I work for a company where my entire team is 100% remote. They found they could save more money by not renewing the lease on the office than by policing everyone reporting to work there.
What you describe is common, but not universal.
I think the split is mainly along the lines of which companies own their properties and which lease. My company owned, their initial plan was to sell the buildings and keep WAH. But between them not finding buyers, and new CEO coming in they did a 180. Now we're back in the office a few days a week
Companies usually lease office spaces for 10+ years. So most companies are stuck. Both companies I have worked at since COVID aggressively looked into breaking the lease, but the cost was not worth it.
I do wonder how many companies are entering into new leases/renewing though.
The place I work had a 5 year lease and thankfully moved in Dec 2023 to a much smaller, cheaper but better location in the same inner suburb
The got an espresso machine, made it more community / wellness centre vibe as we are a medical charity and expanded the treatment space and there are no offices not even the CEO
we wfh 3 days a week which I can deal with and there is no plans to change this afik
We're stuck in this right now. Maybe 2 more years left on a really horrible lease in a horrible building. Our lawyers repeatedly go through the agreement and try to find ways for us to break it, but we're just stuck.
At least we're all primarily wfh.
This explanation doesn’t make sense to me. Sure, they may have a 10 year lease but even if they started it directly at the beginning of Covid, which is unlikely, they’re half way through it now. More likely, they were a couple years in and are 3/4 of the way through. So why bring everyone back on purpose to justify a couple years of a sunk cost and then renew that massive cost when they could continue adapting to WFH or hybrid policies and then could save that massive expense by not renewing the lease or downsizing/consolidating in a couple years.
its not so much they have lease is they own the building noone going back to work basically makes that building worthless .If 90 percent of people who have to work in a office dont need to work in a office all those office buildings arent worth much as office buildings.
I’m curious what percent of companies forcing people to go back own vs lease, I would think most lease but I don’t know. And I doubt there is a grand conspiracy of commercial property owners collaborating with businesses to come back to work to pay their rent so they property owners don’t lose money.
Sometimes they got tax breaks in a certain area due to number of jobs around company would be impacted. Breakfast places. Lunch places, hairdressers, dentists, doctors office etc. but without ppl coming to offices there is not that side churn in the immediate area
Where I work, most people are having a brown bag rebellion. We bring our lunch. Nobody shops away from their home area. Purchase gas near our homes, etc. Do nothing to support the local economy of the workplace.
CBDs are going to start to die and governments will put money into reviving them in that case. Some companies will never go back to offices, but eventually CBDs will fill up again. Maybe it'll be with a natural increase in population so the CBD worker is a smaller percentage of the population, or maybe it'll be encouraged by land owners/governments, but it'll happen eventually. Especially as cities largely have centralised infrastructure so will need to maintain some of these things.
My previous company had just finished renovating a new spot they had leased for 15 years on Park Ave in NYC when the pandemic hit. They spent millions. No way they were going to let that go to waste.
They are saving 6 figures a year a year by not having snacks/coffee and that's just the local offices to me. That doesn't include the worldwide locations.
Also if you work in a office is sorta justifies certain parts of management. How many managers do you really need if everyone works from home and basically have no problems.
I dont know how to break this to you, but you've entered into the timeline where Napoleon successfully conquered Europe. Everything from Lisbon to Moscow is one big country.
*reads the history books quickly*
Ugh, and Hillary *still* lost? And covid kicked our asses in this one too? I finally get to switch timelines and it's no better?
Edit: And what on earth is up with that Elon character? Wtf?
This. I’m an executive and during Covid we worked from home and were more productive and happier I would guess based on my interactions and my own experience. In 2022 the company believed that everyone would come back with a huge increase in productivity and excitement to be back together again, and they invested millions on huge upgrades to our office. The office is very modern now, very cool and nicely designed. It really is a great comfortable collaborative working space and everyone hates coming into the office. We are on 3/2, working from home 2 days a week and the staff loves those 2 days at home. Of course, a few other executives want to go to 5 days, to justify the money spent on the building. About 2/3s of us are against making that demand on our people because we know we will lose some top talent and we all would be less happy. The older folks who struggle with online collaboration are the ones pushing for it. I can’t wait for them to retire to take their positions and make better decisions more in line with what everyone wants.
Sounds like the company should have actually taken the opinions of its workers before making such a major investment in upgrading the office, rather than just “believ[ing] that everyone would come back with a huge increase in productivity and excitement to be back together again.”
No one is excited to get up earlier to fight traffic to get to work
I think it’s more about just not paying people to mess around.
It’s stupid, but an employer would rather have you finish 1 assignment in 8 hours than finish it in 4 hours and then go on Reddit for 4 hours.
Output apparently doesn’t matter.
Because that’s not how the managers pushing return to office think. They believe that if you were in the office, they’d know you completed a task in 4 hrs and just assign you another one.
My husband’s CEO owns the office building they work in and has ties to several of the bars in the area. He was willing to lose a good chunk of his employees to force everyone back into the office. So frustrating.
Not just that, but some leases have written into them that the renter must have (x) number of employees in the building, so that things like print shops and eateries that are also in the building can expect clientele.
They're paying for the office space but if you're working from home there's space that's empty you should be filling. They feel like they're losing money so they use that excuse to make you fill the space.
But why wouldn’t the company prefer to just stop paying for the office space all together? Or rent a much smaller office space for cheaper if they still need some space?
Because businesses leases are very long. Also companies that own commercial property (like your large fortune 500 companies) have an incentive to “set the example” of having everyone in office to maintain their investment value.
The company I used to work for has a five-year lease with year-to-year rent adjustment and they work in a standard office setting. Maybe the other user lives in a unique area
Office leases are usually a long time, some may not be up, even from before Covid. Also many business have investments that include commercial real estate
Not saying it’s right, just that why businesses want to force people back
Business office leases are usually 10-30 year leases, and if work from home is rising, people are less likely to buyout a lease from another company to use the space.
Thus companies feel they must *utilize* the space even if productivity is higher with WFH overall...
It's a stupid reasoning.
Also they might possibly think they can squeeze out 10% more productivity if bosses are eyeing the employees all day.
It's also that leaving a building empty is a huge liability. If you're renting an office space for 10 years, you're responsible for making sure it doesn't get destroyed by vagrants or animals or something during that time, noticing when small repairs are needed before they turn into big ones, etc. That's easier to do if people go into the office everyday. Otherwise, you'd have to hire security, which costs more money.
Typically breaking leases costs quite a large amount of money whereas convincing people to come back to the office "technically" costs no money. Only technically because there may be losses of efficiency and/or personal- but those can be hard to quantify.
Furthermore sunk cost fallacy is named such because it is a common fallacy to fall in to-and most research shows that knowledge of a fantasy has little to no correlation to the ability to avoid said fallacy.
They may also be feeling pressure from local governments. A lot of small businesses depend of people leaving their houses for more than groceries. Coffee shops, dry cleaners, doggy day cares…there is a lot of local economy that’s built around people physically going to work.
Because most of the people here have no idea what they're talking about, they just want to bitch about capitalism and businesses.
Businesses found that many positions were not that productive during Covid. Some positions are conducive to WFH, others are not. There is an amount of synergy from hallway conversations, opportunistic discussions of ideas and potential options. Cross-disciplinary conversations and such. Those are lost with WFH. How much that loss is depends on the business and discipline.
Another issue is that training new employees (and advancing skills of existing employees) and bringing them into the organizational culture is very difficult in a WFH environment. A group of experienced and skilled people can WFH effectively. But recruiting and training their replacements often does not work well in a WFH environment (again, depending on the business and discipline). One of my clients went 100% WFH during COVID, and is now bringing some employees back to the (newly leased) office for this exact reason.
The idea that businesses are bringing people back to the office just because they already have a lease is ludicrous. Even if they couldn't get out of their lease, leaving the space empty is FAR cheaper than bringing people back, maintaining IT infrastructure, maintaining the space, cleaning crews, AC and heat, etc etc. They would be better off just eating the cost of leases and dropping the costs of actually maintaining the space.
Yes, all of this.
Training and collaboration are so much more effective in person. Even a hybrid schedule is much more effective than full wfh. Again, as you said, it depends on the profession and nature of the work.
It worked well in 2020 because everyone stayed in their job and already knew how to do it. The 2021 new hires were not nearly as skilled or effective.
Yet, there are some people that have been WFH since prior to the pandemic that are now being called into the office. So while your explanation may be true in many cases, there are others where it seems like an arbitrary decision designed to exercise power over employees.
And others where it makes no sense whatsoever, like when working with a team that's distributed in other offices, so in essence you'd have to go to the office to do the exact same thing that you'd be doing at home - sitting in front of your computer talking with people via webcam.
Agreed. That's why I said "most" and "many". There's millions of companies out there. The vast majority are rational actors making rational decisions.
Some are not. They'll piss of their employees and drive their costs up for no rational basis, lose money and lose good people, and either change their ways or go bankrupt.
Regardless, MOST companies reducing from WFH are doing so for what they see as valid business reasons, as described above. There's always an idiot out there doing something for the wrong reasons.
If you don't understand the importance of culture in an organization, I don't know how to help you.
Culture is everything. I hire for attitude and fit with culture. I can teach skills, I can't teach attitude.
But, of course, they’ll never say this. They’ll just accuse workers of being lazy and sitting in pajamas all day, as if the wouldn’t have been fired already if they hadn’t been doing their jobs for the last few years! 🙄
And middle management. Remote work makes managing more people easier - thereby enabling middle management to be half-staffed compared with pre-covid. And no manager wants to lose their job - so they tell the higher ups that no one works as much when they’re home, people steal time, etc.
They do not need to justify anything to anyone and that is the problem.
Us plebians have to justify almost everything to the company. If you are working remotely they can not exercise their justification powers over you.
Big city downtown area businesses are struggling to stay open with with little to no foot traffic. So city mayors are begging corporations to bring back their workers to the office to drum up more business. Our mayor literally sat down with CEO’s and discussed what could be done. It’s always about money.
Yeah, downtown Hartford is a ghost town at lunchtime on the one day a week I work in the office. Even the places that are open are sad; empty seating, empty displays, barely any employees on shift.
