People really want to push remote work as being great for businesses. The sad reality is that it’s not (at least for knowledge workers)… it kills productivity and the output is always lower quality.
{citation needed}
CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
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Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#12The thing that I keep coming back to, is that if a company is taking an action, it should be about reducing friction to go to and making the office space a better place to work. If the company is taking an action that makes it less likely for people to come to the office or enjoy it, then it's pretty clear what they are doing.
Yes, I view it as an amplifier for the existing management culture. If your system is supportive and focused on shared goals, RTO falls naturally into a balance where people come in when it makes sense (e.g. meaningful meetings & collaboration) and stay home when it does not. If your system is distrustful and based on dominance displays, which is far too common, the mandate is inflexible and transparently based on things like not expecting managers to be effective at measuring productivity, and it will be unpopular for those reasons. Both dynamics existed before the pandemic but the change in what people were used to and the current business climate demanding performative layoffs really cranked the intensity up.
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#13does anyone really find RTO surprising? I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. it's more obvious in roles where the work is less quantifiable, but even in engineering roles everyone hears stories
the alternative seems to be aggressively metricize and cut-- but that seems bad for different reasons
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#14The absolute psychosis of management around RTO is truly baffling. It’s very telling that in the face of no evidence whatsoever of negative effects of remote work even after several years their reasons for demanding return have become increasingly abstract and now they’ve reached the “because I said so” phase.
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#15People really want to push remote work as being great for businesses. The sad reality is that it’s not (at least for knowledge workers)… it kills productivity and the output is always lower quality.
In the same "methinks" kind of vibe of OP: you can be physically in the office, and mentally somewhere else completely.
If you don't want to be productive, you can make that happen anywhere.
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#16does anyone really find RTO surprising? I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. it's more obvious in roles where the work is less quantifiable, but even in engineering roles everyone hears stories the alternative seems to be aggressively metricize and cut-- but that seems bad for different reasons
I know plenty of people who go into offices and blatantly don't work.
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#17The thing that I keep coming back to, is that if a company is taking an action, it should be about reducing friction to go to and making the office space a better place to work. If the company is taking an action that makes it less likely for people to come to the office or enjoy it, then it's pretty clear what they are doing.
> If the company is taking an action that makes it less likely for people to come to the office or enjoy it, then it's pretty clear what they are doing.
Cheaper staff reduction without redundancy payments!
Except for the intangible domain knowledge loss, but that won't appear on a finance spreadsheet.
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#18does anyone really find RTO surprising? I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. it's more obvious in roles where the work is less quantifiable, but even in engineering roles everyone hears stories the alternative seems to be aggressively metricize and cut-- but that seems bad for different reasons
the alternative seems to be aggressively metricize and cut
The SWE industry almost universally practices Scrum which is already pretty great for metricizing and tracking work.
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#19does anyone really find RTO surprising? I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. it's more obvious in roles where the work is less quantifiable, but even in engineering roles everyone hears stories the alternative seems to be aggressively metricize and cut-- but that seems bad for different reasons
My experience has been that people who work from home are a lot more productive than people who "work" in an office.
Re: CEOs Are Using Return to Office Mandates to Mask Poor Management
#20does anyone really find RTO surprising? I know several people personally who just blatantly don't work. it's more obvious in roles where the work is less quantifiable, but even in engineering roles everyone hears stories the alternative seems to be aggressively metricize and cut-- but that seems bad for different reasons
> it's more obvious in roles where the work is less quantifiable.
So management can go to the office and pretend to work, leave the engineers with very much quantifiable metrics alone.