Leaders are perhaps experiencing more resistance than they had anticipated.
Amazon is perhaps the most documented example of how ugly the RTO battle can get: Around 30,000 employees signed a petition protesting the company’s in-office mandate, and more than 1,800 pledged to walk out from their jobs to take a stand.
The tech giant is still complaining that workers are dodging the three-day in-office mandate, over a year after it was announced.
My job originally encouraged it. But we collectively ignored it. They tried to threaten us by saying, “We track your badges” and people laughing. Like, you really want to fire your best employees for that? I double dog dare you you POS.
There was even a brown nosing department lead who tried to bully people like, “I’m at the office, unlike X”. And now we all say, “We come on days when you’re not there.”
I love it that the norms are shifting. Can’t let the asskissers win.
My previous company conducted a six week experiment in late 2022 having everyone come to the office twice per week. They compared the metrics and saw that it didn’t make a difference in productivity, told everyone they could wfh unless they needed to grab supplies, and rented a smaller office. We cut the space to around a third of what we used to have. In 2019, the owner was considering doubling our space. Some get it, some don’t.
This is absolutely the way. One of the companies I work with, a couple years ago had a great employee who was moving out of the state. They had an office, but they didn’t want to lose her, so they let her go remote. That employee became unintentionally a work from home trial. She did just as well remote as she did in the office. So when COVID happened everybody got a laptop and the exact same VPN setup she had. Business continued and the sky did not fall due to lack of ‘water cooler chat’.
So when lockdown lifted, it was ‘welcome back to the office everybody it’s great to have you back here, first order of business pack your shit and get it out of the building cuz we’re breaking the lease next month’.
They moved all their servers to the cloud and became a totally virtual company. Now they can recruit from anywhere in the country and pick the best people for the job no matter where they live. And what they pay for cloud costs is a tiny fraction of what they paid for office space.
There is SO MUCH economic incentive for virtual companies. Startup costs are slashed, utility bills nearly completely gone, hire anyone anywhere, liability insurance requirements greatly reduced.
Blows my mind that we get so much resistance from companies, especially ones in the tech sector that really don’t have an in-person requirement.
The smallest ones are the most agile and the least to lose by going virtual.
Big ones however have a conundrum. If the company has spent tens or hundreds of millions of dollars building a giant headquarters, and then they go virtual or largely remote, then that money becomes basically a wasted investment. And so they have to admit to their investors that money was wasted, much of which can’t be recouped even if they sell the building. That goes triple for companies with big campuses like Apple or Google. That’s why you get a lot of companies demanding things like in office 3 days a week, to create justification for having the office in the first place.There’s also a simple human factor. A lot of management, even tech management, still has the attitude that being able to physically watch the employee somehow enables better control or management or increases productivity. It’s crap of course, unless you have lazy unmotivated employees they will work just as well from somewhere else as they will with you breathing down their neck.
But it’s caused some interesting shake-ups. A while back I read a great interview with a (fully virtual) tech startup CEO, he said whenever their bigger competitors announce RTO his HR department quickly buys a bunch of LinkedIn keywords targeting them.
He found, as almost anybody could figure out with basic logic, that the best and most valuable employees know their worth and thus are the first to quit rather than RTO, and his company is right there with an offer of ‘work on some exciting new tech and we will never push RTO because we have no office to return to’. Said he’s gotten some of his best people that way.So when the bigger CEOs are now saying they don’t see full return to office, I think that’s because they are realizing they have no other choice, the labor market has changed and demanding full-time in person or even hybrid has become the same as a significant salary cut.
My company reduced office space as well. This nailed the new 2-days office rule. They cannot roll it back
One time I worked for a small company (300ish employees) that was well known locally for being heavy handed and micromanaging. I have never before or since seen so much intentional time wasting by so many people in one place.
Turns out if you micromanage your workforce and are constantly slapping their hands for not appearing to be busy enough, you’ll successfully create a bunch of actors who should get Emmys for playing the part of “productive” employees.
On the other hand, if you treat them well, give them the tools to do their jobs, and leave them alone most people will actually do their jobs quite well. Shocking, I know.
Can confirm, experienced this shift myself.
It’s worth noting that my job was kind of special in the sense that it was usually field work. I visited the office once or twice a year. The ones with “normal” positions were mostly in the office because it was objectively a healthy work place with nice people, and under such circumstances the “collaboration argument” is actually valid to a certain degree. However, nobody (except from the ones who actually needed to be on site to do their job, such as manufacturing and repair) were under any obligation to physically be in the office, as long as the job got done well. Once in a while us riffraff from the field service department would coordinate and visit the head office together, and that’s when it was pretty much packed, as it was one of the rare opportunities for everyone to meet. (This usually resulted in everyone getting an invite to a “technical meeting” at a pub nearby, with some department heads card in the bar)
However, then we were bought by a huge competitor, and they allowed none of this. I kept ignoring most requests that said I had to be in the office a certain amount of time. And when they began contacting me directly and insist, I made sure to select days that incurred the highest airline fees. That’s when they started to back off and mostly make demands that made sense.
However, gone were the days when people actually enjoyed meeting each other, be it in or outside of the office. Nobody truly cared anymore, especially since the new corporate overlords wanted to micromanage everything. I left that job a few months ago, and I hear from a lot of my former coworker that there’s a really big exodus.
My hope is that the new company ended up paying for pretty much nothing. The profit was in the people and their experience, and the people are taking their experience elsewhere for higher pay and less corporate bullshit.
