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The data is in: RTO policies don't improve employee performance or company value
- bhaney 3y agoEveryone already knew this was the case and having hard data around it was never going to change anything. RTO has always been about protecting real estate values and massaging egos, regardless of the hollow rhetoric about performance that was clearly bullshit from the start.
- x86x87 3y agoBut but.... What about all those watercooler conversation? The spontaneous ideas riffing? The surges in team energy? /s
- 000ooo000 3y agoMillions of gamers all over the world are still absolutely puzzled how they ever built any rapport with each other playing games over the internet without routinely bumping into each other in the hallway twice a week. A total mystery.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoExcept at a certain point this doesn’t matter to shareholders or boards. As leases and tax agreements expire, BYOO (bring your own office) will look to save hundreds of millions to billions a year in real estate and related expenses significantly boosting EPS. Then we can tear down the human warehouse hamster wheels and rebuild them with housing and services for human life.
- BigJono 3y agoYep, that's why there are so many Bloomberg articles jacking off RTO. It's a better investment to shout about how everyone else should RTO than to do it yourself. Shareholders and board members don't want their company to RTO, they want the entire industry to RTO. If their own company RTOs and CBD real estate crashes anyway, they're the ones that are left holding the bag, whether it's because of big fixed term leases, real estate investment or whatever other skin they have in the game.
- richiebful1 3y agoCan someone explain how a tenant company suffers when commercial real estate value collapses? It's another thing entirely if the company owns its own offices, of course
- BigJono 3y agoCommercial leases for large offices are pretty long. I think 8-10 years or longer is fairly normal? If you're stuck with 5 more years of 2019 rates and all your competitors have downsized, your cost per employee is going to be much higher. Some percentage of the larger companies are going to own their office space too. I'd guess as we get further from the start of covid (bit over 4 years now?) the pressure to RTO will dwindle as more companies downsize.
- fnordpiglet 3y agoYeah it’s mostly sunk cost fallacy driving the regret. Elderly leadership who harken for the way they developed their career are the ones pushing the narrative. “Think of the children,” “how can we organize in any other way than the emergent reality my career was shaped by,” etc are the real drivers and the sunk cost is used to buttress. Eventually cold hard cash will win out over fallacious thinking.
- dogleash 3y ago> Everyone already knew this was the case and having hard data around it was never going to change anything. See also: open offices. It's a con. Everyone knows it's a con. But it's one of those cons that get so big, everyone just pretends like they're not rotten liars.
- Spivak 3y agoWFH is essentially "what if everyone at work had their own office?" I'm not at all shocked people who don't even need the flexibility enjoy it as a perk.
- hiatus 3y ago> RTO has always been about protecting real estate values Most businesses don't own their office space afaik, so why would a business care about protecting real estate values? If anything, wouldn't the majority of businesses prefer to see a decline in real estate values as that would lead to a decrease in rent?
- usea 3y agoBecause the decision isn't made for the benefit of the business. It's made for the benefit of individuals; either management, their friends/families, or investors. At the expense of shareholders and employees.
- hiatus 3y agoSo you are saying that executives at businesses are violating their fiduciary duties and putting their own personal profit goals related to commercial real estate above their obligations to the company? Surely with making such a claim you can provide a list of a number of companies doing so.
- whiterknight 3y agoThis real estate narrative never made sense. offices exist to optimize (and monitor) employees.
- hiatus 3y ago> The reason offices exist is to optimize (and monitor) employees. This rationale makes no sense to me. Forcing the totality of all employee interactions to a device owned and controlled by the company seems to provide a more complete monitoring solution than any in-person monitoring could provide.
- whiterknight 3y agoThe office existed before those. The point is that work from home doesn’t ruin some real estate investment scheme. It reduces their expenditures, in the same way that they don’t have to buy cubicles. But that cost is miniscule, they would prefer to pay it to get the (perceived) productivity and monitoring benefits.
- whiterknight 3y agoI don’t know it’s the case and this is hardly “hard data”.
- hasty_pudding 3y agoIts not about that. It's way easier to control people in an office. Employees have to submit to groupthink and can be monitored and caught alot easier if they dont submit to this groupthink. It's a lot easier to control people through groupthink than via reason. In an office not only do you have to do your job but you also have to be "a person the group would want to have a beer with". You don't want to lose your job for not being a cultural fit do you? So management has a lot more control over the situation. Ive been depressed and withdrawn and just focusing on work before and been called into managements office and told Im not "acting like myself, is everything ok?" with a bit of an ominous tone and so I had to pretend to be outgoing and cheerful when I wasnt.
