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Bosses are using RTO mandates as a way to blame employees as a scapegoat
- gdevenyi 3y agoHow far will I have to scroll down to learn what RTO is?
- cwmma 3y agoReturn to office
- calebkaiser 3y agoSecond sentence of the article.
- eloisant 3y agowhich is behind a paywall
- midasuni 3y ago“Return” to office. The mandate people travel to a specific location to perform a task. The idea is that people can’t perform that task from anywhere else.
- toomuchtodo 3y agoFinancial performance during the pandemic was very favorable for some orgs, and leadership will struggle to deliver on shareholder go forward expectations (which are arguably unrealistic in the new post pandemic macro, due to structural demographics, cost of money, etc), leading to performance art ("someone do something"). Somewhat similar to retail stores blaming theft for store closures when it's their fundamentals [1]. Like a magician, misdirection. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38602429 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38602429 (Retailers Lobby: “We Lied About Organized Theft”)
- ryanobjc 3y agoRe: Walgreens, never forget they lost like a cool billion into theranos! I feel like the anti theft is performance art to scare voters into voting for tax dollars to replace Walgreens store security.
- jrockway 3y agoI agree with you. Everyone is trying to get you riled up over theft, but it's really just a calculated risk. There are two retail strategies. One is to let people walk into the distribution centers and touch everything, hopefully making them more emotionally attached to the product and thus pay a higher price. This carries the risk of people walking out with the merchandise without paying, but it's offset by the improved convenience. ("Is this the right size? Let me just take it over to that closet and see. Yeah it is, here is my credit card, can I wear this out?") The other strategy is to publish a list of what's in your distribution center, and then have an employee of the store bring it to your house. Since the general public can't get into the distribution center, the risk that they walk off without paying is lower. (But not zero. Employees steal. Customers steal by claiming they never received what they order. To me, that's the same thing as smashing the glass of a retailer and walking out with their stuff. But, it doesn't make for an emotional photograph, so people don't treat it that way. They're wrong, though. Stealing $1000 worth of stuff through deception is the same as stealing $1000 worth of stuff by force.) Strategy two is doing very well these days. But it's always done well. Remember when you could order a house kit from Sears and they would put it on the next train to your town? Same thing as Amazon. It was popular then and it's popular now.
- wahnfrieden 3y agoThe crime wave at Walgreens is very real, but it's coming from their executives, not shoplifters Walgreens has stolen MUCH more from its employees than shoplifters have
- pm90 3y ago“Performance art” is my favorite term now. I see so much of it. Serious problems that need creative solutions instead being hit with antics to show everyone is “working hard” or doing their best. Gratitude channels that were created with the intention of genuinely celebrating “wins” turning into political schemes abused by some to portray how much they’re “winning”. Its all very gross and seems like a huge distraction while the real issues remain unaddressed.
- esafak 3y agoThat means remote work is not actually a problem and we can drop the RTO mandates once the economy picks up.
- npilk 3y agohttps://archive.is/sFTAq https://archive.is/sFTAq
- debo_ 3y agoInteresting to see a paper that hasn't finished peer review yet getting coverage in Fortune.
- 5350-uiop-1130 3y ago> "Business, found that an office return isn’t actually boosting a company’s bottom line" manufacturing consent. stage 1: demonise workers "quiet quitters" stage 2: implement mass layoffs stage 3: re-hire those positions remotely in cheaper locations
- batch12 3y agoI wonder what the impact of quiet quitting, loud quitting, and other highlighted extremes that dont reflect the vast majority of enployers had on some of these decisions.
- tschellenbach 3y agoI had several teams abused remote work. From not doing much of anything to working multiple jobs. We still have remote work at Stream, but it's reserved for teams where recruiting is very hard and performance is excellent. I think almost all companies are cutting back heavily on remote work.
- fireynis 3y agoThat sounds like a problem to do with employees rather than remote work. With a group of bad employees, bringing them back into the office means you have to babysit them with an adult, costing you money. IMO between deliverables, code metrics and the like you should just identify and fire these people regardless of where they work.
- mardifoufs 3y agoYes it absolutely is and it spoils it for everyone, but it's super hard to filter that out. One can be a super performer with a great resume and still just not work at all when it's from home.
- fireynis 3y agoWhy does it spoil it for everyone? Is there some reason they can work in an office and be more performance without having to hire someone to sit on them? Aren't they just bad employees wfh or wfo? I think the solution is just be a good manager.
