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Asklemmy @lemmy.ml
andallthat @lemmy.world

why are companies trying so hard to have employees back in the office?

I have posted this on Reddit (askeconomics) a while back but got no good replies. Copying it here because I don't want to send traffic to Reddit.

What do you think?

I see a big push to take employees back to the office. I personally don't mind either working remote or in the office, but I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit and I haven't seen a convincing explanation yet of why they are so keen to have everyone back.

If remote work was just as productive as in-person, a remote-only company could use it to be more efficient than their work-in-office competitors, so I assume there's no conclusive evidence that this is the case. But I haven't seen conclusive evidence of the contrary either, and I think employers would have good reason to trumpet any findings at least internally to their employees ("we've seen KPI so-and-so drop with everyone working from home" or "project X was severely delayed by lack of in-person coordination" wouldn't make everyone happy to return in presence, but at least it would make a good argument for a manager to explain to their team)

Instead, all I keep hearing is inspirational wish-wash like "we value the power of working together". Which is fine, but why are we valuing it more than the cost of office space?

On the side of employees, I often see arguments like "these companies made a big investment in offices and now they don't want to look stupid by leaving them empty". But all these large companies have spent billions to acquire smaller companies/products and dropped them without a second thought. I can't believe the same companies would now be so sentimentally attached to office buildings if it made any economic sense to close them.

236 comments

  • A comment I've seen a few times is that remote work highlights the minimal value that middle-managers provide to companies.

    If you're employees work from home with little interaction with their managers and they do it well/better, then why have those managers? Like you said, companies want to be cost effective. So the push back to the office could be coming from managers who don't want a light shined on their lack of value.

    • Ironically that probably ousts out their minimal value harder. Not a good look forcing your "underlings" if productivity was good prior, and subsequently falls flat.

    • Middle management has gotten absolutely out of control in America

      Imo (and this is largely conjecture) it’s an end result of stagnant wages. It used to be that you might stay in the same position but get actual pay increases 50 years ago. Now you don’t get the pay increases really, maybe a 3% annual bump if you’re lucky. They need something to retain talent so a lot of places end up creating bullshit management positions out of thin air to retain staff that come with a slightly more modest pay bump.

      So instead of the 3% bump you get a 5% bump and now you’re “director of clinical programming” or “associate manager of marketing and sales for eastern iowa division” and have 10 employees “report” to you but in reality you’re neutered and have no actual power to do anything to them but tattle to the actual boss. But then the company doesn’t have to give you a 7-10% bump that outpaces inflation and feels like an actual raise. They save the real promotions for nepotism.

      But this happens constantly and now industries are jam packed with employees that just bother other employees all day and/or create systems that slow down employees en masse to “increase accountability” that are constantly updated and replaced without removing old ones.

      Whenever someone goes on about fixing healthcare this comes to mind. I’ve worked in healthcare for years and it is absolutely full of this. Pharma, insurance, hospital admin, all of them are loaded up with tons of these kinds of staff. I can’t tell you how many useless staff I’ve seen get promoted to positions that were literally created for them to supervise a handful of people. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to fill out 7 sets of paperwork that takes 2 hours and is all redundant copies of each other because 9 middle managers from the hospital, insurance, and state administration are all constantly convinced I’m a fraudulent liar despite being a licensed professional with a decade and a half of clinical experience and absolutely no investigations or citations on my record whatsoever.

      Single payer healthcare is definitely a great idea that should be pursued but this is a huge problem that also needs to be addressed regardless of who’s paying the bill if you want to see changes with actual costs, wait times, clinician burn out, etc.

      I’d imagine it’s similar for other industries too. How much wasted resources are in middle management at tech companies, at food production, at basically anything? How much of rising costs are basically going to pay the glut of middle managers that being nothing to the table but resource drain? Who do nothing in terms of bringing in money, who do nothing in terms of providing value? How much cheaper could my cellphone, bread, wood, etc be without these parasites sucking up resources

      But then the societal impact comes up. If you addressed this problem tonight that would mean millions of people go from comfortably middle class to jobless overnight. America isn’t known for great social supports as is, what happens when you throw a 7-8 figure number into the mix (with the reduced tax income from the loss of their job income).

