I have posted this on Reddit (askeconomics) a while back but got no good replies. Copying it here because I don’t want to send traffic to Reddit.
What do you think?
I see a big push to take employees back to the office. I personally don’t mind either working remote or in the office, but I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit and I haven’t seen a convincing explanation yet of why they are so keen to have everyone back.
If remote work was just as productive as in-person, a remote-only company could use it to be more efficient than their work-in-office competitors, so I assume there’s no conclusive evidence that this is the case. But I haven’t seen conclusive evidence of the contrary either, and I think employers would have good reason to trumpet any findings at least internally to their employees (“we’ve seen KPI so-and-so drop with everyone working from home” or “project X was severely delayed by lack of in-person coordination” wouldn’t make everyone happy to return in presence, but at least it would make a good argument for a manager to explain to their team)
Instead, all I keep hearing is inspirational wish-wash like “we value the power of working together”. Which is fine, but why are we valuing it more than the cost of office space?
On the side of employees, I often see arguments like “these companies made a big investment in offices and now they don’t want to look stupid by leaving them empty”. But all these large companies have spent billions to acquire smaller companies/products and dropped them without a second thought. I can’t believe the same companies would now be so sentimentally attached to office buildings if it made any economic sense to close them.
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.
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:
- Productivity (via constant distractions)
- Time (commuting)
- Money (via the building maintenance costs)
- Space (the actual building)
- Resources (heating and shit)
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. :<
And that’s why capitalism is so efficient.
/s
it’s just that the largest companies built those places
And that’s the biggest one imho: They were able to leverage their huge size to save money long term by building and owning.
Now that the status quo has changed, they want to change it back so that their advantage is still in effect.
Correct. They either own the buildings and have to pay for upkeep (and can’t get rid of them) or they’re on a long term lease.
My employer spent tens of millions having several custom buildings built over a decade ago. They house our servers as well. The only way they could get rid of their buildings is to get new buildings for the servers. That’s a pretty tough sell.
A friend works for a housing association that had a very fancy office and that’s now been sold as they are all working from home.
Another reason you’ve not yet been given is that some of these companies have decades long contracts for renting. The government should intervene and cancel the contracts and pay for them to be converted to flats tbqh. Someone will say “But that will cost more than building a new one![citation needed]” but knocking down half the office buildings at once will probably give everyone in the cities supercancer*[citation needed]*
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.
Not just rent, they own those big buildings. They’re assets, and what happens when everyone realizes they don’t need those buildings at the same time? Corporate real estate crashes and those assets are worthless. Nobody wants a huge asset dropping off their balance sheet because they let their employees wfh before they could offload their offices.
The shitty middle management who think like your second point are convenient, but I don’t think they’re the ones making the decision to call employees back in a lot of cases.
I’ve never understood the empty buildings argument. Wouldn’t the company be “wasting” just as much money if the building was empty or full? Might even cost more to have it occupied since then you need hvac.
No, if the building was empty, they should get rid of it. But there’s the whole sunk cost thing if they built it themselves or are in a multi year lease
That does not make sense at all if you consider the number one priority of any company: money. If they make just as much or even more when people work more efficiently they would not care.
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.
Great summary, I wish all the WFH fanatics would read and understand this. I really hate how in most online spaces they make it seem like 100% WFH is the answer for everything.
Thanks for helping bring this perspective to light. Most threads on work from home go all in on productivity being higher, but don’t take into account the longer term consequences of working from home on knowledge sharing, education, training, and team building. Even if productivity is higher now, that doesn’t mean it will remain that way in the long run.
while generic work productivity is about the same level, teaching new skills isn’t.
As someone who did his last year of college and first two years of career from home this is spot on. My senior simply refused to teach me anything, or even answering my chats and my manager didn’t care. I had to learn doing inverse engineering on the excel files because I cannot even sit at his side and saw him work ans learn. I changed companies a month ago to a full-time in office position and I’m learning more in this month that what I did on the past two years (its also helps that my new manager is also a college professor and have like 40 years of industry experience).
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.
