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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

#791

Post by danaris »

QuantumFunnel wrote: post #536
danaris wrote: post #455

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, then show the evidence. If this is a shareholder action, of a publicly-traded company, then (IIUC) shouldn't that be publicly-available information somewhere?

This is probably better evidence than any public filing https://wolfstreet.com/2025/09/01/office-cmbs-delinquency-ra...

...No?

That shows, if I'm reading it right, that commercial real estate is having trouble. We know that; it's not in doubt.

What's in doubt is whether that is the primary motivator behind the RTO efforts.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#792

Post by InsideOutSanta »

mrweasel wrote: post #688
bilekas wrote: post #663

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Backdoor layoffs. It's always backdoor layoffs. If they really appreciated and needed you at the company, they would cater for your needs when you're delivering your work.

If it's layoffs aren't there a very real risk that the most talented people, who enjoy working from home will simply leave, while the less talented returns to the office because they'll have a harder time finding new jobs? So you're doing backdoor layoffs, but you're laying off the people you'd most likely want to keep, leaving the company with the less experienced/talented people.

This assumes that companies view their employees as individuals. At a certain scale, companies inevitably start viewing their employees as "resources" that behave more like robots than human beings.

There is no way for somebody like Nadella to have an understanding of most employees' performance, and the chain of management is so long that he doesn't trust anyone else's ability to ascertain individual performance. This leads to the introduction of "objective measurements" of performance, which further undermines trust, as everyone now starts trying to manipulate the numbers.

I think at some point, it's just inevitable that C-level management takes decisions based on the assumption that people are replaceable and that the difference between a great performer and a poor performer is essentially irrelevant.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#793

Post by nlitened »

zurfer wrote: post #689
nlitened wrote: post #649

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With WFH the following things become very difficult and/or ineffective: 1. Onboarding and growing junior employees. 2. Managing/coordinating people 3. Doing/coming up with something innovative 4. Making sure an employee is not working another job in parallel With RTO, companies try go get back the ability to do these things, at the expense of employees’ commute time

Thanks for sticking the head out ;) I'm really not sure where 1 to 3 come from? 1 and 2 are about spending time with people. 3 can't also be true, just look at all the innovations that OSS has created (at least 90 perc. remote collaboration). Number 4 is a real problem and a symptom of the biggest problem imo, which is that it's hard to build trust online/remotely.

> 1 and 2 are about spending time with people

It is true, and spending time with people over video calls or text chats is a very low-bandwidth, rather thankless job which is generally demotivating long-term. Not that many people are actually willing to channel their emotions for hours daily into pixels on screen with no actual emotional human connection. This means that juniors remain isolated, senior employees feel that tutoring juniors is a waste of their time (which is true in this setup), and good managers either stop caring or burn out.

> 3 can't also be true, just look at all the innovations that OSS has created

Innovating in things you deeply care about is one thing, innovating for yet another work project that brings shareholder value is another. The only recipe that has worked for the latter so far has been "put multiple smart people in one room".

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#794

Post by jdbernard »

blacklion wrote: post #762
realusername wrote: post #744

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends of your company, I personally meet my team roughly every 3 months and I push back any task on the calendar because I know the days in the office aren't even half the productivity of the usual remote days. I even avoid big deployments during these days. Remote is usually all focused work and the office time is mostly coffee chats and random interruptions of unrelated subjects because on how much easier it is t…

Open space is PURE EVIL. Don't have fixed working place where you could leave your headphones (and external DAC in my case), cup, charging wires for your gadgets (not everything is USB-C still), some papers, etc is PURE EVIL too. Combined together it is ninth circle of hell. Never worked in open space and refused (otherwise good) offers twice due to open space in office. Culture in which everybody can ping anybody at…

The combination of these things you're mentioning is one of the main reasons, at least for me, that WFH is so much more productive. A lot of tech companies have evolved a culture and built offices that are in opposition to doing good work. Open plan offices have been the norm in my experience over the last 10 years (maybe more). Anytime interruption via Slack/Teams is the typical culture.

