80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans

The decades of evidence that open office plans are utter shit for productivity already proved that the emperor wears no clothes and they have no idea what makes for better productivity.

My guess is that CEOs and VCs have some obscure reason to force people back into the office. Perhaps related to real estate, especially considering how hard to sell it is and how much higher the interest rates are. Middle management will typically eat up whatever narrative C-level feeds them.

My money would be on that being half right. They have no way to really measure productivity, but they were very afraid that productivity would drop to zero—and that is something they would be able to see.

Before COVID I don’t know how many times discussions around WFH basically stopped at “we can’t know that people aren’t just watching TV all day”. I think in a lot of places that was a genuine fear—nobody will be working.

So seeing productivity not go near enough to zero to be noticeable was… really good productivity compared to some people’s initial expectations.

Then what happened was a lot of the pending and backlog of projects and busyness got moved over to a completed status. But the lack of productivity at the executive levels meant that the project funnel wasn’t keeping up. So the company was at risk of having a ton of people with not enough to do.

This is purely my personal anthropological perspective of the situation having been an active participant working closely with executives making these decisions the past few years as well as talking with colleagues that do the same. I’m aware it’s probably completely BS.

Whatever management’s current whim is represents not only a reasonable but the only effective way to serve shareholder interests, amd to do anything differently would be a irresponsible and anyone disagreeing is objectively working against the interest of the firm, and any prior contrary statements about what is best for the firm are nonoperational and any reference to them is a bad faith distraction.

Oceania, Inc., has always been at war with EastAsia, LLC.

In our case, we do have good, long-standing metrics: we measure how happy our customers say they are with our service. Since the whole point is to have happy, repeat customers and they have no reason to lie about being happy, we can trust this. That went up significantly and sustained itself during the pandemic.

While my employer did initially want to bring people back to the office, they relented after the push back and have been relatively soft and flexible about this, actually opening up a dialog to talk to everyone about what they need and want.

It doesn't hurt that they're looking at some significant cost savings by significantly downsizing our office footprint.

This isn't how most engineers write software at the ground level though. Engineers need quiet concentration, free from distraction. Yes, there are hard problems that need collaboration to solve, but that type of interaction can be scheduled when needed. Far from needing to "bounce ideas" off other engineers, most senior engineers are pretty self-sufficient.

There is a different issue at play with junior engineers. They need supervision and that's hard to do unless your on a zoom call with them all day long. This isn't a new problem - it's simply a problem exposed by being remote. When we were in the office, all these junior engineers, were pulling productivity away from your senior engineers. Moving everything back to the office didn't increase productivity, it's actually decreasing it. Commute + sidebar conversations + mentoring junior engineers = less productivity out of your senior engineering staff.

There's definitely a "managers are from mars and engineers are from venus" sort of vibe happening here. Managers need that interaction and collaboration in order to provide oversight and provide direction. Senior engineers need a place to concentrate - and typically that isn't in the office where we have noisy open floor plans.

Governments are not ready for the majority of people having the freedom to work anywhere.

The whole foundation of our local and state governments control is based on manageable demographics, we are red or blue, we embrace the old or the new ways, etc., they are not ready for a sudden change in the mix, every local government had worked really hard to keep the status quo.

Changing to work-at-office increases productivity.

.

Maybe the Hawthorne Effect actually is real?

- real estate agencies push for return to office(as they own a lot of office space that's now empty)

- Turns out.. you don't need so many middle managers - without their direct oversight everything just kept working fine. So now you have internal vested interest in return to office for people in power.

The alpha is that pedantic and over-analytical guys dismiss crystal energy at the expense of their reproductive opportunities, and the way around it is literally just not doing that.

One thing I quickly noticed is that the purpose of all crystals are expected to be the same.

“It absorbs energy and gives out good energy”

So I same the same thing everytime.

Employers must be encountering something similar from some form of stakeholder, such as the board for an analogous self preservation or reproductive opportunity, so the answer is always “increase productivity” every time.

Which employer would ever say: "ah man it's all fucked up. Our productivity is completely gone. We're not getting anything done"

Imagine what that would do the stock prices

Consult complete, that will be $10000

It's about the desire to control thier investments. They want their investments to work out, so they try to force people back into the office.

Conflict of interest.

This contrasts with say, a subsistance farmer who produces food for their family and lives in a small community where every product of their labor has a known and appreciable impact. In that case, the equivalent goal of "changing the world" is "helping the community", which is much more attainable.

That's a reason why the quality of most Japanese products is superlative. Another nation that is passionate about their stuff are Italians, but they value good looks and good food above all. The US values profits and growth and China values high output volumes.

