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My last employer forced all of us to return to the office - it reversed the policy, only after a significant exodus of talent. I was one of those, but far from

My last employer forced all of us to return to the office - it reversed the policy, only after a significant exodus of talent. I was one of those, but far from the most difficult to replace.

laughingpine 5y ago
My current employer is in the process of making this mistake, and it feels awful. We've already started losing some good folks.
- jleyank 5y ago
  Are they showing some sign of regretting the loss, or operating on the premise that the good workers are in the office and the problem children are going away? If it’s the latter, then talent is fungible and they’ll just find more.
  - justin_oaks 5y ago
    I think part of the problem is that it's hard to measure the productivity of individual workers and even harder to link that to specific outcomes. Thus if all the best workers are replaced and now we have higher system failures, more bugs, and slower project releases, then management can choose to believe that those problems are unrelated to the decision that caused people to leave. Only the lowest members of the team understand the loss in real terms... and who wants their thoughts and opinions on things?
  - SuoDuanDao 5y ago
    There's a definite internal disagreement over how to see it. A lot of managers are highly extraverted and will justify any cost to the business if it lets them work in the environment they prefer. Others had looked at productivity and seen it increase over the same time period. In my opinion the former group won a Pyrrhic victory but the war is still ongoing.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Good folks going to better employers though.
- justin_oaks 5y ago
  It seems strange to me when management makes mistakes like this. It's reminiscent of requiring people to move when the company moves office locations, or offering people money to volunteer to be laid off. In each of those cases, the ones who are most fearful for their jobs are often the least competent who know they'll have a hard time getting a new job. The highest skilled folks have no problem walking away because they know they can get another job in no time. I guess it's the management delusion that each employee is fungible and can be replaced with a new employee without any loss of productivity.
  - DiggyJohnson 5y ago
    I’m at a company that still does all of those things. Still virtual, though!
  - tensor 5y ago
    I don't think managers generally think that there is no loss of productivity when you have churn. Loss of productivity due to churn is a very well known phenomenon. But it's also true that almost any employee can be replaced, and if they can't you should probably fix your org structure or processes so that they can be. Having single employee dependencies is one of the worst scenarios for organization robustness, and that includes people at the C-level. The old adage that a good manager should aim to make themselves replaceable has some merit. All that said, I think people often incorrectly assume that having people in an office will yield productivity gains. I don't know of any research that definitively shows that to be true, and good management should be doing result based performance management not ass in seat performance management anyways. Despite this, I still routinely meeting high level people in companies who insist that assess in seats somehow give more productivity. I don't buy that hypothesis.
    - rapind 5y ago
      This isn’t about “single” employee dependency though, companies are seeing significant attrition due to these policies. There’s no way to know this is safe and it’s probably hard to estimate costs. Even in an ideal configuration where your employees are basically redundant raid drives (and yes you need to pay a lot for this redundancy which I doubt most employers do), you generally don’t want to lost too many at once, and even if you survive you still have high costs associated with replacement (training, hiring, fit, etc) It might still be the best long term decision in some cases, but man, you better be making this decision based on more than a hunch.

My last employer forced all of us to return to the office - it reversed the policy, only after a significant exodus of talent. I was one of those, but far from the most difficult to replace.

laughingpine 5y ago

My current employer is in the process of making this mistake, and it feels awful. We've already started losing some good folks.

jleyank 5y ago
Are they showing some sign of regretting the loss, or operating on the premise that the good workers are in the office and the problem children are going away? If it’s the latter, then talent is fungible and they’ll just find more.
- justin_oaks 5y ago
  I think part of the problem is that it's hard to measure the productivity of individual workers and even harder to link that to specific outcomes. Thus if all the best workers are replaced and now we have higher system failures, more bugs, and slower project releases, then management can choose to believe that those problems are unrelated to the decision that caused people to leave. Only the lowest members of the team understand the loss in real terms... and who wants their thoughts and opinions on things?
- SuoDuanDao 5y ago
  There's a definite internal disagreement over how to see it. A lot of managers are highly extraverted and will justify any cost to the business if it lets them work in the environment they prefer. Others had looked at productivity and seen it increase over the same time period. In my opinion the former group won a Pyrrhic victory but the war is still ongoing.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
Good folks going to better employers though.
justin_oaks 5y ago
It seems strange to me when management makes mistakes like this. It's reminiscent of requiring people to move when the company moves office locations, or offering people money to volunteer to be laid off. In each of those cases, the ones who are most fearful for their jobs are often the least competent who know they'll have a hard time getting a new job. The highest skilled folks have no problem walking away because they know they can get another job in no time. I guess it's the management delusion that each employee is fungible and can be replaced with a new employee without any loss of productivity.
- DiggyJohnson 5y ago
  I’m at a company that still does all of those things. Still virtual, though!
- tensor 5y ago
  I don't think managers generally think that there is no loss of productivity when you have churn. Loss of productivity due to churn is a very well known phenomenon. But it's also true that almost any employee can be replaced, and if they can't you should probably fix your org structure or processes so that they can be. Having single employee dependencies is one of the worst scenarios for organization robustness, and that includes people at the C-level. The old adage that a good manager should aim to make themselves replaceable has some merit. All that said, I think people often incorrectly assume that having people in an office will yield productivity gains. I don't know of any research that definitively shows that to be true, and good management should be doing result based performance management not ass in seat performance management anyways. Despite this, I still routinely meeting high level people in companies who insist that assess in seats somehow give more productivity. I don't buy that hypothesis.
  - rapind 5y ago
    This isn’t about “single” employee dependency though, companies are seeing significant attrition due to these policies. There’s no way to know this is safe and it’s probably hard to estimate costs. Even in an ideal configuration where your employees are basically redundant raid drives (and yes you need to pay a lot for this redundancy which I doubt most employers do), you generally don’t want to lost too many at once, and even if you survive you still have high costs associated with replacement (training, hiring, fit, etc) It might still be the best long term decision in some cases, but man, you better be making this decision based on more than a hunch.