dad at his retirement party (he was an old-school programmer, so it was just right).

      1. Rainy*

        Ooh, and Re: Your Brains (in English or French) by Jonathan Coulton. Oh, Mandelbrot Set also by JoCo.

        Mission Statement by Weird Al.

        2. HigherEdExpat*

          Came to the comments to ensure “Mission Statement” had made the list.

          (I once had to do a work reflection for the VP no one liked explaining how my day-to-day fit in the university’s mission statement/strategic plan. I sent this song along with it to my supervisor as required listening.)

          1. ferrina*

            “Mission Statement” was my first thought. It was a great and terrible moment in my career when I discovered that not only did I understand all the lyrics, I had heard executives unintentionally quote parts of the song.

            I’ve also used this song as training material when staff ask how they can better understand executive jargon.

          4. LW #5*

            I’m also in higher ed, maybe that was a giveaway given our fiscal year end is this week, but I think universities have their own fun challenges of our mission and how we, at the administrative level, fit into that.

          1. Madame Desmortes*

            Also perhaps Coulton’s “Chiron Beta Prime.” Extra points if the occasion is around the end-of-year holidays.

        6. lin*

          Thank you for Mission Statement.

          I have spent this week running a strategy retreat for a division and we have one more day to go tomorrow. I am pleased that only the first 30% of Weird Al’s lyrics were used unironically over the last thee days.

          Somehow, I missed that song when it came out, TEN YEARS AGO, and did not know it existed. To be fair I missed a lot of things in 2014 due to extenuating circumstances. My day is now complete and I think I might play it as our icebreaker tomorrow morning.

      2. Goodbye to the Sunshine*

        How about “In Tall Buildings” by John Hartford? Not sure how much airplay it got, but we sang the heck out of it at folk music camp.

    12. nnn*

      And Weird Al’s Mission Statement isn’t specifically about HR or accounting, but it also isn’t…not about HR or accounting

    13. Crencestre*

      Hopefully, your company does NOT inspire the whole office to burst out in a full-throated rendition of “Take This Job and Shove It!”

    15. AnnaKonda*

      App support makes me think of but Technologic by Daft Punk “Buy it, use it, break it, fix it, trash it, change it, mail, upgrade it”

      2. Le le lemon*

        HAHA! Flight of the Conchords is great. “Leggy Blonde” for a politer version of a straight-to-HR topic!

      3. FotCfan*

        omg this song immediately came to mind but it’s so horribly NSFW that I would only include it if I knew absolutely everyone hearing would have the same sense of humour!

        1. LW #5*

          Yeah while I think think there might be some in my office this would be ok for (personally I love it, and I was in a previous office where it might have been fine for many!) I don’t think this one will be ok.

    17. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

      It’s more blue collar than HR/accountacy, but what about Money for Nothing by Dire Straits.

      She works hard for the money by Donna Summer

      Manic Monday by the Bangles

      1. Kate*

        As a karaoke enthusiast, just a note that Money for Nothing contains a vociferously repeated slur about sexuality.

        1. nnn*

          I think there’s a version without that verse. I couldn’t tell you which ones (maybe radio edit?) but I managed to go decades without being aware of it

          1. The OG Sleepless*

            There is. Even in 1985, that verse was deemed inappropriate for radio, and I never heard it until about 10 years later.

            1. Another Kristin*

              yeah, they say “that little queen” (still not great but not the f-slur) in live versions, or just leave out the 2nd verse

          2. QED*

            It’s the edit from the Sultans of Swing album–first disc of their greatest hits album. It totally cuts the verse and also some of the intro so the song is shorter. It’s available on Spotify, etc.

            I have this knowledge at my fingertips because this was one of the 4 CDs my dad kept in his car when I was in middle and high school, so I listed to it A LOT

          1. Lynda*

            Title is “Morning Train (Nine To Five)” so we don’t get it confused with Dolly’s song.

      1. RetiredAcademicLibrarian*

        If that counts, so would Day-o by Harry Belafonte “Come Mr. Tallyman, tally me bananas. Daylight comes & me wanna go home”

        1. AcademiaNut*

          Also the Chemical Worker’s Song by Great Big Sea

          It’s go boys, go
          They’ll time your every breath
          And every day you’re in this place
          you’re two days nearer death

          1. Lenora Rose*

            There’s lots of old school work songs out there if you want to get into difficult labour jobs, but I think they stop feeling like modern office workplace songs. Poverty Knock is one for the loom mills.

        2. Cardboard Marmalade*

          Good point, and in a similar vein, the nursery rhyme “Baa Baa Black Sheep” is very obviously about some sort of bookkeeping.

      2. ChrisZ*

        Check out the lyrics first (kinda funny for accounting) but try Work Song by Nina Simone. Also You Work For Me by Laura Mvula (I’m thinking HR for that one ;) )

      3. Nonanon*

        Oooh if we’re doing “not happy accounting” might I introduce “One Piece at a Time”?

        1. New laptop who dis*

          Yes! My first thought.

          I will also nominate as a more general song, “Working For A Living” by Huey Lewis and the News

    20. Mavis Mae*

      LW#5: – Money (Pink Floyd); Money’s Too Tight to Mention (Simply Red); Money, Money, Money (ABBA); Short Skirt/Long Jacket (Cake – I think the girl the song is about is clearly from Finance or HR); Nine to Five (Dolly Parton).
      There are so few songs actually about HR or accounting that I really think you should re-enact (or at least show) the accounting pirates from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, which is really about M&A but at least has The Accountancy Shanty: https://youtu.be/7YUiBBltOg4?si=nVmXHDVHbXskad9D
      (full story here https://youtu.be/ecFBcpY9NHI?si=G4EHIEagCYv15BB0)

    21. OneLuckyDuck*

      9 to 5 100%. Just a Bum by Greg Brown “time ain’t money when all you’ve got is time”, bonus points for mentioning pink slips later in the song. Van Diemen’s Land from U2 mentions “when an honest man/ sees an honest wage”. If you Google “A CFO Summer playlist” there’s a good list of 10 accounting songs. Finally, while catchy, would *not* recommend “For the Love of Money” by the O’Jays due to its use as The Apprentice theme song!

    22. Not a Cat Lawyer*

      Not all accounting/HR related:

      Money by Pink Floyd
      Working for the Weekend by Loverboy
      Manic Monday by The Bangles
      Taking Care of Business by Bachman Turner Overdrive

      And my new favorite song: Cat Accountant by Cheryl Wheeler

      1. BigBaDaBoom*

        *blink* never expected to see a Cheryl Wheeler reference in the wild. Haven’t listened to her in ages but she has a place in my former folkie heart.

    23. Not that kind of doctor*

      “I Wanna Be a Producer” from The Producers is all about the character wanting to STOP being an accountant.

      “Re: Your Brains” by Jonathan Couton is a very funny song in the voice of a zombie having a corporate-speak negotiation about eating his coworker’s brains.

      1. Humble Schoolmarm*

        The repeated unhappy in “I Wanna Be a Producer” would either be hilarious or a bit of a mess depending on your office.

    24. Charlie*

      Bright Future in Sales – Fountains of Wayne
      Good Help Is So Hard to Find – Death Cab for Cutie
      Insurance Fraud #2 – The Mountain Goats

      1. Princess Sparklepony*

        I just knew that had to be a FoW song that would work! They mention work a lot.

        DMV gets a huge shout out in Yolanda Hayes. But it’s not accounting or HR.

      2. AMT*

        I Ctrl-F’d “Mountain Goats” because I knew there had to be at least one song that fit the bill.

    25. anne gibson*

      “Pay me you owe me” also referred to at “pay me my money down” is a renaissance faire favorite.

      “Working for a living” by Huey Lewis & the News

      Any version of the legend of John Henry, though that’s not quite accounting ;)

      The Offspring’s “Why don’t you get a job?”

      And while it’s a tiny bit of a stretch “ain’t no rest for the wicked” makes my personal work playlist :)

      1. 15 Pieces of Flair*

        When I read “pay me what you owe me”, my brain added “don’t act like you forgot” from BBHMM by Rihanna.

        2. Ladybug*

          Considering that I just played this song at work after receiving payment for an invoice that we’d been having back and forth with the customer for months… yes. (I did not play the radio edit. But it was just me and my suite mate, who knew the song was coming.) BBHMM!

    28. Higgs Bison*

      I wish I knew some accounting or hr songs, but I do know some IT-related songs by MC Frontalot, Optimus Rhyme, YTCracker, and Weird Al. A sampling of links to follow.

    29. Chirpy*

      Note that this song is going to be pretty niche, and more science/ research themed, but perhaps “Still Alive” from Portal? (written by Jonathan Coulton).

      1. JustaTech*

        I have quoted that song several times in work presentations and to my secret sadness, no one has *ever* noticed.
        (I work in science, so phrases like “now these points of data make a beautiful line” fly completely under the radar.)

    31. The Prettiest Curse*

      I would like to take this opportunity to recommend “Villain Era” by Lady Parts to anyone who hasn’t heard it yet. The swearing and lack of accountancy references might mean it’s unsuitable for this particular question, but it’s like hearing all of the AAM comment section distilled into song form.

      2. Tessera Member 42*

        Love this mention because “Villain Era” was the first song I thought of too! “Mr. Boss Man” by Lindsay Jordan has the same vibes.

      3. TVfan*

        I was hoping to see this one! I’ve had “you expect a response, but I’m tucked in tight” playing on a loop in my head for months now lol

    33. GovSysadmin*

      Back in the early 2000s there was a weird trend of companies creating corporate anthems. They’ve mostly been lost to the internet memory hole, but when you said “accounting”, my thoughts immediately turned to my favorite terrible corporate anthem from KPMG.

      https://youtu.be/NCvKXgp-Awo?si=txZ95ilb-ecy9pnU

      You’re welcome. (?)

    35. Saturday*

      “I was looking for a job, and then I found a job, and heaven knows I’m miserable now….”

    37. Anglonemi*

      “Employee of the year” by Chaos Engine might be a bit hard to find and a bit musically heavy for some but it’s an absolute banger

    39. Kingderella*

      “Two Weeks Notice” by Fantasia Barrino. (Admittedly I don’t fully understand the context here, do these songs have to be well known? Because this is a deep cut.)

    41. Mainly Lurking (UK)*

      Prince Charles and the City Beat Band have a couple of songs: Cash (Cash Money) and More Money.

      1. Heffalump*

        “Money” was originally by Barrett Strong, an early Motown artist. I strongly recommend his version. It was later covered by the Beatles.

        Mr. Rock and Roll Trivia strikes again.

      1. PlusOne*

        Came here to say this! The Sick Note is the best HR song!! (And weirdly enough, also the song my husband sings to our kids as a lullaby because they find it hilarious and it’s so fun to sing.)

    45. londonedit*

      The two that came to my mind were Taxloss by Mansun and Living for the Weekend by Hard-Fi

      2. Vanamonde von Mekkhan*

        TMBG’s Seven days of the week (I never go to work) would probably fit as well.

      3. KO*

        During my minimum wage days, I had “Minimum Wage” by TMBG as my alarm in the mornings. Being jolted awake by “minimum waaaaaage….. HYAH!” is great if you want to imagine your boring life as a sitcom.

        1. Elitist Semicolon*

          I…may occasionally yell “minimum waaaaaaage…HYAH!” around the house when I’m home alone. Amazing how often my brain produces that out of nowhere.

      2. LW #5*

        I was thinking this too! I feel like it would be the best! I suppose as the LW that should be me, but unfortunately I don’t have the capacity for that right now.

      1. Shrimp Emplaced*

        Why must I spend my time filling up my mind
        With facts and figures that never add up anyway?
        They never add up anyway

        Great suggestion re: “Hey Julie”!

    49. Cardboard Marmalade*

      “I Need a Dollar” by Aloe Blacc is about a layoff, which feels plausibly HR &/or accounting-related.

      “Hey, I Don’t Work Here” by Tom Cardy is more of a general work song, also fairly NSFW due to abundant cussing.

      Both are insidiously catchy, so be warned!

    51. Union Mike*

      The first HR related song that comes to mind is “Solidarity Forever” but that’s probably not what they’re looking for.

    53. canuckian*

      Taxman, Mr. Thief by Cheap Trick, Takin’ Care of Business–BTO, Morning Train by Sheena Easton, Working for the Weekend by Loverboy

      1. Shrimp Emplaced*

        “I’m an Accountant” by Rocky Paterra — too obscure for a trivia quiz, but it’s an amusing novelty song worth the google

        1. HB*

          Came to see if someone recommended this! First hear it on Tik Tok where I learned that I need to specify that while I am an accountant I am not a *spicy* accountant.

    54. Prawo Jazdy*

      “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)” by The Pet Shop Boys. I believe this was actually used in a bank commercial not too long ago.

    55. KenDoll*

      Running Just To Catch Myself by Mark Schulz

      And like many others have suggested – Code Monkey!

    56. WellRed*

      As someone who’s hosted a lot of music trivia for work, if the point is to have people identify the song or fill in the lyric or whatever, the songs need to be somewhat recognizable and familiar to people not obscure titles. Nothing is more of a bummer than a game nobody does well at. So, know your audience. May I add Working for the Weekend if you have any 80s buffs.

      1. Occasional Bingoer*

        I’ve been to some music bingos in bars where they play a bit of the music video and include the name of the song – so the object is *just* bingo and not guessing the song, too.

        Since so many of these songs are deep cuts to fulfill the HR/Accounting brief, that might be an option for OP to make sure everyone is able to participate.

      2. LW #5*

        Noted, I will pass this along to the actual trivia compiler/organizer who I think is following along here as well!

    58. Slinky*

      There was a TikTok song a few years ago called “I’m an accountant.” It was about an actor who tells people he’s an accountant to avoid follow-up questions about being an actor.

    60. Resident Catholicville, U.S.A.*

      I do AR/collections and consider a certain Rihanna song to be my theme song, but it’s probably not work appropriate? (Though, my boss thinks it’s fine and she kind of encourages me.)

    63. Angstrom*

      “Highway Patrol” by Junior Brown (police officer).
      “Eat at Joe’s” by Suzy Boggus (waitress). I like the Live at Cafe Milano version.
      Mark Knopfler has several songs about jobs: “Why Aye Man”(construction), “Quality Shoe”(salesman), etc.
      There are a gazillion songs about being a musician, life on the road, etc.
      The classic western genre is about the life of cowboys and ranchers.

    64. Bossypants*

      Add it Up by the Violent Femmes: There’s counting!
      Back on the Chain Gang: The Pretenders
      Workin’ on the Highway: Bruce Springsteen

    67. Whale I Never*

      More of an IT song, but “The Gates” by Da Vinci’s Notebook is an absolute ear worm.

      This could make for a good trivia question–the “Wellerman” sea shanty is a song about maritime accounting and HR! Whalers waiting to get paid in tea and rum rather than wages.

      “Ordinary Man” by Christy Moore is more of a cynical take, but relevant… and I feel like these suggestions are revealing some things about my music taste!

    69. NYWeasel*

      “Take A Walk” by Passion Pit probably isn’t the vibe you’re going for but it’s about someone mismanaging their business investments and then deciding to run away rather than deal with the fallout.

      1. AndersonDarling*

        The first thing I thought was Hermes Conrad singing the Bureaucrat Song. Not right for a trivia question, but the best acounting-ish song I know.

    70. 15 Pieces of Flair*

      Probably not the vibe your company wants, but when I think of an accounting song, I go to “Unhappy” from the Producers. “Unhappy (clack), unhappy (clack), very very very very very unhappy”

    71. Liane*

      Alan Jackson & Jimmy Buffett’s “It’s 5 O’clock Somewhere” is from a very unhappy employee’s point of view. It definitely has workplace problems for HR to address, mostly super-long lunch with (lots of) drinking. Possibly also: leaving early without notice/approval; “employee attitude or manager sucks” question; and employee morale.

    73. Apex Mountain*

      folk singer Christine Lavin has a song about two office workers, one of whom is an accountant and the other one worked on the 37th floor.

      1. Data Bear*

        Doris and Edwin: The Movie!

        Great song. Note that it might be upsetting for people who have 9/11 PTSD.

    74. PX*

      People have already suggested the Rihanna song I came to add, but perhaps more in the spirit than the actual theme could also be Bills bills bills by Destiny’s Child

    76. Shirley You’re Joking*

      There’s a song from the 90’s about calling in sick to work by singer-songwriter Hayden Desser. It’s called We Don’t Mind.

      Lyrics include:
      We both have to be at work in an hour
      Let’s call in sick I suggest to her
      I’ll call your boss and tell her that you’re under
      The weather, you’ll call mine, you will tell her
      That I’m very sick and that, you’re my mother

      So we walk down the street
      Looking for a phone booth we
      Rehearse what we’re going to say
      So that we can have this day, away

      We find a phone booth with room for two
      I call your boss and I don’t speak the truth
      They’re pretty mad about you but they’ll get through
      You call my work in my mother’s voice, they believe you

    77. Tegan Jovanka*

      Weird Al’s song Dog Eat Dog is a Talking Heads style parody about working your way up the corporate ladder.

    79. Brunelleschi*

      Perhaps Proletariat Blues by Blue Scholars or Frankly, Mr. Shankly by The Smiths are too salty? Still good if anyone needs a Take This Job And Shove It playlist.

      1. Frankly, Mr. Shankly*

        Since it’s my user name, that was going to be my suggestion as well, but….. maybe too salty lol. Also by The Smiths is Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now

      2. CCProf*

        Step into my Office, Baby by Belle and Sebastian would definitely qualify as an HR nightmare, especially with the explicit references to working in an office.

    81. Browstag*

      Short Skirt, Long Jacket by Cake always gave me work vibes as a management consultant in HCM

      1. Comma Queen*

        SOMEBODY has to cut through all that red tape, though HR might prefer something other than a machete be used.

    82. Applesauced*

      “Hey Big Spender” from Sweet Charity
      (caveat, I haven’t seen this show in a while, and there may be inappropriate lyrics)

    84. Strive to Excel*

      More related to why it’s unwise to irritate accountants than anything else, but Lament of the Combat Archer by Ken Theriot. Bonus points for Ren Faire nerding!

      1. Strive to Excel*

        Also Paper Sea by Leslie Fish. Though that one is more about bureaucracy and the perils thereof.

        1. Worldwalker*

          That is a great song. And a good introduction to Leslie Fish.

          It’s definitely about work, just bureaucratic work. In real life, when I was taking EMT training, I was told that there were two reasons why EMTs should continue doing CPR until the patient was in the ER: One, because EMTs can’t pronounce death except in very limited circumstances. (the patient being cut in half being the sort of thing) And the other? Because the patient is still technically alive as long as you’re doing CPR, so there’s much less paperwork if he dies in the ER instead of in your rig. And the goal of any first responder, from the newest rookie cop to the oldest fire chief, is to do less paperwork and more work work. They’re all dogpaddling frantically in the paper sea.

    85. noname today*

      Signs by the five man electrical band:
      And the sign said
      “Long-haired freaky people
      Need not apply”
      So I tucked my hair up under my hat
      And I went in to ask him why
      He said, “You look like a fine upstandin’ young man
      I think you’ll do”
      So I took off my hat and said, “Imagine that
      Huh, me workin’ for you”
      Whoa

    88. Fernie*

      “Friday On My Mind” by The Easybeats, on the “working for the weekend” theme

      “Summertime Blues” by Eddie Cochran, about a summer job

    92. Soprani*

      Coffee Break from How to Succed in Business Without Really Trying
      When Will My Life Begin and I’ve Got A Dream from Tangled
      Surface Pressure from Encanto
      Heigh-Ho from Snow White
      And NSFW (Welcome To Th) Sh!show by Miracle Archives

    93. Greengirl*

      Money by Pink Floyd

      She Works Hard for the Money by Donna Summer (sort of HR in that HR handles job offers and salary offers?)

    95. Phony Genius*

      Since it’s an IT group, and telephones are often part of IT, how about “Mr. Telephone Man” by New Edition?

    96. WillowSunstar*

      Work in general: Bang the Drum All Day by Todd Rundgren, still is played on some classic rock stations so some people would recognize it.

      1. JustaTech*

        Back in the early 00’s there was a radio station in Boston that would play that every Friday afternoon and people would call in to “air drum” to it over the phone – they would literally say “bang bang bang, bangbangbang!”.
        It was hilarious.

    97. Annonnynonnyno*

      “The Ascent of Stan” by Ben Folds – about a hippie who makes it in the business world (some regrets).

    99. Slovenly Braid Cultist*

      Is it really a work-related playlist without Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5?

      Accounting-wise, I immediately thought of Money by Pink Floyd but it might be a bit too cynical.

    100. Joan Jett and the Number Crunchers*

      9-5 comes to mind. Also, B**** Better Have My Money but that might not fly at most work places.

    101. Firefinch*

      OK, so you have to have at least one actual corporate anthem. They are truly truly awful. KPMG has one.
      KPMG
      We’re strong as can be
      A dream of power and energy.
      We go for the goal,
      Together we hold
      On to our vision of global strategy.
      Play around with searching for these and really, you ought to have at least one in your trivia contest somewhere.

      1. Worldwalker*

        If you’ve ever heard “The Glaucoma Hymn” (if not, don’t search for it; it’s really bad) you may have just beaten it.

        1. Firefinch*

          Tom Waits did a version of this that’s a dirge. Disney tried to sue him over it. But it is how like work is like for adults sometimes. And that’s a trivia question for you right there!

    105. Jackalope*

      This might not work for you because it’s in French, but Le blues du businessman by Celine Dion.

    106. Luna (the other one)*

      “Re: Your Brains” by Jonathan Coulton is in the style of a work email about turning everyone into zombies.

    107. Radioactive Cyborg Llama*

      If you think a little beyond explicitly work-related songs, you could use something like “People (who need people)” as an HR song. There are also a bunch of songs about money.
      General work songs:
      Morning train
      Day-o
      I don’t wanna work (just wanna bang on the drums all day)

    109. Just Another Cog in the Machine*

      All About the Pentiums by Weird Al? It’s very (outdated) IT/computer related.

    112. KTbrd*

      Lw5, another broadway suggestion: Lots of options in How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying. “The Company Way” comes to mind but there may be others!

    114. Bumblebee Mask*

      It’s not “good” HR related but there’s always Don’t Stand So Close To Me by the Police. :D
      It could be something like, What popular song by the Police portrays an HR nightmare?

    116. Susannah*

      I feel awful about it, but the first thing that comes to my mind is “Take This Job and Shove It.”

    117. Jennifer Strange*

      I will say upfront I’m a musical theatre nerd:

      -Pretty much anything from How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying
      -7 1/2 Cents from Pajama Game
      -The opening part of I Wanna Be a Producer from The Producers (with all of the accountants singing “Unhappy…unhappy)
      -Money Song from Cabaret
      -9-5 (Dolly Parton)

    119. starrai*

      “Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)” by the Pet Shop Boys, and “Big Time” by Peter Gabriel.

    120. Joy*

      Life’s Been Good by Joe Walsh – there’s a line in there that goes, “I have accountants pay for it all.”

    123. Data Bear*

      It’s more of a recruiter song than an HR song, but Occupation by Sparks works for anybody who does hiring.

    125. GlendaorGlen*

      Beatles Taxman
      Keith Juluka Kind Regards
      The Verve Closing Time
      Dolly Parton 9 to 5
      Abba Money Money
      Pink Floyd Money
      Money Makes the World Go ‘Round
      On the Twentieth Century 5 Zeroes
      Rothschilds Rothschild and Sons
      Jethro Tull For Queen and Country – Warchild
      Flying Lizards Money (That’s What I Want)
      Conal Gallen The Builders and the Banksters
      The Clash Career Opportunities
      Stan Roger White Collar Holler
      Jonathan Coulton Your Brains (in English or French)
      Jonathan Coulton Oh, Mandelbrot Set
      Jonathan Coulton Code Monkey
      Weird Al Mission Statement
      Weird Al Calling in Sick Today
      John Hartford In Tall Buildings
      Rocky Paterra I’m an Accountant
      Daft Punk Technologic
      Dire Straits Money for Nothing [Radio Edit Version]
      Donna Summer She works hard for the money
      Bangles Manic Monday
      Great Big Sea Chemical Worker’s Song
      Hulamen Working for a Living
      The Dubliners The Sick Note
      Huey Lewis and the News Working For A Living
      Greg Brown Just a Bum
      U2 Van Diemen’s Land
      O’Jays For the Love of Money
      They Might be Giants Memo to Human Resources
      They Might be Giants Seven days of the week (I never go to work)
      They Might be Giants Minimum Wage
      Loverboy Working for the Weekend
      Bachman Turner Overdrive Taking Care of Business
      Cheryl Wheeler Cat Accountant
      The Producers I Wanna Be a Producer
      Fountains of Wayne Bright Future in Sales
      Fountains of Wayne Hey Julie
      Death Cab for Cutie Good Help Is So Hard to Find
      The Mountain Goats Insurance Fraud #2
      Spinal Tap Gimme Some Money
      RB Greaves Take A Letter Maria
      Aloe Blacc I Need a Dollar
      The Offspring Why don’t you get a job
      Tim Heidecker Work From Home
      Barenaked Ladies If I Had $1,000,000
      Bon Jovi Work for the working
      XTC Making Plans for Nigel
      Jimmy Buffett It’s my job
      Cake Short Skirt, Long Jacket
      The Kinks Sunny Afternoon (The Taxman)
      Laura Mvula Also You Work For Me
      Lunchnoney Lewis Bills
      Ben Folds The Ascent of Stan
      Cheap Trick Mr. Thief
      Sheena Easton Morning Train
      The Pet Shop Boys Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money)
      Todd Rundgren Bang The Drum
      Mark Schulz All Day Running Just To Catch Myself
      ShowTunes
      Monty Python Accountancy Shanty
      Monty Python The Money Song
      Caberet The Money Song
      How to Succeed in Business Brotherhood of Man
      How to Succeed in Business A Secretary is Not a Toy
      The Pajama Game 7 1/2 Cents
      The Pajama Game Racing With The Clock
      The Pajama Game Think Of The Time I Save
      Thoroughly Modern Millie Speed Test

      NSFW
      Iain and Deanna” by Flight of the Conchords
      “Business Time” by Flight of the Conchords
      Lady Parts Villain Era
      Mr. Boss Man Lindsay Jordan
      Sorry to Inform You Sockpuppet
      Step Into My Office, Baby” by Belle and Sebastian
      You’ll Never Work In This Town Again” by the Divine Comedy
      Take This Job and Shove It” by Johnny Paycheck
      “Swivelchair” by Nothing Painted Blue
      Hey, I Don’t Work Here” by Tom Cardy
      Frankly, Mr. Shankly by The Smiths

      1. whimbrel*

        I’m sure it’s entirely inappropriate for the event but Patricia the Stripper by Chris de Burgh. Live version especially!

    127. K in Boston*

      UGH, I actually also worked in IT on a finance application and literally had a song list up in the office up until we got sent home for lockdown! I wish so badly I’d taken a picture of it…here’s what I remember (or think I remember)…

      Bills, Bills, Bills – Destiny’s Child
      Mo Money Mo Problems – Notorious B.I.G.
      Money, Money, Money – ABBA
      If I Had a Million Dollars – Barenaked Ladies
      Rich Girl – Gwen Stefani
      Gold Digger – Kanye West
      She Works Hard for the Money – Donna Summer
      Billionaire – Travie McCoy
      9 to 5 – Dolly Parton

      If I were doing it today, I’d definitely add:

      Opportunities (Let’s Make Lots of Money) – Pet Shop Boys (obviously existed before the pandemic, don’t know why I didn’t think of it before, this song slaps)
      Man in Finance (G6 Trust Fund) – Girl on Couch, Billen Ted

    132. Elitist Semicolon*

      Moxy Früvous, I Love My Boss (but that’s kinda more about an HR disaster than anything)

      2. whimbrel*

        The first thing this brought to mind was how the singer from Moxy Früvous was in fact an actual HR disaster :/

    133. Tea.Earl Grey.Hot*

      Re: Your Brains by Jonathan Coulton (I laughed so hard I nearly cried the first time I Heard this because it was so my work life)

      Mission Statement – Weird Al (referenced near daily by all friends who are office drones)

    134. Good Enough For Government Work*

      I Don’t Like Mondays – The Boomtown Rats
      A Deeper Love – Aretha Franklin

      1. s*

        Just here to speak up for the fictional all-girl black and brown Muslim punk band Lady Parts, from the amazing show “We Are Lady Parts,” and their song “Villain Era,” about a boss eating half your yogurt from the communal fridge and then putting it back (eww).

        Maybe a little too NSFW for an HR department (“Self-care, bad b*tch, I’m a villain, I’m a villain/Out of office message saying ‘Zero f*cks given'”) but still worth a listen for sure!

