Would you quit if your company moved your office?

You also have to consider that a job you love is very hard to find.

You could get a job in the city and hate it, have to work long hours, etc., etc.

You've got to weigh your options.

Could you change your hours slightly so you miss a good deal of the traffic nightmares and cut a chunk of your commute down? like 8am-4pm or 11am-7pm? You would be slightly off your co-workers hours but only by about 2 hours.

Yes, Chai, that's exactly how I feel.

Heeven, you're right that it is hard to find a job you love. If I leave, I'll take my time looking for the right opportunity. Location isn't everything, but it is 80% of everything to me. And I guess weighing my options is what has me here posting about it.

My hours can't adjust much because of my kids. I'd either have to leave before they were off to school, or come home just before they're heading to bed. There is a bit of flexibility, but the window is roughly between 8 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. And it's not just the time it takes, anyway, it's being physically so far from where all of my other priorities are. As Chai said, if I have errands to run, they're all near home not work, so I can't do that at lunch time. If I want to be class reader one day, that's another 2 hours out of my day and half a tank of gas for the two round trips that day.

i was really lucky that we moved to a small city when coming to canada - there were 60,000 inhabitants when we came here 51 years ago , it's up to about 120,000+ now .
the first 7 years we lived downtown and i walked to work - and walked home for lunch pretty well every day .
after 7 years we moved to he 'burbs ! now it was about a 7-8 minutes drive to get to work and i still went home for lunch most days

since the city has expanded in the last few years , we now seem to be living downtown - even though we haven't moved !
one shopping centre , one branch library and the Y are within walking distance , the drive to the pool takes about 7-8 minutes "in rush-hour" , lake ontario is a 5 minute drive .
we've considered moving a few times , but always decided "to stick around" - we've been living in the same house for 44 years now , might as well stay here for a while longer
hbg

I can understand your situation, FreeDuck. My daughter started last
September in a new school, and it's quite a distance from home. I thought
I could handle it, but it's killing me, especially in the morning rush hour.
Then in the afternoon the same distance again - certain days, I'm adding
up close to 100 miles a day (including trips to work).

She probably will go back to her old school next year, as I just can't
see myself stressing over this for years to come, in addition to getting up
so much earlier to make the commute.

Freeduck, I was thinking about your situation (while I was commuting, actually). Here's what I came up with.

I think it's best to focus on what can be immediately changed for the most good. E. g. the best bang for the buck. Dropping one car is a nice idea but I'm thinking it's not going to happen right now. Rather, my suggestion is to concentrate on two things: length of commute and means of transportation.

Means is easier. Here are a few ideas:
1) Carpooling. Just because the people who live nearby don't have kids does not mean that they might not want to carpool with you. Also, carpooling doesn't have to be 5 days/week, 200 or so days per year deal. What if you could ride with, say, Mary on Mondays, Steve on Tuesdays, Dennis on Thursdays, etc.? Another idea with carpools is to meet at a somewhat central location, but that location can be on the way to work. So instead of picking up someone at their house, you all meet at the post office two towns over and join up there. That could alleviate having to 'pool with someone who lived really close to you. Another idea is to just be the passenger, and pay gas money to whoever drives. It costs you $$ but you could rest or make phone calls during the trip. Yet another idea is to, instead of looking for people at your office to carpool, to see if someone working in, say, the same industrial park, wants to carpool.
2) Working from home. So they said no to 2 days/week. What about 1 day/week? Or a couple of days/month? Or when the weather is really bad, regardless of the day? Or part of the day, say the afternoons, or just Wednesday afternoons or whatever? They like you, they know you're competent and they know you've got kids. Despite the fact that they don't want to make a policy, it could be pinned that way, e. g. you need to pick up Ducklet from school on Fridays after flugelhorn practice or whatever. Only you and your manager need to know. Surely there are people who call into meetings (rather than show up) on occasion, aren't there?
3) Public transportation. While it's a nightmare to and from your home to the office, what would happen if you picked it up farther down the line? E. g. if the bus from Smith Street (near home) only leaves three times per day, but the bus from Jones Street leaves ten times per day, and it's not too far a drive and you can get parking, why not drive to the Jones Street stop and take advantage of the better schedule?

Length of commute. Except for working at home, even part of the time, the only way you're going to accomplish this is to either move closer to the office or move the office closer to you. While you're not fond of the neighborhood that the office is in, what about the surrounding communities? Or even halfway between where you are now, and where the office is? Lopping off half of the commute would give you options for public transportation and carpooling that you don't currently have, I bet.

Anyway, I sympathise re the length of the commute. Unless you can get paid for, work or rest during, or read what you like, that time, it's utterly wasted, I feel. And you will never get it back (man, am I the voice of doom, or what?).

I hope this helps.

hamburger, it sounds like you're sitting pretty where you are. I envy you.

CJane, thanks for the commiseration.

Jes, thanks for the suggestions, they are good and it does make sense to try to focus on what I can change. Unfortunately, the first three are not so easy.

Carpooling -- only one coworker lives in town and he's a late riser. He might be willing to change his schedule one or two days a week, though, so that's worth a shot. Including others isn't really an option. Think of a big cross -- my office is at the top of the cross and everyone except me and the other guy (welive at the bottom) live there or at one of the two ends of the cross bar.

