16 ms·

The damaging results of mandated return to office

• simonw 3y ago
  "Unispace finds that nearly half (42%) of companies that mandated office returns witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated." My guess is that you're also more likely to lose your best performers - since they will have higher confidence in being able to find a remote-friendly job somewhere else.
  • randallsquared 3y ago
    There's a belief among folks who already favor RTO that the highest performers will also dislike permanent WFH, it seems to me. And given how notoriously difficult it is to reliably measure developer quality, that may be a belief they can harbor long past when you'd expect evidence to have mounted against it.
    • belval 3y ago
      Your parent does not really say that though. Assuming that WFH/RTO preference is distributed equally across highest and lowest performers his statement will be true. As lowest performers will be stickier (regardless of preference) and highest performers won't be so you may lose 50% of your highest performers but a lower amount of lowest WFH-loving performers. Effectively averaging down the skill level of your company. It's not really a WFH/RTO thing so much as a benefits thing. The same would be true for another variable like free lunches.
      • darkerside 3y ago
        Is there a study that breaks down whether high performers are more or less likely to want a return to office?
        • deleted 3y ago
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        • aaomidi 3y ago
          A study like that would be nearly impossible to measure. What we do know is anecdotal evidence of very influential and high performers at various FAANG type companies that have ended up leaving due to forced RTO.
          • brookst 3y ago
            Everyone has anecdotes that support their opinion. Anecdotally, I work at a large company that fully supports 0% to 100% remote work, and I work with a wide mix. Some people, and some roles, just do better in the office. Others don’t. I’d be very suspicious of forming beliefs based on anecdotes, especially if they coincidentally align to your expectations.
            • smaudet 3y ago
              I do agree some roles. e.g. sales, have to be done in office. If you want to snooze someone over dinner a remote call is a poor shadow of an option. Less certain about roles that are generally technical. The strongest claim for in-office work, collaboration, is mostly a well solved problem for at least software, possible simple administration that just relies on some collaborative spreadsheets. Sitting everyone in a stuffy boardroom all staring at the same boring spreadsheet is likely to cause stress and mental fatigue, not increased collaboration. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7889069/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7889069/ This is a well known effect. Even large "interactive" meetings in remote settings can be counter productive - of course not all meetings are bad and one key to being an excellent manager is picking the right people for the right meetings, but the idea that your "top performers" objectively speaking will be the ones experiencing the most stress is seriously suspect. What is more likely is some combination of workers who either "do well" in high stress environments, usually implying they are healthy and have some effective stress management techniques and as such are recognized as top performers compared to those unable to effectively manage their stress, or those in mainly technical areas have not yet experienced (somehow) the benefits of less stressful remote-work environments. E.g. parents or partners in cramped personal quarters being more distracted compared to e.g. a private office space. Finally, for those workers that have an active job component where they must e.g. be on site for customer testing or perhaps they are a technical liason, some hybrid approach may work better - in office for resources which are cost prohibitive to simulate or when their role requires them to interact in an another capacity e.g. as a technician, security guard, or triage such as a front desk. There is also the case where "top performers" are leeching off their colleagues e.g. where they can "get more done" because they can interrogate and corral others but where others are mostly experiencing productivity hits as a result of the constant interruption.
    • TechBro8615 3y ago
      Just because they think they can justify it doesn't mean they're right. If the best performers are leaving, but management is stubbornly or ignorantly refusing to admit it, that only hides the problem, and the company will eventually fail.
    • bee_rider 3y ago
      This works nicely with the current top comment I think. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36501068 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36501068 We’ll just find out in a couple years or decades by observing who is still standing.
    • theshrike79 3y ago
      There are actual high performers and there are people who can cosplay as high performers in the office because of their amazing people skills. I think the RTO folks are in the latter group. If their work was measured objectively by results, they wouldn't be considered high performers.
    • seanhunter 3y ago
      There's a number of kind of obvious reasons for that belief. Firstly the people who are mandating RTO want to think of themselves as high performers. They want RTO so "high performers want RTO" is obvious to them. Secondly a lot of non-doing managers want to be able to justify their existance. To do that they need people in the office to distract by walking around and having conversations etc. They can't do this when people are just WFH doing deep work. Thirdly, if they know a manager wants RTO, then people who want to suck up to that manager will say they want RTO and will come in to the office to actively suck up to the manager. The manager will see these sycophants as high performers because they are spending their time fluffing the ego of the aformentioned manager.
      • saiya-jin 3y ago
        Not every job is Office space, in fact I've never experienced one in my 20 years of coding in 3 countries. You find bits and pieces if you look hard enough in some places, but that's it. Behavior you describe would never get my any promotion anywhere I worked. Maybe I was just lucky, who knows.
