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.
Yeah, our company had hybrid available to everyone, so going remote was simply increasing the hybrid days to 100%. Our productivity skyrocketed because instead of having to waste 5-10 minutes per hour walking across a stupidly huge campus, or battling people for meeting rooms, we could just meet in virtual rooms, and instantly “teleport” to the next one. We had no commute, people would meet early or late, or during lunch.
Nobody asked us to work more but we did because we COULD. We were already fully aligned on hitting our goals, and being in the office was an obstacle rather than an aid. We’re increasing our in-office days over the overwhelmingly negative feedback (why even ask for input if you’re just going to ignore it?). I’ll just have to mentally pull back on available bandwidth for the time wasted on in-office days, reject more meetings, and extend deadlines accordingly. I’ll need to free up all that extra time for the small talk and “networking” they want me to do instead of working.