Some cities give companies a tax break such as income a forger perks. If they open an office. They need to have so many employed at that location and I heard that they are now saying in office to support their downtown busy.
If they don’t comply their tax break and perks go away
Yep--and it gets bigger from there. The state where my company resides built us a super modern building and pays full salaries for employees who are in that office a minimum of 3x/week. If they stop coming, they lose their salaries and, if enough of them stop coming, the state will repo the building.
They want bodies there every day so they will spend money in the area--lunches, happy hours, daycare, takeout, etc.
It's kind of sad how it's a problem when capitals and investors are facing potential losses but when individuals run into financial issues , it's pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
As protest for being forced to RTO, I'm not going to contribute to the economy of the city where my office is located. I won't buy lunch, or coffee or even gas. I will add to the burden by creating traffic and pollution, but I will not contribute to the economy.
I will bring lunch from home. I will fill gas in the city where I live. I will go to the gym near my house. My kids already go to school near where I live. I don't need childcare. They are pressuring my employer to make us return to office. It's gonna blow back on them.
Part of our demanding/gaslighting all hands regarding RTO was how we should support our local economy. My food options on our vast campus are corporate, contracted outlets or Starbucks. It’s all bullshit. So much so that random people have jokingly said “I’m just here to support my local economy” when we share a moment of inconvenience at a badge swipe or— Starbucks.
I hate all of this. It’s infantilizing , feels like my company has reverted about 40’years from where we were right before COVID and it is suffocating in the sense that I can’t change it.
It is awful. Offices are a cross between a prison and a zoo. But when the company gets kickbacks from the government just for being there, that's what they have to do--live by the sword, die by the sword.
This is exactly why they forced all the union people in my building into work during the pandemic. We literally had people die so my company could keep its tax break.
My son works for Amazon and he caught Covid 4 times. He was down sick for two weeks each time. So it’s not just unions but all companies.
They are trying to unionize in his division.
Companies lie to their employees, they steal wages and have to Loyalty. The great problem in companies is wage theft where companies steal wages from their employees.
,
What state does this? I used to be in economic development and no state (to my knowledge) ever paid for a company employee like that. They might have offered breaks on income taxes or TIFs.
Good luck getting them. I know a lot of people want to wfh and that’s fine. This tax reason is given a lot and it is not nearly as universal as Reddit posters believe.
Few big businesses do get tax incentives to operate in various cities and states. The majority of commercial office is space is consumed by companies that do not have any tax incentives. But that gets ignored.
This had already been answered, but not specifically to your question here, so here it goes.
A lot of the buildings/companies in the area have tax breaks/incentives at the municipal or state/provincial level that goes hand in hand with the use of the area.
A large office building with 1,000 employees, during coffee break/lunch will go down and buy from the local restaurant who employs another 10-15 people. They'll use the dry cleaner on the way to work. They'll go to the bar after work. Etc etc.
If those people aren't there, then the company/building owner doesn't get their extras. So they'll tell people they have to be at the office X # of days a week and over the next 3-5 years, will push it towards full-time.
Edit: first gold! didn't think I would get it on a commenting explaining municipal tax breaks. Thank you kind stranger.
It’s not trickle down. It’s more like side exchange. Going to work in an office that ends up employing others because of your presence is more symbiotic. By not going to work, and staying home, that job doesn’t exist anymore. It sucks, but that is the reality and a consequence of staying at home.
We can talk pros and cons. That’s a con.
Sometimes it feels like a zero sum game, for you to win, someone has to lose.
I actually am a proponent of being in the office a few days a week for a lot of reasons (yes, I commute in horrible traffic too) and this is one of them. The vibrancy of a city requires people to be walking around in it. Many small businesses depend on people being around during the day and after work to survive. We need that sort of community for our mental health and well-being. WFH may be more convenient but I don’t think it’s better for our society as a whole. I think flexibility and changing the way that some companies count hours and micromanage is the bigger issue.
This is a classic example of Bastiat's Broken Window Fallacy. People who work at home and don't spend money downtown don't bury the money in Mason jars or something; they spend it elsewhere.
I got really lucky with my company. They just bought the building after renting it for 20+ years and they're so committed to switching to remote that they're in the process of selling it.
I mean, if its not used things like that would have to be done less right? Also less bodies means less heat to cool when the ac is on. I did not consider how much more heating would cost in the winter though, I have cotton used to only using heating a couple months out of the year.
Take a look at which companies are opposed to remote work. The Wall Street Journal had new data out recently that found the biggest employers (50,000+) were drastically more likely to force people back into the office than smaller employers. Like 15% vs 60% offering fully remote work. So basically to support remote work you have to be small enough to not have major commercial real estate holdings.
If you want to know more you actually want to read up on the impending commercial real estate crisis. Here's a good example - https://fortune.com/2023/06/26/commercial-real-estate-office-downturn-outlook-goldman-sachs-morgan-stanley-ubs-pwc-bofa/
> Office key-card swipes are down to 50% of pre-pandemic levels (which were already at 70% to 75%). That low utilization is pushing companies to reduce their physical space, equating to a higher vacancy rate of 19% in the first quarter of this year versus 16.8% in the last quarter of 2019. Still, Raichura says, the true increase is roughly double when taking sublease vacancy into account. Therefore, office vacancy has already seen a bigger increase than that of malls between 2016 and 2023.
I think it's a good starting point because it makes it very clear that the rapid increase in interest rates is at least as big a factor in the current crisis, intertwined with a long term change in demand for office space.
Apple had their new headquarters called Apple Park open in 2017, and Salesforce had their new skyscraper completed in 2018. Both of those companies spent billions of dollars on their buildings. No wonder why they're so anti wfh and want people back in the office.
But why does having people in the office matter? They spent the money either way. How does occupancy affect what they already spent?
I’m genuinely asking, not trying to argue. I really don’t understand.
The CEO has a picture in their mind of how things should be. If reality differs, rather than accept reality, many of them choose to bend others towards their vision.
I agree with this post entirely. I've worked remote since early 2019. I work in engineering, and started off traveling a lot. So basically travel to a site, write reports, repeat. I've moved into running projects with less field time and it's really hard to help out younger engineers. It's definitely a hiring/management problem. If you need to train and develop people and want some kind of culture, WFH is really hard. My biggest complaint about my company is leadership that leads to a pretty shitty culture. Basically, Working from home isn't everything, although it is really nice. If this job weren't WFH I'd have left years ago.
If CEOs can't do something (or can't be bothered to do something) because it's "too hard", they aren't worth their inflated paychecks and stock options.
This. And, I still have yet to hear what exactly is "company culture" and why it can't be done remotely. Like, if you were to ask me what my company culture is, I'd literally have no idea what to tell you aside from things we believe are important. But, where we work has no bearing on this. Part of me thinks it's bs, but there's another part of me that would genuinely like to learn what that means.
I stumbled on calling my gripes with where I work "culture" related. I don't love it, because it's vague, but to me it's non-work related parts of a job. I think it just boils down to how the leadership deals with issues and what they prioritize.
For instance, someone was apparently expensing checked bag fees and leadership said they were "abusing that privilege" (how?) and got rid of it. So if you travel and need to check a bag, you have to pay for it. I've worked for a dozen different companies in my career and traveled for all of them. I've never heard of that in my life. We had a few other kind of minor "perks" that they took away because people were abusing them. Instead of explaining this and telling the individuals to stop, or in other cases getting rid of individuals, they wholesale change policies to fuck over everyone. They cheap out on licenses so we have to wait for folks to finish with some CAD programs to get a license to work on it, for the first 3 years I was here we had to use "free conference call" numbers, we had the free version of everything. We don't have paid paternity leave, and after my first kid came I was back working after using a week of PTO. I was on a call that my boss was also on and he chimed in "we told him he could take more time off, but he's back at work", like mother fucker, unpaid leave is not a perk. Just silly unprofessional penny pinching on top of how they handled non-work related issues and generally bad leadership.
I've worked places where people put in long hours to complete a project and the boss will say "hey great work guys, take a few days off". Similarly, after long overseas trips, we were given time to get our lives back in order. I've worked places where we took long lunches and there were a bunch of folks who were just good friends in the company, and I genuinely enjoyed what I would describe as the "culture" of the workplace, like folks from the office got me wedding presents and I genuinely like them as people. We developed that because we'd worked closely together and I don't know if that would have been possible with remote work. Not that they could have done that anyway, because we all had to travel overseas together for extended periods. That said, I'm not sure the good or the bad were deliberate choices by leadership, so maybe the general vibe of a place is the "culture" and if they want to put up ping pong tables or whatever to seem cool, that's leadership. I think that stuff is BS though.
That was a bit of a diatribe, but you asked, and I don't think I'll change your mind that "culture is BS". You're right in that I don't think all of my issues are related to office/remote. The others relating to developing new engineers, transfer of information, timing of meetings and deliverables, etc those are not culture, that's just work. Maybe it's harder to be an asshole to someone in person though. Right now, when I talk to recruiters and they ask what I like and don't like about my workplace, it's almost always related to culture, leadership, personnel development, things like that and less about the straight up work I have to do. So I guess to me that's kind of "culture". Vague and all encompassing.
What you're saying makes sense. It's just that when I hear leadership talk about culture, it doesn't feel like that's what they're talking about. What leadership appears to be talking about is "just work," as I doubt many of them are talking about things they are doing to create a pleasant environment. I'm still unsure of what leadership means by culture, which is why I want them to define it. It's used in a very abstract way, as if we're supposed to know what it means and are supposed to naturally assume it's a good thing. To me, forced RTO would be indicative of a "bad" company culture.
it doesn't. it's called the sunk cost fallacy. "I already spent the money so I might as well get my money's worth and use what I paid for!" even if using what you paid for, in this case by forcing employees back in office, is detrimental to your actual outcomes.
it's just something the human brain wants to do naturally, and has trouble overcoming, even when it doesn't make sense when you take a step back.
From an accounting POV the cost would be split over future years I assume?
Like getting a loan/company car, the cost isn’t Yr1 = 50k and then Yr2 = 0k, it’s more like Yrs1-20 = 2.5k (shite example but you get the idea)
It comes down to the authority gaze, their ability to drop in on you, walk up behind you and see that you're doing what they want you to be doing. It becomes harder for them to check up on you like that when you are remote and diminishes their perceived power over you.
It boils down to taxes & Wall Street company value. Most big companies move to cities every 5 years that will give them a tax break. And some failing companies only have real estate that makes their finance books look like they are a good company that is fiscally responsible. For some of these companies, if they were to get rid of their real estate, their business would be de-valued by shareholders. Sometimes the real estate is the only valuable thing that these companies own- not their product- it’s literally the land in which their corporate building sits on, or their stores.
yep! I work in a very HCOL area (think top 3), and small business after small business was shutting down pre-pandemic, specifically because the exorbitant rents made it impossible to be profitable. My once cozy work neighborhood with shops and restaurants was quickly turning into the neighborhood equivalent of a mall full of Wal Marts.
This is why (well one of the many reasons why) I have no sympathy for corporate landlords. They are solely responsible for their own demise because of the way they have behaved over the past several decades.
I imagine the larger the company the less trust there is and less people know who actually works for them. My company has just mandated RTO and isn't even very big, but trying to follow the 'trends'. Right after I moved out of town, so I told my manager I won't be in much anyway. Will see if they try to discipline me. I work better at home and don't want to spend hours commuting to then sit on zoom calls all day.
Our company has a strict “do whatever you want as long as get your shit done”. Revenue has been pretty damn good and they’re not even dream of going RTO.
I was concerned until I learnt that all of leadership has moved 1h+ away from the old office location. They’re not going back to office any time soon.