    • AwaAwa 3y ago
      Bootlickers/Fluff afficianados do best in RTO. The class that usually winds up in managerial/exec roles. Small wonder.
  • dclowd9901 3y ago
    I’ve noticed companies give special dispensation to their top workers to work however they like. So much for an egalitarian workplace.
    • lo_zamoyski 3y ago
      Egalitarianism is not a good thing.
  • destroy-2A 3y ago
    Don't underestimate the overconfidence of your worst performers.
• deleted 3y ago
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• karaterobot 3y ago
  We'll get a lot more hybrid offices: some people in the office, others at home. This is far from ideal, but it's what we'll get. Managers will get to keep some of their precious oversight—err, excuse me, serendipitous collaboration—but workers with any leverage will stay home if they want. Over time, we'll hit an equilibrium that is less WFH than today, but more than in 2019. > A late-stage SaaS startup decided to embrace this wave of change. They worked with me to introduce flexible work policies, and the result was almost immediate - they noticed a sharp decrease in employee turnover and an uptick in job applications. Their story echoes the collective message from all three reports: companies must adapt to flexible work policies or risk being swept away. I'd love to see current hiring stats on committed work from home or flexible companies. There are more places that allow WFH than ever, but as some companies are forcing a return to the office, I bet the remaining WFH companies could exploit the fact that the majority of people don't want to do that. At least some people are willing to switch jobs over it, and so WFH companies should get an influx of talented applicants.
  • bluefirebrand 3y ago
    > This is far from ideal, but it's what we'll get It's not ideal, but it's also almost no different than the teleconferencing with satellite offices that we had previously anyways. Just instead of calling other offices overseas or whatever, you're calling people at their homes or their own chosen offices.
    • RestlessMind 3y ago
      Unless hybrid means all the employees are mandated to be in the office on the same days. And they can WFH or RTO on the remaining days. At least that's what I am seeing among my social circle.
      • bluefirebrand 3y ago
        Sure but any company above a certain size has more than one office, or overseas contractors.. If everyone is dialing in to the daily stand-up from their desks, what is the point of having everyone commute to the office to do it?
• getmeinrn 3y ago
  >Employees, having tasted the fruits of flexible work, felt averse to relinquishing these newfound freedoms. Translation for sociopathic leaders: never let your workers taste something good. It only took a global pandemic that forced people home in order for us to experiment with something that a huge portion of the population sees as beneficial to their well-being. Where were the small scale experiments before the pandemic, and why did they never catch on?
  • esafak 3y ago
    People could say trials are exceptions that don't generalize. Now that everybody's tried it successfully at scale for long enough to eliminate short-term effects, the excuses are discredited.
  • SamoyedFurFluff 3y ago
    I think there were small scale experiments. Look at Gumroad, which not only is fully remote but only pays by the hour, so you aren’t actually obligated for the full 40hs/wk if you don’t want it. Look at Gitlab that was fully remote. They don’t catch on because large institutions that functioned on an office culture by definition are only led by people who thrive in said culture. Those people re highly unlikely to go with something that they wouldn’t thrive in (like wfh) unless forced to, and they actually have the political power to ensure it so.
  • MattPalmer1086 3y ago
    I was working at home on and off for many years before the pandemic. It wasn't that unusual. Which is why so many companies could switch over to it fairly easily when the need arose.
• sitkack 3y ago
  Bring it on! These Dino companies need to go.
• jeconst 3y ago
  "Unispace finds that nearly half (42%) of companies that mandated office returns witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated. And almost a third (29%) of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment. Imagine that — nearly half!" Does this mean that 58% of companies that mandated a return underestimated attrition? And 71% are doing fine with recruitment?
  • ec109685 3y ago
    Author wrote the book on hybrid and remote teams, so definitely has a vested interest in return to office failures: "Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams."
  • gizmo686 3y ago
    I haven't read the underlying report since it is behind a wall. Having said that, when companies make predictions, they rarely predict a specific number. It is likely that a significant amount of companies saw attrition that was within the expected range. Having said that, they certainly should also report the number that saw less then expected. There is really no way to make sense of just the number presented.
  • wernercd 3y ago
    Depends on how you measure. if you got 3 levels - high, normal, low - then the 58% could be both normal and low...
  • ghiculescu 3y ago
    Sounds like return to office mandates correlate with less attrition and easier recruitment…
• 23B1 3y ago
  Glad to see Entrepreneur.com publishing something counter to the prevailing narrative amongst the business-news commentariat. (Also a really nice, clean website redesign.)
• deleted 3y ago
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• monero-xmr 3y ago
  The real first advantage in a long time that small companies and startups have over big FAANG players and similar is 100% remote. The edge on hiring is real and by putting remote-OK in your job description you get a much better swath of employees willing to get paid less to avoid the commuting nightmare and live anywhere.