If one works in a Fortune 500 company they're probably creating value for shareholders instead of changing the world. What they are primarily changing is the income gap, by making the rich richer.

You bring up Japan yet they're known for being excessively and pointlessly overworked to the point of depression and suicide. It is a culture that rewards obedience and prostration to your job above everything else. So many were peer pressured into finding meaning in their work to such an excessive extent, and of course didn't become happy because its a system that optimizes for cohesion and stability, not happiness and meaning.

There is also an entire generation that has been trained to pretend what they happen to do for a living is exactly what they are passionate about in life. To say otherwise with the slightest doubt would be to feel like the biggest failure.

that's the crux of a lot of people here. You are comparing coworkers to friend and some people don't care about friendhips at work. They just want to do their work, stay in good graces, and get back to their leisure ASAP. It's not their job to care about overall company productivity, so as long as they feel more productive it's a win. Any inefficies is irrelevant because it means the ball is in their court and they still get more time for said leisure.

As of now, the WFH initiative is the cloesest we got to a wide scale 32 hour work week that many desire.

It's all situational. I agree with you that in-person collaboration is beneficial, but bringing people to the office doesn't necessarily do that without restructuring teams that were built on a distributed basis, which can be super disruptive and lose a lot of organizational context.

Do you continue doing what it takes to be close with those friends? Do you talk every other day, for instance, like you do with your teammates? Do you share your experiences, think together, have plans and commitments?

Geographical proximity is not the most important contributor to closeness. I feel closer to random strangers on the Internet than how much I feel close to my neighbors.

I cant stand it when people put out these blanket statements in the form of objective facts. If I'm in a group team huddle with our cameras on - I'm able to pick up on body language, I can see their faces and we can all exchange ideas at the same time. As far as somebody talking over somebody else you can split into multiple groups if it's too big, you would have the same issue in proximity.

You seem to be under the impression that social interactions can only happen if we're all breathing the same air. The only thing that being on site would add is potential tactility. Do you find yourself hugging and touching your coworkers a lot?

If only you believe you have this "relationship" at work that's even remotely close to things being equal. For some, perhaps, but on average?

- Do you get to decide what to do or your boss? Even if you know better ways of doing things or see issues you might not have the politics to pull it off. Does this happen in a relationship? If so, it's pretty poor.

- Can you "unfriend" a co-worker and choose not to work with them? Do you choose your team? You can certainly quit your relationship or even friendship. In a company you get assigned a team. You can't pick and choose.

> Human beings are social creatures - yes, even we introverts need interaction.

And you will get it? You assume your co-workers are your friends. Friendship and relationships common together on common things they like. Co-workers come together to work and may not actually have anything in common. So you prefer being forced together and fake friends than not have any? It can be worse. Being professional is all it is.

> We have to acknowledge the real tradeoffs - the loss of the "team"

That's not a WFH issue. Your whole argument sits on that the only way to build relationships is in-person, even by quoting how long-distance relationships fail. Well do you hug and kiss your "team"? If not, then maybe it's fine. And it fails because there aren't ways to enforce the long-distance relationship to spend time together. Are you forced to spend time together with your co-workers? Yes.

Some folks focus on deep work, and benefit from working remote - others focus on collaboration. There are cons of remote work, there are also cons of in-office work. Remote workers who work best with deep stretches of focus are unlikely to be as productive in office. Collaborative workers who focus on long brainstorming meetings etc. are unlikely to be productive remote where people can just go on mute.

There have to be meaningful downsides that CEOs and the like believe is outweighing all that.

I was wondering if there is an online whiteboard where every participant can work concurrently. I think excalidraw has a shared feature but I haven't tried it with > 2 people.

1. They care more about control than doing the right thing.

2. They don't get satisfaction from improvements that don't come directly from their doing

Very stringent quotas, asinine team building activities, and of course, mandatory in-office policies construct a narrative for the company that no good thing that happens is from anywhere but the top-down. They can look at improvements in the bottom line and concoct a much more salient narrative that they were responsible for it; that their employees were nannied and hand-held to success. It's much more satisfying for an egomaniac to reckon with this conclusion than the still gratifying albeit less viscerally satisfying one that granting workers respect and independence will merit the best outcomes.

I ask which project this is for and log my hour on that. At least my boss sees I'm not slacking, and if it happens a lot can take action. Perhaps the other person needs more guidance or maybe was a poor fit for that project.

But I've also heard of old co-workers at later jobs where hybrid was just flowery words and really meant "mandatory remote time and mandatory office".

