It's been a "fun" time in Detroit lately. The Big 3 have been forcing people back into the office some, with increasingly shrill demands. Last year, GM required us to come back 3 days a week, you pick the days. Managers looked at that, listened to employees and it was quickly 2 days, then they weren't enforcing it at the HR level at all, so it was no days. Until suddenly in December, after a bit of a struggling year, we got an email (at the same time as our managers and senior managers, make of that what you will) that they had actually been tracking badge swipes in aggregate and that we would all be returning to the office 3 days a week, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday starting the second week in January. Then it got delayed two weeks because there literally weren't enough seats for everyone, much less seats in the building you were assigned to, much less parking, much less parking for the building you were assigned to. And wouldn't you know it, about 6 years ago, GM had moved to "hoteling" or "hot desking" with an intentional 90% capacity for the number of people assigned to the building, but the COVID hiring binge hit us too, so now there were main buildings with as low as 60% capacity for the number of people assigned. Then, we got an updated email, some teams were going to come back a few weeks later, so that IT and facilities would have enough time to fix problems as they arose and get desks setup, etc. Then we had an ugly winter storm. Then it got delayed another two weeks. Now it's the second week in February. Order, followed by counter order, equals disorder. Isn't RTO fun guys?
To be fair, forcing employees to while away their lives by wasting their own unreimbursed time sitting in a car commuting every day represents a non-negligible portion of every automaker's bottom line.
> And wouldn't you know it, about 6 years ago, GM had moved to "hoteling" or "hot desking" with an intentional 90% capacity for the number of people assigned to the building
Why do so many organizations seem to have such a poor grasp on estate management that you keep hearing the same story again and again? Maybe the question should be: why is it apparently so common for leadership to make wide ranging policy without arming themselves with the most basic data, which should be easily available? It's not even a bigcorp thing. I've seen it personally somewhere that has nothing in common with GM.
Taking my bitterness and sarcasm out of it for a moment, in our case it feels much more like a way to deflect blame from senior leadership onto employees for company culture and product choice issues that are affecting the bottom line, along with prep for an ugly round of layoffs to make up some of the cost of conceding to so many of the UAW's demands. Not necessarily that those demands were unreasonable, but it's interesting that "badge swipes will be tracked" came pretty much at the same time that managers were ordered to stack rank like in the bad old MS days under Balmer. We haven't officially received word of the firing of those bottom 10% with "needs improvement" performance reviews, but I think that's mostly a function of performance reviews being communicated now-ish. History says that it'll probably be mid-March. Either way, we've reached updating the old resume time. The unfortunate thing is that I have zero interest in relocating to the Bay, and all the really high paying jobs have also mandated some RTO, so I doubt I'm going to be special enough to get a fully remote role at any of the FAANG companies.
Oh, and also ironically, we just hired a bunch of Silicon Valley people who get to be 100% remote, along with some execs in HR, DEI and the like that are weirdly all in Denver. These announcements came roughly in the same time frame as the new RTO mandate, which is especially insulting because a number of people hired in 2021 and 2022 were hired as fully remote, but if they live within 50 miles of a major office center (not counting assembly plants) they were all redesignated as hybrid or in office, without their consent. This means that some of my coworkers now have 40 mile commutes and needed to figure out much more complicated child care, since they get to spend hours on the road that could have been used to pick kids up at reasonable times. Gotta love the double standard.
This subject has been discussed to death, especially on this site. There's no new information about this debate. The first issue seems to be that front line managers see WFH making them irrelevant, and this is bubbling up to senior management as "company can't do X because no one is in the office." Separately, you have a large contingent of workers who really prefer working in the office at least some days. Lastly, senior management came of age in a pre-Internet era and it's hard for them to imagine any work getting done if people are not physically in the office.
These factors together seem to be conspiring to cause companies to try to solve a non-problem related to the physical location of the work activities. This will gradually sort itself out as companies come up with better ways to measure performance, but the transition period has been a bit rocky so far.
I think it's interesting to see an article like this every couple of weeks. The way I view it is that we're watching the five stages of grief (with regard to the "death of the office") play out in real time, at population scale.
At first it was denial - "everyone will be back in the office eventually!"
Then it was anger - "you will RTO or you will lose your job!"
Now it seems like we've finally hit bargaining - "you'll come in 3 days per week, wait, 2 days, wait, special exception for the last week of every month".
I wonder how long it goes on until we get to depression and acceptance?
