White-collar workers temporarily enjoyed unprecedented power during the pandemic to decide where and how they worked.
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No CEO is working
And even if they were, it still can’t justify orders of magnitude differences in compensation.
They count golfing and flying to some guy’s private island as work too. I would love to see them keep timesheets.
commercial real estate values are one rationale but I don’t really buy that unless you own the property. Lots of companies that don’t own their property are doing it.
One big rationale behind forcing return to office is that it causes soft layoffs from all of the people who do not want to return to in person working. It’s a great way to downsize without announcing layoffs and taking a share price hit.
A part of that real estate equation is that the municipalities give tax breaks to the companies because they anticipate the extra people in the area getting them more money from gas stations, lunches, etc. Those contracts usually state that the building needs to have a certain occupancy for them to maintain the credit… and now municipalities are coming knocking for their back taxes since buildings haven’t been full.
Thats what’s happening around me, at least
Then I have the perfect solution! Burn the offices! :)
Double dip! Insurance companies hate him!
Sunk cost. No matter if they buy or lease their building, it seems like a waste to have it empty all the time. But that money isn’t coming back whether employees come in or not.
Hold out a couple more years for leases to expire. Office real estate market hasn’t seen its bottom yet.
Well. Getting more and more obvious that employers want to “own” their employees. Just a number in the grid - pro tip: Don’t mention that at work to a manager, ends terribly. Dead man talking.
It’s really there from the beginning: you don’t get paid to do work, you get paid for your time. What happens when you finish all your allotted tasks in 4 hours instead of 8, you think you can just go home?
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I’m actually surprised that no one has blown up one of these ugly corporate campuses overnight yet, just so they can’t be forced back in the office. God knows if there was a way for me to WFH when I was a sous chef, and a chef for 20 years I would have.
Commercial real estate will tank and the economy will too.
The people who are in charge are shit planner’s because they just love money and pay to win at universities.
It doesn’t matter anyway because the environment collapse is cascading.
GLHF.
The piece I love is that commercial real estate near me has not really even decreased since 2019, meaning, commercial real estate greed isn’t abiding by supply and demand and they’re trying to push their losses back on businesses. Workers need to stick it out until lease contracts loop back around and then we’ll see who gets left holding the bag.
Once you have enough money to buy anything, all thats left is power and high scores. That’s why we should eat them.
It’s interesting that we’ve had the tech to work from home for many jobs since probably the 70s or 80s and something like covid finally forced the hand of so many obstinate “leaders”.
Grab power back? I wasn’t aware the proletariat had made any real true legal progress for their rights in the first place, in, well, many decades. Especially not compared to everything we’ve lost in that time:-(
Did you forget to log into your lemmygrad account, comrade?
You’re aware that the working class exist outside of the long gone Soviet Union… right?
(I assume you’re mocking me for supporting workers rights)
Justify middle management headcount, and keep commercial real estate (and all the ancillary businesses like medium/high end center city restaurant chains) investments up
I think this speculative take is so popular because it gets a rise out of people, but it’s much more likely that corporate real estate is just a real big asset on corporate balance sheets, and if everyone panic sells their offices at the same time that market will crash leaving corporations to hold the bag.
I know we want to believe that every senior manager on the planet is fragile masochist who needs to see their employees to feel big and strong and in control, but it’s much more likely that this is related to finances.
They get tax breaks from the city to maintain a minimum occupancy. The cities were waiving those requirements during covid, and now they’re not. It’s that simple. The government and the corpos want their extra money from your pocket and they’re insisting on behavior that will get it for them.
I think it can be both commercial real estate holdings, seeing what Big Tech and other prominent CEOs are doing and following their lead, and a way to cutt staff without official layoffs. (Since many people will quit rather than RTO since they no longer live close.to the office, or because they are close to retirement, or they take another position that is WFH or hybrid. I day this because those of some of the reasons my coworkers have quit rather than come in 2 or 3 days a week.)
Very good point about forcing attrition, my only counter argument (for lack of a better word) would be that it’s more dangerous than traditional layoffs since you don’t get to choose which or exactly how many employees leave, and my guess is that there’s reason to believe you’d lose a large number of senior employees who would have an easier time finding a different remote position.
However the benefits of not having to admit to actual layoffs might outweigh these cons for a lot of companies for sure.
Except that work is more than just tech companies and there are other industries with retention issues and they are still trying to get people back into the office because of coordination and training issues. In some cases, they have been far more aggressive than tech companies in this regard.