Companies can probably get more out of average and below average people easily by forcing them into an office. That’s good enough for some companies to get by. And I say this as an average person who would get more done if I didn’t work remotely.

I still have 1:1s with my manager, am still accountable for my targets and organizational goals, and generally do the same thing whether I'm WFH or in office.

Office work has several advantages: 1) I like discussing in person with coworkers - sometimes coming up with fun/interesting ideas 2) office itself is more conducive to a particular type of work 3) I get some isolation from the family

But that commute...

People have always found ways to be unproductive even in the in-office era: going to the bathroom while on the clock, constantly hanging out in the break room under the guise of getting coffee, office small talk, or just old fashioned web browsing on their computers/phones. Pretending like every white collar job was at 100% efficiency in the pre-pandemic era was just pure delusion on management's part.

I work way harder unsupervised.

It's probably also naïve to believe all humans respond to supervision the same way...

What makes it even worse is the one-size-fits-all mandate, with strict enforcement, like you didn't come in to the office Monday, so you have to come on Tuesday.

Once they've been notified that they're underperforming, try to help them out. If they can't be helped, fire them with well-documented cause (their history of poor performance).

I worked at a company which had a similar approach to the one being considered , i.e. force everyone in. Every decision there was based on the lowest common denominators. This meant that the really good high performing people all quit. It's a ghost town over there these days.

Set expectations, support people with meeting them, fire them if they continue taking the piss. Don't ruin it for all of you high performers because you can't be bothered going through the process to fire someone. You'll have better overall performance, satisfaction, and retention if you work to get the slackers either performing or out.

With a little of handholding and outcome motivation management, you should be able to hack into their dopamine cycle, keep their interest and those deliverables coming.

It seems to me that if they are working few seconds every 20 minutes, there should be drop in their actual productivity. If these people have half functioning managers, they should be able to figure that out.

Dismissing people for having almost no output is dismissing for a cause.

Or the employer interprets higher than average turnover on other things, like greedy, disgruntled workers leaving for better pay, or some other completely unrelated thing to RTO policy changes.

Very true, and the reason why it's important to spell this out explicitly is because any solution that hinges on identifying and blaming a single or few orchestrators is dead on arrival.

I think there are thousands of people orchestrating this, independently.

There wasn’t before.

There is now.

Lobbyists are pushing for it. Big investment firms like Vanguard and Blackrock that have a lot to lose if the commercial real estate market collapses are pushing companies to mandate RTO policies if they want to keep getting investments. Makes sense.

Im not one for conspiracy theories, but that’s a great position for governments and big business to find themselves in!

I've personally never used Cobra, because it is in fact cheaper to buy individual plans.

So while some may have been more open to letting employees work from home, others may have just decided they would’ve used different arguments against it instead now that they know the ones that used didn’t hold up (as widely forecast).

- The people who need to stay home to take care of their children and family members.

- The companies who can't find [good] enough local talent, or can't afford them.

- The people who can't find jobs locally and cannot move, due to financial, familial, environmental, or other reasons.

- People with diverse needs who require a flexible schedule and safe space.

- People who live in dangerous places where commuting could put them at increased risk. (see: can't move because of X) (also: commuting is actively dangerous to your health; constant sitting, danger of traffic collisions, being robbed at bus stops, etc)

- Anyone who wants to live in a cheaper, less dangerous city, or doesn't want to commute a long time.

WFH can benefit everyone, but they have to learn how to work a completely different way, and most people are lazy as hell so they don't.

That said, the problem I do see is that the folks hired into a fully remote environment have a significantly lower "attachment" to the company. Working together in an office fosters a sense of belonging to the group (over time) in a way that remote work cannot. This is the thing that isn't getting attention, IMO - but maybe it doesn't matter. Maybe we were all overly attached to our jobs anyway :)

You can hop as easily to huddle as you'd do an interruption. Of course, a junior interrupting ALL the time in real life would be a terrible thing so you definitely need to strike a balance.

But I see most arguments for office is better from people who just don't know how to communicate effectively through tools and potentially are bad at cross location team collab, which happens all the time in big companies.

Actually I myself joined my current company after March 2020. I can't imagine a 5-day, in-person experience would be any more effective or productive. If anything, I was able to completely pay no attention the mandatory training of "corporate value" nonsense -- it felt great to be "in" the meeting but spend the time doing actual development or doing some household chores.

Requiring everyone to be in an office because your personal learning style involves no personal effort and requires everyone else to enable you to be effective is in fact selfish.

I have many team members who work extremely well in this kind of environment, but there will always be some who don’t. It’s both a choice and a skill to function as a part of the team, and leadership needs to cultivate that culture. I don’t see this being any different in person, though it may not be quite as visible to the folks making the return to office decisions.

