8 ms·

Executives and Research Disagree About Hybrid Work. Why?

43 points by ctoth 2y ago

i_am_jl 2y ago
People trust their feelings and experience over research, more at 11.
- gryfft 2y ago
  > “Leadership is a lot less fulfilling and a lot less fun when you’re doing it remotely,” Bock said. There's also this, which makes a great deal of sense to me even as it angers me from the other end of the power gradient. Management likes to do things that feel good to management.
  - i_am_jl 2y ago
    I dunno. I feel like if executives believed they were hamstringing their teams with RTO edicts they wouldn't see them as so fulfilling or fun. Maybe I'm giving executives too much credit but I believe that, for the most part, they believe they're better managers when their employees are in the office. I think that's true in a lot of cases, but it also ignores that employees can be better workers when they're hybrid or remote.
    - LaGrange 2y ago
      > Maybe I'm giving executives too much credit but I believe that, for the most part, they believe they're better managers when their employees are in the office. I don't know, I'd say a usual expectation of a worker is to learn how to adapt to a changing understanding of their work, but like, maybe I'm expecting too much. Why would I expect managers to keep up to date on management research, it's not like they're being paid for doing their jobs well or anything. Edit: fun fact, it's been so far my experience that C levels are surprised management research exists.
- l33t7332273 2y ago
  The research in this area has been hazy at best. It’s very difficult to quantify all of the factors. It’s a disservice to pretend that WFH > RTO is “settled science”
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
  Research often measures the wrong thing, mistakes the map for the territory, or misses the forest for the trees.
sampo 2y ago
https://archive.is/UvAEi https://archive.is/UvAEi
lopkeny12ko 2y ago
tl;dr: Leaders who run massively successful and profitable businesses rightfully doubt research published by a random academic with zero entrepreneurial experience. If only someone could explain why.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
shams93 2y ago
Its really hard to force employees into sexual relationships with the "big boss" when everyone is working hundreds or thousands of miles away.
- kelsey98765431 2y ago
  the amount of times i have been asked to turn on my camera is ridiculous, i do not owe some old man a smile and i will gladly allow myself to be let go over it every time. the nerve of some people is astounding.
  - ctoth 2y ago
    I am totally blind. My response to the camera request in meetings is that I will be happy to let you see me once I can see you.
- maybelsyrup 2y ago
  You don’t deserve the downvotes here. Whether or not you’re kidding, I think you’re probably right.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- formerlurker 2y ago
  The awesome thing about not going to the office is that I no longer have to deal with repressed nerds and tech bros. I hate being asked out for coffee after I say no for the third time. I no longer have to deal with them looking at my body or making casual sexist jokes.
paulcole 2y ago
I do love that HN commenters painstakingly refute and poke holes in any and all research except that which confirms that remote work is good.
- ttyprintk 2y ago
  4 out of 6 comments here side with the brass.
- lovich 2y ago
  When leaders only give empty platitudes as their reason for the RTO and don’t even fund enough office space[1] for their workers why would anyone not? Maybe they have a good reason but we have no reason to believe so if they won’t explain [1]I, and multiple other engineers I know at different companies, don’t even have desks now. We have hot desking and whatever random locker with 1 cubic ft of storage that you can find, which get cleared out every several days. I rewatched office space with my boomer father recently and he could not believe me when I said I would take their office environment in a heart beat. “All Hands” meetings in the office also mean “please direct your team to only have 50% of them come in as we do not have enough desks for everyone”
- dingnuts 2y ago
  I don't need a study to know it's good. I like it and it positively affects my life. My employer pays for an amount of work, and gets it. I negotiated my salary under remote conditions. If my employer believes I'm more productive in the office they're welcome to renegotiate my salary on that basis.
- hooverd 2y ago
  Most of the comments in this thread are doing the opposite. They're saying that despite the research the intangibles are actually what matter (for RTO).
SpicyLemonZest 2y ago
I think most executives are pretty straightforward that their concern isn’t about the things most studies measure. Jassy sees the benefits as being: > we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another These are all hard to measure through studies, and not really the same thing as productivity or job satisfaction.
