4 ms·

Has anyone studied what drives RTO?

benterix 2y ago
I don't believe a CEO giving an honest answer in such a study and saying, say, (1) they enjoy the feeling of power and having tighter control over their subjects or (2) they just follow their gut feeling in spite the lack of any studies that RTO gives positive net results for the company.
- artemonster 2y ago
  Also paying for half empty office space must be constantly bugging all the beancounting „optimizers“
  - lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago
    Good optimizers will not react to half empty office space by pushing for RTO. They'll react by pushing for smaller office. So the problem that you pointed out isn't optimization as a concept, it's dumb people.
  - wiether 2y ago
    I worked for a few weeks in a company where coming to office was mandatory. Given the job we were doing, it didn't make sense. Until I learned that the boss was owning the building personally and was renting it to the company. Seen this way, it was much clearer why they wanted to have people in, instead of downsizing or just not having offices at all.
  - blitzar 2y ago
    Real estate costs to 0, variable costs including electricity, heating, cooling to 0, health and safety, workplace insurance, cleaning, catering, security and other cost centre's all gone. It's a beancounting optimisers wet dream.
    - benterix 2y ago
      I believe in these people's minds they lose something if they have a small office. Feeling of prestige - that we are this huge company taking up 6 buildings? Hard to point it down, but for some reason they stubbornly want to pay for these office spaces...
  - tmottabr 2y ago
    then downsize your offices.. It is what the company i work for did.. They were already friendly with remote work before, i for instance have worked fully remote for over 10 years already. Before the pandemic they had space problem in their San Francisco office, if you were not in the office at least 3 times per week you were at risk of loosing your desk space. During pandemic when everyone was forced to go full remote and performance was not impacted they just moved to a much smaller office space and kept everyone remote.
- datavirtue 2y ago
  I just learned that our CEO owns our building and the company rents it from him. This secret knowledge was just given to me because I'm in the club. I immediately stated that information should be common knowledge for every ESOP member. No one was interested in that.
lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago
This is what I'd really like to know. What really REALLY is behind managers/executives pushing for RTO. My theory so far is that they believe that employees working from home take advantage of decreased supervision to slack. Now on HN you'll read "doesn't matter that I'm working fewer hours if I'm delivering work". But I think managers/executives fear they're not very good at assessing how much tasks are meant to take. If a task is mean to take 1 day and I take 3 days and I explain why it took me longer, some times it's really difficult to assess whether the explanation is true or I'm BSing. (Of course, they don't admit this. They use their own BS to justify RTO. Enhanced collaboration or whatever.) Bottom line, managers/executives don't know how much output they can realistically expect, but they suspect it will be lower from home.
- fian 2y ago
  There are broader implications for the economy if a large percentage of people continue to WFH. In larger cities, many smaller businesses, like food outlets, are sustained by workers coming to their city offices most weekdays. Many such businesses failed during COVID knockdowns due to lack of customers. Some are still struggling to become viable again with a low RTO percentage. For some medium to large businesses, these struggling smaller businesses or business owners are their customers. So there is some self interest from many companies to go back to the way things were. Arguably the failed or struggling businesses could be being replaced by other services, eg home food delivery, but I've not personally noticed anything like that happening.
  - Zanfa 2y ago
    > There are broader implications for the economy if a large percentage of people continue to WFH. In larger cities, many smaller businesses, like food outlets, are sustained by workers coming to their city offices most weekdays. The opposite is true as well. Many (likely more) small businesses have gone bankrupt because of people concentrating to other locations due to urbanization.
  - mathgeek 2y ago
    > Arguably the failed or struggling businesses could be being replaced by other services, eg home food delivery, but I've not personally noticed anything like that happening. It already happened before and during covid (that's what the gig economy created/captured). That has its own problems, not the least of which is the overhead costs passed to consumers. Overall, the scale required of such businesses keeps small ones from flourishing in any large numbers compared to brick and mortar.
artyom 2y ago
It's a long term social class game to drive salaries back to the pre crypto/pandemic era. RTO is coupled with big layoffs, hiring freezes, etc. It may not impact highest performers that much but makes it worse for everyone. Big players play the game, the rest just imitates.
- HPsquared 2y ago
  That doesn't make much sense though, I'm sure a lot of people would happily WFH for less pay than if they have to commute, spend all day in a noisy open office, etc.
  - artyom 2y ago
    Less pay for doing exactly what you're already doing? How would that work?
    - HPsquared 2y ago
      WFH involves doing less. You don't have to spend 1-2 hours a day, plus expenses, commuting - and having to have an expensive house near the office.
      - tmottabr 2y ago
        except we are not getting paid to commute, we are expected to commute to do the work we are getting paid for. If we were paid to commute to the office then our commute time would be part of the work day. But I am paid for the work i do during work hours and if i have to commute that is expected to happen out of work hours. So actually the Company is already saving money by having me remote, so now i am also expected to get paid less for doing the same work while also saving the company money?