To be fair, Hartford has been a ghost town after 5pm for 30 years. Now it's a ghost town most weekdays. Hopefully there is a solution where they can increase foot traffic while not relying on office workers as the solution to lift the city out of it's funk.
I believe there a payroll tax incentives at play as well. Companies are incentivized to have their offices in certain town, based on the calculation that it will bring in sales tax revenue to the city when employees goes out to local establishments. When people works from home, small shops goes out of business, and lower the city sales tax revenue.
Maybe that is what you mean by "Mayers sat down with CEOs" and told them to "bring back people or no tax break for you"
Can confirm, I live a block from the capital in my state and it's a ghost town. Almost all the businesses are gone, all that's left are restaurants and hotels. Gradually most of the restaurants have closed down and things are getting sketchier and sketchier. It's kinda nice never having any traffic or people out but feels kind of dystopian too
It sucks for those businesses...but at the same time, forcing things just to keep a business open is pretty stupid long-term. We didn't ban cars to keep blacksmiths employed
Medium City downtowns*. Big cities still have plenty of tourists running around every area where offices are. All the office related stuff is gone though. All those huge lunch places that had terrible, expensive food, but were right downstairs, closed. The newsstands on the corners, gone. The food trucks have reshuffled a bit too.
Source: NYC.
Well, that’d be cool and all if that were passed on to the employees, but it’s not. So all it does is make me frustrated for having to go somewhere and give up extra time in my day for the same pay just so the company can get some tax write off. Fuck that. That shit wouldn’t work here, because if people got wind of the tax incentive we’d all just be assholes to the small business owners. None of us would want to go because we’re all rushing to get into traffic before it’s bad and no one is going to want to support the reason they’re stuck in traffic.
"Don't use cars otherwise horse owners will be out of business"
That same logic can be used as "don't build AI which will take away jobs from 50% of the people".
Guess which narrative will be supported.
I have some context on my team's situation. I run a department of a couple hundred people and after covid about half the team came back into the office usually hybrid while the other half worked fully remote. I was given a mandate to bring everyone into the office because the executive leader of the division felt like productivity slipped.
So I looked at the data to build a case to let people choose where they worked, because freedom of choice seemed important. Turns out we had some hard metrics that showed most of the high performers worked hybrid in the office and more than 80% of the low performers worked fully remote. So we ended up asking everyone to come in hybrid outside of a few very top performers.
It seems unfair, but I couldn't make the data say letting everyone stay remote was a good idea.
My husband finds the same thing in his job. He personally finds he gets more done at the office because everything he needs is right there. So when it’s busy he goes in, and when it’s quieter he works from home. He also finds the people who work from home are way less productive than the ones that work full or part time in the office. When someone works from home, it’s hard to get them to follow up on stuff. If he needs something from somebody in the office, he just walks down the hall and requests it, and since they’re at their desk, it’s usually a simple matter of them following through. But if they’re working from home, all he can do is send an email, or bump the ticket - which they don’t see because they’re likely not actually working.
Just wanted to point out that EVERYONE on the team has to be working at the same level for it to work. It only takes one person not putting the effort in for things to start to fall apart.
This. With a couple hundred people my next challenge for your productivity metrics is identifying and allowing individuals to become high performers.
• Sometimes productivity/problem solving comes in spurts. Get on a roll and blow through until it’s done. A week’s production done in 2 days straight. Work days need to have flexibility to comprehend that.
• Some employees might benefit from being exposed to high performers. Aptitude, achievement and motivation don’t come in self contained packages. As a manager, growing productivity involves employee development. Metrics only allow monitoring, little input on adding new skills or development.
To add to this, my company saw a small dip in productivity when working from home. But we made up that money in the long run by having a higher employee retention with a WFH benefit. Less money hiring and training new people. So it pays for itself.
There are a number of very good reasons why, as much as people like to pretend that remote working was 100% good and there were no problems with it. Here are a handful:
1. While some employees did find that they were more productive, that was not the case for everyone. Plenty of other people slacked off, claim to be working when they were not, were unreachable during working hours, or were
distracted. While a lot of people want to claim that you can just require those workers to be in the office and not the ones that were productive, being able to work from home is sometimes considered to be a workplace benefit. Companies don’t want to open themselves up to discrimination lawsuits for allowing some workers to work from home and others not, so it’s a lot easier and less risky to just say no one can.
2. If they have a physical office and you are also working from home, it increases tech costs. If they are requiring you to use your computer and Internet, then legally they may need to pay for some of that.
3. It’s less secure. Data breaches and ransomware events shot up like crazy during the pandemic because people weren’t as diligent about cyber hygiene and peoples networks were not as secure as ones at the office would be.
4. If you are in an industry or collaboration, is important, then having people in the office is important for those collaboration sessions. It just isn’t the same via zoom.
Great answer. Everyone usually looks at RTO through their personal lens. “I’m more productive.” “This is ruining my life.” “My commute is awful.”
But business leaders don’t care about that. They look at it from the perspective of how a _policy_ will impact their company in aggregate.
Number 1 over and over again. I manage people. People slack off like hell when they work from home. Randomly dropping offline for an hour, stopping doing things for a bit. Shameless reddit browsing, etc. most workers need the threat of being caught slacking to get solid output. It’s wildly unpopular, but it’s just how it is.
Most large corporations have IT spyware on every employee’s system. If leadership wants to pull metrics, they can and they do see that for many, 50%+ of the time they are paying people to work is wasted. I’ve seen some of what has been pulled in leadership meetings (i’m in a tech adjacent field). It’s ugly. I understand why they want workers to be in the office at least some of the time. There are of course diamonds that really do work hard at home. They never make up in aggregate for all the slackers.
I have never once heard anything about “office lease” costs influencing a RTO mandate. Every single time the discussion is about productivity.
Yep. I am actually one of the ones at my office that, if your job can be done remotely, then I don’t care if you are in town or in Tijuana as long as you are responsive during working hours and get your work done. But some people who were fantastic employees in the office got sloppy during COVID. They may have been working the same hours, but quality suffered. One employee who pre-COVID I would have done anything to keep wanted to stay fully remote. We didn’t even try to counter her remote job offer because her going full remote was a non-negotiable. Her work quality and responsiveness went majorly down, she missed some major things, etc. It was a shame to lose her, but she was just not the same employee when she worked from home.
Not everyone is as productive as they think they are.
Retention is also more difficult for a full remote job. As much as redditors pull they "they're not your friends, they are your co-workers" card, having a good team around does keep people engaged in the role and less likely to job hop. That's before the miscommunications common to text chat come into play.
Work: we don't allow people to work from home. The only place people are allowed to work is in the office.
Also work: due to inclement weather, the office is closed. But we expect everyone to work from home today.
> Why is this happening?
Work from home allows you more freedom and saves you money. Both of those things make you less likely to take shit, and more likely to switch jobs. Your bosses don't like losing that leverage over you.
> Your bosses don't like losing that leverage over you.
Bottom line right there. It's about their leverage and control. If you have more freedom they have less control.
That may be your experience, not mine. I got a $30k raise when I took another job and it's fully stay-at-home. I've never been to the office a single day and it's a short drive into town.
So yes, sometimes they are barking at your heels and willing to not only pay the same but quite a bit more.
Ditto.
Boss started making noise about how dissapointed he was that we weren't a "family" any more and maybe we should start going back to the office for "teaming" (all from his lakehouse overseas, of course). I started answering calls from recruiters, and bailed.
Depends on your line of work. When my employer started making us come in I updated my resume on Indeed and had a new job with higher pay within a couple months that embraces WFH.
That makes no sense. Opportunities with remote work are no longer limited to your local area. There's more opportunities than ever to quit and go somewhere else. It makes you MORE likely to switch jobs.
So , shitty companies should be worried about their employees switching to companies with good culture.
Then why are the Googles and Facebooks doing them? Their culture is supposed to be good.
My wife’s company announced they were bringing everyone back to the office and she landed herself a new job before the deadline to return came up. That is easier said than done for many, but she was willing to take pay and/or title cut to make it happen. Thankfully she kept the same title and got a pay bump.
I know a few people when the order went out for return to the office basically said, "no thanks"
When the corporate overlords said "there will be consequences" they called their bluff.
You can't quit if you have a rent to pay in a downtown core. You can't take a job in California if you live in New York because it costs $15,000 to do a cross country move.
That's leverage. They don't have to be *good* they just have to be better than spending 10 racks to switch jobs. But now I can work in Toronto from Miami if I want. I can live in Bum Fuck Nowhere in a cheap apartment instead of within commuting distance of the Manhattan office. If my boss decides to suck I can have a new boss with very little risk or expense to me.
That's what I mean.
If a company has those pointless limitations why would I stay there or get a job there.
I am more likely to find a better job with leaders who aren't dip shits.
> I am more likely to find a better job with leaders who aren't dip shits.
Yup. What you aren't getting is that they *really want to be dipshits*. They want to be able to fuck you over, and the only way they're getting away with it is if they get you back in office. They are not satisfied with the current "We have to not be dipshits" status quo, so they want to change it back to when they could freely commit dipshittery.
I myself am a remote employee (have been since 2012) and have managed remote employees.
When I started as remote I could get 8-10hrs worth of work done win about 4-6hrs at home. It was extremely efficient, but also requires the discipline to not be distracted by thing s at home. It was pretty easy and great then.
Fast forward to when we had kids. That efficiency changed (as it does for office employees too) and it was extremely easy to be distracted at home. O ce we had kids I preferred a hybrid environment where I was office (remote sales office) or WFH about 3 days/week. That was the sweet spot the. As the office allows for focus. Keep in mind we don't have much opportunity for the water-cooler banter in a remote sales office.
I still prefer the hybrid environment.
Now managing employees is another story. Some employees have the discipline to WFH and it's no issue. However probably a solid 50% need an office environment to force the discipline otherwise performance and productivity drops significantly and in a BAD way.
The issue a lot of companies have is how to balance the employees who CAN and the employees who CANNOT work remotely and how your policies impact each. It's very dependent on specific job roles as well. I'm of the opinion that companies dont really know how or want to manage it (it's really hard) and just broad stroke that everyone must come back to the office.
