Skip to main content

Company Town

Enticing employees back of office buildings by going resimerical is an interesting idea but needs to be taken a lot further to have a chance. Depending on the age and life-stage of the employee their needs and wants will vary a great deal. Lets say for the sake of argument, a vast majority of the employees at a certain company ExampleCo are either single or coupled with no kids or pre-school kids. A resimerical situation that could work for this set is heavily subsidized housing in walking distance from the place of work. Add to that easy access to amenities they would care for like daycare, fitness centers, food and entertainment - ExampleCo might have a good number of takers for working from the office all days of the week. 

Assuming this office location is the downtown area of the city, it will likely not cater to the folks with kids that need to go to school - and the desirable ones currently tend to be in the suburbs. To get this crowd to come to office everyday, would take more doing - they need bigger homes, they likely want to own the home, the schools need to be equal or better than what they have in the suburbs. Notwithstanding all these incentives, if there are employers out there who are willing to accommodate 100% remote workers, they might be the ones to come out ahead. 

The singles and couples with no kids will prefer the ability to work from anywhere in the world - make the most of their years of freedom instead of being tied down to a subsidized apartment less than a mile from their office. It is all about how much choice does the person have and what they will be willing to give up in the face of such choice. Back in the day, these problems were solved by company towns. I grew up in one myself back in India and am very grateful for the quality of life and the opportunities it afforded me. 

As companies layoff tenured and newer employees for no understandable reason and the most uncivil manner possible, they can no longer have a reasonable expectation of loyalty for anyone who works for them. People will not make life and lifestyle changes to comply with the mandates of company leadership when they know full well they can be tossed out like last week's garbage any time. They want to make the choices that are right for them and their families - not what helps the CEO make more money.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...

Changing Pace

This blog has been a big part of my life for the last five years. Besides giving me the opportunity to connect with a number of interesting people and share my thoughts and ideas with them, it has been a form of daily meditation for me. No matter what the day threw my way, I made a very deliberate effort to find a little quiet time to write.The process of thinking about what to write and then the act of writing itself worked as an antidote to aggravations big and small. Five and half years ago, when I started Heartcrossings both my personal and professional lives left a lot to be desired for. The only real happiness I had was in being J's mother. While that was often enough to make me forget what I did not have, I sorely needed a third place to call my own and shape in the likeness of my dreams. This blog has been where there were no limits or constraints and that was absolutely exhilarating - it is the reason I have been able to nurture it for as long and as much as I have. A lot ...