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What's a middle manager to do if s/he can't Lumbergh around the office?
by grakker 2y ago
What's a middle manager to do if s/he can't Lumbergh around the office?
- kevinventullo 2y agoIt’s not middle management pushing for this. It’s clueless upper management.
- marcus_holmes 2y agoThe clueless upper management are serving their wealthy owners who have a commercial real estate portfolio that is losing them huge amounts of money unless they can get the little people back in the offices.
- Spooky23 2y agoThey are more worried about employee fraud. Commercial real estate is boned anyway.
- dilyevsky 2y agoGreat many folks are completely ineffective in remote setting. Some are not but many are. Simple as that. No real estate mogul conspiracy theories necessary
- rescripting 2y agoAre there studies to this effect? Any empirical evidence companies can give plotting productivity decline and subsequent increase after RTO? Or is it all just vibes?
- dilyevsky 2y agoHow would you even do a study like that? Besides, looking at scientific studies is not how businesses make decisions. They sometimes use studies as justification but there's a difference.
- barbazoo 2y agoWhat real estate does Amazon own in this case?
- marcus_holmes 2y agoWell, presumably they own the offices that their staff are returning to. But I'm more talking about wealth funds that own commercial real estate that are also shareholders in Amazon, quietly having a word with execs about how to get the workers back in the offices. You know, the old "you should come for a weekend to the country and meet a few people", the people turn out to be incredibly rich and connected, and all they want from you is this little favour where you get all your people back in the office. Just for a while so they have the chance to unload their commercial real estate portfolio without taking a huge loss.
- barbazoo 2y agoDoesn’t sound very plausible to me unless you have an actual connection for either speculation. We’re talking about tens of thousands of employees here.
- Twirrim 2y agoI've spoken to a few folks in middle management there, and some senior engineers, and it's exactly this story. So far as they can figure there aren't many middle managers actually pushing for this. It's all senior leadership trying valiantly to recapture the "Day 1" mentality that process and procedures have beaten out of the company.
- p_l 2y agoI ended up working for european part of rather big US database company that similarly started pushing RTO. The RTO mandates were fully delivered from US HQ and from the very top, while middle management tried very hard to preserve remote work, especially as many people were hired from quite far away from office... and no, the salaries were nowhere close to justify people moving.
- iou 2y ago> I'm gonna need you to go ahead and RTO.