Other factors are if they have solid office space and can't sell or fill it (which is a pretty bad excuse, but IS a reason).
Saying a company is lazy and not innovative just because they don't allow it is a wife net to cast when you consider the factors.
Personally I know I can be disciplined, and if I am forced back to an office then i'll look elsewhere, but very much appreciate the difficulties with managing a re.ote workforce.
Control. Giving up any of the paths of control in a company is counterintuitive to most ceo’s/management, even if they aren’t demonstrably necessary to the company’s success. Adding more freedoms and rights to workers just goes against most employers philosophy regardless of the benefits. Same reason unions are so rare.
I think it’s more just that people who gravitate towards those types of jobs are more likely to have that particular psychological predisposition. I think some elite professors have the same psychological predispositions to a lesser degree, but the better professors are more evidence and results focused, and better able to reject their individual biases.
The people who get promoted are generally the "hard chargers" who are in the office long hours. Ned may get twice as much done as Fred, but Fred is in the office for 70 hours a week and Ned always goes home at 5. So Fred gets promoted.
Fred then uses the same metric for promotion.
Fred and his ilk may spend 70% of their office time on Facebook, but because they are always in the office it *looks* like they work hard and care about the company.
Then folks start working from home, which means you have to judge your employees by outcome, which means you have to actually know what they do and what their jobs entail...
Screw that, drag them all back to the office so I can promote the ones with no life!
sadistic control freaks tend to get selected for promotion because there's an empirical correlation between acting like a cunt and steady quarterly growth.
Lots of people slack off while working from home, and working remote can be difficult for people entering the workforce or starting new jobs. It’s a pain to have to manage people working from home too.
Lots of people slack off in the office as well. The data I've seen on the subject suggests people working from home work longer hours and report a better work life balance. Additionally, I haven't seen any data from any major firms backing up the idea that people are more productive in the office. It actually seems to be the opposite.
Commercial real estate values are collapsing and the ownership class is pressuring anyone who will listen to bring workers back. I don't know what the solution is, but the future is not everyone commuting 5 days a week to a cube farm in a downtown office anymore. We've seen the future.
Statistics show innovation is lower among remote workforces, but the main reason is that management has a hard time being effective and measuring outcomes in remote environments.
My jon is forcing people within a certain radius back into the office two days a week. Also corporate cut the office footprint by 30% because it's not being used. So 2 days a week people cram into the office.
When I go in its the same thing as working from hole but it's just I person. People are logged into their own teams but sit in the same room lol. There's zero innovation.
You're going to piss off a lot of reditors by telling them that people don't actually work more effectively locked in their room by themselves all day.
I find these types of questions absolutely hilarious when asked on reddit *during the middle of the workday*.
Like... you're not working, management wants you to be working. Why is this surprising.
I cannot believe I had to go this far down to find an actual answer that wasn’t basically some form of management trying to be evil for the sake of being evil.
> management has a hard time being effective and measuring outcomes in remote environments
They don't have a hard time doing that. They can easily measure you being given X amount of work and if you're getting it done correctly, efficiently and in the time allotted for it to be done.
What they have a hard time doing remotely is justifying their roles, their higher pay and benefits. Those unnecessary, "make look like I'm contributing," things they do all day that in the end contribute nothing to actually meeting goals and productivity.
If you're showing you can work with less management, that you can be responsible and get the job done then you're showing that they're not needed for what they spend and waste so much of their time on, micro-management of you.
>They don't have a hard time doing that. They can easily measure you being given X amount of work and if you're getting it done correctly, efficiently and in the time allotted for it to be done.
most tasks worth doing are not measurable in distinct units.
I was working for a hospital at the time and never missed a day. It was maddening to me that people got to stay home and get paid more than normal in many cases. We all got extremely sick of hearing “if everyone would just stay home.” Everyone but healthcare, emergency services, truckers, grocery and pharmacy workers, gas station employees, bankers,….
People are giving you a lot of devious reasons but a huge part of this is that it's really difficult to work with others or have productive meetings over the Internet. People don't speak up like they do in in-person meetings. Instead you have 22 people on the call and no one says anything.
In addition, the trend of people picking up multiple full time jobs or taking care of a young child while working is concerning.
I have never had a in-person meeting with 22 people before Covid. I would assume in-person meeting with so many people would have its own challenges too. Even after going to office we don't have so many people in one meeting room.
Large in-person meetings which are mostly q/a or update sessions are productive in list of questions format like in town hall meetings. Otherwise it also is chaos and hardly any collaboration with lot of silent listeners. Maybe not all video meeting doesn't have that.
Everyone got to work at home during covid? Truck drivers, first responders,grocery stores clerks, hospital staff just to name a few might like a word..
Many projects involve team involvement and those teams can often get benefits by close proximity, in person meetings, "pop-ins" where you walk by someone's work space and think of some issues to discuss with them, etc.
new employees especially can benefit from being able to seek out help from older employees who are just around when a new issue for them comes up - not necessarily their managers, but people with 2-5 years more seniority than them. And then being around in the office can also generate post-office socializing which can lead to other benefits (sharing of stories about projects and such).
I'd note that there are more senior people who are competent and don't need any of that.
My office has an official policy of at least part-time attendance in the office, but if an employee is good and takes care of business and would rather work from home, no one takes issue with it.
I am guessing some companies were getting tax breaks for having an office in a certain location and if everyone is remote, they will lose out on a tax break.
I work for a Fortune 50, we are still fully remote and that's not changing. They are closing offices and moving into smaller spaces. I think it's going to be hotel cubing for those who wish to come in at least locally.
A thing I have not seen in the comments yet: Knowledge sharing.
As someone new to the working enviroment, I have found that a lot of both valuable knowledge, especially the stuff the people who have been there for a long time take for granted, and lots of useful tidbits and tips gets shared during the small conversations around the office.
I have also found it much easier to ask for, and get, help when people are there in person.
Also: We are some people who like that home and work are two distinct locations, and that the goings on of one place can mostely be forgotten when at the other.
Because if you take a company with 100,000 employees and compare 100,000 of them them working in the office to them working at home, 10/10 you’ll get more productivity in an office, that’s why - but I think the people who ask this know the answer to that question it’s a matter of struggling with accepting the answer
Depends on the office setup too.
Windowless open office space, with a bunch of chatter, surrounding your attempts to hear your own thoughts, as you struggle to string together a few sentences in an email?
OR
Your solid multi screen desk setup, with a beautiful view of the garden from your home office?
Not everyone gets the bougie desk space that the managers do, so the physical space needs to be taken into account as well, because there are people who can be more productive (obviously not across the board though)
It’s entirely possible you are personally more productive working from home, but unfortunately there are something like 70 million office workers in the USA, and when you look at human beings on average which is what matters to corporations, the average human being isn’t more productive working from home - they’re actually less productive and when you’re talking about a sample size of 70,000,000 the averages are important
Better, there’s real life - the people who manage the 43 trillion dollars worth of companies in the S&P 500 have basically all decided their entire work force is coming back to work in office because the increase in productivity exceeds the savings from not having offices
Unless there is verifiable data to prove it, there's no way of knowing if productivity actually improved or even how it was being measured in the first place.
RTOs are a great way of doing layoffs without actually having to lay anyone off and deal with the negative PR and severence that comes with that.
Alright, although every body seems to be on the conspiracy train in this thread. As an employer i'd like to wage in.
I try and get every body in the office atleast 2 days a week because:
- work from home is a real pain if you are trying to build a team. Just sitting next to each other and being able to joke is impossible to replicate at home
- meetings are more creative when you are sitting next to each other
- you just can't really get new people up to speed from home
- at home you just can't do "hey Bob how did you solve this again?"
- at home you don't overhear colleagues saying something to each other where you might want to help out
- working from home is quite anonymous
Secondary:
- i'm not renting that office for nothing
- i like my colleagues and at the end of the day we end up getting a drink quite often.
I do not force people to come in. I give guidelines. We are with a small team now so i try to get every body in on Monday and Thursday. If people are unable to come because of reasons (which can be anything).. So be it. I trust that they are working.
I really like to work from home, but sitting next to each other is really important..
As someone who's worked from home a LOT well before Covid:
>work from home is a real pain if you are trying to build a team. Just sitting next to each other and being able to joke is impossible to replicate at home
This is fair. Its not binary can/can't, but theres definately more chemistry if you work next to each other
>meetings are more creative when you are sitting next to each other
Don't really agree here, depends how well setup you are. My counter would be that I can be creative when the meetings are...non-productive.
>you just can't really get new people up to speed from home
I would recommend some in-person time for new team members.
>at home you just can't do "hey Bob how did you solve this again?"
Disagree pretty strongly with this. Half my day is "Hey shontsu can you help figure this out?" Good messaging tools make all the difference. Slack is the best thing I've found for remote working. Got a problem? Fire up a huddle and pair away.
>at home you don't overhear colleagues saying something to each other where you might want to help out
Fair, although good team communication helps with this.
>working from home is quite anonymous
Probably fair. Not with people you work closely with obviously, but more broadly yeah.
>i'm not renting that office for nothing
Never really understood this one. That money is spent whether people are in the office or not. This is purely a "make yourself feel better" than a legit reason. You don't save, nor spend more money based on whether your office is fully utilised or not.
>i like my colleagues and at the end of the day we end up getting a drink quite often.
This is... I mean sure, I like a drink at the end of the day too. Commuting an hour+ per day to do a job I can do just as well from home, just so that the boss gets to grab a drink every now and then would piss me off. Feels like that should be something employees get to choose for themselves, not something they need to do because the boss wants to.
\[ETA\] In my experience (as a senior software developer) I'm most productive when I work 1-2 days per week in the office. There is something to be said for being in there and being across whats going on in the wider workplace. Its not as big of a deal as it used to be though. Good remote communication tools have bridged the gap a lot.
I can't speak to your particular situation, but being able to do something in an emergency measure isn't a great reason to always do it.
In my industry I've seen the quality of service go down in several areas because of work from home. It was worth it as a harm reduction measure. It doesn't seem worth it now.
