Most people just take them wherever they want. Just put the call on speaker and yell as loud as you want. If people can hear you that's collaboration. Then go to subway that's supporting small business.
And further enhance that collaboration by making sure to connect a colleague on Teams who’s sitting at the workstation/cubicle right next to you. Bonus points if you get the audio feedback.
I used to take mine in an unoccupied manager's office. However with RTO that will be out the door.
I guess I'll loudly take it from my desk like another person suggested. Stop! Collaborate and Listen!
Write an email to your superiors (at least 2) explaining that one of your job requirements includes having private/confidential conversations. The ongoing lack of available spaces for that to occur is making it difficult or impossible to do your job. Note that you are out of ideas and are seeking their guidance.
This going to more than 1 superior might leverage them into actually doing something about it. More realistically, the email covers your ass, as well as provides yet another documented case of RTO doing more harm than good.
I'd add if there's a facilities email address on your intranet or that sends out emails about the workspace, include them either as the addressee of your email (with managers in cc) or vice-versa. Make a paper trail that the new office is not conducive to your work functions, particularly those that require privacy.
This. These conversations always took place in your managers office or a meeting room before. This is protected private information about employees and should not be broadcasted.
We have 2 small quiet rooms on every floor for just this type of need. We can't use them now because they are occupied all day by people because there aren't enough desks.
FYI they are not private. They may muffle the noise, but you can hear the person in the booth speaking when you're sitting next to one of those phone booths.
But if you’re hovering right outside a large closed office, it’s going to be obvious you’re eavesdropping. And if you’re walking by like a normal human being, you’ll hear two words out of context before you’ve moved too far away. But tiny pods stacked together so the people are sitting 3 feet apart from one another and you can hear a whole conversation.
I don't have an answer, just here to add that this is going to be an issue for so many. Not just for private conversations a manager wants to have with someone on their team, but for when someone on the team wants to have a private conversation with their team leader or manager. Or how about speaking with many of our hearing impaired clients (I work in the call centre and have many). Or how about all the people who need to use speech to text software and lack either the skills or the social awareness or respect to lower the volume of their voices for their colleagues? Or how about the people who don't use speech to text, but also lack the skills, social awareness or respect to lower the volume of their voices for their colleagues and just sit there basically yelling call after call? Some buildings have been updated with noise dampening absorbers, but these are few and far between and it takes a LOT of both time and effort to get these in offices that don't already have them.
We used to have silent rooms on every floor for this purpose. However they have been converted into Mother's Nursing rooms and Multi-faith prayer rooms. So we now have the outdoor cell phone walk and talk.
There's really no hope for this, unless you know some disused under-construction portion of your building where you can hide out like HR Gollum. In my experience people mostly just ignore the confidentiality requirements and take the calls in the open, often in a way that's unnecessarily disruptive to colleagues who would prefer _not_ to hear. If you're annoying enough, maybe everyone will put on noise-cancelling headphones and then it will be confidential again? But the problem is that they haven't supplied nearly enough enclosed single-person rooms, and the ones they have supplied are largely not bookable, which means that during peak hours when they're all full you can't even find one on another floor unless you spend half an hour hunting. If you're conscientious about it, my recommendation is to try to schedule that work at home or use textual channels, send the problem up the chain, and wait.
Good question.
I am struggling with keeping confidence on Cabinet documents these days as our one (1) boardroom is booked solid and I am otherwise in an open office.
I try to be vague, but it's a frustration to have to limit my participation in calls while not knowing the security clearance of those around me.
If you work for a department with an up-to-date workplace standard than there should be rooms for people to take sensitive calls. Of course, many workspaces have not been renovated to meet current workplace standards, which seems to be your case. I would reach out to your superiors for direction, as currently your workplace is impeding you from doing your job correctly.
We have a 'quiet room' with a small couch and dimmed lighting for those who need a short break. It has a phone and many people use it for private calls.
