Today I went to the office for nothing
As a software engineer I am part of a small in-house development team. The place where we work is quite flexible. Sometimes part of the team works from home and sometimes part of the team works at the office.
Today I was the only one who went to the office and if I had known that the others were going to work from home I might have stayed at home because I have no meetings for the rest of the day and it would have saved me travel time.
Normally we indicate at the beginning of the week where we work, only we forget this now and then. As a result, I drove to work for nothing today.
This got me thinking. Are we the only ones this has happened to? If not, what do you use as a solution for this?
And if there is a paid solution would you use it?
Thank you for your time!
I had the same problem at work, so I made https://gethotdesk.com which is a slack app to see who is going to be in and when
Sweet, thats a nice looking Slack app! Thanks for sharing.
Could also be about team culture! My team uses the google calendar feature to indicate if we're in office or working from home. The team expectation is to plan for the week every monday.
Woah! I didn't know about that feature! Will definitely try it out! Thanks for sharing!
We also had a similar problem. What ended up happening is that the team made just a channel in which they would share the times they would go to the office. It is working well so far!
How long do you plan ahead and does this remain clear with multiple teammates?
Common problem I think for lots of teams now. We generally try and add to calendar the week before so everyone can see which days, but it doesn't always happen. The other issue is when the only day you can really make it in is different to everyone else. Sometimes I might still go just for a cha he of routine break from home, bit sometimes it feels silly.
This happened to me multiple times. I worked in a small <10 person startup that forced us to go to the office a couple times per week (even though I worked in a team of 1) and had multiple days where I came to the office only to be completely alone 🙄
I can imagine it can sometimes feel pointless to go to the office when you work alone. But I think sometimes it's nice to go to the office all by yourself without being disturbed.
You're almost never alone in something, haha.
We always discuss this during planning sessions. The company where I work also developed a simple app for this, and we created a report on top of it to easily see who's in the office when.
This signals to me there is a need for an app like this! I don't think we'd pay for this now, as we already have a solution. But we probably would if this existed when we needed it!
Good to hear we are not alone! Thanks for sharing your thoughts.
This could be an intriguing situation of voting every Friday for the following week to determine where the team will work in a democratic manner. The team's calendar is then configured with an alert.
This sometimes could work if the team is flexible and open-minded to hearing other people's concerns. However part of the positives of flexible remote work is that you can be flexible when you need it, not on others' need. I think not knowing or having control over when I go into the office could be background stress that is unnecessary.
I think you can't completely avoid this. I used to co-work with my ex-teammates and some people dropped off last minute even if they promised they would join that day. They were planning co-working spots for every day of the week in a google sheet, I think it's a good solution. To avoid mishaps I can only suggest building trust and empathy within the team so people tell in advance they won't join and when they sign up to come that day they actually come to the office. Hope it will work out for you nicely after all!