X [Doubt]
CEOs, admit they used feelings over logic and everyone had to just pretend it made sense?
this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2023
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The only feelings were probably that they thought the productivity loss would be less than the losses in commercial real estate, and now they've either minimized the real estate losses, or realized them, and they feel the equation has flipped
It has nothing to do with real estate. This is often echoed on social media but is baseless.
Companies typically chase quarterly growth over all else. Working from home benefits that while trying to fix real estate values is a long term thing, only offering a payout if they sell the building, which most companies aren't worried about. Companies tend to be very hesitant to hurt quarterly growth in favor of long term, iffy investments.
Even if they did care about real estate value, they'd rather all other companies return to office, boosting those values, while they could then remain remote and take advantage of both the higher real estate values and also the numerous advantages of remote work.
Boosting real estate values in this way is a collective action problem where most companies would need to work together for the greater good (as they see it). But if you hold this world view, that CEOs will screw over their employees for their bottom line, why wouldn't they also screw over other companies? They would. They would want other companies to work together to fix the real estate values while also benefitting from remote work. So it would all fall apart.
Here are more likely scenarios:
- SHAREHOLDERS. Shareholders don't like unused assets. "Use it or lose it". So, CEOs force return to office because they think it'll help the stock price. Shareholders are also likely to blame as evidenced by publicly traded companies being more likely to mandate a return to office.
- Personal preference. CEOs, and other executives who make this decision, simply prefer to work in the office and they prefer a full office to an empty one. Either cause: they have a very extroverted personality (likely how they got the job in the first place), they feel more powerful with all their underlings around, or they have a harder time working from home and can't fathom anyone being different.
It's even better when my CEO slipped up and admitted in front of the entire company that the return to office policy was based solely on a feeling.
I thought the point was to get people to resign so they didn't have to pay severance?
My company had that same attitude when they announced full RTO. They were then faced with extremely high turnover for a sustained period. They had trouble hiring people to fulfill the constant merry-go-round of job openings and that negatively impacted productivity. So they backed off from full RTO and moved to a hybrid model instead.
Hybrid model is such a stupid fucking compromise. Come in when a scrum or meeting is needed. Leave everyone else the fuck alone if they're hitting targets.
It also limits hiring/job pools because you still need to live close enough to come in to the office. May as well be a full office job then. Hybrid is not a compromise to remote.
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Maybe enough people resigned.
I sincerely thought this headline was from the onion. I don't think a lot of CEOs have the humility to admit fault.
It's impossible to hide the productivity losses from shareholders.
When has easily identified objective reality ever discouraged CEOs?
The data showed the same thing on a smaller scale BEFORE the pandemic and they still almost universally demanded that people needlessly commute to perform location-agnostic tasks.
That they haven't learned any lessons is par for the course.
Alternate headline: CEOs still out of touch with rank and file employees, continue to set policy based on enormous egos and to assuage shareholders
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CEOs will admit nothing.
Shareholders like to hear that employees are having to come to the office, being fired, or pissing in bottles. It means more money for the shareholders.
"Every hour we'll beat our lowest performing employee with a pool ball in a sock."
The line goes up.
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Just let people work remote. It is the best way for me to be productive and not have to spend extra money on travel.
"You want something that doesn't affect our bottom line and improves your life? Fuck you! I pulled myself up by the bootstraps... They were golden and provided by my daddy, but I pulled myself up all the same!"
--Billionaires, probably
Anybody with a job that isn't in a warehouse will tell you productivity went up with work from home, not down. Fuck the media for always sleeping through reality.
Also didn't help teachers at all. But ya, for all office workers who aren't social and especially for those of us who had a long commute, wfh was a godsend.
Not to mention, you aren't as aware of down time when you're there in person. You're at the office, so most tasks you do still feel like work. If you're a knowledge worker you might spend 4 hours getting actual work done, and you can see that way more easily at home. I think that's why people have been more productive, because they think they're falling behind when they really aren't.
Plus, being in a familiar environment and not needing to wake up early for commutes is massive.