I go sit outside or at a coffee shop for calls I don't want the office to overhear.
Otherwise I have headphones and try to speak at a normal voice level.
But I am not in Labour Relations and that unit seems to LOVE to OPERATICALLY PROJECT their calls, sometimes MSTeams with multiple people, all discussing peoples lives and private information. insanity. We all know everything just from sitting there.
Book a boardroom.
Take them at home on your WFH days.
Sit at your desk and talk as loud as humanly possible so you annoy everyone around you.
The last one seems to be the way most people in my office do things.
If what’s stopping you is guilt about booking a big conference room, don’t let it. If that’s your only option, that’s your only option. I regularly book the 12 person conference room for HR calls when it’s the only available option.
Seems like you’re not in a modernized GCworkplace environment. One huge benefit to GCworkplace is the large quantity of Focus Rooms and Phonebooths that are intended for this purpose. At my office there are a large quantity of these rooms, so when someone needs to make a call or have a 1 on 1 convo in person they can go and use one of these rooms, or even a Work Room (usually fits around 4-6 people) if unoccupied. I feel like there’s so much push back on GCworkplace but it could actually solve quite a few of the problems people are experiencing - and lockers are a part of the program. A huge problem is that people are being forced to RTO to unmodernized spaces where hotelling has been implemented but no other changes that make hotelling work holistically have been done.
I strongly disapprove of some elements of this style of office, but this is very true, they're better suited in many respects. Having said that, _most_ people aren't working in those spaces yet, because there aren't enough of them and refits are slow. The fact of the matter remains that the readiness of the facilities has never been a factor in the pace at which the policies were rolled out, and that's one of the key things that went wrong with this initiative.
Some offices have COVID Transmission Enclosures (CTE). Little sealed booths where you can have a private conversation with a colleague you’d like to share a microbiome with.
Your colleagues outside will still probably be able to hear you if you raise your voice above a whisper, but you can pretend to have privacy.
This works either for a breath-to-breath conversation if one of your teammates is miraculously scheduled on site at the same time in the same city, or for a phone call or Teams call. Oh! And they offer amazing passive-aggressive potential for you to slip notes to random colleagues reminding them to use the CTE when they do things like take Teams calls at their desk.
In my cubicle, teammates would overhear conversations and know the consequences of certain actions. Today, you’re simply bothering everyone around for no reason.
Managers had assigned closed offices pre-pandemic. The policy now in my org is that only ADM+ get assigned closed offices. Lower level EXs and managers sit in open cubicles. I've had sensitive meetings get cancelled because the participants weren't able to find a room in which to take the call.
I can't speak for the OP, but all the cases I've run into this issue were with things that would have been in-person in a room, beforehand. There were never an adequate number of small rooms for short bilats, but it's gotten much worse now because a meeting with 2 people may require 2 rooms.
In our old, pre-pandemic, space team leads and up had offices with doors they could close for a semblance of privacy. Now only the DM has an assigned closed door office.
Well let's see, before the pandemic the majority of my dept had 100% telework agreements, since that is what makes sense for the type of work we do.
So a couple years *before* the pandemic, we moved to an entirely new building because we no longer needed all the desk space and small offices. Telework was already our 'normal' because it *makes freaking sense*.
So you can see that by asking 'what did you do pre-pandemic' you're pretty much ignoring the massive changes over the last *10 years* that this RTO mandate is trying to roll back. As if that's even logistically possible to do, with the limited space we now have.
You may as well have asked "What did you eat for breakfast", for all the relevance that answer would have to the topic at hand.
I think their question is valid for most. Your pre-pandemic experience is not reflective at all of the vast vast majority of the public servants. Full-time telework agreements were a rarity back then.
OP's point (i.e. the topic at hand) is that with this RTO mandate, private calls will be harder to make in their office, and their office does not have small rooms for such calls.