- lopkeny12ko 2y ago
  Exactly, and it's been proven time and time again that such in-person collaboration leads to improved job satisfaction, retention, and overall employee happiness.
  - otikik 2y ago
    By what studies?
    - Mountain_Skies 2y ago
      Ones funded by the Extrovert Realtors Association in cooperation with the League of Municipal Tax Collectors and Parking Deck Guild.
    - LaGrange 2y ago
      Studies by the department of Don't Worry Your Pretty Little Head About It and the University of Imadeitup.
  - hooverd 2y ago
    Is the Amazon meat grinder the paradigm of that? I like in person collaboration despite working remotely, but I don't think forcing everyone back is the right call. Maybe people forget the opposite; scolding emails about how their should be butts in seats at 7 pm when the pizzaman cometh.
  - 2y ago
sharkweek 2y ago
Company I work for implemented more RTO recently and when someone asked in an all hands for data showing that the first RTO decision was leading to an improvement in productivity or some other key metric and the CTO responded saying (paraphrasing) “this isn’t a data based decision leadership is making. It’s because we want to build a culture where people are working next to each other more frequently. We FEEL that the company benefits because of this.” People got bristly that we’re all routinely forced to prove any decision we as employees want to make with data. But was a fascinating moment of transparency, even if a lot of people hated the decision.
- joshdavham 2y ago
  How would you propose they quantify company culture?
  - EPWN3D 2y ago
    The same way you'd measure anything else at a company: productivity. A company's purpose is to make products and money, not to build the culture the CEO wants. If there's data showing that thousands of cumulative hours of commuting leads to more productivity or innovation or whatever, then by all means let's see it. But this is just the open office fad in new clothes. With open offices, the thing which conveniently cost less money also supposedly improved innovation and collaboration. No serious research demonstrates this. With RTO, the thing which conveniently gives middle- and upper-management warm annd fuzzy feelings about their life choices also supposedly increases innovation and collaboration. Again, no serious research demonstrates this. But none of this matters. If this is what the company wants to do, then that's what it wants to do. The CEO can make decisions for whatever reason they want, and if the board are okay with it and the results, then that's the decision. I do wish more C-levels would be honest and just say, "I want to see you all here, because I'm not confident that work will get done if you're not here." At least then no one's insulting anyone's intelligence.
- nine_zeros 2y ago
  The C-Suite is so highly paid and lives such a comfortable life that they can't even fathom how much productivity is lost by the average individual commuting for an hour and having to bounce for kids/family/home/medical issues. They truly don't understand why people may want to leave work, be at home when they themselves have ZERO chores to deal with. And they also don't understand why people are not as passionate as themselves about the work - when they make millions every quarter but the average person just gets by. Empathy is not what C-Suite operates on because they have lost those empathy brain cells by virtue of living a life SO PRIVILEGED that even a basic middle class life with no help, appointments, kids, schools, rent, is unimaginable to them.
Rattay 2y ago
Professional Office Managers need an office to manage. It's like asking for Turkeys to vote for Christmas saying 'don't come and sit in and listen to my speeches all day'
ramon156 2y ago
As an employee, WFH is good As an employer, WFH is evil Here's two citations you can use for your paper, I'll see my check in the mail.
- whatindaheck 2y ago
  It is my opinion that these sorts of statements are devoid of value and don’t contribute to the conversation. Good for Reddit. My grandpap always said the same of unions. Great if you’re in them. Terrible if not. I have similar thoughts on prison. They’re good when you’re not in one but suck if you are.
zeroonetwothree 2y ago
It think it’s obvious CEOs have biases that make them want in person, since it allows them to feel more power and control. On the other hand these studies are very weak and probably don’t actually mean very much. Productivity of individual employees is essentially impossible to measure correctly, and then how do to measure interaction costs like slower communication or lost opportunities in chance meetings and conversations? So I don’t think we really can say one way or another how good it is for the company. Obviously employees do prefer remote work but the goal of a CEO isn’t just to make employees happy so it’s not like we should expect them to.
choxi 2y ago
