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.
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
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That is exactly what they were saying.
Yeah, sorry, I must have misread that.
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.
wait what? where are cities dying?
Isn’t it the opposite, where people move from the countryside into urban areas?
It’s probably a uniquely American thing, similar to how many malls are dying here while they thrive in Europe. Cities have been dying a slow death since like the 70s here because suburbs are a net loss in terms of revenue because they’re more expensive to maintain than the taxes they bring in, so the only way cities can afford them is to sell more land to developers to build more suburbs, which then cost the city money, and repeat into infinity.
Cities have also had a general decline in the population within urban areas during that time, with people moving out to the suburbs for the “American Dream” of owning your own house with a white picket fence, 2.5 kids, and a cat or dog (and to avoid having to look at any poor people, immigrants, or black people). This was exacerbated further during COVID as people fled denser areas. The house prices in my town that’s about an hour away from one of the most expensive cities in the country (comparable to LA prices in the city here) jumped up practically 50% during COVID while prices in the city dropped something like 20% during the first year. Prices in the city have since come back up and are now above what they were before, but prices here never came down.
Cities here also tend to have a business district, sometimes even a “central business district” that’s at the heart of the city, which is made up almost exclusively of office buildings/other companies, with workers commuting into the city. Even my town has people who drive every day to their job in the city. With many of these buildings sitting empty during COVID, there’s been a push for urban renewal by converting them into apartments, but that’s easier said than done. Offices simply don’t have the same infrastructure that apartments need in terms of basic things like plumbing, and would need to be entirely gutted, but it would be a much needed fresh supply of housing that would probably help reinvigorate these city centers.
What’s the penalty for a big Corp to break their lease? I can’t imagine they care about credit rating.
I mean good? There is far to much concentration of people in cities and shit is too expensive.
My company just moved their office space into a smaller section of the parent company’s building, which funnily enough is nicer than where we were beforehand. Going in every few months makes the trip into London feel like a nice trip instead of a commute.
Yeah my office rents a WeWork space downtown and we only go there a couple days every few weeks. I like it, it’s a change of pace.
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]*
I’m extremely pro-WFH for professions that can. I’ve been doing it for 10 years and it has only gotten better since others started to experience it and have empathy for what it means to be a remote worker. Just getting that out of the way before chatting more about hidden difficulties of converting buildings to residential use…
I can’t speak for European office buildings (your use of “flats” has me assuming you’re on the other side of the pond from me), but a large number of US buildings would either have to be 100% gutted back to the main supporting beams OR pulled down and rebuilt. Issue here is a combo of proper placement of utility lines (mostly plumbing) within the building and the added weight residential use brings rather than business use.
Large office leases here have a lot of control over how their floors are laid out, but floor planning normally takes electrical runs into consideration and will leave spaces like kitchens and bathrooms unmoved. Executive offices and other private interior spaces can be created/adjusted by making interior walls and tying into electrical connections already in a floor or drop ceiling.
Plumbing is a whole other monster and takes a lot more work. Not an insurmountable consideration, just harder.
The weight of residential living is one I hadn’t considered until someone pointed it out to me. In addition to all the additional plumbing needed (whose pipes add tonnage by the time you’ve converted a building), you also have to consider water within those pipes, and if a lot of people run their kid’s evening bath around 7 PM, that’s even more tonnage, normally all in a similar vertical line because of repeated floor plans. A lot of corporate buildings here, esp older ones, just weren’t engineered for that and a lot would need significant remediation to support it.
I have way less to say about the super cancers… We did use a LOT of asbestos as we built up urban areas, though.
Yeah I think the floor weight is the actual concern and reason it doesn’t happen rather than zoning, but if it’s possible to renovate it within something close to the same cost as starting again, they should renovate it. We need to start taking into account things like the pollution for stuff like this but it not being considered doesn’t mean someone isn’t getting the bill. I don’t think people who would prefer to demolish and start again consider amount of shit that will be put into the air if you knock down a good portion of the office buildings, even if it doesn’t effect much on a grander scale it will effect the actual cities.
Would be interesting if a structural engineer did a video on all the problems and solutions etc of converting office buildings. Maybe even getting away with the bottom few floors on all office big buildings would be a good start.
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
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.
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.
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.
I am absolutely happy for the people I manage to stay home if they have real work to do. They can clearly do whatever they prefer, even work from the beach as far as I am concerned, but I know that going to the office is a waste of time. But the job we do is project based, long deadlines, no real “daily business” to handle. It however requires maximum focus, because it is not trivial. Offices are hells for concentration and quality work.
They can stay at home and call whenever they want whoever they want.
It has been working great.
It really depends on the positions. Office spaces are very bad for some positions, good fo others. Pushing a unique way of working for fishes and elephants cannot work. This is the main problem with current approach
There are some teams that can maintain full remote; I usually find those teams are filled with people good at their job, can see the big picture, and know to communicate early.