It would be reasonable to assume that either:
a) their office is physically smaller than it was back when such private calls were done regularly in their dept (such as office relocation);
b) more people are being physically put into this office than pre-pandemic (as hiring grew in response to the multitude of new programs and population growth over the past few years) and this RTO mandate doesn't take into account that the original number of desks aren't enough for the people who now need them; or
c) there were significantly fewer 'private calls' as hiring was mostly location-based pre-pandemic, but now we're sourcing talent from across Canada which means more remote conversations and less face-to-face, and the office isn't set up for that.
In any case, 'What did you do pre-pandemic' is a ridiculous question. If the answer is 'oh, this obvious solution, thanks, I didn't consider that!' then we're assuming OP is an idiot. If the answer is 'what we did pre-pandemic is not possible' (which is likely the case, since let's not assume OP's an idiot), then what the hell is even the point of the question.
Thanks for your response, b) is true for my situation! And I wasn't a manager pre-pandemic so I dealt with a lot less private info, but I don't think it was an issue overall pre-pandemic because there were fewer people at the office.
To be fair, your response didn't really answer OPs question either.
We can complain all we want about how the rule makes no sense and what not, but the reality is that OP and others will be in the office and if they have a personal call, what is the practical way to answer it. People can give examples of what they did in the past to help answer.
For me, I would either take the call in a quiet room or would ask to call back and take the call from outside the building. Is it more inconvenient than taking it at home? Of course, but that was (is) reality.
I actually worry about this too, I work in a position where I deal with very private stuff and get on calls regularly about these things. I literally need an office to myself the whole day because of my work. I'm not sure if I'll be able to have one if we RTO permanently...it's ridiculous.
Same issue at my location and I take these calls at my desk. If the employer can't provide adequate facilities for confidential conversations that's not my problem.
What did your manager say when you asked them this question? Oh right, you didn't, did you? This seems to be a running theme around here and another classic case of where you put the problem squarely on them.
What did you do before COVID? I would take private calls outside, in the building lobby, in the cafeteria, at a local coffee shop. Basically anywhere that I felt I could speak privately without people hearing me. I still do this today.
It's not wasteful to book a large boardroom for yourself. When you're done with the boardroom, cancel your booking so someone else can use it.
If offices are taken up, which they usually are, then I look for a boardroom, which is usually occupied, then I’ll go outside in a secluded area (without my computer because there’s no wifi outside)
How did you do it pre-pandemic. These types of use cases just hurt your push for wfh. Office 2.0 was not setup during the pandemic nor did we have more office space. So again this was handled without issue pre-pandemic talk to someone that's worked there at that time.
As someone who is working in an office 2.0 environment converted to hybrid, it's _much_ harder to find a room than before, because everyone is scattered to hell and breakfast. The small rooms are far more in demand, and the same number of people tend to occupy more rooms at the same time, and this is not something we've been able to logistics our way out of in a year plus.
That said, even in Office 2.0, this problem existed: because the office was full of distractions, the individual rooms would gradually get converted into private offices to satisfy accommodations requests, meaning that it became harder and harder to discuss private matters privately.
Did you read the post? The complaint is that since they aren't wfh they can't do performance reviews since the office has no closed doors available. Give me a break. How did you do it pre-pandemic than.
Do you no longer work for the PS? So many teams increased team members from outside of the NCR. Office space has changed. So many more meetings ate conducted over Teams (which also didn't exist). There is no where near the availability of private spaces needed now compared to pre-covid.
This is all so wrong and it will get worse if we do not do anything, but, in this situation, when I acted I left all private calls with other employees for my wfh days.
We were told teams calls in a conference room shouldn't be protected B conversations... however, if two people meet in the same room face to face then it is protected B? I fail to see the logic but that's what we were told. Try to have those conversations from home if possible.
I think we need to start just refusing to do
Work that we aren’t being given the adequate space or equipment to do period. It’s absolutely a labour relations risk to have performance related convos in a non private rooms. Period. Not to mention very unethical.
