Further proves just how disconnected these people are
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?
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).
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.
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.
I just read “Remote: Office Not Required (2013)” and I’d recommend it for anyone who is having these talks at work. It’s a quick read and I found my copy at the library. We have to advocate for your interests. I will take an in person meeting over a video call any day of the week, but that in no way means that you can’t get the same work done virtually as you can in person and it is significantly less pleasant spending life in an office than having to do a video call zero or more times a day.
It is clear that remote work works just fine. I think the problem runs deeper than productivity or social needs and is more about some unknown insecurities and values that workers and managers have about work. Traditionally work is something that happens above all else. We orchestrate our lives around work. Remote work changes this and that’s a huge deal. IMO that’s why it’s hard to debate this topic using facts around productivity or mental health or even company success, because it’s a philosophical debate about how we live.
Hey google, I heard people like money. Maybe if you pay willing employees a reasonable amount to commute, they’ll be willing to come in. Otherwise, shut it.
