Has anyone studied what drives RTO?
What really REALLY is behind managers/executives pushing for RTO.
My theory so far is that they believe that employees working from home take advantage of decreased supervision to slack. Now on HN you'll read "doesn't matter that I'm working fewer hours if I'm delivering work". But I think managers/executives fear they're not very good at assessing how much tasks are meant to take. If a task is mean to take 1 day and I take 3 days and I explain why it took me longer, some times it's really difficult to assess whether the explanation is true or I'm BSing. (Of course, they don't admit this. They use their own BS to justify RTO. Enhanced collaboration or whatever.)
Bottom line, managers/executives don't know how much output they can realistically expect, but they suspect it will be lower from home.
Many such businesses failed during COVID knockdowns due to lack of customers. Some are still struggling to become viable again with a low RTO percentage.
For some medium to large businesses, these struggling smaller businesses or business owners are their customers. So there is some self interest from many companies to go back to the way things were.
Arguably the failed or struggling businesses could be being replaced by other services, eg home food delivery, but I've not personally noticed anything like that happening.
The opposite is true as well. Many (likely more) small businesses have gone bankrupt because of people concentrating to other locations due to urbanization.
It already happened before and during covid (that's what the gig economy created/captured). That has its own problems, not the least of which is the overhead costs passed to consumers. Overall, the scale required of such businesses keeps small ones from flourishing in any large numbers compared to brick and mortar.
Irrelevant, the motivations of middle managers and executives is not the broader economy. It's their companies results and/or they are perceived by their bosses.
The person I was responding to asked "what drives RTO?". Everything you said might be true, but it doesn't drive RTO. Yes, of course if you own a restaurant you want more foot traffic. But that's irrelevant for an office worker having his boss pushing RTO.
Perhaps the restaurant was leasing the premises from a landlord. The landlord may still have a loan for the business premises. That loan could be at risk of going into arrears if no other person decides to try their luck running a restaurant in a location that doesn't have sufficient patronage.
Consider now that the office workers who have refused to RTO work for the bank that holds the loan for the business premises. There is a risk to the bank now that the premises is less valuable because it can't be leased and is less attractive for a future purchaser.
The point is that most businesses don't operate without having other businesses as suppliers or clients. When one business does badly it can affect other businesses in their network. A small number of isolated businesses failing doesn't cause knock on effects. However, if a larger number of smaller retailers, dependent on foot traffic close in the same locality it will have a ripple effect out to many other larger businesses.
Business owners and executives have an interest in trying to maintain a healthy business network. Some will believe that pushing for RTO should help other local businesses in their business network and thus will be beneficial for their company in the long term.
You're missing the point of this conversation.
My gut tells me that's mostly nonsense, considering how much I see delivery drivers driving around neighborhoods and picking up orders (when I'm picking up my takeout, for example).
The demand didn't go anywhere, it's just that the people are now getting delivery to their suburban home, rather than walking to the food place from the office during lunch.
A far bigger decrease in demand is due to some crazy price increases in outside-of-home dining options. A single mediocre burger will now easily run you $12, whereas pre-COVID you used to be able to get a whole meal for $10. Basically, if you feel "bad" for the small restaurants guy, your first place to look should be in the delivery app corporate grift, not blaming the WFH employees.
I would take this a step further:
My observation has been that many managers (at all levels) subscribe to a very feudal and classist belief that every employee (with the possible exception of those who actively brown-nose) is always looking for as many ways to screw the company as possible. If not being constantly monitored, they will slack off; if they claim to have a disability they need accommodations for, that's just a way of getting you to endorse their slacking.
Essentially, it's a mindset that views the manager-subordinate relationship as a fully adversarial one, at all times, no matter how good a performer any given subordinate is.
So the problem that you pointed out isn't optimization as a concept, it's dumb people.
It's a beancounting optimisers wet dream.
They were already friendly with remote work before, i for instance have worked fully remote for over 10 years already.
Before the pandemic they had space problem in their San Francisco office, if you were not in the office at least 3 times per week you were at risk of loosing your desk space.
During pandemic when everyone was forced to go full remote and performance was not impacted they just moved to a much smaller office space and kept everyone remote.
