Autodesk

My colleagues are pleasant and intelligent. Work-life balance is currently good. Global holidays are nice.

We have been working from home since March 2020, and this has been a great success. We have genuinely been as productive at home as in the office; honestly, in my case, my performance has been greater while working from home.

Despite this, management in the Birmingham office seems very keen to push us towards a return to the office early next year. Autodesk has introduced a global company-wide "workplace flexibility" program, which allows most employees to change their working pattern to hybrid-remote. Under hybrid-remote, there is no minimum requirement to be in the office other than specific instances which your management chain deems to be useful for team collaboration.

Organizations have adopted this in varying ways. In the Birmingham office, this has been made clear to mean "2-3 days a week in the office."

This is an issue, as in a recent employee survey, it came out that over half of employees in my organization wish to be in the office no more than 1 day a week. Despite this, management is taking a hard stance on this, rejecting flexible working applications from people who have relocated in the last 18 months and increasingly trying to push the idea of returning to the office on the rest of us.

A lot of employees here are currently waiting in the hope that management will eventually cave in and allow more flexibility, otherwise people will be left with no choice but to leave the company for a role that is more remote-friendly.

If this happens, the company will surely struggle to hire experienced engineers to fill the vacancies. There has already been an ongoing problem with hiring experienced engineers for roles here, and this will only get worse if we're forced to go into the office so often.

The office itself is also in an undesirable location. If the office was in the city center rather than an industrial park in Small Heath, people might feel differently about returning. I would very much advise any prospective employee to check out the surrounding location to the office if they don't get an opportunity to see it during the hiring process.

Pay could be better, especially given the recent tech salary boom.

You've heard this all countless times, but seriously, try and weigh up the risk of losing large numbers of good employees versus keeping the office alive.