- gymbeaux 3y agoUnderrated comment.
- hiatus 3y ago> It's way easier to control people in an office. It's easier to monitor people in an office than it is to give them company owned computers with spyware on them? It's easier to monitor people at the watercooler than to read their slack DMs? > In an office not only do you have to do your job but you also have to be "a person the group would want to have a beer with". The same holds true for remote work. Your unwillingness to join too many remote happy hours is noted.
- hasty_pudding 3y agoYeah but a few remote happy hours vs "all day every day" is very different.
- cj 3y agoI find it curious why people advocating for WFH aren’t also advocating to keep schools, kids and teachers learning at home. If WFH is truly the future, we should be teaching our kids how to operate in a virtual environment rather than in person.
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- orzig 3y agoArticle is paywalled but the paper it’s based on is freely available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401
- cj 3y agoThe data is in: WFH is better for some companies/people and worse for others. Debating that one is objectively better than the other is silly.
- x86x87 3y agoImho it's not silly. You have to look at the impact it has on aggregate. WFH is going to prevail in the medium to long term. It's inevitable.
- cj 3y agoI disagree. Looking at the aggregate data doesn’t give you much insight into whether a specific company would be better off in person or remote or hybrid. Every company is different.
- auntienomen 3y agoRTO is just backdoor age and parental status discrimination. Gotta shake out everyone who's not a cheap twentysomething.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jacknews 3y agoThere are probably arguments either way, some things are quite obviously better remote, and some things in person. Managing people is maybe easier in person. It's certainly easier if you're a 'controlling boss', as you can intimidate and harry employees much more effectively in the flesh (I'm not advocating that btw). It makes you wonder. Why are companies often so against hiring (as employees) people who have been freelance, or run their own business, for example? Perhaps a good part of the whole institution of the 'company' is about coercion, rather than just 'working together for a common purpose'.
- jensensbutton 3y agoThis is giving some serious "take a position then write an article to try and prove it's the right one" vibes. The "data" cited is laughable, as is the analysis. Meta did RTO and just had one of the strongest quarters in history. I guess that "proves" that RTO is actually beneficial and that people trying to wfh are just lazy. Why is this even shared here? What a joke.
- timr 3y agoThe paper [1] cited here is a joke. Here's how they collected their dataset: > We collect RTO information for S&P 500 firms through manual news searches on Google and Factiva. Specifically, for each firm, we search by using the company’s name and the following keywords: ‘Work from Home’, ‘return to office’, and ‘days required working in the office’. We focus on S&P 500 firms because these large firms are closely followed by media, thus mitigating concerns about media coverage bias. Among the S&P 500 firms, 137 publicly announce their RTO policy and are classified as RTO firms in this study. These 137 firms become our treatment firms They then correlate this with other (ahem) high quality datasets...like Glassdoor reviews. Their "determinant model" takes into account CEO gender and politics and an (arbitrary) measurement of "CEO power" [2], but doesn't take into account even basic things like industry, other than if the company is "high tech" or not. If you bother even skimming the thing, you can see that it isn't serious -- there's a weird editorial quote at the top of page two, from a PR firm, which calls RTO "eyewash for investors". Real academic papers don't do this kind of thing. This is like a bad undergrad term paper. [1] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401 [2] "CEO relative power, calculated as CEO’s total compensation divided by the average total compensations paid to the four highest-paid executives in the firm" (p. 40)
- tlb 3y ago_According to my measurements, [policy I don't like] doesn't improve [thing that isn't actually measured by the metrics I used]_ is an evergreen source of clickbait academic papers.
- itsdrewmiller 3y agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39282449 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39282449 almost the exact same comment, and I still don't see why you think this is a joke.
- timr 3y agoYep, same paper, same reason. Paper isn't any better than before. And you're making the same "I don't understand" reply, despite someone responding to you last time with the answer. It's like we're trapped in a time loop.
- imchillyb 3y agoEuropean countries require 30 days _mandatory_ time off. This has been policy for over a century now, and there are plenty of research papers that show this required time off has an overall benefit to society. Any counter claims must _prove_ such counter claims against the overwhelming evidence provided by the European Union and their required time off policies. Junk article with an agenda. RTO costs companies money, costs investors money, and costs boards of directors their constant revenue increases. Good. Invest _this_.