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Companies with return-to-office mandates face losing their most valuable workers

275 points by ewgfdgdfgdf 2y ago

Feeble 2y ago
"Remote workers were not only more productive they were more satisfied with remote work than they had been with working in a traditional office" I think some citation is needed here, there are multiple studies and they have very varied outcome. This one for instance find that productivity drops 18% when working from home: https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515 https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515 At best he is cherry picking his studies and ignoring the contrarian studies, at worst he is blindy pushing his own interest and views.
- rrr_oh_man 2y ago
  I love this, though: > Second, there is a negative selection effect into the office, since workers who prefer home-based work are 12% faster and more accurate at baseline
- pbhjpbhj 2y ago
  This study is of Indian workers doing data entry and employed either direct to office or entirely remotely. I'd expect pretty different results in different industries, demographics, countries. Cherry picking indeed.
  - chrisjj 2y ago
    I suggest you'd need to show more than "I'd expect" for your cherry picking charge to stick.
    - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
      I can't disclose details but I know for my office raw [short term] productivity was about 20% up for WFH (the situation differs in almost every aspect from that in the study your linked). That's non statistically significant to make a general statement, but confirms to me that as a minimum there is high variability. Data entry is low skill, high churn; in person I'd expect managers to put a lot of pressure on because they can drive people away in six months (it might even be preferable for employment law reasons) and still have plenty of people needing jobs to pick up the work. I'm not going to research a paper here, only to note my direct experience makes the broad applicability of your single study highly questionable. It's one study, I'm sure there are now more longitudinal indicative studies for most regions that anyone here can find with ease. You (I assume) were probably right to suggest the OP might be cherry picking, but you didn't do much better IMO (nor did I, I suppose).
- drdrek 2y ago
  This article is the usual case of decide on a conclusion then build the data sources. It's probably the norm now. How many are going to click and share: "Popular belief inconclusive, meta research suggests" vs "A research paper finds popular belief validated!"
robertlagrant 2y ago
I tend to agree with the premise, but it's hard to read something so obviously one-sided. This seems like an article written to be linked to by other articles as "evidence", when it seems pretty weak.
- chrisjj 2y ago
  Agreed. Really poor.
unpopularopp 2y ago
This article doesn't mention people who don't enjoy WFH because of the unification of the workplace and home. Personally I hated that I can never "leave" work and it's always with me at home. Also not everyone can afford an office room to "close out" work to a separate physical place (which is a typical reply when this topic brought up) and I don't even think it counts. I personally like working in office because it's where I work, and then I go home and that's my home. I don't work at home at all (and it's a company policy everyone knows that). But I live in Europe, work is a 30 min bicycle drive from home which I also enjoy. Considering it's an irish news site I'm surprised that was not mentioned.
- keiferski 2y ago
  Yeah I really don’t like working at home. The best situation IMO is a separate workspace that’s within a 5-10 minute walk, preferably with a cafe or some kind of public space en route.
  - prmoustache 2y ago
    The problem is not liking or not working at home. The problem is being forced to work in an office if it doesn't fit you and other jobs allow you to stay at home. And the impact it has on corps ability to retain those workers. I know I have received a number of offers for work with higher salary in the last 2 years with forced hybrid work from office/home[1] but I won't accept any of that. At least until my youngest daughter is out of primary school. I don't mind going to the office once in a while, or even everyday if it is 5-20 minutes from home (as long as I keep possibility to work from home if a particular need comes). But I will refuse one that forces me to burn co2 for no value, that add stress to my day (commuting by vehicle) or that takes me more than 20 minutes by bicycle or public transport as long as I can find a decent one that doesn't force me to do that. My partner's doesn't work from a computer so she will have priority in our place of living for the foreseeable future.
    - keiferski 2y ago
      I agree and I do support companies that allow WFH, as it allows for the situation I mentioned - via coworking in my case. But I was replying to the idea of working at home specifically.
paulgb 2y ago
> Executives who are pushing employees to come back to the office are most likely to succeed if they can make a convincing case for why coming back to the office benefits employees and the organisation. The typical explanation that coming back to the office is important for the culture of the organisation is unfounded at best, and hogwash at worse. Maybe big organizations are bad at communicating RTO reasons, but isn’t it pretty obvious to everyone who has done both that the biggest advantage of working in person is high-bandwidth communication? I feel like the quality and quantity of information exchanged with my colleagues is much higher on days we work in person than remote. There’s a reason why even fully remote companies usually do some sort of recurring offsite. That’s not to say that the benefits of RTO always outweigh the costs, but I find the trope that RTO is just some pointy-haired boss whim to be silly.
- stringsandchars 2y ago
  > high-bandwidth communication This just sounds like some sort of buzzwordy justification for hauling people back to the office. My experience, is that communication propagates better in group-chat environments like Slack, that meetings are faster and more productive on Meet, that my work-focus is magnitudes better in the quiet of my home, and that (if absolutely needed - which is pretty much never) a get-together is more creative and productive if it doesn't happen at the office - but is at another venue altogether.
  - vineyardmike 2y ago
    > My experience, is that communication propagates better in group-chat environments like Slack, that meetings are faster and more productive on Meet, that my work-focus is magnitudes better in the quiet of my home I think this is super dependent on the person and circumstances. I found "meetings" which are just doc reviews or low involvement group updates are better via slack or meet. Active discussions from a few participants are better in person (esp. if using a whiteboard). I think this speaks to the waste of "this meeting could have been an email" culture more than anything. I found that some people are better able to "focus" by ignoring junior employees when WFH, increasing their own productivity at the expense of the junior's productivity and growth. Some of my most "productive" coworkers are also the least helpful to the team, and the least active on chat too.
komali2 2y ago
> I believe the pandemic shook things up in the world of work in ways that are still poorly understood. The great political philosopher Edmund Burke noted that "custom reconciles us to every thing", and I think this applies to all sorts of workplace norms and practices. If we were used to the way things were done in organisations, we were willing to put up with all sorts of organisational policies that were burdensome (e.g., dress codes) or even abusive (e.g., the expectation that we should work beyond normal working hours if asked to do this.) > A year or two away from the office has opened a lot of eyes, and things that were once widely accepted (e.g., office politics) are now barely tolerated, if they are accepted at all. I wonder if this has anything to do with zoomers beginning to enter the workforce. They're often characterized as being far more cynical and vocally intolerant of "office shenanigans."
- addicted 2y ago
  > things that were once widely accepted (e.g., office politics) are now barely tolerated, if they are accepted at all. I’d argue that the fact that the author thinks that “office politics” have somehow disappeared is a reason to discredit anything the author might have to say wrt work altogether. It’s possibly true that with WFH the “politics” people have become much more adept at hiding the fact that they’re playing “office” politics, especially from those, who apparently like the author seem unaware of what’s actually going on at work, but the actual “office politics” has only grown significantly. It’s just more insidious now and the outcomes are not visible until much later.
- bdw5204 2y ago
  There were people who wouldn't put up with the absurdities of office "culture" before universal remote work. They'd end up going into academia or entrepreneurship. My guess is Zoomers are less willing to tolerate this because they didn't "get used to it" in the pre-2020 world when nobody else was questioning it publicly and those who did question it would be gaslit into thinking the insanity was normal. They see a critical mass of older people rejecting these ridiculous norms and that removes the fear of saying what they actually think and the ability of those who've given up hope of anything better to just shut their questions down.
- 2y ago
b3lvedere 2y ago
"This finding is not unexpected. Once you let workers do away with the commute to and from the office, office politics, workplace bullying, boring meetings, the need to wear and take care of business suits and other costly and often uncomfortable attire, you should not be surprised that they will feel happier." Gee.. how weird... people get happier when you don't force them to deal with (unpaid) time consuming and frustrating corporate [insert your favorite animal feces right here].
- iLoveOncall 2y ago
