Earlier in the pandemic many news and magazine organizations would proudly write about how working from home always actually can lead to over working and being too “productive”. I am yet to collect some evidence on it but I think we remember a good amount about this.
Now after a bunch of companies want their remote workers back at the office, every one of those companies are being almost propaganda machines which do not cite sound scientific studies but cite each other and interviews with higher ups in top companies that “remote workers are less productive”. This is further cementing the general public’s opinion on this matter.
And research that shows the opposite is buried deep within any search results.
Have you noticed this? Please share what you have observed. I’m going paranoid about this.
I’d say it’s not all black or white. In my industry (software) most of my friends and colleagues have strong opinions about staying remote. It’s mostly along the lines of “either let me continue to work from home or find someone else”. Also most of the headhunter messages I get on LinkedIn offer up to 100% remote jobs. Of course this is all anecdotal and depends heavily on the field of work. But maybe it’s worth considering that you have the power to shape your own future. If you do not want to work in an office, you’ll find something else. Don’t let those corporations fool you.
I think remote work is here to stay exactly because of what you’ve said. Companies always want highly skilled workers and experts. Those people have a lot of leverage when it comes to offers and hiring. Offering and maintaining remote work is a big plus when weighing offers, especially when you consider who these knowledge workers are.
They’re at least 5 years out of college and many have started families. And they’ve realized that they want to spend more time with their family and kids and not waste it commuting to work. Most are probably 10+ years of experience in their relevant industry and with 12-15 year olds. I feel like that demographic had a massive awakening with COVID about where their priorities lie.
I think it’s unlikely for remote work to stay at just the experienced knowledge professional level. Hell with 3 years of semi relevant experience I was able to leverage +$5000 on my salary for a remote job. Companies need more and more skilled office workers. This opposition to remote work won’t last, I think.
See I’m in software dev and I am constantly getting recruiter calls asking me for in-office work. I’m the guy saying “you literally cannot pay me enough to go back in an office”… but I’d gladly take 2/3 or maybe even 1/2 my current pay for a 4-day, 32 hour work week.
That easy, beginning of the pandemic: Companies panic that all their employees would call in sick. Or some even die (not that they’d care, but a lot of companies have a bus factor of one). So remote work gets tolerated or praised, everything works great.
Now the pandemic is “over”, it’s safe to go back into the office. Companies have massive real estate costs, so they want to put their employees back into the office. Besides middle managers being afraid of their jobs as they seem to have become useless if they can’t look over your shoulder and micromanage you.
It’s never about facts, it’s always what the companies and managers want in the moment.
I agree with this the most.
Me too, what I have learned is to avoid all media promoting going back to office, since they are just PR tool and can not br trusted.
The news is propaganda. Welcome to the club.
The best is this article using AI to show what a remote worker would look like after 70 years working from home. So ridiculous it’s laugable. The propaganda is strong. Lol
They also made another article about what the worker looks like after 20 years w life-size model too https://news.sky.com/story/life-sized-model-shows-what-office-workers-might-look-like-in-20-years-11843868
Is the argument here that employees won’t buy ergonomic furniture and desks? Because with all the gas money I’m saving I’ve bought a nicer chair and monitor than I had in office…
The content was made by office furniture companies… which probably took a hit w wfh… but … like you noted. You bought better. Same here. My place had chairs from the 60s
I’ll be weird and say I absolutely prefer working in-office over from home in most cases. I prefer being able to build relationships with my coworkers, ask quick questions and give quick answers, and just actually being able to talk to people.
However, I don’t think everyone needs to be in the office. My line of work requires it but I think it’s dumb that companies are requiring them to go in when there’s no reason beyond “we rent the space so we have to use it.”
Also you’re correct in how the headlines changed and it’s really dumb, but it’s mostly about the fact that real estate owners are trying to force people to rent their spaces instead of selling them.
I think there’s a balance for most people. I don’t mind being in the office but I hate commuting there. If the office was down the end of my street then I’d go every day. Luckily I mostly work on my own work so I only need to talk to people occasionally.
I can agree with the commute. I started working here by getting up at 6:30 and then traffic would put me at work at 7:30 and on some days it was extra bad. I got a dog who liked to wake me up at 5 so I ended up shifting my whole schedule and now I’m up at 5, out the door by 5:30, and then at work by 6 which means I leave at 3. The commute isn’t as bad now but it’s definitely not for everyone.
My new “position” is product owner and team lead so I have to interact with my team all day long. It’s definitely easier to talk to the folks at my location than it is to talk to the ones in different states just because I can turn around and go “Hey , what was that requirement you had a question about?” So much easier.
Completely agree, especially about quick questions and small minutia. It’s the little things that add up. It’s so much easier to walk to someone’s desk or office than chase them down with a text or trying to get them on the phone.
I changed jobs during the pandemic. I asked if I could work remotely permanently, they said yes. It’s in my contract I work from home, not the office. I’ve been watching the “sea change” as working remotely has been removed from various companies and wondering why? If all the research points to it being better, then - again - why? The speculation about it being related to real estate is depressing!
People working from home aren’t consuming much anymore.
Of course there’s commercial property leases and micromanaging bosses, but I think the uptick in this messaging is in response to people spending less money.
Less money on cars, gas, clothes, eating out, fancy coffee, hair/nails, dry cleaning, kid/animal care, gym (?), and probably so much more that I’m not thinking of.
And when we do spend money on those things, they’re lasting longer and we’re getting more discerning. When I do consider spending money on eating out, I’ll def choose going hungry over getting something lower quality.
Hell yeah. I eat out like twice a month now but both are carefully planned experiences at excellent restaurants.
