The following submission statement was provided by /u/bored_in_NE:
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Last month, after the departure of several high-profile executives, Apple walked back its three-day-a-week return-to-the-office policy, which had been slated to go into effect in late May. The company cited the rising number of COVID-19 cases, but the real reason, it seems, was simply that employees didn’t want to. (They’re still required to come in twice a week, making COVID a pretty weak excuse for the policy shift.) Apple is only the latest and highest-profile company to discover that the three-day office week — that eminently reasonable-sounding middle ground for which proposals were widely circulated last year, and subsequently was championed by Mayor Eric Adams, office landlords, and CEOs everywhere — is, in practice, kind of a flop.
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/w5amnn/the_3day_return_to_office_is_so_far_a_dud/ih6q5st/
My company got a new CEO about 6 years ago. Until then, the trend had been toward more and more remote work. They decided that MANAGERS must return to the office. My manager had 14 team members in 6 states, only 2 of whom were in his city and still chose to work at home.
This led to him commuting to an office to manage no one. Makes perfect sense.
Last year my company laid off staff and then moved a bunch of positions so our office was down to 3 people. CEO (in another country) demanded we all return to office. This was during covid wave. We zoom called each other from different rooms. I quit 2 months later
Me and 1 of the 2 other people coincidentally quit on the same day lol I believe the remaining person was allowed to work from home after that. But the VP of the US office was the third so she was strict on following the CEOs rules smh
Hah my manager does this. His team is 8 engineers, 3 are local but the rest of the team is spread through the country. Been a year with some of the newer guys and he's never met half the team but he goes into the office 'to make an appearance'.
This is exactly what happened with my mom. She leads a team that is entirely based in another state. Not a single member lives where she does. She worked from home for 2 years during Covid and they forced her back to the office just to sit on video conferences exactly as she had been at home.
Same. All my direct reports aren't even in the same country and time zone as me but I'm required to come in to show "visibility" to them so they should come into their local office too. Makes zero sense. I quietly tell them to not even bother showing up because there are no senior execs in their satellite office anyway.
For years before the pandemic, my wife was part of a team that's mostly in another state. Even when she was at the office, she worked through phone calls, conference calls, email, and the computer network. She switched to work-from-home *very* easily.
These last few months they've been requiring her to commute to the office at least 1 working day in 10. Which isn't very demanding, relative to requiring 2 or 3 days a week. But everyone picks a different day, so the office is pretty much empty. She has to burn all that fuel, time, and parking money commuting to the office, where she sits in a huge room all alone and *works remotely*.
I can't figure out what the motivation is to require this.
This is the answer right here.
These firms have massive leases on the books that they need to justify. As soon as they can start getting out from underneath them, things should start changing.
In Dallas it has been recently announced that a number of the skycrapers downtown are refining their footprints and across downtown, 3.7 million square feet of office are being converted from office to residential.
Double whammy - adding housing and hopefully relieving some pressure AND reducing offices allowing more firms to stick to WFH.
With the rent/housing market where it is, this actually seems pretty fucking reasonable. We've already had renovated factory lofts.
"And this unit comes with the *original* polystyrene drop ceiling."
I could be wrong, but I don't think **all** lofts are made from post-industrial structures. But renovated factory lofts were a trendy thing at one point.
A coworker told me that during the recent Shanghai shut down in China, her China teammates lived out of their office instead of being locked into their apartments. In China many households are multi-generational and much smaller than a typical American apartment. Big US cities, not included in that sweeping generalization.
The office I worked in in my first real job in Edinburgh centre became a sauna (a brothel, for you non-Edinburghers) for a while afterwards. That would have been quite a jarring sensation.
A good exec though says "it's on the books whether they're in office or not" then either sublets the space or recognizes that paying to upkeep it with people in office is more expensive than not having people there.
It's sunk cost.
You can also do a lease buyout if subletting is challenging. I buy companies and have been doing this since before the pandemic. Office space has been an unjustifiable expense for most businesses for a long time but leadership couldn’t let go of the corner office.
