1y ago

The reason CEOs want workers to Return To Office is because they want you to quit

www.fastcompany.com /90969112/op-ed-the-real-reason-ceos-want-workers-back-in-the-office-is-because-they-want-you-to-quit

Antiwork @lemmy.world

www.fastcompany.com /90969112/op-ed-the-real-reason-ceos-want-workers-back-in-the-office-is-because-they-want-you-to-quit

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TechNews @radiation.party

The reason CEOs want workers to RTO is because they want you to quit

www.fastcompany.com /90969112/op-ed-the-real-reason-ceos-want-workers-back-in-the-office-is-because-they-want-you-to-quit

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133 comments

The main thing I don't get is that the top talent at your company are the ones that can easily find another job instead of putting up with your BS. The people that aren't competent enough to leave on a whim are the ones you're going to be keeping.
- I don't think being fickle and being competent are necessarily linked.
  Some of the best workers i've met over the years are making way less than some of the worst workers i've met, just because the ones who could talk the talk and play the bullshit made way more money and swap jobs way more often.
  The highest paid company hoppers are undoubtably the first ones to go, that doesn't mean they are the most important, talented people though.
  
  If bad people are aware that they're bad, they're strongly incentivized to not risk their livelihoods by voluntarily ending their employment.
  If people are clinging to a job tightly even as working condition deteriorates, it's an indicator that they don't think they'll fare well on the job market.
  The disconnect has more to do with perception of their own value. Good people who underestimate themselves awill be inclined to stay. Bad people who know they're bad will be more inclined to stay.
  Bad people who think they're good, and good people who know they're good will be the most likely to leave.
  So, the strategy of intentionally tanking your conditions to prune bad people actually only successfully prunes bad people who think they're good.
  On the other hand, you loose good people who know they're good, entrenches the bad people who know they're bad, and demoralized the shit out of good people who don't realize they're good.
  
  Yeah, but you're thinking about when the company picks people to fire. Forcing people back to the office decreases worker satisfaction across the board, and workers will respond individually. I'd argue that those highest paid will be most willing to suffer the inconvenience of commuting, regardless of their talent, so the "make working here annoying" plan will tend to retain higher paid employees while losing lower paid people through attrition. Likewise, workers are more likely to tolerate the annoyances if they don't have any other options. Good people can more easily job-hop, so this strategy is also likely to retain the lower-performing employees while the top performers go elsewhere, not considering pay rate. Total labor costs will decline, because there's fewer people working, but it's not an efficient selection process.
  Long story short: pissing on your employees results in a smaller, lower quality workforce.
  
  I don't think being fickle and being competent are necessarily linked.
  Quiting when management makes a "fuck you" policy isn't fickleness, it's common sense, for those who can.
  Job mobility and talent are strongly measurably connected.
  "Fuck you" policies lose top talent.
  It's not an interesting discussion. Grab your popcorn and wait for the "find out" phase to come around.
  And if you own stock, focus on mid-cap for awhile, beacuse the large-cap players are doubling down on "fuck around".
- Yep. One of my friends works in sales and has worked from home for 3 1/2 of her 4 years with her current company. She's in the top 10 performers out of 250-ish people in her division and her company is going to lose her if they stick to the demand that people return to the office. She's waiting to see what happens, but she's already had recruiters put out feelers once the tentative plan got out, and there are other top performers ready to jump ship too.
- Buddy of mine straight up laughed at his boss when they told him to return to office, and strangely it has never come up again.
  When you know the value you bring, it's hard to muscle you around.
  
