In some cases, the pressure is also coming from external to the company, from cities and VCs and similar who care about the commercial real-estate value of now-abandoned offices.
Does the office provide a better environment for building things together? How much do people cheat in WFH situations? Do people ask for help at the right time in WFH? What are the right ratios: A few days per week, or a few weeks per year, or everyone at home because we don’t like each other? By the way, do people develop the same sense of workmateness when only meeting colleagues remotely?
It seems all that union-talk “Boss is evil. Boss wants office. Office evil. Bad managers.” is kidnapping a real debate that is extremely important.
Unless I’m proven otherwise:
- People who WFH 2 days per week seem to spend 1hr less per day working,
- 100%-Remote people never seem to belong to the company, and in fact the team of 4 that I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months, and it only lasts 2-3 months with local people.
Unless we stop debating whether real estate companies form a coup against the workers, I’ll never hear better arguments.
Not for me personally, because at home I can create the perfect environment. Tons of monitors, high noise satisfying mechanical keyboard, that I'm sure would bother others in the office, music that puts me in the flow, very large desk, really comfy clothes, the exact lighting, temperature, water and coffee and everything that is perfect for me.
> Do people ask for help at the right time in WFH?
I think that's a culture thing, but if not it should be talked about and Slack should be used for that, people should have good culture around when they respond or how responses are expected.
> What are the right ratios: A few days per week, or a few weeks per year, or everyone at home because we don’t like each other?
I think it should be optional however frequently everyone wants to come. Also not wanting to come to office doesn't mean to me that I don't like someone. I just don't want to have the obligation of socialising. I want to focus on what I want to focus at the time.
> By the way, do people develop the same sense of workmateness when only meeting colleagues remotely?
It's something I don't particularly care for. I enjoy building things, but I don't particularly care for team building or similar things. The thing is then this means that if I come to office or team building events, it's something that I have to actively spend energy on to pretend that I care and that this is fun. I get much less work done if there's pressure of socialisation, especially unrelated to the actual work since it's mentally draining and takes focus away from actual work.
> - People who WFH 2 days per week seem to spend 1hr less per day working,
In a healthy environment we shouldn't actually measure hours spent on working, but the value/output produced. I don't track how many hours I work. For all you know, maybe all I do is work when I'm sleeping so add another 8h there to my hours measured since my subconscious is deep at work. All I'm making sure is that my deliveries are hitting what is expected and more in terms of quality and quantity. It's another great aspect for me. If I have a low inspiration day, I will maybe do a hour of work just to make sure there's no fires, I'm not blocking anyone else and do whatever I want for the rest of the day. However if I have high inspiration day I will do a continuous 13h spurt without eating or going anywhere. No need to try myself fit neatly in a 8h schedule that just doesn't align with how my energy naturally operates. I don't need to justify how I operate and spend my hours to some arbitrary standards. All they see is that I deliver and if they are not control freaks, that should be enough for them. I've been in an environment where people don't doubt my deliveries, but maybe that's because I'm lucky to be in such an environment.
> - 100%-Remote people never seem to belong to the company, and in fact the team of 4 that I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months, and it only lasts 2-3 months with local people.
Firstly - I don't belong to anyone to be clear. I'm not a slave. I belong to myself. Even if I went to the office I wouldn't "belong" to anyone. I wouldn't work for a company that would own me in the first place. In fact anyone can quit at any time. I'm here to build things, not to belong to anyone. The company has a product to build and the product provides value at scale, I'm here for building it to the best of my abilities.
> I’ve recruited still seems to be in the underproductive ramp-up after 8 months
I think that's a hiring problem (skill issue tbh). I'm being a bit snarky since you seemed to imply that people should belong to companies or at least you worded it that way. I've done a lot of hiring as well, and we are all remote and we managed to hire a great, motivated team. I have no doubt they are doing their things diligently and it's clearly visible even through Zoom since they talk about their technical challenges and it's clear what kind of effort they've put in. If they didn't put in the effort they wouldn't be able to talk about those challenges at such detail. And I do constantly think how great job we did hiring.
Or they’re on the hook for a lease for the next five years and it will cost more to break the lease.
Companies waste money all the time. I don’t think it’s a stretch to think they did or would waste oodles of money on purchasing or leasing their offices.
The more passion you have, the more ridiculous form it takes. In normal debates, intelligent people usually admit that there are various trade-offs, and there are different POVs which might favor one trade-off over another. But in the home office debate, pro-HO seems to take a position that RTO cannot have any true, valid benefit, there's no real trade-off to be made, and therefore it can be explained only by ulterior motives or some conspiracy - usually hyper-controlling managers or this real estate conspiracy.
I think it heavily depends on the person and type of work. I'm SWE and for most daily work I don't mind getting interrupted - I'm able to get back to work without a problem. It's only if I work on an extra difficult problem which requires very deep focus, I go somewhere quiet, but that's less than once a week.
