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They're wasting money on big buildings and rent.
Also, they want control of your activity while your on the clock. It bothers them if you're more productive, get the same amount of work done but can relax more at home. Which is the way it should be. If I can do the same work in 4 hours than I can in 8, I should get paid the same, and be able to relax, instead of being made to stay at work for 8hrs and be given even more things to do to just stay busy.
I am surprised they don't just cut costs by not having a physical location then? Or is this just while waiting out lease agreements.
Some smaller companies are doing this. It makes them more agile financially and actually helps their growth to not have a building to pay for. I don’t understand the larger companies.
They spent millions building a facility or are locked into 5/10 year leases. I've also heard it's because cities are dying, no one in offices to eat 'down the street' at the food shops, people don't stop at the bar on the way home, no impulse shopping trip because you're already out.
Imagine how much space we could reclaim for homes to reinvigorate those bars and eateries! :o
What? That’s absolutely incorrect. Cities are the number one most sought after and thriving alternative, especially among young people.
Maybe cities in the US, but that’s because they’re mostly poorly designed parking lots for suburbanites.
Cities are certainly not dying anywhere else on Earth wtf.
Plenty are, it's just that the largest companies built those places, they cannot trivially liquidate them. Plus they usually own the whole land, so cutting part of it away is not easy.
They still should. For many jobs office work is a completely unnecessary waste of:
But managers are loathe to ever admit any failings, our market culture frowns upon this. Hence admitting that your building is no longer needed is not a thing any manager to wants to bring up in a meeting to their bosses, so back to the office it is. :<
First, a lot of studies have shown the productivity boost for WFH may not be uniform or actually exist. Whether the possible productivity boost is worth the money on office space hasn't been answered, it is likely more in that gray area than WFH proponents want it to be.
Second, while generic work productivity is about the same level, teaching new skills isn't. We have data showing educating from home has been worse for students, and that seems to be filtering into the office place. Junior staff aren't picking up skills fast enough and are probably a major reason why WFH productivity measures are lower than expected. It isn't because new staff are lazy, just that they have fewer people to ask questions to and don't ask as many questions in general.
Third, building and maintaining a work network has fallen apart. People don't know others in an office, which can be a problem in flat company structures where communication is not expected to go through the boss only. So you have people who feel like they are doing productive work, but aren't talking to others. This can cause a lot of rework that the managers see in slipping deadlines.
That said, the answer seems to be hybrid for these jobs as workers won't tolerate full time in the office anymore. However, hybrid has been a clusterfuck in a lot of companies because the hybrid model is new and not everyone knows how to manage to it.
I just wanted to say that this is pretty much the most well thought out answer on WFH I've seen. It's nuanced and balanced.
Thank you.
You're welcome.
As you can see from some of the replies, there is the assumption that bosses and executives are evil and trying to make the worker's lives worse, but I don't see that in a lot of these discussions.
I can also see how some staff may see themselves as being more productive yet their managers may see less productivity within their department overall.
To speak to your points, I started with about 1 year ago in a new career in IT. We initially were coming in one day a week and this has moved to two days.
First, when we moved to two days, I have it about 6 weeks, then started crunching numbers. By the sole metric of closing tickets... My team as a whole is more productive in the office. I didn't break down exactly who was more of less productive, but I have my ideas. I'm willing to bet that I work better at home, but it's a moot point as the team is better on site.
As far as learning new skills, even at one day a week, I've caught up to the rest of my team and have surpassed them technically. Again, it's IT and I've always had a strong interest, whereas I see some of the team probably view it as "just work" I'm actually enjoying the work. Again, it's a second career so maybe maturity is in play here too, but even the younger guys who were hired after me are growing very quickly.
You're absolutely right about networking. I felt so isolated when I started. It wasn't until I learned a few people a few steps above where I was that I learned who is a good resource, and who I can trust. Once I got my head around that, I think people actually see the work in doing and redirect me for it. If I were 100% wfh I don't think I would be having as good a time.
Just my experience
Here's the fun part:
When execs were hyper focused on outsourcing, not once did they say productivity was a problem
Second local workers wanted to do the same though, suddenly if you're not in the office you're useless.
Which is it? Outsourcing is trash or WFH is just fine?
They outsourced because they could pay their employees less.
Some companies attempted to pay workers who moved to areas with cheaper cost of living, but that failed. My guess is that full remote companies are going to shift wages so that they are closer to the national average than the region.