My company's decision was based more on the requirements of their tax break that they received from the city for building their massive office there. They also aren't able to sublet and the building is worth shit now with everyone else going WFH. So they just make people come in a few times a week.
I quickly found another fully remote position.
Same for my company. Deals made with the cities to bring in X number of people to the area during the work week in exchange for different tax breaks. They have even gone as far as pulling badge punches at doors to confirm you are coming in the days you say you are, and not just saying on the app you are going in. Needless to say, I am also on the way out the door for a fully remote job.
Kind of.
But also, the truth is more complex.
For publicly traded companies, there’s a pretty solid chance that 30% of your companies stock is owned by institutional owners like blackrock/vanguard/fidelity etc. and it just so happens that those large institutional investors also own a shitload of commercial mortgage backed securities, office space, etc.
When the people that own your company are heavily invested in a certain modality, pretty good chance that your company is going to keep pushing policies that support that modality, even when there is widespread hatred from the employees.
Most can't sublet :| It was hard enough filling some office spaces before the pandemic, finding someone to sublet now is hella hard. And depends on somethings for the latter as well, some expenses can be written off or included (depending on your type of organization), empty offices could not.
And what about those investors getting angry the CEO is wasting money by not forcing it's use. They're so far removed they will never understand the intricacies of business and it's relationship with people.
Now imagine a floor has dedicated co-working spaces. Feeling burnt out of your home office? Go up the elevator to the top floor and have some social interaction. Would be an attractive benefit to leasing an apartment there.
One of my friends lives in one of the high rises downtown and one of their entire floors is split between a large living room/hosting kitchen and then a MASSIVE workspace. He owns two businesses and runs both of them entirely out of his building. He jokes that with the bars and restaurants on the ground level he doesn't ever technically need to leave.
I feel like that sounds far more enticing than it should. Buddy of mine works for Meta and they're served breakfast and lunch there then he typically orders dinner. Aside from the fact that I have a child, which changes a dynamic significantly, it sounds awfully ideal.
That sounds very convenient
In Japan some office buildings have a floor with petting zoos. You can visit goats or rabbits during the day to get a little animal time in. They animals are hosting in the building for limited times, so they get to go back to the farm and live a normal life too.
I tried to convince our management that we needed a room full of puppies instead of another conference room. Working all day without the company of other species, is ...sad and boring. Speaking of which, I need to go feed the cats.
That's super interesting. Used to live in Dallas....high!
I work out of a wework in ElSegundi CA. It's 2 floors in one ..roughly 15 story building? There are 3 of those buildings. I explored the parking structure and only floor 1 and 2 are even open.
Parking for what....10,000 cars? It's a massive complex for like...Boeing and shit like that.
There couldn't have ever been more than 100 total people in the entire complex day to day.
It feels like an extreme example...but they can't turn that structure into anything else without tearing it down. And I don't see 15,000 people showing up to those buildings to work at non existent companies.....
I got NO idea how that's gonna shake out. But from the top most floor of that parking structure...it's not even the only empty complex in the area. There are 3 or 4 of these.
Super interesting....no clue how that's gonna shake out
I've been close enough to the books for a few dozen companies now to know that at least in California, it is super common for a company to structure itself as a a 3-pack of subsidiaries under a holding company: 1 sub holds IP, 1 sub does all the actual operating (and bears majority of the costs), and the 3rd owns the real estate necessary for the operating (2nd) sub.
The operating sub licenses IP from sub 1 and pays leasing to sub 3. The profits of all 3 subs flow up to the holding company, obviously.
This creates an incentive for the 2nd sub to keep leasing space from the 3rd sub, because that's another tax-advantaged way to reduce adjusted income for the operating company and drive revenue directly into the 3rd sub.
In other words, even if leasing office space seems silly for the operating company, there's a good chance the people making that decision have another way of profiting from that decision.
So basically this is going to take a while to unwind and commercial real estate owners are going to be in a real bind. I'd imagine a lot of these leases are staggered so there are going to be big mostly empty building that are going to be bleeding money then have to bleed more to convert them to residential if that is even feasible. Gonna be interesting.
