RTO is about controlling labor, nothing else. Everything else is a smoke screen. Ask yourself the following questions and you'll understand what happened:<p>- why did RTO happen seemingly right after salaries jumped and labor became scarce?<p>- why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment?<p>- why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!)<p>- why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work?<p>- why did RTO happen at the same time that outsourcing ramped up? If businesses are so opposed to remote work, why are they outsourcing so aggressively?<p>It's not about AI. It's not about CRE. It's not about "synergy" in person. It's about disciplining labor. Businesses will happily tank productivity to prevent the power balance from tipping towards the employee.<p>In that 2020-2023 period, people started talking seriously about how much value they bring to the table. They started making demands of their employers (especially around diversity, equity, inclusion). They started interviewing at multiple places, seeing their worth, demanding more, and giving only as much effort as strictly required to get the job done. The sudden, overnight, incredibly strong reaction to this period, the hard right turn, that is the whip cracking down on labor.
When you also consider the nation as you know, a nation, and not a rat race of individual interest, the best thing the government could do is encourage working from home. Break the hell up these "hubs" of white collar industry and let's disperse this work and compensation across the country. I'm betting we would see quite a lot more growth anyhow if these jobs were distributed across the country vs just concentrated in like sf/nyc/boston. like there are limits to how much growth little old south san fransisco can sustain. there are finite amount of office space. only finite amount of housing accomodations in the bay area (forgetting for a moment the rampant NIMBYism).<p>And what else is that everyone loses in this present situation. People in the job hub in SF also lose, because they are operating in this fundamentally broken local economy, way too enriched for high income workers making their home cost 2.5m and their compensation actually pretty poor as far as what it can get in the local economy. West Atherton would be a 400k median home neighborhood in most of the midwest. Literally same floorplans, lot sizes, fit and finish. Same country club down the road. Same private school up the road. Boutique shopping and steak dinners still available.
Correct. Workers were starting to get power, people had seen through the fog at what was actually happening and were acting out against it. Agency is a direct threat to the owner class.
It is amazing how much the constraints of working in the office shackle people to positions or locations. So many people working below their worth due to spouses ability to get a job in some location for example. Maybe you do land a job in your line of work in this little corner of the earth where your spouses jobs are more a plenty. Now you have to hold on for dear life to this company, do whatever the hell they ask of you and take whatever offer they give you because you have no leverage at all.<p>The fact that people completely miss this fact and just go "well I like talking to people in person" I mean at a certain point belies ignorance that borders on stupidity with how hard people cling to the "ability to talk to people in the hallway" against even just the obvious negative externalities like the commute and limited home choices. No one ever talks about this career side and juggling a two body problem.
or was it capital becoming more expensive as that happened during the same period...
I can't speak to your sector, but from the perspective in my management role (in law) the explanation is quite simple: managing remote workers is more difficult and less pleasant than managing workers in the office. I actually hate it. And even granting that remote and in-office workers are "productive" in the sense that they bill hours (though not even this seems true in my anecdotal experience), we find that people with less in-office time tend to have qualitatively worse performance. At least in my field, being in the office, spending time with your co-workers, and getting to know them has value.<p>Of course, other things have value too. Often, our folks who prefer to com into the office less do so because they have small children who they want to spend time with, more fully share parental responsibilities with their partner, etc. I'm glad that they have the opportunity to do that, but it does generally seem to come at <i>some</i> professional cost.
>we find that people with less in-office time tend to have qualitatively worse performance. At least in my field, being in the office, spending time with your co-workers, and getting to know them has value.<p>I think you are confounded by the fact your most overeager overachievers are going to return to office no matter what.
I have the opposite experience (in tech at small or medium companies). Managing remote workers is much easier since outcomes (and outputs) are necessarily more visible.<p>Before working remotely (pre-2019) when managing teams in person, I found myself necessarily having discussions to get synced with folks. At my most recent role (and previous remote first roles), team members were excellent at providing updates on Github issues (the sources of truth for work items). Of course, this required buy in at all levels and trickling company objectives down through the program(s) and linking work items to OKRs etc. It was very obvious when folks weren't hitting objectives and easy to gather detailed written evidence of this.<p>And regarding getting to know folks. Most recent offsite was at a villa in Croatia where I got to both meet my team members and ended up getting to know them like friends. NOw that I think about it this has happened at previous companies as well during remote offsites.<p>I wonder if it's field-specific. Sounds like there are multiple anecdotes across a wide distribution of outcomes.
