80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans: ‘A lot of executives have egg on their faces’::As some business leaders accept hybrid work as a permanent reality, others are backtracking on earlier pledges to let employees work from home.
I’ve never really accepted the theory that return to office pushes are driven by office maintenance costs, or whatever. Hell, those expenses go UP when everyone is back. Working from home takes away electrical usage, and mitigates janitorial demand. If productivity is up or equal, and building maintenance costs are down, then wtf is it really about?
I’m surprised people in this comments section aren’t aware of the real estate mob. It’s the oligarchy who are pushing for return to offices. They have valuable investments in both big companies and the real estate, and they don’t want to see the values of their assets going down.
Somebody posted about this on lemmy a week or so ago. I’ll see if I can find it.
Don’t worry, they will divest now while it’s propped up. When they are divested and it’s suckers holding the bag, they will be fine with wfh.
The dam is broken, there is no going back. It will be different by company and industry but it’s not going away.
It’s about ego. The boss doesn’t know how to make the company perform better, they’re all out of ideas. They have to change something to make it look like they’re doing something, so RTO is the low hanging fruit.
There’s really no more justification needed than that. Looking at practical benefits to explain RTO pushes won’t get you answers because the practical benefits are so slim and conditional relative to the strain it creates.
It’s all about ego. They self-identity as the hardcore alpha boss that deserves high pay because they “earn” it. So to massage that ego, they go into the office and see nobody else there. So in that worldview they are hardworking (an assumed condition), and nobody else is there, therefore everyone else is not hardworking (regardless of how much work they’re actually doing).
I just don’t get it. That money has already been spent or guaranteed for the current leases. It’s a sunk cost either way. If they end up not needing it that office space then, once those leases are up, that become a cost saving and improve the bottom line of corporate profits right?
Only thing I can think of is that a a considerable percentage of upper management are getting kick backs by property owners who can see what WFH policies mean to their business model, or there are a lot of managers that don’t know how to evaluate employee performance based on their deliverables.