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> I did exactly what this exec advocated - using hard data and statistics to paint a picture of what these mandates look like from a worker perspective - and wa

> I did exactly what this exec advocated - using hard data and statistics to paint a picture of what these mandates look like from a worker perspective - and was roundly shot down. Of course they did. If you want to convince a company doing RTO why it’s bad, you need to show the negative impacts to the organization. Everybody seems to approach this from their individual perspective.

mystifyingpoi 2y ago
Exactly. You must play by their rules.
AnthonyMouse 2y ago
> If you want to convince a company doing RTO why it’s bad, you need to show the negative impacts to the organization. There is a reason these are the same thing that should already be obvious: If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead. This before you even consider the costs to the company directly. If employees work from home you need less office space etc. That's not just rent but heat, power, security, insurance, internet, furniture, taxes, cleaning, lawyers and permits. That's a ton of money.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  > If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead. I'm not following. How much is the difference? The difference to them is $30,000. But you forgot to specify what the difference to the company is.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    The difference to the company is that if you don't force people to take on $30,000 in expenses, you'll be able to find people willing to work for up to $30,000 less in compensation. In addition to the other benefits of expanding the talent pool beyond the local geographic area, which might let you get better people, e.g. because you can hire someone in Boston who wants to stay in Boston, without opening an office there.
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      Something has gone seriously wrong in your thinking. You appear to be attempting to subtract two unrelated quantities from each other. Let's try this another way: In scenario A, Jim holds a remote job at Omnicorp. In scenario B1, nothing changes. In scenario B2, Jim is transferred into a job with the same responsibilities that is not remote. This raises Jim's expenses by $2,500 a month. It also raises Omnicorp's revenue by $X per month. X is the value you forgot to consider. What is it? If, for example, it is -$500, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $36,000 per year. If we split that difference evenly between Jim and Omnicorp, Jim will receive a $12,000 raise... but Omnicorp will suffer a net loss of $18,000 per year, so it's hard to see why this would happen or who it helps. If it's +$1,000, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $18,000 per year. Splitting that difference evenly means Jim gets a $21,000 raise, but again there is no reason this would actually take place, because the company is paying $21,000 a year in order to receive $12,000. Or, viewed another way, the transfer destroys value and you shouldn't expect it to happen. If X is +$3,000, then the total cost of transferring Jim is -$6,000 per year. At this point the transfer makes sense and it should happen. Splitting the difference evenly means Jim will get a $33,000 raise. At no point does it make any sense to consider leaving Jim where he is and giving him a $15,000 raise.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        > It also raises Omnicorp's revenue by $X per month. X is the value you forgot to consider. What is it? It is quite possibly a negative number. Remember that forcing Jim to show up to an office requires you to have an office, which is a huge, major expense that could easily overcome the benefits of having Jim in the office instead of at home. But let's continue with your assumption that it's of some actual value to the company: > If, for example, it is -$500, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $36,000 per year. If we split that difference evenly between Jim and Omnicorp, Jim will receive a $12,000 raise... but Omnicorp will suffer a net loss of $18,000 per year, so it's hard to see why this would happen or who it helps. This is the part where you're confused. Suppose that Jim refuses to work from home for less than $8000/mo and refuses to work from the office for less than $10500/mo, because his incremental cost of working from the office is $2500/mo. Meanwhile the company values Jim working from the office at $500/mo. Since $500 is less than $2500, it does not make sense for Jim to work from the office, instead it makes sense for the company to pay Jim somewhere between $8000/mo and $10000/mo to work from home, because any of those numbers make both of them no worse off than paying Jim $10500/mo to work from the office. This does not depend on what Jim is currently being paid or even whether he is currently working from home. If the value to the company of having Jim work from the office instead of from home is $3000/mo then the company should offer Jim anywhere between $10500/mo and $11000/mo to work from the office, for the same reason. But since $3000/mo is $36,000/year on top of their expenses for maintaining an office, that value to an ordinary company of having Jim work from the office is implausibly high.
- hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  > There is a reason these are the same thing that should already be obvious: If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead. Sorry to be blunt, but I think this is incredibly naive given the current market. Since the explosion of remote work I've seen a ton of offshoring to excellent software developers in Latin American and Europe. There is absolutely zero benefit to paying an American salary in those situations because everyone is remote anyway (and there is enough timezone overlap that everyone can work roughly the same hours). Workers will simply get fired if they don't come in and execs really want RTO, they're not going to get paid more.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > Workers will simply get fired if they don't come in and execs really want RTO, they're not going to get paid more. If execs really want RTO then people will quit and they'll have to hire new people, pay retraining costs, pay them more because other companies are still offering WFH, lose out on all those lower cost workers in Latin America (or Texas or Virginia) and still be paying millions of dollars for office space their employees don't even want to be in.
