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 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