      Fwiw I genuinely think that point is a huge factor in why our government resists proper single payer healthcare; a true program would displace millions of workers overnight as it would make companies like Aetna, Cigna, etc largely redundant and reliant on their much less lucrative life/home/auto/renters insurance divisions. They would slash workers left and right. If we ever get one it will be a two lane system where the private insurers stay alongside it as a “boutique” option for the rich to receive better service, guaranteed. Plus you know, those companies literally own politicians lol and that’s the other much larger problem

  • I work 95% remote, and I'll be the first to admit, there is value in working physically close to your teammates. Discussion and camaraderie can happen organically, which allows people to better understand each others' strengths. There are also fewer things to distract you, and the reality is that many people these days are experiencing a sort of internet-induced ADHD, so being in an office can make it easier to concentrate. All of this allows you to be and feel more productive.

    That's the best argument I've got, but I wouldn't mandate it on anyone. The only people mandating working from office are people who are insecure with their workforce and hiring methodologies. They don't trust their workers to do the job, so they feel the need to micromanage their workers like children. If you're a manager, and you don't feel like you can trust your employees, you've already lost.

    • I actually have ADHD and the opposite is true for me. Working from home I can concentrate without distractions of office workers walking by, or talking about something that I'm not interested in but can't block out. I work in my office at home with the door closed for practically the whole day and it's great. My work has it's own built in structure, but I imagine that other kinds of less structured work could be very difficult for someone with ADHD.

    • I can tell you from experience, there is nothing more distracting than having your manager walk up behind you and tap you on the shoulder while you're working on code. While this problem doesn't go away completely with remote work, at least you have time to compose yourself and bookmark your work before you respond

    • Also for me there is value in occasionally seeing people in person. The exact ratio will depend on the job, but for me it would be about 2-3 days per month in the office. We see each other, talk about how things are going, blockers, stuff we need to change, a little office gossip and then off we go again.

      In that sense, a lax hybrid schedule works best for me personally. However, for it to work, everyone should agree to be in the office in the same days. Coming to an empty office and doing the same zoom calls you could have done from home is less than useful.

      And since, again, the ratio of individual work Vs collaborative work varies by person and team, we'd need to find an average that sort of works for everyone and agree on a common schedule That is where I think the idea of hybrid comes in: 2 or 3 days per week in the office for everyone. My company is trying this and asking (but for now not forcing) people to concentrate attendance in the days in the middle of the week.

      This clearly works better for some and worse for others.

      I heard from a colleague that some companies are trying a different model. They shut down the offices and used part of the savings as budget for managers to create more frequent team events, so teams can e.g. meet in person at a restaurant a couple of times per month. I have no idea who these companies are and how this approach is going.

    • I think it should be on a case-by-case basis. I'm in the legal field, and there's definitely days I don't need to be in the office as almost all of our work is online now. State and federal mandatory efiling, e-discovery is online, and even our document management system is headed to the cloud, so no need for remoting in, just log into Microsoft 365 from any browser. Don't even need to own any Microsoft apps natively anymore.

      On the other hand, there are days that I do need to be in the office: depositions and prepping witnesses, trial preparedness, and sometimes, you just need to touch base with everyone to see how things are going. I work in securities litigation, and those are frequently very complex, document and fact intensive cases.

      We have a entire practices that are 100% remote now. The partners are either elderly, or they live far away from the office and were hybrid remote before the pandemic. The paralegal that works with those attorneys is also 100% remote.

      Lastly, I am much more productive at home than in the office. I do not have ADHD, and do not have a problem with attention, and do not get distracted easily. On the other hand, I'm an introvert, and really loathe the interpersonal nonsense and constant interruptions of ppl barging into my office, more often enough that just to chat. Last month, I had to do a major document review of going through 10s of thousands of emails, and to just plow through that at home, comfy in my bed, where my bathroom is just a few steps away, made me so much more productive than being stuck in the office.

  • The answer that is common but I don't see here is it's a soft layoff result. It allows the company to reduce their employee spend because a percentage of them will resign without the publicity of doing a layoff.

    Without internal intelligence I feel like that's what zoom is doing for example.

    • I honestly think this might be pretty close to the mark. My company just announced RTO today but interestingly was pro WFH even before Covid with many of their staff hired as remote workers. They recently had to lay off a number of people and aren't projecting to be making their numbers this quarter. So I do wonder if this is an attempt to shed more staff without taking active action to lay off more people and the moral hit that comes with that.

      • Those are all typical signs of doing a soft layoff is exactly what they're doing. Not an uncommon tactic and it's been popular for decades because it works.

        I first saw it in the early 2000s when the company I worked at expected everyone to work out of the Denver corporate office. Many refused to make the move and resigned, a few years later we swapped back and reduced the size of the office so nobody but Sr VPs even had a dedicated space in the office and folks moved as far away as Central America to work from again.

