Why Executives Like the Office (2021)
economist.com
economist.com
My managers at work (I'm a software engineer) tend to not have a dedicated office. They have kids running around being noisy and nosy. They STILL dress up wearing nice clothes. And I swear some of them talk about their gorgeous cars for the sake of talking about their cars, especially now nobody sees them drive or park those cars anymore.
They are also very verbose in any sort of meeting and dislike it when people turn off their cameras. I blame their extroverted social needs for this. They got to become a manager because of that social skill and need, and they are working with software engineers who are more toward the introverted side of the spectrum.
I don't want to wake up early, drive my car in traffic jams, find a parking spot, see that someone stole my favourite (but still bad) office chair, sit in an open office full of noisy people, working on shared & dirty keyboards, looking at small budget screens, on desks that can't be adjusted.
At home I have a dedicated office with a sofa. Height-adjustable desk. Herman Miller Aeron chair all to myself. Mechanical keyboard (that doesn't drive other people nuts with its sound) and expensive mouse. Two 27" 1440p 144Hz screens on desk mounted arms. Both of my cats to keep me company. My own toilet all to myself. A fully stocked kitchen. A place to work out. A very nice 55" OLED screen. My coffee machine is all mine (Gaggia Babila) with freshly roasted beans delivered every week. And my office has a view over a park and a large body of water.
Best of all: no office small talk. No interruptions at my desk. And if I realise, during a meeting, that I could just be a fly on the wall and continue working instead? Then I do exactly that, whereas in an office situation I couldn't do that.
Not to mention, My loud, clickity-clackity mechanical keyboard (which isn't allowed to leave my office on punishment of death from my wife - I have the silent one for the living room gaming rig).
I can run a couple of rigs at the same time, and work when the meeting I'm in doesn't particularly pertain to me, even though I lead a small team - which means I'm invited to meetings, but only have to listen to a quarter of what gets said and still have to get work done.
My team generally had their heads in the screen all day, anyway. We're fairly socially awkward and loud talkers/laughers, which means we annoy everyone when we don't communicate via Slack... which is almost every team I've worked on (I'm the worst offender, yes).
I understand remote doesn't work great for every team, but for A LOT of software teams... and we work with an accounting and ops team, it works great for all of us =/
It's not just cleanlines: I've also encountered issues like the hand-soap or toilet paper having run out and not been replaced, toilets not working due to plumbing issues (in one office they installed a fancy new rainwater recycling system that didn't initially work, so toilets wouldn't flush), a toilet on the top floor of a building where the flush was very weak and the cistern would take minutes to slowly refill before you could flush a second time, poorly designed sinks that look pretty but splash water everywhere when you turn on the tap, or a building only having a single cubicle so that I'd need to walk to another building if it was in use.
These seem minor, but are irritating nonetheless.
> My coffee machine is all mine (Gaggia Babila)
I much preferred when people were clearly in or out of a meeting (myself included).
If it were in person I'd still have to be there, except I'd only really be able to check email or maybe take half-assed notes rather than actually get work done.
A common retort might be that "this is the reality of the world." And this may be true, but I shouldn't just acquiesce and accept the reality of the world when I actually have some options.
i mean seriously, i would like to be 100% flex and choose when i go in and not (i virtually do that already) but i know what i signed up for, i enjoy going in to the office, and the mix is good enough for me because i care about my work deeply.
techies don't realise just how abnormal their situation is, and they want society to do for them what it should do for every other person, so i don't really care much for the constant arguments about wfh. just go find a place that lets you do it and then maybe fight for unskilled labour to also have 55" OLED TVs, a fancy coffee machine and the ability to work from home or choose their own hours.
100% flexibility is simply unsustainable: a company can't keep offices for some only or people keep moving gears from home to office and vice versa or having double gears in both location.
A call center operator can work from home and perhaps instead of a cubicle in a city can afford a larger home in the countryside having a better life WFH, banking, assurances, various tertiary sector jobs can be done from remote, not just techies, skilled and rich.
What... where do you work? Budget screens? Bad office chairs? We're quite spoiled in the US with big tech. Everyone gets giant monitors and Herman Miller chairs sprinkled with freedom.
In the rare case you do find a good setup you tend to also see people hijacking your stuff when they get to the office before you do.
I read somewhere that Uber CEO mentioned job as a "privilege" for you. How dare you even question anything at all let alone how you spend majority of your day?
/s
There's a magical period between Friday at 3pm to late night Sunday where no distractions means I can actually coherently focus for hours at a time. Also it's typically enough time to get to a MVP if I need to prove a point. Just sucks that this magical productivity time also happens to be "the weekend" =(
- You lose all asynchronous aspects to work.