Has anyone looked at competitor companies and compared the ones with WFH and the ones without it? I’m curious what that data looks like
- topkai22 2y ago
  This is the study on RTO and financial performance that made waves a few months ago: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401 Summary is- no effect on financial performance in the observation period, but it sure made employees unhappy.
Mountain_Skies 2y ago
My experience has been a bit weird since it is backwards of what most have experienced. For the five years leading up to the pandemic, our senior leadership had been pushing WFH heavily as we were shedding real estate and saving lots from it. Being in a legacy business with lots of aging physical infrastructure, there were lots of opportunities for downsizing infrastructure and our office downsizing just sort of piggybacked on that. The savings were a major part of the CEO's message to the Board each quarter, which seemed to make them and the investors happy. Our division head however hated not being able to come into the office and see "my guys". We were mostly clustered in two metro areas with a few team members in random locations, but the division head was in our metro so we sometimes would meet up for dinner. Each time he'd start talking about having us RTO, even though our last office had been completely subleased to someone else. According to coworkers who were there longer than me, when we did have an office, the division head was only there one or two days a week. He liked parachuting in, doing the rounds, and then head back to his house in the mountains where he did much of his work (90% meetings) remotely. Eventually he was pushed out of the company though I don't know if his pushes on the CEO to do RTO was part of that or not but I assume their visions for the company simply were mismatched. I have since left the company but they did well during the pandemic because the company was already on a remote first path. Wouldn't surprise me if they were able to take advantage of the situation and dump some more leases though I'd guess subleases probably are difficult to arrange now.
lkrubner 2y ago
This explains everything: "It’s not practical. Hybrid work may be technically the best route, but it’s also complicated to oversee." Who cares if workers are productive, when the leadership is clearly less productive? And the leadership's time is extremely valuable. If remote work makes workers more productive, while the leadership is less productive, then remote work is bad for a company, full stop, no other conversation is needed.
- mscarborough 2y ago
  If leadership cannot take advantage of, let alone adjust to remote work in 2024, they're not good leaders.
  - lkrubner 2y ago
    If workers cannot do what the leadership needs, then they are bad workers, they need to be fired.
apierre_cardoso 2y ago
A whole lot of CEOs and executives have highly inflated egos, and if people are remote, they don’t get all the attention, echo chamber and bootlickers, that they want. Often behind a RTO there’s a weak person wanting to feel power over others
carapace 2y ago
I was at a a certain company (not for long) that did quick all-hands stand-up meetings once a week, so everyone could touch base. About 30-40 people, all standing up, took about 15 minutes. At the end of one meeting the CEO hosts a goodbye ritual for the CTO who is leaving for some other job or something. It was all blather about how great the guy is and how great it is that he's leaving and how that's great for the company even though he's great and we'll miss him, etc. etc. yadda yadda. Here's the punchline: at the start of the ritual the CEO and exiting CTO pulled out stools and sat down on them. It's a stand-up meeting. The rest of us are all still standing.
karaterobot 2y ago
> “Leadership is a lot less fulfilling and a lot less fun when you’re doing it remotely,” Bock said. I think this best explains what I've seen, personally. That and the sunk cost fallacy ("we've got all these buildings, we need to use them!").
AndrewKemendo 2y ago
Completely different incentives. Executives are in those roles because their anxieties for control align with productivity for shareholders. The coercive threat is the whole point of executive management in private profit focused organizations. Researchers on the other hand are not as interested in maintaining the power distribution bias. Rather they use “economic” factors like described in the article to describe what would seem to be a mutually beneficial situation. So what’s so confusing? It’s because all these commenters are still stuck in the thinking that by default, incentives are aligned all the way from investors to line workers in a firm (otherwise why would they be there? They can just move in a “free market” - they are “rational actors” and other economics lies etc…) As these studies show, coercive executives hate remote work because it reduces the frequency they can create pop-up tasks and break workflows to satisfy their desires. So productivity is up but control is down. It also