My anecdotal experience has been that most employees I speak to are pretty clear about certain elements at the individual level but vary along many key axes: home office allows them to focus OR is too distracting; they miss the office culture OR hate the inefficiency of office smalltalk; they thrive on in-person connections OR thrive in focused isolation. There is also the topic of commuting, which most people don't love doing.
Employers should largely be motivated by more quantitative thinking, although in practice this varies and the metrics themselves are notoriously difficult to quantify.
Those tax breaks are explicitly contingent on butts being physically in seats to add to the economy and tax revenue of that municipality.
Too few butts in seats triggers penalties or revoking of the tax breaks altogether.
/Dr Mephisto enters the chat/
Separately but simultaneously, there are often local tax-benefits which depend on the company "creating jobs", and that's often defined in a way that means butts-in-offices downtown.
"But will the employees be happy, and will good ones stay?"
"Seven to one, my friend. They're just grumbling like always."
From the bosses point of view RTO is a costly signal that demonstrates how much people want to work for them - signals must be costly in order to be effective. Promoting WFO as more productive and less costly destroys the signaling aspect. Perhaps workers could offer other costly signals - maybe regular arduous in person team building exercises that management can show their friends photos. I really can't think of many alternative socially acceptable costly signals that can be required from employees which is probably why RTO continues to remain so popular.
The hidden layoff round is also high on that list if you ask me. They call everyone back to the office, the people that dont want/cant will not adhere, and thus be fired without the companies having to pay severance.
I we are all cogs at some point but I really have trouble being this cynical.
It's a layoff, but a really poor one losing exactly the people you don't want to lose.
and so right after, Square has gone fully remote as well as X has mostly left the Bay area
If a politician wants jobs in their state in exchange for state tax breaks (or same for a city or county), they can easily condition it on creating/showing X jobs for people who will there. Remote work can break that.
And there are countries/states where the respective corportate tax is 0. Shouldn't shifting your virtual company to that be better than say opening office in California, even if assuming you get local tax benefits.
That logic seems... questionable. Even if CRE firms are in VCs/investors' portfolios, it doesn't make sense to divert money from your SaaS companies to prop up your CRE firms. In the best case (ie. both sides are owned by you), such transfers are zero to slightly negative sum (from opportunity costs and costs associated with operating an office). In the typical case where you're renting from another CRE company, such transfers are definitely negative. It doesn't make sense to go spend your money to prop up the broader CRE market as a CRE investor, just like it doesn't make sense for you to go out to buy iPhones to prop up Apple shares as an Apple investor.
It's just a general attitude that has filtered around C suites or whatever. Go watch any daytime cable news investment shows and you'll see it.
Just run of the mill cohort thinking. No big conspiracy.
As in "we need to RTO to prop up commercial real estate" specifically, or something more general like "we need to RTO to increase collaboration" or whatever?
It's all feels and vibes.
Okay but surely given all the pro-wfh people, you'd think at least someone would leak memos of banks pressuring lenders to institute RTO policies?
So what? I mean companies write down things all the time. "We've revalued our $billion office and adjusted our balance sheet to match. Cause was a global pandemic which we considered as a risk factor in 2019, but it was negligible."
Stock will drop a % or two for a week, then recover and move on (especially as the Amazon machine continues to print cash.)
Microsoft wrote off the Nokia purchase with a shrug and the world just moved on.
Explaining a change of work environment to investors seems like a pretty minor bump, not a major factor in decision making.
I bet there are some incentives in there but it's not the whole picture. It's probably the combination of many things but mostly management that don't know how to manage people remotely, or they started to realise that most middle manager positions are obsolete/unnecessary.
Use to work for a company that was literally told by the city that if they don't have X amount of people in the building they will lose their tax incentives they got for having the company there. The company slowly mandated hybrid then RTO everyday in about 6 months. Got out 2 weeks before it was implemented. My coworkers were extremely jealous that I got a WFH job.
Doubt Boston is alone in these propositions
https://news.bloombergtax.com/daily-tax-report/boston-reside...
I think part of the equation is that less people are going into the office so values of buildings are going down, less people in downtown the less money that goes to all the restaurants/shops/stores during the week.
I can't speak for other cities since I don't live in them but Boston has never really recovered from the pandemic in terms of office workers.
For analogy, imagine the historical City of New York (Manhattan and Bronx) never consolidated with the City of Brooklyn and the city and towns of Queens County, to form a City of Greater New York. WFH Queens would be as bad for Manhattan as WFH New Jersey. Not only loss of going-to-work-associated revenue, but little home-associated. As it is, the mayor vocally pushed for back-to-office (real-estate interests are powerful in NYC, transit budget income, CRE better-vacant-than-cheaper dysfunction, etc).
DowntownRecovery.com project mapped this (using cellphone user data, at least)
Prior discussion on HN: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=downtownrecovery
Prior discussions: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=downtownrecovery
George Carlin: https://youtube.com/watch?v=XE3sYUJASLY