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.
On the subject of remote working being more productive or not, my anedoctal experience is that when remote working is fully embraced, the productivity skyrockets, but when it is embraced half-way it may have a negative effect.
When 2/3 of the employees are in an office, they tend to reach out to one another to discuss things and remote workers often get out of the loop. When everyone is working remotely, these discussions happen on slack channels for everyone to see. And if they are written down in a channel, folks can read it as many times as they need to ensure nothing was missed.
This may seem not to be too important, but it makes a massive difference at the end of the day. And you could try to make that happen without remote working but people will not stop walking out to someone else’s cubicle for small questions when they have that option.
This is definitely a good point, when everyone is wfh things like slack or (bleh) Teams has everything in it. I am an internet kid and used im to communicate with my friend base for a long time, it works for me and I can stay connected with people that way, it seems like some people aren’t able to utilize that effectively.
I work for a large Corp that has offices in several location, prior to covid wfh, information was often silo’d just to certain locations and there were people on teams I didn’t know because they never post in slack/teams and instead just do everything in person. All of a sudden I’m seeing them post and ask questions/comment when they rarely/never had before.
The company is now instituting RTO and claiming it’s in the name of collaboration and culture, but if anything I think wfh helped a lot to make cross-site collaboration and culture more prevalent.
Thanks I agree. Pre COVID, my company closed some very small offices to only keep a few HQs and a handful of people were offered fully remote contracts. They were generally very unhappy, being basically cut off from training, career growth, most of the context around work discussions, company events…
WFH is great when working from home is the norm for everyone. The office ALSO works only when most colleagues are in the office (otherwise you just add commute time to the same zoom call you could have from home).
Yeah, our company had hybrid available to everyone, so going remote was simply increasing the hybrid days to 100%. Our productivity skyrocketed because instead of having to waste 5-10 minutes per hour walking across a stupidly huge campus, or battling people for meeting rooms, we could just meet in virtual rooms, and instantly “teleport” to the next one. We had no commute, people would meet early or late, or during lunch.
Nobody asked us to work more but we did because we COULD. We were already fully aligned on hitting our goals, and being in the office was an obstacle rather than an aid. We’re increasing our in-office days over the overwhelmingly negative feedback (why even ask for input if you’re just going to ignore it?). I’ll just have to mentally pull back on available bandwidth for the time wasted on in-office days, reject more meetings, and extend deadlines accordingly. I’ll need to free up all that extra time for the small talk and “networking” they want me to do instead of working.