makes bullying and intimidation much harder to get away with. So the conundrum is simply executives throwing tantrums about their loss of structural methods of coercion they aren’t able to effect as easily. Never forget, unless you are an owner of the company (eg. meaningful ownership, that has the ability to shut the org down) management, executives and investors are not only not your friends, but they are adversarial to your benefit. Studies like these demonstrate that almost perfectly and yet everybody’s confused about why is it not the same? It’s exceptionally simple and it’s something we’ve all known forever and it’s been captured in comic books and movies and everything else: middle management and above is incentivized to be antagonistic to non-ownership labor by function of the structure that it’s within.
- formerlurker 2y ago
  Could you please link the studies you mention? I only have anecdotes so I am curious to see studies about bullying and intimidation.
firefoxd 2y ago
The problem is everyone thinks Data will give you the answer. Does returning to office increase productivity? How do you measure productivity? Let me tell you how we increased productivity by 19% last year. Our VP aimed to increase productivity by 10%. The Jira team went to work. They studied our workflow, found some inefficiency in our ticket statuses, and reorganized. At the end of the year, we resolved many more tickets, gaining 71 days worth of work, or 19.5%. Celebration! The data clearly shows the improvement. But what they ignored is that on the previous year, we built a system. On the next year, the one with their Jira improvements, we used the system. We resolved more tickets after because those were small bug fixes instead of large architecture efforts. Nothing to do with the new ticket statuses. The lesson was add more ticket statuses and it will make developers more efficient... When we are asked to return to the office and there is push back, it is someone's job to come up with metrics that will measure productivity. They will probably measure ticket completion for on-site and off-site employees, completely ignoring the context of the work.
EPWN3D 2y ago
I actually like being in the office, but I'm in the bay area, so that requires hours of shitty commuting. I like the office, but I don't like it that much. If I had access to an office that I could get to on public transit in like 20 minutes, that'd be a totally different story. But no, everyone has to have sprawling campuses in the middle of suburbia.
bryanlarsen 2y ago
In many cases I suspect that leadership remembers the time when the company was small and everybody was basically all in the same room and how productive that time was. If you can get the entire company into a single small room magical things can happen. But RTO doesn't get the entire company into a single small room.
drewcoo 2y ago
Execs are paid to change reality, not to be dominated by it. What else should we expect?
jussy 2y ago
Does anyone know the legal and liability risk position for a global scale company in relation to where work is done?
llamajams 2y ago
Assuming youre not a quiet quitter , youre not double dipping and you have some interest in your job. I'm pretty sure WFH is more productive and efficient. I'm pretty sure corporate knows this as well. They might even have the numbers to prove it but don't wanna show it. BUT i think the reason they want us to return is that if we stay home.. we will use the efficiency and productivity gains to optimize our personal lives and not the bottom line. It would change white collar culture fundamentally and that would not be good for the status quo.
kkfx 2y ago
Executives of really high ranks know the modern city is the way for them to thrive because SMEs and Citizens thrive living spread, giants thrive in big cities where there is no middle class, only service slaves. Other executives are obedient slaves, being well trained to be to the point they can't recognize their real status, who simply follow the high ranking ones. The reality is complex but we can easily simplify that with full WFH most cities, the biggest first, will be emptied from the middle class, with them in homes outside from Just Eat to Uber to Wymo are dead, large slice of travel and accommodation services are dead as well, real estate for giants is dead (actually it's already nearly-dead under ICU) while the 2030 Agenda's will fail because those outside owning a home, p.v., car etc feel the opportunity to own and can't easily be impoverished just changing service prices. This will happen anyway because we haven't enough resources in the world to build smart-cities and we can't keep up for long the actual ones, but if happen quickly too many will still own to form a new working economy, if happen too late only very few will own enough so there will be anyway no distributed economy. I suggest anyone to rediscover the old Distributism and speculate why both nazism, fascism etc and marxism was against the middle class in particular.