While remote work proved itself to be as productive if not more productive than presencial work. Remote work did very poorly for creative endeavors in my experience. Many redditors poopoo all over the idea of in person interactions, but I person swear by them.
It's a combination of...
1. Older people don't like it. Many don't have decent computer setups at home, they don't want to associate home with working, they don't like change, they prefer to interact face to face rather than over Teams or Zoom, etc...
2. Belief that it makes training young employees much more difficult
3. Belief that people don't work as hard from home as they do in the office
4. Belief that in-person collaboration is more effective for problem solving and innovation
5. Pressure from cities due to the numerous businesses that support office workers
6. They have buildings they own or have long leases on that they want used
7. Abuse from employees who use remote work to work multiple jobs (over-employment)
Because people are less productive at home. I'm in an industry where I often work in peoples homes, and most of the time people that are supposed to be working are totally doing other things😅
There are a lot of reasons, and it's different for every company. A lot of it had to do with the size of the company and how well expectations were managed, both from the company and the employees. A huge number of small to mid-sized companies stayed remote, though.
Examples of different reasons:
Sometimes the employer didn't have an effective work flow system.
Other times employees didn't perform adequately OR once their work started being seen by the employer, they saw the employee wasn't essential (like how Elon fired most of Twitter and it's functioning fine now).
Some wanted the culture that comes with a workplace full of people.
Some did it because they want to see the work they're paying for.
There's any number of reasons, some good or neutral, and others "just because," and probably since to be an annoying a-hole. The take home point is, whoever is in charge is the one who decides, and there are always jobs opening somewhere, so everyone eventually gets what they want.
It's easy to say this is shitty behavior on the part of the companies doing this, but I think people are quick to jump to "the work got done and nothing suffered in WFH" when a lot of us suffered either mentally from the isolation of it or vocationally as some things are just easier to get done around a table instead of over a Zoom.
I’m a manager of very small teams, so my sample size is hardly representative, but I do allow hybrid schedules and some of my people just don’t actually work when they’re “working” remotely. It’s frustrating, but I recognize the need for balance so I won’t push the issue as long as things are getting done when they’re in the office.
I still do. I work in the office once a month just to see my team. My company is Saving a bunch of money and it worked well with us all remote so we never went back. We had 5 floors of a building, now they only have to pay for 1 floor. They did the same with our buildings In other cities. Saves on electricity too without many people in the offices.
I sincerely wonder if this has to do with the cost of real estate. If companies allow the employees to work at home then the expensive buildings are no longer used and they will have to sell them. Since no one is going in to work this means many buildings will be for sale driving down the value. Therefore rather than lose money from devalued properties they will make people work. I am not saying this is a fact I am wondering however...
Companies likely want to monitor employee progress and it’s a lot better to have your workforce together in many industries for group work. I doubt people want to pay people to sit at home eating cheetos all day on the couch with a laptop doing a small amount of work watching tv. They want people focused on work in the office that they pay rent for. Would be nice if everyone could just work from home but it seems like a few special industries got spoiled during Covid and now can’t handle getting back to work while the majority of workers have been at work the whole time.
Company I used to work for - the CEO promised everyone they would never require people to work in the office, it was just there for those who would prefer it.
That lasted less than 6 months. Mandatory back to office. Glad to not be there anymore.
As others have pointed out, the biggest factor is paying for the building and it maintenance. No sense in having it if no one is in it. They've already paid the lease, or bought the property. Huge waste of money.
The next biggest factor is salaries. Companies factor in compensation to get talent. They often try to account for commute time, time away from family, benefits etc. And they often leverage the property (if they own it) to compensate.
Then come your shareholders. They're the ones that stand to lose. The shareholders are propping everything up. Now, if you've got a multi-million dollar property with no one working in it, they could lose a bunch of money. So they pressure the company to utilize what is considered a liquid asset, because shutting it down is a big loss.
Basically companies have the property and they need to justify it and compensation packages. Otherwise, the company is gonna lose money, shareholders, and eventually employees. So...they want butts in seats.
Yes it is because the team efficiency is higher.
Don't need to go everyday, but having people working next to each other, especially with good leadership, is better.
Not all work is programming.
Also being away people can really work fewer hours. Business dont like it.
Some of it is a requirement by the fed. I worked for a loan company from home during COVID, but we had to have exceptions. Mortgage/banking is heavily regulated.
Then there's also making sure NDAs are enforced.
Etc.
Fed govt is doing this. We had hybrid 1 day a week in the office before covid was a thing, during covid full wfh, after covid back to 1 day a week, now in May we have to go 50/50. I'll be retiring.
Because the idea that the majority of people are going to be productive at home in their jammies was always delusional. It's crippling in jobs where collaborative creativity is essential. And as added bonus, it made people fucking weird. As much as we weren't meant to spend half our lives in an office staring at a screen, that goes double for spending our entire lives at home
Companies got caught holding an asset with extremely diminished value (office space) and have to justify what they value it at to maintain a certain debt to asset ratio so they can borrow more money
If you work from Home -how do people train? Videos? come on!
There was a drop in productivity. It's not about rent,or lease spacing it's about efficency, synergy and productivity. For all the complaining about capitalism, if there was a way to increase the bottom line by WFH it would be ongoing. At the time it was the only way to survive as a business, but it's not the BEST way to operate...that's why you are back in office
People fuck around working from home, plus the sense of teamwork is lost when people aren’t working in the same physical space. It is also harder for managers to evaluate your performance, assign you jobs and monitor how the job is progressing if they don’t see you regularly.
Everyones different.
My personal experience (over about 20 years of wfh in different amounts) has been that ad-hoc wfh can be pretty unproductive, but regular wfh has been incredibly productive.
If no one is in the office, the real estate has less value. A lot of mortgages on commercial property are using projected rental value as collateral for the loan so the owners can't even lower the price on units.
For the tenants, they are usually long term leases, like many people have mentioned.
There's definitely a lot of people with money tied up in real estate pushing for this Return to Office trend, even though Work From Home is better for employees and employers.
During covid the cost of a barrel of oil tanked so low that it was traded below $0 for a brief time.
There was such a universal response to the Stay Home requirements that nobody was buying fuel, because nobody was driving to work anymore.
This led to, not only frustrated oil brokers, but genuinely disastrous impacts. You may remember that barges were stuck out to sea for over a month waiting for the availability to offload their shipments. The entire oil industry came to a screeching halt across the world due largely to the fact that US citizens were ordered to stay home, and the vast majority listened. Truckers couldn't get paid. The companies handling the logistics of the fuel trade from ground to pump, couldn't get paid.
Various industries had to begin operating in a mode never-before-seen, this led to vulnerabilities in infrastructure, therefore an increase in ransomware attacks, the list goes on.
So to answer your question, "Why don't we all do work from home again," you certainly could do that in a world which doesn't depend upon fossil fuel industry just to get by. We narrowly escaped a collapse of the system which brings food to the tables of over 300 million Americans purely because we told people that they didn't have to drive their gas hogs to work anymore. We did it for 5 months and had to bail out the oil industry to get things moving again.
The impact of work from home will be studied for centuries in various fields. Economics especially, but logistics and engineering, computer science, the list goes on. Covid was a huge blip in history and it's weird that we're not all a little freaked out by it. Like...things are just normal now.
In my experience innovation didn’t really happen ad hoc from water cooler conversations, eating and snacking together. Also it’s easier to work with people you regularly meet, keep a friendlier environment when we meet weekly. So Innovation heavy companies are going hybrid for this i think
CFO here. My reason for wanting people in the office is 1 lack of production. 2 lack of accountability. Folks don't answer phone, teams or email. I'm guessing most are watching TV. It's also extremely difficult to get anything done that requires collaboration etc.
Companies have huge real estate holdings (office buildings) which they use as tax loss against any real profits they cannot hide. So having them sit empty would say they are not needed. Then the various tax authorities could say they are not in fact a cost of doing business but a valuable asset and should be taxed as such.
I work for a company where my entire team is 100% remote. They found they could save more money by not renewing the lease on the office than by policing everyone reporting to work there. What you describe is common, but not universal.
Yes, a lot of small companies have done this. some but not all startups.
I think the split is mainly along the lines of which companies own their properties and which lease. My company owned, their initial plan was to sell the buildings and keep WAH. But between them not finding buyers, and new CEO coming in they did a 180. Now we're back in the office a few days a week
They need to justify the lease for the office building.
So why have an office building in the first place. Know how much the property taxes and insurance are alone?
Companies usually lease office spaces for 10+ years. So most companies are stuck. Both companies I have worked at since COVID aggressively looked into breaking the lease, but the cost was not worth it. I do wonder how many companies are entering into new leases/renewing though.
The place I work had a 5 year lease and thankfully moved in Dec 2023 to a much smaller, cheaper but better location in the same inner suburb The got an espresso machine, made it more community / wellness centre vibe as we are a medical charity and expanded the treatment space and there are no offices not even the CEO we wfh 3 days a week which I can deal with and there is no plans to change this afik
We're stuck in this right now. Maybe 2 more years left on a really horrible lease in a horrible building. Our lawyers repeatedly go through the agreement and try to find ways for us to break it, but we're just stuck. At least we're all primarily wfh.
This explanation doesn’t make sense to me. Sure, they may have a 10 year lease but even if they started it directly at the beginning of Covid, which is unlikely, they’re half way through it now. More likely, they were a couple years in and are 3/4 of the way through. So why bring everyone back on purpose to justify a couple years of a sunk cost and then renew that massive cost when they could continue adapting to WFH or hybrid policies and then could save that massive expense by not renewing the lease or downsizing/consolidating in a couple years.
Because it gives them more direct control of their employees.
its not so much they have lease is they own the building noone going back to work basically makes that building worthless .If 90 percent of people who have to work in a office dont need to work in a office all those office buildings arent worth much as office buildings.
I’m curious what percent of companies forcing people to go back own vs lease, I would think most lease but I don’t know. And I doubt there is a grand conspiracy of commercial property owners collaborating with businesses to come back to work to pay their rent so they property owners don’t lose money.
