[makingstuffs]

Reading all of these takes stating WFH leads to poor productivity simply doesn’t make sense to me.

If your employees cannot be trusted to fulfil their responsibilities (whether in an office, their home or a tent in a woodland) that is not a geographical issue. It is a mentality issue and you are always going to face productivity issue from that employee regardless of from where they work.

I’ve been told time and time again by an array of managers in a bunch of departments and companies that my productivity never changes. That is regardless of whether I am travelling or at home. This is including being in Sri Lanka during their worst economical crisis and facing power cuts of 8 - 12 hours everyday. As a responsible adult I prepared in advance. I bought power banks which could charge my laptop and ensured they were charged when the power worked. I bought SIM cards for all mobile networks and ensured I had data. It really is simply a matter of taking responsibility of one’s situation and having a sense of respect for, and from, your employer/employee.

Forcing people into working conditions in which they are uncomfortable is only going to harbour resentment towards the company and if you are in a country where workers actually have real rights you will have a hard time firing them.

I fear that this is all simply a smokescreen for the authoritarian shift which has occurred throughout the globe. It started pre pandemic and was exasperated during it. Scary times lay ahead.

[imcrs]

It's not about productivity at all. These same companies were commissioning studies during Covid that told their analysts "look how productive our employees are now that they are working from home!"

It's about crushing labor.

WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can apply for far more roles, work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc, apply for other jobs during work hours, etc. These companies know that white collar workers are not fungible. Their intellectual workers are genuinely very difficult to replace and produce a lot of value.

For talent that isn't fungible, it's RTO. For talent that is fungible, offshoring.

[imcrs]

For your comment about the turn towards authoritarianism, yeah, there's a reason every DEI program at every large corporation was pulled back within a few months, and it's not because the C suite all reads the same Musk tweets on X.

Employees started making demands of management to actually look at some... structural issues. Those demands had teeth because employees acted and organized as a bloc. Only a matter of time before other lines of questioning besides race and sex were explored at work.

Yeah.

[ChadNauseam]

> It's not about productivity at all.

> WFH forces employers to compete. It gives a lot of power to employees, because they can [...] work fewer hours, moonlight for multiple companies, etc

Probably "working fewer hours" and "moonlight for multiple companies" has negative effects on productivity that employers would like to avoid.

[kaliqt]

As Office Space says: it is a question of motivation.

If you care, it'll get done. If you don't, you'll find a way to slack off, even if you're at the office.

[Hammershaft]

I value remote work but undoubtedly people are more capable of silently slacking at home.

[sjw987]

Wild that anybody thinks simply being in the office makes employees work. I have a colleague who sits within 2m of me who keeps their (personal) phone on their desk all day. They literally prop it up against the bottom of their computer monitor. They're not even subtle about it.

They get distracted every 2-3 minutes and spend upwards or 2-3 hours on it. It distracts me when it vibrates 100+ times per day.

Boss walks in, phone is down. Boss walks out, phone in hand.

[notnaut]

Is it not likely that people are more motivated to collaborate, talk about their work, plan together, feel a sense of excitement about work, etc. when they are communing in person? The ol watercooler mindset or whatever.

I mean - there’s this popular topic of the issue of loneliness lately. People are less motivated to do things that would maybe normally bring them social joy and get them out of their own homes and bring them together with others in the flesh. You’d expect people to be motivated to do that kind of thing, maybe? But it’s hard. And it’s harder every day when there’s a zeitgeist of growing isolationism.

I certainly don’t think the inflexibility of a 5 day in person work week with a hellish, uncompensated commute is the answer to the loneliness issue, nor the lack of motivation to do good work. But maybe there is some middle ground that would serve as a kick in the pants of sorts, without making us all miserable little ants going to and fro once again, that could help people get back out there in a way that helps.

I mean, at least, it doesn’t seem like the metaverse or whatever else is filling that gap as the techno-seers foresaw… but maybe future generations will prove that to be more realistic than bringing people back out together in meatspace. Or maybe we just stoop deeper into this new reclusiveness without any real stand ins for grabbing lunch together at all.

[rob74]

...and being forced back to the office for first three and then five days (as Elon Musk said years ago, you can work from home all you want, you just have to work 40 hours per week in the office) is not really going to improve your motivation.

[prmoustache]

> Reading all of these takes stating WFH leads to poor productivity simply doesn’t make sense to me.