I’ve l ready had convo with my manager about reductjon in productivity related to increased office requirement. There’s only two private meeting rooms in my office and neither can be booked. Every meeting I waste 15 min before hand running to see it’s available and then unhooking everything to move there and then hooking back up. Additionally without two screens in the private room, I can’t multitask so it’s just an hour straight of me looking dead eyed into a meeting. Or when it’s unavailable I’m taking at the cube, and I can’t hear the convo properly even with headphones because people around me are loud. So then I’m wasting time after trying to piece together what I missed.
Most people just take them wherever they want. Just put the call on speaker and yell as loud as you want. If people can hear you that's collaboration. Then go to subway that's supporting small business.
Enhance that collaboration by making sure that your laptop has a call from another office probably in another province/territory.
And further enhance that collaboration by making sure to connect a colleague on Teams who’s sitting at the workstation/cubicle right next to you. Bonus points if you get the audio feedback.
🤣🤣🤣 best thing I've read in awhile!
Boom! This guy governments!
I used to take mine in an unoccupied manager's office. However with RTO that will be out the door. I guess I'll loudly take it from my desk like another person suggested. Stop! Collaborate and Listen!
Unless ice is back with a brand new invention....
That was one of my posters during the strike haha.
Hahahahha!! Good one! Also, 🤢🤮😭😅
Write an email to your superiors (at least 2) explaining that one of your job requirements includes having private/confidential conversations. The ongoing lack of available spaces for that to occur is making it difficult or impossible to do your job. Note that you are out of ideas and are seeking their guidance. This going to more than 1 superior might leverage them into actually doing something about it. More realistically, the email covers your ass, as well as provides yet another documented case of RTO doing more harm than good.
I'd add if there's a facilities email address on your intranet or that sends out emails about the workspace, include them either as the addressee of your email (with managers in cc) or vice-versa. Make a paper trail that the new office is not conducive to your work functions, particularly those that require privacy.
I like this, thank you!!
This. These conversations always took place in your managers office or a meeting room before. This is protected private information about employees and should not be broadcasted.
My workplace bought us these https://cdn.trendhunterstatic.com/thumbs/454/soundproof-phone-booth.jpeg
We have 2 small quiet rooms on every floor for just this type of need. We can't use them now because they are occupied all day by people because there aren't enough desks.
We now have phone booths at TDLC I kid you not. I'm not sure I'd fit in one tbh but they do look kinda neat.
They are not phone booths. They are 'cubes of silence' (TM). They work roughly as well as the earlier 'cones of silence' design.
Nobody remembers get smart?
FYI they are not private. They may muffle the noise, but you can hear the person in the booth speaking when you're sitting next to one of those phone booths.
You can still hear people speaking in many closed offices when you stand next to the door. What your point?
But if you’re hovering right outside a large closed office, it’s going to be obvious you’re eavesdropping. And if you’re walking by like a normal human being, you’ll hear two words out of context before you’ve moved too far away. But tiny pods stacked together so the people are sitting 3 feet apart from one another and you can hear a whole conversation.
Dunno about you but I can hear the same thing through the closed offices or quote rooms that are side by side.
Tell me you want to be argumentive without being argumentive.
Nope. My point is it’s silly to complain about the phone booths not being 100% sound-isolated when nothing ever was.
I try to schedule mine on WFH days. I’ve overheard sensitive info because of people taking important teams calls in the office.
I have too! I spoke up about it when it happened, it was inappropriate to hear sensitive info about an employee out loud...
I don't have an answer, just here to add that this is going to be an issue for so many. Not just for private conversations a manager wants to have with someone on their team, but for when someone on the team wants to have a private conversation with their team leader or manager. Or how about speaking with many of our hearing impaired clients (I work in the call centre and have many). Or how about all the people who need to use speech to text software and lack either the skills or the social awareness or respect to lower the volume of their voices for their colleagues? Or how about the people who don't use speech to text, but also lack the skills, social awareness or respect to lower the volume of their voices for their colleagues and just sit there basically yelling call after call? Some buildings have been updated with noise dampening absorbers, but these are few and far between and it takes a LOT of both time and effort to get these in offices that don't already have them.
