I work in IT at a University in Central Florida that's been primarily remote since COVID began. As of January, we're officially being forced to return to office 3 days a week with some outrageous new guidelines.
Monday is supposed to be for meetings and prepping for the weekend. Wednesday is for meetings and training. Friday is for end of the week wrap up. Upper management is so separated from reality that they think this is what work looks like. They're pulling us away from WFH where we worked excessively on projects and customer support to do meetings and prep work. It's an absolute joke.
Our department has been losing people left and right since the “Great Resignation” began and leadership has taken it as a good thing and constantly praises that we “do more with less”. None of the positions have been backfilled and we're absolutely drowning in work. Meanwhile, higher ups constantly get promotions and thrown into interim positions with no qualifications. We just lost another CIO and we already know we're hiring outside of our university again because there's no faith in our current leadership whatsoever.
We've been told our productivity has gone up, despite losing ~40% of IT staff last I heard, and apparently that's not good enough to stay remote. WFH is harming our productivity and we have to RTO immediately!
All of this is happening while the university has only given us whopping 1% raises over the past two years. Not only that, this also means we now get to pay the lovely $100 parking permit charge that never applied to our office before last month. Just an embarrassment all across the board. This was easier to swallow before when we were at least remote, but now?
And let's not forget the “Holiday Appreciation Party” invite they just emailed out where they'll be giving us “a small token of appreciation for the high participation rate in the Employee Engagement survey”. The same survey that they happened to close just days before announcing RTO.
Myself and many others are at an absolute loss right now. Starting to apply elsewhere for remote work at this point and waiting for the other shoe to drop. The thread going around the university's subreddit right now has been shared nearly 100 times already, so this is definitely spreading fast.