Return-to-office orders look like a way for elite, work-obsessed CEOs to grab power back from employees

They really aren't losing money because:

a) WFH has been saving them money (i.e. lowered heating, water, electricity, stationary, toilet paper, food, janitorial, window cleaning, etc.).

b) Their WFH staff are more productive than their office staff.

Just let those leases expire when they do, and these companies will really be saving a ton of money from not having to lease large office space.

I don't get the desire to cling onto some outdated, unproductive, sad way of doing things.

No this isn't right. It's cheaper to have an empty building than a full one so companies who own their buildings would still make more money letting their employees work from home.

Also, even if it was true, no company is going to try to solve a problem like that. Companies are selfish. They'd rather everyone else go back to work to boost the value of commercial real estate while they continue to work from home to increase their profits everywhere.

The only reason companies are forcing people back is because upper management simply prefers that work environment. They like to sit in their corner office, surrounded by their peons. A sense of power.

Or, they have the kind of personality where they thrive surrounded by people and can't understand how anyone could be productive at home, data be damned.

It has nothing to do with real estate.

They try to rent those spaces where I live and its hilariously not working.

You know it's a BS job if A Certain Someone is like 5 of them at once!

And even if they were, it still can't justify orders of magnitude differences in compensation.

They count golfing and flying to some guy's private island as work too. I would love to see them keep timesheets.

A part of that real estate equation is that the municipalities give tax breaks to the companies because they anticipate the extra people in the area getting them more money from gas stations, lunches, etc. Those contracts usually state that the building needs to have a certain occupancy for them to maintain the credit... and now municipalities are coming knocking for their back taxes since buildings haven't been full.

Thats what's happening around me, at least

Sunk cost. No matter if they buy or lease their building, it seems like a waste to have it empty all the time. But that money isn't coming back whether employees come in or not.

Hold out a couple more years for leases to expire. Office real estate market hasn't seen its bottom yet.

It's really there from the beginning: you don't get paid to do work, you get paid for your time. What happens when you finish all your allotted tasks in 4 hours instead of 8, you think you can just go home?

I'm actually surprised that no one has blown up one of these ugly corporate campuses overnight yet, just so they can't be forced back in the office. God knows if there was a way for me to WFH when I was a sous chef, and a chef for 20 years I would have.

i just wish sycophants in the general public wouldn't believe them

i love how we're supposed to accept the premise that because big companies starting gambling on office buildings (???? why would you do this???? why is it built like this?? why is this allowed??) everyone's life has to be measurably worse

The piece I love is that commercial real estate near me has not really even decreased since 2019, meaning, commercial real estate greed isn't abiding by supply and demand and they're trying to push their losses back on businesses. Workers need to stick it out until lease contracts loop back around and then we'll see who gets left holding the bag.

Did you forget to log into your lemmygrad account, comrade?

It can be multiple things.

Real estate costs that they are stuck with. For example, my employer committed to a 20 year lease shortly before the pandemic. They don't have a good exit clause so either those office towers are going to be empty or used, but either way, my employer is paying for them, might as well get use out of them.

Managers that have such a poor understanding of the work that they can't comfortably tell if the work output from their employees is good or slacking. At least being able to see them in person they feel more comfortable that the employee looks more likely to be engaged. It's still possible a slacker is conning them, but at least they aren't as obviously doing so. They may not be masochistic as much as they hired people that know more than they do, and are therefore at a severe disadvantage when evaluating an employee.

As others have pointed out, one mans annoying distraction is another employee's great help. A new hire that needed mentorship. A colleague stuck on a little thing without going out of their way to ask for help in a remote context.

Realistically, having some work from home for morale/better work life balance, and focused individual work and some in person time is probably the most productive scenario.

They get tax breaks from the city to maintain a minimum occupancy. The cities were waiving those requirements during covid, and now they're not. It's that simple. The government and the corpos want their extra money from your pocket and they're insisting on behavior that will get it for them.

Agreed. #1 advice from anyone is "invest in real estate because it's the only thing they're not making any more of." So even if a huge corporation owns nothing and just rents every inch of office space, most likely their investment strategy includes commercial real estate.

Anecdotally, I happen to know of some people who threw a ton of money into local commercial buildings pre-pandemic, because that was the way the investor-class herd was going. These are people that I consider very wealthy, but are small potatoes compared to most of these big corporate CEO types. Now that they own all these buildings, they're squawking because they can't rent them.

I think it can be both commercial real estate holdings, seeing what Big Tech and other prominent CEOs are doing and following their lead, and a way to cutt staff without official layoffs. (Since many people will quit rather than RTO since they no longer live close.to the office, or because they are close to retirement, or they take another position that is WFH or hybrid. I day this because those of some of the reasons my coworkers have quit rather than come in 2 or 3 days a week.)

is there any meaningful difference? why should the lives of millions be worse because execs made fucking bets on office buildings?

Corporations don't hold real estate unless they are real estate corporations. This theory is a conspiracy theory.

Yeah bruh, this is 100% about making sure the poors stay in their goddamned place.

Coordination, mentoring, and culture are intentional. The problem is that in an "in person" work place, deficiencies in those areas are very easy to sweep under the rug.

What I will call "churn", rather the flurry of activity generated by masses of employees coming, going, and doing is frequently mistaken for productivity when instead it's professional level time wasting. The "ship" is making a lot of bubbles and waves but in reality it's just doing very wide donuts in the middle of the ocean and not generating any real forward momentum. Hence, "churn."

