Plus they have a ton invested in commercial real-estate and office buildings. They literally losing money and makes me happy.
They really aren't losing money because:
a) WFH has been saving them money (i.e. lowered heating, water, electricity, stationary, toilet paper, food, janitorial, window cleaning, etc.).
b) Their WFH staff are more productive than their office staff.
Just let those leases expire when they do, and these companies will really be saving a ton of money from not having to lease large office space.
I don't get the desire to cling onto some outdated, unproductive, sad way of doing things.
Just let those leases expire when they do
The companies losing money are the huge companies who don't lease from what I've seen.
A company in my city JUST finished a $250-million expansion onto their HQ right as COVID hit. That same land area is in a central location and was even being highly considered for high density housing before the company bought the land. The parking lot for the new building never gets more than half full. Fuck 'em.
haha. Too bad for them. Just like how regular folks were/still are getting screwed by stuff over the last few years, it's hard for me to have any sympathy for a company that even has $250 million for an expansion.
Control. They call it office culture because it's a cult. They control the way you think and make it easy for you to be manipulated and keep you under their thumb. They can't make you think they give anahit if they can't bribe you with bullshit like snacks and pizza and a gym. They can't slowly take away your benefits because "hey look we gave you standing desks". Office culture needs to die.
a) WFH has been saving them money (i.e. lowered heating, water, electricity, stationary, toilet paper, food, janitorial, window cleaning, etc.).
How? If I own a building and I can't rent it out, I'm losing money. I still have to pay some bills and probably repay the loan that I took to build or renovate it.
b) Their WFH staff are more productive than their office staff.
Is there undeniable data proving that? I'd like to see a bunch of researches that support each other and have serious samples.
Majority of studies and measurements show that remote working leads to happier, less stressed workers spending more time on task. Previous studies have shown those are key factors in driving productivity.
The notable difference is that manager reported productivity often show worse measures as unchanged or lower productivity, even where less subjective measures show increases.
Some studies have tried to measure productivity directly, these commonly have unaddressed problems with methodology, and show more mixed results ranging from slightly less productive to significantly more productive.
I seem to remember a study measuring rate of completion of task lists as much more productive, including call centers, IT, customer service and sales. Whereas more nebulous tasks in management and group facilitation suffered slightly.
I'm thinking it's due time for a meta study on the topic though, maybe you could put one together?
How? If I own a building and I can’t rent it out, I’m losing money. I still have to pay some bills and probably repay the loan that I took to build or renovate it.
To clarify, they may still be losing money (i.e. leasing/renting costs), but not nearly as much as if they had to maintain and pay for utilities for a building that's full of people.
It's still to their advantage to keep people home.
Is there undeniable data proving that? I’d like to see a bunch of researches that support each other and have serious samples.
Yes and no... depending on the type of work and who wants the study to succeed/fail. 😂 Even having people WFH 1-2 days a week has been shown to be positive for productivity, employee happiness, etc.
I find that one caveat with studies that shows how WFH "fails" is that they tend to use some piss-poor setup that's not designed with the appropriate tools to allow people to be efficient. For example, no dedicated office space at home, lack of communication tools, etc. These are growing pains for the most part, and an effective WFH setup is distraction-free and made to be efficient.
One analysis suggested that a hybrid work but without specific corporate mandate seemed to see the best result.
If the business arbitrarily said "come in all the time" or "come in three days a week", they tended to not get good results.
If the business said "ok, no more office, all remote", they seemed to also not get good results.
The businesses that said "office is open and ready for you to use as you and your teams see fit", they seemed to have the best result. The optimistic will ascribe that to people thriving on the flexibility and respect of their employer. My somewhat more cynical view is that peer pressure works to get people into the office, and the employee is less pissed because it's "their choice" to come in. Just like when a company grants employees "unlimited vacation" and rejoice, as unlimited vacation tends to mean the employees take less vacation.
b) Their WFH staff are more productive than their office staff.
This probably varies place to place, person to person. However, over the course of, say, 10 years, productivity would likely drop in a 100% WFH scenario. People retire and the new hires never really find their groove without the in person experience.
Just let those leases expire when they do
Some of these leases are absurdly long, like decades long. Some own the buildings rather than lease, so they'd need to sell, but who would be buying?
I do see significant reduction in office space and more aggressive 'hot desking' to size a lower occupancy rate due to increased WFH. Before pandemic, our office planned to 80% occupancy, based on measuring generally 60% occupancy (between sick days, vacations, meetings, and travel, a lot of people aren't at their desks). I would not be surprised for them to size for, say, 50% occupancy if opportunities to exit lease for some of the buildings comes up.
No this isn't right. It's cheaper to have an empty building than a full one so companies who own their buildings would still make more money letting their employees work from home.