Agreed. #1 advice from anyone is “invest in real estate because it’s the only thing they’re not making any more of.” So even if a huge corporation owns nothing and just rents every inch of office space, most likely their investment strategy includes commercial real estate.
Anecdotally, I happen to know of some people who threw a ton of money into local commercial buildings pre-pandemic, because that was the way the investor-class herd was going. These are people that I consider very wealthy, but are small potatoes compared to most of these big corporate CEO types. Now that they own all these buildings, they’re squawking because they can’t rent them.
If the CEO of Zoom is asking for staff to go back to the office, it may not just be a desire to control.
I find that a lot of people who defend full remote tend to speak past issues like coordination and mentoring. You may have some CEO’s seeing that people are doing individually productive work, but the organization as a whole isn’t productive.
Coordination, mentoring, and culture are intentional. The problem is that in an “in person” work place, deficiencies in those areas are very easy to sweep under the rug.
What I will call “churn”, rather the flurry of activity generated by masses of employees coming, going, and doing is frequently mistaken for productivity when instead it’s professional level time wasting. The “ship” is making a lot of bubbles and waves but in reality it’s just doing very wide donuts in the middle of the ocean and not generating any real forward momentum. Hence, “churn.”
I’ve worked for fully remote orgs with excellent culture, fully in person orgs with horrible culture and vice-versa. In my experience, remote work has benefits for employees and the company. It’s saves both money and can (not necessarily does) improve the quality of life of the employees. Not all jobs can be remote. That’s understandable. White collar office jobs don’t usually fall into the “can’t be remote” category.
While remote work can impact the org culture, it usually is more of magnifying glass in that all the existing deficiencies in the orgs culture bubble to the surface and get put in display for everyone to see. CEO’s and other senior execs who are embarrassed by this, incompetent, or just don’t care immediately blame the magnifying glass instead of the root problem. Identifying and dealing with the root problem would require time and effort that they aren’t willing to invest. They’d rather sweep it back under the rug again and continue ignoring it.
And, as is now common, especially in corporate America, the attention span is so short and general state of corporate governance so poor that the only thing that matters is the stock price right at this very moment. No one cares if they’re company is even going to be here in 20 years.
So if you work for a company who’s CEO is whining about the need for “culture” and “water cooler moments” as a means to being people back into the office, rest assured that when that happens, the company will have the same shitty culture it always has, except maybe a little worse (since lots of layoff or constructive dismissals tend to damage the culture and erode trust). Nothing will change except the guys at the top will get back to pretending everything is fine, even if it’s really not.
Coordination, mentoring, and culture are intentional.
They are, but you may have issues with keeping up these with full remote, where people don’t get all the social cues that they would get in an office.
Hell, listen to a lot of the criticism here. Executives and management are trying to “control” workers instead of blindly following individual productivity measurements, even if those individual productivity metrics may not be good for the company.
You may also have cases where the culture role was given to a senior member that no one longer listens to because there isn’t a direct chain of command and the duties aren’t made explicit to everyone.
Full remote can work, but I feel like a lot of companies are finding that it isn’t working as advertised compared to being in office and there isn’t a known way to do so that they can implement. So, they are going back.
My main point was that often the idea that things were working just fine when everyone was “in office” is an illusion and nothing more. Companies that are finding that remote work “isn’t working” don’t know what “working” is or looks like. If they’re blindly calling employees back to the office, then they’ve successfully solved nothing. Other than maybe adding value back to someone’s commercial real estate portfolio. They’ve just convinced themselves and everyone else further up the ladder that everything is fine while squandering vast amounts of talent and institutional knowledge so someone on the top floor doesn’t have to ask or answer the question of why their performance metrics are so bad. Don’t have to worry about performance metrics when butts in seats is the only metric.
There are organizations out there where the HR department is responsible for curating a high quality workforce and establishing a foundation of culture, including practices, that reflect the organizations principals and values as well as path to integrating that culture with the workforce. These organizations often have good leadership that understands how to successfully leverage a large distributed workforce to achieve measurable goals. The focus is on performance and there is a high degree of trust between different levels in the organization.
Then there companies where the workforce is treated like cattle and HR’s role is to just shuffle the paperwork. They don’t value their employees and have a highly rule and/or power driven culture.There is a general distrust between the levels of the org. These types of organizations tend to spend vast amounts of resources simply maintaining the bureaucracy instead of actually getting things done. Management perceives this as “productivity” but here again, it’s just a big ship going in circles in the middle of the ocean.
There are also a lot of organizations that hover somewhere in between those two examples.
