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Our CEO just announced, "You’ve probably heard that many businesses, including some of our competitors, are calling employees back to the office, significantly

by PTOB 3y ago

Our CEO just announced, "You’ve probably heard that many businesses, including some of our competitors, are calling employees back to the office, significantly reducing or eliminating work-from-home options, and curtailing much of the flexibility they once allowed. Even the tech industry – among the first to send employees home in March 2020 – is calling staff back to the office. Some with perks, others with threats. Some of these companies are citing a loss of culture and others are seeing a drop in their profitability or revenue. It seems their solution to one, or all these problems, is to bring employees back under their roofs. Meanwhile, our flexible options seem to be working, creating a differentiator in the market. It’s been a draw for new hires and a benefit that our employees have enthusiastically embraced. And, since 2020, we’ve had our three highest revenue years, and we remain on track to grow further this year..."

slickrick216 3y ago
This signals they are not personally invested in commercial real estate or friends with people who are. Good for them.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  unless you’re invested in that particular building, your business is a drop in the bucket and not going to move the needle
  - Arn_Thor 3y ago
    It won’t move the needle, no. But neither does your vote. On the other hand, “get out the vote” campaigns are still a thing. It’s not a perfect analogy, but if business owners band together and all push people back to the office, it’s not unreasonable for them to hope it at least props up office space asset values.
  - SteveNuts 3y ago
    Sure but if you're a business that either purchased tens of millions of dollars of commercial real estate for your office, or are on the hook for a multi year, multi million dollar lease that doesn't look great on the balance sheet or to investors to have useless assets. And there's not much you can do to even that out when the price of commercial real estate is dropping significantly. I'm definitely not saying it's right, IMO it's a sunk cost and businesses need to plan for the future accordingly (even if it means unloading those assets at a loss).
    - jncfhnb 3y ago
      The occupancy of the building does not appear on the balance sheet. Can’t imagine people really care.
MontyCarloHall 3y ago
>Meanwhile, our flexible options seem to be working, creating a differentiator in the market It will be interesting to see how the return to office/remote work debate will be settled by the competitive market. If remote work is such a big draw for top talent (and increases productivity), companies that offer remote flexibility will outperform companies that don’t, since they will attract better employees who are also more productive. If, on the other hand, remote work leads to a decrease in productivity (as return to office proponents claim), it may be the case that the better talent wooed by companies offering remote positions will be offset by the drop in productivity from remote work. It may also be the case that remote flexibility simply isn’t that big of a draw, and companies with remote options won’t attract significantly better talent than companies without them.
- Guthur 3y ago
  Commercial property market forces might be stronger...
  - Schnitz 3y ago
    Care to explain?
    - bloppe 3y ago
      Coming to the office has to be significantly more productive than working from home for it to make sense after accounting for the astronomical costs of office space in major cities.
      - codeduck 3y ago
        This smells like a sunk-cost fallacy. My counterargument would be that there has been a massive captive market for commercial real-estate that has now, thanks to high-bandwidth networking, been exposed as superfluous. The pandemic ripped the bandage off our collective eyes. People are now seeing that it is not necessary to jam employees cheek-by-jowl in order to extract value from them.
CoastalCoder 3y ago
That's a heck of an advertisement for your company and CEO. Can you say who they are? Even if they're not currently hiring, it's something worth remembering.
- PTOB 3y ago
  Sadly, I cannot. I can say that we're an mid-tier (size-wise) engineering consultancy working across the US. My team specializes in the design of "hyper-scale" data centers. Very intensive Building Information Modeling workflows and such.
nly 3y ago
The moment revenue tanks they will panic and change their tune

by PTOB 3y ago

slickrick216 3y ago

This signals they are not personally invested in commercial real estate or friends with people who are. Good for them.

jncfhnb 3y ago
unless you’re invested in that particular building, your business is a drop in the bucket and not going to move the needle
- Arn_Thor 3y ago
  It won’t move the needle, no. But neither does your vote. On the other hand, “get out the vote” campaigns are still a thing. It’s not a perfect analogy, but if business owners band together and all push people back to the office, it’s not unreasonable for them to hope it at least props up office space asset values.
- SteveNuts 3y ago
  Sure but if you're a business that either purchased tens of millions of dollars of commercial real estate for your office, or are on the hook for a multi year, multi million dollar lease that doesn't look great on the balance sheet or to investors to have useless assets. And there's not much you can do to even that out when the price of commercial real estate is dropping significantly. I'm definitely not saying it's right, IMO it's a sunk cost and businesses need to plan for the future accordingly (even if it means unloading those assets at a loss).
  - jncfhnb 3y ago
    The occupancy of the building does not appear on the balance sheet. Can’t imagine people really care.

MontyCarloHall 3y ago

>Meanwhile, our flexible options seem to be working, creating a differentiator in the market It will be interesting to see how the return to office/remote work debate will be settled by the competitive market. If remote work is such a big draw for top talent (and increases productivity), companies that offer remote flexibility will outperform companies that don’t, since they will attract better employees who are also more productive. If, on the other hand, remote work leads to a decrease in productivity (as return to office proponents claim), it may be the case that the better talent wooed by companies offering remote positions will be offset by the drop in productivity from remote work. It may also be the case that remote flexibility simply isn’t that big of a draw, and companies with remote options won’t attract significantly better talent than companies without them.

Guthur 3y ago
Commercial property market forces might be stronger...
- Schnitz 3y ago
  Care to explain?
  - bloppe 3y ago
    Coming to the office has to be significantly more productive than working from home for it to make sense after accounting for the astronomical costs of office space in major cities.
    - codeduck 3y ago
      This smells like a sunk-cost fallacy. My counterargument would be that there has been a massive captive market for commercial real-estate that has now, thanks to high-bandwidth networking, been exposed as superfluous. The pandemic ripped the bandage off our collective eyes. People are now seeing that it is not necessary to jam employees cheek-by-jowl in order to extract value from them.

CoastalCoder 3y ago

That's a heck of an advertisement for your company and CEO. Can you say who they are? Even if they're not currently hiring, it's something worth remembering.

PTOB 3y ago
Sadly, I cannot. I can say that we're an mid-tier (size-wise) engineering consultancy working across the US. My team specializes in the design of "hyper-scale" data centers. Very intensive Building Information Modeling workflows and such.

nly 3y ago

The moment revenue tanks they will panic and change their tune