  I've seen a lot of people with that attitude still get let go. I've fired people with huge ego's that were extremely valuable to operations that really thought they were untouchable. As good as you think you are, there's someone else just as good or better that will take your place.
  That being said, fuck working for someone that doesn't respect you, or makes demands of you purely because they want to flex on you.
- Have you ever had a middle manager above you who constantly has to interfere as if to prove how necessary they are?
  This is similar. It's not always about the amount/quality of your work or even about the money; sometimes it's just about control. Those who don't actually do much (again, managers and CEOs, etc) want desperate people they can rule over.
- They don't see workers as people, they're a commodity like everything else.
- Even better, the competent ones ask for more money
  Seriously the actions of all these big companies shows they don't really give a shit about retaining top talent. Unfortunately, for big name companies, they'll always have an inflow of talented new grads who are willing to give up their dignity to get their name on their resumes, and it's cheaper (in the short term, which is all shareholders care about) to churn and burn them then to invest in long term talent
  
  We are all freely interchangeable widgets in their calculations. They don’t have time to consider that some people might be better than the job than others.
  
  I put up with hellish demands and a nightmare commute because I thought working at Important Company was a privilege. And to so degree it was. But I don’t put up with bullshit anymore and that was a lesson I had to learn on my own, the hard way.
- It's because the people making these decisions aren't incrntivised to think about the long term effect for the company. All they need to worry about is if it makes line go up in the short-term so they can get a fat bonus then use how much line went up to get a job somewhere else before the shit hits the fan. Rinse and repeat.
- Because CEOs are dumb
- Better yet if the workers unionized they could end up with a strike or no workers at all. If these were the good ol days they may even wake up without their kneecaps.

That’s part of it. Another part is middle management can’t function without seeing you. Finally, it’s not worth it to a company to maintain a lease on a building if nobody works there and it’s not easy getting out of those leases.
- What doesn't make sense is why they're not firing the useless middle managers.
  
  Where I work, it’s the middle managers who make a list of useless people. They obviously won’t put their own names on the list.
  
  Even a structure that is only a house of cards still depends on the cards of the middle tiers to hold itself up.
  
  have you led a team before?
- Then middle management is either incompetent or like micro manage.
  
  There are so many fucking managers and administrators in modern organizations.
  
  *and
  
  Yes.
- The lease is already paid, or the money is planned to be paid. You can't recover this money anyway. But you can still save on energy and cleaning.
  Getting out of the lease is as easy as not renewing it.
  
  Yes, it is that easy. Commercial leases are often in the 10-20 year range, however.
- I agree with most of this except the lease is a sunk cost, making people come in based on a variable that won't change is bad decision making, the discussion should be made independently of lease. I agree some managers think this way, it's usually the ones who could benefit from remedial business finance classes.
  
  The larger issue may be that companies occupying the buildings supports interests of the owning class, and so its influence is being applied accordingly to shape the larger social forces.
  
  Yes and no. It's more like a trap that the company is trapped in. It's the corporate equivalent of having to keep renting an apartment you don't live in anymore and can't sub-let. The sunk cost fallacy applies, but also it's a case of "we're stuck with this and we're going to USE it even if it kills our wage slaves."

I'm not going to quit or return to the cubefarm. These coprophagous donkey molesters can fucking well fire me and pay unemployment.
- TIL the word “coprophagous.”
  
  For the lazy
  A coprophagous organism is one that eats the faeces/excrement of another animal. Many insect species are coprophagous and often specialise in the consumption of faeces from large herbivores.
  
  I thought they misspelled "sarcophagus"

It isn't, it's all the office space they own, if people are allowed to keep working from home the retail office market will crash pretty hard.
- It can be both.
- Ever see how much real estate companies like Google has? If all those bay area companies said fuckit let's be remote it would crash the market and rock the economy.
  We should though, if possible.
- Cool. Then we can convert it to housing
  
  I'm told that office buildings are actually terrible from a housing standpoint. Like, it's actually easier to just tear the whole thing down and build an entirely new complex than convert it into apartments.
  
  Whoa hold up partner we have zoning laws for that.
- No one cares about retail office market. A market bubble crashing is merely an opportunity to earn money for the others. Capitalism doesn't care about losers.
  
  America only has capitalism for the poor. For the rich, it's socialism. You better believe retail office owners stand to be losers, and they have power to fight.
- Few organizations own their own office space, most lease. So it's not so much "they", the CEOs that want you to return to work, but "they", the venture capitalists (whom the CEOs answer to). These investors have a stake not only in the organization, but separately have investments in commercial office real estate that they stand to lose money on if those leases aren't renewed.
  