But again, the problem isn’t remote work. Remote work works just fine. The problem is poor management, a lack of accountability, culture that fosters distrust and fails to set quantifiable performance goal. An organization like that is certainly prone to accept the bullshit excuse of “RemOtE wOrK iSnT wOrKiNg” rather than trying to find the real source of the problems. Especially since poor leadership is probably problem number one.
The issue may not be “just fine”, but which one is showing better results.
And some of the CEO’s are communicating why they think that full remote is failing. The Zoom CEO cited that Zoom meetings aren’t creating the environment for collaboration that in person meetings are. You can call him a liar, but he is giving a reason why he wants people back in the office.
And I think that this is happening across a lot of companies. It isn’t that working in the office is “good”, but it is apparently giving better results than the other option within their organization.
Why RTO makes sense,
People working at companies like Zoom typically get large sums of RSUs. These RSUs typically start to vest at 1 year and then continue to vest for 2-3 years. By forcing people to go into the office, some of these people will leave, forfeiting any non-vested RSUs. This allows companies to do layoffs without the cost associated.
Salary. These companies will just hire new bodies with lower salaries and higher RSU packages that will vest over longer time with the goal of saving money in the immediate now that debt is no longer cheap.
Training/Mentoring require more effort remotely.
Why RTO doesn’t make sense,
Many companies like Zoom have offices scattered across the country. The tech company I work for, for example, me and 3 colleagues are the only ones near my local office in a team of 80. My manager is in another state and most of my 80+ member team are in other states or countries (follow the sun posture). Any internal meeting I have to have would have to be done over Zoom.
Consultant companies like PWC are doing much more consultant hours virtually instead of traveling to clients because clients don’t want to spend the extra billable for the travel, which is a key indicator that remote work isn’t the detriment that it’s being made out to be.
I mentored remotely just fine even back before the pandemic. There are all kinds of tools for communicating with people.
people have lives far, far beyond the scope of offices and business. people have dreams, desires, goals that matter a trillion times more than ‘mentorship’ or ‘organizational productivity’ ever, ever could.
centering these discussions around business-school shit is being fundamentally blind. the fact that we have to cloak everything in ‘productivity’ language is a sick show of penance.
That’s fine that people have lives outside of work, but employers aren’t paying people to have good lives. An employer isn’t going to self advocate for less productivity.
Show it, the studies have shown that workers are more productive when remote. Evidence would help make things easier to stomach with this insane RTO push. Covid is still kicking around, and the dramatic return to commutes is damaging to our planet.
Coordination comes from competent leadership regardless of location. Any company larger than 10 people needs some way to handle coordination. Async coordination is really under trained and under utilized as a result but works really well with remote workers. You can’t async everything tho so synchronous coordination happens the same way remotely as it does in person, with a meeting and sequential execution. This is basic stuff for people who work with logic often like programmers who have had remote work opportunities for decades now.
Mentoring, you’re worried about that when most companies won’t pay for training or provide time or bandwidth for mentorship. Assuming leadership is onboard with the actual costs and output reductions that come with mentorship, you collaborate mostly the same way IRL as you do remotely: by looking at a screen together. Which is far easier over zoom / teams. Or you ask questions in a call or through chat.
I for one am sick of WFH. There I friggin said it. It’s isolating, lonely, and never stops, because there’s no divide between work and life. I’m sick of working 12 hours and barely even leaving the house. I miss learning from colleagues who are discussing things I’m not super familiar with, looking over their shoulder to learn more. I miss forming real actual bonds with colleagues and becoming friends with them once we’ve quit whatever shithole company we met at.
I know this is the minority opinion but I’m really sick of EVERY SINGLE DISCUSSION being about how management is just trying to control staff. Some of us actually want to be in an office and genuinely dislike WFH. I can make a genuine argument for more efficiency in office too, even including commute. Etc. This is all debatable, it’s not just about commercial real estate values.
WFH crowd isn’t trying to make you WFH
Work from office people are trying to force WFH people in
You’re welcome to your opinion and no one is hating you for it, just leave us introverts alone
This is about orders to return to the office, not options to do so.
You know something that really bugs me? People who demand full remote, but absolutely suck at communicating. If you’re gonna be remote you need to go out of your way to be accessible and communicative. I have found it there is a ton of overlap between people demanding full remote and people who refuse to answer the damn phone when I call. Then they text me back two seconds later, unironically, not realizing they’re demonstrating their shit communication skills. I’ve stopped arguing with staff years ago about turning on their webcam.
It just really pisses me off and would really help the WFH argument if they improved communication skills and attitude.