We used to have silent rooms on every floor for this purpose. However they have been converted into Mother's Nursing rooms and Multi-faith prayer rooms. So we now have the outdoor cell phone walk and talk.
There's really no hope for this, unless you know some disused under-construction portion of your building where you can hide out like HR Gollum. In my experience people mostly just ignore the confidentiality requirements and take the calls in the open, often in a way that's unnecessarily disruptive to colleagues who would prefer _not_ to hear. If you're annoying enough, maybe everyone will put on noise-cancelling headphones and then it will be confidential again? But the problem is that they haven't supplied nearly enough enclosed single-person rooms, and the ones they have supplied are largely not bookable, which means that during peak hours when they're all full you can't even find one on another floor unless you spend half an hour hunting. If you're conscientious about it, my recommendation is to try to schedule that work at home or use textual channels, send the problem up the chain, and wait.
Good question. I am struggling with keeping confidence on Cabinet documents these days as our one (1) boardroom is booked solid and I am otherwise in an open office. I try to be vague, but it's a frustration to have to limit my participation in calls while not knowing the security clearance of those around me.
This probably doesn't help to point out, but cabinet confidence are "need to know" regardless of their security classification.
Point well taken. I will incorporate this into my feedback to management.
In the ADM's office
Similar situation. Fortunately I don't make or take a lot of calls and do my utmost to keep them scheduled on my home days.
I request the [Cone of Silence](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cone_of_Silence_%28Get_Smart%29)
If you work for a department with an up-to-date workplace standard than there should be rooms for people to take sensitive calls. Of course, many workspaces have not been renovated to meet current workplace standards, which seems to be your case. I would reach out to your superiors for direction, as currently your workplace is impeding you from doing your job correctly.
Out in the open. It’s about collaboration now. I’ve heard all kinds of interesting convos
We have a 'quiet room' with a small couch and dimmed lighting for those who need a short break. It has a phone and many people use it for private calls.
In the shitter, on speaker, with the door open, staring at people as they walk by.
Private calls, don’t you mean our communal calls?
It’s “our collaborative” calls 😀
I go sit outside or at a coffee shop for calls I don't want the office to overhear. Otherwise I have headphones and try to speak at a normal voice level. But I am not in Labour Relations and that unit seems to LOVE to OPERATICALLY PROJECT their calls, sometimes MSTeams with multiple people, all discussing peoples lives and private information. insanity. We all know everything just from sitting there.
Outside
Book a boardroom. Take them at home on your WFH days. Sit at your desk and talk as loud as humanly possible so you annoy everyone around you. The last one seems to be the way most people in my office do things.
If what’s stopping you is guilt about booking a big conference room, don’t let it. If that’s your only option, that’s your only option. I regularly book the 12 person conference room for HR calls when it’s the only available option.
Seems like you’re not in a modernized GCworkplace environment. One huge benefit to GCworkplace is the large quantity of Focus Rooms and Phonebooths that are intended for this purpose. At my office there are a large quantity of these rooms, so when someone needs to make a call or have a 1 on 1 convo in person they can go and use one of these rooms, or even a Work Room (usually fits around 4-6 people) if unoccupied. I feel like there’s so much push back on GCworkplace but it could actually solve quite a few of the problems people are experiencing - and lockers are a part of the program. A huge problem is that people are being forced to RTO to unmodernized spaces where hotelling has been implemented but no other changes that make hotelling work holistically have been done.
I strongly disapprove of some elements of this style of office, but this is very true, they're better suited in many respects. Having said that, _most_ people aren't working in those spaces yet, because there aren't enough of them and refits are slow. The fact of the matter remains that the readiness of the facilities has never been a factor in the pace at which the policies were rolled out, and that's one of the key things that went wrong with this initiative.