>The internet and cell phones obviate so much of what was once done at the office, which is, after all, largely an artifact of the 20th century thanks to the rise of mass transportation, the ability to build tall office buildings and the previous immovability of the “work” telephone, which was stuck to a desk. All this, thankfully, is going the way of the dodo.
This seems to me to have been forgotten as technology evolved over the last 2-3 decades. There was a time when you HAD to be in the office, because that was where your desk phone was, your desktop PC (including local software) was, the physical access point for your corporate network/applications was, etc. With laptops, smartphones, the internet, VPNs, SaaS applications, that hasn't been the case for a long time, Covid was just the CATALYST that forced people and companies to actually utilize the capabilities they already had.
And invest in them for the whole office instead of them being limited to specific departments. Like it used to be that only sales got Zoom licenses because they were on calls with remote customers, only devs got access to Slack everyone else was on Teams/Outlook. The pandemic made everyone build out the infrastructure for work anywhere. It's got to be in the top 5 advancements in the information age that obviates so much waste moving people back and forth to office buildings and execs desperately want to go back for some strange reason.
I sometimes like to ask provocatively "What would have happened had COVID happened 25 years ago?" (Don't sweat the exact timeline. I'm about right.) Yes, vaccines/medical issues but that's somewhat orthogonal.
I think the answer was that most office workers would have struggled to work. Yes, we could have mapped home phones to office numbers, bought people cell phones and paid for their plans, subsidized a second phone line, etc. But it would have been hard and difficult; most people would have been nowhere near prepared. I suspect at the end of the day, we'd mostly have made do for a month or three, said screw it, and reopened offices even if we knew more people would probably get sick. Oh, and forget things like grocery delivery or streaming TV (Netflix DVD barely existed) for the most part.
This article simply doesn’t reflect my personal experience. I‘m rather at the beginning of my career, but feel like personal growth, enjoyment and satisfaction with the work is much higher when I go to the office and when my colleagues do the same (we have full freedom to never do though).
>> I‘m rather at the beginning of my career, but feel like personal growth, enjoyment and satisfaction with the work is much higher when I go to the office and when my colleagues do the same
I had a fast-growing career trajectory and it was definitely due to the magic of working in close quarters with my co-workers and especially bosses and mentors.
That was 20+yrs ago. I do wonder how that would work now -- I go into the office and i'm on Zoom calls for 6hrs of the 8 or 9hrs. The Zoom calls are with overseas team members.
Even the folks in the office on the same call are on Zoom, each of us in separate rooms to prevent microphone reverb. It feels nothing like the magic of 20yrs ago when we were all elbow-to-elbow in war rooms.
I think RTO makes sense, but we need a lot of breakout conference rooms. We also need to be opinionated about scheduling meetings so there is actual facetime IRL rather than just facetime via Zoom while in office.
Having the option to work remotely doesn't mean that in-person work must be eliminated. Even considering only the people whose jobs can be done remotely, it's entirely valid to want to be around people. But requiring people to be in the office when their jobs can trivially be done remotely is silly.
I speak as someone who likes to work in the presence of others, so I mostly do, but I appreciate the option to work remotely and make use of it regularly. The notion of "the office" isn't going extinct, it's just evolving, and in this case I think it's evolving in a good direction.
Onboarding, new hires, even teams getting together when possible/practical some of the time are the things I hear even from execs who are generally supportive of letting people continue to work from home whenever they want to.
I happen to be on a very distributed team and the person I'm mentoring lives in a different city anyway, so it's impractical for me. But I'd actually go into an office now and then if it were convenient and I'd know people there.
To each their own. It is reasonable that the company may provide some physical common space for workers like yourself. It is totally moronic however to force people who do not want to to be there.
Same for older employees like myself actively recruiting younger employees to replace us: it's much harder with full remote. For many younger parents or long-commuters WFH is perfect but if you're rebuilding a workforce those Zoom only coworkers don't connect the same way.
Honestly, it's a first world problem to solve. It's great that we have the flexibility, just need to figure out how to avoid long-term negative repercussions that have not fully been felt yet.
I'm also at the beginning, and I started right when COVID hit. :D To me, it seems like an intense gray. There are upsides and downsides to both in-person and remote, and they balance each other out almost perfectly.
I have a great home situation, though (it's better than my office physically), and most of my coworkers are older than I am, so they're less keen on interpersonal connection and rarely ever go to the office.
I think WFH primarily benefits "older" workers and parents with young children; it also allows them to live where there is more space for their kids without having a huge time-wasting commute. For many workers in their 20s, for example, working at the office is often a better experience, they're happy living small downtown flats, and WFH can be lonely.