  • dreday 3y ago
    Exactly. Hybrid does not work for me. I want to live wherever I feel like, not wherever your company wants to have offices.
• diego_moita 3y ago
  I wish we stopped with the "companies should do this/should do that". Existing big companies are too comfortable and lazy for the remote work revolution. Remote work is a radical change in culture and work organization. It will take new companies with new workflows and organizational ideas to make it work well. We're not there yet. Managers don't understand yet how to do it, they need to read a lot of documentation (Gitlab's is a good start) to start grasping it. But it will happen and the companies/startups that crack remote work will be at great advantage. Employee satisfaction is just a small part. There are other, bigger advantages: access to a bigger talent pool, talent retention, saving money, etc And then, after that comes a revolution in cities. Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand). Unsafe or expensive cities have a lot to loose (e.g. San Francisco).
  • lobstrosity420 3y ago
    > Walkable, safe and cheap places with good internet have a lot to gain (e.g. Portugal, Thailand) Why do the people living in those cities feel so strongly that this isn't the case[1]? How does the city administration deal with skyrocketing rents? [1] https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/05/12/proto-gentrifies-are-digital-nomads-ruining-portugal https://www.euronews.com/travel/2023/05/12/proto-gentrifies-...
    • deleted 3y ago
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    • losteric 3y ago
      Skyrocketing rent demonstrates the strong demand for such environments. Prices would fall if there were more competitive cities.
      • lghh 3y ago
        Or low supply.
    • kpw94 3y ago
      The solution is a local inflation: You have to raise everyone's wages, prices, etc until there's an equilibrium (finally too expensive for digital nomads? no more rising rent prices). But it's not something that can be done easily/overnight. This is how these places would have "a lot to gain". If it's just rent prices going up, the nomads & the local landlords are the only one benefiting and everyone else is upset.
• deleted 3y ago
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• m1117 3y ago
  I think companies should be inclusive, and bring people to the office. Because people who don't like working from home will feel excluded when they're lonely in the office.
  • vvladymyrov 3y ago
    I’m definitely feel excluded while WFH from the race and contention for the meeting rooms for taking a conf call with my colleges in other offices…
• throwaway675309 3y ago
  There have been a lot of, at least to me, somewhat unsubstantiated criticisms that fully remote work is difficult for new graduates. I can only provide n=1 sample data, but back when I was working for a company that was fully remote, we brought on many junior engineers who lived across the United States and didn't have any problems onboarding them by keeping a continual slack team huddle running during office hours. In a lot of ways, it was actually better for them because they could have a multi monitor set up and be looking at one of our shared screens while taking notes on the other one instead of a bunch of people crammed up against one laptop screen in an office.
  • baq 3y ago
    That’s the thing - you need to consciously do things like that. Some don’t have presence of mind to do that and effectively waste everybody’s time.
  • smarmgoblin 3y ago
    At least in software engineering, this is a great opportunity to start understanding how to cooperate and work with a team in this field. There should be a little bit of friction involved in tapping someone on the shoulder, and if you can only code within arms reach of a senior engineer you won’t make it very long. Sometimes I think the college mindset of “if my code doesn’t compile, the TA must have made a mistake giving it to me like this, I’ll ask him what’s wrong” persists into a first job. And there are jobs (and senior engineers) who encourage this pattern too, so it can be a while before anyone encounters a different atmosphere unfortunately.
    • plaguepilled 3y ago
      Taking accountability for your solution does not require a physical presence. This is not relevant. Edit: I worded that a bit poorly. The point I wanted to convey was that the physical location isn't what determines accountability.
  • lordnacho 3y ago
    The thing is the way it used to be done was you'd mill around the office and then when there was a free moment, you'd ask the senior guys some questions. It wasn't really structured. What you're describing has some merit, but it also means you are being watched all day, just like if you were in the office. Not being watched is probably a major benefit of WFH.
• iJohnDoe 3y ago
  Everyone is still compiling data from different vantage points. I don’t think anyone knows what it means yet. 2008 implosion? Nothing? A new evolution? Unemployment armageddon? Something totally new we don’t have a model for yet? Some people thinking history repeating itself as usual and nothing new? Then those people should tell us what’s next if they claim to know everything. After all, it’s a repeat, so they should know already.
• DarthNebo 3y ago
  I used to just leave my work laptop back in the office locker, coz apparently we can't work from home anymore so no 'emergency/important' work after 5PM lol.
  • Ancalagon 3y ago
    This is the kicker for me. Work can’t be done productively from home? Fine then. My laptop goes in my backpack at 5pm when I get into my car, and it stays there until I pull it out at the office at 9am tomorrow.
    • okeuro49 3y ago
      Unless you're being paid to be on-call, if you're WFH, you should still close the lid on your laptop at 5pm and open it at 9am.