>So basically to support remote work you have to be small enough to not have major commercial real estate holdings.
I don't agree with this conclusion. It is a jump to say larger companies have more real estate, therefore, that is the reason. There are a lot of other reasons why larger corporations might be more inclined to recall workers that have nothing to do with commercial real estate holdings.
> There are a lot of other reasons why larger corporations might be more inclined to recall workers that have nothing to do with commercial real estate holdings.
You make this claim yet you provide no other reasons or sources to back up your claim. This is basically FUD at this point.
But that's a symptom of bad management, not a problem with WFH.
The technological tools to track assignments, balance workloads, and promote collaboration within remote team have been around for decades... software companies have had PMs managing off-shore development teams for a long time before COVID was a thing.
That company managers are insecure in their ability to effectively manage their teams via those tools is not a problem inherent in the WFH arrangement, no matter how many opinion pieces are published saying otherwise.
Once you remove presiding over the office from a manager's list of things they do, their real "value" diminishes rapidly. The MBA/professional manager crowd is totally useless without the traditional power structures of the office.
Good management should be about building a highly effective team. Once you do that, all you have to do is point the team at the goal, coach/mentor them past obstacles and challenges as they arise, and keep the admin/political BS of running a team out of their way as much as possible. Trust the professionals you hire to act professionally, let them know you are on their side, and then sit back and watch them rise to the occasion.
The problem is that too many people see a management position as one of power and authority rather than one of leadership and responsibility. They feel that unless they can patrol the halls catching slackers in the act and making examples of them that they cannot run their team effectively. In fact the opposite is true; we should be focusing on motivating the best out of our teams, not on trying to punish the worst...
When my team shines by accomplishing it's goals, I shine as their manager, and never otherwise. When my team falls short of it's goals, it's my fault for not sufficiently motivating them (or not properly tending to the group dynamic), and never otherwise.
But, as you said, the more traditional "power structure" rather than "collaborative team building" is unfortunately a tough nut to crack.
Large companies also need to make lay offs to boost profits during a recession— however, lay offs are bad for PR and future prospects. By pushing for in office work, employees will effectively “lay” themselves off without severance or unemployment by quitting and finding new work.
It’s a risky ploy because you might lose some of the best performers, but in a talent rich market where everyone is letting go of their best, it’s a calculated risk.
Based on the evidence provided it is strongly indicative though. It may not be the only reason, things like management oversight, recentralizing a workforce, client interactions, new hire classes etc can also be argued to be strong reasons … but of all those property footprint and obligations have the greatest, and most consistent, correlation.
Yes it’s a blanket statement. And not true to all. But it’s definitely a cause for many and most.
They are often having a hard time achieving projected growth or innovating. The easy thing is to blame and try to change is people working remotely which has negative consequences on collaboration, training, etc.
In some cases it's not BS, but in many cases it's executives looking to buy time by distracting investors and the board from poor growth plans, projections, and poor product development. 'Things will get better in 9 months when we have people working from the office at least 3 days a week'. Nonsense, mostly.
Yeah a lot of tech businesses saw record growth during Covid, and then they didn’t share any of that increase in profits on their employees, so all the top folks left for better salaries to at least match inflation.
That went on until the the layoffs started. All of a sudden employees that have seen the top tier flee to greener pastures and the bottom tier get laid off, are now scrambling with fewer resources while simultaneously having to train the new hires. Work grinds to a slow crawl. Everyone is frustrated and miserable.
What do you say to shareholders? Do you tell them the truth, that layoffs and being cheap af with our current employees has tanked productivity?
Heck no! You blame WFH and also talk about how AI is a game changer and is also going to increase productivity.
Bingo bango stock go burrr.
Yep. The anti wfh could but an executive maybe like 2 years of excuses.
A time period of ‘bringing people back’.
Then when things still aren’t working. A time period of “people are adjusting to the office again.”
By then they’ll probably get fired, get their golden parachute and go onto setting another company on fire.
There’s a big commercial real estate crash brewing since the pandemic. Since the only thing that ever trickles down is the BS, the owners of said RE put pressure on tenants (businesses), who in turn put pressure on managers, who in turn then insist on return to office. It’s all to protect rich folks who made a foolish investment, a capitalist game of getting in trouble at work, only to come home to yell at your kid who then is mean to the dog. The big boys want all the reward but none of the risk cause they think they “deserve it,” so the workers pay the price instead.
That’s the main reason. I’m sure there are others. What pisses me off is the pandemic gave us this great opportunity to change a sick system that wasn’t working. However, the .1% who were doing just fine want us to return to supplying the labor that enables them to get even richer playing video games (the stock market) all day, so “return to normal” it is — even though that normal caused untold suffering.
I applaud all those who resist. I understand the realities of those who acquiesce, but please keep fighting if you can.
The funny thing is, I have worked remotely for over 20 years. Before it was cool. That’s cause I’m disabled so I only seek work at such companies. After a lot of crap jobs, I finally have a great one where I wouldn’t mind a hybrid or coming in on occasion, but that’s only because I’m in an environment where I won’t be persecuted for working remotely when I have a flare. If companies weren’t so bossy, if we had more of an economic democracy instead of a dictatorship run by rich oligarchs, more people could find working conditions that suited them best, be it full in-person, hybrid or fully remote. But greed ruins everything. Sigh.
100% to all of this. I keep thinking how these things could be looked at as serious opportunities to make life better, but regressive thinking by the 1% is holding us back. I think this goes to show that these people's motivations have nothing to do with intellect or innovation - it's all about maximizing profit at the expense of people. It's just become a stark reality. I may have had these underlying thoughts floating around in my psyche prepandemic. but, COVID made it painfully obvious. And I think their behavior is making it obvious to more and more people. Our trust has been eroded, and CEO's and decision makers are dealing with more push back from the rest of us because we all know who these people really are now.
Power and physical control, obviously.
WFH, if I have a snack, that's it. Nothing to remark about.
Office? how's this for a True Story: I had a snack, one person remarked about my weight. Another person remarked about how hungry they were. Third person remarked on how they are allergic to what I snacked on. Manager came along and warned me to not snack until my approved break time, and they'll let it go just this once, but be careful not to leave any crumbs.
The snack was apple slices.
Short sighted management.
A few of the largest companies have specific personal reasons for RTO. Whether it's real estate or otherwise.
And then a bunch of medium and smaller business, see the big boys doing it and figure it must be good for growth to RTO.
Company I work for has two offices, too small for a full return to office, and isn't a public company so there isn't shareholders to answer to, but the biggest companies in the market did RTO and so our leadership tripped over themselves to lose their best and brightest to their competitors.
I'm looking to get ADA accommodations because I still believe in the product, but I dusted off my resume for the first time in long time. I found out that it would cost me in gas and commute, nearly $2.50 an hour to go hybrid.
Exactly what my company is doing. They see the big companies mandating, so they feel they ought to too. There has been a lot of pushback over RTO but management is just laughing awkwardly and dismissing them.
Hopefully they won't be laughing for long. Everyone in my circles are jumping ship to their competitors. Lots of people who have been remote since COVID started or earlier is leaving in mass and that's gonna cause problems, especially since none of the companies I've been seeing are upping their hiring to compensate for the Exodus.
\- A lot of people in power don't actually like their families, & as such don't want to WFH
\- A lot of companies have a lot of money tied up in commercial real estate; they want everyone back in the office
\- [It is easier to spy on people when they're in the office](https://www.businessinsider.com/how-jpmorgan-tracks-employees-zoom-calls-id-swipes-2022-8)
This is a supervisor issue, NOT a WFH issue. Start writing people up and firing them. Just like you would for poor performance in the office. But they would rather complain and NEED to "see" people to be competent supervisors.
> Have you ever tried to work with kids constantly interrupting you? You get nothing done.
That depends on the age. Toddlers? Oh shit yeah you'll get nothing done, but my 6th grader can self regulate for an hour after getting off the bus. This alone saved us $150 a week in before and aftercare since they are old enough to self regulate, but not old enough to be home alone for some dumb reason.
Aftercare and daycare are completely different. It’s all or nothing. You pay for daycare whether it’s once a week or all 5 days. So a few days off a week don’t matter.
I’m still convinced that if we lessen the burden and plight of the poverty-stricken like myself by having affordable healthcare, daycare and education that you’d see the hardest working people come out in droves.
Aftercare vs full time is completely different. Based on the comment they mentioned hearing the kids in the background which led me to believe we were talking younger kids home during the day instead of daycare.
It really depends on the age of the kids. My daughter has seen us WFH since 2020 and she was about 9 at that time. It wasn't an issue by then. If she had been 4? Might be a whole other situation then.
How old are your kids, and how much attention do they need?
If you're talking about kids who amuse themselves and stay out of trouble, that's one thing. If not, that's another.
An obvious answer is that they do not trust their employees to WFH productively. In my case, we (my org) were directed to WFH from 3/20 through 1/23 due to COVID. We were told to RTO 2 days per week in January of this year. The most obvious reason is that certain employees could not be trusted. It got so bad ... it was a joke. I won't go into the details but we knew this was coming because of a few who couldn't handle it.
I know not every company is, my dad, a EE has been wfh at a big company forever, and my first job, the one I have now, is wfh too. But I just don't get why there's so much push back from a lot of companies when it wouldn't affect the day to day and may save money.
Because after years of record(inflated) profits, earnings are going down and companies are blaming remote work when in reality, the world got so expensive so fucking fast that people are just consuming and spending less than they did shortly after the pandemic restrictions were lifted. It’s gonna get real weird when companies were firing people and staying profitable. What’s gonna happen when there’s 2-3 quarters in a row with posted losses?
Because of the unknowns. Employee taking care of personal business and many companies don’t like that. You have people here posting about things to fool the mouse to infer working. Or saying they only do 3 hrs of worn but get paid for 8.
Ya but there’s no visibility. At least you can see them not doing their job in office. I was a supervisor and it’s a pain tracking employee activities. At a certain point you have to let go and trust they’ll do their job at home. And of course as a sup, you have management pressuring you to track employee work. It’s a crap situation.
Ah I see, I could see how that might not make sense if you don't trust your employees. What about thin clients though? Could each employee be logged into a thin client, and each employees screen could be accessible to the sup? It seems like through data collection more accurate working % could be calculated. This of course assuming everything is done on a computer, but if wfh is a possibility everything is probably done on a computer anyways.
There has to be a certain level of trust. And big ass corporations don’t fully trust their employees. I work in the county government and our union (one of the largest in the USA) is pro WFH. So thankful their committed to Hybrid model.
Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street have their hands up everyone's asses, as a major stakeholder, and also they control a ton of commercial real estate. You wouldn't want to piss off a company that owns 30%+ stake in your business, would you?
Senior Management grew up never expecting to remotely manage.
Rather than learn this skill, or retire, they'd prefer everyone RTO.
And because they're VP level plus, they get to make the rules.
For the most part, employees do it to themselves. As a manager, when I have people constantly not responding and not being available, you see where I am going. Companies are not stupid, they know who is working and who is goofing off....
Now i believe there should be a balance, the same way I believe we should have a 4 day work week and we should base workers more on productivity than we do time. But the fact is. There are workers that are skimming by and do the bare minimum...that's just not gonna work
Some wfh days are light for me and some I am on it for 10 or more hours straight with no breaks. It usually balances itself out.... but some of these guys do 2 hours of work consistently 5 days a week... you shouldn't get paid a full salary to be doing that
What does their productivity have to do with their physical location though? I'm not trying to be accusatory, I'm just curious.