43 points by ctoth 2y ago

i_am_jl 2y ago

People trust their feelings and experience over research, more at 11.

gryfft 2y ago
> “Leadership is a lot less fulfilling and a lot less fun when you’re doing it remotely,” Bock said. There's also this, which makes a great deal of sense to me even as it angers me from the other end of the power gradient. Management likes to do things that feel good to management.
- i_am_jl 2y ago
  I dunno. I feel like if executives believed they were hamstringing their teams with RTO edicts they wouldn't see them as so fulfilling or fun. Maybe I'm giving executives too much credit but I believe that, for the most part, they believe they're better managers when their employees are in the office. I think that's true in a lot of cases, but it also ignores that employees can be better workers when they're hybrid or remote.
  - LaGrange 2y ago
    > Maybe I'm giving executives too much credit but I believe that, for the most part, they believe they're better managers when their employees are in the office. I don't know, I'd say a usual expectation of a worker is to learn how to adapt to a changing understanding of their work, but like, maybe I'm expecting too much. Why would I expect managers to keep up to date on management research, it's not like they're being paid for doing their jobs well or anything. Edit: fun fact, it's been so far my experience that C levels are surprised management research exists.
l33t7332273 2y ago
The research in this area has been hazy at best. It’s very difficult to quantify all of the factors. It’s a disservice to pretend that WFH > RTO is “settled science”
2OEH8eoCRo0 2y ago
Research often measures the wrong thing, mistakes the map for the territory, or misses the forest for the trees.

sampo 2y ago

https://archive.is/UvAEi https://archive.is/UvAEi

lopkeny12ko 2y ago

tl;dr: Leaders who run massively successful and profitable businesses rightfully doubt research published by a random academic with zero entrepreneurial experience. If only someone could explain why.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]

shams93 2y ago

Its really hard to force employees into sexual relationships with the "big boss" when everyone is working hundreds or thousands of miles away.

kelsey98765431 2y ago
the amount of times i have been asked to turn on my camera is ridiculous, i do not owe some old man a smile and i will gladly allow myself to be let go over it every time. the nerve of some people is astounding.
- ctoth 2y ago
  I am totally blind. My response to the camera request in meetings is that I will be happy to let you see me once I can see you.
maybelsyrup 2y ago
You don’t deserve the downvotes here. Whether or not you’re kidding, I think you’re probably right.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
formerlurker 2y ago
The awesome thing about not going to the office is that I no longer have to deal with repressed nerds and tech bros. I hate being asked out for coffee after I say no for the third time. I no longer have to deal with them looking at my body or making casual sexist jokes.

paulcole 2y ago

I do love that HN commenters painstakingly refute and poke holes in any and all research except that which confirms that remote work is good.

ttyprintk 2y ago
4 out of 6 comments here side with the brass.
lovich 2y ago
When leaders only give empty platitudes as their reason for the RTO and don’t even fund enough office space[1] for their workers why would anyone not? Maybe they have a good reason but we have no reason to believe so if they won’t explain [1]I, and multiple other engineers I know at different companies, don’t even have desks now. We have hot desking and whatever random locker with 1 cubic ft of storage that you can find, which get cleared out every several days. I rewatched office space with my boomer father recently and he could not believe me when I said I would take their office environment in a heart beat. “All Hands” meetings in the office also mean “please direct your team to only have 50% of them come in as we do not have enough desks for everyone”
dingnuts 2y ago
I don't need a study to know it's good. I like it and it positively affects my life. My employer pays for an amount of work, and gets it. I negotiated my salary under remote conditions. If my employer believes I'm more productive in the office they're welcome to renegotiate my salary on that basis.
hooverd 2y ago
Most of the comments in this thread are doing the opposite. They're saying that despite the research the intangibles are actually what matter (for RTO).