      • somsak2 3y ago
        Most people doing software are salaried, not hourly, so this doesn't really apply very cleanly. Would you rather get paid $100k and be paid extra for oncall, or $350k and not be compensated for oncall? That's the real comparison that's being made, and why people consistently choose the FAANGs where on-call is an expectation -- the extra on call pay isn't going to make up for the big gap in total comp.
• xwdv 3y ago
  I’m wondering if some residential buildings will start incorporating luxury co-working office areas where remote workers can stroll into and work amongst other people who WFH in the same building. Kind of like a WeWork. A place for people to find a desk and hang out for a change of scenery, and perhaps meet some locals. It seems like this would almost be necessary for remote workers who don’t have fancy homes but just have a simple studio or 1 bedroom apartment that gets very boring after a while. This would probably kill off whatever co-working space businesses are left out there.
• m348e912 3y ago
  I think a good solution is industries should standardize on pay differential between working at the office full time, vs hybrid, vs full time work from home. Here is just an example: Looking at the same exact job. Office workers would make 20% more than the WFH employees and Hybrid workers would make 10% more than WFH employees. Now employees have incentives to pursue jobs on both ends of the spectrum. Maybe the employee values the freedom of working from home, not having to endure the cost of commuting or living in a major metro area. You could argue about the percentages, but basically a pay differential could be the thing that settles the WFH struggle.
  • malfist 3y ago
    Why is the cost of my labor different if I'm in the office or not. I produce the same work, I should be compensated the same
    • dboreham 3y ago
      I think the parent is trying to say that if employers value workers in their corporate offices more than workers at home, then they should pay more to get that higher value.
    • erik_seaberg 3y ago
      Remote-first jobs are still in the minority (low labor demand), and a lot of devs across the time zone are eager to take them (high labor supply), so we should expect to see lower offers.
    • WalterBright 3y ago
      > Why is the cost of my labor different if I'm in the office or not. The Law of Supply & Demand.
      • briantakita 3y ago
        Supply & Demand is a two way street...Perhaps the employers will adequately compensate for commute time.
• jupp0r 3y ago
  Companies who mandate return to the office should pay employees for the additional commute time at their hourly rate. If this becomes too expensive then productivity gains from being in the office are apparently not worth it.
  • deathanatos 3y ago
    I agree with you 100%, they should, but companies would look at you like you're demanding an absolutely bonkers amount of money. (They'd much rather the employees come back for free! And they'll complain about the higher than expected attrition the whole way…)
    • jupp0r 3y ago
      I agree with you that it's not realistic, but you understand the point I'm trying to make. In the end of the day you are taking a pay cut with this. With a one way 1h commute and 8h of work it's a 20% pay cut. I'm not surprised that smart people treat it accordingly.
  • abduhl 3y ago
    Careful with this kind of demand. It’s possible that companies may pay the office workers their increased rate simply by reducing pay to remote workers.
    • jupp0r 3y ago
      If they think that this is good allocation of their resources, why shouldn't they? (rhetorical question, it's because remote workers are not 2h of commute time per day less productive).
    • fmajid 3y ago
      They will do that anyway, by offshoring fully remote jobs. There will be a minority of very high-level experts who will be able to dictate their terms, as indeed happened even before Covid, but the vast majority will not.
    • 3y ago
• ge96 3y ago
  I have to return to office since I left my previous remote one, been remote for 3 years. Silver lining (cope) for me is losing weight and slowing down passage of time. Also interacting with people IRL is nice, seeing physical people. I don't get out much other than going to the bars once in a while. But it sucks... Losing an hour a day for driving and I gotta get up earlier to get ready/drive. And I'll be working in a cubicle... Oh well got my cans for tunes.
  • threads2 3y ago
    > slowing down passage of time My days/months have been flying by and I thought I was just because I'm getting older. Thanks for mentioning this in the context of working from home. I feel a little better now. Maybe I should get an office job too.
    • dclowd9901 3y ago
      Stasis causes memory to meld together. Even an office job will become a stasis at some point. If you really want to undercut that effect, inject new experiences into your life as often as possible.
      • Ancalagon 3y ago
        Really the answer is to just quit working and become a hunter/gatherer, or travel the world. I’m only half-joking.
        • ge96 3y ago
          > quit working that is the plan... gotta save/invest
    • theshrike79 3y ago
      > My days/months have been flying by and I thought I was just because I'm getting older. The theory behind this is that your brain "compresses" memories. Identical days are just stored as "and here I spent 5 days working". And if your weekends are mostly similar, then it's just "And then I spent 12 weeks doing routine shit". For kids time seems to move slower because everything they experience is new and can't be "compressed". As an adult you can emulate this by doing things you haven't done before, getting new experiences.