The lack of structured times to communicate and collaborate is a big reason working from an office is counter-productive.

if slack is the only way remote companies communicate, they’re doing it wrong imo.

Commuting can be expensive and even potentially dangerous. Car, insurance, gas, dangerous traffic, time wasted driving at least 2x a day.

There’s also the potentially unproductive office environments: loud, annoying co-workers, constant interruptions, etc.

RTO has costs, WFH has benefits and employers who don’t recognize that should be shunned. If the reason they require you to come back is because they wisely rented office space and didn’t even consult the employees on whether the workers would return, that should tell you how much you can trust management and how much they value you as an employee.

Nothing else. Even with the above, I would still prefer a hybrid or remote positions as long as I have a choice.

Standing on a crowded train is not something I want to do every day (once a week is plenty), there is simply nothing the company can offer to make me reconsider.

My best, most productives were in offices with doors and one other space-mate and we both liked the door closed and the light off. I rebuilt Compaq 4U rackmount servers in the dark in that office. I loved it.

-

I hated Intel cubes - even though the cube was ~7' tall and the ceilings were ~13' - they still sucked. (I forgot the humble brag ;; my cube and Pee Schedule was right next to Andy Grove - and for who-knows we always ended up peeing next to eachother (never spoke)

But I never went to my cube next to his (SC5)

And we just ran the game lab... (golden gaming of my life (about to start BG3) - but yeah I have had surreal tech experiences in my life...

I've hated every open office. (fb being the worst)

--

The WAYMO campus should just be little auto-driving "cubicle pods" that roam around and find the magnettic connection to the person you want to talk to and you both agree to meet - and then on the SmartMAC (like tarmac) the little pods just route you to eachother and dock.

Think Conways Game of Conferencing - and all the little pods can form SNAKE like elements, or TETRIS Rooms - gimme a big L!

For me the main reason is I want to keep living where I live. Village near a small city in western Europe. Cheap living, lots of nature. But no big tech around. The closest "hub" with some tech corps is too far to commute daily.

There's no way I'm selling my house to go live in a shitty noisy, overpriced appartment in or near Amsterdam Paris, Berlin or whatever and spend double the current amount on groceries, dining etc. I imagine in the US this is way more the case even.

So if you insist on RTO, regardless of doors, you'll miss out on a large group of individuals who live too far away to commute.

At one time Google was discussing live-in housing on campus so that people could live there. It was a non-starter due to zoning issues but their reasoning was they could create dormitory style housing like Foxcon did and pay people less actual money for more hours of their time. At its heart it was profoundly evil but the pitch was all "they are young, single, they don't want to bother with renting and keeping house they loved their college environment and they will love it here." And through the lens of the founders, for whom the best times of their lives was living in college working through the night on cool technical problems, it no doubt seemed like heaven.

> I care about commute - time and money, especially time.

I'm assuming you have done the whole draw a circle around where you live that represents your maximum willingness to commute and then apply for jobs in that circle thing? It was very popular in silicon valley during the dot com boom. When the commute circle comes up empty though, what do you do?

Not snark, 100% serious. Hired a consultant who was fairly specialized and she spent 6 months working for me and at the end quit but offered to come back in 6 months. Her solution was she would live in the Bay area for 6 months, renting an apartment, save her money and then fly back to Hawaii and live there for 6 months on the money she had saved. She had worked out what was, to me, an ingenious solution to the conundrum that there isn't anywhere near where you want to live that you would like to work.

There are a lot of reasons why people won't work in the office, and I get it, working from home is way better for the employee. One of the more interesting things COVID did was switch the "balance of power" from employers back to employees and so far it has been pretty awesome. In my lunch discussion my message was more "You are gonna have to make people be willing to work in your office if you want to compete for the best ones." The unemployment rate is low, but employees are a population, not a single type, their effectiveness falls along a standard distribution like most things. To compete for the talent you want is making management "cave" to things like offices. It has been relatively minor so far, but as work actions go the whole "I don't wanna go back" movement has certainly been felt in the Bay Area.

Organizational dynamics is a really well studied topic and co-located organizations are able to respond faster, and more effectively, to changing conditions. Consider firefighters who used to respond to a call from home, get to the station, and then head out. Versus ones that are living in the station and can start out immediately. It is a dramatic illustration of the principle but one worth considering if you are managing a large organization.