Ironically that probably ousts out their minimal value harder. Not a good look forcing your “underlings” if productivity was good prior, and subsequently falls flat.
Look: a lot of companies would suffer from an office real estate crash.
- the businesses that own the office real estate
- car manufacturers
- tire manufacturers
- petroleum companies
- coffee franchises
- fast food franchises lining freeways on the way to work
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.
I think what they don’t realize is that it’s basically Pandora’s box at this point, and what’s been let out is a ticking time bomb. Unless something changes, remote work will always be on the cards now and will probably always be preferable.
Maybe they’re focused on playing for time so they can insure their assets and move to hedge funds that are shorting all of the above industries? I don’t know investing that well.
I really feel like this makes the most sense. It beats out all the other arguments.
Middle managers need more control? Big bosses never care that much about what middle managers say, why now? And across tons of companies? Seems silly. Middle managers are notoriously ineffective.
They want to retain control/keep you tired? Maybe, but it would take a large conspiracy coordinated between the execs, which seems like a stretch. There would need to be a massive Illuminati-esque organization like that Stonecutters episode from The Simpsons.
But as always, it comes back to “follow the money.” The people making the decision will lose money somehow, so they are trying not to lose, or to minimize losses. All board of directors people have multiple investments and interests, so of course they are trying to make the best of their situation. They own part of the IT company renting the space, but also have investment in office retail space and some local businesses. If the office life drives an area to stay alive, its dying will shift the money away from all their investments. As usual, they are making those decisions without giving a shit about anything but money and their own interests.
Yup. A lot of companies benefiting off the inefficiency of commuting.
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.
Absolutely, we have whatsapp groups now so if I have a question I can fire it over to anyone or everyone if needed, it’s so much easier and I can ignore it until convenient.
Talking to others may not boost your productivity working, but it can give you a better understanding of what to do when you are productive.
Sure, clearing and refining tasks is important. But we’re talking about your colleague or boss talking for talking’s sake.
Not all talking needs to be work related only.
I’ve seen a lot better productivity between staff that will talk to each other about non-work tasks than those that don’t. People aren’t robots.
And I’m not one of them. People are different.
If you’re going in to talk to people it means you’re not working. Unless… the company pays you just to talk to people. 🤷♂️
And how does that make you feel?
On a serious note though people who I didn’t like and didn’t want to talk to would come by my desk daily and spend a minimum of 20 minutes just talking about shit I didn’t care about. How they got any work at all done is beyond me because obviously they were doing the rounds and talking to everyone else too. And how I got any work done between the million visits? I hated being in an office. I was so miserable.
Same… it’s not my current company, but the company before this one got me interested in noise cancelling headphones. People bullshitting and talking loud all day may as well have been nails on a chalkboard.
I kind of agree that remote working every single day gets very socially deprived very quickly. Although the office isn’t a place for socialising, not having anyone to talk to day in day out at work drives me a bit mad.
But I also think 90% of the time, working from home is better. Maybe a hybrid model where you only go to the office once or maximum twice a week or something could work for most people. The introverts and the extroverts reaching a compromise.
Or, just make it free choice? If you miss socialising then go in, if you don’t then stay home?
Also helps those of us unable to drive for various reasons (in my case, physical tourettes triggered by stress. Liable to start having pseudoseizures [like seizures but I’m concious during them] when driving which is… Really not good)
Don’t forget all the people that hate their kids (and “family”) too. That was one of the biggest driving forces at the immediate end of the pandemic lockdowns. Then they changed course and said it was about productivity because hating your kids sounds bad.
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.
I can tell you from experience, there is nothing more distracting than having your manager walk up behind you and tap you on the shoulder while you’re working on code. While this problem doesn’t go away completely with remote work, at least you have time to compose yourself and bookmark your work before you respond
I haven’t had a manager that makes a habit out of that, that’s a no no. If someone is in the zone, you don’t mess with em. We did have Do Not Disturb signs we could put up, but I never felt the need.
Also for me there is value in occasionally seeing people in person. The exact ratio will depend on the job, but for me it would be about 2-3 days per month in the office. We see each other, talk about how things are going, blockers, stuff we need to change, a little office gossip and then off we go again.
