Can someone ELI5* the major reasons a large employer would want to enforce return-to-office? Some other comments touch on tax laws for domestic/foreign work, but why by in the office at all?
(* sorry if wrong forum for this acronym)
For many companies the transition to remote during covid was a massive drop in performance of their staff. For developers, IT and the like, most of us had some experience, if not had already transitioned, but in those industries that hadn't, it's easy to look at those two years and say "this was worse".
Unless your company is VERY focused on remote staffing, collaboration is just easier in person for most roles. Add in time zone differences and it gets even more difficult.
Some people are bad at working remotely at home. Especially if there are distractions in their home office. (Like my wife, my dogs, my daughter, etc.) It can be hard to get others to take working from home seriously. I've gone as far as to rent an office for myself to go to every day.
When remote becomes a possibility, the idea of living elsewhere soon follows for many people. (as in this article) Even without crossing national borders, many US companies have tax and legal implications across state lines. Even supporting benefits for employees becomes more difficult as almost all health insurance networks are state based.
There are no doubt a thousand and one people that could reply "But not me, why should I change" but the simple truth is many people are easier to get higher quality work out of in person in an office, and an office is easier to manage than a distributed workforce.
> For many companies the transition to remote during covid was a massive drop in performance of their staff.
This was the expected outcome, since most companies hadn't prepared at all for a multi-year global lockdown. However, my understanding is that even companies that had very little preparation handled the pandemic absolutely fantastic, and other factors were much more important (supply chain of physical goods, jobs that could only be done in-person, reduced travel and leisure etc). If productivity dropped for white-collar WFH type of jobs across the board, I think we would never hear the end of it. Instead, the media zeitgeist is blaming the "anti-work" culture, that people aren't taking minimum wage jobs anymore etc. It's definitely not the narrative I'd expect if "WFH=low productivity" were true.
IT is easier when everyone is in the same place - for example, fixing a person’s work laptop or updating software. Workers compensation is easier to manage, for example if someone is injured on the job. Finally, as much as the knowledge class hates butts-in-seats as a metric for performance, it is easier to tell “how” your employees are doing when you see them every day. Especially when you want to check if someone is burning out.
In my view, both sides of the RTO divide have failed to adequately acknowledge the pitfalls of their own position, which has led to this topic being unnecessarily polarized.
If managers are making time to interact enough with their employees day to day to actually assess burnout, then they can make the time to have zoom meetings with their team. Its no different. Funny you cite IT when that line of work especially is basically 50% remote work if not more of just controlling a users device remotely to fix software issues. Hardware issues you could just mail out/in gear to one site. Probably a whole lot cheaper than having a dedicated IT department in each and every office you have around the globe.
The company pays for that office. Maybe they own it, maybe they lease/rent it. If it sits empty, then it is a non-performing asset and they need to get rid of it. Or shrink what part of it they rent until there isn't any "wasted" space.
Cities depend on property taxes. If all the offices suddenly stop being used as offices, they're going to have a terrible time. Nobody is paying taxes.
Commercial real estate is over built. If too many companies decide that they don't need commercial space anymore, then the market is going to collapse. Every one who borrowed money to build/own commercial real estate is going to find their bubble getting popped. Like the 2007-2008 meltdown in residential property.
If commercial real estate gets re-valued to reflect the newer, much lower, need for that space, then asset values fall through the floor. So anyone who still is paying taxes will be paying much lower levels of taxes. More bad news for cities.
Too many managers depend on people sitting in chairs. This is usually called "presenteeism". Part of the problem with presenteeism is that people feel forced to show up to work even if they are sick. Mismanagers usually don't know what you do. Or how to measure whether you're doing a good job or not. But they can see whether you're at your desk or not.
Manager empires are based on the number of people. If all of your minions are working from home, then other mismanagers cannot measure your status any more. Likewise, this leads to why many mismanagers pad their staff so that they can appear to be more important. Unimportant managers don't get "good" parking spaces, nor good corner offices. Nor do they get admiration from the other mismanagers.
- It isn't just middle managers who use "seat time" as a proxy.
- Businesses often sign 10+ year leases and commercial real-estate is EXPENSIVE. With a long term lease in place how do they justify the rents while the space is vacant?
- Many senior leaders are required to be in the office, so naturally you need to be there too.
The one that hasn't been mentioned yet is that the flip side of "managers want to see their people" is "managers' jobs are much harder in remote positions."
It means that every meeting is via zoom. That's great for 2 hours a day. It's terrible for 6 hours during a meeting-heavy day. (Consider a manager with 15 reports that meets with 2 tech leads half hour weekly, a manager for half hour weekly, all ICs for a half hour bi-weekly, and has 4 hour long manager screening interviews a week. Team rituals usually take about 4 hours a week; anything else has been moved to email/slack. That's about 16 hours a week base load. Every single one of those, and every other meeting, is either on zoom (exhausting) or writing up an email (which takes 2-3 times as long as having a meeting.)
On top of that, performance management is more difficult. For great and average performers, it's not that different. However, it's much harder for low performers because it's bad to offer feedback async. So, things that should be a five minute conversation in an office turn into having to schedule a meeting. It also means that we have to rely on metrics more as well, and everyone here knows how bad metrics are at judging performance.
The problem amplifies for senior management. You lose the rewarding parts of the job and the parts that were positives turn into drudgery or negative.
I work remotely. I choose to work remotely because the positives outweigh the negatives, even as a manager, but it is a harder and less rewarding job remotely.
Many reasons but the two that seem to be the most common are that managers don't feel comfortable evaluating employees on output rather than time their butt is in a chair and many people (ICs and management alike) use the office as an outlet for their social needs. Perhaps the third reason, though less common, is the belief that the best ideas come from hanging out at the water cooler.