• jasonpeacock 3y ago
  Huh, same author as: https://fortune.com/2023/06/26/forced-return-to-office-is-the-definition-of-insanity-remote-hybrid-work-careers-gleb-tsipursky/ https://fortune.com/2023/06/26/forced-return-to-office-is-th... from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36499167 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36499167
• deathanatos 3y ago
  What's worse to me is the return to the "hybrid" office we keep getting threatened with. (My company has not actually done a RTO … yet. I don't know if we ever will.) Now instead of a lousy 4' desk in an open office plan … I also get a desk that isn't mine? I'm supposed to … what, lug a keyboard¹ & mouse & laptop in? It seems like literally nobody has imagined what it might be like for a SWE to actually attempt to do work in the machinations that get proposed. (And in my case, luckily, never seem to materialize.) ¹between the insistence on MBPs, and my RSI, an external keyboard is a requirement, not a nicety
  • BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    An external keyboard and mouse is a necessity for any non-emergency work. 100% of laptop keyboards and trackpads suck for anything other than emergencies, and many suck for emergencies as well. This is inarguable fact.
    • tylerag 3y ago
      I won't argue with you, but I will ask how many laptops have you tried?
      • BLKNSLVR 3y ago
        Probably 10 - 15 over the course of 20-odd years. Sizes from a 10" ASUS eeePC to a Toshiba 17" monster desktop replacement, generic brands, a 14" Lenovo Thinkpad, a 13.3" Dell XPS, Samsung (real puurty silver slimline thing I was sad to say goodbye to), current work laptop is an HP Elitebook, a 15" ASUS, a 13.3" ASUS, and at least a couple of other work ones that aren't memorable enough. Plus my kids' school chromebooks. No macs though, I've not crossed that border yet. I can deal with any keyboard, but for actual proper typing in an environment where one is meant to be working, gotta be an external keyboard. I've got a mechanical at home, but I'm fine with non-mechanical at work, so I don't think I'm too much of a prima donna - I won't say that's inarguable fact though ;)
      • deathanatos 3y ago
        I know the thread has drifted a bit here, but in the context of employment, I don't have the option to try different laptops. I've never worked at an employer that permitted BYOD for the laptop, and so you're stuck with what they issue, which is generally a single choice, as they don't want to put in the IT work to support more than that. If that choice is a MBP … then you're stuck with not only an infamous keyboard, but also one that causes me (and many people I've worked with) RSI … it's that, or an external.
• pipeline_peak 3y ago
  Great, I can hear about sports and eat shitty complimentary pizza while eavesdropping on some 20 ur old intern get bullied by his superior for driving an old car/having bad facial hair. Corporate environments bring out the worst in people. I don’t believe 70% of workers are looking to be lazy by wfh. We want to sift thru the toxic bullshit so we can actually do our FUCKING work. Yes I’m bitter
  • BLKNSLVR 3y ago
    > 20 ur old intern get bullied by his superior for driving an old car/having bad facial hair. It seems that, for whatever reason, covid has increased the intolerance of shitty behaviour like this. Possibly because remote working meant people could choose to have less contact with toxic co-workers, and so upon return to the office it was far more obviously toxic than before covid when it may have been somewhat normalised. This is how it should be. Penalise the fouls.
• dsign 3y ago
  I cherish the days I go to the office, the two hours commute each way. But that's because I do it about once or twice a month. And the rest of the week I need it to recover from all the strong emotions. Going to the office everyday would, for me, feel like drinking every day. Probably not very good in the long run.
• pachico 3y ago
  Sorry but, who isn't struggling with hiring?
  • wincy 3y ago
    It’s been super easy for me to recruit people from my network. Yesterday texted an old friend and he straight up said “sign me up”. Just placed another friend who was extremely competent at our previous job but he got swept up in layoffs. Big layoffs at my old jobs that are in industries that saw huge booms because of the pandemic, whereas I’m in a nice stable industry at a very large company that has a decade+ worth of huge contracts lined up. They made the home office return to work, but for our sizable satellite office they’re literally building a new 4-story building so the devs can come back in 2025 or so. Business is booming if you’re in the right industry, and for tech workers it’s not that hard to switch it up.
• di456 3y ago
  I am grateful for a remote job. Sometimes being at home for too long I get stir crazy and if I plan my day well I can schedule in time for breaks and walks and feel better. If I had a 45+ minute commute each way again I'd be stir crazy in traffic. No thanks. The hardest part for me is balancing slack and video conferences. Slack can be useful but it's hard to have more nuanced conversations and make complex decisions. Those really need conversation to make them effective. A friend recently mentioned that they are on a forced return to office 3 days a week and they spend most of their day on calls with people in other cities and countries. If I had a job I was mildly disinterested in and was forced to commute for no reason, that would nudge me to quietly apply for other jobs. Any company claiming to be climate friendly and forcing people to commute is hypocritical (cough cough Amazon). If someone wants to be in an office, then accommodate them. Then for everyone else shift the office space budget to the travel budget. Done.
  • ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
    "Any company claiming to be climate friendly and forcing people to commute is hypocritical (cough cough Amazon)." But on the other hand it's Amazon and its ilk that allow people to be at home all the time, not out running errands. Don't get me wrong: I'm no fan of Amazon. But on one hand you have a lot of self-proclaimed car-haters pretending that nobody needs a car, but then wanting to take away the street capacity that makes carlessness possible by enabling delivery.
    • di456 3y ago
      I've started enjoying in-person shopping more lately. It's a way to get out of my WFH bubble and feel that I can get in and out of the stores in about the same time as shopping online with Amazon. I'd argue that Amazon is benefiting from more people working remotely and is not as much enabling people to be home more. Even without online shopping I'd still prefer remote work.
      • ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
        I frequently prefer in-person shopping too, but inventory control gets ever worse. At this point, I'm shocked if I find anything in stock anywhere... even staple items. I do prefer to support brick-&-mortar businesses, and will pay a bit extra to do so. "I'd argue that Amazon is benefiting from more people working remotely and is not as much enabling people to be home more" Not sure what the point is there.
• clement_b 3y ago
  For now the data may show difficulties, but at some point, people need a job, and if only onsite is offered, will 'talents' keep being picky? Not so sure someone laid off once or twice in 2023 will be. Remote as we've known it during the pandemic is not going to stay, and all those that have made a move to a city for a better (personal) life will be stuck in the mid term, if they are not lucky on their next job search what will they do? I know this isn't popular opinion, but if some level of hybrid will probably remain on the long run (e.g., WFH once/twice a week doesn't hurt productivity and provide a great improvement for QoL) I don't see remote being the new way of working we have enjoyed in 2020-22. This is gone. edit: typo
• NKosmatos 3y ago
  Once you’ve tasted the fruits of WFH and you like the taste, you’ll never go back. It’s like going from a black and white TV to a color one, from a dummy phone to a smartphone, from dialup internet to fiber to the home. You never go the other way round, unless there is a very strong reason and personal decision. People like to improve their lives in whatever way is best for them and will strongly object to a “downgrade” imposed by others, unless it’s something they’ve decided on their own and on purpose.
  • benjaminwootton 3y ago
    Needing to eat and have a roof over your head is a fairly strong reason. The number of people who need to work already vastly outnumbers the number of WFH positions.
    • NKosmatos 3y ago
      Exactly, that's what the big "bad" companies use to force us to do things we don't want, our need for food, housing and a normal life. We're discussing about the majority of people and not for the HN "elite" that have the privilege/luxury of earning hundreds of thousands, thus affording to be picky with their next work positions. I'm working fully remote the last few years and I'm troubled on what is going to happen when the hybrid or RTO call arrives. I'm not in a position to be very picky and for sure I'll try to find another remote job, but as you correctly state: num of people seeking WFH > num of WFH positions
    • randomdata 3y ago
      > Needing to eat and have a roof over your head is a fairly strong reason. Producing food and shelter are quite well suited to being done at home. Once upon a time that was the norm. > The number of people who need to work already vastly outnumbers the number of WFH positions. There is no limit on WFH positions. It is technically possible for everyone to find one. However, you will often be entering uncharted territory to explore them. Commuting to a restaurant to flip burgers, or whatever, is much more well understood and thus carries far less risk. Indeed, the worker will prefer low risk opportunities in the vast majority of cases.
• pmontra 3y ago
  I worked for a mobile operator for 5 years starting in 2001. We had 20 months to bootstrap the company and get at least 3 million customers. There were no virtual operators back then. We had to have our network, our software, our everything. We were a big startup, about 3k people. I think that the only way to pull that off is working all together in an office. Too many things to do, people to talk with, known and unknown unknowns to figure out, etc. But a couple of years after launch, when the dust settled down? Working from home would start to be possible. I'm self employed and working from home now, for almost 17 years. The only two things that would make me go back to an office are either I can't find a customer for a long time or somebody covers me with gold, really a lot of it.
  • stakhanov 3y ago
    This way of looking at remote work might be well-intentioned vis-a-vis remote work, but it's still essentially remote-hostile. Specifically, I'm referring to the type of thinking where you think of remote work as capable of handling "business as usual" but maybe less productive than on-site and less capable of handling "crunchtime". This type of thinking is what blows up hybrid remote/onsite companies. One day, somebody thinks it's a good idea to hire Bob remotely, while Frank, who has been with the firm for a while, has to stay on-site, to limit the scope of the "remote experiment". Now you've just given Frank a reason to be jealous of Bob, and, at the first possible opportunity, Frank is going to start putting out the message "Bob is just not pulling his weight. But what do you expect? He's remote." A manager of a failing project with remote people is going to go: Wouldn't it be a great idea, to fly everybody in for a month, just to get through crunchtime? And now you're alienating your remote workforce, because the only thing worse than an on-site job that you sign up for, is a remote job that transforms into a "living out of hotels" job that you didn't sign up for. The inevitable outcome is that the company blows itself up, either from the bottom-up, because you've allowed a caste system to happen, and the castes are at war with each other, or from the top-down, because some high-level manager goes "well, if on-site is more productive, why not increase the productivity of the whole company by mandating everybody to be on-site?"