Also, even if it was true, no company is going to try to solve a problem like that. Companies are selfish. They'd rather everyone else go back to work to boost the value of commercial real estate while they continue to work from home to increase their profits everywhere.
The only reason companies are forcing people back is because upper management simply prefers that work environment. They like to sit in their corner office, surrounded by their peons. A sense of power.
Or, they have the kind of personality where they thrive surrounded by people and can't understand how anyone could be productive at home, data be damned.
It has nothing to do with real estate.
I 100% agree there are people in management who just like to have a sense of power over people, but there are big corporations losing money over real-estate.
For starters, if you're a firm who owns a lot of rental office space, you're losing money on the businesses not renewing their license (which I'm not saying this is a bad thing).
Then, you have the huge corporate business who have a huge amount of office space which they own. A company in my city JUST finished a $250-million expansion onto their HQ right as COVID hit. That same land area is in a central location and was even being highly considered for high density housing before the company bought the land. The parking lot for the new building never gets more than half full. Fuck 'em.
They try to rent those spaces where I live and its hilariously not working.
commercial real estate values are one rationale but I don't really buy that unless you own the property. Lots of companies that don't own their property are doing it.
One big rationale behind forcing return to office is that it causes soft layoffs from all of the people who do not want to return to in person working. It's a great way to downsize without announcing layoffs and taking a share price hit.
A part of that real estate equation is that the municipalities give tax breaks to the companies because they anticipate the extra people in the area getting them more money from gas stations, lunches, etc. Those contracts usually state that the building needs to have a certain occupancy for them to maintain the credit... and now municipalities are coming knocking for their back taxes since buildings haven't been full.
Thats what's happening around me, at least
Then I have the perfect solution! Burn the offices! :)
Double dip! Insurance companies hate him!
Sunk cost. No matter if they buy or lease their building, it seems like a waste to have it empty all the time. But that money isn't coming back whether employees come in or not.
Hold out a couple more years for leases to expire. Office real estate market hasn't seen its bottom yet.
Well. Getting more and more obvious that employers want to "own" their employees. Just a number in the grid - pro tip: Don't mention that at work to a manager, ends terribly. Dead man talking.
It's really there from the beginning: you don't get paid to do work, you get paid for your time. What happens when you finish all your allotted tasks in 4 hours instead of 8, you think you can just go home?
That's why I don't finish my tasks as fast as I can :D
Once you have enough money to buy anything, all thats left is power and high scores. That's why we should eat them.
Commercial real estate will tank and the economy will too.
The people who are in charge are shit planner’s because they just love money and pay to win at universities.
It doesn’t matter anyway because the environment collapse is cascading.
GLHF.
i love how we're supposed to accept the premise that because big companies starting gambling on office buildings (???? why would you do this???? why is it built like this?? why is this allowed??) everyone's life has to be measurably worse
The piece I love is that commercial real estate near me has not really even decreased since 2019, meaning, commercial real estate greed isn't abiding by supply and demand and they're trying to push their losses back on businesses. Workers need to stick it out until lease contracts loop back around and then we'll see who gets left holding the bag.
Grab power back? I wasn't aware the proletariat had made any real true legal progress for their rights in the first place, in, well, many decades. Especially not compared to everything we've lost in that time:-(
I think this speculative take is so popular because it gets a rise out of people, but it's much more likely that corporate real estate is just a real big asset on corporate balance sheets, and if everyone panic sells their offices at the same time that market will crash leaving corporations to hold the bag.
I know we want to believe that every senior manager on the planet is fragile masochist who needs to see their employees to feel big and strong and in control, but it's much more likely that this is related to finances.
It can be multiple things.
Real estate costs that they are stuck with. For example, my employer committed to a 20 year lease shortly before the pandemic. They don't have a good exit clause so either those office towers are going to be empty or used, but either way, my employer is paying for them, might as well get use out of them.
Managers that have such a poor understanding of the work that they can't comfortably tell if the work output from their employees is good or slacking. At least being able to see them in person they feel more comfortable that the employee looks more likely to be engaged. It's still possible a slacker is conning them, but at least they aren't as obviously doing so. They may not be masochistic as much as they hired people that know more than they do, and are therefore at a severe disadvantage when evaluating an employee.
As others have pointed out, one mans annoying distraction is another employee's great help. A new hire that needed mentorship. A colleague stuck on a little thing without going out of their way to ask for help in a remote context.
Realistically, having some work from home for morale/better work life balance, and focused individual work and some in person time is probably the most productive scenario.
They get tax breaks from the city to maintain a minimum occupancy. The cities were waiving those requirements during covid, and now they're not. It's that simple. The government and the corpos want their extra money from your pocket and they're insisting on behavior that will get it for them.