        Also, “Glass Ceiling Feeling.” Really good song for the DEI parts of corporate life.

    137. NMitford*

      Business related, but not HR or accounting specific:

      Keep the Customer Satisifed — Simon and Garfunkel
      Maggie’s Farm — Bob Dylan (more in the vein of Take This Job and Shove It)

    139. Paulina*

      Having not seen these listed, here are a couple of songs where how much work sucks is key:

      Thank You, by Dido (this one at least is well known, and Eminem’s use of it in Stan might make a good trivia question)

      Echo Beach, by Martha and the Muffins

    141. Philosophia*

      “Something to Point To” from the musical Working (I’ll link to the page where I found the lyrics in the reply)

    142. Who knows*

      “Hate My Life” by Theory of a Deadman is NSFW but has some choice words for work lol

      More appropriately, “So-Called Chaos” by Alanis Morissette

    143. frostipaws*

      “Slave to the Wage” by Placebo
      “Welcome to the Working Week” by Elvis Costello
      “Overworked and Underpaid” by Quiet Riot
      “Career Opportunities” by The Clash
      “Got a Job” by The Miracles
      “Worker’s Song” by Dropkick Murphys
      “Door to Door” by Creedence Clearwater Revival
      “Workin’” by Lynyrd Skynyrd
      “Working Girl” by Cher
      “Working Class Hero” by John Lennon
      “Working Man” by Rush
      “Car Wash” by Rose Royce

    144. EmoManager*

      My first thought was Lucy Dacus’s “Night Shift” but that’s not actually about work, but about uprooting your life and schedule to avoid an ex.

    145. Jack McCullough*

      John Henry: “Gonna die with this hammer in my hand”

      Or was that not the spirit you were aiming for? ;-)

    146. Anastaziax*

      A few of my favorite general job/work songs (not positive if they’ve already been ):

      Doing My Job by John McCutcheon

      Doin My Job by The Dappled Grays

      Now That the Work is Done by J P Cormier

      Work Song by Nellie McKay funny/irreverant

      Something More Than Free by Jason Isbell (played at DNC 2024)
      “….just lucky to have the work”

      Taking Care of Business by Bachman -Turner Overdrive

    149. Karriegrace*

      Bright Future In Sales by Fountains of Wayne?

      (This is the late AdamSchlesinger’s band…he’s the man that wrote all the songs for Crazy Ex-Girfriend and That Thing You Do among others.)

    150. Book Addict*

      His songs have a lot of swears, so they may not work, but Thomas Benjamin Wild has a couple of great ones! They are more work-general than HR/Finance. “Could you really not just put this in an email” and “Apologies for the late reply”.

    152. HungryLawyer*

      LW5, this is probably not HR- and accounting-specific enough, but I recommend Bright Future in Sales by Fountains Of Wayne

    154. I Speak Heardle*

      These may be kind of obscure in 2024 and so no-go for trivia, but Kool Moe Dee’s “I Go to Work” and Melle Mel/Furious 5’s “We Don’t Work for Free” are work songs worth knowing.

    155. a raging ball of distinction*

      “Bother,” by Les Sins. A dance song whose only lyrics are “Don’t bother me, I’m working.” Great background music for doing something repetitive (spreadsheets!)

    156. daffodil*

      1234 by Feist — counting. I prefer the sesame street version but you do you.
      Superman by Taylor Swift (“he’s got a busy day today to save the world or go to work”)

    158. Pointy Stix*

      The continuing education provider we take our annual tax update seminars with has an instructor that has a play list of money & tax-related songs that she plays during breaks.
      Money for Nothing by Dire Straits is on that list. I’m racking my brain for others, but can’t think of any others.

    159. FreakInTheExcelSheets*

      Work related but more from the applicant POV than the current employee:
      Get a Job by The Silhouettes
      Job Application by Meryn Cadell
      Favorite line
      “I’m a very fast learner and I promise that if you give me this job
      I’ll be the perfect subhuman and never let my contempt shine in my worshipping eyes…”

    160. From one GM to another*

      I don’t know how clean you have to be but “Alright Hear This” by the Beastie Boys and “Juicy” by Notorious B.I.G. both mention accountants…. honestly rap is full of these but these are two that I think are recognizable.

    161. Puggles*

      Morning Train by Sheena Easton
      Money For Nothing by Dire Straits
      Opportunities by Pet Shop Boys

    162. Lorraine*

      It’s more about work than HR/Accounting specifically, but this gives me the opportunity to plug my all-time favorite song about working, “Circle Back” from Quarter Life Poetry. I highly recommend the music video.

    163. Kristen W.*

      You might find several good options on the Fountains of Wayne album Welcome Interstate Managers, including “Bright Future in Sales.”

    165. Gumby*

      Not sure how exactly the trivia game will work and if lyrics are necessary to the endeavor but, if not, I always enjoy The Typewriter by Leroy Anderson.

    166. JustAnotherWednesday*

      Rihanna – Work ft. Drake
      Fifth Harmony – Work from Home ft. Ty Dolla $ign
      Hozier – Work Song

      1. JustAnotherWednesday*

        Bachman-Turner Overdrive – Take Care of Business
        Donna Summer – She Works Hard for the Money

    167. Lucy Librarian*

      Cake has “Short Skirt/Long Jacket” : I want a girl with good dividends / At Citibank we will meet accidentally / We’ll start to talk when she borrows my pen

      Mike Doughty “I Hear the Bells” : And I’m seeking girls in sales and marketing / Let’s go make out up in the balcony / Your business dress, so businesslike /And I’m tossing the blouse over a chair back
      –might depend on the office!

    168. wanda*

      It’s obscure, but “Whatever You Want” by Vienna Teng is about uncovering corporate accounting fraud.

    169. Banana Pyjamas*

      Some Kind of Trouble by Tanya Tucker. The first person narrator finds out she’s terminated in the second verse when she makes a time-off request.

      Just Got Paid by N’sync

      I guess it’s more of a working person’s song but Downeaster Alexa by Billy Joel.

      I’m just trying to think of some less obscure song and/or artists not already listed.

    170. Greg*

      Not a real song, but in my family we have a tradition of doing parodies at weddings. When my brother married a fellow accountant, I felt like there had to be a way to come up with an accounting-themed love song. After a couple of days, it finally hit me: You Light Up My LIFO

      A sample verse

      I’m not getting
      Any Ernster or Younger
      Could it be my good fortune is starting to accrue
      Finally a long-term asset worth keeping
      I want to spend
      All my fiscal years with you

      […]

      Someday we’ll be
      Husband and wife-o
      ‘Cuz you, you light up my LIFO

    173. Thingstring*

      Maybe “busy doin nothing” by Swedish singer Ace Wilder. The persona in the song would be a real problem for any HR…

    176. TSS*

      Maybe Elton John’s “Mona Lisas and Mad Hatters”? It’s “sons of bankers, sons of lawyers” instead of HR people, but the chorus feels like a business with artificial lights to me.

  2. MsCary*

    I wouldn’t assume anything about when a hire is going to retire. Plenty of people work into their seventies. Like Alison said it’d be a mistake to assume someone younger would stay longer than someone in their 60’s.

    Also how are you calculating your ROI for the recruitment fee? How long do you need someone to stay to make the investment worthwhile?

    1. WoodswomanWrites*

      MsCary, as a worker in my 60s, I really appreciate your perspective. It’s not fair to assume that someone in their 60s will leave their job sooner than someone younger. It’s not a representative sample but in my experience, I and people of a comparable age tend to stick around longer once we’ve found a new place to work. It’s great to have a stable role for the rest of our working days. I know I’m generalizing but what I’ve personally seen is that younger people with long careers ahead tend to leave more often as they pursue career growth opportunities and higher salaries.

      In my case, I was hired at 63. I’ve been at my job for three years and plan to stay for several more.

      1. Jeanine*

        Same here, I am almost 60 and plan to stay at my company for the rest of my life if possible. To the OP, how dare you assume that someone 60 isn’t worth hiring, shame on you!!!

        1. Ontariariario*

          I’m surprised at the idea of working somewhere “for the rest of my life”. Almost everyone in my neighbourhood as well as family and friends and coworkers (i.e. wide variety of careers and economic options) retires in their early 60s (except for the occasional nerd who doesn’t want to leave their field of work), so it’s reasonable to think that someone over 60 will be retiring soon. There is clearly a cultural difference if people are expecting to work well past 65!

          1. Jaunty Banana Hat I*

            These days, I think the main cultural difference driving the “work well past 65” is that everything is expensive, not everyone was able to save properly for retirement, and/or retiring is just not an affordable option for everyone even if they want it to be.

            2. Been There 2*

              True, not everyone can afford to retire in the US. The coverage for cancer and chemo was very poor with my employer’s insurance which meant exhausting my retirement account and being forced to sell my home to pay off medical debt. I’m 70, and retirement is nowhere in sight. I must work for as long as I’m able.

              Because of AAM’s blog I’m a model employee (and very grateful to Alison for it). I’m lucky to have an employer who respects me, and hope I’ll still be here in my 80s like several other coworkers.

              Here’s a link to a pertinent article:
              https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/08/26/five-generations-workforce-gen-z-challenge/

          2. Worldwalker*

            I’m assuming Jeanine meant “the rest of my working life.”

            But even so, there are people who like their work, and don’t plan to get out as soon as they possibly can. I’m one of them. I work for another. I’m married to a third. What I do is fun. I love doing it.

            I proudly own the title of “nerd.”

            1. Jeanine*

              Yeah I do mean the rest of my working life, as long as I am able to. Retiring doesn’t even feel like an option at this point.

              1. Edwina*

                I’m 61, and I’m planning to work into my early to mid-70s. I like my job, my company, and my colleagues, and I’m afraid to stop too soon and be stuck with a fixed income that’s not enough.

          3. I Have RBF*

            I’m 63. I won’t get my full retirement Social Security unless I retire at 70, not 65 or 67. Without that full benefit, I won’t be able to afford to retire. A machinist is no different.

            So it’s not a “cultural” difference, it’s an economic one!

            Plus, the SSI is so skimpy, some people are taking part time work to get a little extra money even after 70.

          4. Drago Cucina*

            No, and it’s not because of expenses. I took my job two years ago, at the age of 64.
            My husband and I had a serious conversation about it. He asked what I would do if I retired. The honest answer was volunteer someplace for 40 hours a week.

            It helps that for my position I was hired to be the new sheriff in town and fix some systemic problems. I have a passion for my profession and now have the experience and authority to assist our local locations.

            My other goal is to nurture future leaders so that they can take over when it’s time for me to retire the badge.

          5. Rosemary*

            You must live in a different country, or a very privileged community, as many, many people simple cannot afford to retire at 65…let alone their early 60s.

          6. NotAnotherManager!*

            In the US, being able to retire is a luxury. My mother only “retired” because her position was eliminated and she was laid off at 77. With no health coverage (could not afford COBRA, it’s been months and she’s still waiting to be approved for Medicare). I’m sure this is different in countries with better social safety nets, but here, if you take Social Security (rarely enough to live on) before your mid-to-late 60s (specific age varies by birth year), you also get a lower amount and pensions are not common unless you worked in a union shop or for a government entity.

        2. OP4*

          LOL – I have hired many people over 60. One of our best every employees started in his early 60’s and worked until he was diagnosed with cancer at 84 (and I, along with about 20 current and former employees attended his funeral a couple months later.) Heck, I’ll be there in a few years. But not many people over 60 can do the type of work I’m hiring for.

          Please give people the benefit of the doubt – we aren’t monsters.

          1. HungryLawyer*

            A lot of folks here are giving you the benefit of the doubt. It’s just…taking someone’s age (when over 40) into account when hiring is textbook age discrimination, as Alison said. You may have what you feel are good reasons for doing so, but it is both illegal and unfair.

            1. What_the_What*

              Ok but let’s give the OP the benefit of the doubt for writing in and ASKING if it was okay or not, versus just passing on the candidate with a “nah” and no reason given. That’s at least a level of self awareness. Let’s not villify the man for asking a genuine question. He didn’t say he regularly discriminates based on age. He asked if THIS CIRCUMSTANCE would fall into that category.

              1. HungryLawyer*

                Again, a lot of people are giving the LW the benefit of the doubt here. However, LW has come into the comments to defend their idea that age discrimination may be okay in limited circumstances. You also seem pretty dedicated to defending that idea, which is coming across pretty oddly.

                1. What_the_What*

                  I read the LW’s comments as trying to clarify why he wrote in in the first place and give additional context to his question. But, as per usual, everyone made up their mind he was a “Horrible Discriminatory Employer” and took it from there. I’m trying to be fair and not villify him for asking the question. He could have… just not and acted on his impulse. Your thinking that is “coming across pretty oddly” based on 2 comments tells me you’ve made up your mind and aren’t really open to anything else.

          2. RM*

            Interesting, around here, machinists are typically older welders who have moved on to something related but physically less taxing. The stereotype is “grumpy old man”.

          3. SpaceySteph*

            Everyone who has ever discriminated against an applicant in a protected class has a story about why they are not a monster, their situation is different, etc. It’s still illegal whether or not it is moral.

          4. Pizza Rat*

            But not many people over 60 can do the type of work I’m hiring for.

            It’s stereotyping like this that makes you miss out on good candidates who happen to be over 60.

          5. New Jack Karyn*

            You say that not many people over 60 can do the work that you’re hiring for. Can you include a skills test in the interview process? That should demonstrate if the candidate doesn’t have the strength/vision/steadiness of hand to do the job.

        3. H3llifIknow*

          While I agree that the LW should not be excluding based on age, your rage at “isn’t worth hiring” isn’t accurate. The LW said they’d be OPEN to hiring the person if they had applied directly, but they’re balancing the economics of paying out 30-40K to a recruiter, and wondering if they’ll recoup that if the applicant leaves in a year or two. They also mentioned he was very well qualified. He’s being villified enough w/o adding rage bait language to the equation.

          1. Rosemary*

            Not sure why they think someone younger is more likely to get them their “return on investment.” Reality is, younger people do tend to have an easier time finding jobs – so I’d think they would be more likely to jump ship if a better offer came along. Or they decide to follow their significant other across the country. Or whatever reason. Whereas someone older – because they know they will have a harder time finding a job – will be more likely to stay put until it is time to retire.

      2. Broadway Duchess*

        My dad is over and finally semi-retired. He was an electrical engineer who went into exec leadership and retired after 45 years. we thought he’d take off a year but wound up with a consulting gig training young engineers and he loves it! The company he works for now is part-time and he has such a wealth of knowledge to pass along. Definitely agree– don’t discount older workers and what they can bring!

      3. LL*

        Yeah, my mom is in her late 60s and is planning on staying another year or 2. My dad retired after 65 (I forget the exact age)

    2. Pennyworth*

      I thought older hires are more likely to stay longer and be more loyal, often because they are glad have been recruited.

      1. Insufficient Sausage Explainer*

        Exactly – it gets harder and harder to get hired as you get older not least because of attitudes like the LWs.

        1. Radioactive Cyborg Llama*

          Yes, this–it’s hard to get a job over 55 and if someone gets one, I think they’re not likely to leave until they retire (which could easily be a decade out!) just from the difficulty of finding another job.

          1. Rosemary*

            Over 55? Try over 50, and even younger in some industries. I have several friends in their late 40s-50 who are having a tough go at it, when in the past they never did. Part of it comes from the more senior you are, the fewer roles there are…but they are all getting the sense that age has something to do with it.

      2. ferrina*

        I’m not sure if they stay out of gratefulness, but in older recruits you can easily see what their work history shows. I know several 60+ folks whose career journey was always “how long can I stay at my current company?” These folks stay a decade or more at each company, so you don’t have to worry about losing them to a competitor. Some of these folks are counting the days til they retire, but just as many are planning to keep working past official retirement, just because they like working.

        1. Jeanine*

          well not always because we like working but because we’re forced to due to not being able to afford to retire!

        2. Rosemary*

          I always say that I am at my last job (presuming they feel the same LOL). I am content/comfortable enough, and biding my time until I can retire. If I were younger, I’d definitely be more likely to be looking for the next thing – more growth, more money…whereas now I am content to just stay put. I imagine many other older workers are similar, and employers are just as likely (if not more likely) to get 5+ years out of the 60+ hire as they are someone in their 30s or 40s.

      3. BlatheringViolet*

        Agreed.

        I’m an older employee and the benefit to hiring me is that because I have years experience/knowledge. Burn out is not an issue, because if I was going to burn out, it would have happened 10-15 years ago. I require a lot less supervision because I know what I’m doing & I am 3-4 times faster than my younger colleagues (all of whom I’ve trained) – which make any higher pay very cost effective, because when I leave my employer will need to hire 2-3 people to replace me.

        Younger employees are great if you want to grow them up to higher positions – with the expectation that today’s entry hire will be next year’s supervisor.

        Or if you have a dysfunctional workplace and younger hires are great if you need someone too scared to say anything/leave, or if you want to underpay your staff.

      4. Quill*

        They are also probably less likely to move, due to having family or property in the area they’re already in.

    3. Your Former Password Resetter*

      If it really does take 5-10 years before someone paid for their training costs, then that’s either a gamble you have to take anyway, or you need to build in some assurances into the contract. Like give people a bonus if they make it x years, or extra pay in return for a requirement that they work x years for your company.

      Either way you’re free to discuss their retirement date with them, and discuss how long they intend to stay and what you would need from a machinist to consider them. If they don’t plan to retire until their 70’s, it sounds like you would hire them just fine.

      1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        I don’t know that it would be appropriate to ask about a retirement date, any more than it would be appropriate to ask a young woman about plans to have children.

      2. Ana Gram*

        Oh I wouldn’t ask about retirement plans. If you end up not hiring them, it makes it pretty clear it was age related. Even when I hired people who had a mandatory retirement age of 70 (tied to our state pension plan), we still made it clear that we were happy to hire a, say, 67 year old, provide a year’s training and then they could work for two years. Most opted out but I did hire a 65 year old who does a lovely job.

        Heck, use the money you would’ve spent on a recruiter to advertise more and provide incentives for staying a year, two years, etc.

      3. jasmine*

        Making decisions based on what their retirement date is, is both discriminatory and illegal.

      4. Worldwalker*

        Remember also that a more experienced person is going to need less training than a younger one. That’s especially true in a profession like machinist. What he knows in his bones, someone 20 years younger is going to need 20 years to learn.

        1. Texan In Exile*

          “What he knows in his bones”

          I love this phrase! And this is exactly why I am willing to put up with appointments at the dental school that take three hours, even though my regular dentist would need 30 minutes. The dental students are learning all the latest research, but the professors – including the 84-year-old nun/dentist, whom the student addressed as Dr. Sister LastName – have Seen Things and can pass on the wisdom of experience.

      5. What_the_What*

        The LW wasn’t concerned with “training” costs, but with the 30-40K outlay to a recruiter to find the candidate.

    4. The Unionizer Bunny*

      Also how are you calculating your ROI for the recruitment fee? How long do you need someone to stay to make the investment worthwhile?

      I have this question as well. For the machinist to be worth hiring at all, LW4 must anticipate he would bring in revenue greater than his pay. 25% of the first year is equivalent to “3 months of work”. If the older machinist works 1 year and then retires, but hasn’t recouped the recruiter’s fees yet, LW4 would be paying him in excess of 80% of what he’s worth to the company? This feels unrealistically fair. Where’s all the corporate greed for orders-of-magnitude more/higher profits?

      (For a 2-year tenure, LW4’s machinist would need to be getting paid at least 90% of the revenue he brought in. Are there some hidden variables in this break-even formula?)

    5. DJ Abbott*

      I was coming to say this, too. I work with retired/retiring people, and it’s not unusual for people to work past age 65.
      If LW makes a good work environment with market value pay, this person might stay a while.

    6. El l*

      I wouldn’t apply ROI thinking to hiring today, pretty much ever. People just don’t stay long enough nowadays to have that matter. (blame who you like for that – Jack Welch comes up a lot in these discussions – but it’s true)

      More importantly, perhaps the more experienced guy is worth the extra money. May help the wider culture beyond just his higher production. Only way you know that is to interview them.

      1. Lady Danbury*

        Imo, employers are to blame. There’s no reason for an employee to be loyal and put the employer’s interests above their own when employers have repeatedly shown in some of the worst ways that they have no loyalty to their employees. We’ve seen employers pull offers before a candidate even starts the job, based on their business needs. “It’s just business” goes both ways.

        2. Resentful Oreos*

          I agree 1000%. Loyalty is for saps and suckers. Any employee who thinks their company will be loyal to them needs to wise up quick smart.

          To the OP, a younger employee might leave after a couple of years. Where is the “return on your investment” then? Job-hopping has gone from reprehensible to normal. Hire the best person for the job, whether they are 20 or 70, and don’t think in terms of getting value back for your investment! This is a person, not a mutual fund! Anyone, of any age, can leave your employment for any reason, taking your precious “investment” with them.

          Just stop.

        3. What_the_What*

          I have been a govt contractor for 25+ years. I’ve never been treated unfairly poorly by one of my 11 companies, (oh, and I’m a woman of a certain age now btw). I have, as a hiring manager though, had employEEs who’ve called on Friday to say that they won’t be starting on Monday after all. Quit w/o notice. Abuse WFH privileges. Commit time card fraud, etc…For every bad employer, I’m sure there’s an equally bad employee. I’m not saying that all employers are angels, but the mythology that employees are all saints who are overworked and taken advantage of by “the man” while all employers are all heartless monsters is really unfair. Both sides do bad deeds and can be pretty awful to the other.

      2. ferrina*

        ROI seems to assume that hiring/retention require a one-time investment, but that’s simply not how retention works*. If you are counting on hiring practices to get you a high retention, you’re doing it wrong**. At that point you are only screening for people who don’t like change/really want to stay at a single company. There’s a lot of highly talented people that know their worth, know their value, and advocate for what they want (including looking around). If you want to retain these people, you need competitive compensation, benefits that speak to their goals (including flexible time/location), a healthy work culture, and opportunities to grow.

        *I tend to look at the first 1-1.5 years after hire as Retention Through Hiring, both for the candidate and the company. If we are having people leave us or we are letting people go within the first year or eighteen months, that’s usually because we hired someone that wasn’t a good fit. After that, it’s about retention practices.
        **Obviously you want to screen out people who seem to have a history of job hopping (leaving jobs every 1-2 years).

      1. Paint N Drip*

        My CFO is 76, and a former employer had the company owner stay sharp and functional into his 90s

    8. I Can't Even*

      However also consider if the person has experience since 1984 they have a lot of institutional knowledge and will require less training. This is a benefit you will not get from a young worker fresh out of training.

      1. Double A*

        They also are likely able to help train less experienced employees; that’s a HUGE return on investment there.

    9. Lady Danbury*

      Even if s/he retires at 65, that’s still 5 years away. It’s extremely common and generally not frowned upon to leave a job after less than 5 years. The LW’s expectations on ROI are both unrealistic and discriminatory.

      1. Christmas Carol*

        And since any one born in 1960 or later cannot draw full Social Security until age SIXTY-SEVEN, the odds of empoyees working past age 65 is pretty high. Figure on seven years to retirement, at least.

    10. StressedButOkay*

      And, as we like to say in our department, you never know when someone’s going to win the lottery and go swanning off. Using a recruiter with that kind of fee comes with that ROI risk regardless of age.

    11. Salty Caramel*

      Thank you for saying this. I’m in my late fifties and I am not looking to retire until 70. I’m reasonably healthy and I want that full-time income for at least another decade.

    12. whatchamacallit*

      My dad retired at 68 and only then it was because his position was eliminated. He easily would’ve kept working into his 70s otherwise.

    13. ampersand*

      I’m dismayed that someone is thinking this way and wrote in to ask (though I guess I’m glad they asked instead of simply refusing to interview/hire this person…). Many people now only stay in positions a few years, especially younger hires, because it’s often the only way to get a raise and move up! That used to be frowned upon but it seems it’s become more the norm, especially in non-government jobs.

      If anything, an older worker seems more likely to stay until they retire than moving on to a new position after a couple of years–but regardless, age shouldn’t factor into this.

      1. mbs001*

        Why are you dismayed? When managing companies, we have to make business decisions all the time. It makes no sense to sink the significant hiring fees on a worker who definitely isn’t going to be around for very long. Yes, you can also say other younger employees may not stay that long either. But there’s a chance they will whereas the older worker definitely will not. Nor would I hire someone who is due to give birth within a few months of hire when I’m filling for a position that needs to be filled immediately. The standard question is to ask if there is anything that would prevent them from fulfilling the specific duties . . .

    14. OP4*

      There are things left out of the letter that make working past 65 possible but improbable. Due to the nature of our work it is unrealistic for most of our field employees to do the work after age 65. They are tired. Most either retire sometime after 60 or move to a less physically demanding job elsewhere for less pay (we pay well because the work is hard).

      For example, in the past couple years, we have had several senior field employees either retire or quit between ages 61 and 63. All had been with us 20-25 years. People like working here – but this industry is physically hard.

      In fact, our current machinist has been with us for 20+ years (and wants to retire now that he is 62).

      Also – I feel like people are missing the point that I would have considered this guy if he had applied to our ad directly. It’s the recruiter fee that makes hiring someone that realistically only has 5 years of work for us feel unreasonable and this seems like a legitimate reason to say “I’m not interested” when the recruiter asks why. But – now I know it is against the law even with that caveat.

      1. HoundMom*

        Only you know the job and the physical toll it can take on a body. However, age on a piece of paper is just that. Each person ages differently. Some of my friends are in their late 70’s and have physical jobs (where I am sedentary in my job) and they are in far better physical shape despite being 15 or more years older.

      2. Rae*

        Can you negotiate with the recruiter a payback period? If any employee they bring you and you hire leaves before 5 years the recruiter would pay back a portion of the fee (less and less over time is what I’m picturing)? I’m guessing that could be hard to do now that you’re already in process, but maybe a possibility and removes the focus on this one applicant.

      3. Cranky Old Bat*

        The point you appear to be missing is that you can’t guarantee your ROI no matter how old the person you hire is.

        2. Rosemary*

          Exactly. That 35 year old they hire might leave in 2 years because his wife gets a job across the country. Or he get a better offer elsewhere. Or gets hit by a bus. No guarantees.

    15. Worldwalker*

      Let’s say a 60-year-old machinist, with all those years of experience, works until he’s 65. And on the same day, you hire a 30-year-old machinist, who gets a better job offer and leaves when he’s 32.*

      Which gave you a greater ROI?

      The older machinist, too, is more likely to stay with you longer than the younger one, who might switch jobs every few years. He certainly has more experience, which is a lot more important in a machinist than many other professions — if you’re paying them the same, you’re getting more for your money with the more experienced guy.

      *or moves to another area for his wife’s job because machinists can always get work, or decides he wants to go to grad school in some unrelated field, or he inherits enough money to live on and fulfill his dream of being an artist, or he has a huge row with Fred in accounting and ragequits, or he gets hit by a bus, or any of a number of things.

      1. Rosemary*

        LOL I posted something very similar (albeit much less eloquently) before seeing your post. Down to the “hit by a bus” bit :)

    16. RC*

      I think I actually just saw an article over on NPR about how older people aren’t retiring into their 70s and 80s (!) and how this is actually a problem for the younger work force wanting to enter fields or move up. So, yeah, I wouldn’t necessarily assume.

    17. Mid40sgal*

      This might fall into the advice of not putting every job you’ve had on your resume. Something from 1984 shouldn’t be on there. It sets you up for age discrimination. I have even taken jobs off my LinkedIn in that are over 15 years ago.

      1. But what to call me?*

        My dad ran into a problem with that because he’s had his current job for ~25 years and it’s at a very small company where promotions and other measures of progression/changes in job duties really aren’t a thing. He could either have exactly one job on his resume or include a previous job that was also relevant to the work he was looking for but that clearly showed his age. His job search was unsuccessful, so he’ll probably be in his current job until he retires unless current management runs the company into the ground.
        (He’s almost 60, by the way, still does physical labor heavy volunteer work on a regular basis, and will likely continue to work for another decade or more, barring some medical crisis. Not everyone that age can do that, but it does happen.)

    18. Florp*

      Yeah, my mother in law is 80 and still working, by choice.

      OP, hire the 60 year old and also a kid fresh out of trade school. Have the experienced worker mentor the younger one. Cultivate a culture where the senior people reach back down the ladder and pull the junior workers up. The “investment” will constantly pay it forward.

    19. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

      The culture now is that most younger people will not stay longer than 2 years. Pay has gotten so out of whack now, that the only way to make more is to job hop and it is really talked about/encouraged in some of the job forums my college age kids attend.

      You are more likely to have a 60 year old stay 5 years than a 20 year old.

      But either way I am guessing OP wouldn’t want to hire a woman of child bearing age “just in case” either.

