Oh noooo remote work

[minoanmiss]

CW: Death.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/news/the-death-of-a-wells-fargo-employee-reveals-an-issue-with-remote-work/ar-AA1qjQi0?ocid=msedgntp&pc=U531&cvid=8bf603df31e6439781ef6c344751de42&ei=105

Raise your hand if you ever worked someplace where even though everyone had to come in to the office you were reasonably sure you could lie dead in a cubicle for days before being found.

Comments

[dissectionist]

I can’t raise my hand because I have always forced to work in open-concept spaces where pathogens spread like wildfire and sensory overload is nonstop. But I’ve definitely worked in places where, had I died, they would have noticed due to the open concept, but their only response would have been aggravation that now they need to deal with a corpse and file paperwork.

[adrian_turtle]

I'm not seeing how this is a problem with remote work. It's a problem with any workspace that does not run 24/7 (and relatively few workplaces ever really needed to run those kinds of hours.) Even with everybody working in the office, somebody is going to be the last to leave on any given day. Somebody is going to be the last to leave for the weekend on any given Friday. The second-to-last out the door calls, "Bye, Charlie! See you Monday!" expecting Charlie to head home in 15 minutes. But Charlie has some medical catastrophe and nobody knows until Monday.

You don't reduce the risk of this sort of thing by having all workers in the office every day. (And having all workers in the office every day means more commuting, which isn't exactly safe.) You can reduce it with various kinds of buddy system or surveillance that are more or less intrusive and might or might not be worth it depending on how dangerous the environment is. They HAD security guards who were supposed to check the area but didn't.

And you reduce the risk of people dying suddenly at their desks by making it easier to avoid covid and to access preventative health care. Remote work helps with both of these.

[kore]

They HAD security guards who were supposed to check the area but didn't.

Yeah, my very first reaction was, where the fuck were the security guards? I don't care how isolated this woman was, there should be a setup that will alert security if someone's there after hours!

But of course, let's make it about how TERRIBLE remote work is.

[xenacryst]

Yeah, I'm really loving how this is being spun as a problem with remote work and not, like, a problem with checking in on each other. I work from home nearly all the time, and aside from my days off, it prolly would be at most a matter of a day before someone on my team noticed I'd croaked. Maybe two days, since sometimes things get slow.

[redbird]

Whenever something like this comes up on places like Ask a Manager, most of the examples are cases where the person had died while at home, or in a single-vehicle crash on a remote road, at a time nobody expected to see them. There aren't many where a timely check on someone who was expected did them any good, or in which their boss decided not to check because it wasn't that big a deal that someone was missing a meeting.

Also, one-person offices and shops are hardly a new thing, and people who live alone and want to set up check-in calls or signals already do.

[jadelennox]

raises hand and that was in an office with zero remote work. I just...had no human interaction.

[kore]

"we used to see our colleagues in the office every day. This enabled us to see really clearly if something was wrong, if somebody wasn’t there, if they were acting differently"

HAHAHAHAHA. HAHA.

[julian]

Well, on the sofa in the back room, but same thing, yes.