  > force them to deal with (unpaid) time consuming I have personally turned most of those into paid activities. I wake up at 8:30 and start my commute at 9-9:15, and leave to arrive at 6 at home, essentially being free at the same time as when I work from home. Pretty much everyone does the same in my team and even in my company as a whole.
  - Rinzler89 2y ago
    Don't they track time to see that people are at the office less hours than contracted??
    - n4r9 2y ago
      That's a pretty authoritarian move. No doubt some companies do it, but it's practically encouraging slacking via Godhart's law.
      - Rinzler89 2y ago
        >That's a pretty authoritarian move. It's mandated by law in many EU countries, even in the more privacy focused ones. To track workers working time to prevent or track any overtime hours. But it's also used by companies to make sure all workers are at their desk for the full 40h, and not doing something else like commuting or 2h lunches. Hence why most companies don't allow WFH. They can't track your working time at home, and they're not allowed to install spyware on your devices, so butts ins eats at the office it is.
eiigh 2y ago
[flagged]
rob74 2y ago
> Second, there are employees who are trapped in their jobs, either because of family or community obligations or because they lack the skills, knowledge, and abilities to move to other jobs. With the current job market, I think there are more people in this category than the article makes it sound. That's actually why companies think they can get away with forcing you to come back to the office against your will...
- sys_64738 2y ago
  To a certain extent, but if you try to force change on an org which by unilateral mandate by using a limited job market as the breaker then you need to be prepared for the backlash once the job market picks up. Employees remember.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  I think a lot of people don't change job because looking for another job involve all kind of stress. Am I taking the right decision? Will I be happier at the new position? What if I join and that company is announcing 1 year from now that it will have to layoff workers? Also some hiring process are so bureaucratic and long these days that just the thought of enduring all of it is tiring. Also when you are reaching 45y old you are thinking probably more conservatively. I am saying this having moved jobs 6 times in 23 years.
dfgdfg34545456 2y ago
My thoughts on the office/home work management debate: - Encourage workers back in with a carrot not the stick - Be mindful of workers with families or other dependants who see wfh as a great benefit - Don't count days in office and assess people on it - by doing this you are sending a signal that days worked at home don't count.
- blitzar 2y ago
  > you are sending a signal that days worked at home don't count The majority of c-suite execs believe this to be true (except when they are out of the office or working from their summer rental for two months of the year) - why would you not signal it?
- Devasta 2y ago
  > Encourage workers back in with a carrot not the stick Expensify tried this, making the best office they possible could, the end result was people would come in to try it, leave positive feedback then never go back. https://use.expensify.com/blog/the-secret-experiment-behind-the-expensify-lounge https://use.expensify.com/blog/the-secret-experiment-behind-...
  - dfgdfg34545456 2y ago
    At a glance of that article they improved some of their furnishings and facilities. Is that the only thing you are considering when I refer to a carrot and not a stick?
    - Devasta 2y ago
      Apologies, I might have misunderstood: when you say carrot, are you referring to things like extra bump in salary to go in?
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    Skimming the article, it feels they've focused on trinkets. The one thing that could make meaningful difference to their employees is giving everyone a room with a door that closes. The article doesn't seem to indicate they tried that. Free drinks and call rooms aren't going to offset the hell of an open-plan office; it's not surprising if people already used to WFH would pass on that.
pjc50 2y ago
See also https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2023/0904/1402957-offices-workers-bosses-managers-executives-psychology/ https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2023/0904/1402957-offices-work... There's usually a hugely simplified model of the workplace in play, where workers are turning some handle marked "economic output" and bosses are selfless agents of the company which is in turn entirely operating in the interests of the shareholders. People don't like analysing the non-monetary fuzzy aspects of all this; rewardingness of the job, social relationships, the social reward of "subordination"/"bossness" given to managers (which doesn't work when they don't have any visible subordinates), and so on. That requires a lot of anthropology. (Personal observations: I don't mind being in my current office, but commuting is a pure deadweight loss; the social benefits of contact are real, as are the benefits of being at home; many of my coworkers are on a different continent and I cannot be in the same office as them anyway)
- b3lvedere 2y ago
  "People don't like analysing the non-monetary fuzzy aspects of all this; rewardingness of the job, social relationships". I guess the bosses don't know how to put those fuzzy numbers in Excel yet? :) Should not be too difficult though, since an entire country actually found some way to do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness
  - pjc50 2y ago
    It's a great idea, but how on earth can you quantify happiness? That seems like a good way of fooling yourself by metrics on the unmeasurable.
    - skirmish 2y ago
      Google used to have Googlegeist when most everybody in the company would answer survey questions such as (rate 1-5): * I am excited about my Product Area's strategic direction * My Senior VP takes feedback seriously * I plan to stay with the company for the next 3 years The results would be summarized across Product Areas (e.g. Google Cloud, Youtube), and numbers compared year over year. Then HR forced everyone to RTO, and mostly canceled this feedback outright to hide the wide discontent.
mytailorisrich 2y ago
RTO mandates are sometimes a simple action to a difficult issue that the company is not able to face. In my case we now have a RTO mandate to work from office at least 2 days a week, which means staring at a screen and attending Teams meeting from office instead of from home (there has been no thought beyond "you have to be in office") Why? Management seem to think that there is a productivity issue and that employees should work harder. But apparently, it's due to WFH and the fact that management has been horrible, that the company has gone through several rounds of layoffs with massive reduction in headcount over the last few years, and that salaries have essentially been frozen for 3 years has nothing to do with it. So, yes, CVs have been sent out.
- chrisjj 2y ago
  > there has been no thought beyond "you have to be in office") No thought? > Management seem to think that there is a productivity issue and that employees should work harder. Sounds like thought to me.
firesteelrain 2y ago
One thing I have never seen mentioned is how organizations are dealing with IP theft such as source code. You could share IP with non employees such as a spouse by simply sharing your screen. It’s one thing to sign an NDA and another to have signed it but then inadvertent or intentional screen sharing is another. I work in a highly regulated industry so not sure how this would work.
- sys_64738 2y ago
  Showing a page of code do your wife is one thing, but stealing source code files is a complete other. Orgs are installing tools to track what you do and when you do it so that they can audit your actions. They might not be able to prevent you stealing the code but the evidence of your actions will be usable in a court of law when they make an example of you.
  - firesteelrain 2y ago
    If you have never worked in a highly regulated industry such as defense or finance then I don’t think you would be so flippant over the data loss concerns.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    - Devasta 2y ago
      I work in finance; if you came to me with these sorts of concerns I'd think you a paranoid lunatic. Lock your screen when away from your desk, but no one is going to be pulling the secret sauce from your systems by occasionally going into your office to ask if you'd like a cuppa.
      - firesteelrain 2y ago
        I get it - but I am not paranoid lol This is coming from companies such as Lockheed Martin where working on tangentially related defense projects at home would be bad.
rrr_oh_man 2y ago
I've always found it weird that it's often called "work from home" and not "remote-first". It's not only about the location, imho. I don't want to stay at home. I want to work where I'll be most productive on that day. This can be my dedicated desk, my sofa, a Chinese buffet, the coffee shop around the corner, or one of the remaining WeWork offices. There is also a whole different aspect to it, which imho is overlooked and underappreciated: asynchronicity. When you build your organisation under the paradigm of remote-first, you can tap into a beyond-regional (= worldwide), distributed talent pool. Once you tap into that beyond-regional, distributed talent pool, however, you will get people with very diverse individual realities: People who located in different time zones. People with kids. People with disabilities. People with second jobs. There are also people who are more productive in the mornings, others who just bang out amazing code late at night. People for whom this might change over time, sometimes during the course of the week. Other people who take Wednesdays off, but work Sundays instead. All kinds of things which happen at different times and are not entirely plannable. To capture all these flavours of productivity, you need to also build an organization that works well with asynchronicity. Ideally, an organization that is async-first. This means: as an IC / manager you need to agree on deliverables and time lines, overshare information, submit actionable requests to your people, not require/expect immediate responses, and make explicitly stated assumptions when needed. With this in place you have an organisation that is truly resilient, high-bandwith (as @paulgb said), and works like a global mycelial organism instead of a rooted tree, independent of location or time. That's much more than to just "WFH" from 9 to 5. Source: Have worked with and lead teams from San Francisco to Manila.