Guess what I’m doing for 45-60 minutes each day while NOT driving to/from an office…
Watching anime waiting for 9:00 to roll around
CEOs will never admit shit until they're paid to do so.
Absolutely this. All the metrics already tell us that productivity does not decline from allowing employees to work from home. Why would additional data suddenly cause CEOs to admit what's already known?
But they helped their buddies with empty real estate downtown so it's all good.
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I think this is because the reason to get people to get back into office was to protect commercial real estate values.
Now that the third tallest tower in LA sold for 45% its previous selling price, the dominoes have started to fall.
Now, it will be about getting people to work from home and trying to get out of these buildings as they are a failed investment.
So we are going to start seeing companies “offer” to let people work from home. They may even ask you to take a pay cut or something for the privilege.
This is just my prediction and I’m not an expert in these fields. So take this with a grain of salt.
If you are working in an office by force and they offer to let you work from home with a pay cut, I’d hold out a few months as they may start forcing people to work from home at full pay.
So here is some real-world anecdata from this current month: I have been interviewing in UK with smaller companies and one of the first questions has been what compensation I am seeking. I have been upfront about my preference (remote first) and travel costs, which I calculate as approximately the equivalent of £10k/year gross salary for each scheduled day/week on site from my location to nearest major city. I have said that I can do up to 2 x regular day/week onsite.
- Nobody has disputed my reckoning or reasoning
- Startup company advertised 'hybrid'. I gave a comp ask saying 'with 1 day/week on site'. They came back to suggest a 10k lesser figure full remote. I withdrew because I accepted another offer but this would have been acceptable.
- Scale-up company- again advertised 'hybrid', suggesting 1 day/fortnight onsite. I gave same salary/travel calculation. They came back with offer of my basic figure for remote with quarterly visits at company expense instead, i.e. travel, accommodation etc. I accepted this.
This is a conspiracy theory. For this hypothesis to be true, it would take all companies and and real estate companies to cooperate. This is something people are likely to believe because it is an us vs them theory. But in practice they are incapable of doing it.
The problem is that real estate companies and lending companies have competing interests. Real estate companies want people to go back to office, obviously. But other companies would save loads of money by going full remote. The current lease is irrelevant, because the money is already lost, and it won't be recovered if people go back to office. The sunk cost fallacy is not a fallacy any decent company will fall for. People though will easily believe they do, especially when they are not protecting themselves from it.
My hypothesis is that management and direction are controle freaks who cannot trust their employees. They are also aroogant. This leads to a situation where they will attribute any productivity benefit during remote work to their skills and decisions, and they will attribute any decrease to employee lazyness when they're not closely monitored. They want to correct this by bringing people back to office to appease their mind. There is reaction to change too, obviously, but I suppose it simply takes the shape I described, the shape of distrust of employees.
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This won't happen because no one is measuring productivity. If they had any way to measure productivity or even cared about it, there wouldn't be bullshit jobs. CEOs will never admit this, because it was never the point.
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When did we stop using the Oracle of Delphi and switch to future of work experts for our predictions?
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Return to office mandates were never about productivity. They are about fulfilling obligations to municipalities that gave them tax breaks on real-estate in exchange for hiring a certain number of local employees.
My perspective on this after all my experiences over the past three years or so, working at three different jobs that service hundreds of customer sites and thousands of professional workers, is simply: forcing either work from office, work from home, or a combination of both (aka hybrid), is the wrong move. Your best talent will walk of you force them to do something that they don't want to do. I have seen coworkers and users alike, find new jobs both when forced to WFH and RTO and even with hybrid.
The take away is, work should be flexible. It should be where the workers are most effectively able to complete their duties. If that's the office, workers should have the ability to do that. If that's at home, they should be able to do that. If it's some combination of home/office, again, they should be able to do that.
