I have posted this on Reddit (askeconomics) a while back but got no good replies. Copying it here because I don’t want to send traffic to Reddit.
What do you think?
I see a big push to take employees back to the office. I personally don’t mind either working remote or in the office, but I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit and I haven’t seen a convincing explanation yet of why they are so keen to have everyone back.
If remote work was just as productive as in-person, a remote-only company could use it to be more efficient than their work-in-office competitors, so I assume there’s no conclusive evidence that this is the case. But I haven’t seen conclusive evidence of the contrary either, and I think employers would have good reason to trumpet any findings at least internally to their employees (“we’ve seen KPI so-and-so drop with everyone working from home” or “project X was severely delayed by lack of in-person coordination” wouldn’t make everyone happy to return in presence, but at least it would make a good argument for a manager to explain to their team)
Instead, all I keep hearing is inspirational wish-wash like “we value the power of working together”. Which is fine, but why are we valuing it more than the cost of office space?
On the side of employees, I often see arguments like “these companies made a big investment in offices and now they don’t want to look stupid by leaving them empty”. But all these large companies have spent billions to acquire smaller companies/products and dropped them without a second thought. I can’t believe the same companies would now be so sentimentally attached to office buildings if it made any economic sense to close them.
I am absolutely happy for the people I manage to stay home if they have real work to do. They can clearly do whatever they prefer, even work from the beach as far as I am concerned, but I know that going to the office is a waste of time. But the job we do is project based, long deadlines, no real “daily business” to handle. It however requires maximum focus, because it is not trivial. Offices are hells for concentration and quality work.
They can stay at home and call whenever they want whoever they want.
It has been working great.
It really depends on the positions. Office spaces are very bad for some positions, good fo others. Pushing a unique way of working for fishes and elephants cannot work. This is the main problem with current approach
There are some teams that can maintain full remote; I usually find those teams are filled with people good at their job, can see the big picture, and know to communicate early.
The problem is that not all teams are like that.