A comment I've seen a few times is that remote work highlights the minimal value that middle-managers provide to companies.
If you're employees work from home with little interaction with their managers and they do it well/better, then why have those managers? Like you said, companies want to be cost effective. So the push back to the office could be coming from managers who don't want a light shined on their lack of value.
The people in the boards of directors, the major investors, people who run large investment funds etc. are the same or very close to the owners of commercial real estate.
They don’t want to fuck themselves.
Also many times corporate rent is used as money laundering, to hide profits etc. Like the building is owned by company A, which is incorporated in the Virgin Islands, but is actually owned by the same group that owns company B that rents the building. So they pay money to themselves. So company B is not profitable and doesn’t have to pay taxes. Presto pronto.
Just a very obvious manoeuvre, there are certainly many more.
Look: a lot of companies would suffer from an office real estate crash.
And most importantly, funds invested in all of the above.
People who own businesses also own stocks in other people's businesses. Meaning they all fall and rise together. Trying to keep the "work commute" and "office rental" industries alive is just an attempt on the part of those who hold capital to keep their portfolios growing.
In secret, they are probably also trying to hedge their bets, diversify and make themselves immune to the coming collapse. They'll try to position themselves and their capital in such a way so that the working class is the only group hurt when it happens.
But in public? They are not going to devalue their assets by standing by, complacent, as an office apocalypse approaches.
On the subject of remote working being more productive or not, my anedoctal experience is that when remote working is fully embraced, the productivity skyrockets, but when it is embraced half-way it may have a negative effect.
When 2/3 of the employees are in an office, they tend to reach out to one another to discuss things and remote workers often get out of the loop. When everyone is working remotely, these discussions happen on slack channels for everyone to see. And if they are written down in a channel, folks can read it as many times as they need to ensure nothing was missed.
This may seem not to be too important, but it makes a massive difference at the end of the day. And you could try to make that happen without remote working but people will not stop walking out to someone else's cubicle for small questions when they have that option.
There are apparently some industries where there's less production at home, I work in an industry where this isn't the case though and it seems to be extrovert admin people pushing it, I think they think we're all sad and lonely at home?
"It's nice to come in and have people to talk to!"
Is it? Or are we all just being dragged in because you want chats?
Talking to people isn't really boosting my productivity. I need peace and time to think. The office is the last of all places where I can find that.
I work 95% remote, and I'll be the first to admit, there is value in working physically close to your teammates. Discussion and camaraderie can happen organically, which allows people to better understand each others' strengths. There are also fewer things to distract you, and the reality is that many people these days are experiencing a sort of internet-induced ADHD, so being in an office can make it easier to concentrate. All of this allows you to be and feel more productive.
That's the best argument I've got, but I wouldn't mandate it on anyone. The only people mandating working from office are people who are insecure with their workforce and hiring methodologies. They don't trust their workers to do the job, so they feel the need to micromanage their workers like children. If you're a manager, and you don't feel like you can trust your employees, you've already lost.
I actually have ADHD and the opposite is true for me. Working from home I can concentrate without distractions of office workers walking by, or talking about something that I'm not interested in but can't block out. I work in my office at home with the door closed for practically the whole day and it's great. My work has it's own built in structure, but I imagine that other kinds of less structured work could be very difficult for someone with ADHD.
Because a bigger company did it.
You'd think there'd be abetter reason but the corporate world is surprisingly uncreative. Signed: Someone who saw trillions being burned by IBM's Wattson despite a sea of red flags.
why are companies trying so hard to have employees back in the office?
Managers generally don't know how to manage people, so point fingers at WFH (or anything else that's handy)
Managers are managers because they're good at playing power games, not because they're competent at their jobs. Power games are much harder if you never see the people you manage. Managing in a predominantly WFH environment will be very different and a lot of people who are successful now will fail in this world. That's what they're scared of.
A lot of large companies and executives have investments in real estate. If everyone stopped using offices all of a sudden, they would lost a bunch of money because the space wouldn't be in demand anymore.
Imaginary feeling of loss of control.
It's easy, a lot of companies have board members who are also board members in office space companies.
There are a few reasons.
Managers find it easier to micromanage their employees when they are at the office.
I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit
Yeah..well no. Companies are run by managers who aren't necessarily rational about human resources.
Control.
The answer that is common but I don't see here is it's a soft layoff result. It allows the company to reduce their employee spend because a percentage of them will resign without the publicity of doing a layoff.