In that sense, a lax hybrid schedule works best for me personally. However, for it to work, everyone should agree to be in the office in the same days. Coming to an empty office and doing the same zoom calls you could have done from home is less than useful.
And since, again, the ratio of individual work Vs collaborative work varies by person and team, we’d need to find an average that sort of works for everyone and agree on a common schedule That is where I think the idea of hybrid comes in: 2 or 3 days per week in the office for everyone. My company is trying this and asking (but for now not forcing) people to concentrate attendance in the days in the middle of the week.
This clearly works better for some and worse for others.
I heard from a colleague that some companies are trying a different model. They shut down the offices and used part of the savings as budget for managers to create more frequent team events, so teams can e.g. meet in person at a restaurant a couple of times per month. I have no idea who these companies are and how this approach is going.
I think it should be on a case-by-case basis. I’m in the legal field, and there’s definitely days I don’t need to be in the office as almost all of our work is online now. State and federal mandatory efiling, e-discovery is online, and even our document management system is headed to the cloud, so no need for remoting in, just log into Microsoft 365 from any browser. Don’t even need to own any Microsoft apps natively anymore.
On the other hand, there are days that I do need to be in the office: depositions and prepping witnesses, trial preparedness, and sometimes, you just need to touch base with everyone to see how things are going. I work in securities litigation, and those are frequently very complex, document and fact intensive cases.
We have a entire practices that are 100% remote now. The partners are either elderly, or they live far away from the office and were hybrid remote before the pandemic. The paralegal that works with those attorneys is also 100% remote.
Lastly, I am much more productive at home than in the office. I do not have ADHD, and do not have a problem with attention, and do not get distracted easily. On the other hand, I’m an introvert, and really loathe the interpersonal nonsense and constant interruptions of ppl barging into my office, more often enough that just to chat. Last month, I had to do a major document review of going through 10s of thousands of emails, and to just plow through that at home, comfy in my bed, where my bathroom is just a few steps away, made me so much more productive than being stuck in the office.
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.
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.
Last year a company I wowed at the first interview didn’t follow up. When I asked why, they said that since Facebook was slowing hiring, they were too.
They’re not even related businesses other than both broadly being tech companies.
Almost sounds like they’re going out of their way to directly compete with Facebook for talent.
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.
I know why they did it
It’s just a dumb argument when it wasn’t one before
They are looking at it from a productivity per hour basis.
With offshoring, the individual worker is cheaper, so they can be less productive yet still worth it.
With full remote, you are still paying the workers the same amount of money, so keeping productivity up may be worth it.
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.
This is definitely a good point, when everyone is wfh things like slack or (bleh) Teams has everything in it. I am an internet kid and used im to communicate with my friend base for a long time, it works for me and I can stay connected with people that way, it seems like some people aren’t able to utilize that effectively.
I work for a large Corp that has offices in several location, prior to covid wfh, information was often silo’d just to certain locations and there were people on teams I didn’t know because they never post in slack/teams and instead just do everything in person. All of a sudden I’m seeing them post and ask questions/comment when they rarely/never had before.
The company is now instituting RTO and claiming it’s in the name of collaboration and culture, but if anything I think wfh helped a lot to make cross-site collaboration and culture more prevalent.
Yeah, our company had hybrid available to everyone, so going remote was simply increasing the hybrid days to 100%. Our productivity skyrocketed because instead of having to waste 5-10 minutes per hour walking across a stupidly huge campus, or battling people for meeting rooms, we could just meet in virtual rooms, and instantly “teleport” to the next one. We had no commute, people would meet early or late, or during lunch.
Nobody asked us to work more but we did because we COULD. We were already fully aligned on hitting our goals, and being in the office was an obstacle rather than an aid. We’re increasing our in-office days over the overwhelmingly negative feedback (why even ask for input if you’re just going to ignore it?). I’ll just have to mentally pull back on available bandwidth for the time wasted on in-office days, reject more meetings, and extend deadlines accordingly. I’ll need to free up all that extra time for the small talk and “networking” they want me to do instead of working.
