Can’t put a price on middle management getting to literally look over the shoulders of underlings.
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So all of these companies are lighting money on fire out of spite. Is that the official answer?
It’s certainly possible, just wouldn’t have guessed it. One of my axioms is that corps love money over all else. May have to rethink this.
Companies are run by people, and it turns out, some people are idiots. They want money, sure, but they have poor ideas about what actually makes money. Narcissitic scumbag cheating CEOs assume that their workforce is slacking pff doing nothing but costing the company money because that’s what they would be doing if they were stuck as a drone bee in a dead end position, so they spend a bunch of money making sure that they aren’t, even if the drone bees work better from home.
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the reasons are myriad and complicated. I have designed enough countermeasures at an old job for workplace surveillance (fully remote) to understand there is absolutely a class of people that will take advantage of remote work, either by taking multiple jobs or by shirking reponsibilities entirely. the aging management class is deeply incompetent and unable to tell high performers from bad ones. people who do well in an office tend to sometimes do well in a way they can observe. also, if management sets expectations that everyone WFH is slacking and working 8 jobs thats precisely what people tend to do (from my consulting experience). so, in office. no exceptions. its also a way to do soft layoffs, a combination of a ton of things. It cant be boiled down to just one cause.
it’s also been observable by studies that onboarding is far more difficult remotely, and juniors tend to do far shittier. I like working in an office, know i’m the minority, and wouldnt in a mgmt position dare to presume my way of working was better, but, i think flexible hybrid models are pretty strong. remote work employers, especially in tech, have a downward effect on compensation which also sucks for someone like me and i think probably even the “i should be able to work in any timezone on my terms” kind of people, who also coincidentally dont seem to be worth the trouble when i find myself hiring, would disagree if theyre being very honest.
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That’s why I thought most employers would be content to keep people working at home. Who wants to spend more money on labor?
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So not spite, but stupidity? Or both?
it’s more difficult to manage them. and different
Well, more difficult to manage will cost more money, so does that exceed the cost savings?
I dont know i just work here
I’m going to write a LinkedIn post on this soon.
The issue is two fold.
- management and employees place a different value on work from office. But all the costs sit with the employee.
- There usually isn’t clarity about the rules. So you can’t actually agree a deal between the two parties, because one will always want more office and one will want less. So they fight over it all the time.
So the only positions that don’t result in constant fighting are those that are clear.
- super flexible.
- super inflexible
For my new company I’m gonna try a third way.
Mostly WFH.
For days we need them in the office. They get paid their hourly rate for the commute time.
So managers better be damn sure it’s worth getting them in. And employees should feel better about it
I’m also going to pair it with unlimited overtime for training.
Because where firms have tried to pay more for people coming to the office they (rightly) get called out for sexist outcomes. With women finding it harder to go on.
This availability of overtime squares that off
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I think stupidity is at the top of the list as usual when it comes to decisions mostly driven by feedback from middle management. A flexible hybrid approach is absolutely better for performance but it makes their job more difficult so they don’t like it.
I think a lot of it depends on the type of jobs. I have always worked for automakers and while I’m not on the line building them, parts of my job can be done remotely, but the job can never be 100% remote. I suspect a lot of jobs are similar. There will always be a need to have physical space.
Onboarding is the clear example. Shipping a laptop a new grad’s house and saying “get working” is going to be a disaster. Yeah someone who has been a good performer and on the job for a year or two can probably just work whenever wherever and know what needs to get done. But training new employees is a non-trivial task.
All that said, there is still a LOT of stupidity.
I had one high level manager not like that the bathrooms in the office weren’t being maintained. So he wanted more people in the office so they could justify the increased janitorial staff needed to keep them to his liking.
Despite these people presumably having MBAs or at least taken some sort of business 101 class, the idea of a sunk cost is lost on them. When they see an unused desk it looks like waste to them.