I don't think it is related to poor productivity. I think it is related to a combination of these 3 points:

1) perceived less of control from the management perspective. 10-15years ago companies were all in on "we need metrics on work being done". Let's face it, process induced metrics have often very little relevance to the success of your products. So without being able to pin point what is wrong from the metrics, upper management feel they are managing an invisible structure and they have no idea what they do. They don't have much more idea when they are at the office but they can see them peering at their screen or talking to their colleagues so they must be doing something right? It is reassuring for upper management.

2) Pretending to do something. This RTO decisions are ofen all about making changes for the sake of making changes. All my career I have seen upper management doing restructuration every 6 months to every 2 years with often very little change in the actual efficiency of the whole company or the quality of the products being done. More often than not they just throw shit at the wall and see hat sticks. Other times they just copy what competitors have just done. Once in a while they will maybe observe an improvement.

3) It also give a visible signal to the employees thast something is being done by the management so in a sense it can boost motivation a little bit even though major changes are often disruptive. If it wasn't for these kind of changes and announcement, most employees wouldn't even know/remember who their CEO is.

Having said that, I don't work at Meta/Instagram but I work in a company where the meeting culture is crazy and I think I can agree with him on that point.

[rob74]

The RTO decisions are about making changes to prove that you have power over your employees, and also about attrition: if you don't like the soul-crushing routine of having to come to the office three or five days a week when you could do your job just as well or better working from home, there's the door!

[frm88]

In addition to your 1.) It's also a power demonstration as in: no matter how far you have to travel/commute, we're the ones paying, so you come when called. Since commutes are rarely paid for, that makes clear who's king. Same goes for open office spaces: the conditions and their effect on you don't really matter to the king.

There's a 4. in that these measures sometimes serve the purpose of reducing headcount without having to publicly announce layoffs.

[jmyeet]

It's a mistake to view this from the perspective of productivity and whether or not someone can do their job at home or not. Clearly they can. We kept these companies alive by WFH during the pandemic. But they simply don't care.

RTO mandates are nothing more than soft layoffs. People have moved. People may not be able to come back. People may simply not want to. Some of those people will quit. And that's cheaper than a severance package.

We are in permanent layoff culture now. Why? To suppress wages and get more work for no extra compensation. 5% of the staff gets fired? The other 95% has to do their work for no extra money AND they're not demanding pay raises. Win win.

Over time profits have a tendency to shrink and the only way to maintain the insatiable appetite for increasing profits is, ultimately, by raising prices and cutting costs. I wish more people realized this is all that's going on.

[BrenBarn]

There is a middle ground though between "employees can't be trusted" and "all is well". It's possible for there to be a genuine difference in affordances such that people are more productive in some places than others. I think many people would be less productive in a dank basement than in a pleasant office, but then again maybe you don't want it to be too cushy or productivity may go down. I don't think it's realistic to expect everyone to be equally productive in all environments.

That said, I share your fear that all such considerations are just a smokescreen. In a larger sense the entire issue of "productivity" is a smokescreen. We don't need "more productivity". What we need is for people to be happy, and potentially that may be achieved by reducing productivity in some ways.

[chii]

> What we need is for people to be happy

that is irrelevant to company management - in so far as that happiness has negligible effect on productivity.

However, from anecdotal evidence i've gathered (only sample size of 5-7 or so), in office has been more productive, but they (with the exception of one, who lives 5 mins from their office) all dislike RTO and would've preferred WFH; but not enough to quit over it as it's not a 5 day mandate, but a 3-4 day mandate.

[rustystump]

I am pretty sure that 99% of the anti rto is exclusively due to the god awful soul crushing commute.

5 days a week an hour each way 10 hours of death each week.

There is no authoritarian “shift” this has been business as usual for the last 100 years. Stupid business but business nonetheless

[nodoodles]

Only a 100 years — the whole history before that was working in the vicinity of a home, it does feel natural to return to that. Instead of anvils, we hit keyboards and instead of swords produce alignment, but either way it brings food to the table and allows flexibility in work-life?

[Krssst]

Noisy open spaces with many people talking at the same time and people coming in sick with contagious respiratory infections is not really a recipe for productivity independently of commute.

[billy99k]

"Forcing people into working conditions in which they are uncomfortable is only going to harbour resentment towards the company and if you are in a country where workers actually have real rights you will have a hard time firing them."

They are forcing them back into the office, which was pretty much the norm pre-covid. Having hard to fire employees isn't a good thing for the company or the well-being of other employees, when dealing with a bad employee.

