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Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

businessinsider.com

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Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#221

Post by johnnyanmac »

neilv wrote: post #89

> Microsoft's new approach is the latest sign of the company increasing performance pressure on employees. It has fired thousands of employees deemed low performers this year and introduced a new performance improvement plan meant to exit low performers more quickly. Claims who? These also sound like typical sketchy headcount reduction tactics. Also, it's throwing employees under the bus, because the company is tarri…

>MS had to mention that in the memo, because that's what everyone reading it was thinking?

It's not reducing headcount if they hire just as many people overseas.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#222

Post by ponector »

zero_shift wrote: post #190

At $org, we too are undertaking a mandatory RTO order, enforced with door access logs. People are up in arms, particularly those in our smaller locales, where the offices we have are perfunctory at best. The rationale is the usual one: collaboration, watercooler chat, unspecific evidence / "research" about productivity (that we are told definitely exists, but is yet to be shared). I remain baffled by executives' obse…

>> where it comes from

It's a power play. To show regular folks their place. Big corpo is a modern feodal state, where CEO is an emperor, c-suites are kings, managers are barons, IC are peasants and external contractors are slaves(but leased from other owner).

It's not only RTO, it's also about timetable and dress code. Yes, I had a beef with IT manager about dress code in the development office of a bank. Just because he can show his power he tried to enforce dress code.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#223

Post by mikestew »

zero_shift wrote: post #190

At $org, we too are undertaking a mandatory RTO order, enforced with door access logs. People are up in arms, particularly those in our smaller locales, where the offices we have are perfunctory at best. The rationale is the usual one: collaboration, watercooler chat, unspecific evidence / "research" about productivity (that we are told definitely exists, but is yet to be shared). I remain baffled by executives' obse…

C suites are committed to spending as much as possible on real estate

Executives often own the real estate and lease it back to the company. From Steve Ballmer to the owner of the tiny 85 person company I last worked at, it’s not uncommon.

So, yeah, there’s often some financial incentive there.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#224

Post by coredog64 »

stocksinsmocks wrote: post #79
robotnikman wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remote work means traffic congestion gets better and also helps solves the affordable housing crisis, as people can then choose to live in areas with a lower cost of living but further away from the inner city.

I think the return to office phenomenon is inevitable because employers externalize transportation costs, but internalize value capture from employees being in presumably a less distracting and more controlled environment. It’s a systems problem where the incentive only goes one way. I think you could have a balancing incentive of providing employers tax credits if they can prove that they are using remote or partial…

Pre-pandemic, I had multiple employers that were incentivized via the state and county government to push remote working, ride sharing, and transit utilization as a means of reducing overall government spending on roads and road maintenance. It typically showed up as small benefits to the employee, like a monthly drawing for a $50 Target gift card or preferential parking spots. Based on that, I got the sense that while it may have been helpful in the aggregate, it wasn't wildly cost effective.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#225

Post by reaperducer »

Mobius01 wrote: post #139

I work in a large company that mandated 4-day RTO last year. Even taking a completely objetive point of view on the situation leads to the conclusion that something else is needed. We spend our days at our desks, on Zoom calls. People won’t get up to join in person - mostly because the conference rooms are all blocked by “special projects”, but mostly due to the offshoring of positions and distributed workforce post-…

I suspect the C-suite has noticed the discrepancy between attendance and occupancy

The solution is to downsize your physical plant.

My company has a ton of faults, but every time one of these stories hits the HN front page, I thank God that my company remains committed to work from home. So much so that it recently sold its last building, and the few dozen employees whose roles require them to be physically present have been relocated to a much smaller building on a train line.

The work-from-home policy comes very heavily from the top. I suspect it's due to two things:

1. We have no shareholders. So the C-levels don't feel the need to engage in performative monkey-see-monkey-do antics so they have something to talk about during investor calls.

2. The management is extremely female-heavy. If I had to guess, I'd say it's 4:1 female:male. And the biggest beneficiaries of work from home are caregivers, who are statistically more likely to be women.