- marmaduke 2y ago
  Yes! I have at least a few colleagues who do best coding on the train or airplane. I used to regularly switch coffee shops when switching tasks or projects. Async is great, but it is hard to do partially. Sync is infectious.
- boulos 2y ago
  How have you handled synchronization? I agree with async-primary, but it's also important to get some overlap depending on the situation. Did folks in Manila work off hours to align a bit with San Francisco?
kisamoto 2y ago
Isn't a lot of the WFH/WFO debate centered around personal preferences? A lot of people like WFH but that doesn't mean there aren't also a lot of people who do actually like/prefer to be in the office. Of course generally it's not up to them, instead up to the management who sets the office policy but to describe the people who don't like going to the office as 'the good ones' seems a little short sighted.
- yieldcrv 2y ago
  It appears very few people are privileged to be in a place for it to be a personal preference. Like how the “I love Mondays” people are a rounding error. Very few of the talented people with choices - already rare - are choosing that personal preference. And the other people that love it for the networking were not the talented people with choices, they are the ambitious juniors desperate to build rapport.
chrisjj 2y ago
Evidence needed for this claim remote working "does away with" "office politics, workplace bullying, boring meetings".
shoubidouwah 2y ago
The discussion here follows well understood battle lines, but I want to add my grain of salt: working from the office comes bundled with commute. And the crux of arguments tends to be where you fall on the [commute is hell <-> working from home is hard due to circumstances] continuum. Some say that "commute helps clear the mind / switch context", but a simple walk does the same IMO; the mandatory presence in a vehicle along with everybody else at the same time, unpaid and very often for hours everyday feels incredibly invasive, wasteful and unjust. Every person then can talk price based on their circumstances, but that's the nub of it for me.
- mondrian 2y ago
  The flip side of spending "unpaid time" in commute is having "unpaid space" at home in terms of home office.
  - benterix 2y ago
    I actually rented separate space for that. So I pay for 50 m2 of private office space where I have two rooms, kitchen, bathroom, a desk with a comfortable chair, a bed, some simple gym equipment and other amenities. And in spite of paying for this every month, I would never ever come to the office where I could use some of these things (an old office chair) for free. It feels like some dark era has ended, at least for a certain type of employees.
    - carschno 2y ago
      Interesting. Who pays for that? Sounds like, economically speaking, you are taking over the costs from your employer for providing a usable workspace.
      - shoubidouwah 2y ago
        in other words, "office space provides him with negative utility"
      - benterix 2y ago
dhotson 2y ago
Anecdotally.. - Working from home for long stretches.. feels more like "living at work" for me. Hybrid is good. Some boundaries in my life are healthy. - Most people hate their commute. I ride my bike to work and it's the best bit of my day. - I'm in a three person startup.. a ton of the software engineering and business problems I work on get hashed out talking over lunch and coffee—or in 2 minute hallway chats. - I think there's something in it: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2011/04/28/lunch/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2011/04/28/lunch/ - It helps that my office environment is quiet and I get lots of uninterrupted time. My main argument to support work-from-home is because I think building top-notch software is a strong-link problem. https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-link-problem https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-l... A strong link problem is where "overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is". In this environment you really want to attract and hang on to your top performers! So it makes sense to do what you need to do to keep them happy. But also, in my experience, the best performing teams I've ever worked in.. we ate lunch together nearly every day.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
majoe 2y ago
That article kind of misses the premise of its own headline. 90% of the article is the usual discussion about working from home: Are employers more or less productive, cultural changes after COVID, managers reasons for RTO, etc But all of these don't answer the why of the actual key observation: "...they are losing experienced managers and top performers at disproportionate rates" Why disproportionate? There could be many reasons, but there is surely an obvious one: "You can force employees back to the office, but not the good ones " And why is that so? Because you're less likely to force a good employee than a bad employee to do something, simply because the bad employee has less opportunities to leave your company. The more interesting question would have been, whether there is actually a disproportionate amount of good employees, which wanted to work from home and therefore left, or only a disproportionate amount of good employees, which were able to leave (which is naturally always the case).
999900000999 2y ago
Having the experience of both working remotely and in office recently, you'd have to pay me a minimum of 50k per year more to RTO. I don't want to commute. Above 150k or so I'm only keeping 50% of every dollar above that . So we're taking another 25k a year, or about 2k a month. I'm spending 2 hours a day on my commute. That's around 160 hours a month. That means I'm only making 12.5$ an hour commuting. I also have to give up being able to shower mid day, cook, lay on my couch, etc. I live in a high cost of living city right now, but I could just move to anywhere in the US tomorrow without issue.
- ohthatsnotright 2y ago
  > I could just move to anywhere in the US tomorrow without issue. As someone who did that, be careful. It's not all sunshine and puppies. Many employers promise they can support a move or it's fine but then when you update your address in the HR system it becomes a different story. I certainly wouldn't advise anyone move to a US territory if they think they can just move without issue, employers absolutely will not hire here (not even Gusto).
- listenallyall 2y ago
  > I could just move to anywhere in the US tomorrow without issue So move closer to work?
  - 999900000999 2y ago
    Alright. Hypothetically let's say we're talking about a job in Manhattan. Rent will be about 5k for a 1bdrm vs 1500$ in Chicago. In this case even with a 60k pay difference I'm losing money.
    - listenallyall 2y ago
      Ok, so really you can't "just move to anywhere in the US tomorrow without issue" since you're raising issues. I don't understand, you complained about an hour commute each way, I thought you wanted to reduce that, not move to the midwest. Anyway tons of people who work in Manhattan live in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, even the Bronx or (god forbid) New Jersey. Plenty of public transportation from just about anywhere in the region.
Devasta 2y ago
'Nobody on his deathbed ever said, "I wish I had spent more time at the office."' --Paul Tsongas Thanks to the Covid lockdowns we now know this isn't the case, in fact we can be quite confident a fairly large portion will spend their final moments surrounded by family and loved ones while wishing their could see one more time the thing that matters most to them: the shitty office cube farm.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- avh02 2y ago
  Henry Royce (of Rolls Royce) disagrees: > I have only one regret … that I have not worked harder. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Royce https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Royce
  - 0x000xca0xfe 2y ago
    I don't see the word "office" in this quote?
    - wpguy 2y ago
      I agree with that. I wish worked harder in some of my studies in college or on some self-teaching. None of that has to do with me wasting my time going into an office.
binary132 2y ago
I wonder if the divide has something to do with how much space and comfort a person has in their home. Someone who lives in an apartment with three kids and their in-laws might prefer office work more than someone who lives in a roomy house in the woods or suburbs.
steveBK123 2y ago
Some uncommon topics in the WFH/RTO debate.. Many employers slowly expanded the norms of work hours during remote/hybrid, which haven't been walked back now that they demand in-office. Jobs that used to be a 9-6 in office are now getting regularly scheduled 8/8:30am meetings (and still keeping the 5pm ones). Employees are left with more complex working life of waking up extra extra early, or dialing into early calls, then taking a train between meeting breaks to get in before lunch, etc. This includes stressing that they get in early enough for the swipe to count. A side effect is "statutory swipes" where others push the limits to work substantially fewer hours on office days as some sort of revenge. My wife has coworkers with long commutes who leave at 3pm when in-office. We work in financial services and this is previously unheard of, the markets aren't even closed by then. 3pm departure is like a twice per year markets early close departure time. Another issue is with some of the increase in subway violence in NYC in particular, women are not as comfortable commuting as they were 5 years ago. My wife, and plenty of women I know no longer listen to music during their commute as they want to "remain aware of their surroundings". That is to say, the commute is quite the opposite of mind clearing for them.
- demosthanos 2y ago
