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The return-to-the-office trend backfires

thehill.com

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Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#21

Post by thewebguyd »

matchbok3 wrote: post #10
CivBase wrote: post #4

For something to "backfire" you first have to account for why it was done. This article assumes performance and retention are the only considerations. It does not account for things like commercial real estate value, a buesiness's ability to monitor and control its employees, or excuses for layoffs.

What do you mean by "monitor and control"? Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work? What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?

> Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work?

There's a difference between visibility into work progress and just mass surveillance of all activity. The only metric that actually matters is the delivery of value.

Monitoring isn't an effective way to lead. It only reinforces employees to optimize for "looking busy" rather than being effective. If you have to audit your employees daily actions to know if they are doing their job, you've failed as a manager at defining their role or hiring the right people.

A good manager defines the what and the when, and leaves the how to the professional being paid to do it.

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#22

Post by adamhartenz »

isahers wrote: post #5

This is interesting because it does not jibe at all with the people I know and how productive they are. The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that. I'd imagine there are some confounding variables here. I wonder if a lot of those hybrid companies driving high revenue growth are just profit machines…

That is a lot of thoughts and feelings. There is plenty of research you can read before throwing out opinions.

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#23

Post by nphardon »

ventana wrote: post #17

The article has so many "it's this, not that" contradictions – I counted seven! – that I seriously consider it to be written with a lot of assistance from LLMs. One thing not mentioned in the article is that now that many software engineers are back to their offices, we get the regular fall / spring viral infections spreading out between employees who feel obliged to go to the office even if they have mild cold sympt…

[dead]

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#24

Post by matchbok3 »

thewebguyd wrote: post #21
matchbok3 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "monitor and control"? Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work? What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?

> Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work? There's a difference between visibility into work progress and just mass surveillance of all activity. The only metric that actually matters is the delivery of value. Monitoring isn't an effective way to lead. It only reinforces employees to optimize for "looking busy" rather than being effective. If you have to audit your employees daily…

I mean, maybe. But a company that spends all of it's time "surveilling" their employees rather than adding value will go out of business. So I'm not sure what the point really is when people bring this up when talking about WFH. If someone doesn't want to be surveilled at work they can quit, right?

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#25

Post by asdff »

imcrs wrote: post #13

RTO is about controlling labor, nothing else. Everything else is a smoke screen. Ask yourself the following questions and you'll understand what happened: - why did RTO happen seemingly right after salaries jumped and labor became scarce? - why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment? - why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact…

When you also consider the nation as you know, a nation, and not a rat race of individual interest, the best thing the government could do is encourage working from home. Break the hell up these "hubs" of white collar industry and let's disperse this work and compensation across the country. I'm betting we would see quite a lot more growth anyhow if these jobs were distributed across the country vs just concentrated in like sf/nyc/boston. like there are limits to how much growth little old south san fransisco can sustain. there are finite amount of office space. only finite amount of housing accomodations in the bay area (forgetting for a moment the rampant NIMBYism).

And what else is that everyone loses in this present situation. People in the job hub in SF also lose, because they are operating in this fundamentally broken local economy, way too enriched for high income workers making their home cost 2.5m and their compensation actually pretty poor as far as what it can get in the local economy. West Atherton would be a 400k median home neighborhood in most of the midwest. Literally same floorplans, lot sizes, fit and finish. Same country club down the road. Same private school up the road. Boutique shopping and steak dinners still available.

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#26

Post by matchbok3 »

angiolillo wrote: post #16
matchbok3 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean by "monitor and control"? Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work? What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?

> What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly? By "excuses for layoffs" I suspect what they meant was that there was an pre-existing desire to reduce headcount and RTO was used under the expectation that some percentage of employees would quit voluntarily so that the company can avoid going through the relatively more costly process of laying them off. Of course the downside of this approach is that the company has les…

Gotcha. There was definite over hiring that happened during covid so some of this was a return to normal I think.

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#27

Post by pdabbadabba »

imcrs wrote: post #13

RTO is about controlling labor, nothing else. Everything else is a smoke screen. Ask yourself the following questions and you'll understand what happened: - why did RTO happen seemingly right after salaries jumped and labor became scarce? - why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment? - why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact…

I can't speak to your sector, but from the perspective in my management role (in law) the explanation is quite simple: managing remote workers is more difficult and less pleasant than managing workers in the office. I actually hate it. And even granting that remote and in-office workers are "productive" in the sense that they bill hours (though not even this seems true in my anecdotal experience), we find that people with less in-office time tend to have qualitatively worse performance. At least in my field, being in the office, spending time with your co-workers, and getting to know them has value.

Of course, other things have value too. Often, our folks who prefer to work from home do so because they have small children who they want to spend time with, more fully share parental responsibilities with their partner, etc. I'm glad that they have the opportunity to do that, but it does generally seem to come at some professional cost.

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#28

Post by jmyeet »

Any analysis that frames this as a productivity or talent-attraction issue is flawed from the start because that was never the point and still isn't.

The point of RTO mandates is to suppress wages. It's to get people to quit rather than having to lay them off. It's part of the permanent layoffs culture we're now in where every year 5-10% of the workers at a company will be laid off. Remaining workers will do more labor for the same money and won't be asking for raises because they're thankful to still have a job. And someone quitting is much cheaper than paying them severance.

Tech workers in particular saw massive wage growth in the 2010s due to tight supply. Companies are now in the business of clawing back thoat wage growth. It's why all these big tech companies started RTO mandates and layoffs at about the exact same time. It's a wink-and-nod collusion rather than overt collusion. We're a long way from the times when Google just hired all the engineers to deny them to their competitors.

None of this is necessary. All of these companies are still insanely profitable. But profits have to keep growing and ultimately that comes down to cutting costs. There's nothing else you can do.

Employers don't want you to be financially secure. They want you drowning in debt with declining real wages because then you're absolutely showing up to work and putting up with whatever they want.

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#29

Post by asdff »

isahers wrote: post #5

This is interesting because it does not jibe at all with the people I know and how productive they are. The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that. I'd imagine there are some confounding variables here. I wonder if a lot of those hybrid companies driving high revenue growth are just profit machines…

If someone is actually working 8 solid hours every day 5 days a week on office work, I would expect they are neurodivergent in some way. Even in college when you were still young, people couldn't sustain that level of focused intensity for very much more than maybe a week ahead of an exam, often with the help of adderall.

Re: The return-to-the-office trend backfires

#30

Post by IAmBroom »

isahers wrote: post #5

This is interesting because it does not jibe at all with the people I know and how productive they are. The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that. I'd imagine there are some confounding variables here. I wonder if a lot of those hybrid companies driving high revenue growth are just profit machines…

You claim a significant amount of qualitative data here; how did you measure it? Sounds like some WAGs. Confounding variables don't matter when the "data" is guesswork.
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