If you want to work from home forever, contract with a company, and put it in your contract. This is what I've done for over a decade now.

[a96]

Being a one person company with one client is circumventing employment laws. Sensibly illegal in many countries.

[redhale]

Congrats on your work ethic. But consider that this may simply not be the case for every working adult on earth, and may not even be true for every working adult in your company.

Not everyone is like you. I am, but I know people (some of whom are former and current coworkers) who are much more easily distracted, and are meaningfully less able to compete their work in a timely manner when they work from home.

I'll probably be downvoted, but I just don't think most of these execs are engaging in some larger "authoritarian" play with these moves (maybe some are, but I think incompetence is more likely than malice in most cases). But maybe I'm naive.

As one point, consider the case of Tokyo's "Manuscript Cafe" [0] where patrons intentionally visit to have a cafe owner "force" them to compete a task they may have been procrastinating on. I read this as: being in a "work" location surrounded by other working people is conducive to productivity for some people.

[0] https://www.vice.com/en/article/manuscript-cafe-japan-remote...

[duskdozer]

I think it's only a small portion of WFH advocates who say that everyone should be forced to work remotely. Most want each person to have the ability to work the way that's best for them.

[davidjytang]

Measured for a year, my team overall shipped 60% of issues WFH than when in office. WFH was nice for some colleagues but clearly not working for the team. We promptly change back to in office when able.

[QuiEgo]

Body doubling is a thing!

The crux of this is the way everyone is at their best is different per person.

Work from office is the brute force solution - if it’s the hammer, flexible work is the scalple.

Not every org has managers capable of welding a scalpel instead of a hammer, or who have time to be surgical even if they have the ability. I accept this reality.

[IAmBroom]

You raise an interesting point. No downvote from me, although I'm firmly in the WFH camp.

[xzjis]

The reality is that middle managers are completely useless, but to justify their usefulness they have to force people to come to the office, to reprimand them if they don't strictly follow the schedule, to hold meetings to pretend they're useful by knowing what their team is doing, etc. They have to act as control agents: checking, monitoring, producing unnecessary reporting (a legacy of slavery) just to prove they exist in the organizational chart. The office is a theater where everyone pretends to be busy (especially them), but that's hard if the offices are empty. It's a system where we try to convince ourselves of their usefulness, which pushes them to fill the void in order to maintain a hierarchy that serves more to prevent people from working peacefully than to organize anything.

[amrocha]

Good thing for you that you’re productive anywhere.

I’m not. I much prefer working from an office. I’m way more efficient and happy in an office than working from home.

It’s not a matter of mentality. It’s a matter of being in an environment conducive to work.

You would benefit from not assuming that everyone is the same as you.

[ciberado]

At work, we have the opportunity to choose. Many people are like you and find that going to the office helps their productivity and mental health. Most of us (including me) visit the office only a few times a year.

I think having the choice is great. Although it comes with its own challenges, it works really well when you establish the right culture.

[zaradvutra]

> You would benefit from not assuming that everyone is the same as you.

So would you. A typical office is not an "environment conductive to work" for everyone.

Noise, recirculated air, lifeless rows of desks, bad company and a 2h total commute? No thanks.

[stavros]

Whenever I'm in the office, I get zero work done. It's great for socialising and catching up with colleagues, but abysmal for productivity.

[makingstuffs]

> You would benefit from not assuming that everyone is the same as you.

I’m sorry if it came across that this was the point I was making. I was not. I acknowledge and understand everyone is different.

The point I was making was about trusting people to be responsible adults and do what is right for the productivity without dictating a binary decision.

People who are more productive at home should not be punished because others are not and likewise for the inverse.

[bambax]

Nobody was ever prohibited from coming to the office. If you like it, do it.

But forcing people to come to the office when they hate it, is counter-productive.

[seanmcdirmid]

There are offices where I definitely feel productive. Today’s tight open offices just are not those places.

[rubenvanwyk]

The core issue is like you said - responsibility.

[alsetmusic]

My previous employer ran an experiment. They had us come in two days per week for six weeks and ran the numbers. We ended up going 100% wfh with a downsized office. We been planning to double our office capacity before the pan.

I’m convinced that more than half of orgs would see similar numbers if they cared to look. I bet a bunch of the ones mandating RTO see them but do it anyway.

[port11]

It's the middle managers. They're the unproductive ones in a remote setup.