Side note: I’ve currently been on a two week long work trip (I go home Friday thankfully). While on this work trip, I’ve received a job offer that’s roughly an 18% raise depending on how I calculate certain benefits. I plan on taking that. But I’ve also been in contact and had a pseudo interview with another potential employer I’m very familiar with and there’s some chance I get another offer early next week. So that’s cool as hell. I’m having a really hard time giving any fucks the last two days of this trip knowing within a week or two of getting home I"m putting in my notice.
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Hybrid flexible is absolutely the best option. Probably for everyone, but it will always lead to a contest.
It’s like having a contract that says you have do do between 2 and 8 hours of unpaid OT per week. And the only rule is you just have to kind of figure it out between you how much.
I agree that hybrid is probably best. Hell, even before COVID our company had rolled out a 1 day per week WFH option. And before that I had a job that was 9 hours/day with every other Friday off. That was really nice too.
The evidence that I have seen is (this is internal research that we paid for so there’s no way for me to share a link, sorry):
- Workers are as productive WFH as they are in the office. For a given set of workers with a given set of skills, there is no benefit to forcing them back to the office.
- Skills development for WFH workers is abysmal. Our workers who were experienced workers in 2020 have essentially the exact same skill set now as they did then. Our new hires joining at entry level positions since 2020 are the worst new hires that have ever existed.
- Our employees hate us. A major argument against sending workers back to the office is that it will make them hate employers, but the data shows that WFH employees have awful engagement scores already and in-office workers have mediocre engagement scores.
Forcing people back to the office is a big gamble, but the business case narrative is that WFH workers have stagnating skills and have the worst relationship with the company already, and their personal benefit of working from home comes at the cost of younger workers who are not developing the skills and knowledge to contribute because they have no one to coach or teach them effectively. Is that narrative correct? Maybe. Can companies continue on their current path? Likely not.
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The company I work for recently issued a return to office mandate. Doesnt impact me as i was hired remote and for most of the people i work with it will be more of a hindrance than help.
Those findings make sense to me
I own a small business with two partners. We started a new seven year lease a year before the pandemic. Really nice offices, the expense is considerable. When the pandemic hit we negotiated a very healthy rent abatement and added roughly a year to the lease. We went into that negotiation swinging but the landlord swung back and it had the potential to get ugly quick, my partners and I all had personal guarantees attached to the lease.
Anyway I have one partner who is very much of the “we’re paying for the office, I want butts in seats” mindset. I am on the “I don’t care where people are as long as they do the work” side of things. Other partner is in the middle.
Currently we have one “mandatory” in-office day where we all try to be there at the same time. It’s not a huge deal if people call out that day for illness, other commitments, whatever. Then everyone is expected to come into the office one additional day of their choosing, but we pay zero attention to it. I truly have no idea if people do it, but I think they do.
I definitely think our one group in-office day has real value in terms of team-building and overall cohesion. And I think people actually like coming into the office sometimes. We are dog-friendly and on our group days there are usually three dogs which is great.
It is definitely kind of a bummer to pay a big chunk monthly for space we use relatively sparingly. Once the extended lease is up we will surely do something creative to reduce the monthly nut while preserving a space we can visit together sometimes. Given the state of commercial real estate it’s possible our landlord will cut such a great deal we’ll just keep this space, our building is a ghost town.
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This is interesting. But there must be ways to teach people remotely?
I.e. if we just rely on passive transfer of tacit knowledge by sitting next to people, then it’s not going to work. But there must be ways to figure out what need to to be learned and teaching it.
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Fwiw, I generally enjoyed the daily interaction with co-workers (plus when my kids were young WFH daily would have been a disaster).
But I’ve also had the general flexibility to work a day or partial day from home (in a trade-off that fermentation runs 24/7 so I put in a lot of odd hours both on site and remote monitoring).
As a consultant, long meetings where there are 10 people in a room and just me on the conf call really sucks. Side conversations, some voices not picked up well by the mics, etc. give me everyone on individual conf lines all day.
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