    - kcplate 2y ago
      > If execs really want RTO then people will quit and they'll have to hire new people There have been 550k tech layoffs in the last 2 years. Pretty sure there are quite a few folks ready and willing to do a commute to work in an office to get a paycheck again.
      - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
        The question is not whether they can find someone else to hire. They can always do that for the prevailing market price. The question is, how much more do they have to pay to get someone to take on ~$30,000/year in commuting costs than they would if they didn't require that?
- kcplate 2y ago
  I think your reasoning is flawed because there is no fixed RTO cost to every employees commute and physical location (which I am assuming you mean by their expenses). You could have 2 employees doing the same job, but one (Joe) has a 5 minute walk as their commute and the other (John) has a 50 minute drive in a personal vehicle. If there are enough Joe’s around to fill your roles, the costs associated with the Johns commutes don’t matter to the organization. Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal. Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data. Perhaps things like demonstrating reduced sick time, turnover rate decreases, etc.
  - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
    > You could have 2 employees doing the same job, but one (Joe) has a 5 minute walk as their commute and the other (John) has a 50 minute drive in a personal vehicle. This doesn't mean they have different expenses. John is paying $2500/mo in time and commuting expenses, Joe is paying $2500/mo in additional rent to live in the downtown. Efficient market hypothesis says they're the same and anyway you care about the mean or median rather than rare outliers when operating at scale. > Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal. Most offices are just offices. The jobs that can't be done remotely are the likes of data centers or factories, but these are different facilities in different places. If you're e.g. a tech company, your offices in San Francisco or New York contain entirely people who could work from home whereas your data centers might be in Oregon or Virginia. So the costs are not incremental, they allow you to close entire facilities; and those facilities are the ones with higher costs per unit area; and the incremental costs are not trivial either. Things like rent and utilities scale approximately linearly with square footage or number of employees. Some are even super-linear because larger facilities succumb to bureaucracy, HR drama and combinatorial explosion in risk interactions. > Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data. I can win the debate this way too. That two hours a day your employees were wasting in traffic? They're salaried employees, that's 10 hours a week they're not working.
fnordpiglet 2y ago
This is why RTO will end. It was ending before the pandemic. The cost to the organization is money. They subsidize the employees ability to sit in chair and drink water and use the bathroom. This is a very high cost at any organization. The reason given it’s necessary is CEO has vibes that it’s better. This works for a while but in the end it’s real money spent on questionable benefits. Before the pandemic there was a big push to reduce occupancy costs and get roles that did not need to sit in an office to subsidize their own offices, just like BYOD - but the dollars involved were orders of magnitude better than BYOD. During the pandemic we proved the costs came at the cost of net productivity on average. The reaction we see now is one against a cultural change that is off putting to people who succeeded in a specific emergent reality - the office culture. A 60 year old CEO has trouble using zoom because they didn’t grow up using it. They don’t know how to be effective over a remote relationship because they have developed exceptionally effective in person skills - that’s why they are where they are. They simply can not accept or fathom a world that is different than that. So they invent hand waving bullshit not based on data. But economics wins based on data sooner or later. It is better share holder value to eliminate occupancy costs aggressive and offload the occupancy per employee to the employee. The company effectively gets free facilities in this scenario. There is no way the marginal per employee value of in person vibes out paces the marginal cost to shelter their bodies during the work day. The vibes thing is managed through adaptation. Finally there’s this meme the Dimon and Trump and others use of people not working when working remotely. First that’s not true, second if it’s is, that’s a performance issue. Since when did we stop measuring performance ? The in office or not in office simply isn’t a productivity variable but not working and working during the work day is. RTO is a cultural thing and you’ll never convince the executives of today by any argument conceivable because you’re telling them the sky is green when they know it’s blue. It doesn’t matter that in this case it’s not objective like the color of the sky. It FEELS objectively true. However the economics will change, and the leadership will age away, and one day; maybe when the kids who graduated college having gotten their degrees online run the shop - we will offload the cost of housing the employee during the day to the employee because it’s what makes the most economic sense and we will adapt around the challenges.

mystifyingpoi 2y ago

Exactly. You must play by their rules.