        HPsquared 2y ago
        Pay is compensation for the inconvenience of having to work. An easier day needs less compensation to feel okay with. Just from the subjective view of the employee.
valleyjo 2y ago
If you have a geographically centralized team (I.e everyone is in the same city) it makes sense to me to have the team be together at least one day a week. If you’re by yourself in a company office then RTO mandates makes no sense to me.
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago
  > If you have a geographically centralized team (I.e everyone is in the same city) it makes sense to me to have the team be together at least one day a week Wanna expand on that? Why does that "make sense"?
  - pjc50 2y ago
    In-person collaboration has real benefits for some situations. Team cohesion is not a totally made up thing. So, if it's reasonably cheap, such as everyone in the same city, it's worth getting the team together regularly. Some distributed organizations strive to bring even international teams together from time to time, even if it's just once a year.
    - benterix 2y ago
      The whole point of this discussion is that decisions based on somebody's opinions but applied to everybody give poor results. In this case, if you forced "office Mondays", you would lose several seniors. The question is, is the net result worth it? You can be convinced it is, but without hard data it's meaningless. (I work for an international corporation and we have hybrid meetings once a year but it never works 100% in person because people work from different continents, it would make no sense.)
    - tmottabr 2y ago
      the company that i work for has several people in the same city or close enough that we can go meet at the office, yet i completely disagre with this take. If collaboration is beneficial in some situation then in office meetings should happen with a situation that would benefit from this collaboration arise. If the need is not there then there is no point. In my team we go to the office once a month mostly for social interaction, it is usually the day we are lest productive because we basically drink coffee and catch up and even then it is open if you have other personal needs to participate remotely or not at all, we had months were there wasn't anyone in the office and we just meet virtually. I have not gone into the office yet this year myself for a number of reasons. I still collaborate constantly with my team mates, we have enough tools for remote collaboration that make being physically in the same space irrelevant, this also allow collaboration to extend the team members in other countries so i am not limited to the people that live close by.
TheCapeGreek 2y ago
I agree with others that I don't think most CEOs are going to give truthful answers in such a study. The way I see it: For many there's just a preference/productivity boost for working in-person. That's fine, remote is not for everyone. However my hunch is that if decision-making management is mostly comprised of older millenials and gen X, they're just habitually used to working in-person and refuse to change. Then you can go into the darker reasons: Ego around owning an office space and then having to use it, "fairness" (read: superiority complex) against workers getting the same perks as managers, inability to work in a remote (read: digital first) culture, easy way to get rid of people without paying layoff severance.
wsc981 2y ago
I believe most managers think employees are more likely to slack at home. And I do feel in many cases this feeling is justified (though of course people can also slack on the job). Though, I do know for myself I am very productive at home. So, I personally will avoid working from some office. I prefer to manage my own time and also be flexible in how I divide time in my day. I also don't feel energized by working with many colleagues (as an introvert, it's quite the opposite for me, actually).
Zanfa 2y ago
I doubt most CEOs have ulterior motives other than just wanting things to go back to “normal”. People generally don’t like change.
surgical_fire 2y ago
The managerial class finds is icky that the lower castes suddenly have a benefit that was exclusive to them.
dt3ft 2y ago
My guess: the danger that WFH is making managers irrelevant.
- azemetre 2y ago
  That would be a boon to the company tho, because they can cut off more dead weight and lower OpEx. I think it’s more basic. Many cities rely on business/commercial real estate taxes to generate funds. Many of these governments also give tax incentives if businesses are working in the city. If the companies aren’t doing this they lose out. Most cities cannot make up the loss of funds through residential taxes so the pressure of RTO can help ease it. Boston is a good example of this, residential property taxes are quite low but the city has a hard time making up the difference with the loss of commercial property taxes. So there was a big push to get companies to RTO. It’ll probably take a good 20 years before city governments are able to adapt, hopefully that means more mixed use buildings in the city core like Chicago (commercial store first level, condos/apartments above it) rather than why you commonly see across US cities (entire buildings dedicated to business).
- datavirtue 2y ago
  They are a lot of times. Society is hovering it's finger over the "everyone is a contractor" button. Employment is a holdover construct of subjugation.
theandrewbailey 2y ago
Follow the money. My conspiracy theory: executives are the kinds of people that could have a lot of money invested into commercial real estate. The value of which has seen a massive hit in the past few years (and is at risk of a 2008-style collapse), because fewer people traffic those properties, and thus, fewer businesses rent them. In order to counter those forces, they mandate that everyone in their company return to office in order to prop up the value of their portfolios.