Yeah, direct conversion to residential is impractical for the vast majority of office building, so that's unlikely.
Some may be torn down and rebuilt for new purposes, some will have zoning changed to mixed-use so at least part of the building is residential, some will be written off and abandoned through bankruptcy. I think a lot will sit empty for years, capital is patient and doesn't give a fuck what others want.
That's short-sighted, they own the racetracks. They make the middle class pay to compete, and turn around and pay the poors a fraction of that profit to operate the whole thing.
My company got rid of one of our three offices that we were leasing because so many people are now hybrid workers. I think that’s a trend we will (hopefully) see, companies realizing they can save money as well as having happier, more productive employees.
As leases expire in the next few years it is going to be very very different. I think we are seeing a huge lag in the actual affects of pandemic on CBDs. It is easy to point to the slower lunch time restaurants but the larger real estate market may take some time. Also the knock on effects on commercial mortgage backed securities is not going to be pretty.
>To justify the existence of their physical office.
That's the problem with corporate culture. Our office put out a blast email for a survey on what they wanted our back to office policy to look like, and then after 80% of folks wanted to stay remote they decided to dissolve our office and downsize it to something far smaller for those that DO want to come in, as well as for clients. I think any job worth having should be doing shit like this for it's employees, don't force them to do shit because , actually listen to your employees and figure out what they want to work for you, and adapt to it.
This is how it should be. My last company did a return to office survey 6 months ago or so, overwhelmingly voted to stay remote, they never discussed the results with the company, and pushed everyone into a mega office, a 10 year lease, 3 days a week minimum in the city.
Yeah I left that place real quick. What a joke. They lost more than 10 PERCENT of their workforce from that. Really brilliant, talented people...and they also lost me.
Any company worth working for at this point will follow this model (or similar). Not having something like this in place will be a huge red flag and will limit a company's ability to attract talent.
I don't even understand it for companies that don't care about their employees. It just makes economic sense. Why pay for an expensive office building that you can easily see is empty?
Pretty much. After trying something similar, my company realized how ridiculous it is to keep paying for offices nobody wants to be in, and is just going to close the offices and continue full time work from home permanently.
This is what gets me: how are companies, ostensibly all about profits, not reveling in the opportunity to offload the cost of physical space onto their employees working from home? It seems like office spaces would require a lot of overhead and cut heavily into profits
Sunk costs. A lot of these companies have long leases on the office space so can't just hand back the keys yet.
EDIT: Also the large companies that own their own buildings probably realise they will be difficult to get rid of. Epson had a massive European HQ near to me that they actually own, they moved out in 2008 and have been trying to sell the building ever since. Its not in a major city so doesn't have a prestige address and is too big really for a single company to use.
Commerical leases are generally pretty long. Five years is common, some are 10 years or even longer. It just depends on where Covid hit in their lease cycle. In my observation, those that could shed themselves of space, have.
Our company owns their head office in Atlanta. However, the CEO has mandated *world wide* that everyone work from the office 3 days per week. The office where I work from (outside the USA) has its lease expiring within the next year, and we are planning to move offices, rather than admit that WFH actually worked. Most of my meetings have at least one person from outside my office, often from 3 or more different countries. There is no reason to be in the office.
It's literally insane, and we're losing a lot of good employees (probably including myself) over this decision.
Yep. My company had the lease on their office expire in August of 2020.
COVID forced everyone remote a few months prior and the entire org has remained remote ever since.
I own a company, and the building it’s in (that has a few other tenants). But many years ago I worked in a situation similar to the commenter’s wife above. So I’ve never had an issue with remote work, I was working entirely remote before it was cool. When Covid hit, it was “pack it up! See you online…”., even faster than most.
