America’s return-to-office has been a “lagging return,” reports the Washington Post: Even with millions of workers across the country being asked to return to their cubicles, office occupancy has been relatively static for the past year. The country’s top 10 metropolitan areas averaged 47.2 percent…
Good article. That being said, the examples provided against remote work (“salespeople were taking calls from the top of mountains on hiking trips”) don’t paint a true picture of what remote work has become. There is much opportunity for scheduled collaboration, and still some incidents of unscheduled collaboration (aka water cooler moments) via remote work.
Best quote in the article: “The number one thing people want out of a workplace is concentration space… You’re not going to get them into a place just built for social interaction. You’ve got to be able to concentrate…” That’s where most workplaces are shockingly deficient. Most offices are designed to keep workers precariously balanced between concentrating on work tasks and the threat of immediate distraction by coworkers. “Open Office Design” necessitated more space for meeting rooms, and overbooking of meeting rooms necessitated off-site meetings.
Every article arguing for Return To Office conveniently overlooks several shockingly obvious points: PRODUCTIVITY WENT UP when people worked from home. Workers didn’t have to spend hours of time commuting to/from work. Workers didn’t have to spend money on gasoline and parking and day care for their kids or their dogs. Workers didn’t have to lose an entire day of work if they felt sick but were unsure if they were contagious. Workers Didn’t Have To Work From An Office. They still don’t.
So don’t.
Work from Home is a huge compensation increase; being asked to go back is a huge slap. If a company gave every employee a 15% pay cut no one would be shocked everyone left.
(aka water cooler moments)
When I was in charge of my department, pre-covid, the entire team was spread out between half in various different offices, half WFH (including me). We have always been remote from each other.
One of the things I did was create a chat room called “Watercooler,” specifically for this purpose.
Just to point out, latest research shows productivity is a wash. Essentially, experienced workers saw productivity boost, while new hires since WFH have shown low productivity growth over the last 3 years. The leading theory is experience sharing that happened in person, in a casual manner, had a much larger impact in growing the company talent over longer terms.
Firms need to adapt to keep their talent competitive. Some firms choosing to go back to office is just one strategy.
That reads to me like it’s demonstrated to be superior for employees who understand their work and how to do it, but training employees to that point is not occurring. I don’t think this problem is inherent to the format - every place I have yet worked has de-facto replaced most or all of their training program with an on-the-job copying of tasks and routines from more experienced employees. That crutch has been removed and the absence of quality training programs is further highlighted. Understandably, this will vary wildly with field and firm, and developing an analogue to that type of informal information sharing is already occurring from what I’ve read.
Doubling down on what the other guy said, the answer is structured training instead of mashing people together hoping they learn by osmosis
“We want you to go back to spending 1-2 hours a day getting from point A to point B using a congested mode of transport so you can do work that could have been done at home. Wait why aren’t people on board with this?”
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And almost all companies nowadays have some sort of “climate initiative”. WFH is the biggest help most companies can do for the climate.
It’s no doubt to justify all the money they poured into real estate and buildings. If people don’t come back then they have all these liabilities to deal with
I agree. Mine luckily has no real estate holdings and they have pretty much shut down all the us offices. Even the main one but they said they are looking for a smaller replacement. So they are pretty much just going to keep one in the states for smoozing clients and such.
Lots of companies have sold their real estate, and the ones that lease…. Leasing a whole building is a big item on a budget, you can do a lot better by just not using it if you don’t need it
I think the big thing is most people do not want to go looking for another job and before for most people they would have to be pretty underpaid to do it. WFH is huge though and most people will dust off their resumes if they are forced to commute. I myself rate the value of wfh at 20 to 25% of salary. Granted salary is pretty important so I go with the lower 20% but it gets to that pretty easily with just the commute and there are a variety of factor beyond that. As one person mentioned the climate. I could easily make a case for 30%. So getting a come back to office mandatory makes it easy to look for a horizontal move that is wfh. Oh and of course your not going to leave a wfh unless the new position pays much much higher or is also wfh. An in office position would easily need to add 50% to pull wfh staff from another company.
This is the kind of thing that needs to be all or none…you can’t have some people in the office while others work from home.
Before the pandemic when I worked for a large previously monopolistic telecommunications company that shall remain nameless, I was hired right after their WFH policy ended. Which meant that I had to be in the office every day, but people hired before me could still work from home. Also, the company is spread across half the country (though they are desperately trying to regain all of their previous territories), so most of the people I worked with were in a different office. Which mean everything was done over the phone. Sure, we had a screen sharing application, but the actual voice communication was done over traditional phone calls. Makes sense for a large telecommunications company that already owns the infrastructure, right?
Except I was still required to be in the office. I had to spend 2 hours and $20 in gas every day to be in the office. I had to spend time at home organizing my lunches and preparing office clothes. I had to get up at 5:30am so that I could be sure to make it into the office and be logged in properly for the 8am daily meeting. I didn’t get home until 7pm most days just because getting through city traffic at rush hour was a pain in the ass. And all so that I could be in the office to call into a meeting with people sitting at home.
All this effort being thrown at a slow transition just breeds resentment. If you’re going to do it, rip the Band-Aid off and be ready for the fallout. Otherwise, just leave people work wherever they want. They are going to be on the phone or Zoom meeting anyways because of the few that still work from home, so what’s the difference?
I feel like they’d get much less resentment if they just embraced the flexibility, if you want to be in the office fine but there’s really no reason you HAVE to be unless there’s equipment you need or you need some face to face time with coworkers… the two tiered system is just bizarre
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That’s my stapler…