I loved reading every bit of that. Esp the company waltzing in and then getting kicked in the dick
Another weird obsession with the new company was their brand and logo. When they bought our company, of course employees of said company wore and used a lot of merch with the company name. Mostly T-Shirts, but also some other stuff (us field crew got some nice travel stuff with the company logo on it, such as a water proof duffel bag, a pelicase, etc).
Some executive asshat in the new company threw a hissyfit about people wearing the logo of their former competitor, and to a certain degree I can understand this, except the new company NEVER handed out stuff like that. So whenever I was in the field I always had work wear on with the wrong (in their eyes) logo. Hell, sometimes out of spite I even wore a t-shirt from a long defunct competitor that I worked for back in 2011.
I love the cut of your jib
small company (300ish employees)
I work for a miniscule company, four employees and the owner.
I can’t believe you work for Five Guys!
I’m included in the calculation, so I AM (one of) Five Guys!
Because companies are planning to increase hiring soon. The fed is going to cut the interest rate, spurring growth. RTO was just about making employees quit to avoid severance payouts and other layoff perks back when the economy was more slumped.
(it was also about commercial real estate values taking a land dive but otherwise spot on)
This is the only correct answer
What about “we have this massive office and only 3 people use it” and “we want to micro manage our employees”
The complex interplay of macro and micro
There’s some of that. I know companies in my city were given tax breaks for hosting their office building there. The theory is, the business brings more people into the area who will be spending money on lunch/happy hour/gas/etc. The tax income of that is more than the tax benefit they offer the company.
Well, people stop coming to the office, and their tax benefit of the employees being in the city dries up. The city was threatening the companies tax benefit if the people didn’t come back, and thus, RTO (in my city, anyway).
Never thought about that angle, makes sense though
I agree that those were side benefits of RTO, but it’s only stopping because they are planning to start buying up and hoarding tech workers again when the interest rate drops.
Why would they make employees quit when they are just going to hire again? Weeding out the job hoppers?
It’s like when you cancel your Netflix when money is tight and then resub once you can afford it again.
We are just labor subscriptions for corporations.
First you cut the costs and get a bonus for that, then you fill the empty roles, and then get a bonus for that
Quarterly profits were down. Next quarter is irrelevant.
Because a lot of CEOs these days only care about quarterly reports. When interest rates went up, companies cost to do business also went up, so to keep the red profit line going up, they had to cut costs somewhere. Labor makes up most of the expenses so layoffs and forced RTO happened.
These CEOs don’t care that they lose years of experience when employees leave. And by the time the lack of experience catches up to the companies shitting themselves, the CEOs hope to have moved on to something else with their massive stock rewards for “increasing shareholder value”. Even the Boeing CEO who wasn’t lucky enough to leave before shit hit the fan is going to get a golden parachute. So really no downside for them.
The computer did that auto-layoff thing.
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There are only 3 reasons employers force RTO: control, real estate, impending RIFs.
what is RIF?
Reduction In Force. I e. Layoffs
An investment vehicle. Reserved Investor Fund
"KPMG surveyed U.S. CEOs of companies turning over at least $500 million and found that just one-third expect a full return to the office in the next three years.
It’s a complete 360 from their stance last year, when 62% of CEOs surveyed predicted that working from home would end by 2026."
Reminds me of a joke from the early days of the Sony/MS console wars:
You know why they call it the Xbox 360? Because when you see it you turn 360 degrees and walk away (or moonwalk away)
Man it’s been a minute since I’ve thought about that movie.
It’s criminally forgotten despite having a rare balance of interesting plot balanced with great action and solid special effects. Had the child lead been someone famous it would have stuck around longer. A classic in my book, up there with True Lies, T2, and Predator as Arnolds enduring movies.
I love how Fortune ignores their previous reporting. We all know that RTO was largely about control and a sunk cost in property. It still is. Companies switch between RTO and WFH whenever they want to restructure. Efficiency is the argument, but that’s not the goal. Fortune staff know this, but they’re writing for the bosses, so they feign ignorance. Meh.
Also Fortune is ignoring the serious damage done to the health of many industries by arbitarily hurtig workers and forcing them off of career paths for no fucking reason.
Fuck MBA rich asshats, people need to stop putting them in charge of things they dont know shit.
offices cost money. companies that are smart would keep small offices in major cities to entertain clients/customers and act as a space staff who wants to use it can. Like if their electricity goes out or just prefer to go someplace besides home. locate downtown or near the airports
Exactly what my employer did during the pandemic. Hired more people and reduced the amount of leased office space. Would be impossible to call us back into office now because we simply wouldn’t all fit.
No sign of that changing either. They announced just last week that they’re letting the lease on a large chunk of our remaining offices lapse next year, and have already sub-leased out about half of that. We’re fully remote for good at this point.
same here. had a name for it that was sorta like work where you want to but realistically only a slice of the company could actually work from an office. I mean just on population it would make sense to do like NY, LA, chicago, and then either houston or dallas.
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Sorry to burst your edginess here, but… You do know most companies rent their office space?
I end up getting in late and leaving early on the days I’m in office and yet somehow I still get good reviews. That should be impossible according to c-level execs that are never in office, come and go as they please, and hold these thrice-rescheduled-hastily-engineered all hands meetings where there are never updates to the things they say they’re working on. They just say they’ve put a large group of middle-management on it right before they introduce yet another half-assed convoluted system to measure employee producivity that they don’t even understand. Gotta fire some people because the plan the execs heard about on a retreat didn’t work at all and they lost a bunch of money so they need cash to build that AI in order to fire more people!
Sure … now that they’ve pumped and dumped their office real estate holdings.
Some companies are desginating some cities as “hub cities”. If you’re full time remote and can’t relocate or go to an office in a hub city, they let you go.