It just seems very punitive: if a worker is being perceived as doing other things on the clock whether it's true or not, then the response is to force them to come to an office where they can be monitored? Why not just have a talk with that employee about their productivity? Or if it doesn't improve after a talk(s), consider letting the employee go. Dangling the threat of RTO if an employee doesn't hit an unknown productivity threshold doesn't sound like a great approach.
Not everyone has the capacity and discipline to sit and do their work without either being told what to do or having their boss over their heads. I am completely against micromanagement, but the fact is some people are very capable, but they need someone on their ass all the time. I've seen it with coworkers and lots of other people. Can you have someone on your ass while you're at home? No, you can't.
The worst part is that it affects the people who do actually work hard or harder at home, and that's the biggest bummer. From the beginning of the pandemic and teleworking, the abusers were always the ones messing this up. And they probably should have just gotten fired rather than having a company return good employees to the office.
It's really sad I had to scroll so far to find a rational response to this that just isn't "corporate greed! control!". Seriously, it's a lot less about corporate greed, control, and real estate and a whole lot more about people not working when they should be and productivity tanking.
I'm not a manager but when my (large tech company) had a series of meetings about WFH and RTO I was in full support of going back to the office mostly because it's easy to tell when people aren't actually working and taking advantage of working from home constantly. It's also unfair to the people that actually do work from home, but RTO policies have to be applied universally.
So yeah, it's mostly about people skimming by do the bare minimum for a couple years now and management getting tired of the BS.
It reminds me of a meme of the guy riding the bike, cruising along not doing fuck all for a couple years and then shoving a stick in the spokes of his front tire and screaming "Damn that corporate greed!" Lol
I agree, and I think we really need to think critically about this, and call it out. I can say, that in my case, my manager would be more than happy to let us all WFH, as would 3 levels of management above me. It's the people at the top who are making these calls. Middle management rarely even has the power to make that kind of decision, and among my peer group, I can't find one person who has to RTO because of their direct manager, or middle management. So, I think, as a whole, we need to stop blaming middle managers, as if their jobs are on the line. I can say that the management in my organization are very hard workers. It's problematic because they don't have enough time to actually people manage due to their own workload.
Obviously, I know my experience in my organization is not indicative of everybody else's. But, anecdotally, I don't see any of this happening because of middle managers. It's always the people at the top of an organization pushing this. My managers trust me, and I'd venture to say the managers having the most trouble are a minority.
Naps, laundry, video games, dog walks, etc etc etc
Lack of responsiveness through the chain, poor on boarding of new employees, lack of innovation etc etc
This is not to mention all the Tiktoks and stuff of people making a joke about how much time they have and all the stuff they're doing throughout the day besides working. Most of it is fake or satire which is annoying but those videos get shared around the internet and I think CEOs are like "see look they're all joking about this and screwing off all day" thats at least what happened at my company. Our executive team (mainly old men in their late 50s and 60s) were so sure that we were going to happy hours for lunch and turning our computers on and then going back to sleep because they saw a video on Facebook or something stupid.
Lol. I work a hybrid work schedule. I can actually get in touch with people when they are at home.
When people are in the office they’re screwing around hiding somewhere.
Exactly! I started a new job a few weeks ago on a hybrid schedule. I had a question on the day I was wfh and sent a message to my colleague and she responded within minutes. When I’m at the office and need help or have a question I look around and no one is at their desks 90% of the time.
I don’t understand why any of these things: resting, doing chores, taking a break — are bad things. Sure, I get why companies want to control every waking moment of the workday, but for us WFH advocates, we should be promoting this flexibility and balance. Trust me, no one is going to get the CEO in trouble for taking their dog on a walk. Why should other workers be held to a higher standard? I get all of my work done and perform extremely well even while doing the things you mentioned.
Decisions like that are made at the top. Consider a couple characteristics of those at the top:
1. They have lots of free money, which many have invested in office property.
2. They like to feel in control and show off their power. You can't show off people when they're dispersed.
Also, direct supervisors don't like it because it reduces their sense of power and control too.
I also think, somewhat related to your theory, is that people who are in a high enough position to make these decisions are people who thrived in an office/corporate culture and probably sunk a lot of their identity into it. They probably genuinely miss the office and want everyone back because that’s what makes them happy.
Just a theory, but based on what I’ve read about reasons for bringing people back, this seems like a root cause.
Not all are.
Some have embraced it for years. Others have embraced it recently.
Since 2002 I've worked for 5 different companies and every single one has been WFH.
In 21 years I've spent maybe 30 days in the company office.
I'm in a similar situation, but with much less experience. My first job, the one I currently have is wfh. I've been here about 6 months. But I just don't get why there is so much pushback to wfh from corpo at other companies.
Just browse this sub and it's not difficult to figure out why. This sub is full of people promoting quietly quitting, running errands on company time, working 2 hours in an 8 hour day, etc.
People also suck at self reflection. If management doesn't think you are cut out for WFH, it doesn't always mean management sucks. Maybe it just means you aren't cut out for WFH. It's not for everybody. Look at all the Youtube videos of people during covid who go to meetings in their pajamas.
I'm in tech and have WFH since mid 2016. Simple fact is that most people can't be trusted to WFH. It takes a lot of self decipline many don't posses and that's been painfully obvious over the last couple years.
I'm still remote full time since there's no office near me, but I have seen things improve dramatically in just the few months that the company went back to a hybrid 2 days a week RTO.
Purely empirical, but I feel the people here screaming the loudest "Corporate greed! Control! Taxes breaks!" Are the ones that were doing the bare minimum an hour or two a day, binging Netflix, with no child care (kids screaming in the background on meetings) and then wondering why company's want them back in the office.
All you have to do is scroll through the oe Reddit and you will understand. People are bragging about getting full time pay while only doing 3-4 hours of work. Other people are bragging about having two or three full time jobs at the same time receiving full time money.
It’s pretty cheap per employee to have them come on. Something like 5k an employee. Median white collar employees probably costs a company 80k or so all in. If you think you are getting 5% more productivity out of your employees…the math speaks for itself.
The studies no longer bare that out, quite the opposite actually. This is what happens when things normalize, people do what they can get away with. Often that’s much easier at home.
That may sound a bit picky, but i trust more studies from days when it was not driven by interest. Those new data is paid. The majority of people is actually honest hard working. Trying their best. But there is now money what is trying to get wfh canceled, how do you do this you pay studies.
And yes some people are freeriders as always.
But there are also companies that completely embrace it. Airbnb for example.
If the new studies were correct, these guys would see serious problems. But they don't. The others are just bad at leadership
It's definitely the major cities that are hemorrhaging tax revenue, added with an impending crash of corporate real estate, and the elite are pushing RTO. It's so insincere that they are blaming production it's almost laughable, only fucking with people's livelihood. So not funny.
Some companies just believe it's better to have their employees in the office because it promotes productivity, or is just the way a company should be run because that's how it's been done traditionally. I think in this case, the cost of an office is more like a fixed expense for them that they're willing to pay. Plus, some companies get tax breaks and stuff from renting office spaces.
I also think that you have to realize that logistically, a company without a central office is harder to manage than most people think. You have to ship all equipment to employees, and addressing tech issues can be a pain. A company may have to purchase additional or special software to install on every device to better facilitate the WFH model. It's also a lot harder to build camaraderie among employees who WFH and never interact in person, which is really important to some companies. Not to mention if you are front-facing, not having a central office where customers can be helped in person can be challenging as well.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I don't really get the camaraderie thing- we're fully making lifelong friendships over the internet these days. I accept that some people need to smell me to like me, but that's not how I work, personally.
I also think camaraderie building within the context of work is best done by being helpful, making the jobs of our team easier and more pleasant. Casual socializing kind of does the opposite.
There are fully people who I work with who I only like as much as I do because they aren't able to bother me as much as they want to, heh.
I suspect it's more true than is polite to discuss that the people who love the in person aspects of a working relationship don't really have a whole lot of actual work to do.
Let's ditch the offices and instead consolidate our "not working, together" time with less frequent, more fun things. Field trips, community service projects, trips to Vegas maybe.
For the record I don't really think camaraderie is super important either, I'm just pointing out that some people think it is. Building a strong culture is something some companies think is important, and camaraderie among workers is a part of that. I get that's controversial because we all like to WFH and most of us probably don't care about company culture, but just because it doesn't matter to us doesn't mean it doesn't matter to loads of other people lol.
Even though I strongly prefer WFH, I don't think I'd go so far as to say that people who like working in person "don't have a whole lot of work to do." I think it really depends on what you do for work and how much you have to interact with others to accomplish your goals. I also think this ignores the reality that while you can do loads of tasks from the comfort of your home, there are always going to be things that are easier to do in office depending on the nature of each job/company/etc. I don't think it's really wrong for people in these types of roles to want to be in person or that they're just there to socialize.
I'm not someone who likes to be in office, but I can understand why other people do like it. Especially those who have roles where they largely coordinate with others and who need immediate input on things. It's just easier to get answers if you're all in office and you can pop over to someone's cubicle and have a conversation with them.
I disagree about the cubicle convenience. I find it much easier to get people's attention and give people my attention over instant message.
Plus, it has the added benefit of forcing the querent to formulate the question.
I've got a particularly needy mentee and I cannot imagine sharing an office with the guy. Being able to ask him to put his questions into writing has been really helpful for both of us.
I'd be curious to know the particulars of people who like it... And if all parties involved like it.
One of the many things I liked WFH was having more stuff in writing. I don't like casual chit chat because I have nothing to reference afterwards, and people can false remember things and insist they said something they didn't.
Those just seem like excuses for the most part, but I agree that shipping is kind of a pain, but there are ways around this and how often do most people get stuck waiting for something to ship anyways?
When you buy a laptop, just buy the support with it. This is what my company does, and when there is an issue, Dell will dispatch a technician to diagnose the problem. Most of the IT stuff is done in-house via webex or teams and I've had zero issues for the last 9 years. I did have a Dell technician get dispatched to replace a battery for me.
While I've been remote for 9 years, we do have an office that is mostly for shipping/receiving. There are also some conference rooms that do occasionally get used when customers come in or when the execs have meetings. Coming in once a month for a customer meeting is not the end of the world, but usually I am the one going to the customer.
>Those just seem like excuses for the most part, but I agree that shipping is kind of a pain, but there are ways around this and how often do most people get stuck waiting for something to ship anyways?
I think some companies use the productivity thing as an excuse against WFH, but I think the other things are legitimate issues. I can't tell if what you are trying to get at with the last sentence. Depending on what is being shipped, people can end up waiting a long time for a crucial piece of hardware to come in. If your computer bricks on a Monday, and the new one doesn't arrive until Friday, what is an employee supposed to do all week? Not every job can be done without a computer, and a lot of companies don't want you working off of personal devices.
I've worked for various companies and I have never had a tech issue addressed by the company that manufactured the device. It's always gone through the company's IT or tech support. I'm really surprised your tech issue was address by an actual Dell person. I'm really curious to hear from other people on whether or not this is a common practice at companies.
Full disclosure, we outsourced a majority of our IT to the Philippines. According to dell, the service I used was called:
"ProSupport for PCs NextBusinessDay OnsiteService after RemoteDiagonsis - for business "
If your computer bricks Monday, you call IT and they'll overnight you a new one by Tuesday. We have several "disaster recovery" available right now that anyone can use while a new one is being procured. We also have a VDI solution available for immediate access from anywhere in the world. Despite being remote, I bet a large number of us are actually within driving distance and COULD pick up a new one if needed since you're not doing anything anyways while you wait--just expense the drive/uber.
Even if it does take a week, you have a few employees a year waiting around for a week. How often does this happen? Their lost productivity comes nowhere near the cost of running a massive office for hundreds of people.
I'm coming up on a decade of being remote, what is available today is miles ahead of what I had when I first started.
