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To this day I have no idea why the return to the office 100% mandate is an industry standard. We lost a ton of qualified people to companies offering WFH, can’t hire the people we want since those candidates don’t want to relocate, and moral is shot across the company. I’m leaving this company in favor of one that offers partial WFH and more benefits.
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Many economies have the daily commute factored in. Think about how industries like auto, oil, road construction, fast food, etc... Would be affected if everyone worked from home.
To make sure the commercial real estate industry doesn’t fail
The companies won't allow having a mostly empty space that they are paying for. you on the other hand can have a mostly empty space (your home) that you are paying for while you work in the office. The companies' expenses are more important than yours.
My workplace did the opposite of mandatory RTO and reduced the space they're renting in half (from 2 floors of a business center to 1). It means we have to hotdesk whenever we do need to work in the office, but that's a small price to pay.
Sounds like a great place to work. I’ve always maintained a sparse work space so this would be perfect for me lol
There is no why; you are trying to explain irrational behavior with reason and logic. And so by leaving you contribute to the downfall of irrationalism in business. Bravo!
What blows my mind is the fact that the return to office policy doesn’t help ANYONE. The company continues to pay to run a physical building with limited seating, makes the company pay expensive contractors for repairs/parking/security/etc, and kills productivity across the board. People are worried about leaving on time or else they’ll be stuck in traffic, instead of worrying about finishing an important task.
American business leadership tends to think level of income is correlated with effort, and as a consequence assume anyone below them on the corporate ladder is a lazy bum. Lazy bums obviously need to be in the office so they can be supervised. Evidence to the contrary is just exceptions to the rule, and cannot dictate policy.
See also: Prosperity Gospel, Calvinism.
Income is correlated with effort, just inversely
Income is mostly inversely correlated with how much the work improves society. Source: David Graeber
If the company owns the office buildings then no tenants would devalue the asset.
It satisfies the desire of those at the top who don't believe work gets done if they can't see it physically happen.
Soft firing without having to pay severance. That makes their quarterly numbers look better, which in turn makes stocks and thus their compensation package go up.
Of course it will probably kill the company in the long run, but by then the board will have elected a fall guy to blame and they will all jump out with their golden parachutes, leaving the rest of you to burn.
Yea I’ve seen this but it’s an insane tactic. This targets the people who have options and are talented. They’re also impossible to replace since even a perfect new hire won’t have the 20 years of company experience that the old employee had. I guess most companies today don’t actually care about their own company.
If you think about the corporation as a vehicle for investor capital rather than an entity which provides services, the prevalence of this decision makes a lot more sense.
I guess most companies today don’t actually care about their own company.
Correct.
In many cases because of "fiduciary responsibility" it is quite literally illegal for a company to prioritize long term sustainability over quick profits. Every single company who has opened an IPO and begun selling stock has committed long form suicide.
I think it's a variety of factors and a lot of decision makers failing to view the picture holistically (optimistic view) or just being malicious (pessimistic).
I think ultimately it's short sighted. I think companies that actually are facing problems with WFH (and not just being malicious) should try to address them in different ways instead of just killing it off.
Re 1, my CEO came up with an innovative solution. He decided to significantly downsize our office space when it came time for the lease renewal, and passed the savings on to the shareholders!
I value WFH pretty highly myself, so honestly I'd consider it passed to me as well if it meant not having to RTO.
Just started a fully in office job for the first time in years. The job market is shit and I've got bills to pay. Planning to leave for another WFH job ASAP.
No joke honest to god it is actually a conspiracy, the land value in cities started to plummet so the governor started going around making not so veld threats about keeping people in office and the corporations wanted to work in the cities so they complied ... For now money always wins it will just take longer.
It's because leadership is a heady cocktail of stupid and selfish.
I really want to stress stupid. That means they draw bad conclusions from facts.
Sometimes selfish is a factor. They have an obscure reason like "my share value goes up because we get a kickback from the city for staffing an office here". They don't care if it's bad for everyone else or the company long term. They'll get their money and then leave.
The people running companies no longer understand what the companies do.
This is actually an escalation, when I was younger, the people running companies understood what the company did, they didn't understand what anybody working for them actually did, but they did know they were building airplanes or filling tax returns.
Today, the Epstein class has completely disconnected and random idiots are now in charge. Look at Nadella at Microsoft, that guy has been filtering everything he hears through copilot for two years now, you think he knows fuck about shit?
Working from talking to a customer that works in same industry, but they have to go to an office to just talk on the phone and do exact same job as me. Fucking stupid. Corporations are dumb as hell.
Free market at work I guess
HR has practically been begging me to sue them over this shit. I put in a ADA reasonable accommodation request to WFH, and they've just stopped responding at this point. It's been 3 weeks.
Wife doing the same with her job. Did ADA for WFH and they claim RTO is a essential part of her job because of oversight. But she WFH 1 day a week before covid and then 5 years during covid full WFH and then they decided to demand 2 days a week in office so still 3 days a week WFH. But they need those 2 days of oversite? She 100% works from Teams, nobody she works with is in office as they are contractors. Lawyers have been contacted.
I'm in nearly the same boat. Though they said it an even dumber way:
"Being in the office, collaborating, and not being in an individual silo is an essential job function."
Motherfucker my whole job is to write code. It doesn't matter where I do it and I have MS teams for when I do need to talk to people. They had me working from home for months.
Maybe they should return to office themselves to jerk each other off and leave us the fuck alone
When I used to go to the office I'd spend an hour just chatting with colleagues. Now in WFH I work a full 8 hours if not more and the company doesn't need to accomodate me anymore.
They should be kissing our feet working from home but they're such bootlickers for whoever is above them that they don't care.
Agreed
For the curious (like me): ADA = https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Americans_with_Disabilities_Act_of_1990
Hilarious but my organization has a policy to account for this. It's ultra bullshit.
EDIT: For context, I work for state government and support critical infrastructure, so being available after normal work hours is expected. It's still bullshit though.
Terrible company then.
Every enterprise level org I've worked for has had strong rules about not engaging after-hours.
They understand of you're working after hours you're going to be useless the next day. Consistency is more important.
I was once told that I could have meetings all day because I had all night to finish my code.
Do you get paid for being on stand-by? If not you're being robbed.
Presumably you get an on call rate factored into your pay.
Have your own rules?
I am a massive single point of failure for my org.
Anything bad or unexpected happens to the website that I migrated on prem for us and I am basically the only one who has any idea where to even begin.
And that just constitutes one grafana dashboard I built, of many, that are used by basically every team now. I also stood up the grafana server.
There was an RTO. My boss was literally like "this doesn't apply to you."
It strikes me as mastubatory to take a discussion about working from home and making it entirely about how important you are compared to the common clay of your company.
For a small company they might be the only person who has on-call duties. I don't think the "common clay" of the company envies being on-call 24/7.
I have a very good WFH policy and I have a lot of meetings with Japan on the evening
I told my boss that the day WFH is cancelled I won't be able to attend any of those meetings (and basically all the engineering teams are in the same situation)
WFH would unfortunately not make a lot of sense for my job since its a hands on variety of work everyday and I'm one of only a few available bus drivers. (10 employee community center)
Lot of job security and consistent hours, pay could be better though. And they at least only expect me to respond to scheduling communications.
Thought the dude was heiling Hitler from the thumb