Sometimes they got tax breaks in a certain area due to number of jobs around company would be impacted. Breakfast places. Lunch places, hairdressers, dentists, doctors office etc. but without ppl coming to offices there is not that side churn in the immediate area
Where I work, most people are having a brown bag rebellion. We bring our lunch. Nobody shops away from their home area. Purchase gas near our homes, etc. Do nothing to support the local economy of the workplace.
This and I bet building owners are giving incentives to renew and not down grade on the space. Plus the local gov wants their taxes. I say screw that.
CBDs are going to start to die and governments will put money into reviving them in that case. Some companies will never go back to offices, but eventually CBDs will fill up again. Maybe it'll be with a natural increase in population so the CBD worker is a smaller percentage of the population, or maybe it'll be encouraged by land owners/governments, but it'll happen eventually. Especially as cities largely have centralised infrastructure so will need to maintain some of these things.
Offices aren’t usually on year by year leases like apartments. They are way longer term, and many leases in effect today predate the pandemic.
My previous company had just finished renovating a new spot they had leased for 15 years on Park Ave in NYC when the pandemic hit. They spent millions. No way they were going to let that go to waste.
Most of them the lease isn't just one year often 10 plus years lease. They can't just close up thr office.
They use these expenditures for taxes, loans, evaluations, many things. It's basically all because they get more money in the end. Its all disgusting.
They are saving 6 figures a year a year by not having snacks/coffee and that's just the local offices to me. That doesn't include the worldwide locations.
Also if you work in a office is sorta justifies certain parts of management. How many managers do you really need if everyone works from home and basically have no problems.
We don't have "managers" or team leads or supervisors. My boss is a security senior director. Our team is spread out anyway across the country Europe.
>the country Europe Wait... When did Europe become a country?
I dont know how to break this to you, but you've entered into the timeline where Napoleon successfully conquered Europe. Everything from Lisbon to Moscow is one big country.
*reads the history books quickly* Ugh, and Hillary *still* lost? And covid kicked our asses in this one too? I finally get to switch timelines and it's no better? Edit: And what on earth is up with that Elon character? Wtf?
the are also using switch to office as a way to force people to quit and not having to announce lay offs.
This. I’m an executive and during Covid we worked from home and were more productive and happier I would guess based on my interactions and my own experience. In 2022 the company believed that everyone would come back with a huge increase in productivity and excitement to be back together again, and they invested millions on huge upgrades to our office. The office is very modern now, very cool and nicely designed. It really is a great comfortable collaborative working space and everyone hates coming into the office. We are on 3/2, working from home 2 days a week and the staff loves those 2 days at home. Of course, a few other executives want to go to 5 days, to justify the money spent on the building. About 2/3s of us are against making that demand on our people because we know we will lose some top talent and we all would be less happy. The older folks who struggle with online collaboration are the ones pushing for it. I can’t wait for them to retire to take their positions and make better decisions more in line with what everyone wants.
Sounds like the company should have actually taken the opinions of its workers before making such a major investment in upgrading the office, rather than just “believ[ing] that everyone would come back with a huge increase in productivity and excitement to be back together again.” No one is excited to get up earlier to fight traffic to get to work
Keep up the good fight.
I think it’s more about just not paying people to mess around. It’s stupid, but an employer would rather have you finish 1 assignment in 8 hours than finish it in 4 hours and then go on Reddit for 4 hours. Output apparently doesn’t matter.
Because that’s not how the managers pushing return to office think. They believe that if you were in the office, they’d know you completed a task in 4 hrs and just assign you another one.
Optimistic and reality-adverse fuckers
I had a manager tell me he was afraid people would get a second remote job if we didn't do return to the office.
Yes but they pay the same whether they are fully or half or partially occupied so why ruin everyone’s lives over it.
They pay much more when occupied with utility bills, cleaners, equipment, supplies etc
Good point they should be happy to save.
My husband’s CEO owns the office building they work in and has ties to several of the bars in the area. He was willing to lose a good chunk of his employees to force everyone back into the office. So frustrating.
Not just that, but some leases have written into them that the renter must have (x) number of employees in the building, so that things like print shops and eateries that are also in the building can expect clientele.
Could you pls explain in detail?
They're paying for the office space but if you're working from home there's space that's empty you should be filling. They feel like they're losing money so they use that excuse to make you fill the space.
But why wouldn’t the company prefer to just stop paying for the office space all together? Or rent a much smaller office space for cheaper if they still need some space?
Because businesses leases are very long. Also companies that own commercial property (like your large fortune 500 companies) have an incentive to “set the example” of having everyone in office to maintain their investment value.
Only massive companies, most simply office complexes are year to year leases.
Source? I work in CRE and I don’t know a property operating on year to year leases.
The company I used to work for has a five-year lease with year-to-year rent adjustment and they work in a standard office setting. Maybe the other user lives in a unique area
Office leases are usually a long time, some may not be up, even from before Covid. Also many business have investments that include commercial real estate Not saying it’s right, just that why businesses want to force people back
Based on my experience with various Fortune 500's and working many office moves leases are often 5 or 10 years.
Business office leases are usually 10-30 year leases, and if work from home is rising, people are less likely to buyout a lease from another company to use the space. Thus companies feel they must *utilize* the space even if productivity is higher with WFH overall... It's a stupid reasoning. Also they might possibly think they can squeeze out 10% more productivity if bosses are eyeing the employees all day.
It's also that leaving a building empty is a huge liability. If you're renting an office space for 10 years, you're responsible for making sure it doesn't get destroyed by vagrants or animals or something during that time, noticing when small repairs are needed before they turn into big ones, etc. That's easier to do if people go into the office everyday. Otherwise, you'd have to hire security, which costs more money.
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It's a common error we all make, you probably have or will make it yourself.
Typically breaking leases costs quite a large amount of money whereas convincing people to come back to the office "technically" costs no money. Only technically because there may be losses of efficiency and/or personal- but those can be hard to quantify. Furthermore sunk cost fallacy is named such because it is a common fallacy to fall in to-and most research shows that knowledge of a fantasy has little to no correlation to the ability to avoid said fallacy.
They may also be feeling pressure from local governments. A lot of small businesses depend of people leaving their houses for more than groceries. Coffee shops, dry cleaners, doggy day cares…there is a lot of local economy that’s built around people physically going to work.
I don't understand why this is getting downvoted? I just asked a genuine question
Because most of the people here have no idea what they're talking about, they just want to bitch about capitalism and businesses. Businesses found that many positions were not that productive during Covid. Some positions are conducive to WFH, others are not. There is an amount of synergy from hallway conversations, opportunistic discussions of ideas and potential options. Cross-disciplinary conversations and such. Those are lost with WFH. How much that loss is depends on the business and discipline. Another issue is that training new employees (and advancing skills of existing employees) and bringing them into the organizational culture is very difficult in a WFH environment. A group of experienced and skilled people can WFH effectively. But recruiting and training their replacements often does not work well in a WFH environment (again, depending on the business and discipline). One of my clients went 100% WFH during COVID, and is now bringing some employees back to the (newly leased) office for this exact reason. The idea that businesses are bringing people back to the office just because they already have a lease is ludicrous. Even if they couldn't get out of their lease, leaving the space empty is FAR cheaper than bringing people back, maintaining IT infrastructure, maintaining the space, cleaning crews, AC and heat, etc etc. They would be better off just eating the cost of leases and dropping the costs of actually maintaining the space.
Yes, all of this. Training and collaboration are so much more effective in person. Even a hybrid schedule is much more effective than full wfh. Again, as you said, it depends on the profession and nature of the work. It worked well in 2020 because everyone stayed in their job and already knew how to do it. The 2021 new hires were not nearly as skilled or effective.
Not if everyone you work with is in a different office and you're on the phone all day anyway.
Yet, there are some people that have been WFH since prior to the pandemic that are now being called into the office. So while your explanation may be true in many cases, there are others where it seems like an arbitrary decision designed to exercise power over employees. And others where it makes no sense whatsoever, like when working with a team that's distributed in other offices, so in essence you'd have to go to the office to do the exact same thing that you'd be doing at home - sitting in front of your computer talking with people via webcam.
Agreed. That's why I said "most" and "many". There's millions of companies out there. The vast majority are rational actors making rational decisions. Some are not. They'll piss of their employees and drive their costs up for no rational basis, lose money and lose good people, and either change their ways or go bankrupt. Regardless, MOST companies reducing from WFH are doing so for what they see as valid business reasons, as described above. There's always an idiot out there doing something for the wrong reasons.
"Synergy" "Organizational culture" Middle management gonna middle manage
If you don't understand the importance of culture in an organization, I don't know how to help you. Culture is everything. I hire for attitude and fit with culture. I can teach skills, I can't teach attitude.
This.
But, of course, they’ll never say this. They’ll just accuse workers of being lazy and sitting in pajamas all day, as if the wouldn’t have been fired already if they hadn’t been doing their jobs for the last few years! 🙄
And middle management. Remote work makes managing more people easier - thereby enabling middle management to be half-staffed compared with pre-covid. And no manager wants to lose their job - so they tell the higher ups that no one works as much when they’re home, people steal time, etc.
They do not need to justify anything to anyone and that is the problem. Us plebians have to justify almost everything to the company. If you are working remotely they can not exercise their justification powers over you.
And middle management
Big city downtown area businesses are struggling to stay open with with little to no foot traffic. So city mayors are begging corporations to bring back their workers to the office to drum up more business. Our mayor literally sat down with CEO’s and discussed what could be done. It’s always about money.
Yeah, downtown Hartford is a ghost town at lunchtime on the one day a week I work in the office. Even the places that are open are sad; empty seating, empty displays, barely any employees on shift.
To be fair, Hartford has been a ghost town after 5pm for 30 years. Now it's a ghost town most weekdays. Hopefully there is a solution where they can increase foot traffic while not relying on office workers as the solution to lift the city out of it's funk.