- givemeethekeys 3y agoIs there a list of such bosses, so we can decide for ourselves on whether we'd like to work for them in the future?
- Solvency 3y agoHere you go! https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/w05FAVgOMk https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/s/w05FAVgOMk
- lulznews 3y agoYes, RTO is widely known to be a scam.
- paulcole 3y agoIn what way? Isn’t it just a choice a company commits to that can have a good outcome or a bad outcome for the company?
- thegrim33 3y agoI promise you the person you're replying to can't provide a single number or statistic off the top of their head to back up their position. It seems like such viewpoints are mostly mind-virus based; they simply saw lots of other people on HN/Reddit/Twitter say the same thing so it's now become "true" in their mind, and now they've become another cog in the machine blindly repeating the same thing, influencing other people, and spreading the virus onwards.
- jgalt212 3y agoCYA gonna CYA, only the names have changed.
- kylec 3y agoSucceeding in management is mostly about taking credit for successes and avoiding blame for failures. The better you are at doing that, the higher you'll go in a company. With COVID, remote work, RTO, for the last few years it's all been a regular train of plausible scapegoats that management has been able to deflect blame onto.
- piffey 3y agoSucceeding as a bad manager maybe. I’ve had the pleasure of working for three fantastic managers, one being now, over my career. The second I began asking for leadership advice as I was contemplating making the transition at the time. He gave me a bunch of sage books to read but summarized it in one quote from General Dwight D. Eisenhower: “Leadership consists of nothing but taking responsibility for everything that goes wrong and giving your subordinates credit for everything that goes well.” This has been an easy gauge for sussing out whether a new manager deserves my praise or not in the roles that came after. Leaders that embody that have, in my experience, always maintained a loyal, productive, non toxic team where individuals move up more rapidly, as well as the leader, due to the momentum that comes from not having constant turnover and a team that respects and enjoys their mission and mandate.
- steveBK123 3y agoThat's how genuinely good managers behave, but also why there's so few generally good managers. People do not advance in corporate America by being blame sponges for the people below them. You advance by being a nonstop self promoter and, on occasion, eating blame for your boss.
- pico303 3y agoThat’s a great quote. I’ve always said when it works, it’s to our team members’ credit; when it doesn’t, it’s my fault. But don’t rely on just that as a gauge of a good leader. I don’t know that I’m that effective a leader, since I’m not confident I help the team be particularly productive.
- awinter-py 3y agoI feel this way whenever a senior manager disses the team's 'velocity' velocity is a vector. ICs may bear some responsibility for its magnitude but direction is straight from the top baby
- devmor 3y agoMy personal favorite “velocity” scapegoat is when the team can’t meet estimates but you’re constantly pushed to keep estimates as low as possible.
- tikhonj 3y agoYeah, it's crazy how common that view seems to be in the industry for something that simply does not make sense. What people call "velocity" is an inherently relative measure, but they insist on treating it as an absolute. You can have a really slow team have a "great" velocity if their estimates account for moving slowly, and a fast team have awful "velocity" if their estimates are too short. Ultimately, it's a measure of something like predictability or consistency. Treating it as if it actually measures development speed is a category error. And hey, maybe consistency is what you want to prioritize over everything else! But, well, probably not.
- ParetoOptimal 3y agoThe only people talking while setting points should be ICs and maybe the scrum master occasionally.
- bsdpufferfish 3y agoSo what does a scrum master do again?
- ParetoOptimal 3y agoMost important role is not letting managers attend points setting meetings IMO :D
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- tschellenbach 3y agoI think it's funny how HNews is filled with this type of content. While there are also many posts about people not working at all remotely or working multiple jobs. I think we all have friends who work multiple roles or do nothing remotely. So it's not exactly surprising that companies are stopping with remote work, or at least are becoming careful with remote work.
- swagasaurus-rex 3y agoYou’ve been out of the office too long if you think bringing back employees fixes the problem of freeloaders
- tschellenbach 3y agoPeople literally can't agree on anything. Meanwhile, roughly 100% of companies are cutting back on remote work. It's not a cult or some conspiracy, it just has real problems and companies are responding to that. Does it work for some people, yes. Will it work better in the future, probably. Does it cause massive problems for large parts of the workforce today: definitely.