I was much more open to working in the office when I actually had my own office.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#795

Post by InsideOutSanta »

rob74 wrote: post #701
aurareturn wrote: post #635

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(4) In person teams outperform remote/hybrid teams. I'm surprised this was not mentioned as a possibility.

What's also not mentioned is that in multinational companies, especially since remote working became more widespread and attracting talent more difficult, teams are often made up of people from different locations anyway. So you won't have an in-person team, you'll just be joining Zoom (or in M$'s case, probably Teams) calls from the office rather than from home.

This is also a situation where RTO has clear negative effects. If you have distributed teams, and everybody works from home, communication necessarily moves online. However, when parts of distributed teams are located in shared offices, they create islands of knowledge and personal relationships within the team, leading to all kinds of problems.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#796

Post by sumtechguy »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #573
dragonwriter wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was very clear, I thought, when I said “RTO mandates are about...”, that I was not saying “All of these factors are relevant to Microsoft”. With Microsoft its probably mostly (3), with maybe some degree of (2), with (1) maybe, especially in the political salience, being a plus in the eyes of some decision-makers but not really driving the decision. There are firms (and public agencies) where the relationship betwee…

No CEO cares about commercial real estate profits. It isn't a factor in any major company decision. Why not extend the baseless paranoia and say it is because they want to see auto company profits go up? And also support petroleum companies? Or is it just real estate that is boogeyman secretly running the country behind the scenes?

I worked for a large company that did just that. They reduced the number of buildings they had to shrink costs, and get rid of employees without 'firing' them. MSFT does not strike me as a company that does not understand cost per employee. Why would you think the cost per employee does not come into the picture? I am just curious about that PoV as it is basically grilled into all MBAs and part of financial calculations of most businesses.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#797

Post by pharrington »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #573
dragonwriter wrote: post #572

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was very clear, I thought, when I said “RTO mandates are about...”, that I was not saying “All of these factors are relevant to Microsoft”. With Microsoft its probably mostly (3), with maybe some degree of (2), with (1) maybe, especially in the political salience, being a plus in the eyes of some decision-makers but not really driving the decision. There are firms (and public agencies) where the relationship betwee…

No CEO cares about commercial real estate profits. It isn't a factor in any major company decision. Why not extend the baseless paranoia and say it is because they want to see auto company profits go up? And also support petroleum companies? Or is it just real estate that is boogeyman secretly running the country behind the scenes?

May you explain why ruthlessly profit driven CEOs of megacorporations don't care about the commercial value of the real estate they own?

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#798

Post by outside1234 »

freddie_mercury wrote: post #528
dragonwriter wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

RTO mandates are about many things, but actual business value of being in the office to the business doing the mandate is low on the list. Among the things it is about: (1) Executives with emotional attachment to certain leadership styles that are enabled by physical presence, (2) Interest in the investor class for the commercial real estate market. The business impacted may not be invested in it, but the businesses’…

It is hilarious that people think the second largest company on the planet, with a market cap over $5 trillion, spends even one second worry about the profit margins of commercial real estate companies, makes any decisions based on that, or is somehow cowed by their alleged political power despite being much, much, much smaller than Microsoft.

These executives, though, also made billions in investments themselves in Microsoft's Redmond Campus, which mostly otherwise will stand empty.

These executives don't like looking dumb and these billions in useless investment are statues to them looking stupid otherwise.

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#799

Post by aaron_m04 »

Aurornis wrote: post #206
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…

I don't know. When a company uses RTO to reduce headcount they usually include all employees , with the expectation that those who live far away from the office will resign instead of relocate. If I'm reading this right, it only applies to people who already live within 50 miles of the office. Remote-remote employees are exempt.

50 miles is a very long way to commute daily!

Re: Microsoft is officially sending employees back to the office

#800

Post by xyst »

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…

It’s simple. It comes from the boards of these companies who have investments in corporate real estate. Got to keep the scam going at the expense of worker mental state, environment, and of course control.
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