Let a leadership meeting where C-level imposed strict work from home standards forcing ...

Let a leadership meeting where C-level imposed strict work from home standards forcing us to awkwardly dismiss family and pets. I hold a senior position at a mid-sized company, and ever since March, we've all been working from home This week something came up in a leadership meeting that rattled me and I can't stop thinking about it. #reddit #radditstory #askredditstories #redditstories #storytime  The C level has made a decision to roll out new work from home standards that every employee is expected to follow. That includes a strict dress code during video calls, making sure our backgrounds are always neat and tidy. And what really got me a firm mandate to eliminate distractions, which mainly means pets, kids, and other family members should be out of sight and earshot. They actually held up a few examples of good employee behavior, like someone who locked their dog in a bedroom during a meeting and another who drove across town to arrange childcare with a relative. No one really clarified what sparked all this or how exactly it's going to be enforced. All we were told is that now that we've been home for six months, you should be used to it and should make changes to make your home more of a professional space. That part about distractions made me inwardly cringe. Right now our region has reopened only to mostly close. Again, kids are all stuck doing distance learning, and so many people are sharing their limited space with their families or multiple roommates. Most people I manage don't even have a dedicated office. They're doing their best squeezed into bedrooms or living rooms, juggling kids and partners and pets. In my own case, I have a very large dog. He's generally content napping through my workday, but every so often he wants to hop up and gaze dramatically out the window behind my desk. If I even try to shut him in another room, he howls. So trust me, that isn't any less of a distraction. What makes it all worse is that the company keeps insisting that we'll be back in the office the moment we're off the COVID watch list, but they refuse to say how long we'll definitely be working from home. I've asked outright if they can just give me some minimum date, something to pass on to my staff, like you'll be remote at least until January 31st. The answer is always the same. Nothing concrete. They just want us back as soon as possible. No matter how this all plays out, I'm struggling with how to communicate this to my team. I get the bit about looking presentable and keeping backgrounds neat, or just using a Zoom background if you don't want to clean. But this demand to completely eliminate distractions, I can't get behind it and I have no idea how I'd even enforce it. The realities at home just don't mesh with that expectation. No matter what leadership tries to insist update one. The work from home standards at my company still haven't been released. Some of our leadership got caught up in local drama, and I think the whole thing just slipped off their radar for now. What frustrates me most is how out of touch our leadership is with regular employees. I became a manager right as COVID hit, and I don't have strong relationships with my peers in leadership roles yet. Honestly, I've never felt comfortable reaching out to them. All of my peers appear to support the standards, and it's clear they're as annoyed as I am that we haven't seen changes yet. But it isn't just this. The whole atmosphere at work has been grinding me down. For example, I've been told I rate my staff too highly in their annual evaluations, and then in the same breath, I'm told that even if my team is performing at a high level, I should still lower their scores to motivate them to do better. Apparently, making people feel unappreciated is what drives performance. It doesn't stop there. I keep hearing that I don't work enough hours when I regularly log 60 plus hours every week. I'm also encouraged not to give my staff raises or bonuses unless they're truly exceptional performers. Can you believe that making an immediate switch from working in office to handling everything remotely during a pandemic and consistently outperforming expectations still isn't enough to justify even a 1% raise? I disagree with this so much, and I keep pushing back, but my protests just disappear into the void. Some people have said this is exactly why it's important to ask employers how they handled COVID, and honestly, I can't sing my company's praises on that front. It's disappointing because I genuinely love what I do. #reddit #radditstory #askredditstories #redditstories #askreddit #storytime