- Screensharing is basically one screen at a time and usually "zoomed in", not representing your actual screen. You can't sit side by side and compare laptops. You lose a lot of those subtleties about how you physically do the work.
- Open audio is, I wager, very atypical. For me, it's almost a faux pas.
- This can add up to a lot of lost time for senior devs, so it's going to be avoided. Meaning you'll need to push uphill to make it happen.
I don't believe all the people who say they are super productive at home because being productive is being a good team member. And remote people aren't good team members. They are absent and aloof and the barrier to interacting with them is higher.
People hate the commute. That's fine. I wish everyone would stop lying that WFH is a pareto improvement. It's not.
In 2020, we had a record year in both revenue and earnings. That's the bottom line. I won't mention all the KPIs that our IT staff hit since KPIs are all bullshit, but we exceed the previous year by a significant margin. During this year, my team grew by 20%, and hasn't had any turnover.
In 2021, we had yet another record year in both revenue and earnings. Specifically, earnings were up almost 15%, and we're a financial services business, so we didn't get a boom from commodities etc. As with the previous year, we exceed the goals for our KPIs by a substantial margin.
So now in 2022, we're hybrid, though most of my team prefers to work from home. And we're still doing exceedingly well as far as we can be measured, both as a team and a company.
So that's hard data. The company, despite being 100% remote in 2020/2021, has never been more profitable. Ever.
Maybe your team is full of losers who are absent, aloof, and difficult to interact with. Or perhaps it's something else...
Today I see working from home as a tool with a spectrum of useful applications but I really haven’t found a replacement tool to being next to people in the same space.
Although, I am optimistic about these more casual video chat tools that enable spontaneous conversations. However, I haven’t used one in a serious capacity yet.
Also, it's fair that it makes the company culture fragmented and nearly impossible to move together as a team for folks without that experience. Silos are real.
But, in my experience, the main reason is that senior leaders cannot let go of the 'it's work time you should be working' mindset, and understand that some people work best in the morning, some at night, and some in small bursts with breaks between.
I have learned that a VAST majority of companies simply suck at setting goals and measuring employee productivity.
Being seen in meeting rooms filled with people, talking to them, and pointing to things on a powerpoint presentation can give other more senior managers (who determine their position and compensation) the aura that they are hard at work and making things happen.
This of course is not very strong reasoning.
Yes, and looping it back into a point in the article: the status that these demonstrations are meant to confer (consciously or not).
> 75% wanted to be in the office three days a week or more; only 34% of non-executives felt the same way.
They go on then to talk generally about people might need to be in the office. This is missing something really obvious though - Executives think executives need to be in the office. Not everyone. It makes sense that Executives - people whose role is primarily about co-ordinating the organisation obviously are better off being in the office because the office is good for all the things you need to do as an executive. It is great for high bandwidth communication. Meanwhile, individual contributors work is primarily solitary and so enjoy far more benefits from working at home in a more controlled, isolated environment.
Executives think they themselves should be in the office 3 days a week. That doesn't necessarily mean that executives think everyone else should be in the office 3 days a week.
Jokes on them I used to procrastinate a lot more in the office
But, as with most things, there's tradeoffs, and the author correctly points out a few of them:
> These concerns have substance. Virtual work risks entrenching silos: people are more likely to spend time with colleagues they already know. Corporate culture can be easier to absorb in three dimensions. Deep relationships are harder to form with a laggy internet connection.
Another issue I'd add to this list is that promotions partially hinge on "chummyness" with decision makers. Remote work makes this challenging, and consequently, it might explain why folks are eager to get lucrative pay-rises and promotions by jumping ship to different companies. (Maybe this has always been the case, but it seems to have been exacerbated).
But in a hypothetical where, all things held equal, it's you verses someone else up for promotion, and they're friendlier with the decision-maker, they'll be the one receiving it.
Most of us on this site are professionals, who don't need mission statements, corporate culture etc. to do our jobs. We need effective guidance and management, we don't need a kumbaya culture to make us spend all our waking moments following Keir's precepts.
It’s to the point that I’m thinking of leaving my fully remote company to find an in person office. Something I never thought I’d say.
The only way to cover this deficit is to have bums on seats who will come and help at a moments notice.
Your experience may differ.
ps. having stock/options doesn't help either, it's about control and agency and less so about ownership and profit
Some people do take advantage of WFH and work less. Some people who cannot WFH feel it is unfair. It's a complex issue and both sides should work together to come to a fair solution for everyone. Bickering about it and not compromising is unproductive.