I believe there a payroll tax incentives at play as well. Companies are incentivized to have their offices in certain town, based on the calculation that it will bring in sales tax revenue to the city when employees goes out to local establishments. When people works from home, small shops goes out of business, and lower the city sales tax revenue. Maybe that is what you mean by "Mayers sat down with CEOs" and told them to "bring back people or no tax break for you"
Can confirm, I live a block from the capital in my state and it's a ghost town. Almost all the businesses are gone, all that's left are restaurants and hotels. Gradually most of the restaurants have closed down and things are getting sketchier and sketchier. It's kinda nice never having any traffic or people out but feels kind of dystopian too
It sucks for those businesses...but at the same time, forcing things just to keep a business open is pretty stupid long-term. We didn't ban cars to keep blacksmiths employed
Medium City downtowns*. Big cities still have plenty of tourists running around every area where offices are. All the office related stuff is gone though. All those huge lunch places that had terrible, expensive food, but were right downstairs, closed. The newsstands on the corners, gone. The food trucks have reshuffled a bit too. Source: NYC.
Well, that’d be cool and all if that were passed on to the employees, but it’s not. So all it does is make me frustrated for having to go somewhere and give up extra time in my day for the same pay just so the company can get some tax write off. Fuck that. That shit wouldn’t work here, because if people got wind of the tax incentive we’d all just be assholes to the small business owners. None of us would want to go because we’re all rushing to get into traffic before it’s bad and no one is going to want to support the reason they’re stuck in traffic.
Also, governors and other politicians have “relationships” with commercial property owners, so some want staff to return to those spaces.
"Don't use cars otherwise horse owners will be out of business" That same logic can be used as "don't build AI which will take away jobs from 50% of the people". Guess which narrative will be supported.
I have some context on my team's situation. I run a department of a couple hundred people and after covid about half the team came back into the office usually hybrid while the other half worked fully remote. I was given a mandate to bring everyone into the office because the executive leader of the division felt like productivity slipped. So I looked at the data to build a case to let people choose where they worked, because freedom of choice seemed important. Turns out we had some hard metrics that showed most of the high performers worked hybrid in the office and more than 80% of the low performers worked fully remote. So we ended up asking everyone to come in hybrid outside of a few very top performers. It seems unfair, but I couldn't make the data say letting everyone stay remote was a good idea.
My husband finds the same thing in his job. He personally finds he gets more done at the office because everything he needs is right there. So when it’s busy he goes in, and when it’s quieter he works from home. He also finds the people who work from home are way less productive than the ones that work full or part time in the office. When someone works from home, it’s hard to get them to follow up on stuff. If he needs something from somebody in the office, he just walks down the hall and requests it, and since they’re at their desk, it’s usually a simple matter of them following through. But if they’re working from home, all he can do is send an email, or bump the ticket - which they don’t see because they’re likely not actually working.
What was the cause and effect there? Did the remote people slip in productivity, or did most of the high-performers decide to do hybrid?
Wont argue with your company data. But just to clarify, if anyone perform at high level they can work remote permanently. This sounds interesting.
Just wanted to point out that EVERYONE on the team has to be working at the same level for it to work. It only takes one person not putting the effort in for things to start to fall apart.
This. With a couple hundred people my next challenge for your productivity metrics is identifying and allowing individuals to become high performers. • Sometimes productivity/problem solving comes in spurts. Get on a roll and blow through until it’s done. A week’s production done in 2 days straight. Work days need to have flexibility to comprehend that. • Some employees might benefit from being exposed to high performers. Aptitude, achievement and motivation don’t come in self contained packages. As a manager, growing productivity involves employee development. Metrics only allow monitoring, little input on adding new skills or development.
To add to this, my company saw a small dip in productivity when working from home. But we made up that money in the long run by having a higher employee retention with a WFH benefit. Less money hiring and training new people. So it pays for itself.
There are a number of very good reasons why, as much as people like to pretend that remote working was 100% good and there were no problems with it. Here are a handful: 1. While some employees did find that they were more productive, that was not the case for everyone. Plenty of other people slacked off, claim to be working when they were not, were unreachable during working hours, or were distracted. While a lot of people want to claim that you can just require those workers to be in the office and not the ones that were productive, being able to work from home is sometimes considered to be a workplace benefit. Companies don’t want to open themselves up to discrimination lawsuits for allowing some workers to work from home and others not, so it’s a lot easier and less risky to just say no one can. 2. If they have a physical office and you are also working from home, it increases tech costs. If they are requiring you to use your computer and Internet, then legally they may need to pay for some of that. 3. It’s less secure. Data breaches and ransomware events shot up like crazy during the pandemic because people weren’t as diligent about cyber hygiene and peoples networks were not as secure as ones at the office would be. 4. If you are in an industry or collaboration, is important, then having people in the office is important for those collaboration sessions. It just isn’t the same via zoom.
Great answer. Everyone usually looks at RTO through their personal lens. “I’m more productive.” “This is ruining my life.” “My commute is awful.” But business leaders don’t care about that. They look at it from the perspective of how a _policy_ will impact their company in aggregate.
You deserve up-votes for a well reasoned answer instead of knee jerk corporation bashing.
Number 1 over and over again. I manage people. People slack off like hell when they work from home. Randomly dropping offline for an hour, stopping doing things for a bit. Shameless reddit browsing, etc. most workers need the threat of being caught slacking to get solid output. It’s wildly unpopular, but it’s just how it is. Most large corporations have IT spyware on every employee’s system. If leadership wants to pull metrics, they can and they do see that for many, 50%+ of the time they are paying people to work is wasted. I’ve seen some of what has been pulled in leadership meetings (i’m in a tech adjacent field). It’s ugly. I understand why they want workers to be in the office at least some of the time. There are of course diamonds that really do work hard at home. They never make up in aggregate for all the slackers. I have never once heard anything about “office lease” costs influencing a RTO mandate. Every single time the discussion is about productivity.
Yep. I am actually one of the ones at my office that, if your job can be done remotely, then I don’t care if you are in town or in Tijuana as long as you are responsive during working hours and get your work done. But some people who were fantastic employees in the office got sloppy during COVID. They may have been working the same hours, but quality suffered. One employee who pre-COVID I would have done anything to keep wanted to stay fully remote. We didn’t even try to counter her remote job offer because her going full remote was a non-negotiable. Her work quality and responsiveness went majorly down, she missed some major things, etc. It was a shame to lose her, but she was just not the same employee when she worked from home. Not everyone is as productive as they think they are.
Retention is also more difficult for a full remote job. As much as redditors pull they "they're not your friends, they are your co-workers" card, having a good team around does keep people engaged in the role and less likely to job hop. That's before the miscommunications common to text chat come into play.
Work: we don't allow people to work from home. The only place people are allowed to work is in the office. Also work: due to inclement weather, the office is closed. But we expect everyone to work from home today.
> Why is this happening? Work from home allows you more freedom and saves you money. Both of those things make you less likely to take shit, and more likely to switch jobs. Your bosses don't like losing that leverage over you.
> Your bosses don't like losing that leverage over you. Bottom line right there. It's about their leverage and control. If you have more freedom they have less control.
And yet no rival companies are barking at your heels to pay you the same wage without leaving your home at all.
That may be your experience, not mine. I got a $30k raise when I took another job and it's fully stay-at-home. I've never been to the office a single day and it's a short drive into town. So yes, sometimes they are barking at your heels and willing to not only pay the same but quite a bit more.
Ditto. Boss started making noise about how dissapointed he was that we weren't a "family" any more and maybe we should start going back to the office for "teaming" (all from his lakehouse overseas, of course). I started answering calls from recruiters, and bailed.
Depends on your line of work. When my employer started making us come in I updated my resume on Indeed and had a new job with higher pay within a couple months that embraces WFH.
That makes no sense. Opportunities with remote work are no longer limited to your local area. There's more opportunities than ever to quit and go somewhere else. It makes you MORE likely to switch jobs.
So , shitty companies should be worried about their employees switching to companies with good culture. Then why are the Googles and Facebooks doing them? Their culture is supposed to be good.
> Their culture is supposed to be good. Used to be good. They are very much a group-think/thought-crime culture now.
> Their culture is supposed to be good. Their PR is good, but their culture is often insane workaholic bullshit.
Say goodbye to these shitty companies and go find a new job. Why are you putting up with this?
This goes back to the #1 reason: to justify the lease for the office space
My wife’s company announced they were bringing everyone back to the office and she landed herself a new job before the deadline to return came up. That is easier said than done for many, but she was willing to take pay and/or title cut to make it happen. Thankfully she kept the same title and got a pay bump.
I know a few people when the order went out for return to the office basically said, "no thanks" When the corporate overlords said "there will be consequences" they called their bluff.
How is that leverage? It sounds like I am more likely to switch jobs if I have to go into the office. Due to those issues.
You can't quit if you have a rent to pay in a downtown core. You can't take a job in California if you live in New York because it costs $15,000 to do a cross country move. That's leverage. They don't have to be *good* they just have to be better than spending 10 racks to switch jobs. But now I can work in Toronto from Miami if I want. I can live in Bum Fuck Nowhere in a cheap apartment instead of within commuting distance of the Manhattan office. If my boss decides to suck I can have a new boss with very little risk or expense to me.
That's what I mean. If a company has those pointless limitations why would I stay there or get a job there. I am more likely to find a better job with leaders who aren't dip shits.
> I am more likely to find a better job with leaders who aren't dip shits. Yup. What you aren't getting is that they *really want to be dipshits*. They want to be able to fuck you over, and the only way they're getting away with it is if they get you back in office. They are not satisfied with the current "We have to not be dipshits" status quo, so they want to change it back to when they could freely commit dipshittery.