Though, I do know for myself I am very productive at home. So, I personally will avoid working from some office. I prefer to manage my own time and also be flexible in how I divide time in my day. I also don't feel energized by working with many colleagues (as an introvert, it's quite the opposite for me, actually).
It may not impact highest performers that much but makes it worse for everyone.
Big players play the game, the rest just imitates.
If we were paid to commute to the office then our commute time would be part of the work day.
But I am paid for the work i do during work hours and if i have to commute that is expected to happen out of work hours.
So actually the Company is already saving money by having me remote, so now i am also expected to get paid less for doing the same work while also saving the company money?
Pay is compensation for work done.
Not having to commute does not affect the company at all, they still get the same amount of work done and it is still have the same value to then so i can assure you that the work i do did not became less valuable to the company just because i did not spend hours of my personal time moving to the office and back.
Pay should either stay the same or, ideally, it should go up because while they are saving money by me not going to the office, i on the other hand have extra costs because i have to get good internet, will use my electricity for doing the work.
Where i work not only pay did not get lowered when the team moved to fully remote, they actually pay us extra to cover costs of working from home. They also offer a one-time pay to cover the costs or assembling your home office so you can buy stuff you need like desk, chair, printer, etc when you change to remote or when you are hired as remote.
But in my opinion this mindset is the wrong one when you already have a job and is changing to remote.
If you already have a job that the company already evaluated the value of and agree on a fair pay.. Then moving to work remote does not change the value of your work to the company while changing the costs the company have..
Where i live they cannot legally lower an employee pay, but if they could and had done when i changed to work remotely i would surely have accepted, but i would also start looking for work elsewhere. But i know they have not done it in countries they could have and like i said, they pay us extra to cover internet and utilities.
For many there's just a preference/productivity boost for working in-person. That's fine, remote is not for everyone. However my hunch is that if decision-making management is mostly comprised of older millenials and gen X, they're just habitually used to working in-person and refuse to change.
Then you can go into the darker reasons:
Ego around owning an office space and then having to use it, "fairness" (read: superiority complex) against workers getting the same perks as managers, inability to work in a remote (read: digital first) culture, easy way to get rid of people without paying layoff severance.
Wanna expand on that? Why does that "make sense"?
Some distributed organizations strive to bring even international teams together from time to time, even if it's just once a year.
(I work for an international corporation and we have hybrid meetings once a year but it never works 100% in person because people work from different continents, it would make no sense.)
If collaboration is beneficial in some situation then in office meetings should happen with a situation that would benefit from this collaboration arise. If the need is not there then there is no point.
In my team we go to the office once a month mostly for social interaction, it is usually the day we are lest productive because we basically drink coffee and catch up and even then it is open if you have other personal needs to participate remotely or not at all, we had months were there wasn't anyone in the office and we just meet virtually. I have not gone into the office yet this year myself for a number of reasons.
I still collaborate constantly with my team mates, we have enough tools for remote collaboration that make being physically in the same space irrelevant, this also allow collaboration to extend the team members in other countries so i am not limited to the people that live close by.
My conspiracy theory: executives are the kinds of people that could have a lot of money invested into commercial real estate. The value of which has seen a massive hit in the past few years (and is at risk of a 2008-style collapse), because fewer people traffic those properties, and thus, fewer businesses rent them. In order to counter those forces, they mandate that everyone in their company return to office in order to prop up the value of their portfolios.
I think it’s more basic. Many cities rely on business/commercial real estate taxes to generate funds. Many of these governments also give tax incentives if businesses are working in the city. If the companies aren’t doing this they lose out.
Most cities cannot make up the loss of funds through residential taxes so the pressure of RTO can help ease it.
Boston is a good example of this, residential property taxes are quite low but the city has a hard time making up the difference with the loss of commercial property taxes. So there was a big push to get companies to RTO.
It’ll probably take a good 20 years before city governments are able to adapt, hopefully that means more mixed use buildings in the city core like Chicago (commercial store first level, condos/apartments above it) rather than why you commonly see across US cities (entire buildings dedicated to business).