Execs who mandate a return to office admit that it doesn't improve productivity
fortune.com
fortune.com
If it were ever about productivity it would not have been universal and it would not have been mandatory.
There is nothing wrong with my ability to get my job done sitting at my computer at home. I guess one day though, i might have to change jobs and end up with a less understanding management who will make me commute to an office every day.
i'm not even kidding that driving off a cliff on the way to work might start sounding pretty damn appealing at that point.
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To the execs: go bully someone your own size.
But for many larger companies that were already practicing distributed model prior to the pandemic, the ship has already sailed.
It no longer knows how to harness RTO effectively. That knowledge was long lost prior to Covid.
Imagine you work with a bad and slow laptop and your employer provides you with a new one, 1000x more powerful but the keyboard layout is different, it's dvorak.
You can then replace the keyboard with a layout you know or adapt the way you work by learning dvorak and to touch type.
What would you do if your productivity is at stakes and you could lose your job if your output slows down?
Transpose this to managers who "know" how to manage in a physical space and with small talk and now have to adapt to remote management. They usually don't have any strong metric to measure productivity outside of seeing you work with their eyes, knowing what exactly you're working on and you being there whenever they need you.
They usually see their own productivity as THE indicator of productivity for their team.
Is it now better for THEM to bring back the old "org layout" or to learn the new one and admit they don't know how to measure productivity ?
For all the managers I've seen, they have no problem with fast evolving task they can delegate, but they are reluctant on anything that forces them to evolve, they want to evolve their own way. Like many of us.
I instead see this as part of an industry-wide pushback against rising compensation and power among engineers.
For smaller companies: "big companies do it, there must be a good reason, let's do it too!".
Remote work doesn't seem to affect productivity, Fed study finds
We are pretending to work alot to not stir up social unrest on the work place among other types of staff.
But like there is no need to actually believe in it ourself.
A related aside: I've noticed anecdotally that as you become more senior you get pretty good at feeling out what that number is for each of your teammates and it becomes a pretty useful metric to leverage in your day-to-day toolkit. I'd be curious to see what a workplace would look like if folks were actually allowed to be transparent about that (without repercussions) rather than it having to be guesstimated.