  > Jobs that used to be a 9-6 in office are now getting regularly scheduled 8/8:30am meetings (and still keeping the 5pm ones). Incidentally, this sentence actually demonstrates that this is not a new thing with WFH. At some point in the game for a lot of people, the 9–5 became a 9–6 as employers decided to start begrudging employees their lunch break. If you're on salary, short-sighted employers are incentivized to take as much of your time as you will let them. Going into the office won't prevent that (especially not in the internet era), you have to stand up for yourself.
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Related: Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40339852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40339852
johnny99k 2y ago
After my first few jobs out of college (15 years ago), I realized I hate working from someone else's office. It feels so constrained and like I'm in school again. Remote work was very rare then with salaried jobs, but not as a contractor. The company I'm working for now had an office pre-pandemic (I would meet with the director once/month), sold the one here locally during the pandemic, and got acquired by a large, international, company where the majority of the employees work remotely and the HQ is in Europe (I'm in the US). The last time I had to go to an office was for a local contract a few years ago (80 miles away from me) that required me to drive-in once/week for a few hours. The project ended after a few months and I found something 100% remote. I used to work from coworking spaces and sometimes the library, but now I have my own home office. Everyone talks about mixing life and work when working from home. It's pretty easy for me to just turn everything off and walk away at 5.
- drewcoo 2y ago
  > It feels so constrained and like I'm in school again. When I was in school I did most of my productive work at home.
m0llusk 2y ago
Hard to find a link with all the noise, but there was a big employer in Singapore that studied work from home well before COVID and started to switch to remote work because it made employees so much more productive. Yet this piece casually asserts "Against all expectations, remote workers appear to work harder and more productively than workers in traditional offices." The only people with these expectations were those who ignore the literature on productivity. Kind of sad that this seems to include most managers and workers in tech.
GuB-42 2y ago
It is not specific to "back to the office". You generally can't "force" good employees to do things they don't want to. You can get them back to the office, some of them don't mind, some may even want it, or you may be able to negotiate it with an appropriate compensation, but you can't force them or they will just leave. Same for everything else: being on-call, travel, overtime work, flexible hours, etc...
codr7 2y ago
News flash: You can't force the good ones to do anything against their will. And whenever you force anyone to do anything against their will, there are serious consequences that are not easy to fix.
armada651 2y ago
> First, there are some employees who believe that being in the office will benefit their careers. They are probably right; workers who return to the office are more likely to receive promotions. Whether organisations should promote the careerists who come back to the office in hopes that their loyalty (or submissiveness to RTO mandates) will win them promotions that their performance and effectiveness would not, is an open question. I take issue with the fact how quickly this is dismissed as simply rewarding loyalty and submissiveness. It completely ignores how much junior employees struggle with WFH. Without an office there is very little opportunity for junior employees to casually talk to senior employees and learn from them. It is also much harder for managers to notice if a junior employee is doing well or not. So it is no surprise it is easier to get promotions with an RTO mandate and it has very little to do with loyalty.
- mozman 2y ago
  I proactively schedule 1:1s with junior staff and reach out. I weed out the ones with potential and ones who lack ambition.
  - cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
    “Proactively” scheduling 1:1s with juniors is, frankly, the bare minimum. It’s just doing your job. If you think that this solves the problem, you are bad at your job.
- qzx_pierri 2y ago
  Are you a manager?
- civilized 2y ago
  The lack of communication of potentially valid reasons such as these might contribute to why people view RTO mandates with cynicism. If we knew why we were being asked to RTO, we could solve that problem in the way we thought best, combining in-person and remote time. And those of us with junior team members we care about are already solving for this in the way we think best.
tssva 2y ago
I choose to retire earlier than planned rather than return to the office. I retired last August at age 54. I got remarried in October and now spend my days managing a horse farm and restoration of a 1800s farm house which came with my wife. By managing I mean generally getting in the way of and annoying the actual farm manager and our general contractor. It beats commuting and sitting in an office all day.
irrational 2y ago
My company has some positions that are work from home. Those who work from home receive $80/month for internet. So, by going into the office, I have to pay for my own home internet, gas and maintenance for the car, work clothing, etc. And that isn’t even including the time question (time to get ready, time to drive in and back home, time to find parking and walk in, time to find a place to sit, etc.) So, having to work in the office is a pay cut.
- listenallyall 2y ago
  Yes, for a brief time until your employer opens up those remote jobs to candidates in India, Argentina, Eastern Europe, etc. Then you'll see real pay cuts.
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callamdelaney 2y ago
Is the advantage of 'close collaboration' worth the disadvantage of working in a glorified sweatshop? Give me an office and I'll come to the office.
noirscape 2y ago
I'll take the controversial position and say that RTO (with a semi-flexible hybrid option for sudden appointments) is the best outcome. Some context; during the pandemic, everyone suddenly had to do WFH, including uni studies. In my case, I did both an internship and my studies, so my main exposure to WFH is through this lens. WFH as a mandate policy ended when I got an actual job. The main concerns when it comes to WFH I experienced are as follows: 1. Lack of commute means no hard checks on work-life separation. Commute sucks. It's also a period for your brain to turn off any association you still have with work, a period in which you're unreachable by anyone and in general helps you vent off the day's stress. It's also way too easy to overwork yourself without commute when you don't have to go home on time. With commute, there's a clear endpoint because the next bus is otherwise in an hour. 2. Complete collapse of social interactions. "Get friends" isn't so easy when most third spaces are unavailable (amped up by COVID as a "worst scenario" since they had to close, but they're declining on the whole), you've got introverted tendencies and in general your culture is becoming much more distant in terms of the barrier between "acquainted" and "friend" with casual interactions. Most people get their social interactions in a day from work and unless you're either living with family or friends, WFH won't change that. It just makes people depressed from what I can tell, something which statistics back up (although people who are hard on WFH usually try to blame this on other worldly ills, post-COVID measured a notable spike in mental issues and one that's somewhat settling now that RTO is a thing). 3. Productivity collapse and lack of oversight. Lack of oversight if you have a job with clear requirements, clear goals and clear means to achieve it is great. It completely fucking sucks if you're a junior or need to actively test and check up with other people in the office to see if something fits to desired spec/need to talk about why something doesn't logically fit spec. Email, Slack and Teams have a degree of formality in them that a simple "hey, can you look at this for a sec" when someone walks past your desk doesn't have. Especially during my internship, I noticed this problem as the lack of oversight kinda started to spin out of control after a while due to changing bosses and mediocre rapport with other employees at the company. Never unsolvable, but absolutely not good and I do have concerns with how well training up juniors into seniors (a basic part of career growth as you become experienced with the ins and outs of your job and learn what works) is going to go when direct interactions with seniors (who can rapidly answer institutional knowledge questions or know the "core tools" from the back of their head) are as low as they are with WFH.
acconrad 2y ago
I've been remote for years even before Covid. RTO vs remote comes down to how and where you work best. When folks want to go remote I ask them "when you were in school, did you study better in the library or at home in your bedroom?" If they said bedroom, I assume they can work from home. If they say library, I think RTO makes more sense. As much as I love remote, the best answer, like all things, is that best is relative to each person. What works for you doesn't work for others. Imho the best approach to measure productivity is to see where people do their best work and support that. And if you think something works for you but it isn't (i.e., low performance rating), well... time to head into the office or find a new job. You, the individual, also have to be willing to change if you're not performing your best because you _think_ remote will work for you but in reality you're not nearly as present or productive. Mandates, as the name implies, sort of admits that the ideal isn't best for {someone} otherwise you wouldn't need a mandate; people would naturally come back into the office if they so chose because it was best for them.
potterken 2y ago
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OfficeChad 2y ago
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275 points by ewgfdgdfgdf 2y ago

