Overall productivity was the same. The remaining folks were producing significantly more and burning out. They actually lost work life balance, working way beyond 9-5 hours.
In this case, I don’t think my company has figured out how to manage remote workers. Even the direct managers appear checked out, delegating their own responsibilities to this group of ICs who are burned out.
I think people are delighted to skip their 2+ hour commutes and double down on work instead.
But to lump all office-bound companies by this metric is to miss the nuance and deliberation that (in many companies) goes into this decision.
There are upsides to remote work (mostly, but not exclusively for the employee) and upsides to office work (mostly but not exclusively to the employer) and most companies are somewhere along that spectrum.
realize most employers are leaching off your wifi, electricity, and floorspace. for free and that alone should have saved a bundle. the fact that they didn't glom on to that trick is evidence that it was thought to be not worth it.
some jobs are perfect or amenable to remote work. some aren't. some employees abuse that "privilege". many employees just need face-to-face interactions to be productive and integrated into a team, even if they also like working from home.
it could also cause a little friction if things happen like bob from FANG is still making CA $$$$ (or even $$$$ - 30%) and has moved to another state while jane from FANG who worked in that same state but was only making $$. now they live in the same city and both work remote. it's just a whole new continent of unexplored human resource problems - might just not be worth it.
some companies are liberal and want to push the envelope of new things and ways of doing things to maybe get an edge. some companies are conservative and were working with on site employees just fine thank you before this.
i don't really think it's a conspiracy of evil middle-manager toadies trying to cling on to their way of life - they aren't in charge.
For a lot of companies, there were no savings on floor space. They were stuck with a ton of huge leases and weren't getting any value out of them. Even if these companies are okay with remote workers, they need to push the non-remote workers back to the office to get what they're paying for.
The only thing that makes sense is that something is going worse with everyone remote. Something important enough to make an unpopular decision to fix.
To be fair, you and I don't have the metrics of these large companies. Plus, there are plenty of yet-to-be-seen consequences of remote-work. My team has recently hired a few new people, and so far their onboarding has been noticeably rougher. There's significantly less passive knowledge sharing, and Slack has not proven itself to be a good replacement of wheeling your chair to your neighbor's desk.
> it makes no sense to make everyone come back against their wishes. At best it’s making a decision that pisses off your employee base and has no upside.
Anecdotally speaking, almost every single coworker of mine is dying to go back to at least partial in-office. Personally, I love being able to work half the hours and avoid wasting a couple hour each day commuting, but I don't think I'm representative of the majority.
That's a decent reason, if that is true for folks at your company.
Where I work offices have been back open for months but they're ghost towns.
My only point is that we can't assume that CFO offices are pushing for something unpopular just because there happens to be a lease with a few years left. Note, this would also imply that once that lease is up they would not renew and send everyone home again...which I think we can all agree is not on anyone's roadmap.
bottom line - follow the money. it wasn't thought (correctly or not) a good value proposition.
I am not trying to dis people who work at home. I am also making no judgments about how well they work at home. I say this as a person who has worked for himself for many many years and prefers to do so. Just letting you try on a different perspective.
The people who want to return to the prior status quo are under the illusion that Covid caused the change, and things will revert back afterward.
There is a vicious spiral about to take place in our largest urban cores. The business value associated with those specific locations has taken a permanent hit. Thus, rents will be harder to justify, but the way commercial real estate loans are written prevent lowering the rent. Thus a larger and larger cost DISadvantage will emerge, forcing all but the most location dependent of entities to migrate away from those punitive rents.
Our largest cities will implode, fiscally, as a result. Corrective action could be taken, but would require the Oligarchs give consent to actions against their self interests. Thus, it is essentially inevitable.
Are you talking about the USA?
San Francisco is an outlier - there was a Bloomberg piece about it just a few days ago - their "recovery" from pre-pandemic office utilization is worst among large cities.
So remove San Francisco from the list and look at the rest of the large cities. Residential population in the "downtown" have been growing for decades, "class c" office space has been torn down or converted and companies move to new "class a" office towers, etc. Office vacancies are going to accelerate this trend and open up opportunities for more affordable urban living - especially in converted buildings. Beautiful lobbies, 12 foot ceilings, massive windows, fiber internet already present, etc. The large cities that survive the next 3-4 years are going to be blossoming.
I would like it to be true, that gives me hope.
Or it could be because many people prefer to use teams over slack and teams just isn't suited to long term discussions.
It's just awful now. I really hope people going back to the office changes this but maybe this is the new norm.
... and before all this we relied heavily on slack and didn't have these problems.
A company that leases space might have an expensive multi-year lease. If the office sits unoccupied, that looks like an inefficiency.
These are both examples of reactive thinking.
A lot of companies didn't, and never wanted to, and have been trying to count down the days until they can attend a meeting without their toddler screaming in the background.
Remote work _cultures_ are harder to create, and if you're a low performing company, even two years wasn't enough time to change.
Also, mentoring new hires absolutely sucks when you're working remote.