Thanks I agree. Pre COVID, my company closed some very small offices to only keep a few HQs and a handful of people were offered fully remote contracts. They were generally very unhappy, being basically cut off from training, career growth, most of the context around work discussions, company events…
WFH is great when working from home is the norm for everyone. The office ALSO works only when most colleagues are in the office (otherwise you just add commute time to the same zoom call you could have from home).
It’s easy, a lot of companies have board members who are also board members in office space companies.
Imaginary feeling of loss of control.
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.
I read some research paper not too long ago that showed how a majority of managers promoted from within are bad at their jobs because they got all their experience in other jobs along the way to management that are not even remotely similar to the tasks required for management, thus they don’t actually develop skills that make for good managers.
Like just because you flipped burgers really good at McDonald’s doesn’t mean you would be good at managing other burger flippers.
There is a concept, known as the Peter Principle, that says people will rise to the level of their incompetence. Basically, anyone who is good at a job gets promoted. That keeps happening until they finally end up in a job where they are not good. And that is where they will stay.
Makes sense, but you see the opposite all the time. Someone who has little experience, but has a fresh degree or an MBA in management. They might have learned some management concepts, possibly even supervised people in the past… but they have no idea how the organization truly functions, they don’t know what their team is really doing and if one of their team members or an SME is gone they have no idea what to do other than bark orders at the other team members because they have never done the work themselves.
In an ideal world, you would find someone who was excelling at the vasious jobs they would be managing and then put them into a management training program or pay for their schooling.
Oh for sure. The last decade, most of the jobs I’ve had tell me they want to eventually make me a manager; but then they never actually train me how to manage so I never take the position.
Exactly. There are many managers out there that have picked up a few management skills, put in to a management role over jobs that they have no clue about. Theyre frequently a big dick and create hostile company culture.
Ive not had many managers in my working life with actual people skills…
I think there was literally a management consultant quoted on CBC that said most managers rely on time in office as their only measure of productivity.
Humanity has done many atrocities, but that’s somehow just as disappointing if true. Like, measuring and increasing productivity is the entire point of that job, isn’t it?
deleted by creator
They took the risks, in hopes of higher rewards. They want the rewards without the risk.
[This comment has been deleted by an automated system]
There are a few reasons.
- The people who own the buildings are going bankrupt and so to help out their rich friends CEOs are trying to force people into using office buildings.
- Companies don’t want to let go of their power over an employee.
- They don’t trust their employees.
- They can’t watch their employees.
2,3,4 sure but I don’t think 1 is plausible
1 is plausible.
Remember the super rich have bank friends.
Ever heard of “If you owe the bank $100 it’s your problem. If you owe them $1mil it’s their problem”
A giant building that’s empty that nobody pays rent on is a huge bill to settle somehow with the bank.
1 is not plausible, you can’t believe that all rich companies are money hungry capitalists that only care about their bottom line, then also say that they are going to spend more money they are greedily hoarding to help out their rich friends. That’s the only way that 1 would be plausible, so you have to have that dichotomy of a thought process to believe it.
Go high up enough and everything is in the same hands. Boards of directors are full of people that own business real estate. Even if they might not own that one building, they have vested interested in that market going up, and that means RTO. People still need a house so it’s not like it devalues the personal housing market either.
Oh sweet summer child.
In an ideal world you’d be correct and I want you to be correct. But there are a lot of people who want to live on both sides of the grass here. They want to say they have no money to pay anybody to certain people and have all the money at the same time.
So, maybe not all, but definitely a lot. There is a reason why economies tank. Wall Street has no morals. Recessions, depressions, inflation, and the like happen. It’s because people get greedy and corrupt.
1 is not just plausible, it’s happening all the time.
It’s not necessarily about being a money hungry capitalist though – it’s not even necessarily about rich friends. Many of these buildings are owned/leased by the company. Problem is, that land value is on a company’s books as an asset. People don’t RTO, the value of that asset drops, company has to post a loss, stock value plummets as shitty traders take advantage of the numbers to turn a profit. In a good number of cases, it’s survival.