  • My work place doubled down on work from home and they allow work from anywhere. They still encourage to gather at the workplace sometimes for socialization and general good vibes.

  • I am on team work from home personally, but the reality is we will have to compromise a bit, and I think a hybrid environment is where the sweet spot is. I still work remote about 90% of the time, but realistically I think 60-80% remote, 20-40% in office is ideal and tenable for just about every work type where remote work is feasible.

    There is benefit to being in person with your colleagues, there is benefit to having a centralized area for congregating, meeting with outside stakeholders, etc. However, there is absolutely no reason to be in the office all day every day. It makes no sense. The bulk of employees spend AT LEAST 50% (rank and file probably closer to 85-90%?) of their time working alone, by themselves. Let them do that wherever the fuck they want. If the work is getting done, leave them the fuck alone and let them work in their PJs or on their couch or whatever.

    A hybrid environment also keeps your work force local and prevents us all from being outsourced. If we all insist on working remote full time then there is absolutely no reason for employers not to offer our jobs to someone living somewhere that's cheaper to live. Sure, we could correct over time and move to a lower cost of living place to compete, but is that really what you want? Do you want to leave your home, friends, family, etc just to chase the job you already have solely because they won't pay you what they already do to stay where you are? If you own a home do you want the value to tank as demand plummets? If your rent is cheap do you want it to skyrocket because displaced remote workers are flooding your town in a rush to capitalize?

    • I would agree with most of what you said.

      There are also a not-insignifigant number of people that struggle when at home 100%. Some people are rock stars and able to just get stuff done. But a lot of people are not, sadly, organized enough to handle such an unstructured environment and able to still be effective.

      This isnt a new thing due to covid or the move, but a LOT of folks just do better with a hard separation of work/life and a lot of folks arent self aware enough to know they need it.

      As someone that can and has worked remote, and chooses to come back, it can be frustrating working with people that struggle with these things, and I definitely see differences between home work and office work in some. I actually work in an office because its much easier to maintain balance. I tend to work too much from home and it causes burnout but I also have kids/family that come home early and dont really understand that just because im home doesnt mean i can sit down and talk at their convenience. What I mean is that work/life balanace is harder. So i choose to commute 99% of the time and can WFH when needed.

      But i have one guy that had had this issue chronically for years where he often struggles to communicate, is easily distracted, often needed to be micro managed or have his tasks organized, prioritized and in some cases, even steps spelled out. He does well enough to mostly be of help (so hes not gonna get fired), but he complains about lack of upward mobility or lack of raises, but when the SHTF, hes always got excuses locked and loaded about why hes behind or cant complete a project/task.

      Conversely I have a guy thats AMAZING from wherever. Never has issues and is always way ahead of the curve. Hes also full time remote but excels at it.

      It just depends on the person in a lot of cases and frankly, in my very small use cases, many/most arent the type that are capable of the self discipline needed for the task. Now that said Im not at google or one of those places that hires rockstars in buckets, so they reasons they are RTO are likely different from my orgs.

      Of my team, i would say at least a cool 60% are just much less....themselves from home and easily distracted. Either because they segment their life (which is fine and awesome, i do that too), or because they dont have a good setup at home, or because they are just too easily distracted at home.

  • To verify you're spending every minute on actually working

  • there is really no logical reason. Working “in the office” is basically a bunch of distractions from idiot coworkers who don't know that email / instant messaging apps exist + trying to figure out what is for lunch and planning how to spend the hour+ coming in / going home.

    Frankly the push is likely just because so many companies have invested in the real estate and infrastructure to make a physical office function that they feel they need to make that investment worth while, plus the inertia of old people not willing to just accept that things can be done differently. Similar thing with a 4 day work week, countless studies and actual implementations have proven that it is vastly more productive for companies and preferable for employees, but it will never be implemented in the US because we are conditioned to think running yourself ragged for your job is somehow a moral necessity.

    In my personal opinion, anyone who is a wage slave that claims to “prefer going to the office” is probably someone who doesn’t now how to do their job without bothering their coworkers with basic questions they should know the answer to and/or is so devoid of meaningful personal relationships they only have their coworkers to interact with.

    Work is for chumps.

  • Number of things at play.

    Most companies can't take advantage even in theory of saving costs if they have an office today. If they own it, who is going to buy in this climate? (keeping in mind that if it is office space, then it pretty much has to stay office space, without exorbitant effort and money to change it to something else) My company has 10 years left on their lease, with penalties of vacating early so bad that they would be just as well letting the lease run. If there's one thing a company hates it's being forced to spend money/have assets that are not seeing use.

