Thank you for your input. The situation did have an interesting resolution: someone got fired over this but (maybe surprisingly) it wasn’t me.
My boss was the only other member of my team to show up the day after my angry message, having told the other team members to let her know what they wanted to have me do. Most of the tasks she asks me to do for her when I go to the office maybe take 10 – 15 minutes; hers are the most reasonable and I totally get why she doesn’t want to make a special trip to them. She discovered that she was incorrectly assuming that the tasks my teammates were requesting were the same. The fastest request from my teammates took about 45 minutes, making it click with her that I wasn’t exaggerating when I said that I was spending half the day doing other people’s work.
Like you, my boss didn’t like how I phrased the message, but she agreed that things had to change. She was also under the impression that I like going to the office. It was kind of nice during the first year of the pandemic when gas was cheap and the drive took under 20 minutes no matter what time of the day it was. However, now that I have to deal with normal traffic patterns, my preference would be to get in, do my office tasks, and leave before rush hour to finish the day at home.
My boss informed the team that we were expected to come into the office when it was needed to do any tasks that cannot be done from home. She suggested everyone model what I do, which let tasks without an urgent deadline “stack up” and/or go in when we do a particular presentation (which is made to people who work in the field without the ability to work from home, so I do it in the office to keep credibility and not look like I am rubbing in the privilege of being able to work from home).
This led to the discovery that one of my teammates moved about to a home that is about two hours away from the office. Naturally, he did not want to four hours of commuting every couple of weeks. This actually violates our Hybrid Work Arrangement which requires approval if someone relocates more than 60 miles from the office (while it doesn’t apply to my team, about 50% of the company does functions that require at least one person be on duty 24/7/365, so they decided to apply the rule to everyone to always assure that critical needs are met) and/or to another state (for tax compliance). Since there was no issue with working from a different state, my boss would have probably approved this had he asked before understanding how much was being requested out of teammates (or truly me). Unfortunately for my teammate, layoffs were happening and he found himself being the sacrificial lamb to the budgeting gods from my team.
#hybrid #team #office #Manager