The problem is that not all teams are like that.
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
Did you have any relevant experience or credentials? I’m looking to jump to a new career possibly in IT, but I have absolutely nothing on paper to sell myself with. The most I have is a few years experience in diagnostics as I was once a refrigeration tech.
I have no paper credentials, but I was a licensed educator, so at least it shows I can get credentials if I worked at it.
I started at a local community college party time, then transferred to my current role. Both bosses are the type like, “I can teach anyone IT, but it’s hard to teach soft skills.” Turns out they can’t really teach IT either and I’m left to getting knowledge from my team and outside sources.
I am taking some azure fundamentals courses right now though, so I’m going that legit certs will make me more hireable
I’m about to bootcamp myself out of my current career and into IT. My related experience is limited and this is a major (and costly) move for me. Cashing out an old 401k to finance it. Otherwise I’d be taking a predatory loan from Sallie Mae…
I’ll be starting from scratch, probably doing entry-level work. But I’m ok with that because I’ll eventually be able to better provide for my family, and I’m so broke and stressed that my hair is thinning. Check out springboard or thrivedx. My bootcamp is through them (haven’t decided between software engineer or cybersecurity) but handled by a local university.
Thanks for the info! I’ll have to check that out!
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).
Your comment reflects what my own experience has been over the past few years.
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.
I saw someone else pointing out in the thread that fully remote companies would, in time, probably adjust their salaries too. (EDIT: ah, oops… it wasn’t someone else, it was always you!! Sorry!)
As an employee, in the short term, I like to e.g. keep a London salary and save on housing and commute by moving to Manchester. But in a fully remote company there would be no “London” salary or London office at all, so salaries would be likely reflecting a blended national job market.
The transition is certainly awkward for existing companies, though, as nobody wants a salary cut (which by itself could be a good explaination for them wanting to maintain the previous in-office status quo).
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.
Middle management has gotten absolutely out of control in America
Imo (and this is largely conjecture) it’s an end result of stagnant wages. It used to be that you might stay in the same position but get actual pay increases 50 years ago. Now you don’t get the pay increases really, maybe a 3% annual bump if you’re lucky. They need something to retain talent so a lot of places end up creating bullshit management positions out of thin air to retain staff that come with a slightly more modest pay bump.
So instead of the 3% bump you get a 5% bump and now you’re “director of clinical programming” or “associate manager of marketing and sales for eastern iowa division” and have 10 employees “report” to you but in reality you’re neutered and have no actual power to do anything to them but tattle to the actual boss. But then the company doesn’t have to give you a 7-10% bump that outpaces inflation and feels like an actual raise. They save the real promotions for nepotism.
But this happens constantly and now industries are jam packed with employees that just bother other employees all day and/or create systems that slow down employees en masse to “increase accountability” that are constantly updated and replaced without removing old ones.
Whenever someone goes on about fixing healthcare this comes to mind. I’ve worked in healthcare for years and it is absolutely full of this. Pharma, insurance, hospital admin, all of them are loaded up with tons of these kinds of staff. I can’t tell you how many useless staff I’ve seen get promoted to positions that were literally created for them to supervise a handful of people. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to fill out 7 sets of paperwork that takes 2 hours and is all redundant copies of each other because 9 middle managers from the hospital, insurance, and state administration are all constantly convinced I’m a fraudulent liar despite being a licensed professional with a decade and a half of clinical experience and absolutely no investigations or citations on my record whatsoever.
Single payer healthcare is definitely a great idea that should be pursued but this is a huge problem that also needs to be addressed regardless of who’s paying the bill if you want to see changes with actual costs, wait times, clinician burn out, etc.
I’d imagine it’s similar for other industries too. How much wasted resources are in middle management at tech companies, at food production, at basically anything? How much of rising costs are basically going to pay the glut of middle managers that being nothing to the table but resource drain? Who do nothing in terms of bringing in money, who do nothing in terms of providing value? How much cheaper could my cellphone, bread, wood, etc be without these parasites sucking up resources
But then the societal impact comes up. If you addressed this problem tonight that would mean millions of people go from comfortably middle class to jobless overnight. America isn’t known for great social supports as is, what happens when you throw a 7-8 figure number into the mix (with the reduced tax income from the loss of their job income).
Fwiw I genuinely think that point is a huge factor in why our government resists proper single payer healthcare; a true program would displace millions of workers overnight as it would make companies like Aetna, Cigna, etc largely redundant and reliant on their much less lucrative life/home/auto/renters insurance divisions. They would slash workers left and right. If we ever get one it will be a two lane system where the private insurers stay alongside it as a “boutique” option for the rich to receive better service, guaranteed. Plus you know, those companies literally own politicians lol and that’s the other much larger problem
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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)
That doesn’t sound like a fun time
It is not, no. Being concious as you lose control of your body is… Very unpleasant
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.