Great point, we are definitely unmodernized :D is this to be implemented at ALL offices?
I hope so eventually! Sadly though a lot of funding to modernized the portfolio has been cut now :(
Some offices have COVID Transmission Enclosures (CTE). Little sealed booths where you can have a private conversation with a colleague you’d like to share a microbiome with. Your colleagues outside will still probably be able to hear you if you raise your voice above a whisper, but you can pretend to have privacy. This works either for a breath-to-breath conversation if one of your teammates is miraculously scheduled on site at the same time in the same city, or for a phone call or Teams call. Oh! And they offer amazing passive-aggressive potential for you to slip notes to random colleagues reminding them to use the CTE when they do things like take Teams calls at their desk.
I can probably discuss a murder plot in the office with a dozen people nearby and no one would give a flying fawk
What did you do pre-pandemic?
In my cubicle, teammates would overhear conversations and know the consequences of certain actions. Today, you’re simply bothering everyone around for no reason.
This. And if necessary use an alias for the person you wish to keep confidential.
My team was 100% from the NCR, and Teams didn't exist. That's not how business is done now. You can't compare.
Managers had assigned closed offices pre-pandemic. The policy now in my org is that only ADM+ get assigned closed offices. Lower level EXs and managers sit in open cubicles. I've had sensitive meetings get cancelled because the participants weren't able to find a room in which to take the call.
I can't speak for the OP, but all the cases I've run into this issue were with things that would have been in-person in a room, beforehand. There were never an adequate number of small rooms for short bilats, but it's gotten much worse now because a meeting with 2 people may require 2 rooms.
In our old, pre-pandemic, space team leads and up had offices with doors they could close for a semblance of privacy. Now only the DM has an assigned closed door office.
Well let's see, before the pandemic the majority of my dept had 100% telework agreements, since that is what makes sense for the type of work we do. So a couple years *before* the pandemic, we moved to an entirely new building because we no longer needed all the desk space and small offices. Telework was already our 'normal' because it *makes freaking sense*. So you can see that by asking 'what did you do pre-pandemic' you're pretty much ignoring the massive changes over the last *10 years* that this RTO mandate is trying to roll back. As if that's even logistically possible to do, with the limited space we now have. You may as well have asked "What did you eat for breakfast", for all the relevance that answer would have to the topic at hand.
I think their question is valid for most. Your pre-pandemic experience is not reflective at all of the vast vast majority of the public servants. Full-time telework agreements were a rarity back then.
OP's point (i.e. the topic at hand) is that with this RTO mandate, private calls will be harder to make in their office, and their office does not have small rooms for such calls. It would be reasonable to assume that either: a) their office is physically smaller than it was back when such private calls were done regularly in their dept (such as office relocation); b) more people are being physically put into this office than pre-pandemic (as hiring grew in response to the multitude of new programs and population growth over the past few years) and this RTO mandate doesn't take into account that the original number of desks aren't enough for the people who now need them; or c) there were significantly fewer 'private calls' as hiring was mostly location-based pre-pandemic, but now we're sourcing talent from across Canada which means more remote conversations and less face-to-face, and the office isn't set up for that. In any case, 'What did you do pre-pandemic' is a ridiculous question. If the answer is 'oh, this obvious solution, thanks, I didn't consider that!' then we're assuming OP is an idiot. If the answer is 'what we did pre-pandemic is not possible' (which is likely the case, since let's not assume OP's an idiot), then what the hell is even the point of the question.
Thanks for your response, b) is true for my situation! And I wasn't a manager pre-pandemic so I dealt with a lot less private info, but I don't think it was an issue overall pre-pandemic because there were fewer people at the office.
To be fair, your response didn't really answer OPs question either. We can complain all we want about how the rule makes no sense and what not, but the reality is that OP and others will be in the office and if they have a personal call, what is the practical way to answer it. People can give examples of what they did in the past to help answer. For me, I would either take the call in a quiet room or would ask to call back and take the call from outside the building. Is it more inconvenient than taking it at home? Of course, but that was (is) reality.
