this post was submitted on 09 Aug 2023
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Isn't it significantly cheaper for most businesses to be run remotely? What is the pressure of returning to work coming from?
It's so much cheaper that my last job, which was a remote-first company, was able to pay to fly everyone and a +1 to an all-expense-paid resort for five days to do team building. All of that was cheaper than an office in SF where they were based.
The portion of managers which don't actually contribute anything to productivity don't have much to do if everyone is at home.
And the people who own the real estate (more often CEO, executives, board members than you might think) need their office buildings to maintain inflated values and collect those sweet, sweet lease payments.
I think this is an underappreciated reason. There is often plenty of subtle and not so subtle self-dealing with real estate and also other smaller businesses that serve the needs of offices. Those at the top can double dip extracting money out of the company for themselves, but WFH undermines that source of money.
Then you have managers at various levels who are nothing but dead weight and need people to micro manage or bully to try and justify their existence. Or are social butterflies who want people to interact with regardless if if it is productive or not.
WFH has costs to many managers and executives, so WFH being better for the company and most employees is secondary to their personal interests.
It is!
Most companies make BS solutions for fake problems. Not going to the office exposes a large chunk of fake needs.
Do families really need two cars? If you aren't commuting every day, probably not.
Having more free time means people are more likely to cook and clean for themselves. Can't make money off of that.
How many suits do you need to own? None! You only owned them because you are supposed to wear them in the office.
Dry cleaners? No longer a bill.
Gas? When you aren't sitting in your cities parking lot of a freeway isn't bought as often.
Speaking of parking lots, you aren't paying for parking anymore.
Daycare and dog walkers aren't needed anymore.
Going up work is expensive and companies want us addicted to these fake expenses.
many companies have multi-year commercial leases they suddenly can’t get out of and lots of office furniture they can’t liquidate. it’s a huge investment that suddenly worthless. (boo-hoo!)
Sounds like they made a bad investment choice.
So, I think the thing to do is to let workers talk frankly with their immediate supervisor and they're team mates, and then let people decide for themselves where they would work best from. Weirdly, most people don't go to work with the intent to do a bad job and can be trusted to make that choice for themselves.
That being said, there are some legitimate reasons why some people want a return to office that extend beyond the "butts in seats means productivity" and "people will realize I'm not providing value if we work from home" that a lot of people jump to immediately.
Some professions benefit a lot from face to face communication and coordination. The job can be done remotely, but it's a lot more work. Because rather than accidentally coordinating, you have to be deliberate with every interaction. Wfh has led to a lot less idea spread between teams in those areas, and often there's little idea about how to promote "so I was talking with Jan on the other team, and we had this idea..." Outside of making it so people can randomly talk to one another.
Some businesses have significant investments in their office space. If they're not using it the pressure to divest from an unneeded asset is strong. Because everyone has this pressure, they might lose significant money selling at a loss, or as a penalty for breaking the lease.
If they believe that the wfh trend will slow and possibly reverse to some degree, then they don't want to sell when it's cheap and be forced to buy when it's expensive again. This is often coupled with the previous point.
The final reason has to do with attachment and people. When people don't see each other, they're less attached to one another. If your job is just a place you quietly work and get paid, there's less human connection stopping you from jumping ship immediately.
You are also slower to adopt the company culture, which aside from bullshit buzzword stuff actually has value as the set of poorly defined social contracts about how the company interacts with customers, and generally "does stuff". The actual company culture that makes you know that project plans go in spread sheets, the project proposal in a text document, and how people expect the documentation wiki to be formatted. What style of gif to use to get a chuckle and make people remember the important bit.
It also creates some difficulties for new entrants to the workforce. A lot of people with little or no office experience have reported a much harder time getting situated without people nearby to lend a hand. That process is much harder if there aren't people nearby, so some people want to encourage more people to come back to let that work better.
In the end, these aren't enough for me to think we should be forcing people back, but they're worth considering and talking about as a company or team.