    Contributing to the above, a lot of these folks have a big part of their portfolio invested in real estate, so collapse of the office space segment of real estate would be bad news for them.

    A lot of management looks awfully superfluous in a remote worker scenario. Without the visual aid of dealing with people in person, it seems like maybe you could double the sizes of departments, maybe erase a layer of middle management. So management needs people in person to maintain the appearance of relevance.

    Companies also like to give tours to clients and show a busy looking office space of people working toward their customers goals. You need people in person in order for those tours to look adequately impressive.

    Some of their levers to get longer work out of people work better in the office. For example, my office had way less parking than they had people coming in, and an overflow lot dangling a literal mile away from the buildings. In response to complaints that there's no reasonable parking, that there's no shuttle, that folks have to cross a fairly busy street without a signal light, an executive said "if you cared about your work, you'd come in early enough to get a good spot". They considered people who came in at 8AM to be lazy slackers, because the real dedicated people came in at 7AM, even though office work technically started at 9AM for most of them.

    Frankly, remote work isn't objectively more productive across the board. You can find/create metrics to "prove" either side of the argument (measuring "productivity" is really subjective, and many of the studies are self-reporting where employees decide for themselves their productivity, or even outright state how productive the workers feel. In my experience, individual productivity may see a boost with improved focus, removal of commute, fewer work social distractions. However, the relevance of the work may suffer (for example, in my group one guy spent three weeks doing something no one needed done because he didn't have the presence of others to remind him about what really mattered) and others that depend on collaboration may falter (for example, new college hire is left adrift because it's really hard for an early career person to get traction in a pure remote scenario). We tend to care less about folks who are little more than icons next to text most of the day, or a disembodied voice for select meetings. Ambient collaboration takes a hit, as the barrier to talk to someone is a bit higher when you have to explicitly go to the trouble of typing a message or calling. It seems more intrusive.

    As to why the message tends to be softball, well a number of things.

    They don't want to get into the "data" game because the employees can find studies with data saying the exact opposite. Employees have a vested interest in believing their favored data.

    Other statements are too aggressive, and they want to try to maintain some semblance of morale by being the "good guys". At least at the company level. From what I can tell, the corporate level at my job gets to send the happy, gentle prods to come into office, but the managers are expected to go as asshole as needed to "fix" the attendance problem.

  • The values of managers and business / capitalism. A manager should ideally be primarily focused on creating the conditions that allow their team to do their best work, but many people who get into management and I’m guessing most people at the executive level are people interested in power, influence, and control. Not being able to surveil their underlings takes away from that control. Managers also tend to be the types of types of people naturally suited to modern work culture - extroverts, workaholics, people who’s lives revolve around the careers. The kind of people who like being in the office. Then there is the capitalistic notion of infinite growth, improvement, and never ending increases in productivity, such that managers are pushed to squeeze their employees for every drop of their time, energy, and attention. Productivity gets defined by easy quantitative metrics like hours spent sitting still at a desk focused directly on work tasks, rather than ever being linked to things like a sustainable pace of work or work life balance or employees not living their lives with a constant feeling of dread and anxiety in their guts. Don’t expect managers to push for employee autonomy in forms like remote work when managers have been playing the game by a specific set of rules and motivations that have nothing to do with human quality of life.

  • There is the wonder why hold value on office space ersus the smaller companies that are bought and dropped with no sentimental value. The big difference there is that purchasing out a company doesn't usually come with a years-long agreement to keep it in place, use the products, etc. Office space has that. A years-long agreement to use the space and pay for the use. And to drop the use before the agreement is done costs more than it's worth. And it's even worse for a company that owns property. It costs money to keep the office space usable, money that comes from leases. If someone is going to back out of a lease, the owner of a building now has to pull from other sources of money to upkeep a building.

    I know developers have spent years building and growing office buildings and regions to put said office buildings, and now a massive push to work remotely makes all that effort not just for nothing, but a very costly nothing. And then there is the secondary economy around office buildings. Many stores and restaurants spring up where there are plenty of people working. If there are no people, no reason for those businesses. I used to work in a downtown area with plenty of restaurants that I would eat at. Now that I don't work there, I don't eat at those restaurants anymore.

    The push and call for remote work is going to change literal landscapes in cities and industrial regions in ways we cannot predict, or prevent.

