90% of companies say they’ll return to the office by the end of 2024 | Hacker News Reader

90% of companies say they’ll return to the office by the end of 2024

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18 pointsbelter43 comments

This is why even white collar workers need to have a good look at unionization. Even highly compensated workers at tech companies ultimately have little to no power within a corporation. Corporations are tyrannical authoritarian institutions and the only way to prevent them from harming workers is government intervention (I.e. labor laws) or workers collectively bargaining.

Free market competition is another dynamic.

How does that work when all the employers act as a group and coordinate? This RTO push is coordinated

This creates the opportunity for an employer to not ‘coordinate’ and thus have an edge in attracting talent

This is nonsense. By that logic, a cartel or price-fixing scheme could never happen because there's an opportunity for one actor to not participate in the scheme, and yet....

https://www.reuters.com/article/us-lcd-settlement-idUSTRE7BQ...

https://www.latimes.com/business/technology/la-fi-tn-tech-jo...

You’re not accurately representing my claim. I said this dynamic exists as one (of many) mechanisms to incentivize employers to allow wfh. Not that its existence will prevent cartels or employer coordination.

Whose freedom? Whose market?

The market for employers to match with employees.

The freedom for such associations to be mutually accepted.

>mutually accepted

It's only "mutual" if you completely ignore the power imbalance.

Yeah I guess I haven’t felt it personally (the power imbalance)

No I don’t want unionize with anyone. Social welfare is the right measure to deal with unemployment, not bundle your employment with bunch of other people.

In some cases RTO is just not possible anymore. With my company we all went remote during the pandemic and started hiring fully remote roles and not just those in our city. Our leadership team floated the idea of RTO but we convinced them that it's just not possible because unlike 2019 when 70-80% of our Engineering team is local, now the number is down to like 20%.

We told them that the effect would not be what they want (getting people to collaborate together in person) and pushing harder on the issue will result in the Grindr Situation[1]

[1]: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/videos/2023-09-07/grindr-lose...

It’s not that hard to implement and force a full return to office.

All you have to do is require new hires to work in the office. If they refuse they don’t get the job offer.

You can leave existing employees alone to avoid a mutiny but they’ll eventually leave on their own via routine turnover.

Since most companies will be operating in the same way, full remote jobs will be scarce, reserved for the lucky few top performers and high demand roles.

New employees can mutiny too, and if they do that when they are only 40% of employees, you’re still in trouble.

Presumably, someone who accepted an in-office job either prefers that situation [1] or can’t find another employer offering a better situation (which also seems likely when you look at OP’s article, only 10% of employees plan to avoid an in-office requirement).

The mere fact that they accepted the job in the first place protects the employer from WFH rebellion.

[1] Based on this survey, I would say that a company offering an office environment but with the added flexibility of some work from home days aligns with the preferences the majority of US employees: https://www.randstadusa.com/business/business-insights/news/...

Not if they didn't realize that existing employees were allowed to work from home.

It's a class distinction that breeds resentment and screws up team dynamics. You can't 'just' fix this problem with a grandfather clause. It creates new problems.

It is way simple than it looks. Particularly when it can gradually remove remote employees exactly because with “works”, but less efficiently than rto.

So what's going to happen when all the workers who moved remote and bought homes in Zoomtowns like SLC, Park City, Idaho, etc.

I'm also curious how these ideas circulate. My wife and I both started having daily standup calls in the morning the same week. It definitely seems like company align on these incremental changes to normalize them.

As some of these RTO companies have already done: they will force you to come in to a regional/main office and if you don't, you're out a job.

My employer, FullStory, just sub-leased ~75% of our office space because fewer people were coming in and they decide to "roll with it" instead of fighting that battle.

They were fairly supportive of remote folks even before 2020, but at this point, the majority of the staff work remotely, even many of the ones who live near the office.

I think they are motivated by their urge to micromanage and nothing else. It’s a fallacy to think the “great leaders” are infallible. The last couple of years is a proof that these leaders can be as dumb as rocks.

Does anyone have a running list of cited reasons for why this is happening? The few people I've asked in executive decisionmaking circles have all chalked it up to judgment calls, but I'm inclined to believe that there's a more coordinated effort going on to backstop CRE.

Even the article blames emotions, and while I know people can be fickle, I find it hard to believe that there isn't some kind of data informing the move, whether it's data describing something that should be obvious (productivity) or something opaque or irrelevant to most employees (coordinated effort to prop up investments)

Does it need to be any more complicated than “we’re spending a TON of money on office space…”.

My guess is commercial real estate. The companies pushing RTO are the same ones that own their own office buildings. Offloading those now is near impossible because there's such a glut in the market.

Labor must be disciplined, and cannot be allowed to think that they have the upper hand in negotiations over wages and working conditions. Therefore, RTO is being pushed, even when data shows that workers are more productive and companies would save money by not having to spend money on real estate. The principals that executives claim to be driven by (data, productivity, cost savings, profits) get tossed out the window when it turns out the results don't fit their stated objective.

So many CEOs are in direct communication and believe that the office is better that no matter how data contradicts that, they still will make the move and the masses simply have to obey.