AnthonyMouse 2y ago

> If you want to convince a company doing RTO why it’s bad, you need to show the negative impacts to the organization. There is a reason these are the same thing that should already be obvious: If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead. This before you even consider the costs to the company directly. If employees work from home you need less office space etc. That's not just rent but heat, power, security, insurance, internet, furniture, taxes, cleaning, lawyers and permits. That's a ton of money.

thaumasiotes 2y ago
> If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead. I'm not following. How much is the difference? The difference to them is $30,000. But you forgot to specify what the difference to the company is.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  The difference to the company is that if you don't force people to take on $30,000 in expenses, you'll be able to find people willing to work for up to $30,000 less in compensation. In addition to the other benefits of expanding the talent pool beyond the local geographic area, which might let you get better people, e.g. because you can hire someone in Boston who wants to stay in Boston, without opening an office there.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Something has gone seriously wrong in your thinking. You appear to be attempting to subtract two unrelated quantities from each other. Let's try this another way: In scenario A, Jim holds a remote job at Omnicorp. In scenario B1, nothing changes. In scenario B2, Jim is transferred into a job with the same responsibilities that is not remote. This raises Jim's expenses by $2,500 a month. It also raises Omnicorp's revenue by $X per month. X is the value you forgot to consider. What is it? If, for example, it is -$500, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $36,000 per year. If we split that difference evenly between Jim and Omnicorp, Jim will receive a $12,000 raise... but Omnicorp will suffer a net loss of $18,000 per year, so it's hard to see why this would happen or who it helps. If it's +$1,000, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $18,000 per year. Splitting that difference evenly means Jim gets a $21,000 raise, but again there is no reason this would actually take place, because the company is paying $21,000 a year in order to receive $12,000. Or, viewed another way, the transfer destroys value and you shouldn't expect it to happen. If X is +$3,000, then the total cost of transferring Jim is -$6,000 per year. At this point the transfer makes sense and it should happen. Splitting the difference evenly means Jim will get a $33,000 raise. At no point does it make any sense to consider leaving Jim where he is and giving him a $15,000 raise.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      > It also raises Omnicorp's revenue by $X per month. X is the value you forgot to consider. What is it? It is quite possibly a negative number. Remember that forcing Jim to show up to an office requires you to have an office, which is a huge, major expense that could easily overcome the benefits of having Jim in the office instead of at home. But let's continue with your assumption that it's of some actual value to the company: > If, for example, it is -$500, then the total cost of transferring Jim is $36,000 per year. If we split that difference evenly between Jim and Omnicorp, Jim will receive a $12,000 raise... but Omnicorp will suffer a net loss of $18,000 per year, so it's hard to see why this would happen or who it helps. This is the part where you're confused. Suppose that Jim refuses to work from home for less than $8000/mo and refuses to work from the office for less than $10500/mo, because his incremental cost of working from the office is $2500/mo. Meanwhile the company values Jim working from the office at $500/mo. Since $500 is less than $2500, it does not make sense for Jim to work from the office, instead it makes sense for the company to pay Jim somewhere between $8000/mo and $10000/mo to work from home, because any of those numbers make both of them no worse off than paying Jim $10500/mo to work from the office. This does not depend on what Jim is currently being paid or even whether he is currently working from home. If the value to the company of having Jim work from the office instead of from home is $3000/mo then the company should offer Jim anywhere between $10500/mo and $11000/mo to work from the office, for the same reason. But since $3000/mo is $36,000/year on top of their expenses for maintaining an office, that value to an ordinary company of having Jim work from the office is implausibly high.
hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
> There is a reason these are the same thing that should already be obvious: If you want people to take a job that costs them ~$30,000 more in expenses, you'll have to pay them more. If you split the difference, you both come out $15,000 ahead. Sorry to be blunt, but I think this is incredibly naive given the current market. Since the explosion of remote work I've seen a ton of offshoring to excellent software developers in Latin American and Europe. There is absolutely zero benefit to paying an American salary in those situations because everyone is remote anyway (and there is enough timezone overlap that everyone can work roughly the same hours). Workers will simply get fired if they don't come in and execs really want RTO, they're not going to get paid more.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > Workers will simply get fired if they don't come in and execs really want RTO, they're not going to get paid more. If execs really want RTO then people will quit and they'll have to hire new people, pay retraining costs, pay them more because other companies are still offering WFH, lose out on all those lower cost workers in Latin America (or Texas or Virginia) and still be paying millions of dollars for office space their employees don't even want to be in.
  - kcplate 2y ago
    > If execs really want RTO then people will quit and they'll have to hire new people There have been 550k tech layoffs in the last 2 years. Pretty sure there are quite a few folks ready and willing to do a commute to work in an office to get a paycheck again.
    - AnthonyMouse 2y ago
      The question is not whether they can find someone else to hire. They can always do that for the prevailing market price. The question is, how much more do they have to pay to get someone to take on ~$30,000/year in commuting costs than they would if they didn't require that?
kcplate 2y ago
I think your reasoning is flawed because there is no fixed RTO cost to every employees commute and physical location (which I am assuming you mean by their expenses). You could have 2 employees doing the same job, but one (Joe) has a 5 minute walk as their commute and the other (John) has a 50 minute drive in a personal vehicle. If there are enough Joe’s around to fill your roles, the costs associated with the Johns commutes don’t matter to the organization. Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal. Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data. Perhaps things like demonstrating reduced sick time, turnover rate decreases, etc.
- AnthonyMouse 2y ago
  > You could have 2 employees doing the same job, but one (Joe) has a 5 minute walk as their commute and the other (John) has a 50 minute drive in a personal vehicle. This doesn't mean they have different expenses. John is paying $2500/mo in time and commuting expenses, Joe is paying $2500/mo in additional rent to live in the downtown. Efficient market hypothesis says they're the same and anyway you care about the mean or median rather than rare outliers when operating at scale. > Facilities costs are actually pretty minor in the grand scheme of things…especially if your company has other roles that cannot be done remote. Incremental office space costs are minimal. Most offices are just offices. The jobs that can't be done remotely are the likes of data centers or factories, but these are different facilities in different places. If you're e.g. a tech company, your offices in San Francisco or New York contain entirely people who could work from home whereas your data centers might be in Oregon or Virginia. So the costs are not incremental, they allow you to close entire facilities; and those facilities are the ones with higher costs per unit area; and the incremental costs are not trivial either. Things like rent and utilities scale approximately linearly with square footage or number of employees. Some are even super-linear because larger facilities succumb to bureaucracy, HR drama and combinatorial explosion in risk interactions. > Your only hope to win the debate is to demonstrate with real productivity data. I can win the debate this way too. That two hours a day your employees were wasting in traffic? They're salaried employees, that's 10 hours a week they're not working.