Agreed. #1 advice from anyone is "invest in real estate because it's the only thing they're not making any more of." So even if a huge corporation owns nothing and just rents every inch of office space, most likely their investment strategy includes commercial real estate.
Anecdotally, I happen to know of some people who threw a ton of money into local commercial buildings pre-pandemic, because that was the way the investor-class herd was going. These are people that I consider very wealthy, but are small potatoes compared to most of these big corporate CEO types. Now that they own all these buildings, they're squawking because they can't rent them.
is there any meaningful difference? why should the lives of millions be worse because execs made fucking bets on office buildings?
I think it can be both commercial real estate holdings, seeing what Big Tech and other prominent CEOs are doing and following their lead, and a way to cutt staff without official layoffs. (Since many people will quit rather than RTO since they no longer live close.to the office, or because they are close to retirement, or they take another position that is WFH or hybrid. I day this because those of some of the reasons my coworkers have quit rather than come in 2 or 3 days a week.)
Very good point about forcing attrition, my only counter argument (for lack of a better word) would be that it's more dangerous than traditional layoffs since you don't get to choose which or exactly how many employees leave, and my guess is that there's reason to believe you'd lose a large number of senior employees who would have an easier time finding a different remote position.
However the benefits of not having to admit to actual layoffs might outweigh these cons for a lot of companies for sure.
Corporations don't hold real estate unless they are real estate corporations. This theory is a conspiracy theory.
If the CEO of Zoom is asking for staff to go back to the office, it may not just be a desire to control.
I find that a lot of people who defend full remote tend to speak past issues like coordination and mentoring. You may have some CEO's seeing that people are doing individually productive work, but the organization as a whole isn't productive.
Yeah bruh, this is 100% about making sure the poors stay in their goddamned place.
Coordination, mentoring, and culture are intentional. The problem is that in an "in person" work place, deficiencies in those areas are very easy to sweep under the rug.
What I will call "churn", rather the flurry of activity generated by masses of employees coming, going, and doing is frequently mistaken for productivity when instead it's professional level time wasting. The "ship" is making a lot of bubbles and waves but in reality it's just doing very wide donuts in the middle of the ocean and not generating any real forward momentum. Hence, "churn."
I've worked for fully remote orgs with excellent culture, fully in person orgs with horrible culture and vice-versa. In my experience, remote work has benefits for employees and the company. It's saves both money and can (not necessarily does) improve the quality of life of the employees. Not all jobs can be remote. That's understandable. White collar office jobs don't usually fall into the "can't be remote" category.
While remote work can impact the org culture, it usually is more of magnifying glass in that all the existing deficiencies in the orgs culture bubble to the surface and get put in display for everyone to see. CEO's and other senior execs who are embarrassed by this, incompetent, or just don't care immediately blame the magnifying glass instead of the root problem. Identifying and dealing with the root problem would require time and effort that they aren't willing to invest. They'd rather sweep it back under the rug again and continue ignoring it.
And, as is now common, especially in corporate America, the attention span is so short and general state of corporate governance so poor that the only thing that matters is the stock price right at this very moment. No one cares if they're company is even going to be here in 20 years.
So if you work for a company who's CEO is whining about the need for "culture" and "water cooler moments" as a means to being people back into the office, rest assured that when that happens, the company will have the same shitty culture it always has, except maybe a little worse (since lots of layoff or constructive dismissals tend to damage the culture and erode trust). Nothing will change except the guys at the top will get back to pretending everything is fine, even if it's really not.
Why RTO makes sense,
People working at companies like Zoom typically get large sums of RSUs. These RSUs typically start to vest at 1 year and then continue to vest for 2-3 years. By forcing people to go into the office, some of these people will leave, forfeiting any non-vested RSUs. This allows companies to do layoffs without the cost associated.
Salary. These companies will just hire new bodies with lower salaries and higher RSU packages that will vest over longer time with the goal of saving money in the immediate now that debt is no longer cheap.
Training/Mentoring require more effort remotely.
Corporate real estate.
Why RTO doesn't make sense,
Many companies like Zoom have offices scattered across the country. The tech company I work for, for example, me and 3 colleagues are the only ones near my local office in a team of 80. My manager is in another state and most of my 80+ member team are in other states or countries (follow the sun posture). Any internal meeting I have to have would have to be done over Zoom.
Consultant companies like PWC are doing much more consultant hours virtually instead of traveling to clients because clients don't want to spend the extra billable for the travel, which is a key indicator that remote work isn't the detriment that it's being made out to be.
Open office floor plans make productivity worse.
.
Personally I will never take a job again that requires office time, I much prefer meeting up with coworkers for dinner every couple months over forced "teambuilding"
I mentored remotely just fine even back before the pandemic. There are all kinds of tools for communicating with people.
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