    20. RedinSC*

      One of the things we see here often is that the younger employees can’t make a living here (high cost of living area) so leave after they get a bit of experience. The more seasoned employees have generally (not always) established themselves in the area, they have their homes, their networks, etc, and are less likely to move to a lower cost of living area or go back to school or, or, or

      They can be more likely to stick around.

    3. Elder Millennial*

      No, but someone who started working as a machinist in that year would certainly be at least 50.

      1. Insufficient Sausage Explainer*

        Say they started when they were 16, they’d be 56, so even if they only planned to work till 65, that’s still a good 9 years.

        1. TechWorker*

          Or there might have been other info on the resume that indicated they probably didn’t start at 16.. doesn’t really change the point but don’t think the person in question is ‘definitely 56’ from the context…

        2. sparkle emoji*

          I mean, that assumes they started working very early, in a role that can often involve working up to that level. If this is a CNC machinist and not just a run of the mill machine operator, there’s training involved and some companies want to see some loyalty before someone “earns” that training. I don’t support the LW in trying to avoid hiring older employees, but they’re likely correct about the applicants age given they’d know their fields norms.

          1. amoeba*

            Yup (and probably there’s also stuff like degrees on the resumé as well that would show thy didn’t, in fact, start working at 16!)
            I mean, our field is pretty extreme with long grad school, PhD, etc, so for us, somebody who had their first industry job in 1984 would have been around 30/late 20s at the time – so around 70…

        3. 1-800-BrownCow*

          You cannot legally work in a machine shop or manufacturing environment at 16. He would have at least had to have been 18, which would put him at 58, so still a good number of years left to work.

    5. Empress Ki*

      Someone starting to work in 1984 was probably about 20 at the time. That’s about 60 now.
      Not a good reason to not hire them anyway.

      1. Also-ADHD*

        No, and as Alison said, it’s faulty to assume how long any candidate will stay and plan ROI based on that. You could structure the recruiting payout/% to include some kind of retention vs being a one time flat fee, and I’ve seen recruiters get their % over time (with it drawn out up to 2 years) but that might not work for this industry/recruiter. I’m not familiar with trades using external recruiters. I would think a combo of unions and schools would be effective ways to advertise jobs and the 25% might go better as a hiring bonus or salary improvement to the role instead of imagining a recruiter could solve the issue by identifying a long term hire.

      2. Lab lady*

        And couldn’t they offer an actual co tract with a guaranteed (on both sides) term of employment if they are that worried.

        They won’t because it would mean they couldn’t fire them at will….. but you can’t have it both ways.

        1. Happy meal with extra happy*

          Unless they’re offering contracts to everyone, I’d still be very concerned about discrimination claims with this. Also, as much as the praises of employment contracts are sung here (and it’s not necessarily wrong!), I think many US employees would be a bit freaked out by them if they’re not in an industry where they’re common.

          1. amoeba*

            Yeah, and also, that kind of contract would very probably be illegal where I live – I mean, we do have long notice periods, but a job you basically cannot quit? Nah.

          2. Paulina*

            It’s also not fair to burden the employee with something extra because of additional expenses from how they were hired. The employee is worth their salary, which is what they’d be getting. The concern is about whether the duration of employment will end up being worth the finder’s fee that the recruiter wants. It seems very problematic to add requirements for the employee that might require them to pay “back” for something they never got. This would be even more problematic since the nature of the work makes OP’s concern more about how long the employee will be able to do the very physical work, not just whether they will want to stay.

            Discrimination issues aside, it also doesn’t make sense to add problematic unusual conditions to hiring for a position that they’re having so much trouble filling.

  4. EA*

    On OP3, I would not mention the family concern if you’ve already expressed your sympathy. It can almost be more exhausting when you feel like you have to acknowledge well wishes constantly. I’d stick to work topics and keep emails as concise as possible.

    1. allathian*

      Yes, I agree. Although it really depends on the person and on your relationship, some people would appreciate a kind word in most emails, others would prefer to stick to business.

      But yeah, when my dad was in hospital for a couple months with a health issue, I genuinely appreciated my coworkers’ well wishes to start with. Most coworkers instinctively seemed to know that when I was at work, I needed to not think about my dad all the time and I certainly didn’t want to manage their feelings about his illness.

      But there was one particular teammate who kept asking how my dad was doing pretty much every time I saw her, several times a week. It got to the point where I actively started avoiding her before I realized that I had to say something. So I went to her and asked her to stop asking about my dad every time, that I appreciated her sympathy but that I wanted to be able to focus on work when I was at work. I thought she got it, but when she again asked about my dad the next time I saw her, I burst into tears. They were partly provoked because I’d had some bad news about his health that day, but her ignoring my wishes on this really upset and frustrated me, and when I cry, 9 times out of 10 it’s because I’m frustrated or angry rather than sad (I’ll weep when I’m sad, sob when I’m frustrated).

      Thankfully my dad recovered, but my relationship with that teammate never did. I stuck to strictly business with her from then on and never sought her company unless I needed something from her to do my job. Thankfully she retired a couple years later, and I “coincidentally” scheduled PTO for the day of her retirement party.

      1. Work for work’s sake*

        One thing that might be nice is added clarity about urgency, when things are due, what requires specific attention vs what is nice to know, etc. Always good to include anyway, but especially when someone’s mental load may be split.

        1. anne of mean gables*

          Yes I was in this position recently (our director, who normally responds to emails from 4a to 10p, was out with a serious, long-lasting family health issue) and I handled it by prefacing my first email to her with a “I know you are tending to X, I also know you want to be kept in the loop, please respond to this at your convenience – if I don’t hear back from you I will check in next week” disclaimer. We’re quite close so it was pretty informal but you could phrase it more formally too. I think just explicitly naming the situation and being clear about your expectations for response/attention (low) goes a long way. (and I might handle it differently if I did not KNOW she would want to be kept in the loop, or was my subordinate or same-level colleague rather than director).

        2. hi there*

          Seconding this. You might add a line in one of your emails to clarify your intent, like “I know you’re checking in periodically, so will highlight deadlines or priorities within each email. I hope this helps during this challenging time – but let me know if you have another preference.”

          Love anne of mean gables’ script, too! :)

      2. PhyllisB*

        I can so relate. Those of you who are faithful readers here know about my son. Before we got answers, every time I went to church at least five people would ask if I had heard anything. I would say no but I would update as soon as I heard. Didn’t do any good. I finally asked them kindly not to ask me anymore, and they honored that.
        Now that we have our answer, I encounter people that I know are aware, but are afraid to mention it. I understand and usually bring it up to dispel the awkwardness.

    2. WoodswomanWrites*

      I agree with this and Alison’s perspective. Sadly, I lived this experience myself earlier this year. OP3, while it’s not an identical situation, I think it’s comparable.

      My beloved brother-in-law passed away unexpectedly and I spent the next month working from my sister’s home in a different state. People emailed me initial thoughtful notes and asked how they could help, and that was great.

      There are three things my co-workers did by email that were most helpful for me.

      One was checking about timelines and due dates when they wrote to me about projects, offering to be flexible and asking if I needed more time. That was a wonderful way of communicating their concern without asking me how my sister and I were doing and having to say we felt like crap and cried every day.

      The second thing my co-workers did was have patience with my being distracted. They would politely ping me if I forgot to respond to a request, etc. I appreciated their reminders.

      The third thing was the support I received from management to do whatever I needed to care for my sister and myself. Leadership let me know that I had their support to continue working remotely as long as I needed to.

      All of these things communicated the concern and kindness of my colleagues without putting me on the spot. I really appreciated having work to focus on without bringing up the personal things.

    3. Allonge*

      Yes – depending on how often you write, a ‘hope you are doing ok’ may be nice sometimes, but, don’t overdo this. You are still in a work relationship, and it’s ok – and most likely welcome – to focus on that.

      1. sometimeswhy*

        This could nest probably anywhere in this thread bu anchoring it here for the “hope you’re doing ok.” I dealt with a family emergency earlier this year and kept working through it, albeit reduced hours. In part to keep a reliable drumbeat in my day to day and in part because I’m in a single-point-of-failure role. (I’m working on that.) Looking back on that month and change there were two things that I really appreciated that my colleagues did aside from regular work stuff and taking on things that I delegated away.

        One was this. Not asking how I was doing just sometimes saying “I hope you’re hanging in there.” This I could just acknowledge with a nod or a smile or a thanks but it didn’t ask me to divulge how i was actually doing which would’ve made me lose composure in a way that wouldn’t have helped anything, including me.

        The other was putting context into every request, “I’m reaching out to you about XNEED which is important because YREASON and has ZDEADLINE and afaik you’re the subject matter expert. Please feel free to redirect me if there’s someone more appropriate.” Sometimes I took care of it. Sometimes I looped someone else in.

    4. SarahKay*

      This, definitely. When I’ve had problems in my personal life then I find work is a break from having to deal with the feelings. If someone is putting sympathy in every email they send to me I’d be a mess.
      The occasional sympathetic comment (for me) would be okay, but we’re talking once a week, max, and I’d want it separate from normal work communications.

    5. NobodyHasTimeForThis*

      Amen, I missed a fair bit of time when my son was in a near-fatal accident and when I came back I wanted to work at work. He was still in the hospital and it was still unclear how well he would recover. I did not want to talk about it at work because I did not want to cry at work

  5. Bookworm in Stitches*

    For #2, your daughter needs to ask if there is a room she’ll be able to pump that meets all the legal requirements. If there isn’t, maybe she can use that to at least postpone the return to office.

  6. John*

    LW2: We need some kind of legislation protecting WFH. At a minimum, increasing the number of days someone has to spend in the office should be considered constructive dismissal if the employee decides to quit.

    1. TheBunny*

      I completely disagree. I enjoy my WFH days, but it’s really not the employer causing them to disappear.

      Yes they want people in office to know they are working…but the proliferation of people talking on social media about what they are doing instead of working, and the colleagues you can never find during the day… those are the reason.

      3. Emmy Noether*

        I disagree. If employers don’t want to offer WFH, they need to not offer it from the start, not revoke it later. I know we’re still figuring all this out, but employers should realize that while for some employees, WFH is just a nice perk, for others, it’s necessary to make their life work.

        For example, I’m fully remote because I moved away. To work in office, I would have to buy a car and commute more than an hour each way to another office where I don’t actually work with anyone. There’s no universe where I’m going to do that. So I have an addendum to my contract that guarantees me fully remote. I know contracts are rare in the US, but I’m sure y’all can come up with something.

        Also, how is it relevant to me if others are skiving off? If I’m not doing my work, put me on a PIP, leave others out of it. Collective punishment was a bad idea in first grade, and it’s a bad idea at work.

        1. GythaOgden*

          Employers can’t be that rigid. That’s like saying if we employ someone, we can never sack them (or if you get employed somewhere, you can never leave that place). Things happen, business needs shift, teams shift and so on and so forth, and what matters is the needs of the business at any one time, not rigidity that might actually hamper what they’re trying to achieve. Changes should be made well enough in advance, but management has the right to look at a situation from a bird’s eye view, spot the weak parts and make changes that suit them and their priorities.

          Particularly in any business that depends on in-person labour (like mine — healthcare estates and facilities), there are factors at play here that mean rank and file WFHers are far from the least privileged among us. Therefore, configuring working conditions so that people at least touch base with those they manage can do a lot more for genuine equity and cohesion in the workplace than a certain, relatively privileged, sector of the workforce getting what they want at the expense of other stakeholders’ needs.

          IME as an in-person worker up until last November, there were a lot of things remote workers said and did that showed that they didn’t realise their own privilege and our relationships got worse rather than better. We tried to make things work for them, but there was a real quantifiable negative change for us, which led to us getting ignored and treated worse than we had been when most people worked in the office. Yet when we tried to articulate that, WFHers here and elsewhere accused us of being crabs in a bucket and trying to get ahead at your expense. Yes, maybe we were, but the WFHers were the crab fishermen rather than the crabs. We were trying to get back into the sea; you were actively stopping us.

          I am in a relatively privileged position now in that the deliverables in my job can be sent out 100% from home, but there’s a strong collaborative need within my team that means we’ve set up an in-person day after about nine months of working in this constellation. There’s a direct need for management and coordinators to be on-site as much as possible to oversee work going on as property managers, and a need for me to familiarise myself with the people I am assigning work to because of that equity issue I mentioned above.

          Being too stubborn about it would mean stubborning ourselves out of a job in estates and facilities, and that’s not fair to anyone involved, least of all us ourselves.

        2. TechWorker*

          In the U.K. you generally have a designated place of work in the contract, which can be ‘remote’. I think that generally works well, if a company wants full time remote, but isn’t willing to put it in the contract, you know where you stand. If a company offers 2 days a week remote or whatever but contract says in office, it’s clear that is a perk and they can revoke it whilst still being within the contract.

          1. LateRiser*

            Yeah, we had to sign an addendum to our contracts once the lockdown-induced need to WFH passed if we wanted to keep doing so even one day a week (which was kind of weird because people would have regular WFH days pre-covid anyway). It changed work location to “office or home” and gave the company the right to demand to see our home working solution and check ergonomics etc. Not that they’ve ever used that clause, thankfully.

            1. londonedit*

              We had to do an online ergonomics survey when WFH started – basically we had to answer various questions about our workstation setup and confirm that we understood the recommendations and that any deviation from them was our own choice so the company wouldn’t be liable from a health and safety point of view.

              We also have to specify our work location – since 2020 there’s been an option for ‘hybrid’ and there is an expectation of a certain number of in-office days per week. But as others have said, the company is within its rights to revoke WFH, they’d just need everyone to sign an addendum to their contracts.

        3. DJ Abbott*

          US employers will never be willing to use contracts. They love at-will employment because they can use it to fire people for all kinds of petty stupid reasons which cover discrimination, or incompetent management, or anything else they don’t want to deal with.
          If Congress ever tried to legislate this employers would fight tooth and nail and it would take decades to happen, if it did it all.

          1. Happy meal with extra happy*

            Would US employees be willing to use contracts? I think the idea that one couldn’t just quit a job whenever they wanted would be difficult for many here, despite the protections such contracts also offer.

            1. Salty Caramel*

              I know of people who have them but it’s a minority and a small one at that. With 59 of the US states having “at will” employment, it’s to the employer’s advantage to be able to terminate you at any time for any reason.

              Employees are supposed to be able to quit at any time for any reason, but most employers demand notice. 2 weeks is traditional and might be in the Employee Handbook.

              2. DJ Abbott*

                Technically employers can’t force an employee to work a notice period. An employee can just quit one day and leave. Or with a shorter notice period.
                Employers can refuse to give a good reference though.

        4. blah*

          “Here’s how things work outside the US, you guys should just do that too!” How is this helpful?

          1. Jamjari*

            First, how is assuming OP is in the US helpful? I assume Alison has info we don’t here so OP probably is, but the letter didn’t say, unless I missed it.

            But also, why is it different from sharing salary or PTO amounts or other benefits? Knowledge about how things are done at different companies, different jurisdictions, and even in different countries can be helpful in knowing what you’d like changed where you are … just some of those changes are bigger mountains to climb.

            And I agree with the original response – the law should change so that if you were officially remote and your employer changes that, that you can quit and be eligible for unemployment insurance (which I assume that’s not currently the case).

            And to the people commenting about WFH people skirking work – they’d do that anyway in the office, it would just be different. Measure people by their results, not how long their butt warms a specific seat.

            1. KatCardigans*

              OP’s daughter has a 3-month-old and seems to be back at work full time. That *could* be anywhere, but it’s more common in the US to be back full-time with such a young baby than it is in many other countries.

          3. amoeba*

            I mean, that’s not really what the comment says though! I understood it more as “I have an addendum to my contract – I know you don’t really do contracts in the US, but I’m sure you could do something similar (like put it in writing, etc.)”

            1. DJ Abbott*

              Putting it in writing might help, but would not be legally binding in the US. I think Alison was mentioning this last week.

        5. Strive to Excel*

          Sometimes a company can try an initiative and find that it doesn’t work for them. Just because a company offers X benefit once doesn’t mean that they will always offer it in perpetuity.

        6. Six for the truth over solace in lies*

          She started working for them in 2020. I daresay the context of “they may have been legally required to offer it on a temporary basis because of a worldwide pandemic” makes the calculation a bit different. After all, it would be remarkably poor incentive to say “any measures you take in a time of international crisis must be something you’re willing to keep doing when the crisis has passed.”

          It’s probably a good thing for our collective mental health that the circumstances of mid-2020 are rapidly being blunted in our memory, admittedly.

        8. Where’s the Orchestra?*

          There is a process on my fully telework team to pull people back into the office after being sent remote/telework. It’s included in the teleworking agreement that you sign before going remote. Mostly it centers around productivity and availability standards, but does also include conditions for your WFH environment (like it becoming obvious there are other people constantly looking over your shoulder and you deal with extensive PII). They don’t jump straight to pulling folks back into the office, but it is acknowledged that if management thinks your home office set up is part of your working struggles, having to come back into the office is a very real possibility.

          (And yes, we have two folks that were pulled back into the office after having been remote because they were constantly not meeting standards at home. In the office they never miss standards, so something about the other environment may have played a role in the problems they were having.)

        9. Fluffy Orange Menace*

          That isn’t the case here. The LW’s daughter was sent to WFH during COVID. It wasn’t a perk or condition of her initial employment. She got a “gimme” for 4 years and now they want her back *Shrug*. Annoying for sure, but not an offer they revoked out of bad faith.

          1. Greg*

            Plus I know we are supposed to operate on the information that we’re given, but I can’t help but speculate that, “My daughter’s new boss hates her,” is, “My daughter isn’t doing the job she’s been hired to do because she has two children at home who she is caring for and her supervisor is holding her accountable.”

            Not to say she should be working with a three month old (thanks US childcare policies!).

      4. Also-ADHD*

        I don’t think those ARE the reason everywhere frankly, not directly at least. (If it is some larger perception thing ultimately based on controlling workers and wearing people down to maintain capitalist control of all levels of labor, I guess the perception there’s more people posting in social media who need to be “controlled” might be the issue.) Plenty of high performers or companies/teams without performance issues documented have done RTO and plenty of teams with people who aren’t doing great jobs didn’t do RTO. Plenty of people slack and are useless or hard to get ahold of in office too. In a few spot cases, RTO might support productivity but overall, the data doesn’t bear that out (the data is a little better on an in office or hybrid strategy for collaboration, innovation, or mentorship of new hires, but not necessarily if you control for other variables). I would say patterns we are seeing indicate that the main reasons companies have pushed RTO are 1) real estate investments simply can’t free fall economically without hurting a significant amount of the class making decisions (we’re seeing them divest RE and the market correction done more softly in this area and this will become less of a factor over the next decade) and the pandemic WFH was not good for that market as it was too immediate, plus real estate decisions tend to be longer term; 2) RTO was a (terrible) strategy for soft layoffs, and in some cases high performers in certain niches did get exclusions, though tech did this and many companies did regret this method and found actual layoffs more beneficial even with the financial costs (because RTO didn’t necessarily cause the “right” employees to leave); 3) post-pandemic workers had more power and RTO was a way to ensure companies regained more power back—being in office may make it harder to look for other jobs or direct areas of control and may also just create a return to hustle culture normalized in the prior decades that young people are thankfully rejecting, etc. There are other factors of control that I think come from the type of people contributing to these decisions (often who aren’t beholden to them and can WFH all they want as execs) based on age and demographics and old school ideas about control, but I mean more the org idea of control not adding in the CEO wants pretty young women around to harass etc; 4) Companies don’t understand how to manage employees/train managers, and so you get very disparate results with WFH benefits or drawbacks that are hard to understand (I’m talking even within the same function or company) but if you control for how the org is both measuring and managing performance, the issue becomes more clear.

        The reality is WFH has such clear benefits for workers that the organizational discussion wasn’t really resolved (WFH was an emergency situation that then was perpetuated longer term by one of the first / most employee-friendly labor markets in most of our lifetime) and orgs don’t like having less control. It’s not really because there are noticing people not do their jobs in meaningful ways.

        I mean, social media posts may rankle but more because of the idea of worker control is rankling. Though one good way to promote WFH might be TikToks on how easy it is to form unions if you’re brought in on RTO, I don’t know. The whole narrative of capitalism is mostly about control, and only very rarely has someone been actually assessed for performance issues, singles out for RTO as a solution, and even more rarely would that “work” to get more productivity out of them, though it might create more misery and control. (Note this is not to say in office jobs are all miserable or shouldn’t exist—some jobs make sense to be in office or hybrid for totally reasonable reasons, but I’m speaking to using it punitively to control performance based on “people are slacking off”. There’s real data and it doesn’t indicate that’s likely to happen WFH if you have roles that can work from home and measure/manage them in ways that are effective and it doesn’t indicate in office time inherently creates more productivity—in some cases, it creates less, though not all—or makes people “care” about doing a good job.)

      5. Sloanicota*

        This is a strange comment. That’s your perspective, but if someone takes a job that is listed as WFH and makes plans around that, such as moving too far away to commute, there should be unemployment offered if the employer then alters that arrangement. I’m sorry if you feel ill used in your role / happy that WFH is just a perk to you but that’s like saying “I don’t need insurance because I get it through my husband, so nobody really needs it, and anyway people abuse insurance.”

        1. Don't Usually Read the Comments*

          All comments are simply one person’s perspective, though, including the original comment in this thread that there needs to be legislation around this issue.

        3. ferrina*

          Agree. WFH, like all benefits, has different value to different people. I love WFH and it makes a huge difference in my life. If anything, it increases my productivity because I’m able to work under my ideal circumstances and I can easily work on things in odd hours, making short-notice items less hectic.

          If my company stopped WFH, I would be looking for other opportunities. Many of my coworkers feel the same, though some prefer working in the office. Honestly, consistently offering WFH has a huge impact on our retention.

      6. Bast*

        You can goof off in the office just as easily as at home. If someone is not doing their work, that needs to be addressed with them specifically; no need to bring everyone else into it.

        1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

          I actually had more unproductive time at the office, between socializing (keeping the extroverts happy), water cooler/ad hoc stuff that had to be repeated or transcribed later, etc.

          I sort of think RTO should be managed like layoffs, where there’s a period of advanced notice required (90 days?). Perhaps a requirement of severance in lieu if a role has been remote for a period (24 months?). I am glad I’m not charged with finding/crafting the solution; it’s going to be impossible to please everyone with a one-size-fits-all policy.

        2. NaoNao*

          Eh, with respect, I think *some limited kinds* of goofing off can happen in the office: surfing the web, chatting, long breaks, etc. But I certainly can’t step out for an hour and a half to do errands and then make up the time on the back end, take multiple small breaks to do chores, scroll my phone during dull town hall meetings, make an entire lunch from scratch and clean up, watch tv on another screen or my phone, take a nap instead of lunch hour, and so on, in the office.

          I honestly don’t believe that the majority of corporations requiring RTO are maliciously desiring “control” as many people posit. I do think most corporations are run by people for whom butts in seats, face time, networking and relationships/politicking and “perception is reality” was/is a way of doing business and the huge shift to tracking actual productivity via deliverables and KPIs is not worth the effort vs. just insisting on RTO.

          It also does work as a ‘soft layoff’–because there’s no possible way corporations don’t know that an overwhelming majority of people prefer WFH and will quit or be let go rather than return five days a week.

          1. YetAnotherAnalyst*

            It’s been a bit since I’ve worked in the office, but I’ve seen all of these except lunch from scratch and the chores in our office pre-2020, and more – for awhile it seemed like all the managers at my office playing Cookie Clicker in every meeting! So it’s going to depend a lot on the particular office culture, but even on my bad days WFH I get more done than I did on my good days at the office.

          2. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

            make an entire lunch from scratch and clean up

            Fresh, real food without preservatives is correlated with better health (so lower healthcare/insurance costs), better energy (productivity) and morale (productivity) and generates less waste than fast-food, all of which are good things for the business.

            1. Jellybeans*

              So is exercising, getting lots of sleep, and taking relaxing vacations.

              The argument that it’s okay to slack off at work and spend significant amount of paid working time doing leisure activities because doing leisure activities makes you healthier, is a HELL of a take.

              People really will bend over backwards to justify not working.

              Just go buy a salad.

              1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

                So you’re saying, given the same 60 minute lunch break, people wouldn’t be better off eating real food, even if part of the 60 are spent on prep and cleanup? The peer reviews on that opinion are going to be… interesting.

          3. Deborah Vance, Vance Refrigeration*

            My previous workplace had hammocks in the breaking room. A lot of people spent their lunch hours napping, and more than once someone slept through the afternoon. Also, people do sometimes step out of the office to run errands — as long as they deliver what’s expected, it’s not really a problem.

        3. MassMatt*

          There are unproductive goof-offs in the office as well as at home, and ineffective managers too.

          But one key difference which this letter touches upon is being a primary caregiver while working. That’s something impossible to do while in the office.

          My prior employer went about 50% remote several years before the pandemic, so it was planned and not an emergency response. One of the main criterion for WFH specified they could not be a primary caregiver during working hours—if they had young kids, or disabled adults, at home they needed to have care arranged. WFH was not a PT arrangement so you can squeeze some work in around looking after kids, etc.

          1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

            One of the main criterion for WFH specified they could not be a primary caregiver during working hours—if they had young kids, or disabled adults, at home they needed to have care arranged.

            I keep hearing those stories, and it spooked me to the point where I bring it up anytime a recruitment feels like it’s getting serious, and every last hiring manager has claimed the same thing (I’m paraphrasing; wording does vary): get your work done well, keep the kids off camera/mic, and we’ll work with you. We understand that family is why you work.

            I’m starting to wonder if Programming is an outlier, and for once a positive one.

            1. My Brain is Sometimes Slow*

              Does this mean that you support employees working from home with young kids or disabled adults? I promise I’m not trying to be snarky–I’m just not sure I’m reading your comment correctly!

              1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

                I personally fall on the “just get the job done” side of the divide, be it caring for others, method of brewing coffee, choice of beverages and/or diet, work location, techniques, etc. I trust results and quality metrics to tell the tale, and have no desire to control others.

                That post, though, just contributes my experience: I’m not seeing hiring managers making the same hardline stances on the presence of children while working remotely, and acknowledging my experience may be an outlier. Normally, I feel programming is more toxic than older, better established professions.

              2. Bitte Meddler*

                I’m not Sola Lingua but my company supports employees working from home with humans who require a certain amount of caretaking, at least based on my experience (elderly mother lives with me) and one of the women on my extended team (adult son with severe autism).

                We’re told pretty much the same thing: Get your work done, attend key meetings, keep the person you’re caring for off camera (if possible; the adult son with autism does make appearances every now and then but my coworker does a fabulous job of redirecting him without losing her train of thought in meetings).

                Several of my colleagues have children who are pre-school and school-aged, and everyone understands that we might see / hear them in the summer or over school breaks. As long as the person is still meeting their deliverables, literally no one cares.

                I think it would be different if the person being cared for was an infant.

          2. Bast*

            It touches upon being a primary caregiver while working from home, but we don’t actually know that. Alison questions it in her response, though it is a fairly safe bet from what we know. While I do think it’s fair to have a clause about WFH while being a primary caregiver, there are certain jobs where it is possible (though a pain). I could not be a primary caregiver while WFH because it was expected I would be at my desk, available the same as if I was in the office. There are other jobs where it isn’t exactly “you must be available 9 to 5 and sit in your seat all day” and more “as long as the work gets done on time and you’re generally responsive to emails/Slack, we don’t care” type of jobs.

        4. Jellybeans*

          Not really. Every time WFH comes up there are comments here from people casually mentioning that they take naps, cook meals, run errands etc. while WFH. Not really comparable to spending a few minutes chatting in the break room.

          A lot of people are just very entitled and have the mentality that it’s somehow outrageous to be expected to actually do something for their salary (look at the whole “staying awake in meetings is emotional labour” thing) – thinking it’s okay to take naps during working hours is very entitled behaviour.

      7. Learn ALL the things*

        People waste time on social media and disappear for hours at a time in the office too.

        1. ferrina*

          TRUTH.

          Back in the Office-Only days, there were several people that everyone knew did nothing, and their bosses did nothing about it. There will always be someone who is doing the bare minimum or below, and there will always be someone who is willing to allow that. That’s not location-dependent.

          1. JustaTech*

            Seriously. There was a guy in my office known for taking long lunches and watching anime during working hours. There was the IT guy who would just disappear for fully half the day and claim to be in the other building.

            I feel like this was a discussion recently here, because I quoted the Prince song about “doing something close to nothing, but different from the day before”.

            1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

              I’ve had enough on-site peers earn the nickname “Hácenada” that you’d think it was a real name.

        2. I Have RBF*

          This.

