Is this really how you greet employees as they go back to F2F work?

There are a lot of people in the working world who have been dreading one thing for a while now: the eventual return to the office buildings they were forced to “abandon” 2 years ago at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. And now that that fear has come into fruition, workers are anxious with the countdown to face-to-face work.

In one Canadian office building, employees were greeted back to work with insensitive posters and below-the-belt signage that seemed to make fun of them not working from home anymore. These photos were shared by Audra Williams on Twitter last March 7, 2022 and quickly became viral. As of writing, the tweet now has 14.6k retweets, 5,883 quote tweets, 150.6k likes.

Twitter users were quick to criticize Oxford Properties—the Canada-based company in question, for their “unkind” signage and distasteful humor in a time when both telework and face-to-face work could be done.

Oxford Properties later issued a statement through blogTO, acknowledging their mistake and explaining that they have taken down the signage.

“Unfortunately, in an attempt to be lighthearted, the signage came off as uncaring, which was never our intention. The signage clearly missed the mark and was removed last week as a result. The campaign should have not made it into production, and we sincerely apologize to any customers, colleagues and members of the public that were offended.”

In the Philippines, more and more businesses have started to normalize operations and implement back to face-to-face work due to the lowering of COVID-19 restrictions and the current low cases of COVID-19 recorded in the country. There are companies and individuals that have been clamoring for the continuation of remote work, due to safety issues and the rising fuel prices caused by *another* global phenomenon. However, as of press time the government has disallowed the continuation of WFH arrangement for BPO firms, saying that the WFH arrangement had been “only a time-bound temporary measure” due to a surge of COVID-19 cases.

If Philippine companies welcomed back their employees the same way Oxford Properties did, how do you think Filipinos would react to it? With anger? With memes? Or with the “meh” kind of attitude? Well, telework and WFH could be done together anyway IMO.

 

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