Major employers scrap plans to cut back on offices – KPMG

I'm totally in the other camp - I love working from home, and have been home-based for over 4 years now (dedicated room and set-up etc.). The only difference that covid has brought, is that my partner is now also work-from-home, which interestingly has impacted my productivity somewhat; We prefer to just sit around and chat, than focus on work - It now takes a bit more effort to get my head down and focus. :)

All that said, I'd still not want to go back into an office. Here in London, this means over an hour commute each way, on typically standing-room only trains, and then 8 hours in noisy open-plan with tiny desks, and your stuff kept in a locker.

Ultimately it's down to choice: Going forwards I'd like to see companies offer the choice of working in the office, or working from home. That way everyone can work in a location that suits them best.

And this is exactly what awaits most people after Covid. Programmers are lucky for having any options at all.

It makes no sense. Let people fucking WFH if they want to and set up a laptop for Zoom/Teams in meetings, as long as they come in for important stuff now and then.

I can't do that in the office. If I were to go into the office, I'd need to either (a) spend longer over the same tasks to stretch them to fill out the day because I'm constantly being observed, or (b) finish my work at the same rate and ask for more work. Both of those options are obviously not ideal from my perspective as someone who wants to expend the minimal amount of time to get work done.

Why would I want to wake up earlier, commute, set up at work, not eat what I want (or what I can at home) - just to sit at a computer, something I could do at home. At least at home I can 'finish early' (save for meetings). Going physically into the office is not in any way to my benefit. It's a lose/lose/lose/lose/... situation for me. I'm seriously considering getting another job that's almost entirely remote-only.

All the rest of it is better in the office, IMO. That said, it only applies if I actually have my own office, and not a shared workspace. (Which I did, pre-Covid, and I expect to have it again.)

Most of my co-workers did not have their own offices, so I expect they won't feel as kindly towards going back once we're all vaccinated.

In the end, for me it's kind of a wash. I get good things each way. But I'm pretty sure the business is going to want to go back to having an office because it simplifies so many things for them.

But that's what "the office" means. It means shitty unoptimal work conditions, it means hours a day stuck in traffic and it means visibility is as important as productivity. You can't get rid of those things, they are effectively part of the definition of working in an office as far as I'm concerned.

I love working from home. I'll never go back to any kind of morning commute to a noisy workspace full of managers breathing down my neck for as long as I can help it.

Major (or a subset of) employers do not like losing centralised control of their employees, but there are a large cohort of employees who wish to see remote or hybrid models of work and, critically, this trend was growing prior to COVID-19. COVID merely accelerated this trend, as it did with a lot of pre-existing social and industrial changes.

> And lastly I'm just not convinced that businesses actually act based solely on hard figures.

Correct. Large, Big-5-hiring, corporations are probably going to be the last companies to move to true hybrid models. They are behemoths that cannot be turned quickly. They have slow bones, vast inertia, and long memories, and will have been optimised for reporting chains that require face-to-face interactions and strong visual signaling. All of this takes time to change.

But I wouldn't expect that this return to all-onsite work will be completed before the pendulum begins to swing back again the other way.

It’s almost as if some people prefer one way and others prefer the other way! Which is why WFH advocates just want the option. They aren’t asking for everyone to have to WFH, just for the choice.

The back-to-office advocates however want to go back to office and force everyone else to go back to office. This is the difference in approaches. They don’t want people to have a choice—they want it their way for everyone.

you could have just said this. everything else you wrote is superfluous justification

Coming in a day or two a week is only possible if you're still basically commuting distance from an office. It can in principle be a longer commute. But I'm probably not going to hop on a plane or drive 8 hours once a week to come in for a day of meetings. (Though I could once a month for a few days.)

I work at a company that's pretty distributed and remote anyway but I do know people who used to come into an office regularly who have moved out of commuting distance.

Overall I agree with you though that mostly offices are not going to go away but that there will be an increased degree of willingness to allow 2-days-WFH and similar arrangements, especially in sectors like tech where attracting and retaining good employees is difficult -- it's a relatively cheap perk to offer and the last year has raised corporate awareness of its desirability among some employees and that it isn't actually impractical.

- no part of our house needs to be dedicated to work

- work starts and stops at regular times

- I have at least 30m of language study time in the car (accounting for conversations with my daughter which will be a priority)

- my office is 5 min from trails I can run at lunch

Working from home, as in the spare bedroom, is a challenge and a buzzkill.

If everyone is in the office on different days, then of course you lose the benefits of in-person collaboration. But if everyone is in the office on the same days, then it's harder to meet with people because their schedules might be full or you might not have enough rooms for all the meetings. Sure, you can try to align schedules by related teams, but it will be hard to get perfectly.

