I have posted this on Reddit (askeconomics) a while back but got no good replies. Copying it here because I don’t want to send traffic to Reddit.
What do you think?
I see a big push to take employees back to the office. I personally don’t mind either working remote or in the office, but I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit and I haven’t seen a convincing explanation yet of why they are so keen to have everyone back.
If remote work was just as productive as in-person, a remote-only company could use it to be more efficient than their work-in-office competitors, so I assume there’s no conclusive evidence that this is the case. But I haven’t seen conclusive evidence of the contrary either, and I think employers would have good reason to trumpet any findings at least internally to their employees (“we’ve seen KPI so-and-so drop with everyone working from home” or “project X was severely delayed by lack of in-person coordination” wouldn’t make everyone happy to return in presence, but at least it would make a good argument for a manager to explain to their team)
Instead, all I keep hearing is inspirational wish-wash like “we value the power of working together”. Which is fine, but why are we valuing it more than the cost of office space?
On the side of employees, I often see arguments like “these companies made a big investment in offices and now they don’t want to look stupid by leaving them empty”. But all these large companies have spent billions to acquire smaller companies/products and dropped them without a second thought. I can’t believe the same companies would now be so sentimentally attached to office buildings if it made any economic sense to close them.
Same reason they all had layoffs at the same time; activist investors want them to. Probably because these investors own a lot of commercial real estate as well.
Also, it’s probably a good way for them to reduce their workforce without publicly announcing layoffs.
It’s always good to step back from “companies” and think of companies as just a bunch of people.
Is it good for companies to force employees back to the office? Nah, probably not. Is it good for the guy who has to explain why he signed a 10-year lease on all that office space, and now it’s sitting empty? Yup. Is it good for the lonely manager who wants to be surrounded by people, and has the power to make that happen? Yup. Is it good for the exec who has to find some reason why his department is underperforming, and decides remote work is a good scapegoat? Ehhh….
My hunch is that we’re seeing an influence campaign by people who own lots of commercial real estate swaying bosses. I don’t have any actual info about who owns or has a stake in commercial real estate, but my gut tells me it’s likely to be really wealthy businesspeople who a bunch of CEOs probably look up to/play golf with/whatever.
I am no exoert
But i have read of 2 reasons.
1: the boss thinks people who sit at home, are lazy and get nothing done. When they are in the office he can keep an eye on them!
2: nobody using their expensive office buildings means waste of rent money. Not wanting to let that go to waste… makes sense. Inviting potential clients to your empty offices would also seem awkward.
Im sure there could be more reasons…
I haven’t had a normal job since before covid so i’m not super qualified, but:
I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit
I think they sometimes do, but not always. The reason being that companies are made of people, and people sometimes but not always think rationally.
In this case, my guess is middle management may be fretting about leaving employees unsupervised. What if they play games or browse Twitter on company time? You can’t monitor them when they’re not in the office!
Inspirational wish-wash like “we value the power of working together” strikes me as common corporate wish-wash. It’s sort of along the lines of “we’re a family here”. They’re trying to make employees emotionally invested in the corpo so they’ll put up with more bullshit.
Well yes, I do feel we might have collectively given more thought to this here than my company has…
It’s just that I work in one of those places where a trivial change that our users are asking for requires a business case and endless discussion, so it’s weird to think that a big, life-changing decision like this would just be taken without a particularly strong motivation.
But maybe I’m just starting from the wrong premise here. The purpose of the business case is for us little guys to obtain buy-in from the top management, but if a decision comes directly from the top management they don’t need much more than their own gut feelings?
Maybe especially so if they have to make a decision based on an unprecedented situation with no data and no guidance from what other companies have done before.I can see how the least risky bet would seem returning to the previous, proven situation where most people were working in the office.
Oh yeah, power in a corporation goes top down, and it figures that top management likes it that way.
There’s definitely safety to be found in the familiar, i do it a lot, whenever i have to do something unfamiliar i will often let myself get overwhelmed trying to consider all the tiny implications. Eventually though the experience from early adopters will enlighten other companies. It’s a lot easier to take a decision like this when other people have done it and you have data to see what the results were. In the case of work from home, this process is already well underway, it’s been three years since covid and there’s already a lot of data that you can point to.