Reading the comments (which are great btw!) I have observed that a number of people haven't contextualized work yet. Specifically, an employer is an enterprise that employs people to achieve its goals. The employer has factors they can change and factors they cannot when creating an attractive place to work for people who can (in theory) choose to work anywhere. Some of those employers will say "work at the office or quit, your choice." with the expectation that some will quit but presumably most will stay (change is really hard after all and it's scary to jump into the abyss). They want you to stay of course, it is better for them, and this is a rare opportunity to suggest/demand they revert some of the things that made working in the office so awful. Yes, making such demands forces them to decide, and their decision might be one you don't like, but if you are true to your goals and needs you will be happier with either decision. It is just harder to recognize that future happiness in the moment when you're crushed by them saying, "Okay then, we will call Friday your last day then."

I don't think this is even that crazy either. I do WFH but if I were to goto the office in NYC, here's what that 9-6 work schedule would look like when you're dependent on a train:

    - Wake up at 6am, eat breakfast, get cleaned up, prepare for the day
    - 6:50am, drive to the train station
    - Catch the 7:10am train to NYC which arrives at 8:30am
    - Walk 15 minutes to the office
    - Work until 6pm (no private offices, segments of open floors with desks and monitors to plug in a laptop)
    - Walk 15 minutes back to the train station
    - The next available train back is 6:40pm which arrives at 8pm
    - Drive home from the train station to be home around 8:10pm to 8:15pm

   - $268 a month for 20 train trips (a business week) with a discount applied
   - $150 for 10 lunches (I'm trying to average out things like a slice of pizza sometimes or something nicer and maybe you bring lunch half the time)
   - $200 for 10 dinners (half the time you eat near the train station while waiting because the idea of cooking after getting home is too tiring)
   - $15 a month in gas (kind of rounding here based on miles per gallon, etc. but this is close)

That's 6:50am to 8:10pm end to end (~13.5 hours) and you still need to handle dinner half the time. You also pretty much have to get up around 6am every day so you can't do too much at night. You're lucky if you manage to get dinner and fall asleep while watching a movie.

Compare that to working from home:

    - Wake up anytime before 8:45am to give you some time to get ready
    - Do whatever you want between 6am to 9pm if you wake up early
    - Work until 6pm (my own private office or anywhere within reason)
    - Do whatever you want until you decide to fall asleep

Pants are optional at any point during the work day. I say that as a joke but also kind of serious. Your work environment may require wearing pants even if it's 90f / 32c with 70% humidity.

There's also a huge amount of flexibility in the sense that maybe you have something to do between 2pm and 4pm like a doctor's appointment. You can still work around those hours when doing WFH and maybe eat lunch at your desk and put an extra hour in the evening to make it for it. Or maybe your job is ok with you just taking that 2 hours to do your thing and don't worry about it. That's not really an option when you have a long commute. You have to take the full day off.

So now you go back to the person I'm replying to who says they would need 2.5x to go back. That's not all that crazy. Your work day goes from 9 hours to 13.5 hours which is already 50% more. You can't just add 50% to your salary because you're going to get taxed on that, and all of that will be taxed at the highest bracket you're in. Your life transforms from "work with a decent amount of personal time" to "I can't really do anything except work and commute". That's priceless in value or at least requires a substantial increase to consider it given what you're giving up.

Fully remote meetings work for routine stuff like regular team planning etc. Where they fail is what I call the "magic meeting" where management types seem to think if they get the right people in a room together things will just magically happen. But those meetings never achieve much anyway apart from making people feel good for a while. A remote meeting just removes any illusion.

Bringing in cupcakes once a month it’s not trying. Simply threatening layoffs is not trying. Saying the word culture 30 times is not trying.

The pandemic proved work from home works for a large number of people and many of them found at a serious quality of life improvement. trying to take that away and asking people to pretend it didn’t exist in exchange for some stupid token like adding a couple extra plants to the office so it feels more “homey“ shows employees that you don’t care about them AT ALL. Just like it did when you tried to force them back into the office during the initial height of a deadly pandemic.

But if they really do care about RTO and they want to incentivize people with a modest commute to come back... make the office better.

If possible, have a whiteboard way at the back of the room where it's visible but incomprehensible.

And order food! Have some cookies, croissants, pizza delivered right as the meeting starts.

Having everyone work in the office all the time was an accepted norm that everyone was ok with. Nobody (really) saw this coming and if they did, everyone would've thought they were nuts. If the CEO decided "hey let's try WFH!" they probably would've been removed by the board. So it's pretty unfair for the board to be like "this guy's an idiot for not trying WFH in the past!"

They could play it off as "wow turns out we were wrong about WFH, this is going to be great in the long term! Right now here's how we might use that extra space" - they could detail things like improving retention by bringing back private offices for people who want to work in the office, subletting the space, and other things.