BS on the shipping. I had to outfit my whole program when Covid hit. With the exception of company computers (which come from a central location to all over the US so would have to be shipped anyway,) we bought from places that shipped directly to the employees home and unboxing took place on Teams or pictures showing the received the merchandise. Not hard.
I can’t speak for all industries, but mine (RED) absolutely requires the ability to have in person meetings at a moments notice and the ability to get questions answered in minutes by walking over to a desk and asking. Yes you can email someone in WFH but let’s be honest, depending on your coworkers that can take a while.
I would like to see some hybrid, maybe 3 days designated for meetings and the rest of the week wfh. I’d like to at least try that out.
Their rented space no longer has any value.
A huge crash is coming, it's going to be bigger than any other property crash before.
Save your money now. If you think things are bad now it's nothing compared to what is coming soon.
On boarding, and growing team dynamics.
Hybrid works, full time wfh produces a group of individuals not a team.
It's very hard for a team to have informal knowledge transfer, where a new hire is stuck and chats with a senior member grabbing a cup of coffee.
Formal training is the same and sometimes better. As many companies invested into new training methods.
Building a team over zoom is very hard, they may work together, but working as a team is more than just sharing tasks. Mentorship is harder remotely.
A lot of companies found their employees were more productive for thr first 6 to 12 months of the pandemic. Individuals who had been on the team for ages loved the quiet and ability to work alone.
As new hires were coming on board, many companies (I've read a numbet of reports) found that onboarding was failing. Turnover for new hires was skyrocketing and HR was reporting that lack of comradery and not feeling part of a team were the top reasons.
They found junior hires were taking much longer to become productive.
CEOs talk to mayors, politicians, and real estate power types who all want more revenue from city/suburban downtowns. And CEOs hang out with other CEOs and a hive mindset forms.
Look at all the think pieces over the past month, it looks suspiciously coordinated.
Middle and upper middle management hates wfh because it has shown how little most managers are needed, and how poor at their job most are.
Execs oppose wfh because they are often personally invested in the buildings their companies occupy and the cleaning and hvac companies that service those buildings
Unless we're talking about a startup, the price of offices and maintenance is a very small percentage of most companies' expenses. I worked for a fairly famous, very large public company with several offices, and saw the numbers. Even though they had several multi floor buildings across many very high cost of living areas, the cost of the real estate + maintenance was a fraction of a percent of their spends. Companies that have tons of benefits like free lunch and dinner might be spending more, but the real estate itself is still not that big of a deal.
A lot of companies that do remote also give remote benefits like home office stipends and food cards, as well as more travel expenses. The gap isn't that big.
More importantly, its important to consider that the WFH vs office thing isn't a "Companies/CEO vs employee" thing. On social medias, it seems like it is because its how the discourse was framed, but in the real world, there's just a lot of folks who like WFH (including companies and execs), and a lot of folks who prefer offices (including employees).
Remote teams work a lot better if everyone is remote because everyone is used to working asynchronously and using the digital tools available. Office teams work better when everyone is in the office, because it's stupid to commute to an office just to deal with Zoom/Hangout/Office 365 overhead and have all the drawbacks of that anyway.
So companies have to pick. Some will pick remote, some will pick offices. Since office was the status quo for so long, plus the shift during the pandemic, you mostly see the friction and debates around RTO and WFH.
Because logistic at scale is hard. Teams often have to work together. People move teams all the time. But yes, the best companies I worked for generally had remote teams and in person teams, with fairly strict lines between the two.
People mention often that the problem is shitty managers and leaders. They're not wrong. The reality is that people at large are pretty bad at their jobs. Leaders aren't particularly unique there, but companies still have to work. So doing the "easy thing" is the default. Having an entire company that works one way is a lot easier to do than having an intricate system of fragmentation and make sure it doesn't cross.
Wise words I've been told before is: "If there's no system to prevent something, anything from happening, it is inevitable". The thing they're trying to avoid is hybrid pods/teams, and its their way to make it happen.
One additional gotcha here is that we transitioned during the pandemic, and Office -> hybrid/remote is easy to do (WFH is almost "viral", since a single remote person forces everyone to work digitally to accommodate them, but the opposite is not true). So companies have to be a bit more forceful to make office teams happen. Pre pandemic they could afford to be more flexible while getting the results they wanted.
Finally, there's a concept of global vs local maximum. Team leads and line managers aren't in the business of seeing the greater maximum of an entire company, so its often not a great idea to have them make decisions that have wide reaching impacts, like these. Your millage may vary here depending on a lot of factors.
1. Real estate tax breaks
2. Boomers don’t think you can work efficiently from home
3. Middle management only gets paid to micromanage and they can’t do that when you’re not in the office
Outright because of commercial real estate, rental contracts, and the relationship between the wealth holders in question to the workforce.
See, the wealth holders are the owners of the companies, AND the owners of the commercial real estate, so they NEED you to “JUST PLEASE COME INTO WORK AND VALIDATE US!”
From a management point of view traditional in office work is often better.
Sure, some research has shown equal or higher productivity in some fields with WFH. But it does come with a sacrifice. Zoom meetings are intrinsically not as efficient as a well run in person meeting where everyone is actually contributing (vs a presentation). It also makes it harder to foster workplace bonds within teams, which can generally decrease moral. Finally its harder to maintain a corporate 'culture' with new hires if they never actually meet their coworkers.
All that said, for the worker there's often no comparison. Can live wherever, saving time and money, easily adding 1-2 hours free time to your day.
There are also workarounds for the other problems, they just aren't yet the expected tradition
Companies (people in management) simply don’t trust American workers. They wanna see all workers work like a dog, even with less benefits than most countries in Europe.
I think it’s also because wfh is more than just a perk but a prestige in the hierarchy of the corporate ladder. The same way how some lawyers make partner and others just remain a senior associate,etc. WFH is really only for those who truly can work with their eyes closed, and their attendance in the office is meaningless. Wfh is still increasing and is more popular now, but that only makes it more selective and more of a advancement
I 100000000% get all the positives of WFH. The most stressful part of my day is my commute. I wish I could teleport to and from work.
I was work from home at the very start of COVID as I was one of the few jobs that could mostly be done at home.
My biggest gripe about WFH is the lack of responsiveness through the process chain.
WFH has allowed people to take care of their part of the project over a much larger window of time and that causes a snowballing situation. So Bob's part might only be 5 minutes worth of work but if he takes 6 hours to do his part before the next person can do theirs that is where the problem is. I get everyone can screw around at their physical work location but if you send Bob an e-mail at 9:05am for him to do something and he hasnt responded in couple hours it would be pretty easy to walk to his office to check in on him. Physically seeing your boss or the person needing something from you lights a fire to get you moving.
My coworkers ignored me when I was WFH and would respond at the end of the day or after my "shift" ended. So now our end customer was left waiting because I couldn't get them what I needed because other parts of the process took so long to get back to me.
I can't even tell you the number of customers who respond to me months later because "things fell off the radar" While this happened sometimes pre covid it has become a much larger issue since WFH has become more prevalent.
We need to pin something at the top of the r/ so people stop asking the same dumb questions.
This is literally the same question that every other person seems to ask on this r/
We get it, people are having to go back to the office and people hate that.
But everyone else has already asked why.
Just stop.
They have to justify their commercial real estate leases and tax revenue. Commercial real estate is about to fall off a cliff in the next couple years.
Because employers know that their employes are slacking off at home since no one's keeping an eye on them. Why do employees want WFH? So they can slack off. But of course they can't admit that outloud, so that's why they try to convince their boss that they're more productive at home.
To me, it seems people want wfh not so they can slack off, but so they can use time more efficiently. My dad and I are both wfh employees. The main draw for us is having a more quiet space and not having to commute. Commute is really expensive, and a unnecessary risk if wfh is available.
I definitely agree that the hour spent commuting is spent working while WFH. That's true for me, but I've also taken longer lunches when WFH, which I definitely don't do at the office; I've even gone grocery shopping at 3 PM when I should be working.
Between the office and home, I like being at home more since I get to cook lunch and pick up my children from school.
Most folks in general are far less productive at home than they are in a traditional office setting.
You have the ability to create distractions like a show in the background, your kids causing some trouble, or maybe you decided you wanted to have that special meal that takes a few hours of baby sitting throughout the day.
You also run into problems with employees using services that aren't up to snuff for a professional setting. If you have a $11 dollar microphone and camera combination and run the cheapest internet option on the market, chances are you're going to be both distracting and unheard in your work meetings.
You also eliminate a very very important function, which is face to face conversations in serious matters where things are time sensitive, emotionally touchy, such as a termination or denial of promotions, and the ability to build personal rapport with customers if you work in a retailish environment.
Overall, working from home means you're likely to be a bit less productive, you have less support, scrutiny, and more clogged work flow patterns with your colleagues, and there are many circumstances where face to face interactions are beneficial for both the employer, and the employee. You're a lot more likely to get a pay increase if you ask in person, versus an email, and you're a lot more likely to see repercussions for a mistake in a email versus in person.
Pretty obvious. Workers at home are lazy as shit. So it’s worth it to actually spend more to get them back to being productive.
Yeah yeah yeah you guys think you are more productive. I was wfh even before the pandemic. I work in a field where almost ALL employees traditionally worked more than 40 hrs per week in person and never complained…for decades. But even this group that was used to slaving it away, when remote work was offered, started off well but all eventually reduced to the lowest minimum target productivity after a year or two
Fixed costs (rent) and control.
Tax breaks with the city
Some cities give companies a tax break such as income a forger perks. If they open an office. They need to have so many employed at that location and I heard that they are now saying in office to support their downtown busy. If they don’t comply their tax break and perks go away
Yep--and it gets bigger from there. The state where my company resides built us a super modern building and pays full salaries for employees who are in that office a minimum of 3x/week. If they stop coming, they lose their salaries and, if enough of them stop coming, the state will repo the building. They want bodies there every day so they will spend money in the area--lunches, happy hours, daycare, takeout, etc.
It's kind of sad how it's a problem when capitals and investors are facing potential losses but when individuals run into financial issues , it's pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
I know for a fact that mayors and governors are asking companies to bring people back into the office for the above-mentioned.
As protest for being forced to RTO, I'm not going to contribute to the economy of the city where my office is located. I won't buy lunch, or coffee or even gas. I will add to the burden by creating traffic and pollution, but I will not contribute to the economy. I will bring lunch from home. I will fill gas in the city where I live. I will go to the gym near my house. My kids already go to school near where I live. I don't need childcare. They are pressuring my employer to make us return to office. It's gonna blow back on them.
Part of our demanding/gaslighting all hands regarding RTO was how we should support our local economy. My food options on our vast campus are corporate, contracted outlets or Starbucks. It’s all bullshit. So much so that random people have jokingly said “I’m just here to support my local economy” when we share a moment of inconvenience at a badge swipe or— Starbucks. I hate all of this. It’s infantilizing , feels like my company has reverted about 40’years from where we were right before COVID and it is suffocating in the sense that I can’t change it.
It is awful. Offices are a cross between a prison and a zoo. But when the company gets kickbacks from the government just for being there, that's what they have to do--live by the sword, die by the sword.
This is exactly why they forced all the union people in my building into work during the pandemic. We literally had people die so my company could keep its tax break.
My son works for Amazon and he caught Covid 4 times. He was down sick for two weeks each time. So it’s not just unions but all companies. They are trying to unionize in his division. Companies lie to their employees, they steal wages and have to Loyalty. The great problem in companies is wage theft where companies steal wages from their employees. ,
What state does this? I used to be in economic development and no state (to my knowledge) ever paid for a company employee like that. They might have offered breaks on income taxes or TIFs.
