America’s return-to-office has been a “lagging return,” reports the Washington Post: Even with millions of workers across the country being asked to return to their cubicles, office occupancy has been relatively static for the past year. The country’s top 10 metropolitan areas averaged 47.2 percent…
And almost all companies nowadays have some sort of “climate initiative”. WFH is the biggest help most companies can do for the climate.
It’s no doubt to justify all the money they poured into real estate and buildings. If people don’t come back then they have all these liabilities to deal with
I agree. Mine luckily has no real estate holdings and they have pretty much shut down all the us offices. Even the main one but they said they are looking for a smaller replacement. So they are pretty much just going to keep one in the states for smoozing clients and such.
My company went the opposite route. They sold the property with a 4-story building and now lease only a single floor for a semiannual in person meeting. They’ve fully embraced WFH, although we have a handful of cubicles for anyone who wants or needs to come to the office.
I know I could probably make about 10% more going somewhere else, but no way I’d be willing to do that without a WFH guarantee, and a lot of places aren’t willing to do that right now.
“We want you to go back to spending 1-2 hours a day getting from point A to point B using a congested mode of transport so you can do work that could have been done at home. Wait why aren’t people on board with this?”
Good article. That being said, the examples provided against remote work (“salespeople were taking calls from the top of mountains on hiking trips”) don’t paint a true picture of what remote work has become. There is much opportunity for scheduled collaboration, and still some incidents of unscheduled collaboration (aka water cooler moments) via remote work.
Best quote in the article: “The number one thing people want out of a workplace is concentration space… You’re not going to get them into a place just built for social interaction. You’ve got to be able to concentrate…” That’s where most workplaces are shockingly deficient. Most offices are designed to keep workers precariously balanced between concentrating on work tasks and the threat of immediate distraction by coworkers. “Open Office Design” necessitated more space for meeting rooms, and overbooking of meeting rooms necessitated off-site meetings.
Every article arguing for Return To Office conveniently overlooks several shockingly obvious points: PRODUCTIVITY WENT UP when people worked from home. Workers didn’t have to spend hours of time commuting to/from work. Workers didn’t have to spend money on gasoline and parking and day care for their kids or their dogs. Workers didn’t have to lose an entire day of work if they felt sick but were unsure if they were contagious. Workers Didn’t Have To Work From An Office. They still don’t.
So don’t.
Just to point out, latest research shows productivity is a wash. Essentially, experienced workers saw productivity boost, while new hires since WFH have shown low productivity growth over the last 3 years. The leading theory is experience sharing that happened in person, in a casual manner, had a much larger impact in growing the company talent over longer terms.
Firms need to adapt to keep their talent competitive. Some firms choosing to go back to office is just one strategy.
That reads to me like it’s demonstrated to be superior for employees who understand their work and how to do it, but training employees to that point is not occurring. I don’t think this problem is inherent to the format - every place I have yet worked has de-facto replaced most or all of their training program with an on-the-job copying of tasks and routines from more experienced employees. That crutch has been removed and the absence of quality training programs is further highlighted. Understandably, this will vary wildly with field and firm, and developing an analogue to that type of informal information sharing is already occurring from what I’ve read.
(aka water cooler moments)
When I was in charge of my department, pre-covid, the entire team was spread out between half in various different offices, half WFH (including me). We have always been remote from each other.
One of the things I did was create a chat room called “Watercooler,” specifically for this purpose.
I think the big thing is most people do not want to go looking for another job and before for most people they would have to be pretty underpaid to do it. WFH is huge though and most people will dust off their resumes if they are forced to commute. I myself rate the value of wfh at 20 to 25% of salary. Granted salary is pretty important so I go with the lower 20% but it gets to that pretty easily with just the commute and there are a variety of factor beyond that. As one person mentioned the climate. I could easily make a case for 30%. So getting a come back to office mandatory makes it easy to look for a horizontal move that is wfh. Oh and of course your not going to leave a wfh unless the new position pays much much higher or is also wfh. An in office position would easily need to add 50% to pull wfh staff from another company.