Get better or quit then, I don't give a shit about managers, do your job and let the dozens of people you manage live their fucking lives, we're not here to please you or make your job easier
> qualitatively worse performance<p>How does their quantative performance compare? Is there an opportunity in the differential?
It's worse in the sense that a more senior person has to spend more time fixing it. I guess that's an opportunity in the sense that it allows a firm to bill more hours, but there is generally a reason we wanted that more junior person to do the work originally. (Client cost sensitivity, teal workloads, training, etc.)
I think these conspiracy theories about RTO are really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements.<p>Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.<p>A few of your notes are actually just wrong as well. Salaries jumped during covid due to over-hiring and software booming. "Productivity" is not a number, but a business-by-business decision. The vast, vast majority of people don't want politics at work, and it's exclusively the viewpoint of the laptop class who demand that stuff. (Again, people who work toiling jobs for 10 hours a day don't create petitions and demands like that)<p>At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to. But, believe it or not, many many people, including young people, like the office environment.
If RTO sacrifices a 1.7x revenue growth, where's the consequence for malfeasance or examples of the buck stopping with shareholders?<p>If I owned a share of these orgs, I wouldnt want revenue left on the table because some VP had an attachment problem.
I suspect there's a selection bias from poorly run companies using RTO to cut headcount. Now they can have layoffs and put a positive spin on it with AI.
<i>The article has so many "it's this, not that" contradictions – I counted seven! – that I seriously consider it to be written with a lot of assistance from LLMs.</i><p>One thing not mentioned in the article is that now that many software engineers are back to their offices, we get the regular fall / spring viral infections spreading out between employees who feel obliged to go to the office even if they have mild cold symptoms. If RTO is about productivity, I wonder if anyone has accounted the productivity drop caused by viruses in workspace.
This is interesting because it does not jibe at all with the people I know and how productive they are. The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that. I'd imagine there are some confounding variables here. I wonder if a lot of those hybrid companies driving high revenue growth are just profit machines that don't really rely on employees being productive to grow (i.e. Google). Either way surprising findings to me!
Do they do more work by working longer hours? People often do not. Output is not the same thing as hours worked.<p>Productivity is output per hour, so its also possible for output to fall and productivity to rise. This will be the usual case with fewer hours.
I think you may be confusing work with "work". It's easy to find yourself spending 40 hours in an office and accomplishing 6 hours of actual work, and conversely it's easy to spend 25 hours at home and do 20 hours of actual work.<p>This obviously depends on what the work is. People whose job is to focus on building things for hours at a time have very different optimal work environment from people who meet with and coordinate other people in short bursts. So no one-size-fits-all top-down policy can be effective; local flexibility is required.
> The friends I know working big tech hybrid jobs work maybe 25 hours in a good week, whereas the friends I know in office 4/5 days a week are easily at double that.<p>But are they actually more productive, or are they just spending additional hours "looking busy"?<p>When I worked in office I "worked" 40 hours/week because I had to. Most of that wasn't actually work, maybe about 20-30 hours of actual work, sometimes less. Working from home I have no pressure to pretend to work, there's no "butt-in-chair" requirements. I get slightly more done from home, and exchange I don't have to waste 10-15 hours/week at my desk for no reason other than to make some manager feel good about having butts in chairs.
If someone is actually working 8 solid hours every day 5 days a week on office work, I would expect they are neurodivergent in some way. Even in college when you were still young, people couldn't sustain that level of focused intensity for very much more than maybe a week ahead of an exam, often with the help of adderall.
> don't really rely on employees being productive to grow (i.e. Google)<p>How do you think Google grows? They invented PageRank and have been on a set trajectory since?<p>Google didn't catch up to and surpass OpenAI by doing nothing.
That is a lot of thoughts and feelings. There is plenty of research you can read before throwing out opinions.
You claim a significant amount of qualitative data here; how did you measure it? Sounds like some WAGs. Confounding variables don't matter when the "data" is guesswork.
Do they work or is that just their at the office?
