A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
Our Philosophies:
Our Goals
That’s part of it. Another part is middle management can’t function without seeing you. Finally, it’s not worth it to a company to maintain a lease on a building if nobody works there and it’s not easy getting out of those leases.
What doesn't make sense is why they're not firing the useless middle managers.
Where I work, it’s the middle managers who make a list of useless people. They obviously won’t put their own names on the list.
Even a structure that is only a house of cards still depends on the cards of the middle tiers to hold itself up.
Then middle management is either incompetent or like micro manage.
There are so many fucking managers and administrators in modern organizations.
The lease is already paid, or the money is planned to be paid. You can't recover this money anyway. But you can still save on energy and cleaning.
Getting out of the lease is as easy as not renewing it.
I agree with most of this except the lease is a sunk cost, making people come in based on a variable that won't change is bad decision making, the discussion should be made independently of lease. I agree some managers think this way, it's usually the ones who could benefit from remedial business finance classes.
I'm not going to quit or return to the cubefarm. These coprophagous donkey molesters can fucking well fire me and pay unemployment.
TIL the word “coprophagous.”
For the lazy
A coprophagous organism is one that eats the faeces/excrement of another animal. Many insect species are coprophagous and often specialise in the consumption of faeces from large herbivores.
It isn't, it's all the office space they own, if people are allowed to keep working from home the retail office market will crash pretty hard.
It can be both.
Ever see how much real estate companies like Google has? If all those bay area companies said fuckit let's be remote it would crash the market and rock the economy.
We should though, if possible.
Cool. Then we can convert it to housing
I'm told that office buildings are actually terrible from a housing standpoint. Like, it's actually easier to just tear the whole thing down and build an entirely new complex than convert it into apartments.
This is very true. So let's do it.
No one cares about retail office market. A market bubble crashing is merely an opportunity to earn money for the others. Capitalism doesn't care about losers.
America only has capitalism for the poor. For the rich, it's socialism. You better believe retail office owners stand to be losers, and they have power to fight.
There is no money to be earned though if nobody needs office space then all those offices will need to be converted to living space which will reduce the price of domestic homes too.
Copying my reply from another similar post -
I would lose my control over my minions... Why don't you understand?
Whoops, I meant, my staff can't be monitored...
Whoops, I actually meant, I will lose the one place in life where I can actually throw around my power...
/s
That's what I was thinking, it essentially makes bosses obsolete and they don't want the system to be deconstructed from the top down, ever. That's toppling capitalism, kinda talk.
What if I don’t return to the office and also don’t quit?
Then they get to fire you for non-compliance. And you don't get to collect unemployment. Basically the same as quitting for them.
That’s not what my employment contract says, last I checked. And those can’t be changed unilaterally.
You've got it better than most, then.
You should familiarize yourself with constructive dismissal
Nice, in theory, proving it is the real problem. Meanwhile you're not getting paid and they have an entire fund just for lawyering you into submission.
Yeah, that's why unions are so important... Without one in that situation you're fucked.
Kinda baffling to me most tech-companies don't have one. I get they're attempting to stop unionising but they can't easily be replace their whole workforce at once. They'd loose all their know how...
Middle manager here: they want you to quit, and me to do your job plus the jobs of the other 3 who just left after you're gone.
What do middle managers do in WFH jobs? Most companies I've worked in have as many "managers" as bottom level employees. It's hilarious
Still seems to me the idea of "if people don't come back into work the real estate market implodes" is the most convincing.
Commuters vaporizing and countless city blocks losing their purpose will cause huge upheaval in the real estate market.
And turns out a /lot/ of CEOs have a vested interest in keeping the real estate market artificially propped up.
Thus, they try and force people back to work as hard as they can.
It won't last, the big companies that don't give a shit about real estate due to being even bigger in scale will out compete and the international market will absorb most of the workforce.
If you shackle your success to real estate, then you can't compete with international megacorps that saw this coming awhile ago. Prepare to be acquired.
Big companies are owned by capitalists who also own considerable assets in real property.
Or maybe…
CEO 1: “Our plan to force everyone back to the office isnt working. They’re just quitting”
CEO 2: “Ok new narrative, convince them it was our plan to get them to quit, and keep forcing them to return to office.”
Hey who knew that the best way to make money as a company is have very few workers and be an amazing talker that can dupe others into investing into your pile of shit. Oh wait, Holmes, Neuman and Bankman-fried already came up with that business model. The innovation on that model is just don't get caught.
Whenever they talk about "Business Innovation" this is the crap they are talking about
Or is this op-ed 3D chess reverse psychology to get you back into the office?
There's an often overlooked part that you could call the "extrovert factor." There's always plenty of coworkers that thrive in group settings. Some number, maybe most, middle managers are extroverts, and when forced to work the way the average minion does, they suffer. It's why they became middle managers in the first place. Their productivity suffers in isolation too, so when converted into a wage slave, they can't complete with less extroverted people. Unfortunately they're better situated to promote their own success, getting by in people skills while more competent people get screwed.
Extroverts also seem to suffer in productivity during WFH, even if they aren't managers. They are stuck in a situation that hurts their functionality, offsetting the statistics. If they actually broke down WFH productivity by job description, I suspect that the extrovert/introvert factor will be a huge determiner of productivity.
Optional office hours seem the best fix, but the corporate attitude of obsessively monitoring the workers to be sure they're not wasting time and therefore money is another factor that makes these companies want to favor their preconceptions. The confirmation bias kicks in and then we have to listen to them focus on it.