The reason CEOs want workers to RTO is because they want you to quit
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
It would be nice if we could get this level of honesty from CEOs - but let's not pretend that firing people is the only driver for RTO.
Some other motivations include:
- We took a tax break that specifies some level of in-office time per employee and we already spent the money
- We're getting pressured from local governments to bring customers into the city to spend money at local businesses
- We've sunk cost into our little in-person fiefdom and upper management needs the powertrip to justify the headache that is working in upper management
So yes - the CEOs should just own "it", but so should the politicians and real estate owners/investors who are also concerned that their tax base or investment value don't hold up to this new model of working.
Then what really burns my ass is these are the same people who are going to be whining to the major "news" outlets that "nobody wants to work anymore." No, we just don't want to work for assholes like them.
I spent 8.5 years commuting in the Toronto area with traffic getting worse and worse each year.
Being a morning person meant I lost my most productive work hours in the car (public transport would take almost twice as long) and arrived at the office stressed from the 1.5 hour drive, all while getting emails and calls that I couldn't really deal with in the car, stressing me out more, arriving at the office in no mood to be able to think clearly.
I quit that job (difficult, financially and emotionally, because as the President of the company I had literally built large parts and hire more than 2/3rds of the team), and went back to consulting.
It was night and day, in far fewer hours I produced a lot more, simply because I eliminated stresses and had more and better focus time.
It also helped me create and set up boundaries, because the modern workplace is pretty toxic, at all levels. Maybe always has been.
Not per se but this is an assertion that's being made by the people in powerful positions[0] without really being backed up. I hear at least as much "it just feels better" talk from pro-RTO managers as I do from pro-WFH contributors. Rather than think that working from an office is more productive, pro-RTO arguers want others to assume that it is. It's not an entirely unreasonable thought but the actual "thinking" is sidestepped in order to skip to the desired conclusion.
0: They make organizational decisions and can choose the terminate the employment of the persons who need to be employed for health insurance and income.
Edit: I’m not sure why I can’t reply to the guy below me but plenty of Google results about surveys that show WFH is less productive.
Sure you could imagine a hypothetical world in which offices were designed differently, but for the most part RTO is return-to-open-office, with multiple distractions per hour.
and that home offices are cramped places where work intrudes on the home sanctum; where the chores and unfinished personal tasks of one's life haunt the mind of the worker and distract them from the undivided attention of their work tasks and interactions with coworkers.
I am more on edge from waiting for someone to message me while at home than I ever was when I thought someone was going to walk up to me.
Disclaimer: like everyone else here, this is an opinion. Thinking WFH is magical is also an opinion. WFH has some upsides, and some people get more upside than others.
You can't reply too fast, there's a timeout
> but plenty of Google results about surveys that show WFH is less productive
And plenty show WFH is more productive. And some show there's a trust gap, which might explain the productivity difference. I would say there's no definitive study yet. Some companies have banked on WFH even before the pandemic. It could well be that it's a market and there's a split that optimises productivity.
There’s a lot of studies that show that productivity is better at home for some individuals, I don’t think there has been a proper meta-study because there’s studies that prove whatever you want to believe right now.
Even without citing any study, it does feel organic that it depends entirely on your job, your level of autonomy, your existing relationship to your colleagues and manager, the level of trust and ultimately your home situation.
Having 3 kids running around most of the day in a 2bedroom apartment is not going to be as productive as sitting in an air conditioned office that has good physical and auditory privacy.
However, it’s also true that management has been basically cutting costs extremely in terms of office space for decades, you don’t even get enough personal space or privacy for a cubicle now: let alone a door you could close.
Erosion of the quality of the office over this period of time has created a pretty large gulf to cross. I would argue that most people have better working conditions at home than the torrid open office that we’ve been subjected to.
It's not anything other than a "something pressed a button" button. Offering nothing more than a poor man's analytics system, at best. No additional information can be obtained from it. But, that is still good information, as it tells that there is activity in the vicinity of the comment, which is why one comes here to post and not instead write in their private journal.
For much work, yes, even moreso per hour the employee must dedicate to work (which, in working from office is substantially more than WFH for the same on-the-clock hours.)
> Especially if you’re a big company and have a lot of new grads/inexperienced hires that are harder to train up remotely?
Why would it be harder to train people up remotely, in general? Sure, there's cases whwre this is likely true, but they probably largely correspond to the same types of work that weren't remotable in the first place.
If not, and you're still having to work remotely just in the office with crowded hotdesking, shit wifi and no rooms available, worse coffee, worse monitors and keyboards etc, then no - being at home is way better.
> We're getting pressured from local governments to bring customers into the city to spend money at local businesses
Extremely interested in any examples if you have them handy.
