Google and JPMorgan have each told staff that office attendance will be factored into performance evaluations. The US law firm Davis Polk informed employees that fewer days in the office would result in lower bonuses. And Meta and Amazon both told employees they’re now monitoring badge swipes, with potential consequences for workers who don’t comply with attendance policies – including job loss. Increasingly, workers across many jobs and sectors appear to be barrelling towards the same fate.
In some ways, it’s unsurprising bosses are turning back to attendance as a standard. After all, we’ve long been conditioned to believe showing up is vital to success, from some of our earliest days. In school, perfect attendance is often still seen a badge of honour. The obsession with attendance has also been a mainstay of workplace culture for decades; pre-pandemic, remote work was largely unheard of, and employees were expected to be physically present at their desks throughout the workday.
Yet after the success of flexible arrangements during the pandemic, attendance is still entrenched as a core metric. What’s the point?
If you manage professionals and can’t tell how well your team is doing unless you see them in person daily, you’re a terrible manager.
Alternatively, If I have to bring the people who report to me into the office for them to get their shit together, they’re a lost cause anyway.
Got a better one:
If you’re a professional and need to be managed, you’re not actually a pro.
A good manager is like the coxswain of a row boat. Their job isn’t to provide more power, or tell the rowers how to row. Their job is to keep all the rowers synchronized, and pulling in the same direction.
A good manager does a similar thing. They keep the team both aligned with each other, and pointed in the required business direction. There are a LOT of bad managers out there, however.
Yeah… no. You should be competent enough to contribute where you’re needed without paying a manager to figure it out for you.
This is why Valve has such a unique business structure.
Depending on the business situation, that would be a complete disaster. You don’t want 10 people working on a 5 man job, when 2 more jobs are both languishing, and time critical. A good manager can make the calls about which work can wait, and which needs to take priority, and how to balance things. They can also work as primary points of contact between different teams and companies. This keeps information flow clear and stops people being left out of the loop.
While all of these can be done without a manager, the efficiency plummets as the number of people grow. By the time you’re dealing with large, inter-company politics, a manager is critical to take load off the workers. I don’t want to spend 80% of my time keeping people informed, when I can spend 2% and get on with my actual job.
Lmao this is not how human beings function. The smarter and more skilled your employees are, the more they will conceptualize their own direction from the limited information available to them. Keeping 5, 10, 40+ highly competent people pulling in the same direction is very challenging.
Good teams need good managers the way professional athletes need coaches.
It’s a game that has nothing to do with workers, but real estate instead. If workers don’t go to the office, there will be no need for the company to rent an office the size it does, making it “lose” money. If they cut on their offices, real estate starts losing value (as we can see in some articles that start popping up), and that’s something that bothers a lot of big players.
I think the real estate thing is big, but also they’ll be god-damned if we get a benefit for free.
Once it’s a benefit they have control over, they can use it as leverage for those that want it back. They can cut our pay, increase our hours, both.
But then people will start clamoring about retrofitting the empty skyscrapers into housing and then all the NIMBYs houses lose value, and that’d make tax revenue decrease.
THAT is why.
retrofitting the empty skyscrapers into housing
“Too expensive. Too difficult” they say… it’s fucking bullshit. Those are stalling words. They’re waiting on a plan to maximize the investment. My guess, money and/or tax credit from the government.
To be honest, that’s most likely a valid concern. Office buildings don’t meet the criteria for normal housing. If you look at the distribution of bathrooms and kitchens in these skyscrapers, you need to do quite some construction work to meet the requirements of apartments for housing.
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Yes, they are starting with buildings, that are more suited to refurbish them as residential area. Smaller buildings are better suited, because you can actually get light into them. The center rooms in one of these giant skyscrapers would be without windows. Just to name another reason, why it is not that simple.
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How does this in any way counter my points? They even get subsidized to do it, meaning, that it is too expensive else. And I already stated, that there are buildings, that are more suitable than others. Just look at the absolute numbers, they are talking about 20k units in the next decade. That’s literally nothing.
It’s a consern buy it’s not impossible. Take greed out if the picture and it wouldn’t be an issue. We’ve got to stop encouraging this maximi return on investment shit.
If the developers, that attempt this, all go bankrupt, it does not help at all. If you want to push private companies into doing something unprofitable, you need to subsidize it or the government to do it on its own. For some of these buildings its cheaper to just build a new apartment complex instead of retrofitting them.
A while back someone in the know said how it could be done at a reasonable cost: each floor has small apartments built on the outside walls (one bedroom, two bedroom and family units … possibly different floors for each) with the interior centre section as a common space with a large kitchen, rec room, small kids area, etc. Bathrooms should already be on each floor, just need to tie in showers (and add more stalls if required).
There are towers doing this in a few areas, but the naysayers yell loudly when riled.
Would still be nicer to have sunlight for the communal areas, but that sounds like a working solution. Probably profit goes into the drain though, because you get less units you can rent out and people will pay less for apartments with only a shared bathroom and kitchen.
It’s a game that has nothing to do with workers, but real estate instead.