This something for a manager to actually deal with, not a company-wide RTO mandate. Remediation may end up taking the form of that employee coming into the office anyways, but many people do prefer and work better WFH, and should be allowed to do so.
How do you “actually deal with” staff who are uncommunicative, terrified of phones, shamelessly avoid calls and text you back, demonstrate their inability to function full remote*, push back against RTO with the same intense vitriol you see in this thread, and oh by the way it’s like an entire generation of staff and not just a few folks here and there.
*Even if your work is super technical like mine is, half the job is making sure everyone understands what you did. You can’t just communicate in grunts and sign language then retreat to your cave.
I’m sick of working 12 hours and barely even leaving the house.
If you work from home, no one is forcing you to do that. I leave the house every day to buy groceries or play basketball.
I miss learning from colleagues who are discussing things I’m not super familiar with, looking over their shoulder to learn more.
Oh, you’re one of those annoying people wasting everyone’s time? No wonder it takes you 12 hours to do your own work.
I miss forming real actual bonds with colleagues and becoming friends with them once we’ve quit whatever shithole company we met at.
Have you heard of this amazing invention called a chat room? I think you are upset you can’t bug people all day and call it “networking”. If people want to talk to you, they’ll do it after work too.
While I acknowledge WFH isn’t for everyone. It does take time to create healthy habits around WFH.
For example you mentioned no divide. Imo it is critical to create a “work space” within your home and to isolate work there if possible.
Same with “barely leaving the house”. You have to manually create a habit to get natural sunlight. Be it a walk during your lunch break or before/after work.
As for “forming bonds” with colleagues. I built all of.my relationships entirely remote. It depends on the person but the collaboration and social aspect of remote work is capable of emulating ITO life.
That said, I do agree that “hybrid” is the way to go as it’s a great “one size fits all”. The issue is leadership using a hybrid model that mandates everyone comes into the office. Some people, including myself, just work better and are much happier working from home.
I completely agree with “anchor days” where everyone comes in but that it shouldn’t be around work. Instead it should be collaboration and team social activities.
The thing about hybrid is that if I’m at home while you’re in the office, or vice versa, it’s pointless. Anchor days are good like you said where everyone is in the office or everyone is at home. I disagree that those are good for team social activities. Personally I’ve never really gotten anything out of those forced fun type activities (falling exercises being the textbook cliche example). My field is super technical and complicated with a ton of back and forth. I can’t just shove something in my staff’s face and say here do this. The best training I’ve ever given and received is simply OJT working together on technical shit, sitting next to each other, looking stuff up, problem solving, making decisions, that sort of thing.
Most of my collaboration is through pair programming so I can relate to what you find valuable.
Generally our team activities are after hours or a free lunch, and while not mandatory, it does have good turnout.
I don’t understand your pointlessness argument though. I hear mention of how we’re in the office and in video call for meetings anyway. However I remember that being the case even before COVID. Has your experience been different than this?
Most of our meetings were in meeting rooms already equipped with video conferencing gear. We didn’t always have another office on call in meetings but we often did and it didn’t make a difference whether they were there or not.
Granted, I am in software, so I can’t answer for other types of positions. Most of these articles seem to be about software companies (or fintech).
When we had the initial “office is optional” declaration we had a good portion of people who were still coming in so the in person collaboration aspect was still available. At this phase those more comfortable remained home and it was as if they were just another employee from a satellite office.
I meant there’s no point going to an office if nobody I’m working with is going to be there. I might as well just stay home too.
Just to be clear I’m not sitting here yearning for face to face contact because my colleagues are so gorgeous or to socialize with them. These aren’t “hi how are you” meetings. My field is super technical with tons of back and forth questions, problem solving, and drafts, between me, my staff, other colleagues, clients, whoever. And I’m right smack in the middle conducting the orchestra trying to keep it all together. The in-person time I’m talking about is going over minute technical details with staff/partners/colleagues/whoever to review or because they have questions, ask them ‘prove this, explain that, make a note that this thing over here has been fucked for twenty years,’ etc, or just general problem solving and decision making etc.
These things are infinitely easier when you’re not herding cats trying to get people on a zoom call, it’s fast paced and we’re all juggling thirty things on fire at once, sometimes you gotta catch someone for twenty seconds while they’re taking a piss, that’s just how it is.
So when everyone is in different offices, different time zones, some in office, some at home, it just increases bottlenecks and decreases efficiency. That’s been my experience over the last few years, YMMV
I’m sick of working 12 hours
Longer hours I feel are better suited to an office, at least that way it’s not so draining with others around you
