this post was submitted on 30 Sep 2024
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That and executive ass covering, a way to avoid admitting to shareholders that they wasted their money on useless commercial real estate.
It's also shooting themselves in the foot. The first people to leave aren't going to be the clock punchers, it will be the best and brightest who can easily find other jobs.
That's a feature, not a bug.
The best and brightest will challenge leadership. The shitty barely competent value engineer will say yes until they fuck up so bad they get promoted.
Yes. But some of them are also the most expensive ones, so when they leave costs go down. And we all know "numbers must go up" (=cost must go down).
So you're left with departments full of clock punchers who don't have vision or leadership. If you want to kill your Golden Goose, that's a good way to do it. The remaining departments full of drone followers aren't going to be making you the exciting groundbreaking products that make you money.
Of course then again I personally see value in employees, maybe business leadership does not or thinks they are all generic replaceable.
In my experience: the higher up the management chain, the higher the chance that they are just in for the bonuses - not for the company / industry. And those bonuses are always bound to these numbers which need to go up. When the numbers go down, these people are long gone.
You nailed it. look at their more recent announcements about execs not taking bonuses--- they're giving up bonuses for the coming year. I expect most of them to 'pursue other interests' but they'll keep their bonuses, whatever team gets brought in to right the ship will then get screwed.
Might also be ass covering- with a pre-emptive promise of no bonuses it may be harder to replace them...
Idk about the whole talk of having an excuse to shareholders, I don't think shareholders look into hey these offices are sitting unused I demand an explanation I think they care how much profit the company making and what are future predictions of profit.
No, but it will bring into question the process by which they were acquired to begin with. Somebody will ask, why did you spend x billion on real estate when it was obvious that remote work was the future? Or if they are locked into a long-term lease, eventually the question will come up why are we spending all this money for office space we aren't using? Shouldn't we have thought of this earlier? Not having workers in the office makes it obvious that real estate was a bad investment, and many of these companies are pretty heavily invested in real estate. Easier to screw the workers with what can be explained away as a management strategy than admit a wasted a whole bunch of money buying and building and renovating space you don't need.