While I believe that 90% of the "work-life balance" speeches that come out of our HR department are a bunch of bullshit, I also believe that when it comes to work-from-home, management loves it not just for the massive cost savings they say it's provided.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#226

Post by squigz »

nickff wrote: post #210
zero_shift wrote: post #190

At $org, we too are undertaking a mandatory RTO order, enforced with door access logs. People are up in arms, particularly those in our smaller locales, where the offices we have are perfunctory at best. The rationale is the usual one: collaboration, watercooler chat, unspecific evidence / "research" about productivity (that we are told definitely exists, but is yet to be shared). I remain baffled by executives' obse…

I find this idea that there is a 'CEO RTO mania' to be absurd; if WFH was just as good for the company, and more attractive to employees, we should see a boom in WFH-first companies, which does not seem to be happening. Instead, it seems like CEOs see RTO as a way of getting rid of 'slackers', preventing people from multi-tasking while 'working', and in some cases increasing 'teamwork'. In any case, it makes sense to…

This assumes that executives are all perfectly rational beings and so wouldn't do anything based on personal feeling or beliefs. Sadly, this is not true.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#227

Post by johnnyanmac »

Aurornis wrote: post #219
neilv wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To non-lawyer me, this sounds like something for which lawyers have a term: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Constructive_dismissal If I've heard of this angle, I assume that lawyers know many angles that may apply.

Constructive Dismissal has been brought up in every RTO thread for years, but I've never heard of a case where it worked. The key to constructive dismissal is that a reasonable person would have to find the new conditions intolerable and it has to constitute some form of discrimination (e.g. not a change in company policy, but a targeted attack that discriminates against you). So given that most people commute to wor…

>but I've never heard of a case where it worked.

that's what the severace packages are for. There's not a lot of people being dumped that wouldn't take 3-6 months of pay in advance in exchange for not being able to engage in a length lawsuit with a trillion dollar corporation.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#228

Post by wordofx »

johnnyanmac wrote: post #212
Mobius01 wrote: post #139

I work in a large company that mandated 4-day RTO last year. Even taking a completely objetive point of view on the situation leads to the conclusion that something else is needed. We spend our days at our desks, on Zoom calls. People won’t get up to join in person - mostly because the conference rooms are all blocked by “special projects”, but mostly due to the offshoring of positions and distributed workforce post-…

We should know by now that all these RTO initiatives are not grounded in any reasonable logistics nor financial reasoning. Right now all of tech is in cut mode, and RTO's are a great way to do layoffs without calling them layoffs. Note that when Google got "too many" people RTO'ing, they did layoffs anyway. If your office does try to make things stricter, it's another layoff attempt. I don't think it will work, becau…

[flagged]

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#229

Post by Bluescreenbuddy »

thr0waway001 wrote: post #86
sugarpimpdorsey wrote: post #22

The only thing I hated worse than going into the office was our remote employees, who never seemed to be available when you needed them, had their status set to Away (or wouldn't respond for hours if they were green). It was a privilege, people abused it, and now it's over. And managers were the worst offenders.

At our company some people outright admitted on a survey sent out to employees that they would go out and run errands during work hours. Like, how stupid do you have to be to kill your golden goose of life work balance?

I literally do this IN the office. I will step away and go to a coffee shop and pick something up. Hell I ask my boss if they want anything. I may go for a walk and get a breather. Go to a doc appointment. GO get my teeth cleaned. My bosses do not give a shit as long as my tasks are done to the standard.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#230

Post by johnnyanmac »

scarface_74 wrote: post #152
neilv wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For better or worse, neither of us is a lawyer, but I'm comfortable in saying that the affected people should: Talk. To. A. Lawyer. Isn't that better than us random Internet people telling them -- although we think something shitty is going on -- they definitely don't have a case, and they definitely shouldn't talk to a lawyer? (For all we know, an actual lawyer might tell them that they actually do have a case.)

It really doesn’t take a lawyer to know what “at will employment” means. A case for what unless it’s discriminatory. Your employer doesn’t have to justify letting you go - at all. Even looking at your citation, it shows that constructive dismissal is only actionable if you can show that they made working conditions harder and they were targeting you under a law meant to protect you against discrimination Companies ha…

>It really doesn’t take a lawyer to know what “at will employment” means.

It takes a lawyer to understand an individual's situation, background, and contract in order to see if this is just a bad but legal hand, or in fact something worth filing against. We don't know every engineer's story that is impacted here.

>Companies have been giving employees an ultimatum between “relocate or quit” forever.

Yes, and severance packages makes it less tempting to try and look into suing.

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