Don’t forget tax incentives offered by cities and states to locate lots of office workers in those taxable areas. No workers there, no payroll/sales taxes collected. No revenue derived from workers forced to go there where they will eat, shop, and consume services. Those cities and states what their money.
This reason doesn’t really make sense to me. The company pays the same for the office whether there are people in it or not. Forcing people into the office isn’t saving them any money, in fact they probably pay more when you factor in utilities.
They do pay more. The issue comes in because many executives are really doing two jobs. Job one is the company exec. They want to save money and downsizing office space is kosher with that job. But their second job is being landlords for commercial office space. Their portfolios will be negatively affected by companies (including their own) getting rid of office space.
They are choosing to prioritize their personal wealth (commercial real estate investments) over the health of their company.
Modern business is full of this type of stuff. The priority is always personal benefits over the health of the company. Run it into the ground while extracting as much as you possibly can and walking away from any consequences.
The great Neo-liberal grift.
42 years and the only thing to trickle down were two skyscrapers and half the smaller bridges in the country.
And the middle class down the social ladder
I fucking hate neoliberalism.
It’s responsible for the vast majority of society’s problems at this point.
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Neoliberalism is trickle down. It’s believing that tax cuts benefit society more than collectively investing in that society, usually in direct opposition to any actual tabulated, factual data.
If you don’t remember the world before January 1981, and you live in a western nation, than you havent experienced anything other than neoliberalism.
Nixon was more of a leftist than Clinton or Obama. All we’ve known is the Center-right (Democrats) and the right/far-right.
Conservativism is dead in America. You’re average conservative now would look at Dubya’s “Compassionate Conservativism” push for Medicare Part D and shriek until their owners finally came and put them into bed.
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If you pay for a building that can house 100 workers, but only 20 come into the office and the other 80 work from home, you have way more space than what you need. You could probably rent a place half as big for half the price and still have room.
Would you rent a 5 bedroom, 4 bathroom house with a 3-car garage as a bachelor? I mean you can but you’re paying for way more than what you actually need.
When that’s all they build, do you really have a choice?
It’s an interconnected issue where the value of real estate is dependent on people having a use for it.
What’s the point?
Middle management needs something to do to justify their useless existence.
Idk what podcast or whatever uses “middle management” as a scapegoat, but this is the dumbest fucking meme.
Like CEOs and middle management are the problem but SVPs and department heads are totally cool? How does that make sense? Whoever initiated this just had one shitty boss and 0 professional corporate experience.
I absolutely guarantee you that middle management is not making “return to office” decisions.
Some of my coworkers love going into the office. They’re also really bad at responding to slack. I wonder if these are related.
Anyway, we should all unionize and push back against this kind of nonsense
During the pandemic, when we were all forced to work from home, one of my coworkers would incessantly bitch and moan about how he missed being back at the office.
He is the kind of person who pulls all sorts of bullshit out of his ass and starts treating it as if it’s true. At some point he started going around saying that “productivity when WFH is ok but everybody is complaining that they can’t make plans for future projects without face to face time”. When our director got curious and asked him where he had heard about this, he changed the topic.
Basically this is a person who doesn’t want to do anything and makes a career out of going around and pretending to be working and calling meetings when they’re not needed. For this kind of person, WFH is deadly as it clearly shows that their “skills” are not needed for the company’s success.
I dunno man, if those people played it right, WFH would be the best. Still getting nothing done, but now you get to stay home every day.
Yeah, for people like me that finish the asigned tasks in very little time, Office culture is torture since yeah, we shouldn’t show how fast we work since it will only end up with our workload increasing, but having to pretend to work or working slower than would like is the worst. At home I just prepare partial commits or simply commit once at the end of the day, or do whatever whenever and people don’t monitor when were those lambda functions edited, when was the pipeline launched… etc. They only care if it’s done for the next day. And it is, and they are happy. They don’t need to know I spent 6 out of 8 work hours playing Baldurs Gate 3, do they?
Exactly. Which I think is the reason these executives are so gung ho about RTO. They realize people aren’t spending 100% of their time and attention on their work every day, and that’s what they want and expect. I’m not sure if they realize people will do the same thing in the office, except they’ll drag it out and make it seem like it took longer as you described. They probably don’t care.
I think part of it is this corporate mindset that they own you if you work there. And you should be grateful for the job they’ve provided, and that means working every minute of every work day. No amount of data showing that’s less productive/efficient will ever get those people to change their minds. Because in this case, for these people, it’s about feeling superior and showing “dominance”.
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And they will love it, OR ELSE!!
There was a time when I would have jumped at the chance to work for one of these companies.
Hell, I even interviewed with Google 17 years ago (for a position that I was thoroughly overqualified for).
But, these days I don’t think they could offer me enough money to convince me it would be worth it… Unless there was a HUGE upfront signing bonus that wouldn’t need to be repaid no matter what happens.
They’re shooting themselves in the foot by drastically reducing the talent pool available to them.
It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Let’s see how it works out for them.
