Except almost all white-collar offices (in the US at least) went remote during the first 2-3 years of COVID. Most did so successfully. Yet, many now want to return to traditional office work with little evidence that’s a better way to work.
There’s a lot of nuance being glossed over here and I don’t think this is clear cut.
Successfully for who? All stakeholders? Every department? Customers and suppliers too?
Does this success translate to a non-pandemic environment with lower expectations by everyone given the circumstances?
I've heard similar stories from friends and family in similar workplaces.
While I realize that's all anecdotal, I haven't heard any stories countering this narrative.
All that said, I like being in the office a few days/week for all the reasons mentioned. But, my team is all remote (hired that way, mostly pre-COVID), so even when I'm at the office, I'm only chatting with peers on other teams, not the people I'm doing project work with.
It's hardly all roses.
Reducing people's different experiences to a homogeneous grey mush is overly reductive.
More progressive corps embraced online socializing earlier, and honestly that's all I need. To be sure something is lost socially by not being in person, but the workplace is not social-drinks club, or if it is that's where your productivity went.
You still build connections with people you only meet online, older folk might have more trouble with that, which makes sense why they might struggle to manage if they heavily depend on "making friends" to do their job.
Training and onboarding can be issues, but barring a straight up lack of talent generally focused efforts are probably better than just assuming the new employee will "make connections" and learn via osmosis.
And yes this might mean going to the office once in a while or to a company event etc
Not an unsurmountable problem but it's not negligible neither (as much as it is slowly growing)
I work in an organization with 10s of thousands of workers across the United States. I will never, in the best circumstances, see more than a handful of them in person, other than in-person team meetings, which have themselves become increasingly rare as the team is more geographically diverse than ever and travel budgets are slashed due to ready electronic collaboration tools. So ... what connection? I mean, I don't really care about having a personal connection with these folks anyway. I like them and enjoy having a positive professional relationship with them, but they're my coworkers and we have amazing tools to build those relationships. If some of them become friends, that's fine, but it's not anywhere close to a prerequisite for me to be successful and fulfilled at work.
My entire career I've worked successfully with people I never met who live on the other side of the planet. The whole discussion about the necessity of in-person collaboration over the last 3 years has struck me as one of the weirdest things I've ever seen. I haven't had a conference call in 3 years. I cannot emphasize how revolutionary and positive that change is. I see my coworkers' faces more now than I ever did in the past thanks to Zoom and Teams. It's nothing short of miraculous how much better things are now.
In return for giving up a pointless commute to use a different Internet connection and for spending less time pandering to bosses who want to promote buddies who look like them instead of competent leaders, I can spend more time with people and things I actually care about and more time doing work I love. Every single bit of this new arrangement is roses.
Speaking personally, everyone I’ve spoken to on the matter (myself included) have zero desire to return to a traditional office.
The working environment which is conducive to a successful developer vs a successful admin are, most likely (in my experience), two completely different environments.
This is obviously hyperbole for... living a life?
Hiring, the same way RO outfits can access unique talent, and information transfer, particularly to newer team members. Also, in industries where over-documentation is an unnecessary liability.
I enjoy going to an office, having a change of scenery, interacting with people (both close friends and casual acquaintances), brainstorming ideas with a small group around a whiteboard, getting lunch with colleagues, etc, etc...
Sure, the "writing code" part of the job is easier when there are fewer distractions. And a crowded open office can be an annoying source of distractions.
And I definitely enjoy having lunch more often with my family, or hanging out with the dogs, or sitting out on my deck under the trees while I read my morning email.
But working in an office was nice too, and I miss it.
You are assuming that decision makers are dumb. I disagree with that. My null hypothesis is that they are smart, competent people and are doing the best decision according to data they are seeing.
Speaking as a senior manager at a smallish software company (300 people), absolutely, decision makers are in my experience smart and competent.
But what they don't do is necessarily make decisions based on data.
I don't believe for a second that most RTO debates are based on meaningful measurement. As with a lot of corporate decisions, I suspect it's a lot of HIPPOs, fingers in the air, and herding behavior.
The pandemic hit, we transitioned to remote work, I was happy. Everyone quickly adapted and learned how to efficiently work from home. About two years later, two things happened:
1. Surveys and postmortems showed that remote work lead to increased employee satisfaction and productivity at our company.
2. Company leadership started talking about a mandated return to office.
People of course challenged this decision, pointing to the data, and no real explanation was given. Those who wanted to returned to office, but the mandated return was indefinitely postponed and eventually silently dropped as the manager primarily pushing for a return left the company.
That's precisely the problem. The decision makers suffer from extreme confirmation bias and Dunning-Kruger effect. So what happens is they run surveys, polls etc which are loaded and indicate that employees would 'love' to return to the office. They mandate RTO and are then surprised when people leave en masse because the data they've collected is wrong.
That's only a single aspect, whilst it's also a very wide aspect.
They may not be dumb, they may be "politically smart" and their KPIs are easiest to meet when their subordinates are in the office.
They may not be dumb, but they feel less powerful (and therefore that their position as decision maker is more vulnerable) when their workforce is outside of whipping distance.
They may not be dumb, but their idea of "normal" is not what covid hath wrought, and therefore a return to the office is a return to "normal", and thus a heaving sigh of relief can be had that we're now past that extended weirdness.
They may not be dumb, but they may not be able to understand that people are motivated differently from themselves and from each other. "I work better in the office, therefore y'all do too". (admittedly there's a bit of dumbness in that one, however that's far from saying it's unrealistic or rare).
> according to data they are seeing
Anecdotal warning: Outside of the "best of the best" kinda places, my experience is that most decision makers work on 'feel' and not data - whether data is available or not.
Thing is, that normally works out, but large shifts like the "new normal" during the pandemic can take a while for the gut to pick up, and so the default is to get back to the known-good state...
I agree. They are seeing the data that their skills of busy-bodies bouncing between meetings and impromptu conversations at other employees desks don't translate well to remote work and they understand that their nice 3mil$ house in the valley will cost much less in couple of years if everyone embraces full remote, so they are doing their best to preserve the status quo.
Tech companies are not representative.