• cat_plus_plus 3y ago
  Companies that claim that work from home doesn't work better not be doing mass foreign outsourcing. US employees can easily tolerate 3 hour timezone spread and be available for instant meetings throughout the day, as well as frequent in person offsites. Plus at this point Michigan is not going to be much more expensive than Bangalore.
• briantakita 3y ago
  Companies that expect people to work in an office will not compensate for commute time. Once employees gained the time which would have been spent on the commute to do other things including work & personal matters, it becomes difficult to justify sacrificing that time every day to improve "company culture".
• nologic01 3y ago
  The mandated return to office is a bailout of commercial real estate financing. Paid for via reduced quality of life of the contracting masses and higher environmental impact.
  • wildrhythms 3y ago
    It's also the tax breaks https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-threat-to-work-from-home-tax-breaks https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-02-21/another-t...
• izacus 3y ago
  -- Written by an author of a book selling remote/hybrid work. I'm sure his take is absolutely objective.
• throwaway2037 3y ago
  God, this clickbait crap again. Full title: <<We're Now Finding Out The Damaging Results of The Mandated Return to Office — And It's Worse Than We Thought.>> Nothing new in the article, and nothing new in the discussion.
• waynesonfire 3y ago
  Once the elite convert their offices to housing or cut their losses WFH will not be debated anymore.
• thinkingemote 3y ago
  I would be interested in seeing differences across countries and culture with working from home. The protestant work ethic in the USA essentially makes a worker feel guilty not working hard, or to feel good by working lots. In other places, doing as little as possible "manana" is viewed as a more humane way of life. Some places are more communal even to the level of prioritising the mother company they work for. Maybe ex Communist countries have differences too. Anyhow I imagine it will be skewed as techies may be culturally more American and generally the west is more techy.
• fx1994 3y ago
  I worked from home since covid drama and I don't have issues coming to work from time to time, we have to come at least once a week but generally that day my productivity is almost zero since we talk, eat, drink etc. and if I don7t want to come even that one day, nobody would say a thing. International company with over 5k employers. I wanted to change job last year and they told me I need to come to office art least first 6 months... I declined job offer since it's just pain in the ass to get to office. One hour travel to work, one hour travel from work and that's on a good day traffic. I need to buy expensive shitty food on job and pay for train tickets. So yeah I will never accept to come to office 5 day in a row. I might be spoiled but that's how it is.
• fmajid 3y ago
  I recently changed jobs and had the choice between a senior IC role at a FAANG and an engineering director position at an open-source company that is fully remote. While working in fully remote culture would be intellectually interesting, I opted for the FAANG and enjoying going back to the (incredibly cushy) office, after 3 years of WFH that I found isolating and depressing, even though I am an introvert and possibly even on the spectrum. Perhaps I would be singing a different tune if I didn't live in London with its obscenely overpriced chicken coops of houses and had a spacious home office, but somehow I doubt it.
  • m_rpn 3y ago
    Just moved to London some months ago... nobody told me that the housing situation was so bad to the point to even push us introverts back into the offices XD (couple days a week personally).
    • fmajid 3y ago
      Yes, somehow Brits have been brainwashed by their feudal masters into thinking 80m2 is an adequate size for a 3BR apartment. British homes are some of the smallest and lowest-quality amongst Europe's richer countries, e.g. compared to France.
  • dougmwne 3y ago
    I can tell you that the comfort of your home is a huge factor. I would not dismiss it. I think that it accounts for a lot of the difference between European attitudes to WFH and American. My best WFH situation was a beach house where I had a dedicated room for work, a large back garden and could take 3 walks a day down the beach between calls.
    • fmajid 3y ago
      Well, I am a US expat in Europe, I lived in a house in San Francisco with a very nice home office slash man-cave, then moved to London where it's a 9'x6' (3x2m) fish bowl with eaves and no air conditioning. But it's really the isolation that got to me, most of my colleagues were remote in Tel Aviv. It also helps that my commute is 30 minutes by bus + Tube vs 45 to 90 minutes in SF due to Muni's abysmal unreliability.