If I've learned only one thing about work over the pandemic and this "post pandemic" hell, it's that above all, people want to be able to make that choice for themselves. Any worker worth employing is going to be productive regardless of their location, and for short durations, workers can accept working from home or the office or whatever, even if it's not their preference (eg, the 2020/1 lockdowns). A bad worker will be able to find ways to look busy will while not doing work regardless of if they're working remotely or not, though, in my experience most workers just want to put in the effort, and get paid, and they do. Those that are there to do as little as possible and collect a paycheck are actually pretty rare. People want to work. Giving them the option of choosing where and when to do that is empowering and beneficial to their attitude and work ethic; not to mention, it's also beneficial to their mental health.
Simply, forcing them into either working from home, or the office, or both via "hybrid" is going to have at least a few, wanting to walk.
We have the technology to support both styles of work and taking that choice away from workers will only serve to make those that want the opposite, disgruntled. If you value your workers, then let them choose.
Bluntly, given what I've seen from business owners over the same three+ year time period, they don't care enough about workers to make them happy. It demonstrates a complete lack of shits given about what works want.
If you're a business owner and you have any consideration for those you employ, give them the choice and you will be rewarded with more work, and better work done by those you employ. Anyone who forces the issue, one way or the other, will have some that are happy and some that are very unhappy about it. Choose wisely.
The drain for those companies is happening or has happened and is unlikely to improve just because they finally realize they were wrong.
They didn't do it because productivity. They did it because real estate prices. Also they like to watch people work.
Top management did it for their realestate portfolio, middle management did it because if works at home it suddenly becomes obvious most of them are completely superfluous.
As an employee at a company that has asked people to come back 3 days a week, and forced those that couldn't to "voluntarily resign", I very much doubt this will happen at large companies.
Sure, many companies will shift towards hybrid models, taking smaller office spaces where needed, and letting people work remotely when they want...but RTO became a culture war of sorts rather than a data-driven benefit. To switch back after being so anti-worker would be admitting fault, which CEO's rarely do.
Even if remote was the future, there are instances where I don't see it working:
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If remote work is the future, what becomes of migration? Controlled migration is a huge boost for many cities that want the best and brightest to move there. Without a need for employees to move, either migration worldwide drops, or cities/countries find another way to bring people in.
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Big companies have a huge number of applications, and even if the likes of Google and Amazon say "fuck you, 5 days a week in office" you'll find hundreds of people that'll happily work there and be treated like shit. It's not just tech either - finance, law, insurance, lots of industries that have tried to bring people back, and who have no shortage of people that'll take jobs there.
I love working remotely, but I do appreciate that there needs to be a balance. The smartest thing to do would be to have smaller, shared offices for people that want a desk, and to set up "virtual locations" for tax/salary reasons for people that want to be remote. That way, people get the best of both worlds.
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It's easy to laugh at the term 'Future of Work Expert' because it is inherently ridiculous but some of the actual individuals cited here are people that CEOs will listen to:
- Annie Dean, a panelist and the global head of Team Anywhere at software firm Atlassian, and Meta’s former director of remote work
- Robert Sadow, Scoop’s ('Powerful planning tools for hybrid employees.') CEO and cofounder
- Cara Allamano, who heads up people operations at management software firm Lattice—which, like Atlassian, is remote-first
All of these people are very clearly on the 'remote' side of the argument but they are also in leadership positions where they are walking it, not just talking it. All of their companies provide tooling solutions for orchestrating staff and projects. At least two of these companies are successful. We already know that the data does not back up RTO mandates. We're on the Sarah Cycle/Change curve: We've done Shock and Anger, we are now at the 'Bargaining' stage.
It's good to know that there are people in positions of influence who at least have an ounce of logical thiking capacity.
This reads like an onion headline.
This will probably happen as the sunk cost fallacy of existing office space goes away. They have these big office spaces leased out and they're contractually stuck with that cost. Those leases will expire over the next few years, and a lot of them will decide they don't need them anymore. Until then, they're paying for something that isn't getting use, and there's mental pressure to force the issue.
This will coincide with a collapse of the office rental market. The places heavily invested in that market see it coming, are dreading it, and are driving headlines saying how much better office work is.
How long till 4 day work week?
It's almost like people don't want to be slaves of sociopaths to enrich themselves at the expense of all else.
Who could have known?
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