this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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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.
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.
These are exactly the reason I prefer to work in office. WFH actually makes the office more pleasant, since there is less people there, which gives me more space and less noise.
Unfortunately, the long commute time kind of forced me to be at home. U.S. really need to fix their freaking transport system.
Just buy a faster car /s
Bro, one more lane will make the bus go faster (if it is not obvious /s)
I strongly disagree that there are less distractions in the office.
I live on the east coast but my company is on the west coast, occasionally I fly out and work there and often the first hour, maybe 90 mins of the day is coffee run, breakfast, water cooler chat, stand up, more chit chat, second coffee run, someone comes over to chat, general melee as people muck around, someone makes a loud joke, hour lunch break, late.coming back. afternoon coffee run... it's just chaos
to add to this, time spent on traveling. Also, home is a comfort zone for many workers so it just saves time and increases productivity and you don't want to be kinds tired after the day ends.
I did NOT hate on anyone. I apologize if I sounded like it. I just love being home with my kids.
My company is letting our lease expire & getting a smaller place for equipment.
They can't be dumb enough to fall for the sunk cost fallacy can they? I think it must be something else.
Control. It's all about control, because something something traditions something something profit.
Yep, standard issue throwing good money after bad instead of just taking the L now and moving forward
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.
how the mentoring would be different if the under-performers are in the building or they work from home?
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.
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).
It's good for companies that rent office space, but not for companies that own those offices. This is corporate landlords throwing a shitfit, and they have a lot more money and own more news outlets than companies who rent.
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.
These companies want to reduce headcount. This is an easy way to do so.
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.
And if your employees live in a lower COL area, you can literally pay them less.