It seems like this will happen unless something stops it.

If you think internal combustion engines are going away, you're betting against decades of history. And if you thought horses were going away you were also betting against decades of history.

Things do change. Many people who can work from home now will. And many others will invest in home offices and join them. Some people can't work from home, but amongst office workers that number is very small.

They do not actually succeed to "work together in meatspace" very well when their teams are already in different timezones, cities and even a drive away in the same city.

Some companies will springboard off this, and some will cling to the Old Ways.

Historian here. If you're going to argue the past, then working together in close quarters at scale has only become a societal norm since the Industrial Revolution. Throughout most of (European) history, working from home was the norm.

This shifted when in the 19th century when industrialization moved the workplace for millions from small scale, artisanal home labor towards factories, workshops and crowded urban centers.

The impact on individuals and society was profound. This was also the time where factory workers found themselves facing extremely long workdays, non-existent worker rights, low wages and so on. That's what sparked social and emancipatory movements, and worker parties in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Throughout the 20th century, the workforce in the Northern hemisphere became increasingly more emancipated and educated. Post-war economic boom (1945-1975) and social-economic reforms - especially in Europe - created the momentum that turned a blue collar workforce into a white collar workforce.

Even so, in the late 20th century, many of the extant notions of how work ought to be organized were still firmly rooted in frameworks that first emerged during the Industrial Revolution.

Ever since the emergence of digital technology in the 1960s, visions of modernity and future living have always included the ability to work remotely or from home, rendering the centralized workplace obsolete. It's only now, 50 years later, that commoditization of digital technology has actually turned this into an option for millions of workers.

The problem isn't technology though, it's - still - the tenuous and complex relationship between workers and their employers that harks back towards demanding 40, 60, 80 hours in a centralized workplace where maximization of productivity is put front and center.

Now, in all of this, it should be clear that I'm not advocating for people to wholesale move towards working from home. Nor that people should go back to bare level subsistence living through local farming / artisanal production. That's not how this works.

In that regard, you're absolutely right to state there's "no one way" to organize work.

However, generalizing the notion that "people can't do their work virtually and need to see each other" is false as well as it doesn't take into account the historic backdrop that explains how modern society ended up organizing itself in a way that created centralized workplaces as a necessary requirement.

The fact of the matter is that the technology finally gives people a choice over the locality of their work. Artificially restricting that freedom for everyone because "That's how it has gone on for decades" or "some people in some industries can't work from home" are rather poor arguments in that regard.

CEO's want all the little people back in the office so they can have their minions back.

I’d push back on this claim with another piece of relevant data: employee mental health has plunged [1][2]. While it’s true that productivity has increased, it’s not obvious that this is sustainable.

[1] https://www.hibob.com/blog/covid-19-employee-wellness-survey...

[2] https://www.kff.org/policy-watch/both-remote-and-on-site-wor...

You can levy a dozen counterfactuals at the use of BLS data like this to support permanent WFH. The analysis needs to be way more holistic and BLS figures aren't nuanced enough.

Even on the smallest scale of sample size, I thrived during the work from home year, yet my SO can't wait to get back to office work where they can socialize with coworkers face to face.

Any call for either OR are dramatically overweightted.

According to them it was just a fad that would soon die.

Companies that were quick to embrace open concept office space and cubicles to save expenses are surely going to take advantage of this new paradigm.

I've been expecting that certain groups (people who own commercial real estate, for example), were going to want to us all back in our cubicles.

Not sure I'm right, of course, but it'll be interesting to see how this plays out over the next couple of years.

There are certainly going to be exceptions, but anyone wanting to work remotely permanently will have an uphill battle.

Perhaps in the future that will change. But for now that is how I feel about the situation.

P.S. I didn’t read the article, so I can’t comment on that. I was just reacting to the ridiculous statement that no one wants to work in an office.

The pressure from banks, direct real estate investors, and holders of real-estate / mortgage-backed securities has to be absolutely immense. I trust virtually nothing reported in this space presently, most especially "mood" pieces (e.g., "everyone is clamoring to do X", whether that's remaining in or departing offices).

  a reduction in office use by say 20%

There is a role for good leadership within a corporation. Part of that is to ensure that organisational system is working together towards the quality achievement of a common aim. This is difficult at the best of times but remote working adds additional challenges and if you thought leaders were struggling before how do you think they'll fair with the additional challenge.

I'm sure that's part of the reason, but there is evidence that a single dose provides substantial protection against getting the disease badly enough to hospitalise or kill you: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/feb/22/scotland-covid...

So this may be a case of something that is both politically expedient and genuinely beneficial.