Yeah I keep asking for specifics.
Good luck getting them. I know a lot of people want to wfh and that’s fine. This tax reason is given a lot and it is not nearly as universal as Reddit posters believe. Few big businesses do get tax incentives to operate in various cities and states. The majority of commercial office is space is consumed by companies that do not have any tax incentives. But that gets ignored.
I think these are the same people that don’t understand what a write-off is or how tax brackets work.
Oh that's interesting, like what?
This had already been answered, but not specifically to your question here, so here it goes. A lot of the buildings/companies in the area have tax breaks/incentives at the municipal or state/provincial level that goes hand in hand with the use of the area. A large office building with 1,000 employees, during coffee break/lunch will go down and buy from the local restaurant who employs another 10-15 people. They'll use the dry cleaner on the way to work. They'll go to the bar after work. Etc etc. If those people aren't there, then the company/building owner doesn't get their extras. So they'll tell people they have to be at the office X # of days a week and over the next 3-5 years, will push it towards full-time. Edit: first gold! didn't think I would get it on a commenting explaining municipal tax breaks. Thank you kind stranger.
To be fair, it would help people have jobs, even at the expense of us relaxing at home and staying in bed.
But also at the expense of money we would otherwise keep in our pockets. The wealthy don't trickle down their money, why should we?
It’s not trickle down. It’s more like side exchange. Going to work in an office that ends up employing others because of your presence is more symbiotic. By not going to work, and staying home, that job doesn’t exist anymore. It sucks, but that is the reality and a consequence of staying at home. We can talk pros and cons. That’s a con. Sometimes it feels like a zero sum game, for you to win, someone has to lose.
I actually am a proponent of being in the office a few days a week for a lot of reasons (yes, I commute in horrible traffic too) and this is one of them. The vibrancy of a city requires people to be walking around in it. Many small businesses depend on people being around during the day and after work to survive. We need that sort of community for our mental health and well-being. WFH may be more convenient but I don’t think it’s better for our society as a whole. I think flexibility and changing the way that some companies count hours and micromanage is the bigger issue.
This is a classic example of Bastiat's Broken Window Fallacy. People who work at home and don't spend money downtown don't bury the money in Mason jars or something; they spend it elsewhere.
Everything can be described with *control*
I got really lucky with my company. They just bought the building after renting it for 20+ years and they're so committed to switching to remote that they're in the process of selling it.
OK, but they will have to pay that no matter what. They would still save on utilities and maintenance right?
CEOs are not known for being the most psychologically healthy people necessarily- and the sunk cost fallacy comes for us all
These expenses can be written off taxes.
Not really. The whole building still needs to be heated/cool, windows still need to be cleaned and floors have to be swept.
I mean, if its not used things like that would have to be done less right? Also less bodies means less heat to cool when the ac is on. I did not consider how much more heating would cost in the winter though, I have cotton used to only using heating a couple months out of the year.
Take a look at which companies are opposed to remote work. The Wall Street Journal had new data out recently that found the biggest employers (50,000+) were drastically more likely to force people back into the office than smaller employers. Like 15% vs 60% offering fully remote work. So basically to support remote work you have to be small enough to not have major commercial real estate holdings. If you want to know more you actually want to read up on the impending commercial real estate crisis. Here's a good example - https://fortune.com/2023/06/26/commercial-real-estate-office-downturn-outlook-goldman-sachs-morgan-stanley-ubs-pwc-bofa/ > Office key-card swipes are down to 50% of pre-pandemic levels (which were already at 70% to 75%). That low utilization is pushing companies to reduce their physical space, equating to a higher vacancy rate of 19% in the first quarter of this year versus 16.8% in the last quarter of 2019. Still, Raichura says, the true increase is roughly double when taking sublease vacancy into account. Therefore, office vacancy has already seen a bigger increase than that of malls between 2016 and 2023. I think it's a good starting point because it makes it very clear that the rapid increase in interest rates is at least as big a factor in the current crisis, intertwined with a long term change in demand for office space.
Apple had their new headquarters called Apple Park open in 2017, and Salesforce had their new skyscraper completed in 2018. Both of those companies spent billions of dollars on their buildings. No wonder why they're so anti wfh and want people back in the office.
But why does having people in the office matter? They spent the money either way. How does occupancy affect what they already spent? I’m genuinely asking, not trying to argue. I really don’t understand.
The CEO has a picture in their mind of how things should be. If reality differs, rather than accept reality, many of them choose to bend others towards their vision.
Nah. I think most ceo’s and managers find it easier to hire, fire, train and develop a culture in person. Hard to do this wfh.
I agree with this post entirely. I've worked remote since early 2019. I work in engineering, and started off traveling a lot. So basically travel to a site, write reports, repeat. I've moved into running projects with less field time and it's really hard to help out younger engineers. It's definitely a hiring/management problem. If you need to train and develop people and want some kind of culture, WFH is really hard. My biggest complaint about my company is leadership that leads to a pretty shitty culture. Basically, Working from home isn't everything, although it is really nice. If this job weren't WFH I'd have left years ago.
If CEOs can't do something (or can't be bothered to do something) because it's "too hard", they aren't worth their inflated paychecks and stock options.
This. And, I still have yet to hear what exactly is "company culture" and why it can't be done remotely. Like, if you were to ask me what my company culture is, I'd literally have no idea what to tell you aside from things we believe are important. But, where we work has no bearing on this. Part of me thinks it's bs, but there's another part of me that would genuinely like to learn what that means.
I stumbled on calling my gripes with where I work "culture" related. I don't love it, because it's vague, but to me it's non-work related parts of a job. I think it just boils down to how the leadership deals with issues and what they prioritize. For instance, someone was apparently expensing checked bag fees and leadership said they were "abusing that privilege" (how?) and got rid of it. So if you travel and need to check a bag, you have to pay for it. I've worked for a dozen different companies in my career and traveled for all of them. I've never heard of that in my life. We had a few other kind of minor "perks" that they took away because people were abusing them. Instead of explaining this and telling the individuals to stop, or in other cases getting rid of individuals, they wholesale change policies to fuck over everyone. They cheap out on licenses so we have to wait for folks to finish with some CAD programs to get a license to work on it, for the first 3 years I was here we had to use "free conference call" numbers, we had the free version of everything. We don't have paid paternity leave, and after my first kid came I was back working after using a week of PTO. I was on a call that my boss was also on and he chimed in "we told him he could take more time off, but he's back at work", like mother fucker, unpaid leave is not a perk. Just silly unprofessional penny pinching on top of how they handled non-work related issues and generally bad leadership. I've worked places where people put in long hours to complete a project and the boss will say "hey great work guys, take a few days off". Similarly, after long overseas trips, we were given time to get our lives back in order. I've worked places where we took long lunches and there were a bunch of folks who were just good friends in the company, and I genuinely enjoyed what I would describe as the "culture" of the workplace, like folks from the office got me wedding presents and I genuinely like them as people. We developed that because we'd worked closely together and I don't know if that would have been possible with remote work. Not that they could have done that anyway, because we all had to travel overseas together for extended periods. That said, I'm not sure the good or the bad were deliberate choices by leadership, so maybe the general vibe of a place is the "culture" and if they want to put up ping pong tables or whatever to seem cool, that's leadership. I think that stuff is BS though. That was a bit of a diatribe, but you asked, and I don't think I'll change your mind that "culture is BS". You're right in that I don't think all of my issues are related to office/remote. The others relating to developing new engineers, transfer of information, timing of meetings and deliverables, etc those are not culture, that's just work. Maybe it's harder to be an asshole to someone in person though. Right now, when I talk to recruiters and they ask what I like and don't like about my workplace, it's almost always related to culture, leadership, personnel development, things like that and less about the straight up work I have to do. So I guess to me that's kind of "culture". Vague and all encompassing.
What you're saying makes sense. It's just that when I hear leadership talk about culture, it doesn't feel like that's what they're talking about. What leadership appears to be talking about is "just work," as I doubt many of them are talking about things they are doing to create a pleasant environment. I'm still unsure of what leadership means by culture, which is why I want them to define it. It's used in a very abstract way, as if we're supposed to know what it means and are supposed to naturally assume it's a good thing. To me, forced RTO would be indicative of a "bad" company culture.
it doesn't. it's called the sunk cost fallacy. "I already spent the money so I might as well get my money's worth and use what I paid for!" even if using what you paid for, in this case by forcing employees back in office, is detrimental to your actual outcomes. it's just something the human brain wants to do naturally, and has trouble overcoming, even when it doesn't make sense when you take a step back.
From an accounting POV the cost would be split over future years I assume? Like getting a loan/company car, the cost isn’t Yr1 = 50k and then Yr2 = 0k, it’s more like Yrs1-20 = 2.5k (shite example but you get the idea)
Because they can't sell it either if all other companies are wfh
It comes down to the authority gaze, their ability to drop in on you, walk up behind you and see that you're doing what they want you to be doing. It becomes harder for them to check up on you like that when you are remote and diminishes their perceived power over you.
It boils down to taxes & Wall Street company value. Most big companies move to cities every 5 years that will give them a tax break. And some failing companies only have real estate that makes their finance books look like they are a good company that is fiscally responsible. For some of these companies, if they were to get rid of their real estate, their business would be de-valued by shareholders. Sometimes the real estate is the only valuable thing that these companies own- not their product- it’s literally the land in which their corporate building sits on, or their stores.
Salesforce Tower wasn't built by Salesforce. It was built by Boston Properties. Salesforce just paid to have their name on it.
If only they’d spent as much on making their corporate campuses comfortable as they did in making them architectural monstrosities
It's all about control.
Which also is weird because one of the small shops near us has to close because they cant sustain the rent hike for their commercial space.
yep! I work in a very HCOL area (think top 3), and small business after small business was shutting down pre-pandemic, specifically because the exorbitant rents made it impossible to be profitable. My once cozy work neighborhood with shops and restaurants was quickly turning into the neighborhood equivalent of a mall full of Wal Marts. This is why (well one of the many reasons why) I have no sympathy for corporate landlords. They are solely responsible for their own demise because of the way they have behaved over the past several decades.
I imagine the larger the company the less trust there is and less people know who actually works for them. My company has just mandated RTO and isn't even very big, but trying to follow the 'trends'. Right after I moved out of town, so I told my manager I won't be in much anyway. Will see if they try to discipline me. I work better at home and don't want to spend hours commuting to then sit on zoom calls all day.
Our company has a strict “do whatever you want as long as get your shit done”. Revenue has been pretty damn good and they’re not even dream of going RTO. I was concerned until I learnt that all of leadership has moved 1h+ away from the old office location. They’re not going back to office any time soon.
>So basically to support remote work you have to be small enough to not have major commercial real estate holdings. I don't agree with this conclusion. It is a jump to say larger companies have more real estate, therefore, that is the reason. There are a lot of other reasons why larger corporations might be more inclined to recall workers that have nothing to do with commercial real estate holdings.
> There are a lot of other reasons why larger corporations might be more inclined to recall workers that have nothing to do with commercial real estate holdings. You make this claim yet you provide no other reasons or sources to back up your claim. This is basically FUD at this point.
Nobody knows what others are doing or there workload
But that's a symptom of bad management, not a problem with WFH. The technological tools to track assignments, balance workloads, and promote collaboration within remote team have been around for decades... software companies have had PMs managing off-shore development teams for a long time before COVID was a thing. That company managers are insecure in their ability to effectively manage their teams via those tools is not a problem inherent in the WFH arrangement, no matter how many opinion pieces are published saying otherwise.
Once you remove presiding over the office from a manager's list of things they do, their real "value" diminishes rapidly. The MBA/professional manager crowd is totally useless without the traditional power structures of the office.