          I remember one job where the three of us in one room couldn’t concentrate because Mr Chatty from Accounting would come in to our room and yak at us for hours at a time. Not only was he goofing off, he was screwing up our productivity too.

      8. WillowSunstar*

        I would not mind if we went hybrid, as long as we’re okayed to work from home during really bad winter weather. (Yes, I’m an Upper Midwesterner and our highways can get dangerously icy.) It gets rather lonely working from home when you are single and can’t have a pet because a. allergic and b. expensive in your apartment.

        1. Hush42*

          This is what my company did. We were fully remote from March of 2020 to March of 2022 due to the pandemic. Once we returned to the office the policy has been Monday through Thursday and then people can WFH on Fridays. But we also have manager discretion around things like poor weather or sick days. We are in the Upstate NY “snow belt” and I have several employees who drive 45+ minutes from even snowier areas and I make it very clear that they are encouraged to WFH in bad weather.

          That being said when we were hiring in 2020 and 2021 I made it *very* clear that WFH was not going to be permanent and that we would be bringing people back to the office at some point. I wanted to make extra sure that we didn’t do what OPs daughters employer is doing. Leadership in my company was always clear that WFH would never be permanent.

      9. Gudrid the Well Traveled*

        I think that’s a sort of survivorship bias of the algorithm, though. Videos of people doing what they’re supposed to at work aren’t fun to share so it seems like everyone is goofing off at home.

        1. ferrina*

          You also can’t show “this is what I did at work today” for many corporate/office jobs because that’s proprietary.
          You could show “here’s my hack for Powerpoint”, but that’s an entirely different genre of content.

      10. Lenora Rose*

        Instead of imagining reasons, we should look at what businesses say are their arguments for revoking work from home. Many of them come down to vibes, including the explicit cases where people have pointed out that productivity is UP by every metric with remote or hybrid workers, but management decides to bring them in office anyhow. Blaming the (few) lazy workers for management decisions is at best an incomplete picture of what’s really going on.

        It’s been pointed out there are PLENTY of ways of judging the productivity of remote workers if you’re worried they’re lazing (especially if they’re hybrid and there’s a noticeable difference in results between locations, but not exclusively). There are also PLENTY of people who are unproductive right in an office building under their boss’s nose (including ones who are unproductive because of micromanagement and the boss’s nose being too close), and plenty of ways to discipline or motivate workers who aren’t productive without moving them around physically from location to location.

        NB: I work in office.

        1. JustaTech*

          Yes, please!
          My work just sent out an email that we’re going to a minimum 4 days in office starting in a few weeks (currently I think it’s 3 days for people below a certain title, and 4 for higher ranked people).
          The whole thing is just silly because we have so many people with so many different kinds of jobs. Like, the sales team should never, ever be in the office, they need to be out doing sales calls. The manufacturing folks, on the other hand, can only do their work on-site. So who is this even directed towards?
          (And for us, will it actually be enforced equally, or will the one team that is still mostly remote stay mostly remote and the team that’s mostly on-site be told that they must be on-site full time without a business reason?)

    2. AcademiaNut*

      You’d have to lower the bar for constructive dismissal on a lot of other things at the same time. Changes in benefits, changes in schedule, changes in work site inside the same city, going from a private office to hot desking, and other things that can vastly affect the quality of your job without being illegal, or allowing you to collect UI if you quite because of them.

      Or require enforceable contracts that spell out obligations on both sides and are periodically renewed/re-negotiated.

      1. Sloanicota*

        I actually do think we need to lower the bar on constructive dismissal! So often the advice here is basically, “that stinks but you just have to decide to keep the job under those terms or try to job search” when job searching is hardly an easy thing for most people to just snap their fingers and get done. They can lower your pay or cancel your benefits and you’re just SOL.

        1. Learn ALL the things*

          This. Absolutely this. The IS needs stronger worker protections in general, and this is on the right track.

          2. GythaOgden*

            Europe is not actually that far ahead on this score. A lot of people cry this about the US without actively researching the equivalent situation in the UK, and it can be quite illuminating what you think our laws are like because actually our working culture is a bit different and perhaps overall a bit less flexible than what I read about yours here.

            From his use of the term, I actually think John is in the UK and is wanting the law to be relaxed, but I don’t think it would happen because constructive dismissal should generally be reserved for when there’s been egregious behaviour by the employer rather than a lever to make them do what they want even when it would be things like moving offices, deciding for themselves using their own metrics that things aren’t working out etc etc, and in this case believing that an employee isn’t actually performing well and thus needs more direct supervision. CD is basically the employer version of gross misconduct — the offence has to be so shocking and egregious as to warrant legal action. It would badly hamstring businesses not to be able to, say, move premises or discuss redundancies for financial reasons if those sort of things were brought under the CD umbrella.

            This is the UK site for the ACAS workplace mediation organisation, which is generally the first port of call when trying to work things out with an employer:

            https://www.acas.org.uk/dismissals/constructive-dismissal

            The Citizens Advice Bureau is explicit that CD is hard to claim and applies to the employer being aggressive towards you as a person rather than just changing working conditions for everyone else as well:

            https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/work/dismissal/check-your-rights-if-youre-dismissed/claiming-constructive-dismissal/

            The emphasis here is that CD is for times when the employer is targeting an individual, openly not paying someone, subjecting them to harassment or discrimination etc rather than simply changing routine work procedures (and of course there would be a discussion either with ACAS or a tribunal case, and thus decisions made by learned professionals, not internet semanticists). The reasonable thing to do in routine changes to T&C’s is to have an adult discussion with your manager, find out why things are how they are, and make a case for why you feel the way you do. You don’t generally go straight for the lawsuit, which is effectively what claiming CD would end up as.

            (Like I know someone tried to argue it was CD when a new supervisor tried to stop her eating at her desk and she rage-quit. I’m not sure that got very far because it was something that, however unfair it might have seemed, was not enough of a deal that she couldn’t keep working there at all. I’ve had varying strengths of supervision and maybe been told off a few times about a messy reception desk, which was a fair comment when it happened, but it wasn’t the sort of harassment or bullying that would win a CD case.)

            Making changes the business needs in order to develop or move offices or do any number of routine things that they need to do — like asking a senior site manager/estates coordinator to visit their site for a few days a week — would not be in violation of anyone’s rights here or in the US.

            I suspect also that OP’s new supervisor has legitimate concerns about her performance given she’s juggling a job and two small children and is ensuring that she can be more effective at work. We don’t see the other side of the story where she’s used to letting things go because of childcare but discrepancies have been noticed and the supervisor is in charge of hauling things back.

      2. Lenora Rose*

        This sounds … like a good idea? Are you saying this like you think it isn’t a good idea?

    3. GythaOgden*

      As a former in-person worker and who currently administrates a business with a lot of in-person workers, WFH is already a privilege not open to the majority of the workforce, and generally only available to people who are already fairly well off in the grand scheme of things. The benefits are huge and I’m not going to lie, I’m far better off for being able to do it, but if anyone actually needs better working conditions, it’s the people who make it possible for me to work from home while not being able to do so themselves.

      In a collaborative team like mine we’ve set up once a month in-person days and they’re actually going well. However, most of the team work in-person at least some of the time because they directly supervise delivery of property services to healthcare customers, so cannot work from home 100%.

      Meanwhile we’ve heard an awful lot about WFH concerns over the past four and a half years but very little about making life easier for those who have to work in person, so if anyone needs protection and respect it’s those people, not us.

      WFH is a privilege, not a right, and

      1. Allonge*

        WFH is already a privilege not open to the majority of the workforce

        This. I am all for worker protections! ‘You cannot take back WFH’, however legitimate an expectation on a personal level, is going on a looooong list of things that are not (adequately) protected, and is relevant for a lot fewer people than those commenting here would assume.

        Also, it would be counterproductive – all too many places are already hesitant to authorize WFH. If it cannot be revoked, it will never be offered in the first place.

        1. Future*

          I don’t know if I agree with this sentiment precisely — and I am in a job that can’t really be done from home. I think given that commute and access to transport can have a massive effect on our lives and our budgets, a protection of some sort on job location is not an unreasonable thing to aspire to. Barring legitimate reasons for moving a workplace, of course, like this diamond mine is tapped out but there’s another diamond mine three towns over.

          However, I do agree with the sentiment that there are probably higher priority worker protections in the US to fight for than protection for WFH (I presume this is the US because she is back at work only three months after having a baby). In the particular case described in the letter, workers’ rights to parental leave might be a bigger issue. Ideally very few people should be worrying about combining work and breastfeeding because the vast majority of babies would be weaned or only breastfeeding occasionally by the time their birthing parent returned to work. Maternity leave would be at least six months, if not a year.

          (Not sure what to make of the comment about the three-year-old “at home” since what that actually means is unclear. I’m going to assume she’s not actually caring for the children while working and there’s some sort of full-time childcare other than the time the baby is eating, because otherwise I don’t blame her company for wanting her to return to office.)

          1. anne of mean gables*

            I have a three year old and an infant, and the idea of trying to provide childcare and work simultaneously is beyond my ability to comprehend. I can barely work from home when they’re in the house when my husband is there providing 100% childcare. I know people do it (mostly for lack of better options) but there is just no way you are truly working OR providing adequate supervision in that situation.

            1. Jodi*

              Exactly. It would be a full time job just looking after a toddler and a baby. I don’t see how she fits her job in around that.

              1. Future*

                Yeah. It’s got to just be awkward wording. Some people do say “they have a child at home” just to mean “they have a child”. It doesn’t necessarily mean the child is literally at home during the day and not at daycare or whatever.

      2. JM60*

        I think that having a WFH position being a privilege is a red herring on this point. Having a job that pays 3 times the median income is also a privilege, yet if an employer decides to withdraw that privilege by lowering your salary to the median income would be considered constructive dismissal.

        IMO, if WFH was part of your original agreement with your employer, the law should treat its removal similar to an employer making other major changes to that agreement (such as greatly lowering the salary).

        1. bamcheeks*

          Right! Privilege vs right is a really unhelpfu binary framing that implies workers should be grateful. I’d see work location as a *condition* of work and whilst conditions will sometimes need to change its not unreasonable for employees to base their decisions on their conditions of work.

          1. Emmy Noether*

            A binary is unhelpful because I think there are really at least three categories:

            1) Rights that everyone should get as a matter of law, like a safe working environment.
            2) Conditions that not everyone gets, but that some people need and specifically choose jobs to get (and could reasonably have to quit if revoked), like flexible hours or a specific shift, worksite accessible via public transport, or work from home.
            3) Small perks and priviledges that it would be weird to quit over, like 5 kinds of free soda, or a nice view out the window.

            (Disability accomodations are yet another, 4th category, though they can overlap).

            It’s not helpful to lump in (2) with (3) just because it’s not (1).

            1. Quinalla*

              This is a good way to look at it! We should have better protections for all rights and conditions too as others have said. There is a lot of talk about WFH as while not new (I WFH for over a year before the pandemic and had a coworker who WFH for many years when he moved for family reasons), the amount of people who have experienced it now has given it a new feel, so of course a lot of folks are talking about it.

              I think there are some folks who justify RTO by pointing to various folks talking about not working when they are home or working multiple jobs, but again, that is BAD MANAGEMENT. A lot of folks never figured out how to manage and WFH exposed that so they want people back in the office where they can go back to their comfortable watching people or measuring success by how late people stay and so on. There are a lot of other factors, but I think that is the biggest one. WFH/lockdowns made a lot of things that were already there worse or more obvious. Working more than one job is really hard when in the office I will admit, wasting time at work is NOT hard while in the office. It’s like an Olympic sport for some people, lol.

          2. doreen*

            It’s definitely not unreasonable to base decisions on a condition of work – but I don’t think it follows that leaving a job because of the change in conditions is automatically constructive dismissal. I have gotten the impression (which could be totally incorrect) that constructive dismissal in the US is something that would be intolerable to almost everyone, not just to people in a specific set of circumstances. There’s a difference between moving the office two hours away and moving the office two miles away – even if moving two miles means it’s difficult for one person who uses public transportation or a carpool.

            1. bamcheeks*

              But if that makes the job unviable for the person who uses public transport, it doesn’t seem unreasonable that they should be entitled to unemployment insurance. I can’t think of any good reason why that’s not a reasonable business cost for the business to take into account when they decide to move offices.

              1. doreen*

                It might not be unreasonable for that person to get unemployment, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t the law in the US. And as far as whether it’s reasonable for a business to take that cost into account when moving offices, I’m not sure a business can usually even know without taking a poll of all employees – if my job was thinking of moving two miles away , how would my employer know if that would make my commute easier or more difficult? Maybe it’s no longer on the 55 bus line, but now it’s on the 24 which saves me ten minutes. Maybe it’s closer to the person I carpool with. Maybe that two miles means I can now walk to work from my kids school instead of taking a bus. Maybe it means I have to take a route that takes 30 minutes longer even though it’s only two miles.

                1. Lenora Rose*

                  A business “Taking that into account” doesn’t mean checking in with each individual employee on whether the new office is better or worse situated, it means assuming that some employees might find the change too onerous and making a general estimate how many (Is it 1%, 10%, 30%?). It means having an idea whether the bus access is at the tail end of a low-use route or close to a major artery, which is often a similar calculus to how easy a trip it is by car.

                  It also means calculating the likelihood the location will attract as many or more people than you lose.

                2. anon here*

                  It’s not unreasonable (IMO) to put the cost of raising the objection on employees if a change will usher in a hardship. So, no, I don’t think an employer has to do a pre-change poll.

                  But at the end of the day, a society needs to reckon with who will bear the costs of decisions. I don’t really feel that it’s fair for an employer, who has both more money and more power than any individual employee, to pass all those costs onto the employee by saying “like it or lump it or job search.” I think if the business estimates that the benefits of, e.g., RTO or a site move, will outweigh the costs thereof (in employee inconvenience and/or employees departing), it’s not unreasonable to also say that an employer might also have to pay UI to someone who can no longer make the job work because of a change the employer elected to unilaterally make, and for that to be one more cost of the decision that’s on employers to bear.

                3. CompanyDecidesSeparationType*

                  Having been in this position multiple times, I can tell you that unless the company agrees to treat your leaving when they change the office location as a layoff you are not typically eligible for unemployment when this happens. I have been in this situation 3x and since I can’t drive because of disability I literally had no way to get to the new office location that didn’t cost $150/day or more in cab fare, I could not work in the new location. In two cases, the companies offered to voluntarily lay off anyone who couldn’t work in the new location so we were officially laid off and collected unemployment. The third time the company was not willing to take the hit and did not offer this option. Unemployment was not an option.

        2. Lala*

          Also agree, as someone who has to work in person 99% of the time and could definitely use some additional protections/enforcement of existing protections. I can work from home, with permission, very, very, occasionally. While I would very much prefer that I could do that most or all of the time, my ability to do it even SOME of the time, has made life both easier for me and preserved some of my income/vacation time. As someone with a chronic illness and someone who also has caregiving responsibilities, this makes a big difference.

          So, yeah, I’m in favor of more protections for WFH. I know things don’t always trickle down, but I can hope some do, right?

        3. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

          If WFH is a privilege because not all employees get it, then raises are too by the same “logic.”

      3. Irish Teacher.*

        I disagree that WFH is a privilege. Not so much that I think it is a right, but because it’s simply another way of doing a job. I think that is like saying set working hours are a privilege or having an office is a privilege or having a job where overtime is available is a privilege.

        WFH isn’t something that is just for the employee. It has benefits for employers too and often, employers are using it because it is a cheaper way of running a company or because government is incentivising it. It also has disadvantages as well as advantages for employees.

        I don’t think the fact it’s not open to the majority of the workforce makes it a privilege because there are many things that only apply to certain jobs, like working Monday to Friday and never having to work weekends. I would take WFH to be like that.

        Which one a person likes better comes down to personal preference and I suspect it will be something that people will consider when choosing their careers in a few years time. Just as some people wouldn’t choose jobs that require regular overtime and others self-select into those for the possibility of making more money and some people wouldn’t choose jobs that require weekend work, some people won’t choose jobs that require work from home and others will choose only those roles.

        The reasons we’ve heard a lot of concerns about work from home is because it’s new and people are still figuring out how to make it work most effectively for everybody – employees and employers – whereas we’ve had a lot longer to do that about in-office work.

        That’s not to say we shouldn’t increase benefits for those who work in the office. Everybody deserves the best working conditions that can reasonably be offered, but I don’t think we need to set the needs of those working in the office against those of people who work from home any more than we would set the needs of those who do shift work against those who work a regular 9 to 5 schedule or the needs of those who travel for work against those who work from a specific office.

        1. bamcheeks*

          My employer has told a few hundred of us that we’re all working from home for Sept-Oct whilst some urgent building work is carried out. If this was pre-2020, they’d have had to pay for short-term office accommodation.

          1. The Rural Juror*

            My company recently moved into a new building in the downtown area of our major city because our lease at our old space was not renewed. We’ve gone to a rotating WFH schedule because there’s not enough on-site parking! If we’re all here at the same time they would have to pay quite a bit for off-site parking. They’re having us WFH to save A LOT of money (and I don’t hate it!).

            1. CompanyPaidParking*

              Wow, I’ve worked in cities most of my career and I’ve never met a company that pays for their employee’s parking. I’ve worked places that had extremely limited (very expensive) parking options, to the point where I had coworkers unable to park less than a 30 min walk away if they didn’t arrive before 6:30am. Many of them park at subway stations and then ride the trains in because it’s both easier and cheaper (not easy, but easier) and even those spots tend to fill by 7 or 7:30am.

              Just having a place to park that was close by, even if parking cost $400-500/month, would be a huge perk for many people I know.

      4. WillowSunstar*

        Not well off here, just middle class. Single and scraping by, we went without a raise last year. I do data entry.

      5. Pair of Does*

        More people working from home slows climate change and reduces traffic (and traffic accidents) which benefits everybody. The “not everyone can wfh” dog-in-a-manger argument is just so immature.

        Everyone needs better working conditions, and workers in general need to view each other with solidarity, not divisiveness.

      6. Kara*

        My job is such that i can’t work from home. That other people have it still manages to improve my life. Less traffic alone is huge. Other people not needing to commute means less clogged roads and leads to me spending less time in traffic. WFH lead to just about every store offering personal shopping. It means i can sit down on my lunch break, make up my shopping list, hit Purchase, and then just swing by the grocery store and pick the groceries on my way home. No more spending an hour inside the store. Dunno about your area, but I’ve been seeing more store options pop up in the suburbs that used to be nearly exclusively clustered downtown. Other people having more leisure time means more people outside wanting to bike or go to the park which means more budget going to the park system and more biking options available near me. WFH is not a zero sum game. It betters people’s lives even if they can’t get it themselves.

    4. KateM*

      Shouldn’t it go under the same as moving offices? “It was fine while our office was in the centre of city but now that it gets moved to this new business park (or vice versa) it is not viable anymore.” In both cases, the place from where you work has changed.

      1. Hastily Blessed Fritos*

        This is where I land too. If your commute increases by half an hour each way and you decide that’s too much, does it really matter whether the initial commute was zero or half an hour?

        (About a year after I started my current job, they moved office location across the metro area. What had been walking distance went to 45 minutes each way with zero traffic, more like 90 minutes at reasonable commute times. My manager approved WFH with occasional office days since the alternative was that I would leave.)

      2. Bast*

        There are often bigger considerations that are at play when moving office though, and some are beyond the control of the employer (lease ended, etc). Yes, some people may choose to seek other employment if an office moves, but I put this into an entirely different category than the terms of your employment suddenly being changed. IMO that’s a bit scummy.

        Being hired with the understanding that your position is WFH and then being forced to go into the office is scummy, as is being hired for a 40 HPW position then having it suddenly change to 50, or being told that there will be no weekends and then having to work weekends. People make employment decisions based on these items, and if the workplace can’t uphold their end of the bargain, they can expect to get a reputation as an employer who can’t be trusted, reneges on their word, and turnover is certain. “This position is entirely remote” is different than “This position is entirely remote now, but we are working on transitioning to a hybrid model within the next year” or similar. Oftentimes there is not a legit business reason other than a butts in seats, Covid is over mentality for the switch back, and it’s disheartening for people who applied for a job on the contingency of something like being remote only to have that yanked away. This isn’t just in LW sake, but I can see why LW daughter is upset.

        1. CommanderBanana*

          Scummy is the right word for it.

          When I was hired the office was 3 days in, 2 days WFH, plus a week where you could work from anywhere. A few months later they changed it to 4 days in, 1 day WFH and took away the week of work from anywhere, even though I and a few other newer hires hadn’t used ours yet.

          I understand it is management’s prerogative to change things like WFH days, but I thought it was pretty scummy to promise a benefit and then yank it. I would have felt better about it if they had agreed to let those who hadn’t used their work from anywhere week use it and then changed the policy. Sadly this is kind of typical with this company.

          1. anon here*

            ICK. I also hate the idea that’s so pervasive that it’s so easy to get a new job. It’s…really hard, frequently, in my personal experience.

            1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

              It’s also often the only productive leverage we have, so it can’t disappear from the advice and table.

        2. I Have RBF*

          Plus Covid is not over. One of my roomies infected our entire household this week. I’m the only one who hasn’t (yet) tested positive. I’m wearing an N95 mask in my own house.

          If I was in an in-office job I would have to take massive PTO if I tested positive. Last time I only had to take off a few days, because I’m remote.

      3. DrSalty*

        This is where I land. If the employer changes the requirements and it doesn’t work for you anymore, you’re free to find a new job. Yes it sucks, but that’s just how it works sometimes.

    5. L-squared*

      Look, I loved WFH too, but that is ridiculous.

      Whether you like going to the office or not, there is definitely benefits I can see. And a new manager coming in and deciding they want the team to do that is fair game. And if they no longer like the circumstances, they are free to leave.

      1. I Have RBF*

        “If you don’t like how we do things in this country, you can just leave.”

        That’s what this sounds like. No “try to make it better”, no “protest unfair policies”, just “like it or leave”. This makes no sense in politics, or anything else, why should corporations get a pass?

        I consider significantly changing the circumstances of a job unilaterally to be disgusting overreach on the part of an employer. Just expecting the employee to just suck it up and deal is more indicative of indentured servitude than a fair labor contract. The fact that US employment law is set up more like indentured servitude than a fair engagement doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t push back on it, even in supposedly small things. If no one ever pushed back we wouldn’t have things like the 40 hour work week, overtime, OSHA, etc.

    6. amylynn*

      I think what is really getting employers in trouble with WTO is their inability or unwillingness to see that the burden of proof around WFH has changed. Before 2020, if an employee wanted to work from home the burden was on them to proof that they could do so without a reduction in productivity or disruption to the business. But in 2020 we had a massive, unplanned experiment in WFH during the worst possible time – and it went, on the whole, better than anyone had a right to expect. But employers seem to be doing their best to pretend that 2020 didn’t happen and are acting like saying “It’s time to come back” or spouting some twaddle from a motivation poster is enough justification. Sure, legally, it is, at least in the US. Heck, in the US they don’t even have to give any reason, even a bad one. But in that case they shouldn’t be surprised when employees vote with their feet.

      So is protection for WFH the most important issue for worker rights? Probably not. Does that make it not an issue? No. I think it does mean that if employers need to get in front of it unless they want it to be a recruitment and retention issue and maybe eventually a legal one.

      1. anon here*

        I hope they all get sued, she said beatifically. Maybe the employees will lose (most likely, given the state of the law and the judiciary), but ah, the attorneys’ fees the employers will have to pay will make it all worthwhile.

        1. Busy Bee*

          Sued for what? If this is in the US, employers have the right to make changes, including RTO. I’m not sure what attorney would take this case.

          1. GythaOgden*

            Particularly when you factor in the legions of people who already work in-person and the thousands of companies who deal with in-person labour that generally require some interaction with their managers and administrators.

            I work in healthcare facilities and I wouldn’t be able to do my job if I never went on-site. I don’t do it very often, but it would be a bit absurd for a property manager not to set foot on a site they manage.

            1. New Jack Karyn*

              That’s if they’re actually violating the ADA. Requiring in-office days does not automatically mean a violation.

              1. GythaOgden*

                Yeah, pretty much. I also reckon that given the way demographics works, disabled people are potentially over-represented in lower-prestige/lower-privileged jobs and thus more likely to be in in-person jobs. I certainly was, as autistic, struggling to get something that could be doable from home and only managed it last November. There was no adjustment or accommodation to my job on reception (and in the post room) that could allow me to have done my job at home. (If there had the last few years would have been MUCH better. Weird, but much better, and I may not be lame as well as autistic because that long night of having to work in person when the world sat gassing about how awesome WFH was sent me tumbling down the stairs in a depressive state. If you can sue employers for RTO, I can do it the other way round for my injury.)

                I think people of a certain relatively privileged subset of the workforce bringing a lawsuit like this would get serious, /serious/ side-eye from any lawyer, even disability advocates. I’d really hope this was just laughed out of the office and that disability advocacy actually worked for everyone across the workforce to help people get into work and stay in work whatever their job is.

        2. New Jack Karyn*

          In the US, it’s very common for the losing side in a civil case be required to pay the attorney’s fees and court costs for the winning side. Especially if the case lacked grounds to begin with, as most such suits would be.

    8. MassMatt*

      I completely disagree with the idea that WFH should be a legally protected entitlement. There are many jobs, and many people, for whom it is not suitable or even possible, and the government is not equipped to determine which those are.

      Mr. Market will I think take care of this in the long run. Many employers are currently pushing to get people back in the office. In some cases there may be sone good reason and in others it’s because management finds it easier to feel in control of people in office than remote. This will probably accelerate when the job market softens.

      But let’s not forget that WFH, desk sharing, and hybrid schedules were enacted in the first place by companies, not employees, to reduce their costs. That isn’t going to change in the long run.

      IMO companies that are inflexible regarding WFH (at least a hybrid schedule, which seems the most popular choice) are going to be less competitive than more flexible employers. This will be especially apparent when hiring people for highly skilled positions, as they are the ones with the most options.

      Employers with managers that don’t understand how to manage people remotely are going to be seen as outmoded and part of the problem as WFH ceases to be seen as a temporary pandemic response and part of an efficient business plan.

      1. Alpacas Are Not Dairy Animals*

        Mr. Market has never really done much to improve things for the employee side of the equation, at least not compared to Mssrs Strike, Picket, and Make the Pinkertons Nervous.

        1. I Have RBF*

          This. The market is tilted toward employers. The market didn’t get the 40 hour work week. The market didn’t get railroad workers sick time. Employees have to push to get any power in the workplace.

        2. MassMatt*

          Mr Market did indeed provide for many benefits, including the dramatic increases in compensation we have seen in the past few years as employees said “no” to bad jobs with poor pay and conditions.

          Labor has been increasingly de-unionized and de-organized, much to employee detriment, over the past 40 or so years. But I will point out that strikes are a poor metric for labor strength; when labor is strong they get their demands met before it gets to a strike, or at least a prolonged strike. Strikes are often a sign of labor weakness, not labor strength.

      2. JM60*

        The point isn’t that WFH is an entitlement per se. Entitlement is a red herring for John’s point. No one is entitled to a salary of $200k, but if your original employment agreement is that they’d pay you a salary of $200k, and the employer takes that away from you by reducing your salary to $50k, that would be considered constructive dismissal.

        John’s point is that WFH should be treated like a high salary. The fact that you’re not entitled to either is a red herring. What’s relevant for each (if true) is that it was part of your employment agreement, so substantially changing that employment agreement by taking it away should come with protections (such as being considered constructive dismissal so that you can be eligible for unemployment).

    9. Bitte Meddler*

      I would like to see WFH be protected as a reasonable accommodation for someone with a disability. As in, I think the bar should be higher for a company to say, “This won’t work for us, we need everyone inside a company-paid building.” The reason to require someone with a disability to be in an office should be a lot more valid and quantifiable than “collaboration” or “culture”.

      The ability to WFH during the pandemic opened up the job market to *so many more* people; I hate seeing them being shut back out again.

      For me, after the first month or so of working from home in 2020, I had a massive revelation. I had NO IDEA what it felt like to work and be *healthy*. I had been perpetually sick for years and years, and had thought that was normal.

      Then we started working from home and I was able to get the amount of sleep my body needs (9-10 hours a night) in addition to not being exposed to other people’s germs. Holy wow, what a difference!

      Going back to working in an office would mean living in a state of permanent sickness for me, and would probably shorten my lifespan (it would certainly mean being physically miserable for whatever time I have left).

      Government protections for someone like me would be wonderful.

      1. New Jack Karyn*

        I agree with this take. If someone can make a pretty good case that they have a disability that WFH would be a reasonable accommodation for, then it should be protected. I think the ADA would cover that, but I’ve no idea if there’s any ruling or case law on it.