It's just so poorly managed too. A lot of these companies are heavy on engineering. The returns would likely be stronger if buildings were converted to dedicated offices for engineers; they'd pull those in who want their own office to work, let those who want to stay home keep working from home, maintain that physical presence they want for incubating junior talent, and get better productivity out of everyone.

I think this is a promising approach. My version of it would be to switch to the Bell Labs / Xerox PARC layout style of individual engineer offices surrounding a central conference room area. Couple that with a genuine leadership backing and incentives promoting mentorship for senior individual contributors to come in and mentor juniors in the physical offices. When those juniors are promoted to a sufficient level of demonstrated consistent self-sufficiency and outcome-driven behavior over a number of years, the new more senior position includes the right to go full remote.

In any case, in my personal experience with clients' engineering organizations, those where you have to micromanage to the point going to the office is necessary to manage well don't accomplish much in any case, and tend to produce technical debt at a much faster pace, than those with much tighter company culture cohesion around self-motivated engineers. I've concluded over the decades it is due to a highly useful information compression dynamic leading to an even more useful abstraction interface only possible in a high trust environment.

As a junior developer who works remote, I would love to work at a place that took this approach.

Companies are more efficient/productive with in office workers.

Throw all the click-minded news articles and anecdotes in the world at me. These leaders aren't idiots and they are definitely crunching numbers. If full remote was more profitable, they would do it. Full stop.

The headline should be "90% of companies find in office work more profitable". Because that is all they really care about.

At my prior megacorp where I was a senior leader we analyzed closely remote work patterns and in office patterns and found a pronounced improvement in productivity and employee happiness when employees choose how to work best for themselves. However our aging senior leader declared everyone must work in the office because it’s how his career unfolded. People tried to talk him down, but he wouldn’t accept any data but doubled down hard on hand waving culture arguments. It evolved into “it’s for the children,” despite the out of college hires had done considerably better than other demographics remotely.

No company has provided evidence of any efficiency gain in office, while there is plenty of evidence of gain with universal flexible work arrangements. Even Amazon, a very data driven culture, has no data to back up RTO. It’s just a gut feeling from Andy.

N.b., when my prior company declared all senior leaders must work in the office 5 days a week, I did the only honorable thing and quit loudly and went to a more interesting company paying better with a more interesting role that doesn’t feel the need to control me physically. If employers value controlling my body over my contribution, they can have neither.

My guess is that in some cases, this sort of policy is actually a form of layoffs where they want to reduce costs through lower headcount without calling it a layoff. They know some sizable chunk of employees will balk and find another remote job if forced to return to the office. Instead of the company picking who gets laid off, the employees pick themselves.

There are definitely some downsides to such a policy, especially in that you can't control who leaves. You could lose some top performers this way.

But it would still accomplish lowering costs while sidestepping much of the bad press of being forced to lower costs through a layoff.

A very big reason that few corporations or outlets discuss is commercial real estate. A lot of these businesses likely have deals with the city where they agreed to let them build a fancy new building, in exchange for a larger tax base that commutes to the area, buys lunch, whatever.

Furthermore, buildings are more valuable when they're used.

To add to the other comments, when the nature of the job or the work environment is dysfunctional/dystopian it's easier to get people to be a little more productive when they are in the office.

Prior to the pandemic, I was on an amazing remote team. We made time to hang out and talk twice per week. We often let our standups turn into water cooler sessions. Generally, we understood that we had to “waste” some time in order to create the social interactions that would come naturally in person.

Then I got promoted. I reported into the CEO. Everyone is so busy and has their own priorities that it’s extremely hard to get people to spend time on anything that isn’t strictly business. It’s isolating. It can make people feel out of touch. After a while, it just seems to wear on people.

I also suspect that the types of personalities that thrive at leadership/executive levels don’t do super well with stepping back to socialize.

“ The only industries Kaplan expects to continue to push for a full return to the office are tech…”

Essentially modern tech is all about remoteness - tech companies serve remote customers - yet tech is one of those industries that demand people return to offices.

Shows the level of understanding management has about things.

And hopefully tech “workers” will soon understand what they are taken as.

This is nonsense. Companies may be saying that because it’s the official line but they simply don’t have the power to force the people they need back to the office. Workers aren’t going for it and companies who offer remote now have a competitive advantage in the labor market. Companies have been pushing for RTO but unwillling to let talented engineers who work remote go, because they are important and have a large reserve of domain knowledge. When those talented engineers begin looking for work again, what do you think they’ll prioritize? Flexibility and remote work. In-person work may have a resurgence for a little bit but over time it will erode and eventually remote work will be the norm.

RTO after 3.5 years isn't a return from temporary working habits. Many big companies have structured their teams around not needing to be co-located. RTO is like transitioning from the cloud back to on-prem. It is a complete realignment of the way your company works.

My employer just instituted a 3 day a week policy, but it is not being enforced. They make a point that if this would cause you to leave, then they will work out an exception. My guess is they want the policy in place so they can enforce it when it becomes convenient.

How though? Like 60% of our staff is now remote and not local.

Then your company must be one of the 10%?

Is 60% turnover in a couple years normal for your company? Or I guess did that many people really pick up and move in a couple years?

In my experience at least it's not at all normal.

Likely many companies that favour remote work havent been asked. In fact i call this whole article bs. The reason it was written is to make it appear normal and therefore to increase demands of on site work.

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