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RTO is either companies looking for a way to cut jobs or a way to utilize their commercial real estate.
I also want to think it's a little bit the management/CEOs who think their employees are their friends who get lonely realizing the stripper doesn't actually love them. Meanwhile they refuse to develop a personality or real friendships.
I didn't think that managers like Michael Scott actually existed.
RTO is just posturing to share holders.
"Look, look, we're treating our staff badly, so you know we're a good investment!"
Hm, I don't think that's likely. I have some other tinfoil hat theories:
It's actually:
It's the 2008 housing crisis, but with corporate real estate. COVID forced work from home, which caught banks with their pants down, having no way to actually drive the demand back up for these buildings that will continually house less and less people from less and less businesses (Work from home + businesses not surviving Covid, now Tariffs.)
Our entire banking system is backed up by debt packaged with corporate real estate that's rated as AAA, but is just more toxic cat shit no one wants wrapped in dogshit that banks need. It's a bomb that's been growing as giant corporate buildings become ghost towns, and city centers become more horizontal than verticle.
Big companies with big loans from banks know they're fucked if the corporate real estate market collapses. So they force work from home as a band aid that gives their corporate property some value, or at least justifies it on paper. In reality, the cost to force workers into the office always offsets the billions in losses if their corporate office real estate ever followed real market forces and depreciated in value.
I still don't understand how this talking point makes sense. So businesses are purposefully incurring costs to prop up an industry that they're not involved in? A business will stop leasing a building and save money if they can, hell mine did.
Lots of Fortune 500 companies own buildings and both they and their executives have big investments in commercial real estate. They don't want the market to collapse because it'll hurt them all personally.
See my other comment in this thread.
Companies Renting offices are usually not pushing for RTO. Definitely not full time RTO.
Lots of businesses own their offices. Those buildings are assets on the company balance sheet. If no-one uses those offices they become worthless and the company visibly loses money.
Wouldn't those businesses that own their offices still prefer to sell or rent a property if the business will run without it? Artificially filling a property with employees to "make use of" the property rather than get money out of it is a good way to be left holding the bag when other companies ditch their properties to save money and crash the market anyway. To your point, the property is still the same asset whether employees are in it or not; it costs money. I guess I'm not really buying the notion that businesses are banding together to lose money for the greater good of the business real estate market. The same companies that won't even invest in obvious long-term profitability plans? Really?
That is a lot of it. Companies with office assets don't want to be left holding the bag. They have sunk costs (x year leases) and there are some benefits to the business of people being presentatial, so from the employers PoV everyone should return until the lease expires.
If they own the property then not having it fully used means that it will sell for less when they are finally able to do so.
Some jobs also need a proportion of the workforce to be present, so hybrid becomes the best balance for them.
I would qualify your first point. Parkinson's Law tells us that we have pointless bosses in huge numbers, and they need to justify their own existence. The people who actually produce things, everyone can see if they're working or not by looking at the output. But their supervisors, and especially their supervisors' supervisors, those people are desperate to make themselves relevant, to justify their pointlessly-large salaries despite a complete lack of utility.
So many Boomers have proven incapable of remote Mgmt. If they don't have staff in line-of-sight, they always seem to default to "they're not working hard," regardless of actual productivity.
Boomers need to retire already and remove themselves from their perches at the top of corporate ladders.
You decided to blame the old people instead of ... checks notes ... the rich people. That was a bizarre choice. Meh.
Step 1: Create one of the greatest tools in human history, one of the benefits being that it can allow a ton of people to work from home, increasing their quality of life, reducing traffic, and improving air pollution.
Step 2: Get forced to experience a worldwide pandemic in which we are made to utilize this tool for such a function so we can see that it actually works as intended.
Step 3: Ignore all that for the profit of the few, to the detriment of the many.
Humans = Trash
I would still go to a mall if they didn't have overstock on slim fit clothing. I would also go to the theater more if they had reasonable pricing and actually showed movies I want to watch. There's nothing wrong with either of these things, it's just that capitalism has yet again, ruined them to appease the 1%.
Dropbox were really smart and went for it early, they closed offices completely and sent plenty of workers to full remote. Savong money for the company on office rent, and money and time for the workers.
they saw the profit in it. most of the other companies wernt doing it because: ceo, managment love to have power over the lowly worker, + govt tax benefits, business from commuters
I am in a situation where the return to office was a 6k decrease in wages.
say it with me: GET OVER IT CORPOS, MEATSPACE IS DEPRECATED.
Personally I wouldn't want to work in an office where (almost) everybody is remote. I believe that the best option is to do a hybrid.
Edit: I prefer working with others in person instead of doing it remotely over the phone or teams. Not sure if I am more productive at work or at home due to the distractions at home. But I am in the minority it seems, but then again my commute is about my rewind time so I am refreshed when I am at home. Traffic isn't an issue either and I can bike if I wish (and didn't sweat as much)
Not sure if I am more productive at work or at home due to the distractions at home
Everyone I know is more productive at home, office is all the time coffee breaks, deciding where to go for lunch, then going to lunch, then another coffee break, smoke break, etc
There are specific things that are more efficient in person, mostly meetings with multiple people.
It’s easier to interject and the conversation flows better in person.
With zoom and the like you get to to the “no you go ahead” loops when people talk over each other.
Everything else is just fine remote.
"Where to go for lunch, you go out lunching everyday? We just bring our own lunch.
But yes I am generally less productive at home because I am inclined to do other shit while at work and considering I have to write hours on customers I cannot get away with working 5 hours and writting 8 hours (that's also illegal, but okay)
Sounds like somebody doesn't own any commercial real estate.
or tax benefits for hiring x amount employees, plus govts also dont want WFH, because then they wouldnt get tax revenue from cars, roads, businesses.
People generally don't give up their car or stop buying things when they work from home. Those taxes just shift away from commercial districts and toward residential ones.
I used to manage a team of people who were all remote except one and myself. It's not hard. You set expectations and they either meet them or they don't and you address those issues. I do think some of them struggled due to working from home creating a "barrier" to asking for help when you don't know your coworkers as well, but I did everything I could think of to reduce that so they'd feel comfortable reaching out via teams (creating group chats, designating "helpers", etc) or even coming into the office if they chose but there were very mixed results and in general things were worse than when we were primarily working from the office. I don't think the problem is working from home, it was communication skills and some people just lacking the discipline to not goof off when they are at home (I'm one of these, I need an office environment to focus). That is a case by case thing though that needs to be addressed with the individual.
SLLLLLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAMMMMMMMMMMMMSSSSSSSSS RTO
Funny he says that, because malls and movie theaters are thriving where I live.