    10. JPalmer*

      Absolutely agree. Constructive dismissal happens a lot even when it legally isn’t constructive dismissal.

      So much of healthy employment is based on a social contract rather than an actual contract, and bad actors use that lack of a social contract to punish or constrain individuals outside of the unstated social rules.

    11. Fluffy Orange Menace*

      I have WFH for 41/2 years. Started March 2020 because of COVID. If my employer told me to come back to the office, I’d be unhappy, but I’d go. I was working in an office for 20 years, and WFH wasn’t offered to me as a “perk” to get me to accept a job; it was a response to a crisis, and when we ramped back up, I was permitted to continue, as long as it works for our client. If that ends, why should I DEMAND THAT I BE ALLOWED TO CONTINUE? It’s one thing if a job is ADVERTISED as WFH but … in the LW’s case that isn’t what it was. They were sent home for COVID.

      1. HungryLawyer*

        LOL I misread your first sentence as “I have WFH for the last 41 years” and was quite impressed with your industry’s innovation!

    12. Jellybeans*

      WFH is a privilege, not a right. If someone is less productive while WFH, or if they’re abusing WFH (for example, doing childcare during working hours) then they absolutely shouldn’t be allowed it.

  7. Archi-detect*

    on #1 someone like that can be exhausting from below- I had a boss who was not confident and therefore felt the need to defend her answer way more than needed, and get really defensive on follow up questions on implementation. I get explaining your reasoning to help me understand in the future or to soften a blow, but sometimes I just need you to make a decision, tell me what it is and we can get on with it.

    1. BellaStella*

      Yes and any question from any staff member on anything gets perceived by the director then as challenging their authority. It is exhausting for staff!

      1. MassMatt*

        It’s especially exhausting when the insecure boss still wants “feedback” and comments. You bite the head off anyone who makes a comment, don’t be surprised when your announcements are greeted with silence. OK, so you want…insincere flattery?

    2. Anon for this*

      I experienced something like this and it was awful from below. Got to the point of not wanting any staff to be successful at anything in case it undermined how people viewed the boss. It think it would be important to get a vibe check from staff to see if that is manifesting there as well as on the board, and if it is, it’s likely the impact would be significant.

  8. Observer*

    #2 – WFH being revoked

    You say that your daughter has a 3YO at home, which makes going back to the office a problem. To be honest, this may be the reason for the call back to the office. Because when put this way, it sounds like your daughter is caring for the children while she is working. And that is, legitimately, a non-starter for te vast majority of jobs.

    The one right that your daughter *does* have here is regarding nursing. The law is that her employer is required to give her a reasonable space to pump for the baby. “Reasonable” as in private and uninterrupted that is NOT a bathroom.

    1. GammaGirl1908*

      Coming to say this. It sounds mostly like Daughter has been WFH without other child care, and is surprised that she can’t continue that. As noted, I would not be surprised if this new situation is being pressed BECAUSE her employer suspects she is WFH without other child care.

      Now, they should address it with her as such, and not try to hide behind team-building issues. They should come out and say that they were more flexible about this in 2021, but WFH employees now must have other child care for children under 6 (or whatever). But either way, it should not be a shock to Daughter that her employer knows how much time and energy and focus a 3-year-old and a 3-month-old take, and, to be very blunt, does not want to pay her full-time wages for part-time work.

      If that’s not what’s going on, and she is concerned about something more like how to maintain her pumping schedule while in the office, she should bring that up and insist on appropriate pumping accommodations.

      But if that IS what’s happening, and she is upset that she now has to find child care two days a week, she needs to be made aware that:

      A) employers virtually ALWAYS expect you to have child care when you WFH. They had to make exceptions during the pandemic, but those were temporary and are over. This is not new and is not considered unreasonable;

      B) WFH is not an entitlement, even if you started out that way. You are welcome to decide whether or not you want the job under those conditions, but the employer is allowed to expect you to work in person; and

      C) two predictable days a week in the office is generally considered a pretty good WFH situation.

      1. I don't know either.*

        Yup, all of this.

        WFH is a privilege, not a right, and your employer is in the right for expecting you to actually work for them during that time. *If* the daughter does not have any childcare it’s likely that her employer is seeing that her output is not where it’s supposed to be.

        Or if her output is not where its supposed to be her employer does have every right to try and solve that problem how they see fit, but frankly they should be adults about it and talk it through with your daughter.

        It’s also possible neither is the case and your daughter works her expected output, in which case the employer *still* has the right to call people back to the office.

        But I would start by looking into why the employer might be doing this. Maybe they’re being truthful about this being a teambuilding thing, who knows! Employers do weirder things in the name of team building all the time! But on its own, having two young children at home one of whom is breastfed is not enough to convince an unwiling employer to let you be permanently WFH.

      2. M2*

        She doesn’t need to find childcare for 2 days a week she needs childcare for 5 days a week whether she is working from home or working from the office.

        As a mom there is no way your daughter can be successful at a FT role and taking care of children at home FT. She needs to find childcare full time while she is working. She’s lucky she was only called back 2 days and if it’s found out she’s doing both I would not be surprised if she’s called back all 5 days. She should feel lucky she was able to get away with it for 3 years! My relative years ago WFH and it was known you had to have FT childcare or you would return to office. I babysat their kids after school because after care at school ended at 6 and my relative had to work until 6:30 or 7 because of time difference. Their spouse usually came home at 6 for work so I could leave but sometimes had to stay late so I was there if needed.

        These are the kind of reasons organizations are RTO. Employees taking advantage.

        I have someone who has to leave a bit early to pickup their school aged kids a couple times a week and I allow that as long as they sign on later or are available by phone if there is an emergency. But it’s not an everyday occurrence and if they didn’t get the work done it wouldn’t be allowed. Last year they had to leave at 3:30 2-3x a week for about 3 months but it was temporary and they knew they had to be available in case of emergency and sign on to check email again that day. If they had not done this they would have had to be revoked.

        1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

          THIS. I agree my first thought was its not the boss doesn’t like her, its that the boss wants her working not taking care of kids.

          Right now its only in the office two days a week. But if her productivity suffers on her days WFH because she has no childcare, she is going to be in 5 days a week.

          Daughter needs to figure out childcare, ASAP.

        2. ferrina*

          She doesn’t need to find childcare for 2 days a week she needs childcare for 5 days a week whether she is working from home or working from the office.

          Exactly this. If she’s been watching her young kids while working, that is not okay. It was one thing in the height of the pandemic where there was no other options (society wasn’t structured for it), but now there are options (not always great options, but about the same options as previously). It’s very fair for the employer to say that you can’t care for your children while you are working. Especially with a 3yo and 3mo- you literally can’t turn your back!!

          2. SpaceySteph*

            I think it’s worth considering that there aren’t always options. There is a childcare crisis in the US (which I assume is where daughter is since she is back to work at 3 mo postpartum) in which it is both not plentiful enough and not affordable enough for those who need it.

            There’s a distinct possibility that the outcome here is that OP’s daughter cannot find childcare on short notice, or at all, or for an affordable price and the end result here is that OP’s daughter quits. Maybe employer is fine with that, but they should definitely consider that. And on a large scale, mothers bear the brunt of childcare considerations and exit the workforce far more often than fathers due to lack of availability/affordability of childcare.

            I have fulltime childcare and am not at all interested in working with my kids home all the time (hate every minute of when it happens as a one-off due to a weather cancellation or kid illness… we have no local family and no alternative care) so I fully agree its not a sustainable long term plan. But saying there are options is very much oversimplifying a complex issue.

            1. GythaOgden*

              Any childcare crisis in the developed world has to take into account that a large fraction of the workforce can’t work from home at all and are generally less well off than those people who can WFH, so people who are being asked to RTO are not the ones who really suffer the most.

        3. GammaGirl1908*

          Fair. I phrased it the way I did just in case she does have child care and it now needs to change. It was hard to tell from the letter whether Daughter has no other child care, or whether she has child care and there is a non- or semi-child-care related issue (like the pumping I mentioned), or something in between. Any are possible from the letter.

    2. WS*

      Possibly, or it could be as simple as childcare having awkward opening/closing times, which are simple enough when you’re working from home but impossible in the office.

      1. Allonge*

        I think the point to OP and their daughter is to be specific about that (or whatever else is the issue).

        ‘I don’t have a solution for drop-off / pickup’ is a different problem than ‘I have an infant at home’, and one of them is going to trigger major questions on what exactly daughter has been doing WFH.

        1. General von Klinkerhoffen*

          OP may have at-home care and nurse her infant during breaks. That’s considerably quicker than pumping for most people.

          1. Allonge*

            I suppose there is no issue with ‘awkward opening/closing times’ then? That is what I was responding to.

            1. Allonge*

              Sorry, did not finish before posting: my thing is that we can list a billion ways in which this development is inconvenient and that does not help OP and their daughter.

              The advice I would like to offer here is not just to say ‘well, this is difficult, I have a a baby at home’ because that will be easily read as abusing the WFH arrangement to take care of children. Instead, say ‘I will need X time to arrange something for dropoff time / additional nanny hours’, which indicates that there was some arrangement already.

              1. bamcheeks*

                And, if it’s true, “Unfortunately, this job isn’t viable for me if I need to add a commute. If this is non-negotiable, is there a way we can manage my departure so that I am still able to collect unemployment?”

          2. Observer*

            OP may have at-home care and nurse her infant during breaks. That’s considerably quicker than pumping for most people.

            Except that would not be relevant to the 3yo.

      2. General von Klinkerhoffen*

        For example, if the daycare is close to home but there’s an hour’s commute, RTO means two extra hours of childcare per day.

        Employers requiring RTO could consider offering flexibility on hours – it might be preferable to work longer on WFH days and shorter in-office days (with core hours covered every day).

        1. Sloanicota*

          I’ve certainly heard a lot of people bemoan the fact that they must make pickup on the dot, but with uncertain traffic and commute, can’t be sure they’ll reliably make it without a huge reorg.

        2. anon here*

          This. If an employer is already only switching to hybrid, and especially if there is no work-requires-it reason for RTO, this is precisely the example of a kind of RTO accommodation that smart employers should be making. There is SO MUCH room to problem solve here and I will probably die mad about how many employers refuse to show that they learned anything about how work works during the stress test of the pandemic.

          1. AVP*

            Totally! Just re: timing, if I’m working from an office, I must be either in after 10 or out the door at 5 to make either drop off or pick up (my husband will do the other one but I need to do my half!)

            Whereas working from home, I’m in by 9:30 and working til 5:50. Daycares and schools aren’t flexible on hours, so the commute time gets pulled from work hours, it’s not rocket science.

            (They also don’t let you flexibly just add an hour or two once in a while so all of this stuff needs to be negotiated and paid for in advance! And the latest possible pickup time is 6. Much to many employers’ chagrin.)

            1. JustaTech*

              Argh to this: my grand-boss was whinging about “why isn’t anyone still here at 5:30?” and I flat out said “my child’s daycare closes at 5:30, I must pick him up before then.”
              “Right, right, of course, but what about [coworkers]?”
              “They also have children who need to be picked up from school. That is why they come in before 8.”
              Grumble grumble “I want people in later!”

              Like, dude, people are working more than 8 hours a day, and in-office until 2:30 or 3, and stay late when you schedule late meetings, and are getting all their work done! Don’t push people on their school pick ups, those aren’t flexible at all!

          2. Bitte Meddler*

            At my last company, 1/3rd of my team quit when the new CEO tightened the screws on RTO.

            Pre-pandemic, people could leave early to pick up their kids and then log in at home afterward.

            Post-pandemic, everyone was told they had to be inside the office for 8 hours a day and were required to take a one-hour lunch (meaning: if you didn’t eat offsite, you’d be in the building for nine hours each day). You couldn’t come in at 7:00, work through lunch, and leave at 3:00 to go pick up your kid. Still a full 8-hour workday, but the new CEO doesn’t believe anyone can work through lunch.

            So people started coming in at 6:00 AM to make sure they logged nine hours between the time they badged into the building in the morning and badged out in the afternoon (at 3:00).

            And then the CEO declared that since hardly anyone was in the building at 6:00 AM, and thus no “collaboration” or “culture building” was happening, he was changing the core hours from 9:00-3:00 to 8:30-4:30.

            Meaning, the earliest you could possibly leave the building was 4:30, when traffic was twice what it was at 3:00. Leaving at 3:00 meant people could get their kids by 3:30 and be home by 4:00. Leaving at 4:30 meant people couldn’t get their kids until 5:30, and might not be home until 6:30.

            Utterly asinine and punitive.

      3. Observer*

        ossibly, or it could be as simple as childcare having awkward opening/closing times

        Possible, but I think unlikely. The LW doesn’t say “She has a 3YO and she’s going to have to add childcare time / have issues with her daycare”.

        1. Fluffy Orange Menace*

          Yeah. The letter pretty heavily IMPLIES that the daughter has been caring for the children during the “work day” and now will have to find alternative daycare. If she had daycare currently while working, the issue would have been “her daycare is from 9-4 but her in office hours will be 8-5 and she can’t make that work” or whatever…

    3. Michigander*

      If she is working from home while watching two kids that young full time, I’m shocked that she manages to get anything done. Having had a 3 year old and an infant (now a 4 year old and a 1.5 year old), it is next to impossible to get more than 5 minutes of work done while they’re around.

      1. KateM*

        I did get some work done in these conditions, but it was asynchronous part of job and I did it mostly when kids were in bed, obviously. For the must-be-100%-avalable part of the job, I had a babysitter.

    4. Cheesesteak in Paradise*

      The daughter could have a nanny watching both children except when she nurses the baby

      1. I don't know either.*

        Maybe she does, maybe she doesn’t.

        At any rate, the fact that so many commenters think it sounds like she doesn’t is useful information. Citing having two young kids as the reason you cannot go into the office is going to sound strange and raise questions.

      2. Pastor Petty Labelle*

        I doubt it because then why would it be an issue to having young kids at home? If someone is watching them while she works, then they can watch them while she is in the office, working.

        Should we do more to support working parents? Yes. but on the other hand, you are hired to do a job. You are expected to be doing that job not watching your kids while working around caring for your kids. It’s business, not personal.

        1. YetAnotherAnalyst*

          Because getting a nanny or a family member to watch the kids for an 8 hour workday is different than getting a nanny or family member to watch the kids for an 8 hour workday plus a two hour commute?

          1. Pastor Petty Labelle*

            We don’t know it would be a long commute. But it can be inferred there is no childcare because its not mentioned that changing that childcare would be a problem. The letter literally says daughter has a 3 year and a newborn at home, with no mention of any help.

            1. YetAnotherAnalyst*

              I don’t think you can infer that here. What’s relevant to the mother/employee is not necessarily what’s relevant to the grandparent/LW.
              You asked why a hypothetical childcare situation when the mother’s working from wouldn’t work when she’s working from the office, and the most obvious answer for that is commute time. Per the census bureau, the average US commute is about 27 minutes one way, and you do need to account for some hand-off overlap… so needing childcare for 9-10 hours instead of 8 is a pretty safe bet.

        2. Lenora Rose*

          Because taking a 15 minute break to nurse then pass the baby back to the nanny/other parent 3 times in an 8 hour work day, one during lunch, is less time intensive than having to pump 4-5 times because of the commute.

          1. AVP*

            And if she’s been home for the first three months of the baby’s life, she might not have bottle trained or learned to pump. Which is fine to do but it’s a whole thing and takes some time, the baby might not like it, etc etc.

    5. MsSolo (UK)*

      Though I think the fact childcare isn’t covered in the letter is a concern, my immediate assumption is that LW is the childcare, hence her additional concern about the change. I think there’s some tension here where the change impacts the LW’s routine as much as the mother and kids, which has triggered the letter supposedly on her daughter’s behalf – it’s a big jump to go from looking after the kids in their own home while their mother is working, and available to feed the baby when necessary, to being alone in a house with two kids who know their mother isn’t just upstairs any more. Using boiling water to prepare bottles with a preschooler underfoot, not getting a guaranteed break to go to the loo when baby is feeding, not having a backup person in the house, etc.

      1. KateM*

        It would certainly make sense in the context of it being the grandparent who is writing in, not the daughter who has to return to the office.

        But having this big jump that you described really means that the daughter was significantly participating in childcare during WFH as well, so at least partly the “you shouldn’t complain to your employer about not being able to work without childcare” suggestions still apply.

        1. MsSolo (UK)*

          I wouldn’t say being in the same house means participation beyond the feeding and being another body in case of emergency (I always worried what would happen if clumsy me needed to go to A&E while in sole charge of my daughter), but I agree childcare should not be raised to the employer at all

          If grandma is anxious about being sole carer for two kids all day (and for a longer day, as others have pointed out re the commute; suddenly grandma has to commute earlier and leave later as well, and potentially pick up tasks like making dinner and bathing the kids), then that’s a conversation the two of them need to have with each other about other childcare solutions, not with the employer.

        2. Irish Teacher.*

          If the LW is the childcare, I think it could make a significant difference to her even if the daughter is not participating in the childcare at all while working. For example, depending on the daughter’s job, it may now be possible for the LW (if she is taking care of the children) to say “hey, daughter, I have something I’d like to do Wednesday afternoon if you don’t need me” and for the daughter to say, “oh, no bother. I’ve no meetings Wednesday afternoon, so I can take care of them for a few hours and finish off my work when my partner gets home and can take care of them.” Whereas that might not be possible if the daughter was working in the office.

          Or just that the LW might have to get there an hour earlier if the daughter had a long commute.

          But yeah, it’s all speculation and I agree with MsSolo that those would not be good reasons to give an employer.

          1. anon here*

            Again, these are great examples of the flexibility that WFH has afforded many people and the degree to which strict RTO yanks that away and disrupts their lives and the delicate social and financial arrangements which let many working people scrape by and get through their day.

          2. anon here*

            this is a great example of the flexibility that WFH allows/allowed and that strict RTO will unnecessarily end. LW’s daughter may need to pay the equivalent of monthly rent of a 1BR apartment for daycare if her current childcare arrangements (e.g., if LW looked after the kids in the home from 9-6 or whatever) required the above level of flexibility and LW can’t do it anymore if daughter can’t afford her flexibility for appointments. That’s an expense most families I know can’t absorb; it’s a reason people terminate pregnancies that would otherwise be wanted (to edge toward a live wire…).

            1. Fluffy Orange Menace*

              However, the problem is that the “flexibility” often equates to “being paid to take care of my own children while allegedly working and doing a half assed job of it.” The LW assumed that WFH would be “forever” and clearly made no arrangements to have help, from the sound of it. I’m sympathetic. I worked part time while in grad school w/ 2 kiddos in daycare and my entire paycheck went to pay daycare costs, plus some! It’s a balance and choice that every mother has to make. Is it worth working to pay for daycare? Can we live on one paycheck, etc… But in THIS case, the daughter really hasn’t much of a leg to stand on. Her assumption that she’d WFH forever isn’t legally binding.

    6. Irish Teacher.*

      I think it really does depend. That was definitely my original thought too, that the daughter was working from home without childcare and the employer was unhappy with that and/or with her output.

      And honestly, I would say a baby and a 3 year old would definitely require childcare while working. If it was 7 year old and an 8 year old, I’d think it depends on the kids. I’d still assume a need for childcare as most children that age require a fair bit of supervision, but I could imagine situations in which the parent could make it work. I find it very hard to imagine a 3 year old and a baby not interfering with work.

      But on the other hand, I think it’s possible she has childcare, but that having to work in the office could still cause problems. If, for instance, she has a family member who can care for the kids from 10am until 6pm, that would probably be doable, working from home, but not if she was 9-5 or 9-6 in the office and had an hour long commute both ways. Or if her partner works say 4pm to midnight and she has to be finished work by 3:30. Not possible if the office is only open 9-6.

      Or it could even just mean significantly more cost for childcare, if she would have to pay for her commuting time onto what she is now requiring.

      1. Sloanicota*

        The most obvious solution, which I was surprised wasn’t the main advice, is that the daughter can probably job search and hopefully find another fully remote and flexible job. Companies that reneg on WFH agreements can’t be shocked that employees look elsewhere. Good luck to the daughter, I feel like the comments today are strongly pro-employer.

        1. doreen*

          I think that’s because the actual question was “What rights does my daughter have, if any?” – advice to look for a fully remote and flexible job doesn’t answer that question. It’s a solution to the daughter’s problem but that wasn’t what the LW asked. for. Same goes for pro-employer – if someone says you don’t have a right to remote work unless you have a contract requiring it, that doesn’t mean the person is on the employer’s side . It’s a factual answer to the question in the letter.

          1. Allonge*

            Yes. Also, we don’t know for sure this is a deal-breaker for OP’s daughter – there is a lot of space between ‘inconvenient but manageable, I need a month to arrange all things’ and ‘no way will this work’.

            Not to mention that most people do not need to be advised to look for another job if the current one is changing in a way that is incompatible with their life.

            1. GythaOgden*

              It’s also relevant to suggest that the potential out there for WFH with two small kids where she can continue as she is right now might not be that great either. She might not be able to find a job that will give her perma-WFH without needing childcare; employers are also presumably keeping up with their needs.

              It also sounds as if the supervisor is getting on her case a bit as it is. I’m not sure many employers would be happy with someone whose performance wasn’t great while WFH; they’d presumably be looking for someone who was able to focus and work independently without that distraction, so even finding something else might not be a great solution.

              She may well need a bit of a reality check on this before she is forced out. We always say here that managers need to manage their employees — and this is a bit of a textbook case of managers maybe realising the daughter is underperforming and focusing on shoring up their weekly concentration by imposing some more structure.

          2. Strive to Excel*

            Thing is, walking away from a job and finding a new one *is* a relevant right. That’s the underlying idea with right to work – if companies do something dumb, the employees leave. In practice it is more of an advantage for the employees and there are other problems with it. Nevertheless, “leave and get a new job” is one of the most relevant rights when someone has a problem that can be shortened to “company has screwed me in a way that’s not directly legally protected”.

        2. M2*

          The daughter should not be taking care of her children while also working full time from home. That is the issue here. You can’t do both.

          I’m a mom and a manager and I have seen people try (and their WFH was revoked). That is the issue here.

          If daughter finds another WFH job my guess is she’ll need to find FT child care and she is taking advantage of her company and all the other employees who have child care. This is why so many organizations are RTO because certain employees take advantage!

          1. Temperance*

            It’s not fair to the employer OR the children. It’s a weirdly pervasive attitude I’ve seen in some circles that being “home” is the best for kids until preschool, but I can’t imagine having a caregiver who is supposed to be working makes for a great environment.

            1. Cat Tree*

              Yeah. And it sucks for the mom too. I know there’s a huge shortage of childcare right now, and the care that is available is incredibly expensive. But the solution can’t be that mothers are just routinely expected to work two full-time jobs simultaneously.

            2. TurtlesAllTheWayDown*

              It’s not fair to her coworkers, either. I suppose I’m defending her employer because I’d be a miffed to find out that I’d been paying the equivalent of a mortgage each month to send my daughter to a high quality daycare program, just to realize my coworker was essentially getting paid to watch her kids.

              A lot of moms of kids the same age as mine are constantly asking about leads for WFH opportunities so they can stay home. The ones who pull it off do so by keeping their kids in a playpen and making liberal use of Ms. Rachel and other shows. No judgement to their parenting, but I do love all the things my kid is learning at her school, at least.

        3. Ellis Bell*

          I think there’s a big caveat that the daughter needs to find childcare and not assume that she can provide childcare whilst doing WFH. It sounds obvious, but a lot of people don’t realise it’s necessary. Possibly it’s already in place, but if the daughter wants her next manager to like her work output, then she needs childcare and to be clear with herself that she is only using the WFH for flexibility, not childcare.

        4. GythaOgden*

          They’re probably not even reneging. The employee sounds like she’s the one who is struggling to nurse and cope with a toddler and that has been reflected in her performance. (And potentially in the way her supervisor may be acting towards her in this case.)

          It’s also not that easy to find fully WFH jobs at all, because market forces apply at the employer end too and particularly in fields like mine where there’s a lot of in-person workers, it’s generally not received terribly well for WFHers to be too precious about that kind of perk.

        5. Fluffy Orange Menace*

          I think the comments are pro “the situation is objectively that taking advantage of your employer’s WFH policy to take care of your own children is not a right”. If the LW gave us the relevant info, the LW deosn’t really have a WFH agreement per se–she was sent home with so many of us during COVID and made the assumption that it’d be a “forever” thing and took advantage of that.

      2. Anon for this*

        I think the problem comes down to the fact that if the proposed coming into the office made her existing childcare difficult, the focus of the letter would be on that… not “she has a baby at home she can’t go in!”

        “she has a baby at home she can’t go in” implies that the daughter IS the childcare. And that’s not right. I don’t mind when my coworkers with children have to leave early or come in late because of childcare requirements, but I definitely did not like it when we had a coworker who blatantly took care of his kids during the day. He was never available to handle emergencies, which means I was the only person handling emergencies when it was just me and him working. Which meant I was constantly stressed out from having to juggle five emergencies at the same time. Working from home means you’re available to WORK from home. Not primarily tending to a baby while doing a few work tasks.

      3. fhqwhgads*

        I think it actually doesn’t matter what the reality of the situation is. The letter frames it as a problem because she has a 3 year old and a baby at home. And the point in the advice is if she presents that as the problem when pushing back, it will not go well. That is not a valid reason to push back on going in person. Whatever the details of the circumstances are vis a vis childcare or commute or how long it takes to pump vs nurse or whatever else might be in play, the only reasonable pushback to the employer is based on presence of absence of an adequate pumping space. Everything else is the employee’s responsibility. It makes sense people are responding wondering about the details because we’re humans and humans be judgey. But in terms of the question asked and how to proceed, the daughter’s options are: confirm there’s adequate legal pumping space and if there isn’t ask to continue wfh until there is, deal with whatever details at home she needs to and go in to the office as asked, or get a different job.
        If the question were is the employer being reasonable here: given the info in the letter, I gotta say yes. If this were a “hired remotely while known to live X hours away and they were cool with that but now want her in”, then no, but we’ve got no indication that’s the sitch. It’s been presented as just about the presence of children. In-office can be a dealbreaker for an employee for any reason they want. Doesn’t mean the employer needs to agree.

      4. Consonance*

        My guess is that the issue goes beyond just having childcare. It’s a relatively common arrangement for working mothers to have in-home childcare of some sort, whether it’s another parent, family member, or hired childcare provider, and that they’re able to continue nursing rather than pumping. With a baby so young, there’s a good chance that someone with this arrangement hasn’t developed a pumping routine, the baby hasn’t learned to take a bottle, etc. While I agree with all of the childcare conversations, a three month old baby is SO YOUNG and it may feel entirely impossible for the mother to be away from the baby for that long. Being in the house but a separate room while working? Sure. Able to nurse as needed? Sure. Driving however far away to be gone for nine hours at a stretch? So hard. It’s a much bigger ask than for older children. I think it’s very reasonable for her to have a conversation about *when* she can return to the office, rather than just pushing back on the idea wholesale. She’ll need time to get her family and herself ready to be away for work.

        1. JustaTech*

          I think this is a really good point. I knew I would be going back to work after 4 months, so I started working on pumping and having my kiddo take a bottle very early on, because I didn’t want to discover at 3.5 months that he wouldn’t take a bottle.

          But if you expected to not need to pump and bottle feed at all because you were planning on 100% WFH with in-home care (I’m going to assume that to avoid the “you need childcare” conversation) until the baby was weaned, then suddenly needing to switch to bottle feeding two days a week could be a *huge* deal.
          If that’s the case then, while the LW’s daughter doesn’t have any specific rights about WFH, she might have more leeway to discuss a slower ramp up of in-office days (maybe a week or two to get a pump and build up a little bank and get the baby used to the bottle).

    7. Hyaline*

      I’m in agreement that regardless of the LW’s previous situation and whether it was working or not (as many have said, there are other ways she could have been managing childcare that are now not going to work: she could have had a nanny who can’t change her hours, daycare could have been easier because of the lack of commute, older kiddo could have been in preschool for a large chunk of the day and now the daughter can’t do pickup/drop off for that, whatever), it’s a nonstarter with the employer. Her childcare isn’t the employer’s problem. However–it’s fair to be frustrated that a workable situation is now out of the door because of a change like this, and it could take time to find new solutions that work for in-office days. It may also be difficult to find additional coverage for only two days–plenty of daycares require full time or no-go. And exclusively breastfed babies are often difficult to transition to bottle, especially at 3 months where they’re not on solids or sippy cups yet but have developed Opinions about getting their milk from the source. So this can be frustrating and difficult for MANY reasons outside of “mom was attempting to work and caregive at the same time” and a decent employer will understand that and give some adjustment period.

      1. M2*

        It’s not a workable solution.
        You can’t get all your work done and watch children full time. She always needed to have full time childcare just because you WFH doesn’t mean you can also watch your kids.