Working from home -- the message I got was that it absolutely could not be a formal regular thing. Not 2 days or 1 day or 2 hours. For it to be a sanctioned regular occurrence they'd need to develop a policy, and management is confident that the policy that would result be one of no telecommuting. They did offer to push it for me if that's what I really wanted, but you see the risk, I'd be ruining it for everyone. They don't mind if I do it, but it needs to be on an as needed basis. My managers don't have a problem with me doing it, it's just that I have to kind of have a reason each time I do it, which feels like calling in sick to me. I don't know. But I can do it -- I'll be doing it on Thursday in fact for Duckie's birthday.

Public transportation -- the big problem here is the leg from the most outward train stop to the office. There's about 10 miles between and it involves taking a bus from the station to the end of that bus line at a mall, waiting for another bus, and taking that to the office. So if I moved further down the line, I'd just be cutting out the easiest part of the commute -- the part from my house to the last train station on the line.

It does make sense to focus on what I can change -- that's the most practical way. I guess I feel like those little changes wouldn't be enough for me, they'd just be a way of coping with a bad situation while denying the fundamental conflict within me that says this is not how I want to live. So then it comes down to how important it is to have this job. There are some pretty strong factors on that side -- the love of it, the work, the people, and of course the stability. Every night on the way home I have an hour and a half of NPR to tell me that there's no guarantee I'll have a job this time next year. Does it make sense to leave a stable job where I know I'd be one of the last laid off to become a new comer in another job where stability may not be a given and where I wouldn't have the protection of seniority? So yeah, you can see I'm pretty conflicted.

I'd go along if my employer moved to another city in Hungary (I mean, assuming it was a proper town, not Bumf*ck, Borsod); if it were up to me, I mean, depending on what Anastasia would say.

Another country, not so much. (There were tentative questions about London, I said I wouldnt be interested).

Worse, actually, would be if they moved to some business park somewhere on the outskirts of the city. That I would hate more. Wouldnt quit, but would start looking around after a while I think.

Just curious, why wouldn't you like a business park? I think I know, I just want to be sure.

What's wrong with being the one to push the issue? Someone's going to sometime, and maybe it's better if it's someone that they're already OK with doing it.

You're in IT, right? Retaining trained, reliable employees is getting to be an important issue. Make sure that HR is involved in the discussion of telecommuting, and provide them with some articles.

I think this is the main problem:



She can do it now under plausible deniability ("oh, it's not OK to telecommute occasionally? we had no idea") but if they push, the policy will be an absolute "no," and anyone who telecommutes will get in trouble.

Yeah, what soz said. HR was involved and did the research and would advocate if needed. But alas, we are owned by bankers. They bought a software company but they don't understand the difference between how they work and how we work.

Well as you know, my job is moving out of state. Our option that we decided to take was to move with it. It actually will help out our communting situation. But if you don't like the suburbs that wouldn't help. I used to take public transportation - took it for about 20 years (other than a short stint when my company moved closer to my home and I drove). To be honest - I prefer driving now even with the traffic. Just last week I had to take the subway home - I now appreciate even more not being squeezed in like a sardine and being exposed to all sorts of germs and who knows what. And a couple of days later I was home sick must of been from that fat guy sneezing and breathing on me!

That is exactly why when we bought, we gave up owning a house for a condo - I did not want to spend my time commuting and then have no time with my family.

Is there somewhere closer that would be a place you would like to live? Maybe a half hour away or something you feel is "driveable"?

I was thinking that too linkat.

I was also thinking moving is expensive.

I don't know, this is a tough situation.

There are two big problems with moving. One is that we don't want the kids to have to change schools yet again. The other is that we don't know if we can sell our house.

And I guess deep down inside is this dream I have of living a different kind of life -- where I could walk or bike to work and shopping and where there is a sense of community and other people like me nearby. And before anyone gets any ideas, I don't mean people who look like me, I mean people who care about the same things as I do. I love my neighborhood even as I wish I lived on one of the less busy streets in it and I love the in-town families that we've gotten close to. The further north we moved the less and less of that we would get, I think. It's kind of hard to explain.

Makes perfect sense to me.

Any chance of striking out on your own? Freelancing, something? While the bankers don't get it, it seems like your field would be open to telecommuting with SOME company...

No, I know just what you mean.
I love my neighborhood, and whenever I have to drive to the way north side, I think to myself "God, this is just like South Florida"

The city has grown so fast, that while the already established area are the same, not so where the city is spreading to.

Just community after community, all look the same, with the same strip shopping centers.

Where I live has character.


Freeduck hanging out with people more like her...

Chai.

Yeah, there are lots of jobs that would allow me to telecommute, but that's not really what I want. Telecommuting would only be useful to me as a way to avoid the current drive, but the truth is I like being in the office. I like the collaboration and the impromptu brainstorming and the interaction with other people. I like being able to, for the most part anyway, leave my work here when I go home.

I have thought about freelancing -- not sure I have the cojones to be constantly looking for work, though.

I recently read an article in the NYT about people who are all telecommuters but share an office. As in, they work in different fields/ for different companies, but all contribute to the rent in a certain space and telecommute from it instead of working from home. They have the social element, go out to lunch together, and they also said that it was nice to not have the intra-workplace stresses -- competition, etc.

Maybe find a cool old place somewhere nearby and set up a communal office there?

But I understand too about the give and take involved in working with someone face-to-face, the benefits there.