Same. I use reclaimed commute time to get groceries and cook now. Wife is thrilled now when I call it ‘my’ kitchen (it was hers by default when my commute + work had me out of the house 12 hours a day), and I can whip up a decent meal these days pretty quickly without having to go out
I’ve actually still been seeing positive news
Reminder that Google itself is one of the companies that wants to end remote work so their real estate doesn’t dive in value.
So don’t be surprised about how search results reflect this bias as well.
When you’ve fully digested that, think about who owns the systems that keep capitalism in place.
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It isn’t propaganda to look at the real-world ramifications of this.
- The hard drop in commercial real estate is going to end in a lot of big loans going unpaid. Might end in some bank failures.
- The drop in assessed value is going to hit cities hard in the pocket as they depend a lot on these property taxes from commercial properties to pay theirs bills (social programs, subsidized public transportation, police, fire, public housing, roads, etc).
- It will increase sprawl as more people can now live anywhere and push into wilderness areas and we lose more open space.
- A lot of small businesses depend on those dense commercial areas. You’ll see more contractors, restaurants, etc having to close and downtowns getting deserted like happened in the 70s as people fled to suburbs.
You see a lot of people saying “just turn them into residences!”. It is very difficult and expensive to turn buildings designed as open office spaces into residences.
But corporations have achieved very difficult things in a very short span that cost very many billions like - pivoted to AI which was very difficult until ChatGPT became popular.
Well… mabye they shulould have been nice to workers and have normal apartment prices.
I wouldn’t call those examples real world, they created their own problem. Real world is worker trying to live semi normal life.
Good points. Regarding point 2, I think we’re going to see cities shift to trying to attract people rather than corporations.
Attracting an employer is now a less reliable way to attract their staff to a community.
I suspect we will soon find that policies that attract great grocery stores into a walkable neighborhoods are more effective for cities than implementing lax corporate tax policies.
Re: Sprawl. The world is actually rather empty. A lot of changes are going to happen in domino fashion.
Indeed. And work location is still only one of many reasons to prefer city life. Cinemas, grocery stores, bars, stadiums and playgrounds aren’t going to instantly spread into our most rural areas.
Commercial real estate owners strike back.
I think the companies were lying to us when covid started. They said working from home was awesome and we could still do our jobs well so investors wouldn’t get scared. But now they want us to come back to the office and they say working from home is bad for us. They are just trying to trick us into doing what they want.
I mean, it’s just capitalism. Beginning of the pandemic: thank god for remote work, don’t worry investors we’re not going out of business. End of pandemic: welp, I have to justify my position and why we’re paying all this real estate get back in the office so I can micro-manage you and create useless meetings no one needs so no one realizes that I don’t really do anything around here.
It’s about money and control. Money invested in and harvested from owning commercial properties. Control from making employees do things they don’t want to, just to beat them down and “keep them in line”. A lot of bosses exercise power for its own sake, unfortunately.
I have empathy for folks who want to collaborate, and/or be mentored, and/or socialize at work. I no longer want or need those things from my job, but…I came up that way so it would be hypocritical of me to say that others shouldn’t want them.
On the other hand, cars are destroying everything and commuting in 2023 (if you don’t truly need to) is just dumb. Progress always comes with some amount of pain and adjustment.
It’s simple, during the pandemic they couldn’t have workers come in but they couldn’t have just no work force so they pushed for work from home and made it seem like a big positive to keep money flowing into their pockets. Now that they can have people come into the office they need to justify their leases and justify their middle management oversight so they need people coming back to the offices. It’s not about whats convent or comfortable for the workers, it’s what can make them the most money and justify expenses as to not spook investors. If the company could cancel even half of their leases they would and have most everyone work from home and maybe even cut back on middle management. However they got 20-30 year leases to save money(in month to month payments) and it’d be really expensive to exit the deal sooooo justifying the lease is more important.
it’s what can make them the most money and justify expenses as to not spook investors
Seems contradictory to me. I think they don’t actually give a shit about making the company money, they’re just straight scamming investors in favor of their own personal interests where they can get away with it.
You’re not crazy.
Fact is, at the beginning, remote work was a requirement for companies to keep operating (aka, printing money for the execs and shareholders), so it was freely discussed as a positive thing.
Now that shareholders and execs can require RTO, the narrative is reversed. If you look at most of the articles surrounding WFH “not working” there’s a very high chance that the motivation for such statements revolves around what management says about WFH, with no actual data to corroborate the message.
If you do your own research, a lot of what was true for WFH at the start of the pandemic is still true. The numbers and studies show that on the whole in the majority of circumstances, WFH increases productivity and makes workers happier overall. There are a few exceptions to this, I’m sure of that, and for each person, WFH or in office should be a personal choice, but it’s not. You should be allowed to work where you feel most productive and happy. As long as it doesn’t negatively impact your output, then it shouldn’t matter, but to execs, it does matter.
IMO, the motivation for forced RTO is twofold: first, control. The company you work for wants to exert control over you, so you have to do something that maybe you’re not a big fan of doing, simply because they say so. Additionally, they have more control over your day to day actions while you’re at the office. When you get to converse with others, monitoring how much time you’re spending away from your desk, the ability to walk up to you and grill you for any reason (or no reason). The second, is justifying office expenses. Either to be able to write it off, or pay their real estate owning buddies so those people can get money that could otherwise go to, IDK, wages (lol, it wouldn’t, but you know), and by having the vast majority of their workforce in house all the time, they can keep that going.
I’m sure there’s more to it, but that’s my impression. Fact is, very few companies are allowing RTO to be just an option. Everything is either part-in-office (aka hybrid), or forced full time RTO. Full remote positions are evaporating.
Companies exerting control is most of my issue personally. When you realize how much of your life they own and control, you don’t want to give that back. And I never will.
Real estate tycoons have a huge microphone
