Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mullingitover | Hacker News Reader

Hot on the heels of recent research[1] showing forcing RTO doesn't do anything to improve firms' valuations, but does reduce morale. Remote workers provide a convenient scapegoat for low performing CEOs:

> Our empirical analyses find that the probability of RTO mandates is higher for firms with poor prior stock market performance. However, institutional ownership significantly decreases the probability of RTO, and CEO stock ownership does not have a significant effect on RTO mandates. Further, the probability of RTO mandates is significantly higher for firms with male and powerful CEOs, who are more likely to grab power back from employees through RTO (Cragun et al., 2020; Business Insider, 2023a). 5 Overall, our results do not support the argument that managers impose these mandates to increase firm values. Instead, these findings are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance.

[1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401

That paper is a joke. Here's how they collected their "treatment set":

> We collect RTO information for S&P 500 firms through manual news searches on Google and Factiva. Specifically, for each firm, we search by using the company’s name and the following keywords: ‘Work from Home’, ‘return to office’, and ‘days required working in the office’. We focus on S&P 500 firms because these large firms are closely followed by media, thus mitigating concerns about media coverage bias. Among the S&P 500 firms, 137 publicly announce their RTO policy and are classified as RTO firms in this study. These 137 firms become our treatment firms

They then correlate this with other (ahem) high quality datasets...like Glassdoor reviews.

Setting aside all personal biases, this is like bad undergrad research. You can't just look at titles and treat papers like pokemon cards.

"this is like bad undergrad research."

Unfortunately I think you just described the corpus of behavioral science over the past two decades

Sadly, yes. I mainly looked out of a sense of morbid curiosity, and I was not disappointed.

What is your concern with this approach? It seems pretty reasonable to me. Obviously the better the data the less chance for some kinds of errors, but nothing here sticks out as particularly bad. (Full disclosure I didn't read the paper itself.)

Among many other things, sample bias.

Sample bias in the sense that they may miss companies in the S&P 500 that aren't as well reported on (possible but I would guess not super likely), or that fortune 500 companies are not representative of companies overall (certainly true but still a reasonable scope for analysis)? Or something other than that?

People generally leave reviews because they are unhappy with a thing. That alone is sampling bias from Glassdoor. Rarely do people leave a review because they are happy with something.

Why is that a bias? When people are more unhappy, they post more negative comments. If they are less unhappy, then they post less negative comments. The bigger concern is that employers post fake positive reviews, which biases against the findings.

I know researchers especially junior researchers are very critical of others’ work. But they focus on s&p 500 because theses firms are big and closely followed by media.

You can tell it's a joke from the second sentence of the abstract. They don't even attempt to pretend that they're impartial or scientific, it's 100% obvious they're coming into it from a completely biased position.

I really think RTO banaza has been nothing more than a soft layoff tactic to unwind the covid hiring surge.

My company had a push to get everyone in “strategic offices” several years before Covid. As far as I could tell it was also a layoff tactic. I think they learned it from IBM.

It didn’t matter what office a person was at, as long as they were at an office. So the idea of “spontaneous cross functional collaboration at the water cooler,” they talked about never actually happened, as people were in offices with people who they had no common ground with (professionally speaking), and everyone was tethered to their desk all day. For myself, I was on a team with people spread across 5 states, 3 countries, and 2 continents… but at least everyone had an office, right… I was on the phone for 6-7 hours per day. I’m not sure when I was supposed to chat it up at the water cooler, or who I was supposed to talk with.

Covid kind of saved me in this respect, but they are pushing RTO now. It seems those near offices are resisting a lot. I hope that goes on for quite a while so the focus remains there and doesn’t shift to those who officially work from home now.

I worked at IBM and my office was like this after the original product was EOL. There were several in-house teams that worked for entirely different divisions of IBM. In hindsight, it does seem odd since you - if lucky - at least had 2-3 other people on the same team at the office.

I wasn't aware of any minimum per team or any other weird metrics. Every team was always distributed geographically anyway. Kind of crazy to think about now to be honest.

I hadn't even considered how this affected middle management either. It seemed less common, at least in our case, to have an off site first line manager. So we might have even had multiple managers per team that way but someone who was there would have to correct me. It should be no surprise the company has its own unique brand of dysfunction.

From paper:

Table 1. Summary Statistics for Determinant Analyses

Panel A: Industry Distribution of Sample Firms in Determinant Analysis

Industry # of Firms

Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing 1

Construction 4

Finance, Insurance, Real Estate 97

Manufacturing 177

Mining 16

Public Administration 3

Retail Trade 21

Services 69

Transportation & Public Utilities 59

Wholesale Trade 10

Total 457

I find it odd how they removed the Information Technology sector and companies from the dataset.

I also count 6 whose core (i.e "essential") employees cannot, by definition, work remotely

They used the first 2 digits of the SIC code for each company, which has Amazon as 59 ("Retail") and Microsoft as 73 ("Services").

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