SpicyLemonZest 2y ago

I think most executives are pretty straightforward that their concern isn’t about the things most studies measure. Jassy sees the benefits as being: > we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another These are all hard to measure through studies, and not really the same thing as productivity or job satisfaction.

lopkeny12ko 2y ago
Exactly, and it's been proven time and time again that such in-person collaboration leads to improved job satisfaction, retention, and overall employee happiness.
- otikik 2y ago
  By what studies?
  - Mountain_Skies 2y ago
    Ones funded by the Extrovert Realtors Association in cooperation with the League of Municipal Tax Collectors and Parking Deck Guild.
  - LaGrange 2y ago
    Studies by the department of Don't Worry Your Pretty Little Head About It and the University of Imadeitup.
- hooverd 2y ago
  Is the Amazon meat grinder the paradigm of that? I like in person collaboration despite working remotely, but I don't think forcing everyone back is the right call. Maybe people forget the opposite; scolding emails about how their should be butts in seats at 7 pm when the pizzaman cometh.
- 2y ago

sharkweek 2y ago

Company I work for implemented more RTO recently and when someone asked in an all hands for data showing that the first RTO decision was leading to an improvement in productivity or some other key metric and the CTO responded saying (paraphrasing) “this isn’t a data based decision leadership is making. It’s because we want to build a culture where people are working next to each other more frequently. We FEEL that the company benefits because of this.” People got bristly that we’re all routinely forced to prove any decision we as employees want to make with data. But was a fascinating moment of transparency, even if a lot of people hated the decision.

joshdavham 2y ago
How would you propose they quantify company culture?
- EPWN3D 2y ago
  The same way you'd measure anything else at a company: productivity. A company's purpose is to make products and money, not to build the culture the CEO wants. If there's data showing that thousands of cumulative hours of commuting leads to more productivity or innovation or whatever, then by all means let's see it. But this is just the open office fad in new clothes. With open offices, the thing which conveniently cost less money also supposedly improved innovation and collaboration. No serious research demonstrates this. With RTO, the thing which conveniently gives middle- and upper-management warm annd fuzzy feelings about their life choices also supposedly increases innovation and collaboration. Again, no serious research demonstrates this. But none of this matters. If this is what the company wants to do, then that's what it wants to do. The CEO can make decisions for whatever reason they want, and if the board are okay with it and the results, then that's the decision. I do wish more C-levels would be honest and just say, "I want to see you all here, because I'm not confident that work will get done if you're not here." At least then no one's insulting anyone's intelligence.
nine_zeros 2y ago
The C-Suite is so highly paid and lives such a comfortable life that they can't even fathom how much productivity is lost by the average individual commuting for an hour and having to bounce for kids/family/home/medical issues. They truly don't understand why people may want to leave work, be at home when they themselves have ZERO chores to deal with. And they also don't understand why people are not as passionate as themselves about the work - when they make millions every quarter but the average person just gets by. Empathy is not what C-Suite operates on because they have lost those empathy brain cells by virtue of living a life SO PRIVILEGED that even a basic middle class life with no help, appointments, kids, schools, rent, is unimaginable to them.

Rattay 2y ago

Professional Office Managers need an office to manage. It's like asking for Turkeys to vote for Christmas saying 'don't come and sit in and listen to my speeches all day'

ramon156 2y ago

As an employee, WFH is good As an employer, WFH is evil Here's two citations you can use for your paper, I'll see my check in the mail.

whatindaheck 2y ago
It is my opinion that these sorts of statements are devoid of value and don’t contribute to the conversation. Good for Reddit. My grandpap always said the same of unions. Great if you’re in them. Terrible if not. I have similar thoughts on prison. They’re good when you’re not in one but suck if you are.

zeroonetwothree 2y ago

It think it’s obvious CEOs have biases that make them want in person, since it allows them to feel more power and control. On the other hand these studies are very weak and probably don’t actually mean very much. Productivity of individual employees is essentially impossible to measure correctly, and then how do to measure interaction costs like slower communication or lost opportunities in chance meetings and conversations? So I don’t think we really can say one way or another how good it is for the company. Obviously employees do prefer remote work but the goal of a CEO isn’t just to make employees happy so it’s not like we should expect them to.

choxi 2y ago

Has anyone looked at competitor companies and compared the ones with WFH and the ones without it? I’m curious what that data looks like

topkai22 2y ago
This is the study on RTO and financial performance that made waves a few months ago: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4675401 Summary is- no effect on financial performance in the observation period, but it sure made employees unhappy.