I don't believe a CEO giving an honest answer in such a study and saying, say, (1) they enjoy the feeling of power and having tighter control over their subjects or (2) they just follow their gut feeling in spite the lack of any studies that RTO gives positive net results for the company.

artemonster 2y ago
Also paying for half empty office space must be constantly bugging all the beancounting „optimizers“
- lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago
  Good optimizers will not react to half empty office space by pushing for RTO. They'll react by pushing for smaller office. So the problem that you pointed out isn't optimization as a concept, it's dumb people.
- wiether 2y ago
  I worked for a few weeks in a company where coming to office was mandatory. Given the job we were doing, it didn't make sense. Until I learned that the boss was owning the building personally and was renting it to the company. Seen this way, it was much clearer why they wanted to have people in, instead of downsizing or just not having offices at all.
- blitzar 2y ago
  Real estate costs to 0, variable costs including electricity, heating, cooling to 0, health and safety, workplace insurance, cleaning, catering, security and other cost centre's all gone. It's a beancounting optimisers wet dream.
  - benterix 2y ago
    I believe in these people's minds they lose something if they have a small office. Feeling of prestige - that we are this huge company taking up 6 buildings? Hard to point it down, but for some reason they stubbornly want to pay for these office spaces...
- tmottabr 2y ago
  then downsize your offices.. It is what the company i work for did.. They were already friendly with remote work before, i for instance have worked fully remote for over 10 years already. Before the pandemic they had space problem in their San Francisco office, if you were not in the office at least 3 times per week you were at risk of loosing your desk space. During pandemic when everyone was forced to go full remote and performance was not impacted they just moved to a much smaller office space and kept everyone remote.
datavirtue 2y ago
I just learned that our CEO owns our building and the company rents it from him. This secret knowledge was just given to me because I'm in the club. I immediately stated that information should be common knowledge for every ESOP member. No one was interested in that.

lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago

This is what I'd really like to know. What really REALLY is behind managers/executives pushing for RTO. My theory so far is that they believe that employees working from home take advantage of decreased supervision to slack. Now on HN you'll read "doesn't matter that I'm working fewer hours if I'm delivering work". But I think managers/executives fear they're not very good at assessing how much tasks are meant to take. If a task is mean to take 1 day and I take 3 days and I explain why it took me longer, some times it's really difficult to assess whether the explanation is true or I'm BSing. (Of course, they don't admit this. They use their own BS to justify RTO. Enhanced collaboration or whatever.) Bottom line, managers/executives don't know how much output they can realistically expect, but they suspect it will be lower from home.

fian 2y ago
There are broader implications for the economy if a large percentage of people continue to WFH. In larger cities, many smaller businesses, like food outlets, are sustained by workers coming to their city offices most weekdays. Many such businesses failed during COVID knockdowns due to lack of customers. Some are still struggling to become viable again with a low RTO percentage. For some medium to large businesses, these struggling smaller businesses or business owners are their customers. So there is some self interest from many companies to go back to the way things were. Arguably the failed or struggling businesses could be being replaced by other services, eg home food delivery, but I've not personally noticed anything like that happening.
- Zanfa 2y ago
  > There are broader implications for the economy if a large percentage of people continue to WFH. In larger cities, many smaller businesses, like food outlets, are sustained by workers coming to their city offices most weekdays. The opposite is true as well. Many (likely more) small businesses have gone bankrupt because of people concentrating to other locations due to urbanization.
- mathgeek 2y ago
  > Arguably the failed or struggling businesses could be being replaced by other services, eg home food delivery, but I've not personally noticed anything like that happening. It already happened before and during covid (that's what the gig economy created/captured). That has its own problems, not the least of which is the overhead costs passed to consumers. Overall, the scale required of such businesses keeps small ones from flourishing in any large numbers compared to brick and mortar.

artyom 2y ago

It's a long term social class game to drive salaries back to the pre crypto/pandemic era. RTO is coupled with big layoffs, hiring freezes, etc. It may not impact highest performers that much but makes it worse for everyone. Big players play the game, the rest just imitates.