        From the letter it sounds like the daughter was doing both. It didn’t say anything about daycare closing but that she had a 3 year old and baby. Yeah maybe her mom came and helped a few hours a day but if the employee had proper childcare then it wouldn’t be an issue.

        As a manager I can work with daycare closing and opening times or if your nanny is sick one day or if your nanny quit/ need to find a new daycare and you need a couple week grace period. What I can’t work with is someone thinking they can get what they need done during work hour while watching their children too. Especially for years (as it sounds like from the letter).

        This is what happens. The employer probably expected they had childcare as you need to during the work day and called her in either because they realized she didn’t have care/ they realized her work product wasn’t the same/ new manager and new manager wants to work with new employee for awhile to get to know them.

        1. Hyaline*

          But what I said was that the LW’s daughter might have had a perfectly workable childcare situation–like a nanny, daycare, or a combo with preschool. The letter doesn’t give any indication of what the childcare situation was. There’s a lot of assumption from the line “has a 3 yo and 3 mo old *at home*” but “at home” is a colloquialism that doesn’t necessarily mean “at home with her all the time” but “part of her household.” That workable solution, whatever it was, may no longer be workable, and rearranging childcare is no small challenge.

          1. Anon for this*

            If she had that, that would’ve been the central part of the letter. Instead, the letter focuses on “she has two young children she shouldn’t be expected to come into the office”. As if that should be the ONLY reason the employer shouldn’t be calling her back to the office, not anything to do with “but her childcare won’t work for the increased hours added by the commute”.

            1. dude, who moved my cheese?*

              I just don’t think we can assume this – it was a very short letter, there could be plenty of detail that wasn’t included

            2. YetAnotherAnalyst*

              I don’t think you can infer that from this letter, since the LW isn’t the mother. At least in my experience, there’s a lot of grandparents out there that don’t understand the current realities of being a working parent. LW may be focusing on the point that her daughter won’t be home with the kids, but the daughter might be focusing on the difficulty of getting childcare for the extra commute time.

            3. What_the_What*

              Yeah, I agree. I think if the LW hadn’t added the comment that the new supervisor doesn’t like her, there might have been more wiggle room, but the LW herself made it sound punitive….

        2. GythaOgden*

          Indeed. She’s also maybe the other side of the ‘my colleague is not pulling her weight and management needs to do something’…and management is finally doing something to force the hand of the employee doing something generally against WFH etiquette.

      2. Observer*

        However–it’s fair to be frustrated that a workable situation is now out of the door because of a change like this,

        The thing is that if there is no childcare other than Mom in place, it is *not* a “workable situation”. And, even if there is childcare, but the 3yo is regularly allowed to be with mom, can be heard during meetings, etc. That is also not a “workable situation.”

        And the LW’s language strongly implies that one of these is the case.

    8. Pandemic mom*

      Sidestepping the childcare discussion to note that there is a legal right to *pump* but not a legal right to *breastfeed*. My spouse was our full time caretaker when I went back to work after maternity leave. I was breastfeeding and working at home because of the pandemic, but technically nursing was not covered as a legal break although pumping would have been.

      1. Happy meal with extra happy*

        If you were working from home, how would they know that you were breastfeeding? Couldn’t you just say you were pumping?

      2. Observer*

        What difference does it make?

        In this kind of context, it’s a distinction without a difference.

        1. Pandemic mom*

          It does matter as an argument regarding return to work. She does need to have a place to pump in an office, but the fact she’s breastfeeding a child at home isn’t protected.

      3. Whomst*

        Current US law “requires employers to provide reasonable break time for an employee to express breast milk for their nursing child for one year after the child’s birth each time such employee has need to express the milk.” Directly nursing the baby is just the most effective way to express breast milk, it’s totally covered.

    9. Dust Bunny*

      Or, at the very least, her employer assumes it shouldn’t be a problem because of course she’s not working without childcare, because that has never been the point of WFH and thus shouldn’t be a dealbreaker.

    10. LL*

      I was thinking the same thing. In a previous job I had at my current employer, we were allowed to WFH up to 4 days a week and it was very clear in our WFH agreement that we had to have childcare if we had kids who weren’t old enough to be in school full time (and possibly for younger elementary school-aged kids during after school hours).

      You can’t parent and work at the same time. One or both things will not get the attention that they need and deserve.

    11. sdog*

      Yep, came on to say this, as well. Maybe there’s another issue here, such as that Mom is needing additional childcare for pickup/drop-off, or has a nanny/daycare that’s close to home so she can nurse during the day, which wouldn’t be possible if having to go into the office. But the way this reads is that she’s caring for 2 kids while at home, which is nuts.

      Most workplaces specifically state in their policy that parents must have alternative childcare if working from home, and as a manager, I would expect that my employees be available to focus on work during normal work hours. Obviously, there may be emergencies that come up – I’ve absolutely been that mom that had to deal with a sick kid at home while juggling calls. But that shouldn’t be the norm. And honestly, 2 days in the office still seems to be a reasonable hybrid schedule to me. Your daughter, of course, should be making sure she has childcare all 5 days, not just in the days she’s in the office.

    12. TurtlesAllTheWayDown*

      Yes, reading between the lines, it sounds like her new boss is suspicious of the amount of time daughter spends working vs. childcare. I say this as someone with a 21 month old, and whose husband ALSO works from home, and who still sends my child to daycare – we have the privilege of juggling her back and forth on days when she is sick or if she happens to have a day off and we don’t, but it’s not easy, and I’ve certainly logged some sick time myself having to take care of her. My husband and I joke about her being the only one in our family who commutes. Both my paid job and being a parent require 100% of my attention at any given time.

  9. MsM*

    LW1: In addition to this potentially being a problem for staff, it’s also a problem for external relations. What happens if Flora needs to collaborate with peers at other organizations who may have more impressive credentials on paper, or deal with a donor with seemingly critical questions? Coaching is great if it works, but if she’s self-aware enough to acknowledge this is a her problem, she really needs to be more proactive about finding and implementing strategies for keeping it in check herself.

    1. BellaStella*

      Exactly. Also if she cannot then she needs to go. Self awareness and good skills managing including self management are key to being a leader

    2. Paint N Drip*

      Totally agree. Nobody cares about her resume if she’s impossible to work with (even if just sometimes) and your organization WILL be judged by her prickliness

    3. ferrina*

      Yes yes yes!

      LW writes about issues with the board members, but what about staff Flora manages? Is she willing to let SME or highly talented staff give advice, or does she get defensive over anyone else’s expertise? Part of being a strong leader is knowing how to utilize other people’s talents and expertise, and if she can’t let anyone else know more than her, that’s going to cause serious problems! She can’t be an expert in everything- that is literally the point of having certain staff roles!

    1. BellaStella*

      Same and it never works especially when they get it in their mind that a staff member with skills is threatening their authority etc.

    2. ferrina*

      Me too!

      The biggest offender was the CEO who claimed to be ‘data-driven’, but any time the data said something he didn’t like, it was because I “didn’t know how to read the data” or “didn’t have the right data” (not that any other data existed or that he thought we actually had a problem with our data; he just preferred the imaginary data to actual data).
      One time he actually sold work based on his imaginary data. I told him that our data didn’t support the work he sold and that we would not be able to deliver, but he sold it anyways. After several months of attempting to do the work, followed by a couple months of increasingly awkward client calls, we had to issue a full refund and lost that client forever.

  11. nnn*

    One thing #3 can do is tag emails with “non-urgent” or “info only” when applicable, so they don’t feel like another demand when they’re not

  12. I don't know either.*

    LW2, can you articulate *why* this would be an issue for your daughter? There are several parents who manage to make this work (even if, as Alison points out, there is not nearly enough support for them to do so).

    From the timeline it sounds like your daughter had her first child during the time when there was an increased flexibility on behalf of employers towards working from home with children. Rightly or wrongly, that time is now over, which means your daughter would have to have childcare available for her children even when working from home. Is it at all possible she does not have other childcare and that she is functionally doing two jobs at once? Because that might be the entire reason her job is requiring her to come in again – they might have noticed that her output is below what it should be and have their suspicions that it is because she is also the full time carer for her children.

    Even if she does have full time childcare it is possible her job for some reason suspects she does not (or that she is still spending way too much time with her children when she is supposed to be working). It might be worth it for your daughter to ask *why* she is being brought back (unless this is part of a company wide recalling-everyone-to-the-office campaign) and negotiate from there.

    But at any rate, have her ask her employer if they have a proper pumping room that fulfills the legal requirements.

  13. OP1*

    OP1 here- yes I do worry about the impact it has on staff morale, even if I’m not hearing about it yet (I know as a board member I might well not hear from staff even if I try and be open and available). It’s all made harder by the fact that when she was promoted to her role the previous ED attempted to salt the earth behind her and the current ED faced a campaign of difficult behaviour from previous board members and outgoing staff loyal to the former ED (we upheld a bullying complaint against more than one person who are not with us any more), so I can understand why she feels defensive! But I think the commenters are right that I’ve probably had too much sensitivity to that situation and haven’t set clear enough expectations on the behaviour I need to see.

    1. misspiggy*

      So are you sure it’s imposter syndrome and not trauma from previous bullying at your institution? Because that may change the way forward quite considerably.

      1. OP1*

        She’s described it as imposter syndrome, which is why I used that language, but I think a trauma response would also make a lot of sense. Would you mind expanding on how that should be approached differently?

        1. Ally McBeal*

          I’m not sure it should. The reason for her reaction isn’t yours to manage – she needs a management coach. That coach can suggest therapy if they think it’s appropriate (does your organization have an EAP?), but it’s not ideal for that suggestion to come from you as her manager.

          1. sparkle emoji*

            +1
            You don’t need to be concerned about the “why”, that’s for the ED and the management coach to address. You need to focus on the behavior and keeping any imposter/trauma/etc. issues from affecting employees below the ED.

        2. Strive to Excel*

          To me – it would shift my perspective from “this employee needs coaching” to “we should do a comprehensive review of our employee culture AND provide this employee with coaching”. If what she’s struggling with is “the last time I was open to input people jumped all over me” then having a separate communications push of “jumping all over people is Not Ok and we’re changing how we do things here” can be a powerful support.

          You might have already done this! In which case you can already point to this groundwork. But that would be my biggest thought; part of coaching an employer to be open to feedback means setting up an environment where feedback is constructive.

          1. MsM*

            Board culture, too. Especially if any of the current board are trying to intrude on things that should really be under the ED’s purview.

            1. Miracle*

              I’ve had 13 years as an ED in two different organizations and struggling with the board and the employees would be really rough.

        3. anon here*

          I think you might also want to be open to the possibility that there is still stuff going on. The line between “appropriately defensive” and “overly defensive” is very dependent on what you are in fact defending against.

      2. Sloanicota*

        Reading this, I was thinking “hmm, maybe they need to focus on organizational culture change.” Having (multiple) employees behave like this is a red flag that the org is struggling with culture. If the new ED is a product of the prior culture also, that has probably impacted the way they view the work in many ways. Org change is hard and has to come from the top. Longterm employees will otherwise continue to reproduce the prior conditions even if subconsciously since they think that’s normal there.

    2. BellaStella*

      I looked up some strategies online to overcome imposter syndrome. They included things for the ED as she has said this, such as:
      1. Gather accomplishment evidence: Collecting evidence of your accomplishments is a crucial strategy to combat imposter syndrome and self-doubt. Start by creating a dedicated space and time to compile tangible proofs of your achievements, such as certificates, awards, and positive feedback.
      2. Replace negative thoughts with better ones: Challenge thoughts such as, “I am not good at anything.” Instead, ask yourself to come up with three things you are good at.
      3. Define success clearly: Establish clear, achievable goals for each specific role or task, outlining what success means in those contexts. Understand that setbacks and challenges are integral parts of growth, and they don’t invalidate your overall progress.
      4. What does good enough look like? It is crucial to answer this question because it implicitly permits the person to be OK at some tasks.
      and 5. coaching for managers to be better at managing themselves and others.

      Good luck OP, this is so tough and clearly as you note has follow on impacts to staff. Also THANK YOU for dealing with the bullying!!!

      1. OP1*

        Thank you, thank you, thank you. I’ve been racking my brains trying to think of a way to say ‘this is a serious problem and it needs to improve’ without automatically causing a hugely defensive response. I think having a dual approach of ‘please tell me if you’re still being attacked so we can deal with that, but also I need to see xyz from you’ will be more successful. And these specific anti imposter syndrome approaches feel really positive, so I’ll bring them in too.

        And thanks everyone for the clear-eyed advice and not responding like I’m just waffling through managing this- I appreciate the support to be firmer from now on.

    3. Sweetie Darling*

      The sci-fi movie The Core was on last night and even though I’ve seen it before and really just had it on in the background, a line jumped out that hit me as a new manager with imposter syndrome (I think mine manifests more as indecision than defensiveness):

      “Being a leader isn’t about ability. It’s about responsibility….It’s not just about making the right decision, but being accountable for the wrong ones” (slightly paraphrased).

      Taking that in, I don’t have to know everything and perform all the same tasks as well as the people I manage (which feels weird). My role is partly to serve as their champion, fight for funding, address issues as they develop, etc. Of course, it would be great to know everything about everything but since your ED manages those with specific content knowledge, her value lies more in her leadership and ability to accomplish your shared vision. I agree with others about management coaching but maybe helping her understand WHY she’s part of the team will give her permission to let other things go.

      My situation is different and only you know if she’s got that potential to change, but instead of helping her be more confident (and open to other views), you might help her be more vulnerable and willing to acknowledge others’ value differently than her own.

  14. bamcheeks*

    There’s a lot of people assuming that LW2’s daughter can’t go back to the office because she’s looking after her children and working simultaneously. I would just like to point out that it’s completely possible to have perfect, impeccable childcare between 9-6pm (and shorter direct-to-baby breastfeeding breaks than you’d have if you were expressing milk!) and for the whole thing to become unviable once you add a commute on either end! Ask me how I know.

      1. bamcheeks*

        I’ve left a job I really loved because of it, and it was not the only but a significant factor in leaving another. :-(

        1. KateM*

          Would you like to write it out? It seems crazy that it would go straight from having a perfect, impeccable childcare 9-6 to being totally unviable. A very long commute?

          1. Hlao-roo*

            I don’t even think it has to be a long commute! I don’t know the details of bamcheeks’s situation, but making the following assumptions:
            – 8 hours of work per day
            – 1/2 hour lunch break (mandatory, not included in work time)
            – daycare 15 min from house
            – daycare strictly open only from 9am to 6pm
            – work cannot be done during other hours (pre- or post-daycare)

            Working from home works like this:
            – drop kid(s) at daycare at exactly 9am
            – log in to work at 9:15 am
            – log off work at 5:45pm (8.5 hours after starting work)
            – pick kid(s) up from daycare at exactly 6pm

            If work-from-home is replaced by going to an office 30 min from the daycare (not a long commute for most people), the new day is:
            – drop kid(s) at daycare at exactly 9am
            – arrive at office at 9:30am
            – leave office at 5:30pm (only 8 hours after starting work!)
            – pick kid(s) up from daycare at exactly 6pm

            Either the lunch break didn’t happen (potentially running afoul of labor laws in the jurisdiction) or only 7.5 hours of work got done (which is not what the company is paying for). Not a very long commute, but just long enough to make the job/daycare situation combination unworkable.

            1. KateM*

              But mother driving kids to and from daycare is not the only possibility out there, is it? I know our neighbours had problems arriving in time to take their kid out of school – I know they tried at least 1) a neighbour (me) bringing the kid home from school 2) a babysitter bringing the kid home from school and staying with him, before they went with 3) changing school to one that nearer to workplace (and maybe there were some other tings they tried).

              1. dude, who moved my cheese?*

                Yes, those are all real possibilities that we can still assume didn’t work for bamcheeks since she already said the situation was unviable for her.

              2. HannahS*

                So, what you mean is that they tried two different things that didn’t work and then ultimately decided to change schools, something that is generally not possible in the public school system which follows strict catchment boundaries?

                Even for your neighbour it was unviable! They couldn’t make it work; they had to change schools.

              3. bamcheeks*

                It’s honestly wild that you’re trying to problem-solve this based on nearly 0 information. Is it really so hard to accept that sometimes it is just not possible and that this is one of the main reasons people (mainly women!) drop out of the workforce? Do you think they’re all just not trying hard enough?

            2. Temperance*

              Why is only one parent responsible for driving kids? It seems that the best solution would be for one parent to do pickup and the other to do dropoff.

              That’s of course assuming that there are two parents.

              1. Lenora Rose*

                This assumes there are two parents; it ALSO assumes there are two cars.

                Our morning logistics for the past few years are that my husband drives the kids AND ME to the school/daycare (same building) and I bus from there. Our afternoon plans depend on multiple factors, but in general he gets there in the car before I could by bus, so he’s the primary pick-up.

                (This all changes slightly next week (!!!!!eek!!!) as our elder child goes to a different school and will be travelling with a care worker, but the core with our son will remain the same.)

              2. bamcheeks*

                In our case, my partner did nearly all the drop-offs because she was able to shift her day to work later. However, I couldn’t finish work at 5pm and reliably get back to the nursery to pick my daughter up by 6pm (5 minutes to walk to bike and unlock, 5 minute bike ride to station, 5 minute wait for train, 20 minute train ride, 15 minute bike ride home — it worked most of the time but if the train was 5 minutes late or the traffic was bad, I would be late, which isn’t fair on anyone at nursery or my daughter. Late in my pregnancy, I switched to driving, but that meant leaving work at 5, a 10 minute walk to the car because that was the closest parking available, and a 40 minute drive back to nursery– again, it worked fine three days a week, but if there was bad traffic I wouldn’t get there in time.

                I switched to another job where I had a thirty minute walk to work, and that was fine until my elder daughter started school. 30 minute walk to nursery, 10 minutes to pick younger up, get coats and bags etc and get her into a pushchair, 15 minute walk to school to pick up elder– that was actually the most OK, because walking is way more reliable than trains or driving, just stressful because I had to walk as fast as possible. School holidays were impossible though, because none of the childcare options went later than 4 or 5pm and they were all a drive away and my partner doesn’t drive, so I had to do both drop-of and pick-up.

                1. anon here*

                  It is very kind of you to illustrate for the Pull-Yourself-Up-By-Your-Bootstraps crowd the actual difficulties working parents face.

                  The grind is so, so, so real.

                  I used to take my 11 month old 23 blocks south by bus, carrying her lunch & bottles/teeny backpack/my breast pump/my work bag, then drop her off, then get on the subway for 30-40 minutes (when there weren’t subway issues; I was late a lot) to get to work, and then I would have to leave promptly at 5 with my work bag and my pump (which also stored the milk I’d pumped and so had to come back and forth with me), ride the subway for 30-40 minutes to get to her daycare, pick her up, strap her into the Ergo carrier, add her backpack and lunch bag to my alpaca impression, and get back on the local subway to get home, whereupon I had to wash all pump parts, refrigerate the milk for the next day, and also wash all the tiny lunch tupperwares marked with her name. Then I had to walk the dog, also with the baby in the ergo. By this point it was closing in on 7 PM and no one had had dinner. She also did not sleep through the night and I was constantly an emotional shambles because I thought it was my fault because we could not get her to bed earlier than 8ish. Sleep begets sleep, you know? So she should probably try an earlier bedtime!, trilled the Internet, and I would just weep: “HOW THOUGH. HOW.”

                  I lived for the following summer because my husband was a school teacher and this daycare (the only daycare she got a spot in when my maternity leave was up–a nanny was completely financially out of reach, like a non-starter) was on the way to my work but not his–so in summer, he did the pickup (hey, why didn’t he just watch her during the summer and we could save the rent-equivalent daycare tuition? Because she would LOSE HER DAYCARE SPOT, duh!).

                  All of this is why we left that city before she turned 2.

              3. wordswords*

                Right: it’s assuming there are two parents, and it’s assuming the other parent doesn’t have a schedule or commute that makes both pickup and dropoff possible, and so on.

                bamcheeks outlined one scenario in which adding a commute made a workable job a non-starter despite the presence of solid and reliable childcare, as a helpful example; surely we can trust that at the time, they didn’t have other options for dropoff, rather than that that somehow never occurred to anybody in the “can we make this work so I can keep the job I love” conversations?

              4. Elsajeni*

                This is ONE example of A situation in which changing the commute might make it impossible to keep the childcare situation that has been working well so far. What is the point of “problem-solving” the hypothetical example? “Can the other parent do drop-off and pick-up?” In this hypothetical, no, because its whole purpose is to illustrate that there are situations where changing one parent’s commute would cause childcare problems.

            3. ferrina*

              Yep, I know parents who run that schedule currently.

              For the parents saying “why is only one parent doing drop-off/pick-up”- sometimes the other parent has a longer commute and can’t adjust their schedule. Sometimes they only have one car. Sometimes the other parent is out of the picture (y’all, being a single parent with no family support is tough!).

          2. Green Tea*

            This doesn’t seem crazy at all to me, it’s actually incredibly common. You can whaddabout it all you want, it doesn’t change the reality for millions of people. Life in the U.S. is a precarious balance where many working parents are just barely hanging on and anything that makes it more difficult might make things collapse.

            I’m hybrid. I have a husband who is a hands-on father, childcare, and so I do zero childcare during work hours. If my office called me back into the office five days a week, it would cause huge issues, and I might need to search for a different position specifically because adding that commute time is the difference between us barely making things work and not making things work.

            Asking someone to account for every second of their day so you can see if you can armchair quarterback their schedule better than them is… weird.

            2. SpaceySteph*

              My second child was born in March 2020 so I have never worked 5 days a week in the office with 2 kids (and now I have 3). I can honestly not imagine it. Working from home just 2 days a week is hugely important to my work/life balance and if I were ever asked to come in 5 days a week… we’d probably go down to a single earner household.

              Its not anything major, but being able to sleep in a tiny bit on those days because I don’t have to shower/do hair and pack my whole life in a bag, to throw in a load of laundry on my lunch break, to stop working at 5 and then immediately be in the kitchen cooking dinner rather than having a 20 min drive home… its all a huge help in getting me through the week.

    2. Emily*

      A lot of people are assuming that because that is how the letter makes it sound. I’m hoping LW #2 can clarify some things in the comments because I’m very curious as to what is causing LW #2 to conclude that the new supervisor “doesn’t like” their daughter.

      1. bamcheeks*

        I don’t think it does, actually! “Has a 3yo at home” doesn’t imply to me “has a 3yo that she is sole carer for during the working day”. I would have said that when my partner was off work and if I had paid in-home care. I’d probably have said it when my kids were in nursery too, just because nursery was right around the corner from our house.

        1. doreen*

          It might not imply that to you – but from my point of view, if the three year old is at home with a nanny/partner /relative or at a nursery around the corner, then why mention the three year old at all? In those situations, the three year old being at home is irrelevant to working in the office – it might be relevant to working hours (for example, you can’t make it to the office by 8 because you can’t drop off at the nursery until 7:30 ) but not the location.

          1. sparkle emoji*

            Yeah, people are pointing out that the current phrasing reads to many like the daughter is taking care of 2 kids while working from home. If that’s not the case, daughter needs to workshop how she’s going to talk to her boss about this so she doesn’t give them the same impression.

            1. sdog*

              Yeah, there are a lot of reasons going back to the office could be problematic. Maybe 3yo doesn’t go to preschool fulltime and now she has to up the childcare. Maybe she has a nanny at home that walks the baby to her when she needs to nurse. But that’s not how this is written.

              I used to have a nanny that came in the mornings for baby + toddler, picked up the then kindergartner (that ended at 11:45, WTF), and left around 1pm when they were all down for nap/quiet time. I was able to finish out my workday during those hours, but office days meant hundreds of dollars more per week in childcare to account for both the commute + nap/quiet time when obviously an adult had to be in the house. I’m not saying there can’t be other things going on here, but to me, it’s telling that she’s describing the 3yo being home and not talking about this is as adding to child care costs, or something along those lines.

          2. bamcheeks*

            the three year old being at home is irrelevant to working in the office

            But it’s literally not irrelevant? That’s my point — there might be all sorts of reasons why it’s relevant which aren’t “LW cares for the 3yo during the working day”. This isn’t a letter TO an employer, it’s a grandma writing about how this is going to cause issues for her daughter. It might be the extra hours of the commute. It might be being significantly further away from home if there’s an emergency involving the kids. It might be being around at lunchtime. It might be not leaving them for more than 4-6 hours at a time, especially whilst the 3yo is adjusting to having a new younger sibling. She gets to decide what’s relevant and what isn’t!

            1. mbs001*

              A three year old at home is no excuse for the worker to not be able to come into the office. People do it every day and have done it for decades. An infant at home isn’t an excuse either. You’re either on maternity leave or your back at work.

              But it doesn’t matter in the end. If she can’t do the job she’s being paid to do by her employer — for whatever reason — she needs to find another job. This clearly sounds as though her daughter is caring herself for these young children which is stealing from her employer who is paying her to do work for them — not to care for her children at home!

              1. bamcheeks*

                People do it every day and have done it for decades

                People — mostly women! — also leave the workplace and end up financially dependent on their partners, with various knock-on effects on theirs and their children’s long-term financial security. Like, obviously, lots of people do make it work, but there is also a large minority who do not make it work: “I can see that some people make it work so it must be possible” is classic survivor bias.

                1. Emily*

                  You seem to be taking this very personally and it seems to be coloring your interpretation of the situation. It might be helpful to take a step back.

                2. anon here*

                  Absolutely correct.

                  “People have been able to make it work without paid leave” =/= a reason no one should “pay you to not work” (what my boss told me when I disclosed my second pregnancy). (He was a federal judge.)

                3. I Pay Taxes, Too*

                  @Emily

                  bamcheeks has been dogpiled, so this is reasonably personal to her. Why choose to police her comments and not the comments of the vocal, aggressive instigators who are attacking the LW2 daughter over entirely manufactured scenarios, and turning a banal workplace conflict into a criticism of working parents, “entitlement,” and WFH on the whole?

              1. Emily*

                I Pay Taxes, Too: Wow! You appear to be taking this incredibly personally as well. There is a lot of very loaded language in your comment.

                2. Hroethvitnir*

                  You think the people responding to an asinine comment about how “workers” have been able to make it work en large, therefore it’s unreasonable to expect for consideration as an individual human being by pointing out that the basis for the argument is absolute rubbish and that attitude measurably impacts social inequality need to be lambasted for their tone? Interesting.

                  I don’t know where all these bad faith comments are coming from, but I’m not enjoying it.

                  /not a parent and in fact sterilised to be sure of it, not in a career where WFH is viable, still am capable of empathy

                3. Emily*

                  Hroethvitnir: You claim others are “bad faith commenters”, but your comment is very much in bad faith as well.

                  YetAnotherAnalyst: If they actually had an accurate point to make, then they should be able to do that without overstatements and theatrical language.

                4. I Pay Taxes, Too*

                  @Emily

                  There was no theatrical language. Now who is taking things personally and blowing them out of proportion?

                  Clearly, others are seeing what I’m seeing. Surely it is *all of us* who are the problem. It must be *everybody other than you* who needs to clam down and stop taking personal attacks personally!

                5. Emily*

                  I Pay Taxes, Too: I can tell you are getting very worked up about this, and you are unable to have a reasonable conversation about this. I hope you are able to work through whatever is troubling you so much.

          3. Hyaline*

            “why mention the three year old at all” Well, ok, it IS grandma writing in–this is VERY IMPORTANT info if you’re grandma. I think we can say with no hesitation that this LW left a lot of potentially pertinent info out and very possibly included non-pertinent info. Trying to read between the lines to this degree when the letter is this full of holes is fruitless and exhausting.

        2. mbs001*

          Then the 3 year old shouldn’t have been mentioned by the mother as a reason she can’t go back into the office. It’s clear to me that she’s caring for both the 3-month old and the 3-year old at home — while getting paid to work for her employer.

          1. wordswords*

            What’s “clear to you” seems like a whole lot of assumptions to me, especially given that it was the grandmother who wrote in, meaning that we’re getting a fairly short letter that’s also filtered through a layer of remove from the logistics of the situation. There are a lot of possible scenarios here, and we simply don’t have the information to tell which is the accurate one.

            Now, it’s potentially useful to LW1 to have the feedback on how this framing could sound to an employer, to a point — but only to a point, given that LW1 isn’t the actual mother/employee in the situation and we don’t know how her daughter would have framed it if she were the one writing in.

    3. I don't know either.*

      That might indeed be the case! But the way people are interpreting the situation is still useful information to have when you decide on how to open the conversation with your employer.

      “I have two small children one of whom I breastfeed” is going to sound weird to an employer and is likely to raise the exact questions people are raising here. *If* the company is open to discussing this, having specific examples is going to be worth more.