Mountain_Skies 2y ago

My experience has been a bit weird since it is backwards of what most have experienced. For the five years leading up to the pandemic, our senior leadership had been pushing WFH heavily as we were shedding real estate and saving lots from it. Being in a legacy business with lots of aging physical infrastructure, there were lots of opportunities for downsizing infrastructure and our office downsizing just sort of piggybacked on that. The savings were a major part of the CEO's message to the Board each quarter, which seemed to make them and the investors happy. Our division head however hated not being able to come into the office and see "my guys". We were mostly clustered in two metro areas with a few team members in random locations, but the division head was in our metro so we sometimes would meet up for dinner. Each time he'd start talking about having us RTO, even though our last office had been completely subleased to someone else. According to coworkers who were there longer than me, when we did have an office, the division head was only there one or two days a week. He liked parachuting in, doing the rounds, and then head back to his house in the mountains where he did much of his work (90% meetings) remotely. Eventually he was pushed out of the company though I don't know if his pushes on the CEO to do RTO was part of that or not but I assume their visions for the company simply were mismatched. I have since left the company but they did well during the pandemic because the company was already on a remote first path. Wouldn't surprise me if they were able to take advantage of the situation and dump some more leases though I'd guess subleases probably are difficult to arrange now.

lkrubner 2y ago

This explains everything: "It’s not practical. Hybrid work may be technically the best route, but it’s also complicated to oversee." Who cares if workers are productive, when the leadership is clearly less productive? And the leadership's time is extremely valuable. If remote work makes workers more productive, while the leadership is less productive, then remote work is bad for a company, full stop, no other conversation is needed.

mscarborough 2y ago
If leadership cannot take advantage of, let alone adjust to remote work in 2024, they're not good leaders.
- lkrubner 2y ago
  If workers cannot do what the leadership needs, then they are bad workers, they need to be fired.

apierre_cardoso 2y ago

A whole lot of CEOs and executives have highly inflated egos, and if people are remote, they don’t get all the attention, echo chamber and bootlickers, that they want. Often behind a RTO there’s a weak person wanting to feel power over others

carapace 2y ago

I was at a a certain company (not for long) that did quick all-hands stand-up meetings once a week, so everyone could touch base. About 30-40 people, all standing up, took about 15 minutes. At the end of one meeting the CEO hosts a goodbye ritual for the CTO who is leaving for some other job or something. It was all blather about how great the guy is and how great it is that he's leaving and how that's great for the company even though he's great and we'll miss him, etc. etc. yadda yadda. Here's the punchline: at the start of the ritual the CEO and exiting CTO pulled out stools and sat down on them. It's a stand-up meeting. The rest of us are all still standing.

karaterobot 2y ago

> “Leadership is a lot less fulfilling and a lot less fun when you’re doing it remotely,” Bock said. I think this best explains what I've seen, personally. That and the sunk cost fallacy ("we've got all these buildings, we need to use them!").