HPsquared 2y ago
That doesn't make much sense though, I'm sure a lot of people would happily WFH for less pay than if they have to commute, spend all day in a noisy open office, etc.
- artyom 2y ago
  Less pay for doing exactly what you're already doing? How would that work?
  - HPsquared 2y ago
    WFH involves doing less. You don't have to spend 1-2 hours a day, plus expenses, commuting - and having to have an expensive house near the office.
    - tmottabr 2y ago
      except we are not getting paid to commute, we are expected to commute to do the work we are getting paid for. If we were paid to commute to the office then our commute time would be part of the work day. But I am paid for the work i do during work hours and if i have to commute that is expected to happen out of work hours. So actually the Company is already saving money by having me remote, so now i am also expected to get paid less for doing the same work while also saving the company money?
      - HPsquared 2y ago
        Pay is compensation for the inconvenience of having to work. An easier day needs less compensation to feel okay with. Just from the subjective view of the employee.

valleyjo 2y ago

If you have a geographically centralized team (I.e everyone is in the same city) it makes sense to me to have the team be together at least one day a week. If you’re by yourself in a company office then RTO mandates makes no sense to me.

lkdfjlkdfjlg 2y ago
> If you have a geographically centralized team (I.e everyone is in the same city) it makes sense to me to have the team be together at least one day a week Wanna expand on that? Why does that "make sense"?
- pjc50 2y ago
  In-person collaboration has real benefits for some situations. Team cohesion is not a totally made up thing. So, if it's reasonably cheap, such as everyone in the same city, it's worth getting the team together regularly. Some distributed organizations strive to bring even international teams together from time to time, even if it's just once a year.
  - benterix 2y ago
    The whole point of this discussion is that decisions based on somebody's opinions but applied to everybody give poor results. In this case, if you forced "office Mondays", you would lose several seniors. The question is, is the net result worth it? You can be convinced it is, but without hard data it's meaningless. (I work for an international corporation and we have hybrid meetings once a year but it never works 100% in person because people work from different continents, it would make no sense.)
  - tmottabr 2y ago
    the company that i work for has several people in the same city or close enough that we can go meet at the office, yet i completely disagre with this take. If collaboration is beneficial in some situation then in office meetings should happen with a situation that would benefit from this collaboration arise. If the need is not there then there is no point. In my team we go to the office once a month mostly for social interaction, it is usually the day we are lest productive because we basically drink coffee and catch up and even then it is open if you have other personal needs to participate remotely or not at all, we had months were there wasn't anyone in the office and we just meet virtually. I have not gone into the office yet this year myself for a number of reasons. I still collaborate constantly with my team mates, we have enough tools for remote collaboration that make being physically in the same space irrelevant, this also allow collaboration to extend the team members in other countries so i am not limited to the people that live close by.

TheCapeGreek 2y ago

I agree with others that I don't think most CEOs are going to give truthful answers in such a study. The way I see it: For many there's just a preference/productivity boost for working in-person. That's fine, remote is not for everyone. However my hunch is that if decision-making management is mostly comprised of older millenials and gen X, they're just habitually used to working in-person and refuse to change. Then you can go into the darker reasons: Ego around owning an office space and then having to use it, "fairness" (read: superiority complex) against workers getting the same perks as managers, inability to work in a remote (read: digital first) culture, easy way to get rid of people without paying layoff severance.

wsc981 2y ago

I believe most managers think employees are more likely to slack at home. And I do feel in many cases this feeling is justified (though of course people can also slack on the job). Though, I do know for myself I am very productive at home. So, I personally will avoid working from some office. I prefer to manage my own time and also be flexible in how I divide time in my day. I also don't feel energized by working with many colleagues (as an introvert, it's quite the opposite for me, actually).

Zanfa 2y ago

I doubt most CEOs have ulterior motives other than just wanting things to go back to “normal”. People generally don’t like change.

surgical_fire 2y ago

The managerial class finds is icky that the lower castes suddenly have a benefit that was exclusive to them.

dt3ft 2y ago

My guess: the danger that WFH is making managers irrelevant.

azemetre 2y ago
That would be a boon to the company tho, because they can cut off more dead weight and lower OpEx. I think it’s more basic. Many cities rely on business/commercial real estate taxes to generate funds. Many of these governments also give tax incentives if businesses are working in the city. If the companies aren’t doing this they lose out. Most cities cannot make up the loss of funds through residential taxes so the pressure of RTO can help ease it. Boston is a good example of this, residential property taxes are quite low but the city has a hard time making up the difference with the loss of commercial property taxes. So there was a big push to get companies to RTO. It’ll probably take a good 20 years before city governments are able to adapt, hopefully that means more mixed use buildings in the city core like Chicago (commercial store first level, condos/apartments above it) rather than why you commonly see across US cities (entire buildings dedicated to business).
datavirtue 2y ago
They are a lot of times. Society is hovering it's finger over the "everyone is a contractor" button. Employment is a holdover construct of subjugation.

theandrewbailey 2y ago

Follow the money. My conspiracy theory: executives are the kinds of people that could have a lot of money invested into commercial real estate. The value of which has seen a massive hit in the past few years (and is at risk of a 2008-style collapse), because fewer people traffic those properties, and thus, fewer businesses rent them. In order to counter those forces, they mandate that everyone in their company return to office in order to prop up the value of their portfolios.