Return to office is ‘dead,’ Stanford economist says. Here’s why::The share of workers being called back to the office has flatlined, suggesting remote work is an entrenched feature of the U.S. labor market.
I say this as a rare person who prefers to work in office.
Good.
Seriously, would much rather work with productive happy people. the remote work phenomenon has proven that between reduced traffic, the commercial real estate bubble, the fact that we’re literally all connected to each other 24/7 through the series of tubes means it’s about time we restructure the workforce.
This is the thing. Remote work as an option helps everyone. Lower costs for the employer, happier employees, the people who do want to work in an office have a better time because it’s less crowded, the people who need to care for kids or parents have an easier time…it’s entirely a win for everyone.
Except real estate companies, and therein lies the problem.
nothing has made me more sick recently than learning that these investor scum are trying to flog people back into the office because they gambled too much money on office buildings, so obviously this is the correct next step. never mind eating the fucking loss, never mind gambling on sports like a normal human being, these fucking vampires think they get THAT much control over your life for THAT petty and convoluted and i am sorry COMPLETELY FUCKING MADE UP reason like ‘we gambled on offices too much’
We have a 2 day in office hybrid schedule, where two days are the group days where more meetings are scheduled. But it’s flexible. If you want / need to change the days you come in, no one says anything. It’s a large team, so there’s always at least a couple people in the office on the off days.
Seems to work out for everyone. The more introverted just show up on the off days, and no one cares. Every once in a while, the manager will encourage but not insist on war room kind of gatherings for some aggressive deadline with high visibility. End of the day, work just needs to be done, and everyone is welcome to do what’s most efficient for themselves.
Team seems happy enough.
It doesn’t benefit them, though; they just prefer it.
There are tons of people who prefer it but don’t actually get any benefit out of it.
What gets me is that in this mad dash to address climate change, WFH is a valuable tool to reduce emissions from commuting. I remember driving during the early lockdowns and thinking it would be possible to skateboard down the freeway. You’d think Democrats would be encouraging WFH as a part of their green initiatives, but I can see that having donors in real estate and fossil fuels might run counter to that.
I’ve been saying this forever. We don’t need new tech to be developed or rolled out, we don’t need to move everyone to a city and take a train, we don’t need everyone to buy a new electric car, we just need to take away the reason 1/3 or more of driving occurs. And we already proved we can do it. It’s insane to not make that part of the climate goals.
This compounds too - less traffic means less need to add more lanes, or run more trains, or pave more parking lots, etc… So basically “bad, unnecessary” construction can go away. From what I can tell, almost no one actually wants a larger highway except because of traffic. But most of the traffic is commuters. We might have enough capacity (if you remove most commuters) for a very very long time to handle tourists, delivery trucks, and emergency services…
It’s even good for the environment! The amount of time, money, and energy (and that energy needs to be generated somehow) used to support everyone’s daily commute is IMMENSE. More than a few cities noted significantly improved air quality when the quarantines were in effect in 2020, and there’s still a noticeable difference in a lot of places.
I’m an essential worker, so I kept commuting pretty much like normal throughout the pandemic.
During the initial lockdowns I was averaging a whole MPG better just from not having any traffic.
And the real kicker is that my schedule is kind of weird, so I already commute at times when traffic isn’t too bad, I normally start at 2:30 in the afternoon and work 12 hours until the 2:30 in the morning (before anyone asks, my job isn’t very physically demanding, and I have more and more frequent days off, so 12 hour shifts aren’t too bad) so I’m going in after people have been running out to do stuff on their lunch breaks and before schools let out so traffic is minimal then, and I usually don’t even see a half dozen other cars on the road when I’m heading home, and some of my shifts are weekends so traffic is usually even lighter during the day. And my commute is only about 10 miles/20 minutes, no highways or anything, just normal semi-rural to suburban main roads.
And so a slight reduction in traffic during my commute into work (and no real difference to my commute home) got me a small but noticeable difference in my average fuel economy. Now all told that means I probably only saved a few gallons, maybe a tank of gas myself, but think of all of the millions of people who commute in much heavier traffic both ways, possibly even further, and how much extra gas they’re burning releasing CO2 and other pollutants into the atmosphere.
Imagine what more people being able to work from home, better public transit and carpooling to reduce number of cars on the road, companies staggering the start/end times of their business days so that everyone isn’t commuting at the same time, etc. could do.