• WinstonSmith84 3y ago
  Head hunters and recruiters are very cognisant of this. Jobs are not advertised anymore as "outstanding compensation", "unlimited PTOs" or "great career perspective" but by "REMOTE". And like it used to be a lie that the compensation would be outstanding, it's often a lie that the position is truly remote. Then it's explained that for this remote position, you need to come 4 days per week in the office, and has a big benefit of one day from home - but not Friday nor Monday of course. Sneaky sneaky
• voytec 3y ago
  Is linking to google search results from own site a search-engine-side SEO tactic to pretend that users are looking for this specific site? The company enforced a <a href="https://www.google.com/search?q=entrepreneur.com+return+to+the+office+policy&amp;oq=entrepreneur.com+return+to+the+office+policy&amp;aqs=chrome..69i57j0i512l3.2851j1j4&amp;sourceid=chrome&amp;ie=UTF-8" rel="nofollow noopener">return to the office policy</a>, causing waves of unrest.
• usedtoprog 3y ago
  [dead]
• Detrytus 3y ago
  I think the reason companies insist on return to office is that many employees took advantage of remote work to start a second job on the side. Some people even do more than 2 jobs at once. Getting people back to the office, full time, or at least 1-2 days a week, is going to force employees to choose one job and stick with it.
  • typon 3y ago
    Sounds like a really wild assertion. If I were to guess, the number of employees doing this would be well under 1%. If you have evidence to the contrary, please share it.
• ThinkBeat 3y ago
  This is a matter of power and the marketplace. I wonder what the real-world stats for different professions are as to employees preferring work from home vs at the office. I do know many workers who do not want to work at home. The office was a break from the screaming kids and / or no AC / or have a home that is just not practical as an office / or just prefer a clean break between what is work / office and what is home. Plus, a lot of people behave differently when they are dressed up professionally for work. Again, the distinction between home and work is valuable for some. We have somewhere between 100 - 300 years of experience having people working at the office. We know a lot about how that works / or doesn't. Working from home full time at scale is not yet studied to the extent we can draw real conclusions from it. A couple of years is far too short. So it is an experiment. Personally, I prefer to work from home, but I am not so sure I will be able to long term. My prediction is that working from the office will become increasingly common over time with some professions going back to the office short term and other longer term. And some companies will prefer fully remote. I am not sure what the breakdown will be in 50 years.
  • m0llusk 3y ago
    Mostly I do remote work from a coworking facility. This is liberating for me in much the same way as work from home, but has none of the downsides you mention. The article keeps returning to the term "flexibility" which occurs 22 times. It seems the experiments underway are more varied and complex than a simple work from home test run that breaks sharply away from hundreds of years of experience.
• ochronus 3y ago
  We need the flexibility to choose, there's no one size fits all here. Workplaces also need to cater for different needs and be appealing enough to make it worth going there. I've analyzed the results of a study on this last week: https://leadership.garden/back-to-the-office/ https://leadership.garden/back-to-the-office/
• ochronus 3y ago
  We need flexibility - there's no one size fits all here. Workplaces also need to cater for different needs and be appealing enough to make it worth going there. I've analyzed the results of a study on this last week: https://leadership.garden/back-to-the-office/ https://leadership.garden/back-to-the-office/
• ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  The description of the "anchoring bias" doesn't make sense. It starts with: "The crux of the problem lies in the anchoring bias, which leads us to heavily rely on the first piece of information offered (the 'anchor') when making decisions. When initially joining the company, the employees were primarily concerned with compensation and job security, the "anchors" in their decision-making process." OK, but then it says: "However, once within the fold, the pandemic caused them to shift their focus to work-life balance and flexibility... the rigid return-to-office policy made these new anchors seem less attainable" So the "anchors" are NOT the first piece of information offered, and they can change willy-nilly. Not much of an "anchor."
• ShadowBanThis01 3y ago
  What sucks in the USA is that Trump canceled all the tax deductions home workers could take, just in time for COVID to make home work the norm for millions of people. And those deductions haven't been restored. So now we foot the bill for all the electricity and space required to do our work. People also ignore these costs when arguing for "densification." Now that we spend even more time at home, people who want to make that home a little nicer and more spacious are vilified. OMG, you want a patch of yard? ELITIST. Never mind that everyone's dinky patch of yard could come out of the tracts of dying, boarded-up malls and empty office parks and defunct commercial/industrial zones... and the parking lots that surround them.
• michaelcampbell 3y ago
  I'm going through this. Was hired at 1/month in-office, and now they're saying 4x/month. My feel about this is that this is a solution to a problem that doesn't exist, the solution doesn't work, and I'm having to pay for it. We had an all-hands meeting recently. The message was essentially, "We have heard your feedback that most of you don't like this, but WE like it, so it's staying."
  • readerbaza 3y ago
    should have not showed up when asked 1/month. ...and they say the slippery slope is a fallacy