- cyberlurker 3y ago100%? Is gitlab still remote? I know there are many others. In my view and experience it works great for many companies. No massive problems.
- Amezarak 3y agoI don’t think anyone is seriously suggesting it’s a cult or a conspiracy (though I’m sure there is some coordination), but that doesn’t mean it’s not mostly fad or trend driven vs data driven. IME I’ve worked in offices where at least 20% if not more did absolutely nothing. I mean literally nothing, not that they were doing things that just weren’t visible to me. It has a lot more to do with company culture and performance management than onsite/offsite. I’m not against the idea that the proportion of people who can succeed with remote work is lower, but most of the RTO push seems to be more to do with current management fads than anything else.
- dehrmann 3y agoI don't expect this view to do well here, but my theory on WFH is it's very effective for focus time, so for the first year, people could effectively work through solo work backlogs. Where WFH falls short is building alignment on larger initiatives, and that's what we're seeing. There's a popular thing you read here from ICs (I'm also an IC) about being more productive at home, but what they never bring up (and probably don't know) is if they're working on the right things.
- nostrademons 3y agoThat's my impression as well, as an IC that transitioned to management soon after the pandemic. If you're already aligned on what you're doing, WFH is a good way to get there faster. But getting that alignment has become very difficult in the WFH world. You don't have high-bandwidth communication to lay out complex trade-offs between different people, and you lose a lot of trust that makes it possible to compromise, disagree, and commit.
- ethanbond 3y agoYou’re probably also bad at being a manager, given that you just started in odd circumstances and, if your company is like any software company I’ve ever heard of, you likely weren’t trained into your new role. Not a personal sleight against you, just there are many features of the system around you that should at least cast doubt on your interpretation. This is in general a good argument against WFH but one that managers are (for obvious reasons) reluctant to make: they’re just shitty managers and WFH makes it extra hard to get by with shitty management.
- nostrademons 3y agoIt's entirely possible - I usually feel like I'm routinely failing at management. My organization seems to disagree though, as they continue to give me the highest possible performance ratings, pay me absurd amounts of money, my team's gotten public commendations on its work from 7 levels up the management chain, the anonymous 360 surveys from reports/peers/etc. say that I'm better than 90% of other managers, etc. That alone may tell you something about the incentive structures in large corporations (and the economy at large). I usually like to think of it as winning at a fucked up system. But then, that might be pretty illustrative of the title and article here.
- crop_rotation 3y agoRTO is disliked by everyone. I work in big tech and everyone including the VP of my org dislikes it. It has become a formality and everyone just does whatever is needed according to policy. It is very hard to see anyone benefitting from it. The velocity has gone down and everyone knows and accepts it. I am being told even the EVPs dislike it but it is top down from CEO and everyone should just do the bare minimum required.
- LazarWolf_ 3y agoDisagree with your sentiment. Big tech employee for 12 years. There is substantial support for RTO, but those voices aren’t as loud, don’t advocate their positions as vocally as the rest.
- d3w4s9 3y ago"substantial" needs to be put in context. At my company with thousands of employees, informal polls (where every employee can participate anonymously) show that people who are in favor/against of RTO is 1:4. At least that's a number I can quote.
- aeyes 3y agoWe were also polled at quite a big company with offices in multiple countries. Most engineering teams have teammates in different locations. The results came out very comparable to yours, 78% against RTO but the company is still enforcing it.
- asylteltine 3y agoIn big tech and not one single person I know wants rto. Not one.
- badlucklottery 3y agoSame here. And it makes perfect sense. For me personally, being able to move somewhere with a lower cost of living without having a lengthy commute is a huge benefit. Especially in the face of ongoing layoffs.
- chiefalchemist 3y agoThe root problem is: Management (and Leadership) don't want to learn how to manage in WFH world. It's a different approach and different mindset than in-office. It's certainly not as simple as "look at us...we're using Slack...we're a remote-minded organization now." Tho I've seen such a naive - and lazy? - approach happen more than once. That aside, I also sense there's pressure from above. WFH is putting commercial real estate in a tail spin. Anyone who has investments in such real estate isn't going to be in favor of WFH. These smaller forces add up. RTO makes little sense. It the same as twenty years saying "The internet is a fad..." WFH is the future. There's no turning back at this point, is there?