"Remote workers were not only more productive they were more satisfied with remote work than they had been with working in a traditional office" I think some citation is needed here, there are multiple studies and they have very varied outcome. This one for instance find that productivity drops 18% when working from home: https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515 https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515 At best he is cherry picking his studies and ignoring the contrarian studies, at worst he is blindy pushing his own interest and views.

rrr_oh_man 2y ago
I love this, though: > Second, there is a negative selection effect into the office, since workers who prefer home-based work are 12% faster and more accurate at baseline
pbhjpbhj 2y ago
This study is of Indian workers doing data entry and employed either direct to office or entirely remotely. I'd expect pretty different results in different industries, demographics, countries. Cherry picking indeed.
- chrisjj 2y ago
  I suggest you'd need to show more than "I'd expect" for your cherry picking charge to stick.
  - pbhjpbhj 2y ago
    I can't disclose details but I know for my office raw [short term] productivity was about 20% up for WFH (the situation differs in almost every aspect from that in the study your linked). That's non statistically significant to make a general statement, but confirms to me that as a minimum there is high variability. Data entry is low skill, high churn; in person I'd expect managers to put a lot of pressure on because they can drive people away in six months (it might even be preferable for employment law reasons) and still have plenty of people needing jobs to pick up the work. I'm not going to research a paper here, only to note my direct experience makes the broad applicability of your single study highly questionable. It's one study, I'm sure there are now more longitudinal indicative studies for most regions that anyone here can find with ease. You (I assume) were probably right to suggest the OP might be cherry picking, but you didn't do much better IMO (nor did I, I suppose).
drdrek 2y ago
This article is the usual case of decide on a conclusion then build the data sources. It's probably the norm now. How many are going to click and share: "Popular belief inconclusive, meta research suggests" vs "A research paper finds popular belief validated!"

robertlagrant 2y ago

I tend to agree with the premise, but it's hard to read something so obviously one-sided. This seems like an article written to be linked to by other articles as "evidence", when it seems pretty weak.

chrisjj 2y ago
Agreed. Really poor.

unpopularopp 2y ago

This article doesn't mention people who don't enjoy WFH because of the unification of the workplace and home. Personally I hated that I can never "leave" work and it's always with me at home. Also not everyone can afford an office room to "close out" work to a separate physical place (which is a typical reply when this topic brought up) and I don't even think it counts. I personally like working in office because it's where I work, and then I go home and that's my home. I don't work at home at all (and it's a company policy everyone knows that). But I live in Europe, work is a 30 min bicycle drive from home which I also enjoy. Considering it's an irish news site I'm surprised that was not mentioned.

keiferski 2y ago
Yeah I really don’t like working at home. The best situation IMO is a separate workspace that’s within a 5-10 minute walk, preferably with a cafe or some kind of public space en route.
- prmoustache 2y ago
  The problem is not liking or not working at home. The problem is being forced to work in an office if it doesn't fit you and other jobs allow you to stay at home. And the impact it has on corps ability to retain those workers. I know I have received a number of offers for work with higher salary in the last 2 years with forced hybrid work from office/home[1] but I won't accept any of that. At least until my youngest daughter is out of primary school. I don't mind going to the office once in a while, or even everyday if it is 5-20 minutes from home (as long as I keep possibility to work from home if a particular need comes). But I will refuse one that forces me to burn co2 for no value, that add stress to my day (commuting by vehicle) or that takes me more than 20 minutes by bicycle or public transport as long as I can find a decent one that doesn't force me to do that. My partner's doesn't work from a computer so she will have priority in our place of living for the foreseeable future.
  - keiferski 2y ago
    I agree and I do support companies that allow WFH, as it allows for the situation I mentioned - via coworking in my case. But I was replying to the idea of working at home specifically.

paulgb 2y ago

> Executives who are pushing employees to come back to the office are most likely to succeed if they can make a convincing case for why coming back to the office benefits employees and the organisation. The typical explanation that coming back to the office is important for the culture of the organisation is unfounded at best, and hogwash at worse. Maybe big organizations are bad at communicating RTO reasons, but isn’t it pretty obvious to everyone who has done both that the biggest advantage of working in person is high-bandwidth communication? I feel like the quality and quantity of information exchanged with my colleagues is much higher on days we work in person than remote. There’s a reason why even fully remote companies usually do some sort of recurring offsite. That’s not to say that the benefits of RTO always outweigh the costs, but I find the trope that RTO is just some pointy-haired boss whim to be silly.

stringsandchars 2y ago
> high-bandwidth communication This just sounds like some sort of buzzwordy justification for hauling people back to the office. My experience, is that communication propagates better in group-chat environments like Slack, that meetings are faster and more productive on Meet, that my work-focus is magnitudes better in the quiet of my home, and that (if absolutely needed - which is pretty much never) a get-together is more creative and productive if it doesn't happen at the office - but is at another venue altogether.
- vineyardmike 2y ago
  > My experience, is that communication propagates better in group-chat environments like Slack, that meetings are faster and more productive on Meet, that my work-focus is magnitudes better in the quiet of my home I think this is super dependent on the person and circumstances. I found "meetings" which are just doc reviews or low involvement group updates are better via slack or meet. Active discussions from a few participants are better in person (esp. if using a whiteboard). I think this speaks to the waste of "this meeting could have been an email" culture more than anything. I found that some people are better able to "focus" by ignoring junior employees when WFH, increasing their own productivity at the expense of the junior's productivity and growth. Some of my most "productive" coworkers are also the least helpful to the team, and the least active on chat too.

komali2 2y ago

> I believe the pandemic shook things up in the world of work in ways that are still poorly understood. The great political philosopher Edmund Burke noted that "custom reconciles us to every thing", and I think this applies to all sorts of workplace norms and practices. If we were used to the way things were done in organisations, we were willing to put up with all sorts of organisational policies that were burdensome (e.g., dress codes) or even abusive (e.g., the expectation that we should work beyond normal working hours if asked to do this.) > A year or two away from the office has opened a lot of eyes, and things that were once widely accepted (e.g., office politics) are now barely tolerated, if they are accepted at all. I wonder if this has anything to do with zoomers beginning to enter the workforce. They're often characterized as being far more cynical and vocally intolerant of "office shenanigans."

addicted 2y ago
> things that were once widely accepted (e.g., office politics) are now barely tolerated, if they are accepted at all. I’d argue that the fact that the author thinks that “office politics” have somehow disappeared is a reason to discredit anything the author might have to say wrt work altogether. It’s possibly true that with WFH the “politics” people have become much more adept at hiding the fact that they’re playing “office” politics, especially from those, who apparently like the author seem unaware of what’s actually going on at work, but the actual “office politics” has only grown significantly. It’s just more insidious now and the outcomes are not visible until much later.
bdw5204 2y ago
There were people who wouldn't put up with the absurdities of office "culture" before universal remote work. They'd end up going into academia or entrepreneurship. My guess is Zoomers are less willing to tolerate this because they didn't "get used to it" in the pre-2020 world when nobody else was questioning it publicly and those who did question it would be gaslit into thinking the insanity was normal. They see a critical mass of older people rejecting these ridiculous norms and that removes the fear of saying what they actually think and the ability of those who've given up hope of anything better to just shut their questions down.
2y ago

b3lvedere 2y ago

"This finding is not unexpected. Once you let workers do away with the commute to and from the office, office politics, workplace bullying, boring meetings, the need to wear and take care of business suits and other costly and often uncomfortable attire, you should not be surprised that they will feel happier." Gee.. how weird... people get happier when you don't force them to deal with (unpaid) time consuming and frustrating corporate [insert your favorite animal feces right here].