I think it depends on your colleagues and workplace. Most of my coworkers that go into the office are too shy and quiet for it to help much. My company also doesn’t really lend itself to collaboration so much as delegation or being delegated.
So when I go into the office, even though I’m pretty extroverted for an engineer and would love to collaborate on stuff, it’s just as lonely as WFH.
And that's what WFA's whole thing is. We have an office, come in if you like -- we have snacks, high speed internet, and (hopefully) fewer distractions. It's where it's forced everyone in some fixed days a week 1-5 that eliminates most of the benefit of actually working anywhere.
There are companies that hired distributed teams over the past few years. When everyone was remote, the geographic makeup of the team didn't matter. But now many of those same companies are forcing employees back "the office" which ends up being the employee's local office. Where they proceed to work remotely with their distributed team from "the office". They've badged in, they're in an official office space, but the actual mechanics of work are still just as remote as they ever were.
The people pushing for "Return-to-office" are by and large people who have substantial portions of their personal wealth invested in commercial real estate. Most wealthy individuals hold at least some real estate in their portfolios, and commercial is much easier to invest in at scale than residential, so the wealthiest folks often have a sizeable chunk of their portfolio wrapped up in commercial real estate. This whole "Return-to-office" thing is a bare-faced lie, as it has absolutely nothing to do with "Productivity," "Creativity" or whatever other BS these people are spewing, and EVERYTHING to do with shoring up the value of their commercial real estate holdings.
It's a lot less PR friendly for them to be honest and say to their employees "You need to spend 2 hours a day in a car in traffic, whilst not being compensated for that time, so the office building I own doesn't lose value" though.
Because people care if they or their kids are having their own learning and development impacted.
While they do not care if the companies ability to function is degraded. Notice how the people who are impacted by this are the ones calling to return to in office.
I'm not sure why you find it surprising. School exists in part to provide lower socioeconomic demographics with a part-time stable environment for their children.
Also, workers are paid during that time, whereas children, particularly of younger age, can't really be expected to maintain concentration for 7+ hours in a physically isolated environment with no other children, or a teacher watching.
You’re right that is interesting and I’ve not seen the two compared before. Made me think. I think one of the sibling replies nails it though - it’s the difference between who is negatively impacted overall, ie “us versus them”.
Fully appreciate it’s more nuanced than this of course and there is some negative impact on some people having to WFH.
The whole push back to the office was primarily from commercial landlords pushing these companies back, CEO pushed middle managers, middle managers pushed the workers. It was never about productivity or anything, it’s all about money, not for the companies but for the landlords.
"to say nothing about the reduced pollution and energy consumption that comes from fewer commuters"
In my case the office is a 50 min drive away and my car is a 6 cylinder petrol engine. I've been WFH since 2020 so 4 years worth of car fumes prevented.
Savings on fuel, tolls and commute time. 100 minutes driving per day x 250 work days x 4 years = 1,666 driving hours prevented. I like driving but driving to work is the worst kind of driving.
I constantly see people say RTO is driven by landlords but Ive never seen any data to back this up. Is there really any proof to this or is it just an opinion that's restated over and over? For context, I work remotely and will never return to an office unless I'm at risk of losing my house.
RTO is driven by the inertia of economies of cities themselves.
What happens when office workers no longer have to be in the office? What happens to the physical buildings, the people who maintain them, the local businesses who serve the office workers (e.g. lunch), etc? There are many knock-on effects.
WFH, on a large scale, is forcing us to rethink the concept of cities, suburbs, infrastructure, housing, transit, telecom, etc.
The fact that WFH has been shown to be viable on a large scale indicates that we are probably going to experience a massive societal shift at all levels. A shift to where? No one knows yet.
Return to the office is a funny one. These big corps spent ridiculous amounts of cash building and furnishing a massive office building just to have it empty? What about their vanity of their business' shrine?
But worse, if they decided to sell. Who in the world can buy their vanity building? Everyone else has the same problem. Governments also came in and restrict you from using the building for other purposes. So you cant sell to someone who might make use out of it.
So you might as well try to force people back into the building, but go softly because the last people you want to lose are the first to leave.
Here's what the ever-so-helpful CNN is giving me when I visit it:
Browser Blocked
We apologize, but your web browser is configured in such a way that it is preventing this site from implementing required components that protect your privacy and allow you to view and change your privacy settings. This functionality is required for privacy legislation in your region.
