I think its fair to say that RTO is not about data, or studies, or about anything really. Leaders across all industries have decided people are coming back. Perhaps there is a secret cabal of commercial office space lenders who are putting pressure as share holders, or some other conspiracy theory. But it's happening - no one can do anything about it (except vote with your feet), and no one is going to get better accommodations in this economy (e.g better offices).
I am in the middle of having to tell a top engineer (and team lead) who was hired remote that they can no longer be remote and need to move to one of our office locations (thousands of miles away of course). Just for the privilege of being on a video call with the PMs who of course don't live in the same city anyway.
Sadly, it's like people running these companies are drawing inspiration from Vladamir Putin and saying "Fuck it - I want people in the office". This may be off topic from the article - but I think leaders are just going to say fuck it - you are coming in or you are getting fired.
>Perhaps there is a secret cabal of commercial office space lenders
In a sense, I think this is much of it.
Commercial real estate used to be a fairly predictable investment. Costs were mostly predictable, rents would increase over time, etc.
Now, we have all these vacant buildings and it's highly disruptive to the investors and owners of those buildings. You have companies in the middle of 5, 10, 15 year leases, and they're paying on those spaces with no hope of getting out of the contract. So the companies have a large incentive to justify that spend, which is really only going to happen by utilizing the space, which means in-office work.
I think if there was a viable way for these lessors to get out of those obligations we would see more of an embrace of WFH or hybrid work.
There is also part of the issue where for some people and tasks, an in-office scenario is higher net productivity to the company (but not necessarily the employees).
Additionally, you also have companies where a large contingent of the workforce can't WFH (eg: manufacturing, assembly, etc.). It creates animosity among the workers when the higher paid people also have the luxury of not needing to come to a physical location.
Overall, I think the deck is stacked against WFH becoming a long-term trend for a majority of the workforce. I think it will become a more common perk, something that is earned and not granted.
That's a large part of it. It's especially works well to get rid of people who are older and have families, and keep mostly fresh college graduates and singles. And those usually have a lower salaries, we're getting fresh employees who are lower cost, everything looks great on paper.
Except that the first people who would leave might also be the good experienced engineers, but that loss is a little hard to see on paper at first, to predict and so it doesn't get accounted for very well.
Yes, but you shouldn't extrapolate from that. In many cases "startups" are much much easier to manage remotely. You often have a much smaller, and more focused, employee base. There is much less room for unproductive employees to hide in the shadows.
I don't know if it's true or not, but it's a reasonable hypothesis. There has been no evidence that RTO decisions are being made on data, studies, or anything other than what management feels is right, either. So all we have hypotheses.
> What data do you have to support this, other than a personal anecdote?
If RTO proponents had any hard data, wouldn't they shared it by now? It is _they_ who are making the claim that office work is more productive, so it is on them to _prove_ it. We are being fed some fables about "spontaneous interactions at water cooler" and other such bullshit instead.
Well - at my massive company no one is willing to share any data about these decisions. That's a huge red flag. And anecdotes about remote working are personal (individual manager) and larger team (100s) to entire orgs (500+). it's been working great.
I am in the middle of having to tell a top engineer (and team lead) who was hired remote that they can no longer be remote and need to move to one of our office locations (thousands of miles away of course). Just for the privilege of being on a video call with the PMs who of course don't live in the same city anyway.
Sadly, it's like people running these companies are drawing inspiration from Vladamir Putin and saying "Fuck it - I want people in the office". This may be off topic from the article - but I think leaders are just going to say fuck it - you are coming in or you are getting fired.