That said, where I work, our policy explicitly forbids us from taking care of people at home during our work day…
Hmmm. How…would they know?
Also, I think there’s a question about the legality of your employer trying to enforce what you do in your own home, workday or not.
it’s about time we restructure the workforce.
I suppose a big part of that will be managers learning how to measure productivity more accurately than your clocked-in hours. That’ll be the most interesting change… the “corporate welfare” program of just getting paid to occupy a desk space will have to be replaced with more sophisticated real performance measurements.
I have no idea how that pans out in software. Every bug is vastly different so they can’t merely count the number of bugs you fix. SLOC is a bit of a sloppy measure too.
I’m a manager of an entirely WFH team, it’s easy. I have weekly one on one catch-ups with everyone in my team, where we discuss the work they are doing any blockers or anything like that that has come up. And a fortnightly team meeting.
And if anything urgent does come up they just call or message me at the time.
You measure the output not some BS KPI or how long they worked that day. I trust my people to be adults and come and go from work as needed, as long as they are still getting their work done idgaf how many hours a day/week they work.
Ultimately as their manager I’m there to try to remove as much of the corporate or political BS from my team’s lives as possible, so they can focus on doing great work (whilst also being accommodating to any personal issues that crop up for them)
Thanks to Goodhart’s Law, that doesn’t work. Any number used as a performance target ceases to be a useful measure, because people minmax them. You need to be able to look at a feature in a system, and evaluate if they completed it in an amount of time commensurate with their experience.
You need to think of productivity more abstractly, and have a lot of relevant expertise to assess it. Good management is hard, basically.
Sadly, I don’t think so. The pandemic-era cash grab solution was software that’s basically spyware, logging keystrokes, mouse movements, taking screenshots, etc. Some clever individuals just taped vibrators to their mice and walked away for breaks. You’re asking middle management to do real work here, ya silly.
I’m a bit torn. There are pros and cons for sure, at least when “the office” isn’t just a cubicle you report to maybe with a neighbor you don’t mind. The social aspects of the job (if there are any not on a phone/computer already) can be so much easier in person.
Though that’s not a reason what so ever to force people back. That seems like a blatant attempt to keep the value of commercial realestate up.
I miss the office I worked at where I got a corner office (private!!!) and free lunches.
I do not miss the office where I worked in an open plan near the floor kitchenette and could hear people making coffee and chatting all day, or my coworkers on calls at their desks, or the keyboard clacking…
My wife is a high school teacher. We returned to her classroom one evening after dinner this week so I could help her put together some shelves. After 30 minutes of assembly, I realized I needed to use the bathroom. She gave me her keys and pointed me towards the staff bathrooms. Whilst sitting on the porcelain throne, I realized that I couldn’t remember the last time I did a #2 in a public bathroom. I’ve been WFH since March of 2020 when COVID started, and while I’m sure I’ve crapped in a public restroom in the past 3+ years, it’s so infrequent that I can’t remember.
That’s not really the point though, more that I’ve actually been thinking about it all week and reflecting on what working in an office used to be like - crapping next to your coworkers, packing a lunch, trying to look busy when you just aren’t feeling it that day, the small talk, and everything else that result in me being absolutely drained by the time I got home. Seriously, sometimes I would just sit on the couch and stare at the wall for 30 minutes when I got home.
It took the greatest global event of the 21st century to shift us to WFH. We can’t let companies force us into backsliding into these out-dated work practices when all common sense says otherwise.
Tbh, I still stare at the wall for 30m after a busy day WFH sometimes. A bit of indecision on if I have energy to start this or that, but more just letting my brain cool.
I’m fairly introverted, but more social than many. Watercooler talk doesn’t really bother me unless it’s awkward and unescapable. So I have that going for me.
Edit - or sports or cars. I’ve worked on teams that only talked about those topics and it was like nails on a chalk board to me
because absolutely no one wants to be forced into it while being denied the incredible quality of life benefits of being able to stay at home?
So my employer has been pretty cool about the whole return to office thing. We all had collectively agreed that the vast majority of our jobs could be done remotely. Unless the position absolutely required a physical presence in the office, such as running cables or certain leadership positions, we all were given the option to be permanent work from home.
I don’t mind the office these days, but that’s because I live 9 minute walking distance from it.
I still work from home some days though, so I guess that says something.