    4. Nodramalama*

      I think its useful for LW to know that thats how many commenters have interpret it because it’s also very likely that her daughters work is going to interpret it the same way.

    5. Tuckerman*

      Yup. For licensed centers, the states regulate how long a child can be in care, and the centers implement their own policies based on that (e.g., the state may have a weekly limit that the center enforces in terms of daily max).

      For example, a child may not be permitted to be in care for more than 10 hours per day. If you work 8 hrs plus are required to take a 30 minute unpaid break, and have a commute that is 45 minutes each way, that puts you exactly at 10 hrs. A slight traffic delay or meeting that runs late puts you in violation of the policy.

      This is part of the reason why many people go to unregulated in-home, under the table childcare arrangements.

      1. Coffeebreak*

        Thank you for this informative. Often, they also charge a premium for longer than 7-8 hours.

      2. JustaTech*

        This is why some friends of mine went with a daycare that is very close to one of their work, rather than one that is near their home. Because of their hellacious commute (Bay Area), the only way to get in a full work day and not violate child care laws was to have the kid also commute and go to school near one parent’s work.

    6. M2*

      Most employers will work with daycare times. As a manger and mom I’m happy to do it. Also if kids are sick and you rather WFH instead of taking a sick day that is fine to (occasionally) do. I worked with several of my employees on child care issues, but you must have care when you are meant to be working. We also have a daycare on site and I know what team members make for salary and we pay above market rate. My organization also offers a very reduced summer camp for older kids (the daycare is all year round) on site during the summer for employees kids too. There are lots of other camps around but this camp is about 50% less than every other camp I have looked at.

      The letter did sound like from a managers point of view that she was the main caregiver or only had PT care from her mom while working FT. If you had care why mention a 3 year old at all?

      1. YetAnotherAnalyst*

        If the daughter has some childcare at home (eg, a nanny or a relative), but will need to change to a daycare because of the hours the commute adds, that’s relevant information! She needs to now find a daycare with two available slots and pay for two children (so, $4-5000 a month in a high cost-of-living area, rather than the $2,000 a month for a nanny to watch both of them).

      2. bamcheeks*

        Most employers will work with daycare times… If you had care why mention a 3 year old at all?/i>

        Isn’t this kind of contradictory? If you need your employer to work around daycare times, then quite clearly it would be relevant.

        It was NOT my experience that my employers were happy to “work around” daycare times– I think it’s great if you do but I don’t think that’s necessarily standard. When my second daughter was born I had a job a 45-50 minute train commute from home, and although it was a standard email / office job my manager and my manager’s manager came from retail backgrounds and had a very “you must be in situ and ready to go at 9am” mindset. I left that job during my maternity leave because there wasn’t any flexibility and I wasn’t prepared to be an hour away from my 7mo whilst she was still settling in at nursery. Instead, I got a job a 30 minute walk away, which was great whilst they were both in nursery but got complicated when my elder daughter started school, and I was trying to finish work at 5pm and make it to two different places before 6pm to pick them up.

        In both cases we had full 8-6pm nursery care and after-school club, but it still nearly incompatible with both parents working in a supposedly flexible professional roles. I just don’t think that’s nearly as unusual as people seem to think! Covid and hybrid working hit before we had to deal with school summer holidays, when there is no childcare which starts earlier than 9am or goes on later than 5pm, and the majority is 9-4pm. If my employer hadn’t shifted to hybrid working in 2020 and I was still expected to be in an office 9-5pm Mon-Fri, one of us would have had to stop working.

        1. Coffeebreak*

          Daycares do not “work around your hours.” They have open hours, and you can’t just leave your child there. This is a laughable comment.

          1. Coffeebreak*

            OMG misread completely.

            Still, this is not an accurate comment. Most employers do not adjust your working hours to fit your children’s daycare schedule. I wish I lived in that world.

            1. ScruffyInternHerder*

              I had a former not-quite-over-me manager who still had some sway in my reviews who thought that I could “just pay the penalty for being late” without grasping that it was 1. a penalty per MINUTE late and 2. 3 strikes with this and you’re out.

              So no, I was done with his meetings at my previously negotiated with everyone end time unless he provided, oh, a day’s notice that this was going to be happening. Because his last minute penchant for meetings that ran far over their timeframe would have had me kicked from daycare in one week’s time.

            2. bamcheeks*

              That was my point too! I was responding to M2 who said “Most employers will work with daycare times…”

          2. CommanderBanana*

            LOLLLL right?! Daycares most emphatically do not work around your hours, and employers most definitely do not care about your daycare issues. A lot of the daycares in my area have policies like charging $10 per minute that you’re late picking up your kid after their designated pickup time.

      3. Coffeebreak*

        Most employers will work with daycare times…which ones are these? Honestly, this sounds insanely patronizing to me. Most “white collar” employers probably allow some freedom for their employees, but if you are not a salaried employee, you do not get the freedom to come and go from work on your schedule.

      4. I Pay Taxes, Too*

        “Most employers will work with daycare times. ”

        Lol. Doubt. Super cool that you would do it, but you most certainly do not speak for “most” employers.

      5. Lana Kane*

        “Most employers will work with daycare times.”

        I’m not sure how you can make this generalization. It would involve truly knowing what most employers do, and there are thousands with wildly diverse roles. I have been in roles that were strictly shift based and there was no accomodation to be made – if I needed to be taking phone calls from patients from 8-4:30, then I needed to be there from 8-4:30 regardless of my childcare situation. Part of the issue with working parents is that so many employers are not flexible.

        1. I Have RBF*

          I’m not a parent, but from what I’ve observed with my coworkers, “Most employers will NOT work with daycare times.” They usually say “That’s your problem to solve, you need to be here X to Y every day.”

    7. Anon for this*

      The problem is that if she had any of those things, the reason being asked to return to office is inconvenient would be “her childcare plans just don’t allow flexibility for that”. Not “it’s unreasonable to ask a mother of young children to return to office”.

      1. bamcheeks*

        I didn’t say it’s unreasonable, just that “returning to the office is incompatible with her childcare arrangements” does not mean that she doesn’t HAVE any childcare arrangements.

        Again and again, I see this assumption that obviously there is a reasonable childcare solution available, and if someone doesn’t have childcare in place that enables them to work a standard 9-5 office job outside the home, it must be because they have for some reason chosen not to avail themselves of that childcare solution. In my experience, this is simply not true, and that’s speaking from the privileged position as someone who has always been able to afford childcare, has neurotypical and abled kids who can access mainstream education and childcare, and has a partner with a above averagely-flexible job.

        1. Anon for this*

          LW is the one who said it’s unreasonable, and makes no mention of an existing childcare arrangement.

    8. Nonsense*

      It’s completely possible, of course, but in this scenario I’d say the lack of information implies that it’s not the case. IME with online forums, whenever someone asks such a short question, doesn’t offer any kind of supporting details, and asks about their “rights,” 19/20 times they’re in the wrong and they’re hoping to hide that fact.

      Other times Alison’s been asked this kind of question, we usually get some kernels of information about the existing arrangement – family watching the kids, daycare closing frequently, daycare has no openings for a year+, etc. This has nothing. That’s suspicious.

      1. bamcheeks*

        IME with online forums, whenever someone asks such a short question, doesn’t offer any kind of supporting details, and asks about their “rights,” 19/20 times they’re in the wrong and they’re hoping to hide that fact

        This is wild. IME it’s just as likely that they’ve come up against a fundamental inequity for the first time and are shocked to discover they are completely unprotected, even though they’ve been hearing employers and politicians talk about how important family/diversity/ inclusion are.

        1. Busy Bee*

          I think it’s a bit of an exaggeration to call this a “fundamental inequity.” An employer is making a decision her daughter does not like, asking her to return to office 2 days a week, which it sounds like the entire team has to do. It may well be a completely justified work-based decision (this part cannot be known due to the lack of detail in the letter, but it cannot be denied that it is possible that the daughter is doing childcare while working). Just because it’s not convenient for her does not make it a fundamental inequity.

          I agree with Nonsense; the lack of detail makes me somewhat suspicious, and it is not at all unheard of for people (online and everywhere) to try to spin their characterization of a situation to put themselves in the best possible light, even if that means leaving out some details that would clarify the story.

          1. bamcheeks*

            I mean, I think women being pushed out of the workplace *is* a fundamental inequity, and it is precisely because of these kinds of decisions and the lack of wider social support for parents. Each individual decision may be justifiable: cumulatively they make thousands of people every year, the vast majority of whom are women, decide that working outside the home is untenable and give up. Which has a huge knock-on effect both on those women and their children, who are more likely to end up in poverty if the marriage breaks down or their partner becomes ill or dies, and on the wider society because there are fewer women present in senior roles where social, political, industrial, ergonomic, economic and legal decisions are made. The impact of a decision can be inequity even if that wasn’t its intent.

    9. Ellis Bell*

      I wish OP had included more details about what the childcare arrangements are, because it would have indicated what kind of accommodations the OP’s daughter actually needs. If there’s full time childcare, but OP’s daughter simply needs to be close at hand for breastfeeding reasons, then she needs to consider whether she’d rather express milk at work (which I understand is a protected right) or if she could try to negotiate with her manager a compromise of coming in more regularly, but for shorter periods, like for afternoon meetings which would meet the “part of the team” mandate. If the manager is suspicious about adequate childcare, offering to leave the baby for an hour or two with it’s carer may alleviate that. If it’s that her new location means picking up her three year old up from daycare is now impossible, she may be on better grounds asking for more flexibility and to work from home after pickup. If it’s that someone in the home has been providing care, but can’t provide cover for a full workday plus commute, OP’s daughter will need to ask for time to find a daycare provider. None of these are rights, exactly, but while negotiating OP’s daughter needs to be careful about implying she’s caring for them herself.

    10. mbs001*

      Too bad. She then needs to find a job where she can WFH (only to shorten the timeframes . . . certainly NOT to care for her children when her employer is paying her to do so). Her job doesn’t so she and her partner need to figure it out. I’m sure she didn’t give birth alone.

    11. CrabBearSupreme*

      I asked a question in the last weekend thread that relates to this – I’ve been working at my current job before I had kids, which affords me more flexibility than I would get at a new job where I haven’t “proved my worth” as it were. If/when we move for my husband’s job, I am likely going to have to completely switch careers or drop out of the workforce because of the difficulties of managing full-time work and childcare for young children.

    12. fhqwhgads*

      You’re not wrong but it doesn’t change that the feasibility there is still the employee’s responsibility, not the employer’s.

  15. o_gal*

    LW4 – you might find that someone who is near 60 might get you a better ROI than a younger person. If they started working at 18 in 1984 that makes them 58, with a retirement age of 67. Meaning perhaps 9 years of potentially good work for you.

    1. SansaStark*

      That’s what I was thinking, too. I can’t imagine there’s a lot of 64 year olds job searching if they can help it. Nothing is for certain, but if you were asking me if a 58 year old or 26 year old were more likely to stay the next 9 years in one job, I wouldn’t pick the younger person.

    2. Paint N Drip*

      Absolutely fair. And in my experience someone 60 years old likely established their opinions about work in the “good old days” where employee loyalty was actually worth something, and thus is more apt to act out that employee loyalty.
      Plus someone with forty years of experience is probably EXTREMELY good at their job! The difference between a good and great machinist is a TON of productivity. I don’t understand OP’s perspective I guess

      1. pally*

        There’s a lot of assumptions made about older workers that result in the belief that they are simply too much trouble.

        Things like:

        They need more time off than younger workers.
        They work more slowly than younger workers.
        They can’t learn new technologies like younger workers can.
        They are set in their ways and can’t be made to change like younger workers.
        They have more health issues than younger workers that results in taking more time off than younger workers.
        The health insurance costs are a lot higher than for younger workers.
        They want more money than younger workers want.
        They will get bored with the work and move on to another job in short order-unlike younger workers.

        Heck, just hire younger workers and avoid the whole issue!

        After 8 years of applying for new jobs, I’ve flat out given up. So many times, I get the “not a good fit” or “we went with the other finalist” excuses. And even the “I’m afraid you’ll just get bored and move on” excuse. When you ask about what you could improve on to get hired should the job open up in the future, you get no actionable responses. Just a whole lot of apologies and best wishes for the job hunt.

    3. BW*

      Someone in their late 50’s is more likely to NOT leave you until they retire. You’ll probably get about 10 years out of your investment. Meanwhile, someone younger may jump ship after a couple of years.

    4. Hazel*

      Folks, the whole point of the anti-age discrimination legislation is not to put individuals at a disadvantage based on often- false beliefs about a group. Which is exactly what a lot of these comments are doing.

      The LW needs to stop speculating about age and length of tenure, figure out why they are having a hard time finding people, and work to retain them. That’s it.

    5. Lenora Rose*

      I think the ROI is an entirely wrongheaded way to think about employment as it is: your ROI is that you have someone doing the work. If this is a job where not having someone doing it hurts your bottom line or closes your business because your product isn’t being made, then there’s your ROI, period.

      But even if it were a valid, an older worker is likely to want stability and stable benefits until retirement, and stick it out longer, where a younger worker is still more likely to jump ship to move upward.

  16. KenDoll*

    I think LW2 is mostly being a protective parent because this is going to be tough for their daughter to figure out.

    There is a whole list of things that will be made more difficult by having to be in office, regardless of if she has childcare at home. Just because WFH is a privilege doesn’t mean it’s easy to rearrange existing home operations when the privilege is removed.

    My MIL is a thousand times more comfortable helping out with the kids if there is someone else in the house… even if she never needs me. Pumping is much more difficult at a location other than home, and it’s possible the daughter is nursing directly which is a huge adjustment to figure out for RTO! Making healthy dinners becomes much harder when a commute is added to the workday hours, etc.

    2. Butterfly Counter*

      Making healthy dinners becomes much harder when a commute is added to the workday hours, etc.

      I mean, that’s true of everyone? Asking for WFH to be able to make healthy dinners easier is not going to fly at just about any business or work environment. Also, people choose their commute when they either choose their job or choose their home. WFH privileges shouldn’t be awarded based on something that is entirely within the power of the employee to figure out.

      1. I Pay Taxes, Too*

        The LW in #2 states the daughter has WFH since 2020 but doesn’t clarify if she started the job WFH or if she merely started WFH at the same job she used to commute to.

        Point being, she may well have “chosen the commute”… of WFH.

        1. Butterfly Counter*

          Yes, but the RTW is still entirely within the OP’s daughter’s control whether or not to stay with that employer knowing that this is now what they’re requiring. She can move or find another job to deal with the commute.

          I say this as a person who has moved because of a job change in the family. It’s inconvenient, but it’s still a possible solution.

      2. KenDoll*

        I was just listing dinner as an extra headache when you have kids. I was thinking that a delay in beginning meal prep is not as workable with young children. Just listing one of my current struggles.

        1. TurtlesAllTheWayDown*

          Agreed as someone who works from home. I pick my daughter up from school and then I immediately start dinner – sometimes I can start it before I pick her up, like yesterday where I threw some ingredients in the crockpot at lunch time. Or ask my husband to cook some rice while I’m gone, or stick something in the over. There aren’t enough hours between daycare pickup and bedtime for young children!

          1. SimonTheGreyWarden*

            There aren’t that many more hours between after-school-care pickup and bedtime for slightly older kids, either.

    3. A Simple Narwhal*

      My parents watch my son two days a week in our home, and on my father’s day he is wayyy more comfortable having one of us be home with him. He’s still taking full responsibility of our toddler and most times my husband or myself are in a completely different part of the house, but we’re there just in case something happens that he feels unequipped to handle. I can’t remember the last time that has happened but it makes him feel better that we’re around just in case.

      The other days our daycare is only open 8-5, and in-office daycare days only work because one of us can work the first and last hour of the day remotely from the train during our commutes. If we lost our remote and/or the flexibility it would be a huge pain/mean one of us might need to change jobs.

    4. Pay no attention...*

      I agree with your first sentence. I think the letter writer is trying to figure this out for her adult daughter instead of letting the daughter figure it out herself. It’s certainly going to be an adjustment for the children to go from having mom in the house, even if she’s mostly unavailable, to being 100% in some sort of care for most of the daytime. I somewhat suspect that the OP is the childcare, and would really prefer to keep the arrangement as it is — for example, she can hand the baby over to the mom for feeding instead of needing to give a bottle, or if the toddler misbehaves, mom is in the vicinity to intervene.

  17. Hyaline*

    One thing missing from LW2’s letter—what if any grace period for the return to office. Even if the employee has childcare, it might be set up for her work from home system night not work if she’s commuting to work. Further, it’s often not as simple as “just start pumping” to get an exclusively breastfed baby to take a bottle. Yes the employer can require a return to work at any time, but it would be pretty darn crappy if they didn’t give some period of adjustment up to a couple months or more.

    1. ScruffyInternHerder*

      This is where I landed too. I figured that there was no way that the daughter was caring for a preschooler and a baby while working.

      2. HannahS*

        Yeah, same. Also, isn’t three months the leave time in the US? I assumed that she’s just returning to work, and has been off work looking after her 3 y/o as well.

    2. YetAnotherAnalyst*

      Yeah – I think there’s some room for pushback if the request is RTO next week, because it takes time to find alternative childcare (to cover commuting hours) and transition the infant to a bottle. If the request is “we need you in the office starting two months from now”, there’s probably not much that can be done (though getting an infant into daycare could be a 6 month waitlist, easily).

      1. ScruffyInternHerder*

        Thinking back to when the ScruffKids were babies….I had my office location switched while one of my littles was extremely little, very much pre-panini times. I had a weekend to make the transition, er, well, I found out at 1 pm on Friday.

        It sucked, and the kicker was, my commute was now closer by a significant amount. But the suck was caused by having to completely retool what we’d spent my 6 week maternity leave figuring out and putting into place…in approximately 60 hours of time. My hours were completely different than what they’d been, throwing my entire body’s schedule into turmoil (again, 60 total hours to get my body to adjust to different hours including pumping breaks….), everyone’s sleep schedule off for about two weeks, and if it happened today, even with teenagers, I’d be stating that a grace period for the change would be required.

      2. JustaTech*

        Yes about the wait lists too – just yesterday I was chatting with some neighbors who are desperate for their baby to get into the center we go to. There just aren’t as many centers that will take infants because the licensing laws are different. (I think the major change in teacher-child ratios is at 2 years old.)
        They asked how we had gotten in at 6 months and we were like “we got on the list 4 months before he was born and we are good friend with a former teacher who put in a good word for us”. Like, your options are plan way, way ahead and get lucky, or pay $5000 a month (yes, five thousand).

    4. Head Sheep Counter*

      Well…. since we don’t know the childcare arrangements nor the reason for her RTO, we don’t know if a grace period is legit or not. If she’s the childcare provider and this has been an ongoing issue (eg is against the rules) then… I don’t think a grace period is a legit request as the whole time she’s been WFH was the grace period. If she’s has had childcare responsibilities taken care of elsewhere you raise a good question.

  18. r.*

    LW4,

    you cannot discriminate against the candidate based on their age. However — and please please please do obtain legal advice specific to your jurisdiction; this will be legal in some but potentially illegal in others — you could negotiate with the recruiter over the referral fee for employees less than x years before retirement.

    1. ecnaseener*

      I see two issues with that: 1, the employer doesn’t actually know how far away from retirement anyone is. Many work past the age at which they can start collecting social security. 2, this would incentivize the recruiter to avoid recruiting older candidates, which would be illegal.

      1. Clisby*

        My husband is 66 and I fully expect him to work up into his 70s before he retires. He doesn’t need to for financial reasons, but he really likes his work, and is very good at it.

    3. sparkle emoji*

      Maybe? The way to do that would be to have a years long guarantee period. I think it makes more sense to negotiate down the rate paid to the recruitment agency rather than keeping the deal in limbo for years.

    4. Lenora Rose*

      Or you could realise the entire premise that the older candidate is undesirable because they may retire – years AFTER a younger candidate will have likely left the same role – is a false one and just… not discriminate?

    5. Ginger Cat Lady*

      No. Just no. This idea does not solve the issue here, it just perpetuates and solidifies the idea that older employees are less valuable, and financially incentivizes recruiters to ALSO discriminate. At worst, it *documents the discrimination* and any lawyer worth their salt will eat you up if you try to negotiate lower payments for older candidates!
      You cannot discriminate against candidates by age, PERIOD. No negotiating their worth as less, no refusing to consider them, none of it.

    2. Ginger Cat Lady*

      Exactly. As someone looking for work in their 50s, here’s what I’m hearing:

      – Not a culture fit
      – We need someone who can better relate to our target market
      – We want someone with a longer career ahead of them
      – We are all young enough to be your child. Not looking for an office mom.

      And it’s super discouraging to hear employers write in questions about how they don’t want to hire someone simply because of their age.

      1. WellRed*

        O.M.G. I’d be tempted to file some sort of complaint against that office mom company. But they are all awful.

          1. Ginger Cat Lady*

            Exactly. None of these were in writing, and I’m focusing my energy on finding work, not a legal battle. Reviewed them on Glassdoor honestly and walked away.
            But it sure is discouraging out there with all the ageism.

    3. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      Probably the simplest solution is also the most popular: ghosting.

      I miss the days when Logan’s Run was futuristic Sci Fi.

  20. tw1968*

    Asking everyone here: For LW2 would it be possible to negotiate additional pay as part of coming back to office? Because WFH saves us all a ton of money and time. Having to commute just dumps a lot of extra costs and stress on us. If all of a sudden my job told me they’re going to move me somewhere else that’s double the commute, I’d ask for that. Same for WFH, they’re now making employees shoulder more costs and if you have to come back in it should come with an increase.

    1. Office Workers Unite*

      Unless you were always remote/hybrid, before Covid (here in the US) employees shouldered that extra cost and stress of going in to work. An employee could ask, but the management movement towards everybody back to the office is real.

    2. Bookworm*

      Really? Pre-covid, US employees paid for their commuting costs unless their employer covered offered a discounted public transit pass or something of that sort. Plenty of people have returned to the office without asking or expecting to be reimbursed for their commute. A friend of mine works at a large financial services company in a major US city. Before covid, they were in the office five days a week, having to take a commuter train into the city center from their home in the suburbs. After working from home for about two years, they are now back in the office five days a week. Friend pays several hundred dollars a month for train fare.

      1. Caramel & Cheddar*

        I don’t think “No one asked for compensation for their commute pre-covid” is an argument against doing so now. At the very least, the last four years have demonstrated that the commute is a time and money suck and maybe there’s a way to improve that for workers; just because we accepted the status quo for decades doesn’t mean we should continue to do so. I bet your friend would love to be pocketing that extra money he spends on train fare if given the opportunity!

        1. GythaOgden*

          They’d also have to pay everyone who worked in-person their transport costs as well, and I’m not sure that would be great for the prices of goods and services.

        2. Pita Chips*

          One of the things that infuriated me about WFH during lockdown is how totally married some Powers That Be were to the idea of “getting back to normal.” The old normal was not perfect and they’ve squandered opportunities to make it better.

          Employees who are less tired and stressed perform better. For many, that’s working from home. For others it isn’t, and it doesn’t take much effort to take everyone into consideration.

          1. Caramel & Cheddar*

            Exactly. I find rigid adherence to the pre-covid status quo to be just fundamentally unmaginative from leaders and anyone else who upholds it, to be honest. Can we really not imagine a better world for ourselves? Apparently not.

            1. anon here*

              Golly, you and Pita Chips are making me so sad. This is so spot on and something I will probably stay mad about forever.

              When I realized community spread was happening (after the WA nursing home, but before they shut the NBA down–I think it was that first community case from a flu screening in WA), it was like a sequence from a movie, watching the implications fold out in front of me: “Oh…they’re going to need to pay people to stay home. … Literally everything is going to need to change. … Wow, this could be transformative.”

              I stand by that; the difference is that the powers that be simply decided to accept an insane amount of death, instead.

              1. Caramel & Cheddar*

                We basically had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to radically remake our world and we actively chose not to. I’m also going to stay mad about it forever.

          2. louvella*

            Plus people who have to work in person are still getting COVID at work all the time and it’s a pretty terrible illness.

            1. I Have RBF*

              This.

              My one roomie that works at a desk in person (concierge) brought Covid home from work, so now my entire household is infected, except me. That’s four adults, all over 60, including my spouse who is on hospice for cancer. To say I am angry is an understatement.

        3. Bookworm*

          Friend makes well into six figures, given what job is. Several hundred a month isn’t going to make much difference.

          1. Caramel & Cheddar*

            Congrats to your friend, but I’m assuming not everyone on that train is making six figures.

      2. sb51*

        I pay several hundred dollars a month for train fare, and did pre-pandemic too.

        The big problem? A lot of the fancy financial services company in my major US city have gone to WFH, and so the train and bus schedules have changed to adapt to lower ridership. Which means my 1:45-long commute is now more like 2:30, and has some other substantially more annoying features (like instead of the one layover being at a comfortable station with a grocery next door that I could do a quick shopping trip at, it’s now at a station with poor seating and weather protection that’s really quite unpleasant to stand at for 20 minutes) because a ton of the services never came back.

        And all of this to go in and sit in my office and have almost all of my meetings be virtual, because people from multiple offices are in attendance.

      3. SpaceySteph*

        Just because they don’t doesn’t mean they shouldn’t.

        And its not entirely unheard of for companies to shoulder some of the burden of a commute. Years ago I worked for a company that was based in Washington DC that did have transportation benefits for with tolls and public transit. (I didn’t live where it was relevant so don’t have a lot of particulars). Companies in some major cities also subsidize parking for places where you have to pay for such a thing.

    3. GythaOgden*

      For the love of all that’s holy…

      No //way//. First in line for that kind of thing should be all the millions of mums and dads who have spent the past four and a half years juggling childcare while in in-person obligate roles, usually on a fraction of the salary of WFH workers.

      That would probably be an equity adjuster that would solve some of the issues caused by the years of having been ignored by media, both social and mainstream, which has rewarded a small percentage of the workforce, mostly the better off altogether, with the air time while we were busting our butts — and at certain times risking our lives — to maintain the infrastructure you all took for granted.

      A pay rise that means in-person workers can actually enjoy an equivalent kind of perk would be great, but not for those dragging their feet in going back to the office and taking up their fair share of the work again.

    4. TheBunny*

      Why in the world would a company pay you additional $$$ just to show up for work? You’re literally already being paid to do exactly that.

      1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

        So the employee will continue to (be able to afford to) do the job because, even at the higher rate, the employee would continue to produce surplus value above and beyond their portion of the overhead and consumable costs? Isn’t the implication of RTO that the employees will be more productive in the office, and therefore generating more value?

        It’s little different than any other raise or counter-offer mathematics.

        1. Bookworm*

          Forget about this particular LW. Someone was in the office 5 days a week before covid. They only went WFH because of covid. Employee never moved, office never moved. Company does RTO – back to 5 days a week in the office. Do you really think employee should be paid more to come into the office? For many companies, it seems they never said WFH was going to be a permanent thing.

          1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

            It depends on the going rate in the market for the labor to perform the role, labor supply, labor demand (other open roles) and composition (i.e. remote/hybrid/onsite), cost of replacing the employee, expected on-site productivity, et al. Yes, there are absolutely circumstances where retaining the employee with an upwards salary adjustment to take on (additional) displeasing elements of the job is the smart, fair, and appropriate thing to do.

            Of course, the smart thing for LW2’s daughter’s employer to do the majority of the time is leave her remote and address the productivity/childcare/management-insecurity (or whatever) issue directly if it exists.

            LW2’s daughter’s rights, in this circumstance, appear to be precisely “interview for other positions elsewhere and replace her employer with a better one.”

            1. Bookworm*

              *IF* LW2’s daughter can find another fully remote position. They’re a lot less plentiful than they were a couple of years ago.

              1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

                When is an employee ever guaranteed that there’s a comparable role with a better employer out there to interview for and land?

                2. I Pay Taxes, Too*

                  @Bookworm, do you have a specific gripe with WFH? You seem really hostile to the idea of it. Would you be responding with this same bend if the LW were complaining that they worked in the office, but their office, which had been across the street from home, was unexpectedly relocated 2 hours away? Or that some other benefit, like health insurance, was being renegotiated to the detriment of the employee? Would you consider them “entitled,” too?

            2. mbs001*

              Her daughter is trying to scam the employer. No way is she working her hours for them while simultaneously taking care of a 3-month old and a 3-year old. No way. She’s the type of person who gives WFH a bad rap. She needs to find part-time work or a full-time daycare. Period.

              1. I Pay Taxes, Too*

                Whoa. You have no idea what the childcare arrangements are! The mother who wrote in could very well be providing childcare in the home, but with easy access to breastfeed as needed.

                If we are making things up, why choose the least charitable reading?

