Executives and Research Disagree About Hybrid Work. Why?

Company I work for implemented more RTO recently and when someone asked in an all hands for data showing that the first RTO decision was leading to an improvement in productivity or some other key metric and the CTO responded saying (paraphrasing) “this isn’t a data based decision leadership is making. It’s because we want to build a culture where people are working next to each other more frequently. We FEEL that the company benefits because of this.”

People got bristly that we’re all routinely forced to prove any decision we as employees want to make with data. But was a fascinating moment of transparency, even if a lot of people hated the decision.

Completely different incentives.

Executives are in those roles because their anxieties for control align with productivity for shareholders. The coercive threat is the whole point of executive management in private profit focused organizations.

Researchers on the other hand are not as interested in maintaining the power distribution bias. Rather they use “economic” factors like described in the article to describe what would seem to be a mutually beneficial situation.

So what’s so confusing? It’s because all these commenters are still stuck in the thinking that by default, incentives are aligned all the way from investors to line workers in a firm (otherwise why would they be there? They can just move in a “free market” - they are “rational actors” and other economics lies etc…)

As these studies show, coercive executives hate remote work because it reduces the frequency they can create pop-up tasks and break workflows to satisfy their desires. So productivity is up but control is down. It also makes bullying and intimidation much harder to get away with.

So the conundrum is simply executives throwing tantrums about their loss of structural methods of coercion they aren’t able to effect as easily.

Never forget, unless you are an owner of the company (eg. meaningful ownership, that has the ability to shut the org down) management, executives and investors are not only not your friends, but they are adversarial to your benefit.

Studies like these demonstrate that almost perfectly and yet everybody’s confused about why is it not the same?

It’s exceptionally simple and it’s something we’ve all known forever and it’s been captured in comic books and movies and everything else: middle management and above is incentivized to be antagonistic to non-ownership labor by function of the structure that it’s within.

The problem is everyone thinks Data will give you the answer. Does returning to office increase productivity? How do you measure productivity? Let me tell you how we increased productivity by 19% last year.

Our VP aimed to increase productivity by 10%. The Jira team went to work. They studied our workflow, found some inefficiency in our ticket statuses, and reorganized. At the end of the year, we resolved many more tickets, gaining 71 days worth of work, or 19.5%. Celebration!

The data clearly shows the improvement. But what they ignored is that on the previous year, we built a system. On the next year, the one with their Jira improvements, we used the system. We resolved more tickets after because those were small bug fixes instead of large architecture efforts. Nothing to do with the new ticket statuses. The lesson was add more ticket statuses and it will make developers more efficient...

When we are asked to return to the office and there is push back, it is someone's job to come up with metrics that will measure productivity. They will probably measure ticket completion for on-site and off-site employees, completely ignoring the context of the work.

A whole lot of CEOs and executives have highly inflated egos, and if people are remote, they don’t get all the attention, echo chamber and bootlickers, that they want. Often behind a RTO there’s a weak person wanting to feel power over others

I was at a a certain company (not for long) that did quick all-hands stand-up meetings once a week, so everyone could touch base. About 30-40 people, all standing up, took about 15 minutes.

At the end of one meeting the CEO hosts a goodbye ritual for the CTO who is leaving for some other job or something. It was all blather about how great the guy is and how great it is that he's leaving and how that's great for the company even though he's great and we'll miss him, etc. etc. yadda yadda.

Here's the punchline: at the start of the ritual the CEO and exiting CTO pulled out stools and sat down on them. It's a stand-up meeting. The rest of us are all still standing.

It think it’s obvious CEOs have biases that make them want in person, since it allows them to feel more power and control.

On the other hand these studies are very weak and probably don’t actually mean very much. Productivity of individual employees is essentially impossible to measure correctly, and then how do to measure interaction costs like slower communication or lost opportunities in chance meetings and conversations?

So I don’t think we really can say one way or another how good it is for the company. Obviously employees do prefer remote work but the goal of a CEO isn’t just to make employees happy so it’s not like we should expect them to.

I think most executives are pretty straightforward that their concern isn’t about the things most studies measure. Jassy sees the benefits as being:

> we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another

These are all hard to measure through studies, and not really the same thing as productivity or job satisfaction.

Assuming youre not a quiet quitter , youre not double dipping and you have some interest in your job. I'm pretty sure WFH is more productive and efficient. I'm pretty sure corporate knows this as well. They might even have the numbers to prove it but don't wanna show it. BUT i think the reason they want us to return is that if we stay home.. we will use the efficiency and productivity gains to optimize our personal lives and not the bottom line. It would change white collar culture fundamentally and that would not be good for the status quo.

