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Not sure what the purpose is here - it reads more like a soft flex than anything else. We all know "why" RTO gets pushed - and it's not just that executives are living royal lives while the peasants are expected to stress over traffic while their kids wait abandoned at some public school. If anything, thinking that RTO is just about being disconnected highlights how disconnected the author actually is - because it is far more often the case that RTO is driven by tax incentives, rent incentives, and occupant use agreements than just some petty executive saying "let them commute!".

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some petty executive saying "let them commute!".

There was a day after Christmas where the team was kinda taking it easy and went out for a longer than usual lunch, and an executive got in our face about how the day after Christmas is not an excuse to slack off. Then the person had us a deploy a feature that afternoon to prod even though it was supposed to be launched after the holidays. The person also did this remotely because they took the day off (the rest of us were actually in the office).

Power is much nastier than people realize. What I provided was an anecdote, but the #metoo movement probably started just like that.

Edit: I just realized how Dickensian this was, plot synopsis of A Christmas Carol. Just missing the ghosts and soul change.

Good Lord. Over here in the UK Boxing day is a bank holiday.

Many (but not all) organisations take the week of Christmas out as mandatory holiday for efficiency reasons (close building, save heat &c).

We are ecommerce, so the holidays are important revenue events. Our team's management required us to sit at our keyboards, online, so we could screenshot NewRelic graphs and paste them into our teams chat. The people requiring this all had full access to NewRelic to log in and check the graphs. We also had alerts that would page you if something was bad.

The only reason they wanted this observation that way is so that, instead of having to sit down at their laptop and log into the VPN and manage 2FA and keep their computer open so it doesn't log out every 15 minutes and all that, they just had to glance at a teams message on their phone.

We, the peons and laborers of course were not extended that option, and any system built to automatically generate screenshots for teams probably would be treated as a security risk.

I genuinely consider my direct management chain to be effective, nice, and mostly empathetic within reason, but even they manage to internalize a "the peons can be used to give myself a convenience" ideology.

They don't think of you as people, you are just a resource to them.

Can you elaborate on the tax/rent incentives, as it's not obvious what those are.

Same talk as RTO being driven by real estate investors’ influence. I have yet to see some numbers, evidence of this.

Commercial real estate value is often estimated using number of people (feet) who go through the building.

So for example, if you've got 500 people (customers) walking through your building plus 200 people (employees) doing things, then the restaurants and shipping stores and etc can estimate some % of those feet turning into sales.

But if you've got only 300 people (customers) walking through your building plus 50 people (employees) doing things, that % of feet turning into sales goes waaaaaay down. And your retail outlets in the building end up with far fewer sales. They either go out of business or demand cheaper rent.

That's just one way of estimating commercial real estate.

Let's figure your attached parking garage. Assuming it's not-free, then all those employees not paying their parking dues ends up causing the parking garage to not generate revenue. Ooof. Or, let's say it's "free". Well, the people who reserved spots paid for those spots whether they use them or not. But the people who don't reserve spots? The business isn't seeing a return on investment if their employees aren't using them, so why pay their share for maintenance of that parking garage?

What about the HVAC and plumbing? The building owner's son owns those businesses, and it's pretty damn expensive to keep HVAC and plumbing working at peak efficiency. It becomes a lot easier to do if they're not used as much! But your son's business is going to get churned if you don't pay them less for the decreased maintenance costs. And you can't just stop maintenance because those things get damned expensive when they're unmaintained.

And the shipping staff? Well they have to come to the office anyway otherwise nothing gets shipped. It's not fair to those staff! You pay them complete shit, and they used to be able to eat lunch at a decent restaurant and have a decent place to park and have good air conditioning and working toilet. But now, with just everyone else being out of office, the restaurant went out of business and the HVAC is set to a wider range of climate and the toilet's been clogged for a while.

Instead of paying the shipping staff something reasonable to offset their changes, or changing the way that lunch and support services are handled... just demand everyone else come to the office too. That's cheaper.

All of that doesn’t make sense because offices are a cost paid to optimize the efficiency of labor.

Nobody would hurt labor productivity to save an office. It’s backward

I think this assumes there are no conflicts of interest?

You start a successful business- when do you start paying for an office?

Productivity is difficult to measure. I suspect many managers just don't know how to do it, or are not very confident about the results. In-person interactions in an office give managers additional information (such as height). For many, it makes management tasks easier to carry out and generally less stressful (but not necessarily with objectively improved results, I assume).

I don't necessarily buy the arguments around real estate investment, but I think it's important to note that the office is a construct from before the popularity of the internet. A lot of the current crop of exec started their jobs before remote work was viable, so their mental model of how work is done might require an office because that's how they used to work.

It's entirely possible that the question of "labor productivity" has nothing to do with why exec wants us all back in the bullpen, where they can gleefully stare at us from inside their offices.

Undoubtedly the internet makes more remote roles possible. I’m just saying the business already hates paying for the office. Their incentive is aligned with regards to having less office space.

I'm arguing that maybe businesses don't actually hate it. Maybe execs love it and prioritize it.

> Their incentive is aligned with regards to having less office space.

Really? Then why do you think that return-to-office is mandated by so many large organizations? By following that line of thinking then surely their larger footprint would yield even larger savings for work-from-home?

Because they believe it will optimize their labor costs (the most expensive part of white collar business ).

They give employees space in that building so that people have a dedicated space to do their work, free from outside distraction.

This is very much an open question.

Big companies extract tax benefits from governments in exchange for locating their large buildings within said government's jurisdiction. Presumably in some cases said tax benefits come with some sort of verification that the expected quid pro quo (employees wandering around buying lunch and so on) happened.

Our building has multiple first floor stores/restaurants/gym - and post Covid our rental agreements stipulate an average daily occupancy threshold; with a penalty/incentive program based on failing or exceeding that threshold as it is part of the agreements set up with the retailers. There are business tax deductions for on-site workers like utilities, maintenance, office supplies, property insurance, etc. Additionally, there are tax situations - Schaad v. Alder in Ohio for example - where municipalities receive or lose income based on the location of remote workers. In that specific case the municipality where the remote employee actually worked received no income while the municipality where the office existed did.

Cities benefit from people being in office and thus, in the city spending money. In 2024, SF had a new business tax plan to incentivize employers to bring people back to the office, and I wouldn't be surprised if other cities did similar.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/s-f-economy-tax-plan-...

Right but this is a new thing. For decades working from the office was the overwhelming norm. It was just assumed. So I doubt there's many incentives right now. I imagine it's much more about being upset at your expensive rent building being 70+% empty while still costing you as much as well as old fashioned beliefs in performance and monitoring of employees in the office. Also I do think there's some things that may be more difficult to collaborate on even with remote even with video calling

This is what would happen if the Horse Carriage producers had lobbies with enough power and money back when automobiles were invented. They would illegitimately push rules, regulations and coerce the public to cripple cars for their profit and fight against change. Like how the real estate lobbies are doing at this moment. They are akin to horse carriage lobbies and they should be treated as the parasitic, unproductive, reactionary influence that they are on society - without even getting into the bloat in the real estate sector and how it cripples housing.

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