Yup. A lot of companies benefiting off the inefficiency of commuting.
My theory is they’re attempting to keep real estate values high.
This is the truth. Or someone is and those someone’s are putting pressure on bosses who are amenable to it anyway because they like control/lack empathy for employees/etc
Or someone is and those someone’s are putting pressure on
bossesmediaBosses are convinced by articles in mass media that this needs to happen. For real estate.
There are a bunch of new buildings in my city that have apartments with retail space on the ground level. All the retail spaces are empty, never used. I live in one. Someone is taking a bath on all the losses on these investments.
I think the “someone” putting pressure on them isn’t really individual people but just a general sense of class solidarity. Upper middle class and upper class people will do anything to keep their avenues of profit healthy, and their avenues are the status quo. Giving lower level workers more autonomy, flexibility, and the power to shape what the workplace looks like is NOT the status quo. Add the effect that WFH would have on the real estate market to the mix and now they REALLY aren’t going to be interested. Real Estate is a huge money maker AND has strong influence in many other industries. None of this should really matter to us regular folks though. We need to stop thinking that what is good for the goose is good for the gander. If workers want to work from home, we should continue to push for it. Our metrics for what is beneficial to workplaces should be very different from theirs because their goals are very different from ours.
I am on a hybrid schedule and I love it. If they allowed it, I’d probably be at 80% remote because my job, experience, and skillset allows it. It’s beneficial to me, opens up space in our building, reduces my travel cost, reduces traffic at rush hour, and I GET MORE DONE! No losers as far as I am concerned. :)
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.
It’s called the Peter Principle.
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?
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.
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.
I think you’re attributing far more coordination to these guys than they’re actually capable of.
What I’ve learned from following cryptocurrencies is that people don’t need intentional coordination to be affected by the reality-distorting bias of their investments. If someone has bought a narrative about why the thing they invested in has value, when faced with evidence that this narrative may actually be wrong, most of them aren’t going to be sophisticated enough to think “Well that’s a strong argument, I guess it would be in my interest to pretend that it’s false while privately defecting”. Instead they are going to want to dismiss it outright, shit-talk everyone disagreeing, and throw more money/time/effort in the hole. Being financially invested in something messes with your emotions like that.
Basically I think that being invested in commercial real estate is likely to make someone actually believe any ideas that imply that commercial real estate has value, even if they are bullshit.
There doesn’t have to be coordination if there’s incentives.
It’s like how so many people who drive cars act in ways that benefit cars and is counterproductive for those who don’t drive. They want plentiful free parking, lots of lanes, and cheap gasoline. They’re not particularly coordinated. They’re just incentivized because of their position. They benefit from those kinda things, so gravitate towards them (and also don’t oppose them).
What’s the incentive here, though? They personally lose money paying for office space they don’t need.
I don’t think there’s some shadowy Illuminati organisation behind it. They are pretty blatent when they manipulate things.
That said, I do think there are a lot of investors and analysts that have come to the same conclusion and are talking to each other and passing info to their clients.
Well, maybe you know something I don’t, but I’d expect most rich guys would be happy to save on office costs for themselves while still collecting rent from other rich guys, if they were personally okay going remote.
Sure, but if everyone who can goes remote, all that rent money dries up. Most also don’t directly own buildings to rent, but rather have investments in companies that do. If those other companies go under then they lose money on investments. I don’t have any inside knowledge though, this is just the conclusion I’ve been able to come to. Other than just being control freaks.
It’s a shared resource looked at that way. Usually they aren’t so good at managing those without being forced to by law. If it was a forest, they’d cut it all down and go broke afterwards.
I think they’re just being stupid. Or, at least their middle managers are, like CBC has suggested in a more tactful way. I have a bit of inside knowledge, because I’m close with someone that’s been working remote since the early 2000’s, and this is what he’s said about clients and vendors trying to comprehend the arrangement.
I definitely agree that they do stupid things because of short term gains and narcissism. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if they’re just grumpy bosses mad that it’s harder to boss people around.
I also worry though about portraying executives as buffoons. Most of their short term decisions that look stupid make a lot of sense when you look at it through the lense of them just not caring that it makes life worse for other people. It’s honestly probably a combination of a bunch of dumb and greedy things.
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They took the risks, in hopes of higher rewards. They want the rewards without the risk.
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It’s easy, a lot of companies have board members who are also board members in office space companies.
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 honestly think this might be pretty close to the mark. My company just announced RTO today but interestingly was pro WFH even before Covid with many of their staff hired as remote workers. They recently had to lay off a number of people and aren’t projecting to be making their numbers this quarter. So I do wonder if this is an attempt to shed more staff without taking active action to lay off more people and the moral hit that comes with that.