My experience has been a bit weird since it is backwards of what most have experienced. For the five years leading up to the pandemic, our senior leadership had been pushing WFH heavily as we were shedding real estate and saving lots from it. Being in a legacy business with lots of aging physical infrastructure, there were lots of opportunities for downsizing infrastructure and our office downsizing just sort of piggybacked on that. The savings were a major part of the CEO's message to the Board each quarter, which seemed to make them and the investors happy.

Our division head however hated not being able to come into the office and see "my guys". We were mostly clustered in two metro areas with a few team members in random locations, but the division head was in our metro so we sometimes would meet up for dinner. Each time he'd start talking about having us RTO, even though our last office had been completely subleased to someone else. According to coworkers who were there longer than me, when we did have an office, the division head was only there one or two days a week. He liked parachuting in, doing the rounds, and then head back to his house in the mountains where he did much of his work (90% meetings) remotely. Eventually he was pushed out of the company though I don't know if his pushes on the CEO to do RTO was part of that or not but I assume their visions for the company simply were mismatched.

I have since left the company but they did well during the pandemic because the company was already on a remote first path. Wouldn't surprise me if they were able to take advantage of the situation and dump some more leases though I'd guess subleases probably are difficult to arrange now.

> “Leadership is a lot less fulfilling and a lot less fun when you’re doing it remotely,” Bock said.

I think this best explains what I've seen, personally. That and the sunk cost fallacy ("we've got all these buildings, we need to use them!").

I actually like being in the office, but I'm in the bay area, so that requires hours of shitty commuting. I like the office, but I don't like it that much.

If I had access to an office that I could get to on public transit in like 20 minutes, that'd be a totally different story. But no, everyone has to have sprawling campuses in the middle of suburbia.

Professional Office Managers need an office to manage. It's like asking for Turkeys to vote for Christmas saying 'don't come and sit in and listen to my speeches all day'

In many cases I suspect that leadership remembers the time when the company was small and everybody was basically all in the same room and how productive that time was. If you can get the entire company into a single small room magical things can happen. But RTO doesn't get the entire company into a single small room.

Has anyone looked at competitor companies and compared the ones with WFH and the ones without it? I’m curious what that data looks like

Does anyone know the legal and liability risk position for a global scale company in relation to where work is done?

Executives of really high ranks know the modern city is the way for them to thrive because SMEs and Citizens thrive living spread, giants thrive in big cities where there is no middle class, only service slaves. Other executives are obedient slaves, being well trained to be to the point they can't recognize their real status, who simply follow the high ranking ones.

The reality is complex but we can easily simplify that with full WFH most cities, the biggest first, will be emptied from the middle class, with them in homes outside from Just Eat to Uber to Wymo are dead, large slice of travel and accommodation services are dead as well, real estate for giants is dead (actually it's already nearly-dead under ICU) while the 2030 Agenda's will fail because those outside owning a home, p.v., car etc feel the opportunity to own and can't easily be impoverished just changing service prices.

This will happen anyway because we haven't enough resources in the world to build smart-cities and we can't keep up for long the actual ones, but if happen quickly too many will still own to form a new working economy, if happen too late only very few will own enough so there will be anyway no distributed economy.

I suggest anyone to rediscover the old Distributism and speculate why both nazism, fascism etc and marxism was against the middle class in particular.

Execs are paid to change reality, not to be dominated by it. What else should we expect?

Its really hard to force employees into sexual relationships with the "big boss" when everyone is working hundreds or thousands of miles away.

I do love that HN commenters painstakingly refute and poke holes in any and all research except that which confirms that remote work is good.

People trust their feelings and experience over research, more at 11.

tl;dr: Leaders who run massively successful and profitable businesses rightfully doubt research published by a random academic with zero entrepreneurial experience. If only someone could explain why.

As an employee, WFH is good As an employer, WFH is evil

Here's two citations you can use for your paper, I'll see my check in the mail.

This explains everything:

"It’s not practical. Hybrid work may be technically the best route, but it’s also complicated to oversee."

Who cares if workers are productive, when the leadership is clearly less productive? And the leadership's time is extremely valuable. If remote work makes workers more productive, while the leadership is less productive, then remote work is bad for a company, full stop, no other conversation is needed.