We recommend you use a different browser or disable the “EasyList Cookie” filter from your “Content Filtering” settings (found under “Settings” -> “Shields” in the Brave Browser).
Most companies would save money getting reducing, or rid of the office space, as some did after covid
Most companies advertising jobs, have remote positions now
I don't see a RTO movement, I think they are experimenting what works best, trying to get a balance. But their processes have not evolved enough to include remote workers
Software development tasks are hard to estimate. How can a company, without being too invasive, make sure a employee is not underworked or overworked?
> Software development tasks are hard to estimate. How can a company, without being too invasive, make sure a employee is not underworked or overworked?
how do you do it when in person other than walking around and checking that people aren't playing minesweeper instead of coding? (OK, there is the social pressure to at least look like you're coding in case someone glances at your screen, but that doesn't mean you're actually getting anything done. Of course for people who slack off, WFH is a great enabler -- and that indeed is a problem.)
[+] [-] wcunning|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kibwen|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tweetle_beetle|2 years ago|reply
Why do so many organizations seem to have such a poor grasp on estate management that you keep hearing the same story again and again? Maybe the question should be: why is it apparently so common for leadership to make wide ranging policy without arming themselves with the most basic data, which should be easily available? It's not even a bigcorp thing. I've seen it personally somewhere that has nothing in common with GM.
[+] [-] Liquix|2 years ago|reply
They're even trying to force time travelers back into the office? Grim
[+] [-] wcunning|2 years ago|reply
Oh, and also ironically, we just hired a bunch of Silicon Valley people who get to be 100% remote, along with some execs in HR, DEI and the like that are weirdly all in Denver. These announcements came roughly in the same time frame as the new RTO mandate, which is especially insulting because a number of people hired in 2021 and 2022 were hired as fully remote, but if they live within 50 miles of a major office center (not counting assembly plants) they were all redesignated as hybrid or in office, without their consent. This means that some of my coworkers now have 40 mile commutes and needed to figure out much more complicated child care, since they get to spend hours on the road that could have been used to pick kids up at reasonable times. Gotta love the double standard.
[+] [-] JumpCrisscross|2 years ago|reply
This is the worst of all worlds.
[+] [-] fulladder|2 years ago|reply
These factors together seem to be conspiring to cause companies to try to solve a non-problem related to the physical location of the work activities. This will gradually sort itself out as companies come up with better ways to measure performance, but the transition period has been a bit rocky so far.
[+] [-] DylanBohlender|2 years ago|reply
At first it was denial - "everyone will be back in the office eventually!"
Then it was anger - "you will RTO or you will lose your job!"
Now it seems like we've finally hit bargaining - "you'll come in 3 days per week, wait, 2 days, wait, special exception for the last week of every month".
I wonder how long it goes on until we get to depression and acceptance?
[+] [-] JohnMakin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DebtDeflation|2 years ago|reply
This seems to me to have been forgotten as technology evolved over the last 2-3 decades. There was a time when you HAD to be in the office, because that was where your desk phone was, your desktop PC (including local software) was, the physical access point for your corporate network/applications was, etc. With laptops, smartphones, the internet, VPNs, SaaS applications, that hasn't been the case for a long time, Covid was just the CATALYST that forced people and companies to actually utilize the capabilities they already had.
[+] [-] Spivak|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ghaff|2 years ago|reply
I think the answer was that most office workers would have struggled to work. Yes, we could have mapped home phones to office numbers, bought people cell phones and paid for their plans, subsidized a second phone line, etc. But it would have been hard and difficult; most people would have been nowhere near prepared. I suspect at the end of the day, we'd mostly have made do for a month or three, said screw it, and reopened offices even if we knew more people would probably get sick. Oh, and forget things like grocery delivery or streaming TV (Netflix DVD barely existed) for the most part.
[+] [-] Zacharias030|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TuringNYC|2 years ago|reply
I had a fast-growing career trajectory and it was definitely due to the magic of working in close quarters with my co-workers and especially bosses and mentors.
That was 20+yrs ago. I do wonder how that would work now -- I go into the office and i'm on Zoom calls for 6hrs of the 8 or 9hrs. The Zoom calls are with overseas team members.
Even the folks in the office on the same call are on Zoom, each of us in separate rooms to prevent microphone reverb. It feels nothing like the magic of 20yrs ago when we were all elbow-to-elbow in war rooms.
I think RTO makes sense, but we need a lot of breakout conference rooms. We also need to be opinionated about scheduling meetings so there is actual facetime IRL rather than just facetime via Zoom while in office.