I've worked for fully remote orgs with excellent culture, fully in person orgs with horrible culture and vice-versa. In my experience, remote work has benefits for employees and the company. It's saves both money and can (not necessarily does) improve the quality of life of the employees. Not all jobs can be remote. That's understandable. White collar office jobs don't usually fall into the "can't be remote" category.

While remote work can impact the org culture, it usually is more of magnifying glass in that all the existing deficiencies in the orgs culture bubble to the surface and get put in display for everyone to see. CEO's and other senior execs who are embarrassed by this, incompetent, or just don't care immediately blame the magnifying glass instead of the root problem. Identifying and dealing with the root problem would require time and effort that they aren't willing to invest. They'd rather sweep it back under the rug again and continue ignoring it.

And, as is now common, especially in corporate America, the attention span is so short and general state of corporate governance so poor that the only thing that matters is the stock price right at this very moment. No one cares if they're company is even going to be here in 20 years.

So if you work for a company who's CEO is whining about the need for "culture" and "water cooler moments" as a means to being people back into the office, rest assured that when that happens, the company will have the same shitty culture it always has, except maybe a little worse (since lots of layoff or constructive dismissals tend to damage the culture and erode trust). Nothing will change except the guys at the top will get back to pretending everything is fine, even if it's really not.

Why RTO makes sense,

People working at companies like Zoom typically get large sums of RSUs. These RSUs typically start to vest at 1 year and then continue to vest for 2-3 years. By forcing people to go into the office, some of these people will leave, forfeiting any non-vested RSUs. This allows companies to do layoffs without the cost associated.

Salary. These companies will just hire new bodies with lower salaries and higher RSU packages that will vest over longer time with the goal of saving money in the immediate now that debt is no longer cheap.

Training/Mentoring require more effort remotely.

Corporate real estate.

Why RTO doesn't make sense,

Many companies like Zoom have offices scattered across the country. The tech company I work for, for example, me and 3 colleagues are the only ones near my local office in a team of 80. My manager is in another state and most of my 80+ member team are in other states or countries (follow the sun posture). Any internal meeting I have to have would have to be done over Zoom.

Consultant companies like PWC are doing much more consultant hours virtually instead of traveling to clients because clients don't want to spend the extra billable for the travel, which is a key indicator that remote work isn't the detriment that it's being made out to be.

Open office floor plans make productivity worse.

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Personally I will never take a job again that requires office time, I much prefer meeting up with coworkers for dinner every couple months over forced "teambuilding"

I mentored remotely just fine even back before the pandemic. There are all kinds of tools for communicating with people.

Show it, the studies have shown that workers are more productive when remote. Evidence would help make things easier to stomach with this insane RTO push. Covid is still kicking around, and the dramatic return to commutes is damaging to our planet.

Coordination comes from competent leadership regardless of location. Any company larger than 10 people needs some way to handle coordination. Async coordination is really under trained and under utilized as a result but works really well with remote workers. You can't async everything tho so synchronous coordination happens the same way remotely as it does in person, with a meeting and sequential execution. This is basic stuff for people who work with logic often like programmers who have had remote work opportunities for decades now.

Mentoring, you're worried about that when most companies won't pay for training or provide time or bandwidth for mentorship. Assuming leadership is onboard with the actual costs and output reductions that come with mentorship, you collaborate mostly the same way IRL as you do remotely: by looking at a screen together. Which is far easier over zoom / teams. Or you ask questions in a call or through chat.

people have lives far, far beyond the scope of offices and business. people have dreams, desires, goals that matter a trillion times more than 'mentorship' or 'organizational productivity' ever, ever could.

centering these discussions around business-school shit is being fundamentally blind. the fact that we have to cloak everything in 'productivity' language is a sick show of penance.

WFH crowd isn't trying to make you WFH

Work from office people are trying to force WFH people in

You're welcome to your opinion and no one is hating you for it, just leave us introverts alone

This is about orders to return to the office, not options to do so.

I'm sick of working 12 hours and barely even leaving the house.

If you work from home, no one is forcing you to do that. I leave the house every day to buy groceries or play basketball.

I miss learning from colleagues who are discussing things I'm not super familiar with, looking over their shoulder to learn more.

Oh, you're one of those annoying people wasting everyone's time? No wonder it takes you 12 hours to do your own work.

I miss forming real actual bonds with colleagues and becoming friends with them once we've quit whatever shithole company we met at.

Have you heard of this amazing invention called a chat room? I think you are upset you can't bug people all day and call it "networking". If people want to talk to you, they'll do it after work too.

While I acknowledge WFH isn't for everyone. It does take time to create healthy habits around WFH.

For example you mentioned no divide. Imo it is critical to create a "work space" within your home and to isolate work there if possible.

Same with "barely leaving the house". You have to manually create a habit to get natural sunlight. Be it a walk during your lunch break or before/after work.

As for "forming bonds" with colleagues. I built all of.my relationships entirely remote. It depends on the person but the collaboration and social aspect of remote work is capable of emulating ITO life.

That said, I do agree that "hybrid" is the way to go as it's a great "one size fits all". The issue is leadership using a hybrid model that mandates everyone comes into the office. Some people, including myself, just work better and are much happier working from home.

I completely agree with "anchor days" where everyone comes in but that it shouldn't be around work. Instead it should be collaboration and team social activities.

I'm sick of working 12 hours

Longer hours I feel are better suited to an office, at least that way it's not so draining with others around you