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Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

> "To harness this energy and grow skills, we believe our sales teams need to be together in the office," the memo added. "Additionally, our data shows that sales teams are more productive when onsite."

I wonder if they shared the "data" in the memo. Otherwise, this should be considered a magical myth that the company's leadership simply believes.

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Before I got into information systems, I spent about a decade in sales. As someone who's been on both sides of the ball, sales teams absolutely do not need to be in the office. Maybe for quarterly or managerial meetings, but the highest performing sales people and teams I knew where given free reign to do their thing as long as they were hitting their quotas. If you weren't hitting your numbers, then yeah, managers would lean on you to be in the office and on the phone building your pipeline and demonstrating you weren't out on the golf course doing nothing.

Its a total myth that sales people need to be in the office.

I used to sit next to the guy who made cold calls all day long. There was no part of that job he couldn’t have done absolutely anywhere else. Also, massive, massive respect for anybody with the constitution to do that work. It was hour after hour of “no.”

Yeah, it was a tough job and glad I got out. Minimum 65 calls per day is not easy, especially when you know, like you said, most are going to be hang-ups and no's.

The other aspect that was really hard was working your ass off all month to hit your quota, then the first of the month? You get to start all over again. The constant stress and roller coaster of whether you make your numbers every month probably took like 3 years off of my life.

I also worked at places where guys had everything wired. They had their client list and when they ordered and it was a walk in the park every month to hit their numbers, get to President's Club and get that free Hawaiian vacation.

I honestly don't miss anything about it.

> I wonder if they shared the "data" in the memo. Otherwise, this should be considered a magical myth that the company's leadership simply believes.

They never share the data. The data is "management wants it that way." I manage a completely remote team, I couldn't care less if they were in person, they work fantastically this way.

Of course they don’t; because, none of this has anything to do with any measurable KPI(s) other than “we said so.”

E: forgot a quotation mark. Please forgive my indiscretions.

Exactly. I get just as much from my people if not more when they're remote because I hire good people with good work ethics. They're responsible people who do the jobs I trust them to do. This is just control-fetish appeasement.

I believe. Because I know companies like this have almost never spent resources to attempt to improve WFH environment.

Remote work is hard, you need technology, culture, and people all working together to make it efficient. You can't just buy a Slack/Zoom license and expect to suddenly have a productive remote work environment. On the other side, they probably have spent decades to improve physical offices, meeting rooms, desks, seats, lights, it's not a surprise that probably every corner of the space was designed for helping people work better. When they say "we believe RTO is better", it's difficult for me to argue, because of course you can believe one way is better than the other since you didn't really try the other!

I wish these companies just find a different way to lie. It's not "we tried and it didn't work". No, you didn't try at all, because leadership does not care or too lazy to change for themselves.

> I wonder if they shared the "data" in the memo.

Why would they? Quoting imaginary data is a plausible explanation to all interested parties. They don't need to prove anything to employees - just make them leave ALREADY. This immediately shows spending decrease to investors and makes them happy.

Quality decrease is a problem they won't have to explain for the next 2 quarters.

EDIT: this topic was just demoted from 1st to 5th page, with 45 points after 2 hours of being posted. No more fresh comments under such moderation.

There is no data, or I wouldn't have to keep asking for evidence.

Previously [0] [1]

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41247369

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37314527

They never do. I’ve heard that Amazon’s data from internal surveys showed a productivity increase from remote work compared to either hybrid or in office.

Remember when companies were doing just fine on productivity when huge swathes of industries (that could) allowed work from home because of the pandemic and now suddenly we’re asked believe “trust me bro” CEOs more. It’s all about the power play and keeping middle management happy because they won’t stop crying over not being able to call incessant meetings and “walk the floor” lording their power over the underlings.

They’ll probably justify it using some outdated Gartner shit anyway.

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