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Any analysis that frames this as a productivity or talent-attraction issue is flawed from the start because that was never the point and still isn't.<p>The point of RTO mandates is to <i>suppress wages</i>. It's to get people to quit rather than having to lay them off. It's part of the permanent layoffs culture we're now in where every year 5-10% of the workers at a company will be laid off. Remaining workers will do more labor for the same money and won't be asking for raises because they're thankful to still have a job. And someone quitting is much cheaper than paying them severance.<p>Tech workers in particular saw massive wage growth in the 2010s due to tight supply. Companies are now in the business of clawing back thoat wage growth. It's why all these big tech companies started RTO mandates and layoffs at about the exact same time. It's a wink-and-nod collusion rather than overt collusion. We're a long way from the times when Google just hired all the engineers to deny them to their competitors.<p>None of this is necessary. All of these companies are still insanely profitable. But profits have to keep growing and ultimately that comes down to cutting costs. There's nothing else you can do.<p>Employers don't want you to be financially secure. They want you drowning in debt with declining real wages because then you're absolutely showing up to work and putting up with whatever they want.
I don’t know why they keep bringing “productivity” as the justification, it never was, never will, it’s about power dynamics, remote work shifted a lot of power back to employees, it also provided flexibility career wise. Another big reason why it got attacked quickly is it gave the people a window to escape the rat race and save money, when the employee doesn’t spend xyz on gas everyday, plus relocating outside of the crowded urban areas to cheaper smaller cities, rent/housing went down, landlords and banks had to lobby to end it, plus the government since less taxes are paid now as a result, all efforts made to bring back the status quo. It was fascinating to see how they gaslit the public, I was even talking to an employer before and the manager was trash talking wfh as “woke” and “real men” must grind 9hrs a day at least! Another employer was demanding a full camera on at least 6hrs a day if you wfh, or you are not “productive”.<p>Back in the 80s or 90s, working in the office or factory was the default and it made sense, no high speed internet, small town so not much commuting, cheap housing, and affordable life, so if the man worked in the office and the wife stayed home, they can live comfortably. That’s not the case now, wfh balanced that and increased the quality of life instead, so you can now stay with your kids saving the cost of daycare etc, while doing exactly the same work you would do at the office.
For something to "backfire" you first have to account for why it was done. This article assumes performance and retention are the only considerations. It does not account for things like commercial real estate value, a buesiness's ability to monitor and control its employees, or excuses for layoffs.
> commercial real estate value<p>It's a little bit funny that 100% online businesses bought the most expensive and lavish real estate available.<p>It's tragic they think their workers should throw good labor after bad investment to make a white collar feel justified.
The article does say:<p>> The better path is to raise the bar on management, not badge swipes.<p>Real estate may play a role, but terrible management practices are also definitely a factor. And if every other company is doing it, it's safe to copy their behaviour and not stick your neck out.
What do you mean by "monitor and control"? Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work?<p>What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?
> Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work?<p>There's a difference between visibility into work progress and just mass surveillance of all activity. The only metric that actually matters is the delivery of value.<p>Monitoring isn't an effective way to lead. It only reinforces employees to optimize for "looking busy" rather than being effective. If you have to audit your employees daily actions to know if they are doing their job, you've failed as a manager at defining their role or hiring the right people.<p>A good manager defines the what and the when, and leaves the how to the professional being paid to do it.
I mean, maybe. But a company that spends all of it's time "surveilling" their employees rather than adding value will go out of business. So I'm not sure what the point really is when people bring this up when talking about WFH. If someone doesn't want to be surveilled at work they can quit, right?
> What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?<p>By "excuses for layoffs" I suspect what they meant was that there was an pre-existing desire to reduce headcount and RTO was used under the expectation that some percentage of employees would quit voluntarily so that the company can avoid going through the relatively more costly process of laying them off.<p>Of course the downside of this approach is that the company has less control over which employees leave, which may result in them losing the employees who have the best alternatives.
> What do you mean by "monitor and control"? Should an employer not be able to see what their employees are doing at work?<p>I don't see any reason to get into a discussion about how much an employer should or shouldn't be able to monitor and control their employees. Some businesses are simply more trusting of their employees and allow a great deal of independence, while others aren't. Those that aren't will naturally face greater barriers to monitoring and controlling employees who are working remotely.<p>> What is an "excuse" for a layoff, exactly?<p>It's no secret that when the return-to-office movement began, many businesses used it as a means of achieving a headcount reduction. Employees who could not (or would not) return to the office were let go. Parting ways with difficult employees looks much better to investors than layoffs.
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