I don’t get it. Companies want to make money. Study after study proves that WFH generates greater productivity on average and, therefore, more output and more money. Surely, it must be costing more to maintain massive office buildings and overpay useless middle managers to lord over employees?
But… CONTROL… How do we know they’re working? How do we know they’re working FOR US?
I work in a role that was something like 80% travel before the pandemic. Now it’s 0% travel. The company could not be happier; we’re able to offer more competitive services at lower prices than ever before, employees are happier, and our customers really couldn’t care less whether we meet them on site.
They’re still paying to rent/lease, and to maintain the empty office buildings. They’re trying to get their money’s worth, even if it ends up costing them in the long run.
My company just sold about 90% of their buildings. Then consolidated whoever left that likes to work in office (I don’t know why anyone would lol) in one building. They’re still only occupying 8% of that one building.
I don’t know why anyone would lol
- Noisy work environment
- separation of work and home
- forces you to go outside
- less distractions in the office vs home
- want to interact with people not just over zoom
Plenty of reasons people choose to keep going to the office. No need to hate on them, but also no need to force the rest of us back either. I work full time remote WFH and personally love it.
They can’t be dumb enough to fall for the sunk cost fallacy can they? I think it must be something else.
being devils advocate here, they probably are blinded by the reports of workers who are inefficient at remote work. I want remote work as much as the next guy, I am deeply passionate for it; but I can see why management teams would want inhouse. Easier to monitor and punish mentor the under-performers if you are physically present in the building. The higher ups don’t generally care about stats, they only care about what issues are being brought to their plate/causing more work for them… and the underperforming workers are a pretty big additional work for them.
mentor the under-performers if you are physically present in the building
how the mentoring would be different if the under-performers are in the building or they work from home?
Just anecdotally, I noticed that more junior team members were FAR more willing to ask me for help with something after we were pulled back to the office. That can be mitigated with thoughtful collaboration efforts when operating fully remote, but I didn’t even know they needed help until they could just pop by my desk and ask for something. And they started doing it frequently.
But to be clear, I greatly prefer full remote for myself and again, thoughtful approaches to team management can solve or mitigate a bunch of the remote work downsides, probably.
with WFH it’s generally harder to analyze what areas the worker is struggling, and it also lacks the one on one with the worker. You can still technically do a video call or screen-share but, it’s harder to monitor the worker to verify that said mentorship is taking effect, without compromising the privacy of the worker and the system at hand. It’s possible to do but, you lose many tools such as constant monitoring of multiple under-performers at once that make it harder to actually monitor and mentor. This is without including that remote work is much harder to actually monitor work activity vs work productivity until it is too late(end of day, missed deadline, etc).
They get huge tax breaks for the bodies those buildings were supposed to bring to their cities. Now that nobody’s in them, those cities aren’t getting the extra tax money from the office workers anymore, so they’re pressuring companies to bring workers back to the office. No giant, money-thirsty corporation wants to maintain a huge, expensive office building, but they’re stuck doing so unless they want to sell it at a loss and risk pissing off the owners of whatever palms they had to grease to get the deal in the first place.
There have been further studies that show that work from home may not be as productive. The science doesn’t seem to be as settled.
You also may have issues with coordination where some face time would be good on an as-needed basis. It may not need to be full time in the office, but I can see wanting some in person meetings.
Further proves just how disconnected these people are
They’re soooo close to understanding.
Having people stay at this hotel eliminates the commute.
Remote work eliminates the commute.
Now, if the company would simply get with it, they could save money both by not having this asinine hotel idea and by not having all the office space.
I mean its not an absolutely terrible middleground IF EXECUTED PROPERLY.
If I had a job that could be done remotely but they want us in the office for a few days here and there unless my commute was under an hour each way Id be cool with coming in, working, going and grabbing some food with my coworkers, head back to the on campus FREE hotel have an early night and do my second day with no commute the next morning. It doesnt sound that bad provided that were talking like 1 overnight a fortnight max.
I do agree with this – but somehow I don’t believe that’s Google’s goal here.
Its one of those things thats purely in the execution. They could absolutely nail the idea where people look forward to being asked to come into the office.
But big companies dont like dollars going out for difficult to quantify returns, they will always try to screw down the spend and ratchet up the measurable returns.
So they fuck it up.
Tech workers hate offices. That should be common knowledge at this point.