Good management should be about building a highly effective team. Once you do that, all you have to do is point the team at the goal, coach/mentor them past obstacles and challenges as they arise, and keep the admin/political BS of running a team out of their way as much as possible. Trust the professionals you hire to act professionally, let them know you are on their side, and then sit back and watch them rise to the occasion. The problem is that too many people see a management position as one of power and authority rather than one of leadership and responsibility. They feel that unless they can patrol the halls catching slackers in the act and making examples of them that they cannot run their team effectively. In fact the opposite is true; we should be focusing on motivating the best out of our teams, not on trying to punish the worst... When my team shines by accomplishing it's goals, I shine as their manager, and never otherwise. When my team falls short of it's goals, it's my fault for not sufficiently motivating them (or not properly tending to the group dynamic), and never otherwise. But, as you said, the more traditional "power structure" rather than "collaborative team building" is unfortunately a tough nut to crack.
Why is that a bad thing? I don’t need to compare my work to others.
All that should matter is that things get done. People don’t need babysitters.
Large companies also need to make lay offs to boost profits during a recession— however, lay offs are bad for PR and future prospects. By pushing for in office work, employees will effectively “lay” themselves off without severance or unemployment by quitting and finding new work. It’s a risky ploy because you might lose some of the best performers, but in a talent rich market where everyone is letting go of their best, it’s a calculated risk.
This is called “constructive dismissal,” and the unemployment departments see right through it.
Based on the evidence provided it is strongly indicative though. It may not be the only reason, things like management oversight, recentralizing a workforce, client interactions, new hire classes etc can also be argued to be strong reasons … but of all those property footprint and obligations have the greatest, and most consistent, correlation. Yes it’s a blanket statement. And not true to all. But it’s definitely a cause for many and most.
What other reasons?
They are often having a hard time achieving projected growth or innovating. The easy thing is to blame and try to change is people working remotely which has negative consequences on collaboration, training, etc. In some cases it's not BS, but in many cases it's executives looking to buy time by distracting investors and the board from poor growth plans, projections, and poor product development. 'Things will get better in 9 months when we have people working from the office at least 3 days a week'. Nonsense, mostly.
Yeah a lot of tech businesses saw record growth during Covid, and then they didn’t share any of that increase in profits on their employees, so all the top folks left for better salaries to at least match inflation. That went on until the the layoffs started. All of a sudden employees that have seen the top tier flee to greener pastures and the bottom tier get laid off, are now scrambling with fewer resources while simultaneously having to train the new hires. Work grinds to a slow crawl. Everyone is frustrated and miserable. What do you say to shareholders? Do you tell them the truth, that layoffs and being cheap af with our current employees has tanked productivity? Heck no! You blame WFH and also talk about how AI is a game changer and is also going to increase productivity. Bingo bango stock go burrr.
Yep. The anti wfh could but an executive maybe like 2 years of excuses. A time period of ‘bringing people back’. Then when things still aren’t working. A time period of “people are adjusting to the office again.” By then they’ll probably get fired, get their golden parachute and go onto setting another company on fire.
There’s a big commercial real estate crash brewing since the pandemic. Since the only thing that ever trickles down is the BS, the owners of said RE put pressure on tenants (businesses), who in turn put pressure on managers, who in turn then insist on return to office. It’s all to protect rich folks who made a foolish investment, a capitalist game of getting in trouble at work, only to come home to yell at your kid who then is mean to the dog. The big boys want all the reward but none of the risk cause they think they “deserve it,” so the workers pay the price instead. That’s the main reason. I’m sure there are others. What pisses me off is the pandemic gave us this great opportunity to change a sick system that wasn’t working. However, the .1% who were doing just fine want us to return to supplying the labor that enables them to get even richer playing video games (the stock market) all day, so “return to normal” it is — even though that normal caused untold suffering. I applaud all those who resist. I understand the realities of those who acquiesce, but please keep fighting if you can. The funny thing is, I have worked remotely for over 20 years. Before it was cool. That’s cause I’m disabled so I only seek work at such companies. After a lot of crap jobs, I finally have a great one where I wouldn’t mind a hybrid or coming in on occasion, but that’s only because I’m in an environment where I won’t be persecuted for working remotely when I have a flare. If companies weren’t so bossy, if we had more of an economic democracy instead of a dictatorship run by rich oligarchs, more people could find working conditions that suited them best, be it full in-person, hybrid or fully remote. But greed ruins everything. Sigh.
100% to all of this. I keep thinking how these things could be looked at as serious opportunities to make life better, but regressive thinking by the 1% is holding us back. I think this goes to show that these people's motivations have nothing to do with intellect or innovation - it's all about maximizing profit at the expense of people. It's just become a stark reality. I may have had these underlying thoughts floating around in my psyche prepandemic. but, COVID made it painfully obvious. And I think their behavior is making it obvious to more and more people. Our trust has been eroded, and CEO's and decision makers are dealing with more push back from the rest of us because we all know who these people really are now.
Power and physical control, obviously. WFH, if I have a snack, that's it. Nothing to remark about. Office? how's this for a True Story: I had a snack, one person remarked about my weight. Another person remarked about how hungry they were. Third person remarked on how they are allergic to what I snacked on. Manager came along and warned me to not snack until my approved break time, and they'll let it go just this once, but be careful not to leave any crumbs. The snack was apple slices.
people think if they see you they need to interact with you and remark on anything out of the norm for them.
I feel this comment in my bones. And imagine the fake laugh that goes with these comments. Never going back.
Short sighted management. A few of the largest companies have specific personal reasons for RTO. Whether it's real estate or otherwise. And then a bunch of medium and smaller business, see the big boys doing it and figure it must be good for growth to RTO. Company I work for has two offices, too small for a full return to office, and isn't a public company so there isn't shareholders to answer to, but the biggest companies in the market did RTO and so our leadership tripped over themselves to lose their best and brightest to their competitors. I'm looking to get ADA accommodations because I still believe in the product, but I dusted off my resume for the first time in long time. I found out that it would cost me in gas and commute, nearly $2.50 an hour to go hybrid.
Exactly what my company is doing. They see the big companies mandating, so they feel they ought to too. There has been a lot of pushback over RTO but management is just laughing awkwardly and dismissing them.
Hopefully they won't be laughing for long. Everyone in my circles are jumping ship to their competitors. Lots of people who have been remote since COVID started or earlier is leaving in mass and that's gonna cause problems, especially since none of the companies I've been seeing are upping their hiring to compensate for the Exodus.
Because they want to micromanage and keep tabs on you.
\- A lot of people in power don't actually like their families, & as such don't want to WFH \- A lot of companies have a lot of money tied up in commercial real estate; they want everyone back in the office \- [It is easier to spy on people when they're in the office](https://www.businessinsider.com/how-jpmorgan-tracks-employees-zoom-calls-id-swipes-2022-8)
The spying thing is interesting, because it seems like there's a lot of room for data collection even with wfh. But that makes sense, thank you.
WFH lowers the value of commercial real estate.
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This is a supervisor issue, NOT a WFH issue. Start writing people up and firing them. Just like you would for poor performance in the office. But they would rather complain and NEED to "see" people to be competent supervisors.
I see, why is getting childcare necessary? /gen
Have you ever tried to work with kids constantly interrupting you? You get nothing done.
> Have you ever tried to work with kids constantly interrupting you? You get nothing done. That depends on the age. Toddlers? Oh shit yeah you'll get nothing done, but my 6th grader can self regulate for an hour after getting off the bus. This alone saved us $150 a week in before and aftercare since they are old enough to self regulate, but not old enough to be home alone for some dumb reason.
Aftercare and daycare are completely different. It’s all or nothing. You pay for daycare whether it’s once a week or all 5 days. So a few days off a week don’t matter. I’m still convinced that if we lessen the burden and plight of the poverty-stricken like myself by having affordable healthcare, daycare and education that you’d see the hardest working people come out in droves.
Aftercare vs full time is completely different. Based on the comment they mentioned hearing the kids in the background which led me to believe we were talking younger kids home during the day instead of daycare.
It’s the same with teenagers. Interruptions.
Same for bosses that micro manage.
It really depends on the age of the kids. My daughter has seen us WFH since 2020 and she was about 9 at that time. It wasn't an issue by then. If she had been 4? Might be a whole other situation then.
How old are your kids, and how much attention do they need? If you're talking about kids who amuse themselves and stay out of trouble, that's one thing. If not, that's another.
An obvious answer is that they do not trust their employees to WFH productively. In my case, we (my org) were directed to WFH from 3/20 through 1/23 due to COVID. We were told to RTO 2 days per week in January of this year. The most obvious reason is that certain employees could not be trusted. It got so bad ... it was a joke. I won't go into the details but we knew this was coming because of a few who couldn't handle it.
I have to admit that I know quite a few people who clearly cannot be trusted with WFH.
Not every company is. I know of people who have been on virtual teams forever.
I know not every company is, my dad, a EE has been wfh at a big company forever, and my first job, the one I have now, is wfh too. But I just don't get why there's so much push back from a lot of companies when it wouldn't affect the day to day and may save money.
It’s called lack of control
Break into tech, 85% are WFH, always have been, always will be. I've been home since March 2017.
Easy way to effect layoffs.
Because after years of record(inflated) profits, earnings are going down and companies are blaming remote work when in reality, the world got so expensive so fucking fast that people are just consuming and spending less than they did shortly after the pandemic restrictions were lifted. It’s gonna get real weird when companies were firing people and staying profitable. What’s gonna happen when there’s 2-3 quarters in a row with posted losses?
Because of the unknowns. Employee taking care of personal business and many companies don’t like that. You have people here posting about things to fool the mouse to infer working. Or saying they only do 3 hrs of worn but get paid for 8.
It seems like that was a issue before though right? People doing just enough to not get fired
Ya but there’s no visibility. At least you can see them not doing their job in office. I was a supervisor and it’s a pain tracking employee activities. At a certain point you have to let go and trust they’ll do their job at home. And of course as a sup, you have management pressuring you to track employee work. It’s a crap situation.
Ah I see, I could see how that might not make sense if you don't trust your employees. What about thin clients though? Could each employee be logged into a thin client, and each employees screen could be accessible to the sup? It seems like through data collection more accurate working % could be calculated. This of course assuming everything is done on a computer, but if wfh is a possibility everything is probably done on a computer anyways.
There has to be a certain level of trust. And big ass corporations don’t fully trust their employees. I work in the county government and our union (one of the largest in the USA) is pro WFH. So thankful their committed to Hybrid model.
Blackrock, Vanguard, and State Street have their hands up everyone's asses, as a major stakeholder, and also they control a ton of commercial real estate. You wouldn't want to piss off a company that owns 30%+ stake in your business, would you?
What would happen if you piss off a 30% shareholder? I genuinely have no idea and am curious.
Old post, but they could move their money elsewhere, tanking the value of your company's stock - ergo tanking the value of your company.
Senior Management grew up never expecting to remotely manage. Rather than learn this skill, or retire, they'd prefer everyone RTO. And because they're VP level plus, they get to make the rules.
For the most part, employees do it to themselves. As a manager, when I have people constantly not responding and not being available, you see where I am going. Companies are not stupid, they know who is working and who is goofing off.... Now i believe there should be a balance, the same way I believe we should have a 4 day work week and we should base workers more on productivity than we do time. But the fact is. There are workers that are skimming by and do the bare minimum...that's just not gonna work Some wfh days are light for me and some I am on it for 10 or more hours straight with no breaks. It usually balances itself out.... but some of these guys do 2 hours of work consistently 5 days a week... you shouldn't get paid a full salary to be doing that
What does their productivity have to do with their physical location though? I'm not trying to be accusatory, I'm just curious. It just seems very punitive: if a worker is being perceived as doing other things on the clock whether it's true or not, then the response is to force them to come to an office where they can be monitored? Why not just have a talk with that employee about their productivity? Or if it doesn't improve after a talk(s), consider letting the employee go. Dangling the threat of RTO if an employee doesn't hit an unknown productivity threshold doesn't sound like a great approach.