AndrewKemendo 2y ago

Completely different incentives. Executives are in those roles because their anxieties for control align with productivity for shareholders. The coercive threat is the whole point of executive management in private profit focused organizations. Researchers on the other hand are not as interested in maintaining the power distribution bias. Rather they use “economic” factors like described in the article to describe what would seem to be a mutually beneficial situation. So what’s so confusing? It’s because all these commenters are still stuck in the thinking that by default, incentives are aligned all the way from investors to line workers in a firm (otherwise why would they be there? They can just move in a “free market” - they are “rational actors” and other economics lies etc…) As these studies show, coercive executives hate remote work because it reduces the frequency they can create pop-up tasks and break workflows to satisfy their desires. So productivity is up but control is down. It also makes bullying and intimidation much harder to get away with. So the conundrum is simply executives throwing tantrums about their loss of structural methods of coercion they aren’t able to effect as easily. Never forget, unless you are an owner of the company (eg. meaningful ownership, that has the ability to shut the org down) management, executives and investors are not only not your friends, but they are adversarial to your benefit. Studies like these demonstrate that almost perfectly and yet everybody’s confused about why is it not the same? It’s exceptionally simple and it’s something we’ve all known forever and it’s been captured in comic books and movies and everything else: middle management and above is incentivized to be antagonistic to non-ownership labor by function of the structure that it’s within.

formerlurker 2y ago
Could you please link the studies you mention? I only have anecdotes so I am curious to see studies about bullying and intimidation.

firefoxd 2y ago

The problem is everyone thinks Data will give you the answer. Does returning to office increase productivity? How do you measure productivity? Let me tell you how we increased productivity by 19% last year. Our VP aimed to increase productivity by 10%. The Jira team went to work. They studied our workflow, found some inefficiency in our ticket statuses, and reorganized. At the end of the year, we resolved many more tickets, gaining 71 days worth of work, or 19.5%. Celebration! The data clearly shows the improvement. But what they ignored is that on the previous year, we built a system. On the next year, the one with their Jira improvements, we used the system. We resolved more tickets after because those were small bug fixes instead of large architecture efforts. Nothing to do with the new ticket statuses. The lesson was add more ticket statuses and it will make developers more efficient... When we are asked to return to the office and there is push back, it is someone's job to come up with metrics that will measure productivity. They will probably measure ticket completion for on-site and off-site employees, completely ignoring the context of the work.

EPWN3D 2y ago

I actually like being in the office, but I'm in the bay area, so that requires hours of shitty commuting. I like the office, but I don't like it that much. If I had access to an office that I could get to on public transit in like 20 minutes, that'd be a totally different story. But no, everyone has to have sprawling campuses in the middle of suburbia.

bryanlarsen 2y ago

In many cases I suspect that leadership remembers the time when the company was small and everybody was basically all in the same room and how productive that time was. If you can get the entire company into a single small room magical things can happen. But RTO doesn't get the entire company into a single small room.

drewcoo 2y ago

Execs are paid to change reality, not to be dominated by it. What else should we expect?

jussy 2y ago

Does anyone know the legal and liability risk position for a global scale company in relation to where work is done?

llamajams 2y ago

Assuming youre not a quiet quitter , youre not double dipping and you have some interest in your job. I'm pretty sure WFH is more productive and efficient. I'm pretty sure corporate knows this as well. They might even have the numbers to prove it but don't wanna show it. BUT i think the reason they want us to return is that if we stay home.. we will use the efficiency and productivity gains to optimize our personal lives and not the bottom line. It would change white collar culture fundamentally and that would not be good for the status quo.

kkfx 2y ago

Executives of really high ranks know the modern city is the way for them to thrive because SMEs and Citizens thrive living spread, giants thrive in big cities where there is no middle class, only service slaves. Other executives are obedient slaves, being well trained to be to the point they can't recognize their real status, who simply follow the high ranking ones. The reality is complex but we can easily simplify that with full WFH most cities, the biggest first, will be emptied from the middle class, with them in homes outside from Just Eat to Uber to Wymo are dead, large slice of travel and accommodation services are dead as well, real estate for giants is dead (actually it's already nearly-dead under ICU) while the 2030 Agenda's will fail because those outside owning a home, p.v., car etc feel the opportunity to own and can't easily be impoverished just changing service prices. This will happen anyway because we haven't enough resources in the world to build smart-cities and we can't keep up for long the actual ones, but if happen quickly too many will still own to form a new working economy, if happen too late only very few will own enough so there will be anyway no distributed economy. I suggest anyone to rediscover the old Distributism and speculate why both nazism, fascism etc and marxism was against the middle class in particular.