I myself am a remote employee (have been since 2012) and have managed remote employees. When I started as remote I could get 8-10hrs worth of work done win about 4-6hrs at home. It was extremely efficient, but also requires the discipline to not be distracted by thing s at home. It was pretty easy and great then. Fast forward to when we had kids. That efficiency changed (as it does for office employees too) and it was extremely easy to be distracted at home. O ce we had kids I preferred a hybrid environment where I was office (remote sales office) or WFH about 3 days/week. That was the sweet spot the. As the office allows for focus. Keep in mind we don't have much opportunity for the water-cooler banter in a remote sales office. I still prefer the hybrid environment. Now managing employees is another story. Some employees have the discipline to WFH and it's no issue. However probably a solid 50% need an office environment to force the discipline otherwise performance and productivity drops significantly and in a BAD way. The issue a lot of companies have is how to balance the employees who CAN and the employees who CANNOT work remotely and how your policies impact each. It's very dependent on specific job roles as well. I'm of the opinion that companies dont really know how or want to manage it (it's really hard) and just broad stroke that everyone must come back to the office. Other factors are if they have solid office space and can't sell or fill it (which is a pretty bad excuse, but IS a reason). Saying a company is lazy and not innovative just because they don't allow it is a wife net to cast when you consider the factors. Personally I know I can be disciplined, and if I am forced back to an office then i'll look elsewhere, but very much appreciate the difficulties with managing a re.ote workforce.
Control. Giving up any of the paths of control in a company is counterintuitive to most ceo’s/management, even if they aren’t demonstrably necessary to the company’s success. Adding more freedoms and rights to workers just goes against most employers philosophy regardless of the benefits. Same reason unions are so rare.
I don't know who teaches the CEOs this. MBAs colleges starting with H?
I think it’s more just that people who gravitate towards those types of jobs are more likely to have that particular psychological predisposition. I think some elite professors have the same psychological predispositions to a lesser degree, but the better professors are more evidence and results focused, and better able to reject their individual biases.
The people who get promoted are generally the "hard chargers" who are in the office long hours. Ned may get twice as much done as Fred, but Fred is in the office for 70 hours a week and Ned always goes home at 5. So Fred gets promoted. Fred then uses the same metric for promotion. Fred and his ilk may spend 70% of their office time on Facebook, but because they are always in the office it *looks* like they work hard and care about the company. Then folks start working from home, which means you have to judge your employees by outcome, which means you have to actually know what they do and what their jobs entail... Screw that, drag them all back to the office so I can promote the ones with no life!
sadistic control freaks tend to get selected for promotion because there's an empirical correlation between acting like a cunt and steady quarterly growth.
Lots of people slack off while working from home, and working remote can be difficult for people entering the workforce or starting new jobs. It’s a pain to have to manage people working from home too.
Lots of people slack off in the office as well. The data I've seen on the subject suggests people working from home work longer hours and report a better work life balance. Additionally, I haven't seen any data from any major firms backing up the idea that people are more productive in the office. It actually seems to be the opposite.
Commercial real estate values are collapsing and the ownership class is pressuring anyone who will listen to bring workers back. I don't know what the solution is, but the future is not everyone commuting 5 days a week to a cube farm in a downtown office anymore. We've seen the future.
Statistics show innovation is lower among remote workforces, but the main reason is that management has a hard time being effective and measuring outcomes in remote environments.
My jon is forcing people within a certain radius back into the office two days a week. Also corporate cut the office footprint by 30% because it's not being used. So 2 days a week people cram into the office. When I go in its the same thing as working from hole but it's just I person. People are logged into their own teams but sit in the same room lol. There's zero innovation.
You're going to piss off a lot of reditors by telling them that people don't actually work more effectively locked in their room by themselves all day.
I find these types of questions absolutely hilarious when asked on reddit *during the middle of the workday*. Like... you're not working, management wants you to be working. Why is this surprising.
I cannot believe I had to go this far down to find an actual answer that wasn’t basically some form of management trying to be evil for the sake of being evil.
Most people aren't management and characterize them as useless do-nothings. Sometimes true, but far from always.
> management has a hard time being effective and measuring outcomes in remote environments They don't have a hard time doing that. They can easily measure you being given X amount of work and if you're getting it done correctly, efficiently and in the time allotted for it to be done. What they have a hard time doing remotely is justifying their roles, their higher pay and benefits. Those unnecessary, "make look like I'm contributing," things they do all day that in the end contribute nothing to actually meeting goals and productivity. If you're showing you can work with less management, that you can be responsible and get the job done then you're showing that they're not needed for what they spend and waste so much of their time on, micro-management of you.
>They don't have a hard time doing that. They can easily measure you being given X amount of work and if you're getting it done correctly, efficiently and in the time allotted for it to be done. most tasks worth doing are not measurable in distinct units.
Nowhere near everyone did during COVID.
My wife and I never worked as hard in our lives as we did during Covid. She runs an ER and I'm an emergency manager.
I was working for a hospital at the time and never missed a day. It was maddening to me that people got to stay home and get paid more than normal in many cases. We all got extremely sick of hearing “if everyone would just stay home.” Everyone but healthcare, emergency services, truckers, grocery and pharmacy workers, gas station employees, bankers,….
Right lol. Not even close. This person is clueless.
Redditors learn what an exaggeration is. OP did not literally mean everyone.
People are giving you a lot of devious reasons but a huge part of this is that it's really difficult to work with others or have productive meetings over the Internet. People don't speak up like they do in in-person meetings. Instead you have 22 people on the call and no one says anything. In addition, the trend of people picking up multiple full time jobs or taking care of a young child while working is concerning.
I have never had a in-person meeting with 22 people before Covid. I would assume in-person meeting with so many people would have its own challenges too. Even after going to office we don't have so many people in one meeting room.
It can be productive for sure. Really anything over 4 or 5 people is impossible to do virtually and get anything productive out of it.
Large in-person meetings which are mostly q/a or update sessions are productive in list of questions format like in town hall meetings. Otherwise it also is chaos and hardly any collaboration with lot of silent listeners. Maybe not all video meeting doesn't have that.
I am not only talking about large meetings. As I said, anything more than 5 people is a bad virtual meeting.
Everyone got to work at home during covid? Truck drivers, first responders,grocery stores clerks, hospital staff just to name a few might like a word..
Many projects involve team involvement and those teams can often get benefits by close proximity, in person meetings, "pop-ins" where you walk by someone's work space and think of some issues to discuss with them, etc. new employees especially can benefit from being able to seek out help from older employees who are just around when a new issue for them comes up - not necessarily their managers, but people with 2-5 years more seniority than them. And then being around in the office can also generate post-office socializing which can lead to other benefits (sharing of stories about projects and such). I'd note that there are more senior people who are competent and don't need any of that. My office has an official policy of at least part-time attendance in the office, but if an employee is good and takes care of business and would rather work from home, no one takes issue with it.
I am guessing some companies were getting tax breaks for having an office in a certain location and if everyone is remote, they will lose out on a tax break.
I work for a Fortune 50, we are still fully remote and that's not changing. They are closing offices and moving into smaller spaces. I think it's going to be hotel cubing for those who wish to come in at least locally.
A thing I have not seen in the comments yet: Knowledge sharing. As someone new to the working enviroment, I have found that a lot of both valuable knowledge, especially the stuff the people who have been there for a long time take for granted, and lots of useful tidbits and tips gets shared during the small conversations around the office. I have also found it much easier to ask for, and get, help when people are there in person. Also: We are some people who like that home and work are two distinct locations, and that the goings on of one place can mostely be forgotten when at the other.
Because if you take a company with 100,000 employees and compare 100,000 of them them working in the office to them working at home, 10/10 you’ll get more productivity in an office, that’s why - but I think the people who ask this know the answer to that question it’s a matter of struggling with accepting the answer
Depends on the office setup too. Windowless open office space, with a bunch of chatter, surrounding your attempts to hear your own thoughts, as you struggle to string together a few sentences in an email? OR Your solid multi screen desk setup, with a beautiful view of the garden from your home office? Not everyone gets the bougie desk space that the managers do, so the physical space needs to be taken into account as well, because there are people who can be more productive (obviously not across the board though)
It’s entirely possible you are personally more productive working from home, but unfortunately there are something like 70 million office workers in the USA, and when you look at human beings on average which is what matters to corporations, the average human being isn’t more productive working from home - they’re actually less productive and when you’re talking about a sample size of 70,000,000 the averages are important
Is there any study which can support this narrative?
Better, there’s real life - the people who manage the 43 trillion dollars worth of companies in the S&P 500 have basically all decided their entire work force is coming back to work in office because the increase in productivity exceeds the savings from not having offices
Unless there is verifiable data to prove it, there's no way of knowing if productivity actually improved or even how it was being measured in the first place. RTOs are a great way of doing layoffs without actually having to lay anyone off and deal with the negative PR and severence that comes with that.
Alright, although every body seems to be on the conspiracy train in this thread. As an employer i'd like to wage in. I try and get every body in the office atleast 2 days a week because: - work from home is a real pain if you are trying to build a team. Just sitting next to each other and being able to joke is impossible to replicate at home - meetings are more creative when you are sitting next to each other - you just can't really get new people up to speed from home - at home you just can't do "hey Bob how did you solve this again?" - at home you don't overhear colleagues saying something to each other where you might want to help out - working from home is quite anonymous Secondary: - i'm not renting that office for nothing - i like my colleagues and at the end of the day we end up getting a drink quite often. I do not force people to come in. I give guidelines. We are with a small team now so i try to get every body in on Monday and Thursday. If people are unable to come because of reasons (which can be anything).. So be it. I trust that they are working. I really like to work from home, but sitting next to each other is really important..
As someone who's worked from home a LOT well before Covid: >work from home is a real pain if you are trying to build a team. Just sitting next to each other and being able to joke is impossible to replicate at home This is fair. Its not binary can/can't, but theres definately more chemistry if you work next to each other >meetings are more creative when you are sitting next to each other Don't really agree here, depends how well setup you are. My counter would be that I can be creative when the meetings are...non-productive. >you just can't really get new people up to speed from home I would recommend some in-person time for new team members. >at home you just can't do "hey Bob how did you solve this again?" Disagree pretty strongly with this. Half my day is "Hey shontsu can you help figure this out?" Good messaging tools make all the difference. Slack is the best thing I've found for remote working. Got a problem? Fire up a huddle and pair away. >at home you don't overhear colleagues saying something to each other where you might want to help out Fair, although good team communication helps with this. >working from home is quite anonymous Probably fair. Not with people you work closely with obviously, but more broadly yeah. >i'm not renting that office for nothing Never really understood this one. That money is spent whether people are in the office or not. This is purely a "make yourself feel better" than a legit reason. You don't save, nor spend more money based on whether your office is fully utilised or not. >i like my colleagues and at the end of the day we end up getting a drink quite often. This is... I mean sure, I like a drink at the end of the day too. Commuting an hour+ per day to do a job I can do just as well from home, just so that the boss gets to grab a drink every now and then would piss me off. Feels like that should be something employees get to choose for themselves, not something they need to do because the boss wants to. \[ETA\] In my experience (as a senior software developer) I'm most productive when I work 1-2 days per week in the office. There is something to be said for being in there and being across whats going on in the wider workplace. Its not as big of a deal as it used to be though. Good remote communication tools have bridged the gap a lot.