> A hybrid solution is probably best
IMVHO definitively not because of some practical aspects: a company needs offices to host workers, and using them less they are paid and less used, also people need gears, witch means or moving stuff around or have two set of anything. Surely, offices can be rent, can be smaller etc but I see exactly no reason to even try hybrid setup. It's like at war having two generals with opposite ideas and decide to put themselves in the middle, witch means something that does not work in BOTH cases... Not counting the fact that for hybrid setups remote workers still need to be at a reasonable distance to reach the office as needed cutting some economic and life options for many...
> Some people do take advantage of WFH and work less. Some people who cannot WFH feel it is unfair.
Normally we should be paid for the value we gives to the company, not for how hard we work... If with much less effort I do more there is nothing wrong from the company POV, at maximum I might feel overqualified or being happy with the load. The complexity lay IMVHO in the fact that there is very little experience in WFH on scale, witch scare many, there is incertitude for the future so many do not want to invest in something new until the society stabilize etc unfortunately like for ANY "new" thing we can't have "young and experienced workers". We can progress taking risks and eventually profiting from results or remain as we are giving up progress, research, development. Both can work a bit, until something break things again. Since we have only one life and no undo for it I prefer exploring instead of remaining locked. With care, surely, taking time to live and breath but still evolving.
The cost in particular is just a sunk cost fallacy. You're paying for the office regardless, so because of that you're going to force people to pay out of pocket for gas and other incidentals just so they can sit there and (at least for most software engineers) be less productive? And you've also just increased your own costs because you probably could have left the lights and HVAC off? Nonsense.
Ideally it should not come down to a zero sum contest, but that's often how these things happen.
You sit at home and work at Uber for X but everyone's at home all day so there's no need for Uber because no-one moves.
It's like people here have fully internalized "there must be work" but not really thought about what the point of even doing it is.
Post-2020 life has been a neverending comedy show of these sort of quotes from people who "like" sitting in front of a screen so that tomorrow they can continue sitting in front of a screen.
If the main point was to do things outside, I'd spend most days doing what I do (outside) on the weekend. I suspect for most people it has more to do with getting a paycheck.
Another simple explanation:
For an individual dev, your job might be to, say, take a new feature and then work for hours or days on coding, debugging, documenting, etc. that feature. How that maps to WFH is pretty obvious (just code at home instead of work!) Getting up to talk to another employee is maybe a few times a day thing that just becomes a quick ping on Slack. Likewise, if you have a meeting that day, do it on Zoom.
Because you see how you can do your job, you are comfortable with WFH.
For a manager, your job is to get the people and teams you manage to work together to accomplish something, and perhaps make a few key decisions now and then. My contention is that, while I have no doubt that there are methods of succeeding at as a manager in a WFH system, it's simply a much bigger change from how managers are used to working.
For example, walking around the office to see if anyone catches your eye and 'grabs you for a quick question' is not straight forward (pinging dozens of people to say 'hey, anything up' throughout the day is just bothersome.) Likewise, the simple act of observing team dynamics becomes hard because lots of communication is happening in un-observable private communication channels.
It maybe that the WFH model really is better for everyone, but I think managers are simply in for a bigger change to how they work and it's therefore simple to understand why they are more hesitant.
Of course, as a scientist my social landscape and work environment are really different from most Economist readers.
Extroverts tend to get promoted to management. They feed off the presence and interaction of others. But, more importantly, they want to show up and show off. They want to wear nice clothes in the office, not pajamas at home. They want their accomplishments broadcasted around the office, and that's how they get noticed / promoted. There is a lot of research that shows people who are extroverted get paid more.
So of course, extroverted managers are going to push for return-to-office, while their introverted subordinates prefer to work from home and at peace, especially when social interaction can induce anxiety (it does for me).
If you're a manager, figure out how to make both personality types happy, not what makes you happy.
Remote work improves the results of good managers, and makes bad managers' results worse.
Apparently because good managers manage for results, and bad managers manage only for indicia of sork, such as butts in seats, screen time, ability to walk around and interrupt to micromanage...
If a company at this point, with solid results for as-good-as or better results far lower costs (e.g., reduced office costs), and becoming more competitive (e.g., ability to hire workforce from entire continents and not just 50km from your offices), fails to be moving to substantial if not complete remote work, this is a negative sign, and you can safely avoid them if at all possible.
This goes for applying for jobs as well as investment.
Other execs I work with do too. Can only think of 2 in the past 10 years I've worked with that had all of the tropes that these articles tend to parade.
Power trips and lack of empathy sum up (senior) management far too often. The head shed exists to run the company. Other managers exist as conduits or team facilitators. If the grunts don’t grunt contentedly, there’s no company.
Especially when talking about data and Excel.
This is incredibly true for in-person work too.