iLoveOncall 2y ago
> force them to deal with (unpaid) time consuming I have personally turned most of those into paid activities. I wake up at 8:30 and start my commute at 9-9:15, and leave to arrive at 6 at home, essentially being free at the same time as when I work from home. Pretty much everyone does the same in my team and even in my company as a whole.
- Rinzler89 2y ago
  Don't they track time to see that people are at the office less hours than contracted??
  - n4r9 2y ago
    That's a pretty authoritarian move. No doubt some companies do it, but it's practically encouraging slacking via Godhart's law.
    - Rinzler89 2y ago
      >That's a pretty authoritarian move. It's mandated by law in many EU countries, even in the more privacy focused ones. To track workers working time to prevent or track any overtime hours. But it's also used by companies to make sure all workers are at their desk for the full 40h, and not doing something else like commuting or 2h lunches. Hence why most companies don't allow WFH. They can't track your working time at home, and they're not allowed to install spyware on your devices, so butts ins eats at the office it is.

eiigh 2y ago

[flagged]

rob74 2y ago

> Second, there are employees who are trapped in their jobs, either because of family or community obligations or because they lack the skills, knowledge, and abilities to move to other jobs. With the current job market, I think there are more people in this category than the article makes it sound. That's actually why companies think they can get away with forcing you to come back to the office against your will...

sys_64738 2y ago
To a certain extent, but if you try to force change on an org which by unilateral mandate by using a limited job market as the breaker then you need to be prepared for the backlash once the job market picks up. Employees remember.
prmoustache 2y ago
I think a lot of people don't change job because looking for another job involve all kind of stress. Am I taking the right decision? Will I be happier at the new position? What if I join and that company is announcing 1 year from now that it will have to layoff workers? Also some hiring process are so bureaucratic and long these days that just the thought of enduring all of it is tiring. Also when you are reaching 45y old you are thinking probably more conservatively. I am saying this having moved jobs 6 times in 23 years.

dfgdfg34545456 2y ago

My thoughts on the office/home work management debate: - Encourage workers back in with a carrot not the stick - Be mindful of workers with families or other dependants who see wfh as a great benefit - Don't count days in office and assess people on it - by doing this you are sending a signal that days worked at home don't count.

blitzar 2y ago
> you are sending a signal that days worked at home don't count The majority of c-suite execs believe this to be true (except when they are out of the office or working from their summer rental for two months of the year) - why would you not signal it?
Devasta 2y ago
> Encourage workers back in with a carrot not the stick Expensify tried this, making the best office they possible could, the end result was people would come in to try it, leave positive feedback then never go back. https://use.expensify.com/blog/the-secret-experiment-behind-the-expensify-lounge https://use.expensify.com/blog/the-secret-experiment-behind-...
- dfgdfg34545456 2y ago
  At a glance of that article they improved some of their furnishings and facilities. Is that the only thing you are considering when I refer to a carrot and not a stick?
  - Devasta 2y ago
    Apologies, I might have misunderstood: when you say carrot, are you referring to things like extra bump in salary to go in?
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Skimming the article, it feels they've focused on trinkets. The one thing that could make meaningful difference to their employees is giving everyone a room with a door that closes. The article doesn't seem to indicate they tried that. Free drinks and call rooms aren't going to offset the hell of an open-plan office; it's not surprising if people already used to WFH would pass on that.

pjc50 2y ago

See also https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2023/0904/1402957-offices-workers-bosses-managers-executives-psychology/ https://www.rte.ie/brainstorm/2023/0904/1402957-offices-work... There's usually a hugely simplified model of the workplace in play, where workers are turning some handle marked "economic output" and bosses are selfless agents of the company which is in turn entirely operating in the interests of the shareholders. People don't like analysing the non-monetary fuzzy aspects of all this; rewardingness of the job, social relationships, the social reward of "subordination"/"bossness" given to managers (which doesn't work when they don't have any visible subordinates), and so on. That requires a lot of anthropology. (Personal observations: I don't mind being in my current office, but commuting is a pure deadweight loss; the social benefits of contact are real, as are the benefits of being at home; many of my coworkers are on a different continent and I cannot be in the same office as them anyway)

b3lvedere 2y ago
"People don't like analysing the non-monetary fuzzy aspects of all this; rewardingness of the job, social relationships". I guess the bosses don't know how to put those fuzzy numbers in Excel yet? :) Should not be too difficult though, since an entire country actually found some way to do it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_National_Happiness
- pjc50 2y ago
  It's a great idea, but how on earth can you quantify happiness? That seems like a good way of fooling yourself by metrics on the unmeasurable.
  - skirmish 2y ago
    Google used to have Googlegeist when most everybody in the company would answer survey questions such as (rate 1-5): * I am excited about my Product Area's strategic direction * My Senior VP takes feedback seriously * I plan to stay with the company for the next 3 years The results would be summarized across Product Areas (e.g. Google Cloud, Youtube), and numbers compared year over year. Then HR forced everyone to RTO, and mostly canceled this feedback outright to hide the wide discontent.

mytailorisrich 2y ago

RTO mandates are sometimes a simple action to a difficult issue that the company is not able to face. In my case we now have a RTO mandate to work from office at least 2 days a week, which means staring at a screen and attending Teams meeting from office instead of from home (there has been no thought beyond "you have to be in office") Why? Management seem to think that there is a productivity issue and that employees should work harder. But apparently, it's due to WFH and the fact that management has been horrible, that the company has gone through several rounds of layoffs with massive reduction in headcount over the last few years, and that salaries have essentially been frozen for 3 years has nothing to do with it. So, yes, CVs have been sent out.

chrisjj 2y ago
> there has been no thought beyond "you have to be in office") No thought? > Management seem to think that there is a productivity issue and that employees should work harder. Sounds like thought to me.

firesteelrain 2y ago

One thing I have never seen mentioned is how organizations are dealing with IP theft such as source code. You could share IP with non employees such as a spouse by simply sharing your screen. It’s one thing to sign an NDA and another to have signed it but then inadvertent or intentional screen sharing is another. I work in a highly regulated industry so not sure how this would work.

sys_64738 2y ago
Showing a page of code do your wife is one thing, but stealing source code files is a complete other. Orgs are installing tools to track what you do and when you do it so that they can audit your actions. They might not be able to prevent you stealing the code but the evidence of your actions will be usable in a court of law when they make an example of you.
- firesteelrain 2y ago
  If you have never worked in a highly regulated industry such as defense or finance then I don’t think you would be so flippant over the data loss concerns.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - Devasta 2y ago
    I work in finance; if you came to me with these sorts of concerns I'd think you a paranoid lunatic. Lock your screen when away from your desk, but no one is going to be pulling the secret sauce from your systems by occasionally going into your office to ask if you'd like a cuppa.
    - firesteelrain 2y ago
      I get it - but I am not paranoid lol This is coming from companies such as Lockheed Martin where working on tangentially related defense projects at home would be bad.

rrr_oh_man 2y ago

I've always found it weird that it's often called "work from home" and not "remote-first". It's not only about the location, imho. I don't want to stay at home. I want to work where I'll be most productive on that day. This can be my dedicated desk, my sofa, a Chinese buffet, the coffee shop around the corner, or one of the remaining WeWork offices. There is also a whole different aspect to it, which imho is overlooked and underappreciated: asynchronicity. When you build your organisation under the paradigm of remote-first, you can tap into a beyond-regional (= worldwide), distributed talent pool. Once you tap into that beyond-regional, distributed talent pool, however, you will get people with very diverse individual realities: People who located in different time zones. People with kids. People with disabilities. People with second jobs. There are also people who are more productive in the mornings, others who just bang out amazing code late at night. People for whom this might change over time, sometimes during the course of the week. Other people who take Wednesdays off, but work Sundays instead. All kinds of things which happen at different times and are not entirely plannable. To capture all these flavours of productivity, you need to also build an organization that works well with asynchronicity. Ideally, an organization that is async-first. This means: as an IC / manager you need to agree on deliverables and time lines, overshare information, submit actionable requests to your people, not require/expect immediate responses, and make explicitly stated assumptions when needed. With this in place you have an organisation that is truly resilient, high-bandwith (as @paulgb said), and works like a global mycelial organism instead of a rooted tree, independent of location or time. That's much more than to just "WFH" from 9 to 5. Source: Have worked with and lead teams from San Francisco to Manila.

