4 ms·

I knew from the start that this was a major reason so many companies want RTO, no executive wants to look like a fool in front of their board for wasting millio

I knew from the start that this was a major reason so many companies want RTO, no executive wants to look like a fool in front of their board for wasting millions or more on office space. Even more so when you have bigger companies that have billions invested in real estate across major cities

WWLink 3y ago
That's an unfortunate thing with how businesses operate. They shouldn't have to look like a fool in front of their board. Executives are not psychics. I get that their job is to foresee things like that, but sometimes you just.. can't. Having everyone work in the office all the time was an accepted norm that everyone was ok with. Nobody (really) saw this coming and if they did, everyone would've thought they were nuts. If the CEO decided "hey let's try WFH!" they probably would've been removed by the board. So it's pretty unfair for the board to be like "this guy's an idiot for not trying WFH in the past!" They could play it off as "wow turns out we were wrong about WFH, this is going to be great in the long term! Right now here's how we might use that extra space" - they could detail things like improving retention by bringing back private offices for people who want to work in the office, subletting the space, and other things.
- paulmd 3y ago
  > they could detail things like improving retention by ... subletting the space nope, that's actually the root of the problem, nobody else wants to be in the office either so the commercial real-estate market is in slow-motion meltdown for the last 3 years. even if you fervently believe that WFH is the better path, you simply cannot exit your commercial real-estate investments right now without locking in big losses. at the landlord level the game is to simply let the office space go vacant rather than write down the notional value of the property (which is going to be based on X years of rents, and if you lock in a lower rent value you just dropped the value of your investment). But at the tenant level if you want out, it's not like you can just find someone else to sublet your space either, because the building is full of unoccupied offices already. Nobody wants to sign a deal that realizes the losses that exist on paper. So instead the move is to force everyone back to the office so it looks like there's value being generated from the property, as opposed to a white elephant standing empty, which is effectively what it is. And yeah, middle managers and CEOs have every incentive to push for people back in the office from their own ends too... the feeling of power/control and the facilitation of their own communication-focused work as opposed to the output-oriented work of the actual ICs. -- Anecdotally, my current employer has had some weird communication mis-steps where my manager clumsily relayed some "we really want everyone to be at the all-hands this month, in-person if you can!" and it came off as more of a "more layoffs incoming" tone when actually the problem was more that this was boardroom politics around being seen to be using the expensive building we just bought a couple months before the pandemic started. And this is a company that is all-in on remote work already, we have people everywhere (I and another coworker are at least 4 hours from the closest satellite office) and we're nearshoring some junior roles etc. We will never get everyone into an office because that's not the strategy, but even we are not immune to the "we bought the building and can't exit" politics. Last employer, same thing, but they are going all-in on forcing everyone back to office... despite having hired a bunch of people remote during covid for a project. Since the project crashed I guess they dropped all the contractors and are hiring from a bodyshop, and I guess maybe they're doing local hiring for that. But between IC turnover due to the project being a shitshow, and heads rolling in the team leads due to the project failure, and dropping all the people they hired on remote since COVID... I think they basically turned over the entire team that existed pre-covid minus like three people. So they are starting from (almost) scratch anyway.
- agumonkey 3y ago
  It was not a norm, until ubiquitous high speed networking and computing there was no choice but to be in the same place to work together.
charlieyu1 3y ago
The smarter ones would find some way to reduce their cost on office spaces.

WWLink 3y ago

That's an unfortunate thing with how businesses operate. They shouldn't have to look like a fool in front of their board. Executives are not psychics. I get that their job is to foresee things like that, but sometimes you just.. can't. Having everyone work in the office all the time was an accepted norm that everyone was ok with. Nobody (really) saw this coming and if they did, everyone would've thought they were nuts. If the CEO decided "hey let's try WFH!" they probably would've been removed by the board. So it's pretty unfair for the board to be like "this guy's an idiot for not trying WFH in the past!" They could play it off as "wow turns out we were wrong about WFH, this is going to be great in the long term! Right now here's how we might use that extra space" - they could detail things like improving retention by bringing back private offices for people who want to work in the office, subletting the space, and other things.

paulmd 3y ago
> they could detail things like improving retention by ... subletting the space nope, that's actually the root of the problem, nobody else wants to be in the office either so the commercial real-estate market is in slow-motion meltdown for the last 3 years. even if you fervently believe that WFH is the better path, you simply cannot exit your commercial real-estate investments right now without locking in big losses. at the landlord level the game is to simply let the office space go vacant rather than write down the notional value of the property (which is going to be based on X years of rents, and if you lock in a lower rent value you just dropped the value of your investment). But at the tenant level if you want out, it's not like you can just find someone else to sublet your space either, because the building is full of unoccupied offices already. Nobody wants to sign a deal that realizes the losses that exist on paper. So instead the move is to force everyone back to the office so it looks like there's value being generated from the property, as opposed to a white elephant standing empty, which is effectively what it is. And yeah, middle managers and CEOs have every incentive to push for people back in the office from their own ends too... the feeling of power/control and the facilitation of their own communication-focused work as opposed to the output-oriented work of the actual ICs. -- Anecdotally, my current employer has had some weird communication mis-steps where my manager clumsily relayed some "we really want everyone to be at the all-hands this month, in-person if you can!" and it came off as more of a "more layoffs incoming" tone when actually the problem was more that this was boardroom politics around being seen to be using the expensive building we just bought a couple months before the pandemic started. And this is a company that is all-in on remote work already, we have people everywhere (I and another coworker are at least 4 hours from the closest satellite office) and we're nearshoring some junior roles etc. We will never get everyone into an office because that's not the strategy, but even we are not immune to the "we bought the building and can't exit" politics. Last employer, same thing, but they are going all-in on forcing everyone back to office... despite having hired a bunch of people remote during covid for a project. Since the project crashed I guess they dropped all the contractors and are hiring from a bodyshop, and I guess maybe they're doing local hiring for that. But between IC turnover due to the project being a shitshow, and heads rolling in the team leads due to the project failure, and dropping all the people they hired on remote since COVID... I think they basically turned over the entire team that existed pre-covid minus like three people. So they are starting from (almost) scratch anyway.
agumonkey 3y ago
It was not a norm, until ubiquitous high speed networking and computing there was no choice but to be in the same place to work together.

charlieyu1 3y ago

The smarter ones would find some way to reduce their cost on office spaces.