- indymike 3y agoBosses blaming RTO mandates for poor performance is really a signal that leadership is disconnected from reality. It should be expected company wide that the RTO mandate will cause systematic issues, and after the mandate is completed, a new normal will emerge.
- jimbob45 3y agoI wonder if you could game the stock market like this by investing in companies committed to WFH and seeing if you could beat a control group.
- marcosdumay 3y agoIf company commitment meant anything, we wouldn't be in that mess.
- bink 3y agoEvery time this topic comes up I feel compelled to offer my opinion that there is no universal rule when it comes to WFH or RTO. Whether employees are productive when working from home has more to do with how well the company has prepared to operate in that environment rather than any fundamental aspect of the two models. Companies complaining about unproductive staff working from home should focus on improving their processes and management around WFH rather than simply throwing up their hands and trying to force a return to the office.
- steveBK123 3y agoI saw a good comment posted elsewhere that essentially WFH/Remote/Hybrid accentuates employees existing behavior. So your top X% performers are now freed up to perform even better as they save commute time, and some in-office distraction. But your bottom Y% performers who are shirking in-office can now go hard on shirking. As a manager it is your job to see that and behave accordingly. Punishing your entire org because you can't be bothered to PIP, and if necessary fire the bad Y% means you are a bad manager.
- ParetoOptimal 3y agoForced RTO just makes 90% of your employees operate primarily by malicious compliance or at least "minimum effort to get my paycheck".
- awill 3y agoJust think of Seattle while Amazon was WFH. The city was dead. Restaurants, food trucks, barbers etc.. All dead. I'm pretty sure the big firms get tax breaks for forcing RTO, as it helps local businesses.
- sottol 3y agoWFH and WFO companies are pretty different, from the leadership down. Many existing companies (especially large) can't just adapt so they force RTO to accommodate their existing "style" instead of adapting. I think we'll end up with two types of companies, WFH and WFO, and right now it looks like the WFH companies will have an easier time recruiting and hiring. So imo this would work especially well for small, fast-growing companies. We'll see whether they can keep up WFH as they grow but maybe there's a limit where they'll need to transition to working from the office. If that's true, it might be a good time to start companies again and take on some of the incumbents. WFH is a pretty strong selling point to those disgruntled by RTO policies.
- kryogen1c 3y ago> WFH and WFO companies are pretty different I think this is exactly the issue. To rephrase: the biggest difference is management. There are different challenges of course, but the most significant is how to manage. Workers have an easier time shifting location. Furthermore, it's often more difficult to troubleshoot and repair bad management than bad workers, so it's not trivial to discover the source of the corporate problem when you flip your WFH/WFO setting.
- kelnos 3y agoI think it's also the case that management is less willing to accept that they are the problem, and that they need to change. And since they're the ones who call the shots, they force their employees back into a working arrangement that makes them more comfortable and more effective at management.
- marcosdumay 3y ago> We'll see whether they can keep up WFH as they grow I don't think transitioning a medium or large company with a WFH culture into WFO is even possible. If companies grow that way, I'm sure they will stay that way.
- wharvle 3y agoWhen I’ve been at companies large enough to need to solve communication issues, I’ve seen two major styles: 1) Need something? Post in the relevant channel. Use @s if appropriate. If you’re in the wrong place, someone will let you know. Break off to private chats when it makes sense, but mostly not. Folks have a good idea what‘s going on because most exchanges halfway-relevant to what they’re working on or connected to take place in public. 2) Need something? Ask around until you find the right person to talk to, then communicate with them. If electronic, DM or email them, don’t contact in a public channel (there may not even be one that makes sense for the chat). Communication is a network of who-knows-who-to-talk-to. Messaging app is mostly oriented around ad-hoc group and individual chats rather than channel-focused (thanks, fucking MS Teams, for practically enforcing this style at the tool level). If you’re not around to overhear things in person, you won’t know wtf is going on. IMO the latter is clearly just dysfunctional, but this dysfunction is far less painful in-person—it seems to work basically ok, mostly, except that everything takes a little longer than it should. However, all its problems are brought in the open with WFH, and for someone who hadn’t seen the other (better, no matter where everyone’s working) style, I can see how they might think their struggles with WFH are because of WFH.
- johndhi 3y agoWhat does "productiveness" mean exactly? As a manager I find all of this quite hard to quantify.
