I’m so proud of these workers uniting and fighting back on RTO mandates. It has been proven that knowledge workers can work productively and efficiently without being required to be in the office a set number of days.
I'm a big proponent of "I don't care where you work as long as your work gets done" and have been since before covid, but I haven't come across anything that actually proves that, so... source?
If there's a good study out there that shows that that is true, I'd love to see it so I can use it as evidence, but so far every study I've seen that claims this tends to either have some very narrow definition of productivity (like number of emails sent) or fails to take overall impact on the organization into account (more work completed, but less coordination between teams may not be a net positive).
I say this as a remote worker who wouldn’t want to RTO—because I feel like I am more productive at work from home. However, I wouldn’t bet the farm on that if there was a reliable way to measure it.
However there may be less tangible benefits, even if overall productivity is a wash, to having the WFH times. 1) Is the obvious work/life balance. Everything that comes with the convenience of not having to commute, freedom to intersperse everyday household chores during the workday even when it means extending working hours a little later, etc. 2) Is that when I'm WFH I seem to be a little less concerned with the immediate work issues and more likely to drift off into peripheral & speculative projects, things that may yield less results in the short term but might (too soon to really say) yield more in the long term.
Overall I think my general output is about the same, but I'm more content, and perhaps (though not definitively) doing things that will be more productive in the long term.
But there are countless different jobs and responsibilities and personalities that intersect in a way that doesn't lend itself to a single one size fits all rule. But unfortunately, "One rule for all" tends to be the top down approach in most work environments.
I can be much more productive at home when it is about my individual contribution (me coding to deliver something unambiguous), but xxx individuals doing this does not necessarily align into a great product: that does not scale.
It's really unfortunate that it seems so many people are in the "you can pry remote work from my cold dead hands" camp that it's hard to even have a conversation that doesn't devolve into "I feel more productive remote, so you shouldn't care where I work".
I’m pragmatic. I’d rather have a job than look for one. So if my company decides to RTO, I am going to RTO.
It’s simply not the same thing as safe working conditions, ADA accommodations, etc… it’s a preference…and one mostly born out of the pandemic.
However, last week we had a happy hour to all meet in person, and I had a 20 minute conversation with someone about a work topic, and it was amazing how much productive information we were able to share with each other in such a short time. It was just easier to work through things in person than on slack or zoom.
I have absolutely no problem shooting the shit over text, voice, or video chat, and since I went mostly-remote, I have had a number of highly productive conversations over Zoom that looked a lot like a typical casual interaction resulting in good brainstorming. In fact, some of those times, it was even easier to communicate what we needed because one or another of us could share our screens (which is fine in person when you happen to be at someone's desk, or carrying your laptop with you, but if you just run into each other at the water cooler, it often requires a "hey, I'll send you that thing when I get back to my desk and we can continue this over email" or whatever).
I think the biggest thing that far too many RTO proponents fail to understand is that different people work differently, have different experiences, and need different environments to be most effective. This has been hidden to a large extent by the fact that (nearly) everyone has been required to work in an office, but now that we've all experienced something different, many of us have seen firsthand that we can do just as well or even so much better if we're not forced into a particular box.
The other problem is that people advocating WFH over RTO tend to focus on the individual benefit to them rather than the holistic benefit to the organization.
And frankly, there's been way too much prioritization of "benefit to the organization" across all sectors these past few decades, very much at the expense of the individuals who do the actual work.
The really dumb thing is there's also a lot of evidence that doing things that make individuals happier, healthier, and more comfortable is a net benefit to the organization. This leaves the logical conclusion, given the fact that we still do all these things that hurt regular people, being either that a) the people making the decisions actively want to hurt us, or b) they are doing these things to benefit themselves over the organization (in short-term profit, in feelings of control, in feelings of superiority over others, etc).
That may be a logical conclusion given the perspective of a certain set of knowledge workers but how about the employees who are pissed that their roles don’t get that WFH option? Does their unhappiness get a voice with the organization? As an organization how do you reconcile that disparity? Just belaying their fairness concerns with a “learn to code” kind of answer seems a bit more evil than just resetting knowledge workers back to 2019 work environments in my opinion.
So it’s not always a decision to actively hurt, it’s possible that the decision is one of a more holistic fairness for the organization’s employees…which benefits everyone to a degree including the organization.
The idea that no one should be allowed to work from home because some people can't has nothing to do with "fairness". It's the same mentality that says "you kids should have to suffer the same things I did when I was your age", despite the fact that conditions have changed.
I am genuinely sympathetic to people who work jobs that cannot be made remote, but want to work from home. I hope that they will be able to find a way to achieve that desire. But no one gains anything when they force other people to stop working from home just to prevent a "disparity" like that.
There have always been, and will always be, differences in the conditions that different jobs require. As some others have commented, some people have to work shifts; some people have to work outside in bad weather—yet we don't see a clamoring to make everyone work shifts, outside, in bad weather. This is just a very unusual time when some of those differences are changing in a very visible and very widespread way.
No, not exactly. RTO efforts now are simply taking things back to the pre-pandemic normal. The pandemic was the excuse to go remote, if it’s no longer the excuse and if you can’t argue the benefits from a position of strength successfully to your organization…it comes off as a selfish benefit only available to a select few.
Here's one anecdata: I have never in any job coordinated as much with my team mates and other teams as I have in the past ~3 years of working remotely.
The trick wasn't that we're remote or on-site, what increased our level of coordination was how we work. As a team instead of as a random grouping of individuals.
A 10min chat with a colleague remotely feels like a thing. A 20min chat in the office feels like “yeah of course I was coding this whole time”.
I think this effect is also why people like async meetings via documents. They don’t realize it’s still a meeting and is taking waaaay more of their time than just sitting down synchronously for 10min to hash things out. They’d rather do it in 10x 2min bursts between other things.
Calling a conference room from another conference room is strictly worse than a laptop to laptop call
But the thing that tech companies are the most worried about is a long term slide in innovation and competitiveness, and the effect of WFH on that has definitely not been proven one way or the other.
If it becomes overwhelmingly obvious that AI is the more cost-effective employee, then it won’t come to that; employers will just replace their employees with AI. Office presence is completely unrelated.
- If a job can be outsourced, it will be outsourced.
- If a job can be eliminated, it will be eliminated.
- If a job can be replaced by AI, it will be replaced by AI.