          2. I Pay Taxes, Too*

            “Do you really think employee should be paid more to come into the office? ”

            Yes. Life has changed in the last 4.5 years. People’s relationship with work, with commuting, their valuation of their time, and their priorities have changed, too. As somebody who WFH, I do think that people who work in the office doing my same job should get some sort of commuting stipend, at an absolute minimum.

            1. I Have RBF*

              This.

              If you are talking about fairness, then I think it’s perfectly fair to give in-person workers an extra commuting stipend, and not a small one. Most people commuting in-person have at least an hour a day of commuting, and mine was usually two or more. Paying the costs of the commute goes at least part way toward making that burden lighter.

    5. Wren*

      My husband was ordered to return to office after years (pre-covid) of being hired as work from home. No pay increase or anything like that. The economy for his type of work sucks, they know if they lose people they can always hire more (back to office seens, in part, to be a way of getting people to leave). The only people who had exception to wfh or pay were the most valued of the valued, high level people. So he’s going into an office where he’s the only one on his team, commuting hours to get on Zoom. What a thing to have to uproot your life for. :/

      1. Cinnamon Stick*

        Yikes! I really wish some of the people making the return-to-office decision left some room for nuance. It’s ludicrous to ask this of your husband.

        It’s this kind of policy that makes people say RTO is all about control.

    6. Observer*

      Because WFH saves us all a ton of money and time.

      Time? Generally, yes.

      Money? Not necessarily. There are real costs to WFH, and not all employers pay those costs. And in some cases, the employer really can’t – like if your utility bills go up substantially (and that’s not purely theoretical), that’s a cost that your employer is not going to cover, and you couldn’t really even ask them to.

      1. Salty Caramel*

        Gas costs money. So does wear & tear on a vehicle. Car insurance companies want to know how many miles you drive a year and can adjust rates accordingly. Transit passes aren’t cheap and if there’s a commuter benefit, it isn’t a discount, it only lets you use pre-tax dollars. For many jobs, professional clothing. Possibly dry cleaning said professional clothing.

        Everyone’s experience is different. Mine is that the increase in utility bills is offset by saving on the many other expenses that go with working in an office.

        1. Observer*

          Everyone’s experience is different.

          Precisely.

          Note that I did not say that “no one” saves money. I said that the idea that it saves *”all of us”* a ton of money is is not correct. Nothing that you or @Perfectly Cromulent Name say changes that.

      2. Perfectly Cromulent Name*

        The money I save as a remote worker is substantial, and it’s less about the gas/commute, although that does help!

        I don’t pay as much ‘pink tax’- while I’m always clean and presentable, I don’t need to be as groomed/made up to be considered acceptable and in the dress code. That alone saves me money on make-up, salon appointments, etc.

        I am less likely to eat lunch out. I took my lunch almost every day, but it was tempting to go out with my co-workers.

        I don’t pay for a dog walker anymore.

        I don’t pay for as much takeout or more expensive convenience food because I’m not as exhausted and have more time to make dinner.

        I don’t pay for occasional housekeeping help anymore because I do so much more quick cleaning on my lunch hour, so my house stays presentable.

        I don’t have to take my vacation time to wait for the plumber/electrician/insurance adjuster. We recently had a massive hailstorm, and I would have already had to take a week off to deal with the fallout of that (insurance adjuster/contractors/etc) if I were not already home.

        I do not have kids, but I would have to have childcare if I did. But if I worked in the office, I’d have to have childcare, so I’m not saving money there.

        I am so much less stressed that’s probably doing good long term things for my heart health and blood pressure. :)

        I don’t think the cost of my increased electricity use is holding a candle to the savings. (And I actually earn significantly MORE at my WFH job than I did at my last in person job. I would not accept less just because I was at home.) My employer provided all the needed tech equipment- a laptop, two monitors, a docking station, etc. I was already paying for the internet.

        I’m not saying that there are no costs to WFH. There are! But there are a lot of costs to going in to the office that were not immediately clear to me until I stopped paying them.

    7. mbs001*

      Did they reduce their salaries when they went to WFH? No, probably not. So they shouldn’t have to increase them just to get people back in the office. People have been saving those commuting costs all this time. Stop whining!

    8. AC36*

      Well, then they’d have to do that with everyone who had to return to work in the office since the pandemic. Other employees would come forward and demand those same benefits and may even ask for retroactive compensation.

      Just because she has children (breast feeding is NOT a disability) doesn’t mean she should be entitled to additional benefits and additional compensation for merely commuting to work 2 days a week.

      1. anon here*

        Here’s my question: when everyone jumps out against people who would like to continue to WFH (because their work allows for it) on behalf of people who have no choice but to work from the office/job site, why isn’t the standard advice for the WFH crowd (“I guess you should look for a new job, then”) equally applicable to the in-person crew? If a receptionist doesn’t like being a receptionist because they can’t WFH, shouldn’t they look for a new job as a HR associate, rather than make the HR associate RTO to make the receptionist happy that they’re not the only one in the office (i.e. suffering)?

    9. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

      It would be sensible, if workers in a particular field/job are in high demand, to pay as standard an in-office bonus of 5-10% of salary, to compensate for the commute time & expense, as well as losing the convenience and enjoyment of being at home.
      That’s because of the competitive market for such employees, regardless of whether the job was wfh during the panini.

      For less fortunate, easily replaceable, workers I think RTO should be regarded similarly to an employer significantly moving the work location – because it is this. i.e. offering severance and giving entitlement to unemployment pay.
      If you have a union, they should be negotiating vigorously for this.

      Note: low-paid workers are more likely to have room-mates and be cramped wfh, so might actually prefer to be in-office, or need to be for early career developement. However, the employer should still offer the above compensation.

  21. Lurking Tom*

    OP #3, I really sympathize. We’re fully remote and we had one of our employees suddenly and unexpectedly pass away from a heart attack. Left behind his wife and 3 kids 12 or younger. He was also on our finance team, so his work devices have some sensitive information on them, and as the IT guy, my job was to coordinate getting those back to me. It truly sucks having to reach out to someone suffering like that to ask for some computers to be shipped. His wife was very understanding and we were trying to give her as much space/time as she needed, but I don’t think there’s a way to make it not feel like a bother reaching out about something so comparatively inconsequential when she was still picking up the pieces.

  22. Another Hiring Manager*

    LW4: Are you giving sufficient raises to your employees to ensure they will stay a long time? Judging from resumes I get, people often change jobs after as little as one or two years so their salaries can increase beyond a COLA that doesn’t always match the Consumer Price Index. Allison is right, you might not get ROI on someone newish to the workforce is several decades of work in front of them.

    Your math is just a convenient smokescreen for bias.

  23. sofar*

    LW4. I just think it’s really counterproductive to worry about “return on investment” when hiring. What about an employee’s “return on investment” for making other life decisions for a job they could get laid off from in the blink of an eye?

    All employees have flight risk.

    Hire the most qualified person who doesn’t give you red flags that are red flags to a reasonable person. My old workplace would spend months fretting over potential candidate’s “eventual flight risk.” For example: “This is her first job out of school. Young people these days do time in a first job for a year or two to get something for the resume and then they get a new job to get a higher salary.” “This person may be too close to retirement.” “This person is applying just because they got laid off from a management role, and I bet they’ll try to jump back to a job with more authority when they can, and they just want this job because their unemployment is going to run out.” “This person did not complete her graduate degree, I bet she’s going to try to go back to school in a couple years and will quit.”

    1. 1-800-BrownCow*

      I worked for a manager who was very big on “return on investment” when it came to her hiring practices, which drove me nuts. We interviewed some amazing candidates that she wouldn’t hire because she was concerned they wouldn’t stay long. We had 3 stellar, young candidates for a position that she wouldn’t hire because they weren’t originally from the area and she said they’d probably move back closer to their home after a couple years. Another candidate she wouldn’t hire because he had taken a couple years off from working to care for a very sick parent, who had passed away so he was looking to rejoin the work force. She assumed that person might decide to stop working again for a similar reason. Meanwhile, we’d hire some mediocre candidate only because she felt they’d stay long term. I never understood why it was a better return on investment to hire someone who didn’t perform well at their job just because they were more likely to stick around.

      1. CommanderBanana*

        This is so incredibly dumb and short-sighted. As a military brat, I saw a lot of this when military spouses would try to get jobs, because employers knew they would not be staying. And I don’t really get it – I’d rather have a great employee for a year, or two years, than a mediocre or bad one for 10 years.

        1. DramaQ*

          My department is starting to develop the bad habit of wanting ROI. It has lead to hiring a very underqualified mediocre lab technician precisely because he is that and won’t have as many “flight options” available to him and is unlikely to want/be able to move up title wise. That is a REALLY bad way to hire and it shows in the quality of his work. But the management is happy so yay? Meanwhile there was an extremely qualified candidate but she made the “mistake” of saying in the interview she had desire to move up in 3-5 years and that made them automatically move her to the do not hire pile. They could have gotten 3-5 years of amazing work and who knows she may have stayed but instead chose a year of medicore/subpar work that constantly has to be redone and nobody trusts his data.

          1. Dawn*

            That’s so wild also because it’s incredibly normal to want to move up from a position in 3-5 years. A lot of businesses aren’t likely to last another 3-5 years in today’s rapidly-changing world. What kind of idiot hires for people who will stay in the same job forever?

          2. CommanderBanana*

            This is insane. I mean, unless your plan is to fill your workforce with mediocre employees that never leave, in which case, congratulations? I will never understand this type of thinking.

            Good employees leave workplaces in better shape than when they found them. I have, more than once, taken a position where nothing has been documented, processes are a mess, document retention and recording is nonexistent, training is nonexistent, and created all of these things because I am a process person.

            When I left, the person coming in after me was in a way better position than I had been because I had created effective processes that didn’t need a specific person to continue being effective as long as they were being followed.

            I would WAY rather have someone like that for a year or two than a crappy person for a decade.

        2. sofar*

          And it’s extra extra silly b/c mangers will fret about “return on investment” and “flight risk,” and aim for candidates who will stick around for “years,” as if the company isn’t going to lay off everyone six months from now anyway.

  24. Aspiring Chicken Lady*

    LW#3 – When a colleague is going through a rough patch, whether it’s a short term crisis or something longer going, rather than trying lean on the “sympathy” angle, it’s better to focus on lightening the load. So if it’s a standard business request, do as much as you can to make it a simple decision/complete form/well-summarized statement of the problem, or whatever. I will also say something like “hey, I see that X needs doing — can I take some or all off your plate this week? I’ve got some capacity to share.”
    The other thing that’s helpful is to reduce interruptions … minimizing “quick questions” on Teams or whatever in favor of clear actionable emails that hit the inbox early in the day with really good subject lines that indicate urgency levels/complication levels. eg “I can do the TPS report for today if you’d like” or “Questions about project Z – don’t need answers until Tues.”

  25. Media Monkey*

    a nursery close to home that opens 8-6? and working hours 9-5.30 with an hour commute each way to the office? not exactly unreasonable or unusual. nurseries do not tend to cater well for commutes, see also after school/ breakfast clubs that are supposed to be childcare once kids are at school.

  26. Apex Mountain*

    #4 doesn’t really make sense to me. If the guy is 60, that means he’ll be working for at least five years if standard retirement age is 65. If an employee has to be there for more than five years to produce a positive ROI, that sounds strange

    1. Clisby*

      If he’s 60 now, his “standard retirement age” is 67 (assuming you’re talking about Social Security). Yes, he could retire at 62, but that would be a big hit on his retirement income. If he works until 70 without claiming SS, he’d get an 8%/year increase in his eventual SS benefit. He can start using Medicare at age 65, although that’s not free, so he’d have to calculate those premiums v. whatever he’s paying for his current insurance.

  27. ArtK*

    LW4: Although not a machinist myself, I belong to a FB group of machinists. I see folks working well into their 70s. If you’re talking about a manual machinist (i.e. not CNC), those folks are worth their weight in gold. An experienced CNC machinist is worth their weight in silver!

    1. Clisby*

      That’s what I’d have thought. Age can bring a huge amount of expertise, unless the job depends a lot on sheer physical strength. Like, I doubt many 70-year-olds can handle firefighting as well as 40-year-olds.

  28. Definitely not me*

    #4 – I just helped hire someone for a position that resulted in many resumes but only two candidates who interviewed with us. It was an administrative assistant position in a government agency (i.e., rich benefits help to offset the appearance of lower pay than in the private sector) and a few of the best candidates had already accepted another position before their scheduled interview. Anyway, one of the interviewees was quite young and the other was near retirement age. Guess which one we hired? The older one. They made it clear they were interested in the actual job for their own reasons and they asked good questions about our line of work. The young candidate couldn’t answer why they were interested in applying for the job but immediately asked how soon they could move up. That person had no interest in the job for which they were applying except to get a paycheck, and we were grateful they were honest about that.

    Please don’t discount older workers. As Alison said, not only is it illegal, you might be missing a highly competent person who isn’t trying to climb any kind of career ladder and who isn’t merely warming a seat until they find another job.

  29. K in Boston*

    LW4: I’m in my 30s. I was actually very specifically taught when I was an undergrad that older generations tend to stick with companies for awhile because company loyalty (in both directions) was more of A Thing when they were starting in the workforce. Younger generations are less likely to either receive or give that company loyalty, so they just go where the money is, and are in fact taught that changing companies is one of the best ways to increase your salary.

    I have no particular data to point to right now to back this up, but I wouldn’t be surprised if, at least to some extent, it still stands.

    1. RM*

      I see the same thing, I would interview this person and ask them questions about their experience training and mentoring newer workers. If they enjoy this and could be paired with someone who creates organized documentation and/or training videos, you might very well come out ahead.

    2. I went to school with only 1 Jennifer*

      It still stands, except that those older generations have been aging out of the workforce for awhile now. I’m 62 and while I was growing up that whole company loyalty thing was starting to die. My grandfather (WW2 vet generation) was laid off from his job right before (details are hazy: his pension was due to vest?) and he had to look for new work when he was in his late 50’s. It was hard and probably humiliating. And I remember in the mid-80’s, a friend in the computer industry was already having to change jobs to get a decent raise.

  30. 1-800-BrownCow*

    LW #4, you said you would hire them if not for the recruiter costs. HIRE THEM!!!! Machinists are hard to come by anymore, especially a good, experienced machinist! I work in manufacturing with an in-house machine shop and also work with lots of local machine shops and they’re all struggling to hire. My company decided to add an apprenticeship program for our machine shop to help us with staffing and hiring because of the difficulty of just finding machinists. But regardless, if they’re a good candidate for the position, don’t make assumptions based on age, or for any reason. Assumptions are not a good thing and are often wrong. I have two 60+ year old men on my team and both have said they don’t plan to retire in the next 5 yrs, despite their age, one of which I hired a couple years ago.

    I also used to have an engineer on my team that my company hired when he was 62. He worked with us for 7 years before retiring at 69. Not only was he a “risk” for ‘return on investment’ because of his age, his home was on the opposite side of the country and his wife did not want to move. So for him to work at our company, he had to rent an apartment and would fly home 4X a year and his wife (who was retired) would fly out to visit him about 3X a year. That was his life for most of his 60s! And he was one of the best engineers I’ve ever worked with.

    1. Just Thinkin' Here*

      Right? The recruiter found these excellent candidates that HR was not able to find on their own. Which begs the question – why? Did something about the job opening or recruitment method missed the mark?

      The recruiter did their job, hire the guy, and move on to a fully staffed department. Then turn around and ask HR why your budget took a $30K hit that it didn’t need to — or argue it should come out of the HR budget.

      1. JustaTech*

        Yes, this is an important question to be asking.
        I had a coworker who was hired as a “temp to hire” through an agency because our HR department at the time couldn’t be bothered to actually forward any resumes, so even though this coworker had applied directly, no one knew, so she ended up getting hired in a weird contractor position that cost the company extra 1) through the fees and then 2) because her salary ended up being higher because of the contract-status (good for her!).

        Eventually those HR people left and the new ones actually understood that recruiting requires sending resumes to the hiring managers (shocking) and it saved the company a lot of money (and time and hassle).

  31. Coffeebreak*

    LW#4 Your question is so ageist. Why would you think someone younger would stick around? I would actually assume a younger person is more liable to be shopping other jobs, opportunities and life changes than a machinist who you’re assuming is looking to retire in five years? I don’t see why he should suffer your discrimination because you don’t want to pay the recruiter. I am assuming you are very young based on this post.

  32. toolegittoresign*

    LW3 — I have unfortunately been out a couple times this year to deal with crises. What helps most is not “hope you’re hanging in there” but instead an explicit statement of when you need to hear back from me in response to your email. When digging out of the inbox, triage is key and knowing “okay, Jane needs an answer by tomorrow, Rufus says whenever I can respond is fine and Clarice said by the end of the week. So get back to Jane first, then Clarice, then Rufus.”

    1. Antilles*

      +1, this is excellent advice.
      If you’ve got an ongoing personal thing to deal with, you can often have a schedule where you jump in and crank out a couple hours of work whenever you can (e.g., two hours in the morning before leaving to take the sick relative to the doctor’s). So knowing the priorities and urgency levels can really help prioritize.

  33. dude, who moved my cheese?*

    Tangentially related- is 25% of the first year’s salary a normal fee for a recruiter? $30,000 – $40,000 feels stunningly high but maybe that’s because it’s how much orgs in my field are paying for entry level salaries anyway (which is its own dumpster fire)

    1. Parenthesis Guy*

      25% is on the higher end, but not unreasonable. But most roles aren’t paying $120 to $160k.

    2. Overthinking It*

      That just strikes me as pure sinful! All that money that could be going to enriching the employee compensation.

      Might make sense if you were expecting new hire to be an asset to the org for next twenty years, UT according to what I read here, you should expe t employees to last in there positions no longer than 1.5 to 5 years, and you’re a chump if you stay longer!

      Poster could easily get 5 years out of the 60 Year old guy (he probably won’t want to bother with changing (upward mobility) if you treat him decently. More perhaps, as many people work to seventy these days. Importantly, he might help you coach and train some younger, people, which you need, with these types of skilled tradesman getting rarer every day! Make sure he has the personality for that, and if so grab him! Add it. to the job description and increase compensation accordingly. By developing home-grown talent, maybe you won’t need to rely on the recruiter as frequently.

      1. sb51*

        I don’t think “sinful” is useful language here; the company isn’t managing to get quality people into their pipeline, and so they did what is absolutely a standard thing to do in this situation: turn to a recruiter. If it’s a small company without the need for a dedicated recruiting department, outsourcing that makes a lot of sense.

        But the numbers also clearly aren’t working out for them to use a recruiter if they need that long to get ROI, so it was a bit of a poor choice — but not a “sinful” one. Just a normal poor financial choice.

  34. Overthinking It*

    only 2 work related songs I can think of “Takin’ care of Business” ( if you ever get annoyed, think of me: I’m self-employed!) and Johnny Cash’s “I Got It One Piece at a Time’ a humorous song about employ theft. Neither to do with HR or accounting.

    Oh, a third one: “Take This Job ND Shove It” I guess that could be about an HR issue: quitting.

    Almost all work songs are complaining, from “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” up through “Nine to Five”and beyond.

    I think you are going to have to make up some new lyrics to existing work tunes if you want to be humorous and not come off as disgruntled!

  35. Parenthesis Guy*

    LW #4: The first step is determining how long you want this person to stay to get your ROI. Is it two years? Five years? Ten years?

    If it’s two years or less, then instead of paying the person $80k, start them at maybe $70k, but give them a $25k signing bonus provided they stay for two years. If they leave early, they need to pay you back.

    If it’s closer to five years, then maybe provide a stay bonus. Basically, start them at $75k instead of $80k, but if they make it five years, they get $50k.

  36. Jess*

    and/or use some of the money you’d pay the recruiter to raise the salary instead.

    I LOVE YOU FOR THIS!!!!!!!

  37. KellifromCanada*

    LW2 says that her daughter’s supervisor doesn’t like her. I wonder if the daughter’s supervisor is annoyed/frustrated because Daughter is spending all day looking after her kids rather than attending to her work. And calling her back to the office is a natural consequence of that.

    1. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

      I thought “doesn’t like her” probably meant the supervisor was actually trying to manage her properly instead of – like probably the previous supervisor – ignoring work productivity and just letting her do as little work as she chose,
      e.g. the new supervisor specifying the same deliverables as her coworkers within the same time period, then asking after this time why it hadn’t been delivered.

  38. ArtK*

    A couple of other things for LW4:

    If you’re still concerned about ROI based on the recruiter fee, have you factored in how much money you may be losing right now because you don’t have the machinist? Is someone being paid OT to make up? Are you delaying things for customers? Are you turning down work? Look at the recruiter fee as an expense to stop that loss, not an ROI.

    Second, assuming you do interview the older candidates: Do *not* ask them when they expect to retire! If you then turn them down, that’s evidence of age discrimination. Things like “where do you see yourself in 5 years?” are risky, too.

    If they’re qualified, hire them!

  39. Overworked and apparently underpaid*

    Never mind song suggestions, machinists make $120 – $160/yr?? Sign me up.

    2. Too Many Tabs Open*

      What I want to know is, how likely are machinists to be replaced by robots in the next 30 years? Because if that’s a job that needs smart humans and pays well and isn’t easily AI-replaced, I’m suggesting it to my kids!

  40. Rebekah Ross*

    “Should I Stay or Should I Go” by The Clash and “Working 9 to 5” by Dolly Parton and “Take This Job and Shove It”

  41. Sybil Writes*

    LW #4 – The fee paid to a recruiter is an expense, not an investment. You pay to have someone (recruiter) do a job for you (find a qualified machinist). This may seem like semantics, but how you frame the situation may help you when evaluating candidates. Legal issue of age discrimination aside, the recruiting fee is a cost of hiring, not an investment in the ongoing employment of the individual. It’s probably not a cost most companies would want to incur in a high-turnover job, but it’s also unwise to assume any new hire is going to remain in the job more than 2-3 years. Great if they do, but unwise to expect it.

  42. Ginger Cat Lady*

    Alison’s response seems to assume they are in the office, but you said they were out.
    OP3, if they are out dealing with a crisis, and have not explicitly told you to update them, do not send them anything, even if you think they would like updates. Leave them alone.
    They are dealing with a crisis and they need to focus on that.

  43. learnedthehardway*

    OP#4 – it’s illegal to discriminate based on age. Also, you’re making a real assumption about whether this candidate will WANT to retire. MANY people do NOT want to retire when you think they might – some just want to work, others have financial obligations or needs.

    You’re also making a false assumption that a younger candidate would stay for multiple years – they might not. They might leave in a year or 2 for more compensation or for a role closer to home, or because they don’t like their manager, or for a myriad of other reasons.

    In fact, it’s much more likely that the older employee will stay for an extended amount of time – reality is that many companies do discriminate based on age (very illegally). It’s not nice to think this way, but his options are more limited. If your company treats him well, he could be there for 5-10 years.

    1. Sola Lingua Bona Lingua Mortua Est*

      MANY people do NOT want to retire when you think they might – some just want to work, others have financial obligations or needs.

      Agree! Even if someone has hit their full retirement age, the way the Social Security calculations work is that the highest 35 years of earnings are used for the calculations, so they may well continue to work not just to contribute more to an IRA or 401k, but to also displace lower-earning years from the beginning of their careers, any periods of unemployment, sabbaticals, etc. It’s all extremely individual and all but impossible to predict based on a résumé

      Source: https://www-origin.ssa.gov/oact/COLA/Benefits.html

  44. F P*

    #2 is the real reason I became a stay at home mom. There is no support for working moms. it is either drop your kid off at daycare and spend money or have relatives watch your children. And if you have special needs kids forget it.

    1. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

      By support, do you mean state subsidised childcare? Or the right to ask to reduce to pt hours (for pt pay) – very doable, e.g. most EU countries require employers to seriously consider this request by any employee, not just parents.

      However, support can’t be the right to look after the kids yourself while being paid to work.

  45. Violently Purple*

    RE: #39 I had a coworker like this. We stopped saying hello and good bye to her after complaints to our manager just like OPs, and lo and behold! She got mad about that! Now we were “avoiding and excluding” her. So. Our manager made a guideline that we would walk 10 ft away from her cube and wave hello and good night while saying the appropriate greeting for the time of day. We were not to go in her cube, we did not say anything other than the greeting/salutation. We were also not allowed to take lunches together because it was “exclusionary” to people (i.e. her) unless the whole department was going. We all had to take lunch at a different time, which was really depressing!
    She quit 5 months after I got there. Our department is much better now.

    1. Emily*

      I’m so sorry you experienced that! It also sounds like your manager enabled her, which is a real failing on your manager’s part.

  47. film femme*

    Re: Question 51;
    I can’t speak to TV specifically (no personal experience), but I can say after working on production of a studio animated feature – it varies! There are whole departments/teams of people working in music for various studios, and they are usually very well connected with artists/record labels – the labels will be as eager to promote their new artists’ work as the studio will be to use the song. Sometimes they have a catalog to promote, or sometimes it’s a new song. Final say is usually up to the episode/film’s director or the show runner, but decisions are made in conjunction with the music staff, especially with regards to budget.
    On my specific project – we had a ‘scratch track’ of songs that were already out as the film evolved (some pop, some older soundtracks from other movies). Once our composer onboarded, they had some screenings of the movie (still in progress), and they also worked with the composers of the songs (who were pop artists whose work we had liked from our scratch track – our music team handled the negotiations and initial meetings with them, so by the time they came aboard everyone was aware of exactly what was needed, including what type of scene this song was planning to play in and what the themes of the movie were, musically and story-wise.) All of them worked together to create the singles for the film, and the composer scored it; we then had some notes sessions with the director and production team, and things were adjusted/fine tuned. One of the best days of production was the recording of the score – the film is usually locked by then so the score is a finishing touch – and it’s so joyful for everyone to hear it come to life! (Also, incredibly talented studio musicians – they can drop in and out of specific measures in a way that’s amazing to watch.)
    overall – a really cool job! There are not many of them in existence, especially as production shrinks, but definitely fun for the right person.

  48. oaktree*

    Just a note that impostor syndrome never goes away. You learn to manage it, recognize ways where it might impact the way you interact (in the questioner’s situation, becoming defensive), etc. But, I’m decades into my career and it’s still with me daily.

  49. Tiger Snake*

    #4 confuses me because; how long do you expect someone to stay in the same position for?

    If the man is 60 and highly experienced, then that’s at least 5-7 years of work you can reasonably expect. He’s not someone that needs to get lots of training to hit the ground running, so your investment question is purely around the cost to do recruiting.

    But if you don’t recruit and hire, you lose money because the work isn’t getting done. It’s not an investment because you remake the money, it’s an investment because you are losing less than if you didn’t have that role for the 5-7 years you expect to keep him.

    And 5-7 years is a more than reasonable time to expect that anyone would move on. Younger people would have changes in family circumstances too, or just want to move up the ladder to a higher paid position. Using a recruiter doesn’t somehow magically make people required to work for you for 20 years, so I cannot understand the logic.

  50. Retired Vulcan Raises 1 Grey Eyebrow*

    At 60, I’d expect retirement any time now or at least within 3-5 years (Germany)
    …. still the same timeframe for an employee of any age deciding to move on out

  51. 1 Non Blonde*

    The way I gasped at LW#4.

    I had a coworker whose husband had a job that moved him every so often, but not in a super predicable pattern. My boss refused to send coworker to any training because she could leave “soon.” She was there 7 years, same as me, but because I didn’t have a similar home life, I got all the training. We both left within a year of each other, so it’s not like they got a good ROI out of me, either.

  52. MisterOblivious*

    LW 4: age discrimination against a machinist is one of the worst mistakes you could possibly make in your career, especially if you’re hiring a manual machinists. It’s a very technical trade that you learn on the job, and you never, ever stop learning new things. Think of it like you would an artist: their work is constantly improving. A lot of these guys don’t retire at 65. Many of them are creatures of habit, enjoy their work, and work long past the time they could afford to retire. Many of them do machining as a hobby at home. I watch a machinist on youtube that’s 70 and still working full time. He’s known as “the smartest machinist on youtube” according to other machinists on youtube.

    You’re going to get your money’s worth, because of his experience and efficiency, if you hire an old guy.

    Companies are being forced to shut down their manual machining departments as these older folks retire and invest in modern CNC equipment. Companies are finding out the hard and expensive way that failing to invest in training up apprentices is a massive financial mistake because the easier money is going to school to learn CNC. Even Starrett, a company that makes equipment for machinists, trains apprentices, has a program to take in random kids off the street with no training and train them on CNC, is having to shut down entire departments and replace it with CNC machines when the last guy retires. They currently have a department with only one guy in it and the moment he retires, relatively soon, those machines are being sold as scrap metal.

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