The Return to the Office Has Stalled
wsj.com
wsj.com
The office as it was once known is dead. So many in the commercial real estate space in denial about this. Local governments need to create large incentive packages for residential conversions to avoid downtown ghost towns.
The plus side is that having downtown be majority residential will make city living more entertaining/economical.
We're now supposed to hotdesk, using a terribly designed booking system (Planon) that people routinely ignore, sparking many conflicts. It doesn't do things that could actually be useful like to allow you to find colleagues wherever they may be or try to suggest similar roles to sit together.
The desks are now include a variety of useless types like some with bean bags or 'creativity pods' with funky colors but almost no desk space to actually work. Most of them are just a way to inflate the desk count because they can be squeezed into corners not big enough for an actual workspace.
We only have a tiny locker, sometimes so high up you can't see in or so close to the floor we have to sit on the floor to access it. Half the desks have non working screens or docks that aren't being fixed, we're now supposed to bring our own cable locks, mugs, headsets etc and no longer have floors dedicated to departments. So us IT people trying to concentrate are sitting beside sales goons loudly screaming into the phone all day.
To make matters worse, the Spanish government decided that the Aircon may not be lower than 27 degrees Celsius which in fact is so hot that it violates their own labor safety laws. It's literally a sweat shop.
All in all it's really a terrible place to be now and only the hipsters from HR actually like going there to what they call the modern workplace. I'm sure it's because they're not actually working anyway because they sit around chatting all day.
The company is saying we must return to the office to maintain the feeling with the company. Well I'm feeling something alright. We clearly are only there to make their hipster office look busy so I view the company with the same disgust as they apparently do us.
I wonder if it's the same in all companies. I'm not leaving because I have to give up a lot of security and my current boss is luckily ignoring that push to return to the office a bit.
From my perspective as an employee in the tech sector, the greatest value adds to working in person are:
- Faster onboarding for new hires + mentorship in general.
- Better meetings for discussing big plans. Stand ups / check-ins aren't what I'm talking about here, more like "let's plan out this feature" or "what is our strategy for entering this new market?".
- Going over bugs / QA / odd testing results when the person who wrote the code != the person who found the problem, and both can meet. While bug-trackers convey info, I've found that getting to just sit down and look over code can make things much quicker.
I don't yearn to go to the office for deep work, or to answer emails, but if I'm going into an office for a "good" reason, then I might as well have space to do those things instead of having to travel elsewhere. I get that it's often a cost problem to make spaces for every employee to do deep work, which is why I'm very pro-don't-do-deep-work-at-the-office-when possible. Just pay your employees enough to afford a space where they can get that deep work done on days where they aren't being pulled into that meeting.
On the company side, either more employees can be hired while keeping the same office space or a smaller, less expensive space can be rented. With employee commutes being less of a factor, offices can be located closer to customers or in less expensive areas depending on the business needs. Likewise the geographic area from which employees can be hired significantly increases (even if not fully remote, a several hour drive or even a flight might be acceptable if they're only coming into the office on special occasions). You even get ethically dubious perks like getting people to work when they otherwise would have called out of the office, and offloading some of the costs of operating an office onto your employees.
It takes effort and capital to set up all the infrastructure necessary for remote work, it might take a while to realize the full benefits of remote work (moving to a lower cost location is not-trivial), and of course some jobs simply can't be done remotely. But once you already have gone remote, there's no logical business case for returning to the office. You are spending more money to be in an objectively worse position, possibly literally. Companies that choose to engage in this irrational behavior will lose employees and market share to competitors who better take advantage of the opportunity.
The work day is 9 hours and 55 minutes on average for full time employees. Not to mention the preparation time you need for getting ready to commute. As most of us know, at least those who have been fortunate to work remotely, you don't have to devote huge blocks of time before work on work.
Great insight.