> with little evidence that’s a better way to work.
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.
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 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.
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.