To be fair working there 17 years ago would’ve probably been ok. Like, hard work for sure, but very well compensated and still had the famous company culture. These days it’d be like willingly stepping into a meat grinder.
Thanks
If I remember correctly, didn’t Google offer lots of staff facilities and benefits?
…oh right, now they also care about office attendance… welp there goes the “don’t be evil” motto
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Control freak management as the article says
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The two or three out of a hundred employees that get given an inch and take a mile, ruining it for everyone else that isn’t taking the piss
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Unpopular opinion: Teams collaborate better in presence. Remote attendance is inferior to being in the same room even with the most expensive Cisco board or meeting owl.
However if you’re working on your own, processing to-dos, a team around you will be a hindrance. However, creative processes just don’t work that way and require interaction and variability to occur.
That isn’t stopping executives from offshoring more and more functions… and yet, “you’re more creative in the same room”… yeah thought luck my devs are in fucking bengalore… 8000 km from our offices…
The vast majority of workers doesn’t have to be creative. A dev is a Software Engineer, most of the time that means applying already thought through procedures to hopefully well documented requirements. So what is your point?
If you see no creativity in’a software engineer you’re a lost cause…
Seriously, imagine that dudes code if he never once thought creatively about an engineering problem lol
Then why have they spent the past 40 years outsourcing shit to other countries
Unpopular opinion: Teams collaborate better in presence. Remote attendance is inferior to being in the same room even with the most expensive Cisco board or meeting owl.
How do you explain the dominance of free and open source projects like Linux which are developed remotely by people all over the world?
There are plenty of examples of people collaborating effectively from different towns or time zones. If anything, I think too many organizations are too inflexible or have simply been structured in a way that they can’t be efficient remotely.
Think of how much better the result would be if the workers had to commute, had less lunch options, couldn’t take a nap, and had to work in a noisier environment
Is this a trust me bro? Or you got recipets?
I mean it says opinion right there.
My counrerpoint is that it doesn’t matter if it works better for business when it works so much better for everyone and everything else.
My counrerpoint is that it doesn’t matter if it works better for business when…
You’re working for the business though.
No. The business is renting your time and experience … nothing else.
Problem is they still think you work for them.
So the benefits for people and society overall doesn’t matter?
I feel like way too many folks forget that employment is a 2-way street. I have a skill that my employer needs, and I give them my skill and time in exchange for my compensation (salary plus both hard and soft benefits). It is not my responsibility to make sure that the company is at its most successful regardless of my own personal comfort and happiness, my only responsibility is to perform the duties stated in my job description.
When (as is happening all over my industry) a large number of employers decide that something like remote work is now a high priority for them, then it really does stop mattering whether or not it’s best for the company, because all the employees with any bargaining power (which is to say, the good ones) will just leave for companies that do offer remote work.
Think about it this way, it’s absolutely in every companies best interest to pay minimum wage and/or offer no health insurance, 401k, etc (at least where allowed by the law) . So why do companies that need skilled workers offer those things? Because if they didnt then they would never be able to hire talent.
Whats best for the business is getting the best talent, and you only do that by being cognizant of what the most talented people in your industry want. And in most industries where remote work is possible, remote work is increasingly becoming something people want. And COVID proved that whether or not there are slight disadvantages to collaboration in remote work (I’m not personally sold, and the research so far is contradictory), it does work, so companies have increasingly fewer excuses to drag everyone back to the office
Cisco is fully remote besides any hardware production lines.
That’s really funny in light of your comment.
Even collaborative teams frequently have individual work that does not require regular in person attendance on a regular basis and many of us can collaborate just as well on a video call as in person.
I work in IT and a lot of my peers are distributed geographically and of course most of my meetings are with vendors who are also not local. So I go into the office so I can get on Teams meetings and take an hour long lunch that I would have worked through at home. I have in-person meetings maybe once a month.
I agree with this to a certain extent.
I do think it’s easier to be creative and brainstorming with other people when I am in the same room as them, but ultimately it should be a mix of both for that kind of stuff to accommodate for everybody - that way, people can start their to-dos in peace either at the office or at home, wherever they’re already at.
Exactly.
If teams collaborate better im presence, why does everyone work in separate spaces? Even cubicles don’t make sense from your statement, get those people at picnic tables!
If your argument is “teams collaborate better with instant access,” then yes, but technology has bridged that gap.
A cubicle is probably the worst of both worlds.
I strongly disagree that technology has bridged that gap. There always is delay, no spatial information and no equivalent way to switch focus.
Sounds like a skill issue.
I know there is a personality aspect on socializers too.
Studies have shown that worker preferences are somewhat evenly split between office only, hybrid, and full WFH. However, being on Reddit / lemmy is kind of a self selection towards the WFH crowd, so it’s become a quite an echo chamber on this issue. Whereas management tends to the social crowd who prefer full office. And it doesn’t help that management is pushing the return to office for other undisclosed but obvious reasons.
It doesn’t have to be unprofitable. They just don’t need to “maximize their return”. They want tax credits and subsidies for low income housing so they can make the same profit as a bidding war for a luxury condo. It’s greed.