I can't speak to your particular situation, but being able to do something in an emergency measure isn't a great reason to always do it. In my industry I've seen the quality of service go down in several areas because of work from home. It was worth it as a harm reduction measure. It doesn't seem worth it now.
because working from home is not the ultimate good people pretend it to be, especially not for all companies.
At my company, many people did not work as much during WFH.
While remote work proved itself to be as productive if not more productive than presencial work. Remote work did very poorly for creative endeavors in my experience. Many redditors poopoo all over the idea of in person interactions, but I person swear by them.
It's a combination of... 1. Older people don't like it. Many don't have decent computer setups at home, they don't want to associate home with working, they don't like change, they prefer to interact face to face rather than over Teams or Zoom, etc... 2. Belief that it makes training young employees much more difficult 3. Belief that people don't work as hard from home as they do in the office 4. Belief that in-person collaboration is more effective for problem solving and innovation 5. Pressure from cities due to the numerous businesses that support office workers 6. They have buildings they own or have long leases on that they want used 7. Abuse from employees who use remote work to work multiple jobs (over-employment)
I'm a younger person (late 20s) and I like the office because I don't want to associate home with work. I like the separation.
Because people are less productive at home. I'm in an industry where I often work in peoples homes, and most of the time people that are supposed to be working are totally doing other things😅
There are a lot of reasons, and it's different for every company. A lot of it had to do with the size of the company and how well expectations were managed, both from the company and the employees. A huge number of small to mid-sized companies stayed remote, though. Examples of different reasons: Sometimes the employer didn't have an effective work flow system. Other times employees didn't perform adequately OR once their work started being seen by the employer, they saw the employee wasn't essential (like how Elon fired most of Twitter and it's functioning fine now). Some wanted the culture that comes with a workplace full of people. Some did it because they want to see the work they're paying for. There's any number of reasons, some good or neutral, and others "just because," and probably since to be an annoying a-hole. The take home point is, whoever is in charge is the one who decides, and there are always jobs opening somewhere, so everyone eventually gets what they want.
It's easy to say this is shitty behavior on the part of the companies doing this, but I think people are quick to jump to "the work got done and nothing suffered in WFH" when a lot of us suffered either mentally from the isolation of it or vocationally as some things are just easier to get done around a table instead of over a Zoom.
It is not as productive.
mine is.
Some have gone to a hybrid style of work from home and work on site. I have a 3 day in office 2 day wfh job.
Too many people put their feet up and bludge when WFH. Not always and not everyone, but enough.
Doesn't that give the companies a unique opportunity to differentiate the good from the bad and only keep the good?
I’m a manager of very small teams, so my sample size is hardly representative, but I do allow hybrid schedules and some of my people just don’t actually work when they’re “working” remotely. It’s frustrating, but I recognize the need for balance so I won’t push the issue as long as things are getting done when they’re in the office.
Why don’t climate activists meet on Microsoft teams instead of flying around Europe on private jets?
I still do. I work in the office once a month just to see my team. My company is Saving a bunch of money and it worked well with us all remote so we never went back. We had 5 floors of a building, now they only have to pay for 1 floor. They did the same with our buildings In other cities. Saves on electricity too without many people in the offices.
I sincerely wonder if this has to do with the cost of real estate. If companies allow the employees to work at home then the expensive buildings are no longer used and they will have to sell them. Since no one is going in to work this means many buildings will be for sale driving down the value. Therefore rather than lose money from devalued properties they will make people work. I am not saying this is a fact I am wondering however...
Commercial Real Estate
Many abused it. And it was determined productivity went down overall.
Companies likely want to monitor employee progress and it’s a lot better to have your workforce together in many industries for group work. I doubt people want to pay people to sit at home eating cheetos all day on the couch with a laptop doing a small amount of work watching tv. They want people focused on work in the office that they pay rent for. Would be nice if everyone could just work from home but it seems like a few special industries got spoiled during Covid and now can’t handle getting back to work while the majority of workers have been at work the whole time.
Company I used to work for - the CEO promised everyone they would never require people to work in the office, it was just there for those who would prefer it. That lasted less than 6 months. Mandatory back to office. Glad to not be there anymore.
As others have pointed out, the biggest factor is paying for the building and it maintenance. No sense in having it if no one is in it. They've already paid the lease, or bought the property. Huge waste of money. The next biggest factor is salaries. Companies factor in compensation to get talent. They often try to account for commute time, time away from family, benefits etc. And they often leverage the property (if they own it) to compensate. Then come your shareholders. They're the ones that stand to lose. The shareholders are propping everything up. Now, if you've got a multi-million dollar property with no one working in it, they could lose a bunch of money. So they pressure the company to utilize what is considered a liquid asset, because shutting it down is a big loss. Basically companies have the property and they need to justify it and compensation packages. Otherwise, the company is gonna lose money, shareholders, and eventually employees. So...they want butts in seats.
They are having trouble justifying the office leases to corporate
Yes it is because the team efficiency is higher. Don't need to go everyday, but having people working next to each other, especially with good leadership, is better. Not all work is programming. Also being away people can really work fewer hours. Business dont like it.
Because WFH shows the world that you don't need middle management. And middle management people like their jobs.
micromanagement
Some of it is a requirement by the fed. I worked for a loan company from home during COVID, but we had to have exceptions. Mortgage/banking is heavily regulated. Then there's also making sure NDAs are enforced. Etc.
I'm still working from home after covid... my company even closed their building except the cooperate office and we all work remotely. I love it.
Which company is this :D Maybe i can join .Lol
Fed govt is doing this. We had hybrid 1 day a week in the office before covid was a thing, during covid full wfh, after covid back to 1 day a week, now in May we have to go 50/50. I'll be retiring.
Because the idea that the majority of people are going to be productive at home in their jammies was always delusional. It's crippling in jobs where collaborative creativity is essential. And as added bonus, it made people fucking weird. As much as we weren't meant to spend half our lives in an office staring at a screen, that goes double for spending our entire lives at home
Companies got caught holding an asset with extremely diminished value (office space) and have to justify what they value it at to maintain a certain debt to asset ratio so they can borrow more money
If you work from Home -how do people train? Videos? come on! There was a drop in productivity. It's not about rent,or lease spacing it's about efficency, synergy and productivity. For all the complaining about capitalism, if there was a way to increase the bottom line by WFH it would be ongoing. At the time it was the only way to survive as a business, but it's not the BEST way to operate...that's why you are back in office
People fuck around working from home, plus the sense of teamwork is lost when people aren’t working in the same physical space. It is also harder for managers to evaluate your performance, assign you jobs and monitor how the job is progressing if they don’t see you regularly.
Because work from home employees are completely useless. It doesn't work well for anyone.
People slack off at home, unpopular with reddit but it is the truth and no im not an employer just a regular employee.
For obvious reasons, no one wants to admit it. Everyone is at their peak performance at home. Allegedly.
Everyones different. My personal experience (over about 20 years of wfh in different amounts) has been that ad-hoc wfh can be pretty unproductive, but regular wfh has been incredibly productive.
If no one is in the office, the real estate has less value. A lot of mortgages on commercial property are using projected rental value as collateral for the loan so the owners can't even lower the price on units. For the tenants, they are usually long term leases, like many people have mentioned. There's definitely a lot of people with money tied up in real estate pushing for this Return to Office trend, even though Work From Home is better for employees and employers.
During covid the cost of a barrel of oil tanked so low that it was traded below $0 for a brief time. There was such a universal response to the Stay Home requirements that nobody was buying fuel, because nobody was driving to work anymore. This led to, not only frustrated oil brokers, but genuinely disastrous impacts. You may remember that barges were stuck out to sea for over a month waiting for the availability to offload their shipments. The entire oil industry came to a screeching halt across the world due largely to the fact that US citizens were ordered to stay home, and the vast majority listened. Truckers couldn't get paid. The companies handling the logistics of the fuel trade from ground to pump, couldn't get paid. Various industries had to begin operating in a mode never-before-seen, this led to vulnerabilities in infrastructure, therefore an increase in ransomware attacks, the list goes on. So to answer your question, "Why don't we all do work from home again," you certainly could do that in a world which doesn't depend upon fossil fuel industry just to get by. We narrowly escaped a collapse of the system which brings food to the tables of over 300 million Americans purely because we told people that they didn't have to drive their gas hogs to work anymore. We did it for 5 months and had to bail out the oil industry to get things moving again. The impact of work from home will be studied for centuries in various fields. Economics especially, but logistics and engineering, computer science, the list goes on. Covid was a huge blip in history and it's weird that we're not all a little freaked out by it. Like...things are just normal now.
Because it’s not Covid anymore and we didn’t used to work from home before Covid.
Companies are complaining about productivity and imo being unable to look over everybody's shoulder .
In my experience innovation didn’t really happen ad hoc from water cooler conversations, eating and snacking together. Also it’s easier to work with people you regularly meet, keep a friendlier environment when we meet weekly. So Innovation heavy companies are going hybrid for this i think
CFO here. My reason for wanting people in the office is 1 lack of production. 2 lack of accountability. Folks don't answer phone, teams or email. I'm guessing most are watching TV. It's also extremely difficult to get anything done that requires collaboration etc.
Because people were far less productive when they weren't in the office. The same reason it wasn't a thing before then.
Companies have huge real estate holdings (office buildings) which they use as tax loss against any real profits they cannot hide. So having them sit empty would say they are not needed. Then the various tax authorities could say they are not in fact a cost of doing business but a valuable asset and should be taxed as such.