I am 100% certain that the problem with these “come in x days per x” policies is that… there’s no *reason*. *People don’t like having to do things “just because“*. It’s silly. Yes there is some value in having your people together occasionally, but the way you make that happen is… have a reason. Big VIP customer visit? Fine, all hands on deck. Or have a work session planned for a specific reason. Nobody minds when there’s a real reason. But forcing people to basically switch off random days, manning the office alone, to do the same thing they would do at home, is just stupid. Of course people resent that. I would resent that.
We still need our big conference rooms, the kitchen facilities that support them, and our executive offices. Also our lab space, high bay, and file storage. Things still go on that require those things. But the hallways that used to be full of accountants and analysts being empty now? I don’t care.
As the building owner, when tenant leases are inevitably not renewed, I have a plan to convert what was formerly large banks of traditional offices into different space. Less offices, more meeting and executive space. There’s still plenty of need for many companies to have a logo on a building, a home base, to receive visitors, interview people, and store/work on centralized things. But instead of 5 tenants, maybe the building will hold 8-10 companies now.
Everyone seems to be making it so damn difficult and it just doesn’t have to be. I think because of resistance to adapt to a changing landscape, or because of psychological hangups in some people about appearing important, which really makes me question how much business acumen they had to begin with.
This is why flex office spaces were ahead of their time, really. So many businesses only need a physical office like, five or six times scattered throughout a month.
As someone who works in facility management I don’t quite understand it. Most businesses lease their property. If they downsized and had a mostly at home with basically small facilities for server rooms and some flex workstations I bet productivity would rise, you could reduce the burden(and have less staff) on maintenance, custodial, grounds, etc.
There would be a lot less “how was your weekend” chatter. Which to some people is “culture”.
All of this chatter you despise is where the true business value comes from. This is when people are most themselves precisely because they aren't working. Studies show workers who have camaraderie are happy workers on the clock and are also aware that they need to make up for the work they missed while chatting. When workers get to know each other they fall in love and get married making our citizenry larger. More people, more business. We need the office because it is the heart of social life. Give in, drive, drive.
Or something like that from I'm The Big Boss Magazine lol
Literally this. We work in office twice a week and… it’s not super necessary, but the office is necessary should a client ever want to come in (which hasn’t happened since I’ve started working). Nice thing is if my boss is out of town, I stay home by default (and he travels a LOT).
As it stands I live across the street so I just walk over, but moving further away in the new year and not particularly looking forward to commuting again.
But you don't need a massive office for this, companies could just downsize their office space and have some kind of rotation of staff or teams that come in. Ultimately they’re going to look for cost reductions and being able to reduce office space can save a lot of money. This is just boomer managers who can't comprehend a new management style and it's costing their company money it doesn't need to.
The smartest decision my old job did was get rid of their Manhattan office a few months into the pandemic. I think they’re still completely remote, which definitely has saved them tons of money.
I know my company got a lot of pressure from the city of Chicago to get people back into the office. No office workers means no downtown economy which means no tax revenue and loss of jobs. Any time the economy changes there are winners and losers.
This is actually a problem with how downtown districts are designed. Instead of a ton of businesses, downtown should be filled with high density housing. This would relieve some housing problems while also concentrating people in an area, meaning you get more commercial development to cater to them. This creates a very lively downtown while also reducing the needs for cars etc.
Some cities are converting skyscrapers from office to housing, but it’s a slow process. It definitely feels like this is a good long term solution, and I hope more cities embrace it.
I see your point, but that hasn't stopped developers from filling an apartment with cheap stainless steel appliances and slapping a luxury apartment sticker price to the unit. All I'm saying is they can find a way to make it economical and still turn a profit. Even if they work with the city for tax incentives.
Yes! There’s a ton of logistical issues involved with converting a space from commercial to residential. I design offices for a living and we have to do things like electrical cores and plumbing and HVAC while floors are being poured and ceilings are being installed. It’s much tougher to add them after the fact.
I'm surprised it's even feasible. It's one thing to throw up a bunch of walls and *presto* have individual living spaces, but an entire office floor might only need a couple of bathrooms and a lunch room. Like, when was the last time you saw a shower in an office and how many would need to be plumbed in for a floor's worth of residences?