marmaduke 2y ago
Yes! I have at least a few colleagues who do best coding on the train or airplane. I used to regularly switch coffee shops when switching tasks or projects. Async is great, but it is hard to do partially. Sync is infectious.
boulos 2y ago
How have you handled synchronization? I agree with async-primary, but it's also important to get some overlap depending on the situation. Did folks in Manila work off hours to align a bit with San Francisco?

kisamoto 2y ago

Isn't a lot of the WFH/WFO debate centered around personal preferences? A lot of people like WFH but that doesn't mean there aren't also a lot of people who do actually like/prefer to be in the office. Of course generally it's not up to them, instead up to the management who sets the office policy but to describe the people who don't like going to the office as 'the good ones' seems a little short sighted.

yieldcrv 2y ago
It appears very few people are privileged to be in a place for it to be a personal preference. Like how the “I love Mondays” people are a rounding error. Very few of the talented people with choices - already rare - are choosing that personal preference. And the other people that love it for the networking were not the talented people with choices, they are the ambitious juniors desperate to build rapport.

chrisjj 2y ago

Evidence needed for this claim remote working "does away with" "office politics, workplace bullying, boring meetings".

shoubidouwah 2y ago

The discussion here follows well understood battle lines, but I want to add my grain of salt: working from the office comes bundled with commute. And the crux of arguments tends to be where you fall on the [commute is hell <-> working from home is hard due to circumstances] continuum. Some say that "commute helps clear the mind / switch context", but a simple walk does the same IMO; the mandatory presence in a vehicle along with everybody else at the same time, unpaid and very often for hours everyday feels incredibly invasive, wasteful and unjust. Every person then can talk price based on their circumstances, but that's the nub of it for me.

mondrian 2y ago
The flip side of spending "unpaid time" in commute is having "unpaid space" at home in terms of home office.
- benterix 2y ago
  I actually rented separate space for that. So I pay for 50 m2 of private office space where I have two rooms, kitchen, bathroom, a desk with a comfortable chair, a bed, some simple gym equipment and other amenities. And in spite of paying for this every month, I would never ever come to the office where I could use some of these things (an old office chair) for free. It feels like some dark era has ended, at least for a certain type of employees.
  - carschno 2y ago
    Interesting. Who pays for that? Sounds like, economically speaking, you are taking over the costs from your employer for providing a usable workspace.
    - shoubidouwah 2y ago
      in other words, "office space provides him with negative utility"
    - benterix 2y ago

dhotson 2y ago

Anecdotally.. - Working from home for long stretches.. feels more like "living at work" for me. Hybrid is good. Some boundaries in my life are healthy. - Most people hate their commute. I ride my bike to work and it's the best bit of my day. - I'm in a three person startup.. a ton of the software engineering and business problems I work on get hashed out talking over lunch and coffee—or in 2 minute hallway chats. - I think there's something in it: https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2011/04/28/lunch/ https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2011/04/28/lunch/ - It helps that my office environment is quiet and I get lots of uninterrupted time. My main argument to support work-from-home is because I think building top-notch software is a strong-link problem. https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-link-problem https://www.experimental-history.com/p/science-is-a-strong-l... A strong link problem is where "overall quality depends on how good the best stuff is". In this environment you really want to attract and hang on to your top performers! So it makes sense to do what you need to do to keep them happy. But also, in my experience, the best performing teams I've ever worked in.. we ate lunch together nearly every day.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

majoe 2y ago

That article kind of misses the premise of its own headline. 90% of the article is the usual discussion about working from home: Are employers more or less productive, cultural changes after COVID, managers reasons for RTO, etc But all of these don't answer the why of the actual key observation: "...they are losing experienced managers and top performers at disproportionate rates" Why disproportionate? There could be many reasons, but there is surely an obvious one: "You can force employees back to the office, but not the good ones " And why is that so? Because you're less likely to force a good employee than a bad employee to do something, simply because the bad employee has less opportunities to leave your company. The more interesting question would have been, whether there is actually a disproportionate amount of good employees, which wanted to work from home and therefore left, or only a disproportionate amount of good employees, which were able to leave (which is naturally always the case).

999900000999 2y ago

Having the experience of both working remotely and in office recently, you'd have to pay me a minimum of 50k per year more to RTO. I don't want to commute. Above 150k or so I'm only keeping 50% of every dollar above that . So we're taking another 25k a year, or about 2k a month. I'm spending 2 hours a day on my commute. That's around 160 hours a month. That means I'm only making 12.5$ an hour commuting. I also have to give up being able to shower mid day, cook, lay on my couch, etc. I live in a high cost of living city right now, but I could just move to anywhere in the US tomorrow without issue.

ohthatsnotright 2y ago
> I could just move to anywhere in the US tomorrow without issue. As someone who did that, be careful. It's not all sunshine and puppies. Many employers promise they can support a move or it's fine but then when you update your address in the HR system it becomes a different story. I certainly wouldn't advise anyone move to a US territory if they think they can just move without issue, employers absolutely will not hire here (not even Gusto).
listenallyall 2y ago
> I could just move to anywhere in the US tomorrow without issue So move closer to work?
- 999900000999 2y ago
  Alright. Hypothetically let's say we're talking about a job in Manhattan. Rent will be about 5k for a 1bdrm vs 1500$ in Chicago. In this case even with a 60k pay difference I'm losing money.
  - listenallyall 2y ago
    Ok, so really you can't "just move to anywhere in the US tomorrow without issue" since you're raising issues. I don't understand, you complained about an hour commute each way, I thought you wanted to reduce that, not move to the midwest. Anyway tons of people who work in Manhattan live in Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island, even the Bronx or (god forbid) New Jersey. Plenty of public transportation from just about anywhere in the region.

Devasta 2y ago

'Nobody on his deathbed ever said, "I wish I had spent more time at the office."' --Paul Tsongas Thanks to the Covid lockdowns we now know this isn't the case, in fact we can be quite confident a fairly large portion will spend their final moments surrounded by family and loved ones while wishing their could see one more time the thing that matters most to them: the shitty office cube farm.

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avh02 2y ago
Henry Royce (of Rolls Royce) disagrees: > I have only one regret … that I have not worked harder. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Royce https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Henry_Royce
- 0x000xca0xfe 2y ago
  I don't see the word "office" in this quote?
  - wpguy 2y ago
    I agree with that. I wish worked harder in some of my studies in college or on some self-teaching. None of that has to do with me wasting my time going into an office.

binary132 2y ago

I wonder if the divide has something to do with how much space and comfort a person has in their home. Someone who lives in an apartment with three kids and their in-laws might prefer office work more than someone who lives in a roomy house in the woods or suburbs.

steveBK123 2y ago

Some uncommon topics in the WFH/RTO debate.. Many employers slowly expanded the norms of work hours during remote/hybrid, which haven't been walked back now that they demand in-office. Jobs that used to be a 9-6 in office are now getting regularly scheduled 8/8:30am meetings (and still keeping the 5pm ones). Employees are left with more complex working life of waking up extra extra early, or dialing into early calls, then taking a train between meeting breaks to get in before lunch, etc. This includes stressing that they get in early enough for the swipe to count. A side effect is "statutory swipes" where others push the limits to work substantially fewer hours on office days as some sort of revenge. My wife has coworkers with long commutes who leave at 3pm when in-office. We work in financial services and this is previously unheard of, the markets aren't even closed by then. 3pm departure is like a twice per year markets early close departure time. Another issue is with some of the increase in subway violence in NYC in particular, women are not as comfortable commuting as they were 5 years ago. My wife, and plenty of women I know no longer listen to music during their commute as they want to "remain aware of their surroundings". That is to say, the commute is quite the opposite of mind clearing for them.

demosthanos 2y ago
> Jobs that used to be a 9-6 in office are now getting regularly scheduled 8/8:30am meetings (and still keeping the 5pm ones). Incidentally, this sentence actually demonstrates that this is not a new thing with WFH. At some point in the game for a lot of people, the 9–5 became a 9–6 as employers decided to start begrudging employees their lunch break. If you're on salary, short-sighted employers are incentivized to take as much of your time as you will let them. Going into the office won't prevent that (especially not in the internet era), you have to stand up for yourself.