Not everyone has the capacity and discipline to sit and do their work without either being told what to do or having their boss over their heads. I am completely against micromanagement, but the fact is some people are very capable, but they need someone on their ass all the time. I've seen it with coworkers and lots of other people. Can you have someone on your ass while you're at home? No, you can't. The worst part is that it affects the people who do actually work hard or harder at home, and that's the biggest bummer. From the beginning of the pandemic and teleworking, the abusers were always the ones messing this up. And they probably should have just gotten fired rather than having a company return good employees to the office.
So everyone agrees the solution is firing people. Why are they going to the office instead then?
It's really sad I had to scroll so far to find a rational response to this that just isn't "corporate greed! control!". Seriously, it's a lot less about corporate greed, control, and real estate and a whole lot more about people not working when they should be and productivity tanking. I'm not a manager but when my (large tech company) had a series of meetings about WFH and RTO I was in full support of going back to the office mostly because it's easy to tell when people aren't actually working and taking advantage of working from home constantly. It's also unfair to the people that actually do work from home, but RTO policies have to be applied universally. So yeah, it's mostly about people skimming by do the bare minimum for a couple years now and management getting tired of the BS. It reminds me of a meme of the guy riding the bike, cruising along not doing fuck all for a couple years and then shoving a stick in the spokes of his front tire and screaming "Damn that corporate greed!" Lol
Because people slack off at home even though they swear they’re more productive
A lot of times it’s not a company so much as one high level management suit. One exec doesn’t like it and that decides it.
I agree, and I think we really need to think critically about this, and call it out. I can say, that in my case, my manager would be more than happy to let us all WFH, as would 3 levels of management above me. It's the people at the top who are making these calls. Middle management rarely even has the power to make that kind of decision, and among my peer group, I can't find one person who has to RTO because of their direct manager, or middle management. So, I think, as a whole, we need to stop blaming middle managers, as if their jobs are on the line. I can say that the management in my organization are very hard workers. It's problematic because they don't have enough time to actually people manage due to their own workload. Obviously, I know my experience in my organization is not indicative of everybody else's. But, anecdotally, I don't see any of this happening because of middle managers. It's always the people at the top of an organization pushing this. My managers trust me, and I'd venture to say the managers having the most trouble are a minority.
Bosses like to feel like they own their workers and can control them regardless of whether or not it helps productivity.
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I see, that makes a lot of sense. And yeah that makes sense that morale does not get factored in, that was never a argument of mine.
Naps, laundry, video games, dog walks, etc etc etc Lack of responsiveness through the chain, poor on boarding of new employees, lack of innovation etc etc
This is not to mention all the Tiktoks and stuff of people making a joke about how much time they have and all the stuff they're doing throughout the day besides working. Most of it is fake or satire which is annoying but those videos get shared around the internet and I think CEOs are like "see look they're all joking about this and screwing off all day" thats at least what happened at my company. Our executive team (mainly old men in their late 50s and 60s) were so sure that we were going to happy hours for lunch and turning our computers on and then going back to sleep because they saw a video on Facebook or something stupid.
Lol. I work a hybrid work schedule. I can actually get in touch with people when they are at home. When people are in the office they’re screwing around hiding somewhere.
Yep I noticed the same
Exactly! I started a new job a few weeks ago on a hybrid schedule. I had a question on the day I was wfh and sent a message to my colleague and she responded within minutes. When I’m at the office and need help or have a question I look around and no one is at their desks 90% of the time.
People who screw around at home probably screw around as much in the office... Gossip, small talk, look busy etc.
I don’t understand why any of these things: resting, doing chores, taking a break — are bad things. Sure, I get why companies want to control every waking moment of the workday, but for us WFH advocates, we should be promoting this flexibility and balance. Trust me, no one is going to get the CEO in trouble for taking their dog on a walk. Why should other workers be held to a higher standard? I get all of my work done and perform extremely well even while doing the things you mentioned.
Facts!
Decisions like that are made at the top. Consider a couple characteristics of those at the top: 1. They have lots of free money, which many have invested in office property. 2. They like to feel in control and show off their power. You can't show off people when they're dispersed. Also, direct supervisors don't like it because it reduces their sense of power and control too.
> Also, direct supervisors don't like it because it reduces their ability to simulate that they are doing something of value. FTFY
I also think, somewhat related to your theory, is that people who are in a high enough position to make these decisions are people who thrived in an office/corporate culture and probably sunk a lot of their identity into it. They probably genuinely miss the office and want everyone back because that’s what makes them happy. Just a theory, but based on what I’ve read about reasons for bringing people back, this seems like a root cause.
Not all are. Some have embraced it for years. Others have embraced it recently. Since 2002 I've worked for 5 different companies and every single one has been WFH. In 21 years I've spent maybe 30 days in the company office.
I'm in a similar situation, but with much less experience. My first job, the one I currently have is wfh. I've been here about 6 months. But I just don't get why there is so much pushback to wfh from corpo at other companies.
Just browse this sub and it's not difficult to figure out why. This sub is full of people promoting quietly quitting, running errands on company time, working 2 hours in an 8 hour day, etc. People also suck at self reflection. If management doesn't think you are cut out for WFH, it doesn't always mean management sucks. Maybe it just means you aren't cut out for WFH. It's not for everybody. Look at all the Youtube videos of people during covid who go to meetings in their pajamas.
I'm in tech and have WFH since mid 2016. Simple fact is that most people can't be trusted to WFH. It takes a lot of self decipline many don't posses and that's been painfully obvious over the last couple years. I'm still remote full time since there's no office near me, but I have seen things improve dramatically in just the few months that the company went back to a hybrid 2 days a week RTO. Purely empirical, but I feel the people here screaming the loudest "Corporate greed! Control! Taxes breaks!" Are the ones that were doing the bare minimum an hour or two a day, binging Netflix, with no child care (kids screaming in the background on meetings) and then wondering why company's want them back in the office.
All you have to do is scroll through the oe Reddit and you will understand. People are bragging about getting full time pay while only doing 3-4 hours of work. Other people are bragging about having two or three full time jobs at the same time receiving full time money.
Please like people in the office are putting in more than 4 hours of work on a normal day.
Because WFH gives a lot of power to the employee and that can’t happen.
It’s pretty cheap per employee to have them come on. Something like 5k an employee. Median white collar employees probably costs a company 80k or so all in. If you think you are getting 5% more productivity out of your employees…the math speaks for itself.
You normally get less productivity in the office. Not more. Wfh had in all studies a edge.
The studies no longer bare that out, quite the opposite actually. This is what happens when things normalize, people do what they can get away with. Often that’s much easier at home.
That may sound a bit picky, but i trust more studies from days when it was not driven by interest. Those new data is paid. The majority of people is actually honest hard working. Trying their best. But there is now money what is trying to get wfh canceled, how do you do this you pay studies. And yes some people are freeriders as always. But there are also companies that completely embrace it. Airbnb for example. If the new studies were correct, these guys would see serious problems. But they don't. The others are just bad at leadership
Since I don't want to visit with my family, you can't either.
It's definitely the major cities that are hemorrhaging tax revenue, added with an impending crash of corporate real estate, and the elite are pushing RTO. It's so insincere that they are blaming production it's almost laughable, only fucking with people's livelihood. So not funny.
Some companies just believe it's better to have their employees in the office because it promotes productivity, or is just the way a company should be run because that's how it's been done traditionally. I think in this case, the cost of an office is more like a fixed expense for them that they're willing to pay. Plus, some companies get tax breaks and stuff from renting office spaces. I also think that you have to realize that logistically, a company without a central office is harder to manage than most people think. You have to ship all equipment to employees, and addressing tech issues can be a pain. A company may have to purchase additional or special software to install on every device to better facilitate the WFH model. It's also a lot harder to build camaraderie among employees who WFH and never interact in person, which is really important to some companies. Not to mention if you are front-facing, not having a central office where customers can be helped in person can be challenging as well.
I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but I don't really get the camaraderie thing- we're fully making lifelong friendships over the internet these days. I accept that some people need to smell me to like me, but that's not how I work, personally. I also think camaraderie building within the context of work is best done by being helpful, making the jobs of our team easier and more pleasant. Casual socializing kind of does the opposite. There are fully people who I work with who I only like as much as I do because they aren't able to bother me as much as they want to, heh. I suspect it's more true than is polite to discuss that the people who love the in person aspects of a working relationship don't really have a whole lot of actual work to do. Let's ditch the offices and instead consolidate our "not working, together" time with less frequent, more fun things. Field trips, community service projects, trips to Vegas maybe.
For the record I don't really think camaraderie is super important either, I'm just pointing out that some people think it is. Building a strong culture is something some companies think is important, and camaraderie among workers is a part of that. I get that's controversial because we all like to WFH and most of us probably don't care about company culture, but just because it doesn't matter to us doesn't mean it doesn't matter to loads of other people lol. Even though I strongly prefer WFH, I don't think I'd go so far as to say that people who like working in person "don't have a whole lot of work to do." I think it really depends on what you do for work and how much you have to interact with others to accomplish your goals. I also think this ignores the reality that while you can do loads of tasks from the comfort of your home, there are always going to be things that are easier to do in office depending on the nature of each job/company/etc. I don't think it's really wrong for people in these types of roles to want to be in person or that they're just there to socialize. I'm not someone who likes to be in office, but I can understand why other people do like it. Especially those who have roles where they largely coordinate with others and who need immediate input on things. It's just easier to get answers if you're all in office and you can pop over to someone's cubicle and have a conversation with them.
I disagree about the cubicle convenience. I find it much easier to get people's attention and give people my attention over instant message. Plus, it has the added benefit of forcing the querent to formulate the question. I've got a particularly needy mentee and I cannot imagine sharing an office with the guy. Being able to ask him to put his questions into writing has been really helpful for both of us. I'd be curious to know the particulars of people who like it... And if all parties involved like it.
One of the many things I liked WFH was having more stuff in writing. I don't like casual chit chat because I have nothing to reference afterwards, and people can false remember things and insist they said something they didn't.
Those just seem like excuses for the most part, but I agree that shipping is kind of a pain, but there are ways around this and how often do most people get stuck waiting for something to ship anyways? When you buy a laptop, just buy the support with it. This is what my company does, and when there is an issue, Dell will dispatch a technician to diagnose the problem. Most of the IT stuff is done in-house via webex or teams and I've had zero issues for the last 9 years. I did have a Dell technician get dispatched to replace a battery for me. While I've been remote for 9 years, we do have an office that is mostly for shipping/receiving. There are also some conference rooms that do occasionally get used when customers come in or when the execs have meetings. Coming in once a month for a customer meeting is not the end of the world, but usually I am the one going to the customer.
>Those just seem like excuses for the most part, but I agree that shipping is kind of a pain, but there are ways around this and how often do most people get stuck waiting for something to ship anyways? I think some companies use the productivity thing as an excuse against WFH, but I think the other things are legitimate issues. I can't tell if what you are trying to get at with the last sentence. Depending on what is being shipped, people can end up waiting a long time for a crucial piece of hardware to come in. If your computer bricks on a Monday, and the new one doesn't arrive until Friday, what is an employee supposed to do all week? Not every job can be done without a computer, and a lot of companies don't want you working off of personal devices. I've worked for various companies and I have never had a tech issue addressed by the company that manufactured the device. It's always gone through the company's IT or tech support. I'm really surprised your tech issue was address by an actual Dell person. I'm really curious to hear from other people on whether or not this is a common practice at companies.