- jmyeet 3y agoRTO is like voluntary redundancies as a solution to layoffs. It seems like its a good idea but it's not. You rarely hear about voluntary redundancies these days for good reason. If, say, you wanted to downsize by 10% you'd seek volunteers within each division. They'd get a severance package. The net result? All the best people left because they could take the money and get another job. RTO mandates are quiet layoffs. They're layoffs without having to pay severance. It's great (for the employer). At least in theory. Layoffs are a tool for increasing uncompensated workload (as the 5 remaining people still have to do the work of 8) and suppressing wages. Some people can't RTO (eg they moved during the pandemic). Some just don't want to. Particularly in the Bay Area, the commute is a giant waste of hours a day. So, again, the best people just leave. The ones who stay usually can't leave because they're being held captive by work visas and green card applications. Blaming employees is nothing new here. In any large company you will see reorgs happen every 6 months, maybe more often. Some VP you've never heard of (but is in your direct management chain) now reports to a different VP who you've also never heard of. Some orgs have their names changed and there's a new set of priorities. The point of these reorgs is for leadership to escape responsibility for consequences. There's a perpetual handover or ramping up period. Nothing lasts long enough to fail. Nothing lasts long enough to succeed either but there's little value in success and a huge cost to failure so the people involved optimize to avoid failure. More specifically, the appearance of failure. In all of this, you, the employee, are entirely expendable. Your life can be completely upended for no other reason than someone wanted to cancel a project to give the appearance of a reorg or your name was randomly picked for a layoff on a spreadsheet. Always act in your own best interests.
- kyle_grove 3y agoMy main thoughts on RTO: 1. No one work arrangement is optimal for all firms. 2. Most policies around RTO (or remote work) are not meaningfully exploring optima (with respect to organizational health and work product quality). 3. Therefore, the amount of preserveration and energy spent on RTO steals focus from main drivers for firm success. Which is probably the point, as the article points out.
- xyst 3y agoClosest article I could find which lists companies with reported/published RTO mandates: - https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-making-workers-employees-return-to-office-rto-wfh-hybrid-2023-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/companies-making-workers-emp... If anybody has a more comprehensive list, please share. I am personally blacklisting any of these companies.
- 62951413 3y agoA casual search on LI shows 300+ applicants for a regular hybrid position and easily 1,600+ for a remote position in a prestigious company such as Databricks. I'm really curious how one can compete with candidates outside of Bay Area/CA if the CoL alone disqualifies you. Go East, young man?
- happyjack 3y agoThis probably won't resonate to the HN crowd, but I was in NC last week visiting a pump company that I distribute two of their lines. The office was a ghost town. Completely empty, eerie, creepy. I think the applications engineers, accountants, office folks, etc. work from home 3-4 days a week. Meanwhile, there were 80 some employees in the factory on the lower level milling and lapping away, and fabricating pump skids. I don't see this ending well. I know a lot of young folks and admins are singing the work from home praise, but it does create a lot of animosity when machinists are grinding away on 8 hour shifts and HAVE to be there. On the other hand, it's really fresh for someone like me to state any opinion since I'm a sales engineer and work alone out of an aircraft hangar and only see people when I go see clients at their own facilities or travel to see my vendors. I don't think humans are meant to be in isolation, though. But, the modern American life is full of shitty commutes, long hours in traffic, and mental drain. With the rising cost of homes, fuel, life in general, who the hell wants to sit in an hour traffic each way to work? And at the end of the day, who the fuck cares? Any extra profit you generate is going to some boomer shareholder. Might as well sit at home and create what little sanity you can. I think consultants, programmers, sales, and some technical folks and the like are safe. They could do their jobs from home in 1990, and usually frequently travel. Programmers have had svn and git for a long time. Consulting / professional engineers tend to sit on software packages and conference calls much of the day, etc. etc.
- throwingawayusr 3y agoOne aspect I haven’t seen talked about much is how there’s a strong push for RTO but no cutbacks on external contractors. Current large org is forcing RTO but most of my team is in latam or Europe so there’s very little value. If this was truly about in-office efficiency then why keep so many external contractors? My take is that this is yet another mechanism for soft layoffs and control and the cost savings of external contractors are still worthwhile. So we’re left with hybrid teams and being in office still means remote meetings with the majority of ICs. The most charitable take I can give is that leadership truly believes that their immediate reports/teams will do better. My less charitable take is that this is for reasons not shared because they wouldn’t be well received.