If I'm in the office simply because of a tax break, then I feel I'm productive and revenue-generating by doing absolutely nothing while in said office. I mean they could hire homeless people to do that and solve a lot of problems at once.
More and more working professionals I know are essentially forced to live dozens of miles away from where they work in a heavily urbanized area, or give up the dream of ever owning a house.
If this [1] story from a few weeks ago is to be believed these directives are coming from the people at the top: executives, high level management, and investors. That story is about Microsoft specifically, but I don't see anything in there that would indicate the same couldn't have happened at other tech companies.
It should go without saying that I was talking about the people making the decisions about RTO.
Looking over at an employee and seeing them working is the worlds most common self-soothing mechanism. It really is as simple as that.
On the fringes, I'm sure there are a lot of creative collaborative environments with employees that have actual autonomy to act on such collaborations where RTO would move the needle, but I would speculate that very few of these environments actually exist even though everyone thinks they definitely have that environment (this is more at the executive level)
Here I'll do one: "software developers like to choose their own tools because they don't care about using the most efficient best in class tool available, they like to think of themselves as artists as if they were all little da vincis who have yet to be recognized for their brilliance"
See how condescending and dumb this is?
I don't deny it. I literally said "I suspect".
> you've never managed anything significant clearly.
Also armchair psychiatry.
> See how condescending and dumb this is?
I think your wording was a bit exaggerated but has a grain of truth in that many software developers do think of themselves as artists, and they're not wrong about that in essence. I do think it's wrong to claim that there's a unique "most efficient best in class tool available". Different people naturally find different tools more efficient for their personal workflows.
I actually think that the majority of human behavior, including my own, can be explained in animalistic terms. It's not condescending, because we are undeniably animals. In fact, it makes no rational sense for me to waste time commenting on HN, but I do it anyway!
Rather, the ones who have the easiest time finding a new job will often be the first ones to quit. These are not necessarily the most competent ones because, for example, people who are better at self-promotion often do have it easier to find a new job, without necessarily being more competent.
Doesn't that mean the layoff is as humane as possible? It means you inflict the least amount of suffering you could.
However, that’s probably not the case for companies that were laying off people earlier this year despite making record profits (I think most people understood that many of the more profitable companies had overhired over the pandemic) and unlikely to be a driver in RTO driven “layoffs” since they’re not layoffs in the first place and say nothing about employees job security.
RTO driven “layoffs” would be the people who don’t live near the office.
In any case, I personally like being at the office with lots of WFH flexibility.
Especially in the more technical roles most of the real top performers I've seen were not very good at politics or interviewing.
They literally walk away over minor inconveniences like “you can’t use your own mouse here” or “you have to use VS Code and not your Vim setup.” Don’t like something management does? “Eff you.”
Last place I was at did one day in the office, and they all left without new jobs.
All are now employed again, most a level up.
And that's where employees 'dun goofed. Unless they got permanent remote work in a written contract, this was all a temporary measure until the pandemic was over.
And now our office lease is up; CEO recently announced where the new office will be. It will be extremely close to his new house and will have desks for even more people than we have now. You'd have to be delusional to think that RTO isn't coming next year after the move is finished.
I moved to a new house during the pandemic and am now feeling very vindicated knowing that I focused my search on an area that assumed we'd go back to the office and that the office would eventually move closer to the CEO's house (there is published research about this). It's going to end up saving me about 45 minutes of commuting per day!
Life lessons from a too-blunt guy who just wants to work without the politics.
The people who tell people what they need to hear? They may not do as well in the short-term, in fact they often don't, but over the long haul they have the most success and make the best leaders.
Of course these are just overall trends, there are always exceptions.
To paraphrase Wayne Gretzky a bit: "An ass-kisser plays where the manager is now; a great employee plays where the manager is going to be."
Frankly, in many cases, these companies are in breech of contract. In some states that contract isn't worth the paper it's written on and in others, it does. Here's the thing - it's the state where the employee actually works who determines the enforcement of the contract. States benefiting from WFH are going to be more inclined to enforce those contracts.
Don't get me wrong, I love remote work. And Zoom meetings have made it way easier to pull together groups of people on different schedules. But there are significant benefits to being in-office too.
Because of ZIRP, pensions have been reaching for yield by doing anything they can, and that has often been CMBS, CRE equity, CRE bank loans, etc.
When you have multiple levels of people working under you in an office, you can go down the management structure as many levels as you want just by dropping into people's offices, and there's no record of it and no way to prevent it. If you have to schedule a zoom call it shows up in people's calendars and gives worker's immediate supervisors the chance to intervene.