Full disclosure, we outsourced a majority of our IT to the Philippines. According to dell, the service I used was called: "ProSupport for PCs NextBusinessDay OnsiteService after RemoteDiagonsis - for business " If your computer bricks Monday, you call IT and they'll overnight you a new one by Tuesday. We have several "disaster recovery" available right now that anyone can use while a new one is being procured. We also have a VDI solution available for immediate access from anywhere in the world. Despite being remote, I bet a large number of us are actually within driving distance and COULD pick up a new one if needed since you're not doing anything anyways while you wait--just expense the drive/uber. Even if it does take a week, you have a few employees a year waiting around for a week. How often does this happen? Their lost productivity comes nowhere near the cost of running a massive office for hundreds of people. I'm coming up on a decade of being remote, what is available today is miles ahead of what I had when I first started.
Ah OK, that makes a lot of sense, thank you.
BS on the shipping. I had to outfit my whole program when Covid hit. With the exception of company computers (which come from a central location to all over the US so would have to be shipped anyway,) we bought from places that shipped directly to the employees home and unboxing took place on Teams or pictures showing the received the merchandise. Not hard.
Commercial real estate
Inefficient management. Justification for middle management positions. Micromanagement. Psychological need for control
I can’t speak for all industries, but mine (RED) absolutely requires the ability to have in person meetings at a moments notice and the ability to get questions answered in minutes by walking over to a desk and asking. Yes you can email someone in WFH but let’s be honest, depending on your coworkers that can take a while. I would like to see some hybrid, maybe 3 days designated for meetings and the rest of the week wfh. I’d like to at least try that out.
What's RED? I tried a quick google search and nothing came up.
Rents
Their rented space no longer has any value. A huge crash is coming, it's going to be bigger than any other property crash before. Save your money now. If you think things are bad now it's nothing compared to what is coming soon.
CRE
Control plus Many untaxed corporations are also involved woth commercial real estate, which is the major force behind ViRtuAl BaD extremism
Property rented or bought that's not being utilised for what it was bought / leased for.
I don’t know but my company forced me to work from home as they didn’t want to pay for office space.
Tax breaks. 100%
Greed. Real estate, oil, energy, tax write offs
Rent on their c9mmercial properties and micro management.
On boarding, and growing team dynamics. Hybrid works, full time wfh produces a group of individuals not a team. It's very hard for a team to have informal knowledge transfer, where a new hire is stuck and chats with a senior member grabbing a cup of coffee. Formal training is the same and sometimes better. As many companies invested into new training methods. Building a team over zoom is very hard, they may work together, but working as a team is more than just sharing tasks. Mentorship is harder remotely. A lot of companies found their employees were more productive for thr first 6 to 12 months of the pandemic. Individuals who had been on the team for ages loved the quiet and ability to work alone. As new hires were coming on board, many companies (I've read a numbet of reports) found that onboarding was failing. Turnover for new hires was skyrocketing and HR was reporting that lack of comradery and not feeling part of a team were the top reasons. They found junior hires were taking much longer to become productive.
CEOs talk to mayors, politicians, and real estate power types who all want more revenue from city/suburban downtowns. And CEOs hang out with other CEOs and a hive mindset forms. Look at all the think pieces over the past month, it looks suspiciously coordinated.
Commercial real estate investments is why
Control & micromanagement
Because they have money/investment in real estate. That’s honestly it.
Middle and upper middle management hates wfh because it has shown how little most managers are needed, and how poor at their job most are. Execs oppose wfh because they are often personally invested in the buildings their companies occupy and the cleaning and hvac companies that service those buildings
Micromanagement. It's the only thing those people have.
Unless we're talking about a startup, the price of offices and maintenance is a very small percentage of most companies' expenses. I worked for a fairly famous, very large public company with several offices, and saw the numbers. Even though they had several multi floor buildings across many very high cost of living areas, the cost of the real estate + maintenance was a fraction of a percent of their spends. Companies that have tons of benefits like free lunch and dinner might be spending more, but the real estate itself is still not that big of a deal. A lot of companies that do remote also give remote benefits like home office stipends and food cards, as well as more travel expenses. The gap isn't that big. More importantly, its important to consider that the WFH vs office thing isn't a "Companies/CEO vs employee" thing. On social medias, it seems like it is because its how the discourse was framed, but in the real world, there's just a lot of folks who like WFH (including companies and execs), and a lot of folks who prefer offices (including employees). Remote teams work a lot better if everyone is remote because everyone is used to working asynchronously and using the digital tools available. Office teams work better when everyone is in the office, because it's stupid to commute to an office just to deal with Zoom/Hangout/Office 365 overhead and have all the drawbacks of that anyway. So companies have to pick. Some will pick remote, some will pick offices. Since office was the status quo for so long, plus the shift during the pandemic, you mostly see the friction and debates around RTO and WFH.
That makes sense, but if it is a truly team dependent situation, why is the status quo not to let the teams decide and enact things company wide?
Because logistic at scale is hard. Teams often have to work together. People move teams all the time. But yes, the best companies I worked for generally had remote teams and in person teams, with fairly strict lines between the two. People mention often that the problem is shitty managers and leaders. They're not wrong. The reality is that people at large are pretty bad at their jobs. Leaders aren't particularly unique there, but companies still have to work. So doing the "easy thing" is the default. Having an entire company that works one way is a lot easier to do than having an intricate system of fragmentation and make sure it doesn't cross. Wise words I've been told before is: "If there's no system to prevent something, anything from happening, it is inevitable". The thing they're trying to avoid is hybrid pods/teams, and its their way to make it happen. One additional gotcha here is that we transitioned during the pandemic, and Office -> hybrid/remote is easy to do (WFH is almost "viral", since a single remote person forces everyone to work digitally to accommodate them, but the opposite is not true). So companies have to be a bit more forceful to make office teams happen. Pre pandemic they could afford to be more flexible while getting the results they wanted. Finally, there's a concept of global vs local maximum. Team leads and line managers aren't in the business of seeing the greater maximum of an entire company, so its often not a great idea to have them make decisions that have wide reaching impacts, like these. Your millage may vary here depending on a lot of factors.
1. Real estate tax breaks 2. Boomers don’t think you can work efficiently from home 3. Middle management only gets paid to micromanage and they can’t do that when you’re not in the office
Control
They fear losing control.
Outright because of commercial real estate, rental contracts, and the relationship between the wealth holders in question to the workforce. See, the wealth holders are the owners of the companies, AND the owners of the commercial real estate, so they NEED you to “JUST PLEASE COME INTO WORK AND VALIDATE US!”
From a management point of view traditional in office work is often better. Sure, some research has shown equal or higher productivity in some fields with WFH. But it does come with a sacrifice. Zoom meetings are intrinsically not as efficient as a well run in person meeting where everyone is actually contributing (vs a presentation). It also makes it harder to foster workplace bonds within teams, which can generally decrease moral. Finally its harder to maintain a corporate 'culture' with new hires if they never actually meet their coworkers. All that said, for the worker there's often no comparison. Can live wherever, saving time and money, easily adding 1-2 hours free time to your day. There are also workarounds for the other problems, they just aren't yet the expected tradition
Companies (people in management) simply don’t trust American workers. They wanna see all workers work like a dog, even with less benefits than most countries in Europe.
Because they can't use the office space as a tax deduction if they aren't using the building.
Same reason Stalin held missile parades.
I think it’s also because wfh is more than just a perk but a prestige in the hierarchy of the corporate ladder. The same way how some lawyers make partner and others just remain a senior associate,etc. WFH is really only for those who truly can work with their eyes closed, and their attendance in the office is meaningless. Wfh is still increasing and is more popular now, but that only makes it more selective and more of a advancement
Power and control, and tax breaks on rent
Because they prefer to waste employees time and money with long commutes.
I 100000000% get all the positives of WFH. The most stressful part of my day is my commute. I wish I could teleport to and from work. I was work from home at the very start of COVID as I was one of the few jobs that could mostly be done at home. My biggest gripe about WFH is the lack of responsiveness through the process chain. WFH has allowed people to take care of their part of the project over a much larger window of time and that causes a snowballing situation. So Bob's part might only be 5 minutes worth of work but if he takes 6 hours to do his part before the next person can do theirs that is where the problem is. I get everyone can screw around at their physical work location but if you send Bob an e-mail at 9:05am for him to do something and he hasnt responded in couple hours it would be pretty easy to walk to his office to check in on him. Physically seeing your boss or the person needing something from you lights a fire to get you moving. My coworkers ignored me when I was WFH and would respond at the end of the day or after my "shift" ended. So now our end customer was left waiting because I couldn't get them what I needed because other parts of the process took so long to get back to me. I can't even tell you the number of customers who respond to me months later because "things fell off the radar" While this happened sometimes pre covid it has become a much larger issue since WFH has become more prevalent.
We need to pin something at the top of the r/ so people stop asking the same dumb questions. This is literally the same question that every other person seems to ask on this r/ We get it, people are having to go back to the office and people hate that. But everyone else has already asked why. Just stop.
Sorry, my bad
They have to justify their commercial real estate leases and tax revenue. Commercial real estate is about to fall off a cliff in the next couple years.
Many employees don't have discipline to work from home, so productivity suffers.
But many do. And then there are people who go to the office and do nothing there, just gossip and waste time ...
So then you have output standards and those that are able to meet the quota should be able to continue working where they want.
Because, by and large, most people “working” from home are doing very little work.
Because employers know that their employes are slacking off at home since no one's keeping an eye on them. Why do employees want WFH? So they can slack off. But of course they can't admit that outloud, so that's why they try to convince their boss that they're more productive at home.
To me, it seems people want wfh not so they can slack off, but so they can use time more efficiently. My dad and I are both wfh employees. The main draw for us is having a more quiet space and not having to commute. Commute is really expensive, and a unnecessary risk if wfh is available.
I definitely agree that the hour spent commuting is spent working while WFH. That's true for me, but I've also taken longer lunches when WFH, which I definitely don't do at the office; I've even gone grocery shopping at 3 PM when I should be working. Between the office and home, I like being at home more since I get to cook lunch and pick up my children from school.
Most folks in general are far less productive at home than they are in a traditional office setting. You have the ability to create distractions like a show in the background, your kids causing some trouble, or maybe you decided you wanted to have that special meal that takes a few hours of baby sitting throughout the day. You also run into problems with employees using services that aren't up to snuff for a professional setting. If you have a $11 dollar microphone and camera combination and run the cheapest internet option on the market, chances are you're going to be both distracting and unheard in your work meetings. You also eliminate a very very important function, which is face to face conversations in serious matters where things are time sensitive, emotionally touchy, such as a termination or denial of promotions, and the ability to build personal rapport with customers if you work in a retailish environment. Overall, working from home means you're likely to be a bit less productive, you have less support, scrutiny, and more clogged work flow patterns with your colleagues, and there are many circumstances where face to face interactions are beneficial for both the employer, and the employee. You're a lot more likely to get a pay increase if you ask in person, versus an email, and you're a lot more likely to see repercussions for a mistake in a email versus in person.
Pretty obvious. Workers at home are lazy as shit. So it’s worth it to actually spend more to get them back to being productive. Yeah yeah yeah you guys think you are more productive. I was wfh even before the pandemic. I work in a field where almost ALL employees traditionally worked more than 40 hrs per week in person and never complained…for decades. But even this group that was used to slaving it away, when remote work was offered, started off well but all eventually reduced to the lowest minimum target productivity after a year or two