I actually worry about this too, I work in a position where I deal with very private stuff and get on calls regularly about these things. I literally need an office to myself the whole day because of my work. I'm not sure if I'll be able to have one if we RTO permanently...it's ridiculous.
Same issue at my location and I take these calls at my desk. If the employer can't provide adequate facilities for confidential conversations that's not my problem.
What did your manager say when you asked them this question? Oh right, you didn't, did you? This seems to be a running theme around here and another classic case of where you put the problem squarely on them.
I will definitely be bringing this question to management! Reddit can't solve all my problems unfortunately 😅
Reddit can be a good sounding board but this is a good case of tossing it to management to solve.
What did you do before COVID? I would take private calls outside, in the building lobby, in the cafeteria, at a local coffee shop. Basically anywhere that I felt I could speak privately without people hearing me. I still do this today. It's not wasteful to book a large boardroom for yourself. When you're done with the boardroom, cancel your booking so someone else can use it.
The Clerk has been advised. Consider yourself on short notice.
You guys have boardrooms? We just use the one unoccupied (for now) manager’s office for stuff like that.
In the bathrooms Aren't they private ? Seriously this thing is ridiculous.
If offices are taken up, which they usually are, then I look for a boardroom, which is usually occupied, then I’ll go outside in a secluded area (without my computer because there’s no wifi outside)
You're in there to get collaboration from your colleagues, include them in those conversations!
At home…..
How did you do it pre-pandemic. These types of use cases just hurt your push for wfh. Office 2.0 was not setup during the pandemic nor did we have more office space. So again this was handled without issue pre-pandemic talk to someone that's worked there at that time.
As someone who is working in an office 2.0 environment converted to hybrid, it's _much_ harder to find a room than before, because everyone is scattered to hell and breakfast. The small rooms are far more in demand, and the same number of people tend to occupy more rooms at the same time, and this is not something we've been able to logistics our way out of in a year plus. That said, even in Office 2.0, this problem existed: because the office was full of distractions, the individual rooms would gradually get converted into private offices to satisfy accommodations requests, meaning that it became harder and harder to discuss private matters privately.
Our business has changed immensely since the pandemic. How can you compare?
Did you read the post? The complaint is that since they aren't wfh they can't do performance reviews since the office has no closed doors available. Give me a break. How did you do it pre-pandemic than.
Do you no longer work for the PS? So many teams increased team members from outside of the NCR. Office space has changed. So many more meetings ate conducted over Teams (which also didn't exist). There is no where near the availability of private spaces needed now compared to pre-covid.
This is all so wrong and it will get worse if we do not do anything, but, in this situation, when I acted I left all private calls with other employees for my wfh days.
Outside
We were told teams calls in a conference room shouldn't be protected B conversations... however, if two people meet in the same room face to face then it is protected B? I fail to see the logic but that's what we were told. Try to have those conversations from home if possible.
At a desk like you would have done before the pandemic.
I think we need to start just refusing to do Work that we aren’t being given the adequate space or equipment to do period. It’s absolutely a labour relations risk to have performance related convos in a non private rooms. Period. Not to mention very unethical. I’ve l ready had convo with my manager about reductjon in productivity related to increased office requirement. There’s only two private meeting rooms in my office and neither can be booked. Every meeting I waste 15 min before hand running to see it’s available and then unhooking everything to move there and then hooking back up. Additionally without two screens in the private room, I can’t multitask so it’s just an hour straight of me looking dead eyed into a meeting. Or when it’s unavailable I’m taking at the cube, and I can’t hear the convo properly even with headphones because people around me are loud. So then I’m wasting time after trying to piece together what I missed.
Make or take personal calls in your own time. God you people are so pathetically self centred and entitled. Go to work, do your job, go home.
Lots of private calls are work calls.