Boss insists employees work from the office all the time without flexible arrangements, but works from home herself halting production while everyone waits for her to show up: 'My first complaint is, if boss isn't there, there's a halt in work'

The boss's insistence that staff work from the office all the time without flexible arrangements created issues in the workplace when she refused to follow her own policy.

I'll never understand why some bosses and employers are so adamant that work of the sort that can easily be done on a computer from anywhere must instead be done in an office.

There's always this discussion about some conductive energy, this cultural surge that will happen, that staff will somehow link up like the Power Rangers or something, and with their powers combined, all of that collective energy will be greater than the sum of its parts, leading to new ideas and greater productivity.

If this really happens in real life, I have yet to see it. Working in an office, especially all the time with no flexibility, is draining and, over time, pushes workers into "going through the motions," and any short promise of greater communication and smoother transduction evaporates back into a figment of an ethereal dream.

While it might appear that workers are busier in the office, there is a lot of "performative" work giving that impression amongst all the added sudden distractions and long awkward silences punctuated by someone who probably should have taken a sick day and stayed home coughing a few tables away.

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Boss barely in the office, but expects us to always be in the office

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via Getty Images For Unsplash+

_{The image is representative only and does not depict the actual subjects of the story.}
Studies done on worker productivity from home and in the office consistently point to the fact that working from home is actually more productive. During a certain global event of 2020 that cannot be named, employers and researchers were surprised to find that productivity actually rose when forced to work from the confines of their homes.
I always thought that these bosses who push these “always in the office” inflexible working cultures probably just really didn't like their families and homelife, and assumed that, by extension, everyone else must feel the same way. Why else would they be so adamant in their belief that everyone else should leave theirs?

But at least here, there is some consistency, and these bosses are the first ones in and last ones to leave, again, probably trying to get away from their family for as long as humanly possible. They walk their talk and do so noticeably and obnoxiously.
Where these inflexible working policies become confusing is when they are inconsistent. When you have a boss who clearly dislikes coming into the office to work themself, and so seldom does, who insists that everyone else come into the office. There's a level of hypocrisy here that is hard for staff to get past, and creates a real rift between staff and leadership.
That's what was happening here, where this worker found that production in their office ground to a standstill when their boss wasn't there, which was often. Their boss still insisted, however, that everyone else be present, so everyone was just sitting around the office all the time waiting for the boss to show up.
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