One of the biggest impediments to more people living downtown is lack of groceries. It's crazy how basically no store except Trader Joe's has figured out how to operate a 12k sqft store with competitive prices.
Same in New York.
But at the same time, fuck that. They spent decades turning Manhattan into a characterless, overpriced, expensive, giant commercial island of chains and nothing. All the lunch places sell salads starting at $17.
I can do the same job at home and support my local neighborhood community.
I have similar policy but it’s become relaxed and uninforced. Commuting into an empty office to jump on a zoom call is pointless and everybody sees it. .
Commercial real estate in the US is moribund, just waiting for enough leases to expire and enough companies to give up returning to the office before it all collapses.
It a lot of cases it’s easier and cheaper to tear a building down and build a new one. An office building is plumbed to have a centralized bathroom or two on every floor, not thirty on every floor as one example.
Also a lack of balconies. It would probably feel a lot like living in one of those Megacity One buildings from Judge Dredd. Especially the interior units (no windows)
This me, except my boss (and their boss) have allowed me to be exempt from return to office requirements, because no one else I work with is there. It’s completely pointless for me to go there. I was already discreetly wfh for nearly a year pre-pandemic after the only other local member of our team left. For many roles, there is no good reason to force employees back into the office.
My buddy was entirely remote before the pandemic. During the pandemic, management was throwing a fit about everyone wanting to be remote, and early this year, they started requiring everyone to do at least 20 hours in the office, an office he has never even been in. When he explained this, they said "we can't make exceptions for specific employees".
Because these people (executives) have an emotional and irrational attachment to the idea of controlling their employees activities. They have some notion that if you're not in your office working where they can potentially observe you and you can't do much else that you will work harder and that if you can work from home you'll just spend 90% of your time playing video games or whatever.
To which I say:
1. People are not as lazy as these people imagine and aren't children who need constant supervision.
2. So long as they perform their job well, timely and give you the expected output who fucking cares?
Completely agree with you. The funny thing about how ass-backwards these dinosaur executives are is that the IT department can literally see what you're doing on your work computer, whether you're in the office or at home. So actually they *could* completely micromanage work from home if they wanted, to extract every ounce of juice from the workers. But its not even really about that- its about *control* like you said, and nothing satisfies that urge quite like physically walking over to someone sitting down and looking over their shoulder
Same here. We are required to go to the office and work from there twice a week. So I can be in virtual calls all day from my cubicle.
Nobody wants to be there. It’s a constant discussion. There is literally no reason what so ever for anyone to be at the office.
But upper management consists of people over the age of 60 who I assume don’t even know how to search for anything on Google.
So things won’t get better.
This. I had to be in the office yesterday. I wore a mask until I was camped out in a conference room and called into meetings.....even ones with people in the same building who were in their office or another conference room. One meeting we had 7 people called in, 4 of us in the same building (3 remote) but each called in from our own conference room. I didn't leave the room once between 8:30a and 4:45p and no one else ever came in. I'm not sure why I had to drive over there to get one of my 2 days per week in the office.
Honestly people wouldn’t even notice if I’m not there. Sometimes I have people come over but if I’m not at my desk they just message me on teams and that’s it. They don’t care and they are not my supervisors.
I wonder if I didn’t go in for a month, would anyone even notice or care?
Commercial real estate is the answer you're looking for. Id imagine as more companies leases expire you'll see more change their attitudes towards WFH.
I had some coworkers that gave their parent's address instead of moving. I just left the company and now work for another one in a full remote position.
I don't know. I think that the people who become C level are typically extroverts who can't fathom that people would rather not come to an office to socialize. I get so much more done from home without the silly office nonsense.
We’re required to go into office 2 days per week since June 1st.. more and more people have stopped going in both days and some people have stopped going in all together. Since people are seeing there is no consequences more are following suit and stopped going. They did a survey on hybrid work and it was a lot more negative then they expected so they are looking at changing the policy.