  In principle, municipalities could gain control of the assets.
  Little doubt, if a course were followed, the previous owners would be compensated at outrageously inflated prices, defended as rescuing the investors, but nevertheless, control by the public, in the sense of genuine control by the public rather than control by corporations pretending to be concerned for the public, could open pathways for many opportunities toward social interests.
- This is surely the biggest one.
- Good? Maybe we can convert some of the offices to housing then?

Copying my reply from another similar post -
I would lose my control over my minions... Why don't you understand?
Whoops, I meant, my staff can't be monitored...
Whoops, I actually meant, I will lose the one place in life where I can actually throw around my power...
/s
- That's what I was thinking, it essentially makes bosses obsolete and they don't want the system to be deconstructed from the top down, ever. That's toppling capitalism, kinda talk.

What if I don’t return to the office and also don’t quit?
- Then they get to fire you for non-compliance. And you don't get to collect unemployment. Basically the same as quitting for them.
  
  That’s not what my employment contract says, last I checked. And those can’t be changed unilaterally.

Middle manager here: they want you to quit, and me to do your job plus the jobs of the other 3 who just left after you're gone.
- What do middle managers do in WFH jobs? Most companies I've worked in have as many "managers" as bottom level employees. It's hilarious
  
  I'm a middle manager. I run reports to make sure my team is doing what they're supposed to do and identify things they need to be coached on if they're falling short. I also attend meetings with other teams to figure out solutions to things my team collaborates with them on.
  
  In the best case, mentoring.
  In the worst case, produce carbon dioxide, which the plants would need if they weren't plastic and only in the central office thousands of miles away.
  
  Isn’t that because “manager” means you’re exempt from overtime?

Still seems to me the idea of "if people don't come back into work the real estate market implodes" is the most convincing.
Commuters vaporizing and countless city blocks losing their purpose will cause huge upheaval in the real estate market.
And turns out a /lot/ of CEOs have a vested interest in keeping the real estate market artificially propped up.
Thus, they try and force people back to work as hard as they can.
It won't last, the big companies that don't give a shit about real estate due to being even bigger in scale will out compete and the international market will absorb most of the workforce.
If you shackle your success to real estate, then you can't compete with international megacorps that saw this coming awhile ago. Prepare to be acquired.
- It's like we didn't learn pur lesson in 2008
  
  Well, some tried to start a movement, but the police came eventually to stop it.
  I learned that the working class faces ahead of it a long struggle , and has no friend in ACAB.
  
  Im not entirely sure this specific issue has much to do with Synthetic CDOs.
- Big companies are owned by capitalists who also own considerable assets in real property.
- That's a conspiracy theory. Most companies have no interest in keeping high housing market prices, because it increases the wages they pay to their workers and it increases the lease for their offices.
  I have not seen any evidence of a ceo needing the office market to stay high. Some companies renting those building? Sure! But most ceo don't care about those.
  Managers though can't adapt to remote working teams, and they must justify their use to the company. A ceo will also be very easy to convince that people won't work if they're left alone at home, eventhough all studies prove the opposite. There is a toxic culture within the management and directors that workers won't work if they aren't under a leash.

Or maybe…
CEO 1: “Our plan to force everyone back to the office isnt working. They’re just quitting”
CEO 2: “Ok new narrative, convince them it was our plan to get them to quit, and keep forcing them to return to office.”

Hey who knew that the best way to make money as a company is have very few workers and be an amazing talker that can dupe others into investing into your pile of shit. Oh wait, Holmes, Neuman and Bankman-fried already came up with that business model. The innovation on that model is just don't get caught.

Whenever they talk about "Business Innovation" this is the crap they are talking about

Or is this op-ed 3D chess reverse psychology to get you back into the office?