    • Correct, my (large) company was literally getting bullied in the newspaper for no longer "contributing to the local economy by letting its employees work from home*.

  • There are a whole lot of issues around commercial property and corporate taxes that interplay to mean that occupancy is heavily encouraged.

  • I absolutely cannot find the article I read now, but it was about an employee tracking suite of tools that companies often use in workplaces. It allows them to gauge the productivity of employees using a combination of hardware and software. It’s apparently insanely expensive but useful for predatory companies that strive to squeeze every last remaining drop of hope from employees as long as it increases productivity. That’s the reason some companies want people back in office. So they can keep tabs on them.

  • There is a tangible benefit in certain jobs from being in the same space. I work in a place where we are constantly training new employees with OJT. Continuous improvement and learning new things from peers is important for our future capabilities. Knowledge sharing is a big part of my job.

    We rotate in-office and work-from-home weeks and there is a considerable reduction in questions asked and just general training-type or knowledge sharing interactions. Being able to ask a question or provide guidance directly, in-person, and off the cuff is easier than messaging or calling. I definitely get more work done at home, but sacrifice future efficiency of myself, my peers, and the department as a whole because of the reduction of knowledge sharing interactions.

    I think we have struck a good balance with the rotation in the time being. We could certainly try to figure out ways to make knowledge sharing and training easier and more effective to do remotely, but as our culture is now, working from home makes it less effective.

  • In office communication is much more efficient. It is easier to understand (and pay attention to) people in the same room as you than it is to understand people on a call (especially since most people don't have a great microphone and Internet and LAN quality can vary). Some employers have adopted a policy of grouping meetings to designated meeting days and encouraging employees to come in on those.

    • These are mostly excuses.

      1. If your employee isn't paying attn during meetings and not performing well due to that, that's a performance issue. Not a location issue.
      2. If they're not paying attn and are still performing well, maybe the meeting has no value.
      3. Companies should provide the necessary equipment to do the job. That includes an adequate headset, camera, etc... Not providing a $50 headset is not a reason to enforce a commute.

      I've had a remote managers and remote teams for almost a decade now. When I had an office to go to I was often less productive due to all the distractions. Being in a physical location makes it too easy for people to try and jump the queue and just walk over to my desk.

      While I miss (and I very much do miss) the socializing aspect of a shared workspace it didn't make me more productive.

      My current job, which is completely remote, with a geographically spread out team, takes steps to mitigate the separation. Most work related convos take place in an open text channel unless they're private. So you get that, "I heard you taking to Bob about XYZ".

      We use cameras on team meetings. It helps with the human connection as well as with being present when you can see other people and look them in the eye.

      • Teleconference is, at best, good enough and will never have the quality of in person discussion.

        I am not aware of any teleconference software that uses perfectly lossless audio. Those small losses, though hard to hear, can increase the cognitive load of participants. Even with expensive headsets and good software, audio volumes will vary from speaker to speaker. Automatic volume leveling loses even more audio fidelity.

        Due to physics (i.e. we cannot send a signal faster than the speed of light) and processing, there will be additional delay. It makes it hard for people to talk without speaking over each other. It makes discussions trickier since people are hesitant to talk right after one another. Instead of interrupting with questions, they will hold questions until the end, when the context may be forgotten, or don't ask questions at all.

        Even assuming that everyone has good lighting and has their camera pointed perfectly, body language is often lost. Every meeting software I have used hesitates to switch the focused speaker too often. If two people are talking back and forth, one will be religtated to a thumbnail video. When someone is presenting, they cannot easily scan the room to see reactions.

        So, when talking on a meeting, the participants hear (almost) everything being said, but they miss out on all of the non-verbal communication and even some subtleties of the sound.

    • But a business doesn't need to own office space for sporadic meetings. There are rentable meeting rooms in many cities, in libraries, in some coffee shops, universities, colleges, conference buildings, etc. Plus they're a lot nicer than dingy offices.

      • Sure, but many are probably locked into long leases. These leases also cover things like server rooms, show rooms, and storage areas. All of that can be moved, but there is cost (and risk) in moving them. Plus, it is convenient to have work areas for employees to use between meetings.

        Also, some people, like me, prefer to work outside of their home, so it is good to have us in a single place so we can have impromptu meetings.

        Some companies are reducing office space, taking desks away from employees that come in rarely or even switching to a hot bunk model (several employees share the same office and come in on different days) or a hotel model (employees sit in any open office and are expected to take all personal items home at the end of the day).

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