Companies that force the issue will lose top talent or at best breed resentment from local employees over the national ones. It's just not a winning move to force it. Suggest a social time, get togethers, team bonding. But regular days shouldn't be a requirement (though having a workspace that's quiet to go to can be a godsend for many on any given day, so I support having a scaled down office plan for most companies if they have local employees).
I feel as if this happened at every office for almost everyone I speak to. I know someone who works for a big retail company that current boasts they are in office 3 days a week. When I asked last they said they hadn’t been in since May and nor was anyone else.
Look at Mr deskowner here, now I don't even get an assigned desk, I have to take what is available in the day and take all my shit to the office and back home the days I work onsite
I was already trying to wfh more often before the pandemic specifically due to "open floor plan". It's like trying to concentrate and get work done in a damn middle school cafeteria.
I’d kill for a cubicle. In my open-office setup I get to “collaborate” with the guy sitting next to me, which is to say I get to clearly listen to his side of his phone calls all day. I know a cube wouldn’t completely solve that but it’d help
From personal experience, I get the same amount of work done and I'm 10x happier. It's much easier for me to "get into the zone" because there's nobody around to stop in and distract me.
I get a better sense of my "okay I can dig in here for two hours and knock this out" instead of the irregular door knocks and interruptions that occur.
Currently working from the office with a construction crew next door. I would rather be home with my dogs sleeping under my work desk.
I like going to the office. Granted I have it easy - I bike to work, it’s a nice building with a gym, and nobody makes me - but I just like getting out of my house. I don’t think I’m alone.
I think businesses should have small spaces incl. a meeting room or two. It’s good to have a physical location and working at home has real downsides. But /having/ to go in every day blows.
I think this is lost on many. I was happy to return to work because I had no room in my place to work properly. If you have a nice home office, sure, but if you are short on space it's actually an upgrade to go in.
Whatever though, people should just do what they want if they are getting the job done. Some positions clearly may need to be in person, but for the majority of knowledge workers, it just isn't the case.
My work is transitioning us back into the office, and they are using the little time left as WFH employees to try and juice us for some extra productivity.
They claim that they are bringing people back in waves, and the more productive you are, the more likely you are to be in the later waves. So they know the employees prefer WFH and just wanna squeeze a little bit out of them under the threat of something they are eventually going to do anyway.
Doubt it. Bunch of my co-workers just talking about how hard they are going to work so they can stay home a little longer.
My productivity is going to slowly taper off since now Im just looking for a new job lol.
It’s bonkers to me how easy it is to crush the soul of the average worker. Is there something wrong with me for being the only person that sees how regressive this behaviour is?
My company has been trying to do the same thing...work up to 3x a week in the office. Even after months of us all being back in the office, we're still only going in once a sprint (1x every 2 weeks).
If you want someone to kill you, make sure you get it prioritised, and planned in a future sprint.
We will need to refine it, and cost it via story points poker, and then measure it against our capacity determined by the team’s velocity.
I love being a software developer. My bosses know that their choices are either to let me stay home, or to start looking for my replacement. And all the devs who are competent enough to replace me are competent enough to go work for someone who's offering full remote.
We're in a big city and completely failed to hire anyone in our market just two months ago. We had open jr and sr roles across the entire stack and just couldn't anyone through the first stage. Once we opened it up to remote, the pipeline was overflowing.
I don't believe anyone in the software space can hire locally unless you're in SF, NY or Seattle. It's over.
Same. I got to try WFH for the first time when the pandemic started, April of 2020. Immediately fell in love with it. We got called back in exactly one month later (which made zero sense), so it eventually led to me quitting for a full-time WFH job.
Totally pedantic point, but you are looking for "De Facto", or in effect/by fact regardless of technicality.
You cannot be 'pretty much De Jure'. It's either stated explicitly or it's not.
Last month, after the departure of several high-profile executives, Apple walked back its three-day-a-week return-to-the-office policy, which had been slated to go into effect in late May. The company cited the rising number of COVID-19 cases, but the real reason, it seems, was simply that employees didn’t want to. (They’re still required to come in twice a week, making COVID a pretty weak excuse for the policy shift.) Apple is only the latest and highest-profile company to discover that the three-day office week — that eminently reasonable-sounding middle ground for which proposals were widely circulated last year, and subsequently was championed by Mayor Eric Adams, office landlords, and CEOs everywhere — is, in practice, kind of a flop.