There's an often overlooked part that you could call the "extrovert factor." There's always plenty of coworkers that thrive in group settings. Some number, maybe most, middle managers are extroverts, and when forced to work the way the average minion does, they suffer. It's why they became middle managers in the first place. Their productivity suffers in isolation too, so when converted into a wage slave, they can't complete with less extroverted people. Unfortunately they're better situated to promote their own success, getting by in people skills while more competent people get screwed.
Extroverts also seem to suffer in productivity during WFH, even if they aren't managers. They are stuck in a situation that hurts their functionality, offsetting the statistics. If they actually broke down WFH productivity by job description, I suspect that the extrovert/introvert factor will be a huge determiner of productivity.
Optional office hours seem the best fix, but the corporate attitude of obsessively monitoring the workers to be sure they're not wasting time and therefore money is another factor that makes these companies want to favor their preconceptions. The confirmation bias kicks in and then we have to listen to them focus on it.
- Some people just hate their spouses or children too.
- There may be some accuracy in your analysis about the causes for differences in preferences, but a broader issue might be the poverty of opportunities for meaningful social interaction outside the alienated relationships of the workplace.

Some work from home dude cheat the system to work 2 full-time job at a same time. Not anymore. Well done CEO.

I thought my employer wants me to come in is because a lot of my work is hands on. Kinda hard to debug an electrical problem remotely.

Hopefully the hybrid model is here to stay. I actually prefer being in the office. The only negative of going in for me is the commute.
- Hybrid is only good if the employee has the choice.
  Pre-pandemic I was in an office of people I liked about 10 min from home. I'd go back to that, no problem.
  My prior job was 1-2 hours each way due to traffic, and I was in a room by myself. I wouldn't go back to that.
  
  Some may have relatively pleasant commutes, but a problem with employee choice is that some will exercise the choice to make them effectively as scabs, limiting the options of others by making them appear as less valuable to the employer.
  It would be best if workers as a class seized the newly opened opportunities to build community close to their own residential neighborhoods, helping to begin challenging the imposed conditions under which the workplace is so dominant a locus of social interaction.
- The only negative of going in for me is the commute
  That's a pretty HUGE negative. Calculate how much time is wasted by your commute, calculate how much your transportation costs are, and then use that info to recalculate your compensation.
  For me, commuting is aprox 1 hour each way (I'm only 27 miles away, but traffic is bullshit), and it costs me about $8 per day (that's the cost of driving to a nearby park&ride and taking public transportation the rest of the way into the city & back). That's 44 lost hours of free time EVERY MONTH, plus $176 lost out-of-pocket each month just to commute (this is based on an average month with 22 work days). And don't even suggest I move/live closer to work, cost of housing grows exponentially the closer you get to the city.
  I don't understand how anyone can be in favor of commuting in to a job site if it isn't absolutely essential for the type of work being done.
  
  I don’t mind going in once or twice because when I was pure WFH, the lack of human interaction started to drive me a little crazy. Course, I’m also single which doesn’t help.
  Edit: and it’s a ~25min drive
- I have zero desire to be a shared corporate office space for work, but if thats what works for you, I'm glad you have that choice.
  
  I have zero desire to be a shared corporate office space
  I don't wanna be a shared corporate office space neither
- If only the people who wanted to go in went in there'd be practically no commutes. There'd be a lot less reason to have an office, but people can self-select jobs for that, too.
- This used to be me until I got to WFH for 4 years. I'm never go back in an office now.
- It's rare, but I'm the same way. It helps that my commute is 10 minutes in a relatively small city and there's next to zero traffic due to the small size and hours I work. If I had a horrific, or even mildly annoying, commute then I'd feel very different about it. I've turned down higher paying jobs because they required a 45min-1hr one way drive through shit traffic... And that was in 2018 and again in 2021 when that company had already forced everyone back into the office. They're huge on "you must be in the office" and COVID didn't change it for them.
  I like to have the physical distinction of "office is for work, home is for not work". But, I also love the option of work from home. Planning to leave early for a long weekend? WFH that day so I can hop in the car as soon as I'm done. Dentist appointment at 0800? WFH for the morning, drive to dentist, continue on into the office afterwards.
  I know I'm lucky with my current convenient commute... I couldn't handle what a lot of people do and if I was in that position I'd maybe go into the office once a week if at all.

133 comments