[+] [-] kibwen|2 years ago|reply
I speak as someone who likes to work in the presence of others, so I mostly do, but I appreciate the option to work remotely and make use of it regularly. The notion of "the office" isn't going extinct, it's just evolving, and in this case I think it's evolving in a good direction.
[+] [-] ghaff|2 years ago|reply
I happen to be on a very distributed team and the person I'm mentoring lives in a different city anyway, so it's impractical for me. But I'd actually go into an office now and then if it were convenient and I'd know people there.
[+] [-] FpUser|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zwieback|2 years ago|reply
Honestly, it's a first world problem to solve. It's great that we have the flexibility, just need to figure out how to avoid long-term negative repercussions that have not fully been felt yet.
[+] [-] shrimp_emoji|2 years ago|reply
I have a great home situation, though (it's better than my office physically), and most of my coworkers are older than I am, so they're less keen on interpersonal connection and rarely ever go to the office.
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] opportune|2 years ago|reply
So when I go into the office, even though I’m pretty extroverted for an engineer and would love to collaborate on stuff, it’s just as lonely as WFH.
[+] [-] Spivak|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] qgin|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rfwhyte|2 years ago|reply
It's a lot less PR friendly for them to be honest and say to their employees "You need to spend 2 hours a day in a car in traffic, whilst not being compensated for that time, so the office building I own doesn't lose value" though.
[+] [-] librish|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] infotainment|2 years ago|reply
Personally, I think the benefits of in-person apply equally to both.
[+] [-] Gigachad|2 years ago|reply
While they do not care if the companies ability to function is degraded. Notice how the people who are impacted by this are the ones calling to return to in office.
[+] [-] vunderba|2 years ago|reply
Also, workers are paid during that time, whereas children, particularly of younger age, can't really be expected to maintain concentration for 7+ hours in a physically isolated environment with no other children, or a teacher watching.
[+] [-] urbandw311er|2 years ago|reply
Fully appreciate it’s more nuanced than this of course and there is some negative impact on some people having to WFH.
[+] [-] bitcharmer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] d3w4s9|2 years ago|reply
Let me pick a simple one: do people regularly drive half an hour or more to send their kids to school?
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tamimio|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] exodust|2 years ago|reply
"to say nothing about the reduced pollution and energy consumption that comes from fewer commuters"
In my case the office is a 50 min drive away and my car is a 6 cylinder petrol engine. I've been WFH since 2020 so 4 years worth of car fumes prevented.
Savings on fuel, tolls and commute time. 100 minutes driving per day x 250 work days x 4 years = 1,666 driving hours prevented. I like driving but driving to work is the worst kind of driving.
[+] [-] adingus|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CapstanRoller|2 years ago|reply
What happens when office workers no longer have to be in the office? What happens to the physical buildings, the people who maintain them, the local businesses who serve the office workers (e.g. lunch), etc? There are many knock-on effects.
WFH, on a large scale, is forcing us to rethink the concept of cities, suburbs, infrastructure, housing, transit, telecom, etc.
The fact that WFH has been shown to be viable on a large scale indicates that we are probably going to experience a massive societal shift at all levels. A shift to where? No one knows yet.
[+] [-] blueferret|2 years ago|reply
In 2022, they started talking about RTO. Then they tried to enforce it. People quit. They didn't let up.
[+] [-] incomingpain|2 years ago|reply
But worse, if they decided to sell. Who in the world can buy their vanity building? Everyone else has the same problem. Governments also came in and restrict you from using the building for other purposes. So you cant sell to someone who might make use out of it.
So you might as well try to force people back into the building, but go softly because the last people you want to lose are the first to leave.
[+] [-] pdimitar|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brycewray|2 years ago|reply
https://lite.cnn.com/2024/01/22/opinions/remote-work-jobs-be...
[+] [-] fulladder|2 years ago|reply
[+] [-] guilhas|2 years ago|reply
Most companies advertising jobs, have remote positions now
I don't see a RTO movement, I think they are experimenting what works best, trying to get a balance. But their processes have not evolved enough to include remote workers
Software development tasks are hard to estimate. How can a company, without being too invasive, make sure a employee is not underworked or overworked?
[+] [-] insane_dreamer|2 years ago|reply
how do you do it when in person other than walking around and checking that people aren't playing minesweeper instead of coding? (OK, there is the social pressure to at least look like you're coding in case someone glances at your screen, but that doesn't mean you're actually getting anything done. Of course for people who slack off, WFH is a great enabler -- and that indeed is a problem.)