I’m not new in my career, when I started, my training was a couple of days on a full-day teams call with my direct manager, where he showed me the ropes of how we do what we do with the tools we have.
I think it was 3 or 4 days for me, until I had grasped enough of the basics to properly adapt to their way of doing things.
Within a week or so, I was pretty much up to speed. Like with any job, there’s specifics that I learned as I went, but I got the broad strokes during the first week.
I imagine anyone that’s green will need more mentorship that I did. I’m fairly senior in my position, so many times I’m on the other side of mentorship. It’s been a while since I’ve been green.
I’m also a remote guy and I see both sides as well.
The critical assumption you’ve made in this example is that a large majority will choose to be remote, so there won’t be anyone in the office for the in-office people to work with.
I don’t believe that’s as much of a problem as you seem to imply it will be. The problem with the argument is that it’s all assumption and opinion based. To my understanding, there hasn’t been any reliable data produced on what percentage of the population wants in-office and/or remote to be permanent.
Relative to that, you’d also have to take into consideration for populated the company is, and how many people would actually be in the office, before making a determination whether it would be a ghost town or not.
Additionally to that, not everyone wants in-office work for the social aspects of it. Some people’s home life is too chaotic so they prefer in-office, to separate themselves from the chaos of home, and focus on work. It’s not a desire to connect that drives them to the office (pun might be intended here), but rather a lack of outside distraction from their home life while they try to “earn a living”.
There’s also the consideration of who is at home all the time. A homebody spouse, such as a stay-at-home mom/dad, may appreciate having space from their spouse to get things done, as they appreciate the space away. Having such separations can be very healthy and beneficial for relationships, which can also play a role IMO.
The fact is, not everyone is doing it as a social and/or company culture thing. The percentages of people who want it for company culture vs the people who want to for personal reasons, is also an unknown metric.
So in all, at present, we don’t know how many overall people want remote/in-office work, and we don’t know what their motivations for making that choice are. Without that data, it’s difficult to make a value proposition about a decision.
Company owners don’t really care about the metrics, since, during COVID and mandatory isolation, everyone was WFH, and productivity was overall increased. Whether that was because people now had 24/7 access to their work systems, or because people were overall happier about it in average, and were simply more productive due to that, is anyone’s guess.
I appreciate the comment, but there’s a lot more in play than simply socializing and company culture.