Without internal intelligence I feel like that's what zoom is doing for example.
I suspect they were ‘advised’ by the Banks and perhaps the government, to put the brakes on.
Every Corporation would be delighted to dump expensive city real estate, and “externalise facilities costs” to the workforce. ( which is what working from home is, from a balance sheet point of view). It’s what they teach at business school.
However, it would only take a handful of big players to to do this in succession to collapse the real estate market in most cities.
The knock on effect would likely include some large defaults by landlords and developers and who knows where that ends.
A secondary effect is house prices. certainly in London, where people pay a 2-5x premium to live within an hour of they high paying job.
If people no longer need to live near the office, why would they spend so much on crappy housing ? It would likely trigger an exodus away from the capital, collapsing the housing market.
In the UK if the housing market collapses, the economy follows it down the tube in massive way.
Hence the half hearted ‘push’ to get people back in the office .
As an anecdote, I work at a midsized software company as a product manager. I have an international team of about 20 that I manage from home (full-time remote). Overall there is some loss of speed and agility versus having a full-time in-office staff. I'm not a fan of trying to quantify productivity per se, but for things like estimations and deviations there's no question that in my environment at least, things move a little slower and take a little longer. Now personally, the fact that we can hire engineers anywhere across the globe (including in LCOL areas), don't have to pay rent and related fees, and that some of the best engineers specifically want full-time remote more than outweighs the reduced agility (putting aside all of the other potential QOL benefits) -- and if needed, some of the savings from reduced rent and salaries could be used to expand the team anyway. Thankfully my management team agrees and has continued to pursue a remote/hybrid environment. But for those places that value speed and agility most it could be a bit of a problem.
My work place doubled down on work from home and they allow work from anywhere. They still encourage to gather at the workplace sometimes for socialization and general good vibes.
Sunk cost fallacy of big offices.
A couple of extra ones to add to the list:
"Work you don't see didn't happen"
I think a lot of it is down to the assumption that employees are working less because less work is seen.
"A tired employee is a loyal employee"
That one might sound dystopian, but it's also true. Commutes make people feel worse, and contribute to burned out feelings by reducing recuperation time. People in that kind of space are unable to look for new opportunities as easily.
I am no exoert
But i have read of 2 reasons.
1: the boss thinks people who sit at home, are lazy and get nothing done. When they are in the office he can keep an eye on them!
2: nobody using their expensive office buildings means waste of rent money. Not wanting to let that go to waste... makes sense. Inviting potential clients to your empty offices would also seem awkward.
Im sure there could be more reasons..
I am on team work from home personally, but the reality is we will have to compromise a bit, and I think a hybrid environment is where the sweet spot is. I still work remote about 90% of the time, but realistically I think 60-80% remote, 20-40% in office is ideal and tenable for just about every work type where remote work is feasible.
There is benefit to being in person with your colleagues, there is benefit to having a centralized area for congregating, meeting with outside stakeholders, etc. However, there is absolutely no reason to be in the office all day every day. It makes no sense. The bulk of employees spend AT LEAST 50% (rank and file probably closer to 85-90%?) of their time working alone, by themselves. Let them do that wherever the fuck they want. If the work is getting done, leave them the fuck alone and let them work in their PJs or on their couch or whatever.
A hybrid environment also keeps your work force local and prevents us all from being outsourced. If we all insist on working remote full time then there is absolutely no reason for employers not to offer our jobs to someone living somewhere that's cheaper to live. Sure, we could correct over time and move to a lower cost of living place to compete, but is that really what you want? Do you want to leave your home, friends, family, etc just to chase the job you already have solely because they won't pay you what they already do to stay where you are? If you own a home do you want the value to tank as demand plummets? If your rent is cheap do you want it to skyrocket because displaced remote workers are flooding your town in a rush to capitalize?
Found out today that some executives are afraid of leaks and digital records of certain conversations that could happen in person instead.
Companies that overhired the last few years might just wanna increase the attrition rates without explicitly saying so.
To verify you're spending every minute on actually working
Two basic reasons:
Middle managers rate themselves (and others) by how many direct reports they have and it's harder to keep score when you don't see people in person.
Companies have spent billions on office space they can't easily get out of. Look at Apple:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Park
$5 billion dollars. They are deep in the sunk cost fallacy.
Reaction?
https://fortune.com/2023/03/24/remote-work-3-days-apple-discipline-terminates-tracks-tim-cook/