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Related: Ordered back to the office, top tech talent left instead, study finds https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40339852 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40339852

johnny99k 2y ago

After my first few jobs out of college (15 years ago), I realized I hate working from someone else's office. It feels so constrained and like I'm in school again. Remote work was very rare then with salaried jobs, but not as a contractor. The company I'm working for now had an office pre-pandemic (I would meet with the director once/month), sold the one here locally during the pandemic, and got acquired by a large, international, company where the majority of the employees work remotely and the HQ is in Europe (I'm in the US). The last time I had to go to an office was for a local contract a few years ago (80 miles away from me) that required me to drive-in once/week for a few hours. The project ended after a few months and I found something 100% remote. I used to work from coworking spaces and sometimes the library, but now I have my own home office. Everyone talks about mixing life and work when working from home. It's pretty easy for me to just turn everything off and walk away at 5.

drewcoo 2y ago
> It feels so constrained and like I'm in school again. When I was in school I did most of my productive work at home.

m0llusk 2y ago

Hard to find a link with all the noise, but there was a big employer in Singapore that studied work from home well before COVID and started to switch to remote work because it made employees so much more productive. Yet this piece casually asserts "Against all expectations, remote workers appear to work harder and more productively than workers in traditional offices." The only people with these expectations were those who ignore the literature on productivity. Kind of sad that this seems to include most managers and workers in tech.

GuB-42 2y ago

It is not specific to "back to the office". You generally can't "force" good employees to do things they don't want to. You can get them back to the office, some of them don't mind, some may even want it, or you may be able to negotiate it with an appropriate compensation, but you can't force them or they will just leave. Same for everything else: being on-call, travel, overtime work, flexible hours, etc...

codr7 2y ago

News flash: You can't force the good ones to do anything against their will. And whenever you force anyone to do anything against their will, there are serious consequences that are not easy to fix.

armada651 2y ago

> First, there are some employees who believe that being in the office will benefit their careers. They are probably right; workers who return to the office are more likely to receive promotions. Whether organisations should promote the careerists who come back to the office in hopes that their loyalty (or submissiveness to RTO mandates) will win them promotions that their performance and effectiveness would not, is an open question. I take issue with the fact how quickly this is dismissed as simply rewarding loyalty and submissiveness. It completely ignores how much junior employees struggle with WFH. Without an office there is very little opportunity for junior employees to casually talk to senior employees and learn from them. It is also much harder for managers to notice if a junior employee is doing well or not. So it is no surprise it is easier to get promotions with an RTO mandate and it has very little to do with loyalty.

mozman 2y ago
I proactively schedule 1:1s with junior staff and reach out. I weed out the ones with potential and ones who lack ambition.
- cqqxo4zV46cp 2y ago
  “Proactively” scheduling 1:1s with juniors is, frankly, the bare minimum. It’s just doing your job. If you think that this solves the problem, you are bad at your job.
qzx_pierri 2y ago
Are you a manager?
civilized 2y ago
The lack of communication of potentially valid reasons such as these might contribute to why people view RTO mandates with cynicism. If we knew why we were being asked to RTO, we could solve that problem in the way we thought best, combining in-person and remote time. And those of us with junior team members we care about are already solving for this in the way we think best.

tssva 2y ago

I choose to retire earlier than planned rather than return to the office. I retired last August at age 54. I got remarried in October and now spend my days managing a horse farm and restoration of a 1800s farm house which came with my wife. By managing I mean generally getting in the way of and annoying the actual farm manager and our general contractor. It beats commuting and sitting in an office all day.

irrational 2y ago

My company has some positions that are work from home. Those who work from home receive $80/month for internet. So, by going into the office, I have to pay for my own home internet, gas and maintenance for the car, work clothing, etc. And that isn’t even including the time question (time to get ready, time to drive in and back home, time to find parking and walk in, time to find a place to sit, etc.) So, having to work in the office is a pay cut.

listenallyall 2y ago
Yes, for a brief time until your employer opens up those remote jobs to candidates in India, Argentina, Eastern Europe, etc. Then you'll see real pay cuts.

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callamdelaney 2y ago

Is the advantage of 'close collaboration' worth the disadvantage of working in a glorified sweatshop? Give me an office and I'll come to the office.

noirscape 2y ago

I'll take the controversial position and say that RTO (with a semi-flexible hybrid option for sudden appointments) is the best outcome. Some context; during the pandemic, everyone suddenly had to do WFH, including uni studies. In my case, I did both an internship and my studies, so my main exposure to WFH is through this lens. WFH as a mandate policy ended when I got an actual job. The main concerns when it comes to WFH I experienced are as follows: 1. Lack of commute means no hard checks on work-life separation. Commute sucks. It's also a period for your brain to turn off any association you still have with work, a period in which you're unreachable by anyone and in general helps you vent off the day's stress. It's also way too easy to overwork yourself without commute when you don't have to go home on time. With commute, there's a clear endpoint because the next bus is otherwise in an hour. 2. Complete collapse of social interactions. "Get friends" isn't so easy when most third spaces are unavailable (amped up by COVID as a "worst scenario" since they had to close, but they're declining on the whole), you've got introverted tendencies and in general your culture is becoming much more distant in terms of the barrier between "acquainted" and "friend" with casual interactions. Most people get their social interactions in a day from work and unless you're either living with family or friends, WFH won't change that. It just makes people depressed from what I can tell, something which statistics back up (although people who are hard on WFH usually try to blame this on other worldly ills, post-COVID measured a notable spike in mental issues and one that's somewhat settling now that RTO is a thing). 3. Productivity collapse and lack of oversight. Lack of oversight if you have a job with clear requirements, clear goals and clear means to achieve it is great. It completely fucking sucks if you're a junior or need to actively test and check up with other people in the office to see if something fits to desired spec/need to talk about why something doesn't logically fit spec. Email, Slack and Teams have a degree of formality in them that a simple "hey, can you look at this for a sec" when someone walks past your desk doesn't have. Especially during my internship, I noticed this problem as the lack of oversight kinda started to spin out of control after a while due to changing bosses and mediocre rapport with other employees at the company. Never unsolvable, but absolutely not good and I do have concerns with how well training up juniors into seniors (a basic part of career growth as you become experienced with the ins and outs of your job and learn what works) is going to go when direct interactions with seniors (who can rapidly answer institutional knowledge questions or know the "core tools" from the back of their head) are as low as they are with WFH.

acconrad 2y ago

I've been remote for years even before Covid. RTO vs remote comes down to how and where you work best. When folks want to go remote I ask them "when you were in school, did you study better in the library or at home in your bedroom?" If they said bedroom, I assume they can work from home. If they say library, I think RTO makes more sense. As much as I love remote, the best answer, like all things, is that best is relative to each person. What works for you doesn't work for others. Imho the best approach to measure productivity is to see where people do their best work and support that. And if you think something works for you but it isn't (i.e., low performance rating), well... time to head into the office or find a new job. You, the individual, also have to be willing to change if you're not performing your best because you _think_ remote will work for you but in reality you're not nearly as present or productive. Mandates, as the name implies, sort of admits that the ideal isn't best for {someone} otherwise you wouldn't need a mandate; people would naturally come back into the office if they so chose because it was best for them.

potterken 2y ago

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OfficeChad 2y ago

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