fnordpiglet 2y ago

This is why RTO will end. It was ending before the pandemic. The cost to the organization is money. They subsidize the employees ability to sit in chair and drink water and use the bathroom. This is a very high cost at any organization. The reason given it’s necessary is CEO has vibes that it’s better. This works for a while but in the end it’s real money spent on questionable benefits. Before the pandemic there was a big push to reduce occupancy costs and get roles that did not need to sit in an office to subsidize their own offices, just like BYOD - but the dollars involved were orders of magnitude better than BYOD. During the pandemic we proved the costs came at the cost of net productivity on average. The reaction we see now is one against a cultural change that is off putting to people who succeeded in a specific emergent reality - the office culture. A 60 year old CEO has trouble using zoom because they didn’t grow up using it. They don’t know how to be effective over a remote relationship because they have developed exceptionally effective in person skills - that’s why they are where they are. They simply can not accept or fathom a world that is different than that. So they invent hand waving bullshit not based on data. But economics wins based on data sooner or later. It is better share holder value to eliminate occupancy costs aggressive and offload the occupancy per employee to the employee. The company effectively gets free facilities in this scenario. There is no way the marginal per employee value of in person vibes out paces the marginal cost to shelter their bodies during the work day. The vibes thing is managed through adaptation. Finally there’s this meme the Dimon and Trump and others use of people not working when working remotely. First that’s not true, second if it’s is, that’s a performance issue. Since when did we stop measuring performance ? The in office or not in office simply isn’t a productivity variable but not working and working during the work day is. RTO is a cultural thing and you’ll never convince the executives of today by any argument conceivable because you’re telling them the sky is green when they know it’s blue. It doesn’t matter that in this case it’s not objective like the color of the sky. It FEELS objectively true. However the economics will change, and the leadership will age away, and one day; maybe when the kids who graduated college having gotten their degrees online run the shop - we will offload the cost of housing the employee during the day to the employee because it’s what makes the most economic sense and we will adapt around the challenges.