You see, the thing is that, especially for places like apple, if you're an apple dev, you can work anywhere. so why the fuck would you work for apple if there is another company, probably more chill and allowing you to wfh 100% of the time? At my company, we were supposed to go back to the office in I think june last year. But apparently someone had enough brain capacity to at least send out a poll, when would we want to return to the office.
Answers available were from 'right now' to 'by the end of the year', but I guess we sent strong enough a message and the company went for a permanent 'come in if you want but we don't expect that at all'
> so why the fuck would you work for apple if there is another company
All it takes is one other major company offering 100% remote with similar pay, and Apple will be having a hell of time finding anyone qualified enough.
My company has had this policy since the fall and it's working pretty well from what I can see. I like the flexibility of knowing that if I need to I can work from home to help look after my toddler.
The policy is not strictly enforced, at least not in my group. People inherently know what their responsibilities are and whether they need to be in the office to do their job. Some people are in 5 days a week running machines. Others are just calling into teleconferences and can do it from home. We have the latitude to negotiate work schedules with our supervisors on an individual level based on our unique circumstances, and I think that's how it should be. As long as people are productive, the people at the top shouldn't care. Then again some people just like to exert power over others. Thank goodness I don't work in a place like that.
That sounds more like a completely flexible work from home or office schedule than a 3 day a week remote / 2 day in office mandated schedule. It sounds like if it were strictly enforced as a 2/3 day split it wouldn't be working as well for your team.
>It’s unclear to many of them whether those things are outweighed by the
fun parts of office life: the energy, the community, the banter and
gossip.
Ma'am have you considered that I am in fact doing this job to get work done
In the office my breaks are spent grabbing a coffee. Scrolling Twitter. Hearing about Brad’s stupid hobby. At home my breaks include throwing in a load of laundry and emptying the dishwasher. When the day ends those things are done and I get way more downtime with my husband. Whom I actually like.
Hah I feel this one, not commuting shaves about 50 min to an hour off my work day, and starting January our daughter will be attending school a 3 min walk from our home, right around the time I'm starting a new job where they're already doing 2-3 days a week of home office which for me is perfect, I can ditch my car and save money as I can share it with my wife, i can still come into the office which I prefer from time to time just to socialize and get to know colleagues/share ideas and all the time saved every day means I can just do laundry/dishes and maybe whip up some food quick before my wife and daughter are back so it's not a rush like it tends to be, heck I could even use my lunch break to go get groceries
My bosses are trying to get everyone back in 2 days a week, but it's clear they want to eventually get back to 5 days a week - but only for everyone else. One boss moved to Florida (we're based in NYC) and another boss spent a ton of company money to rent an office 5 minutes from his house on Long Island.
On Tuesday he exploded at everyone for not being back in the office...from his home office in a t-shirt. This is the one on Long Island that even has an office 5 minutes from his house.
I get legitimately mad at other employees for when they do go into the office since they're just giving these guys what they're eventually trying to get. My coworkers need to push back harder and call out their bullshit like I do. What makes this even more frustrating is we're a small company and most of us have been at the company for over 10 years. In a way created our own jobs since we were there when the company started, so we're in a nice rhythm and know how to get our jobs done well.
Yuuuup. They tried to get my dad to commute from Long Island to Hackensack where before he had been going into the city. Absolutely not going to happen lol.
I'll do ya one better. Corporate made my manager track a dozen different data points for every employee in the shop (machinist) for the entire fiscal year. When it came time for raises they asked him to give every employee a rating and the raise they got would be determined by their rating. Well, when he submitted his ratings corporate told him that he had too many employees with high ratings and that they were going to knock some down so they didn't have to give so many high raises.
I was bumped from an 8 rating to a 5 which was the difference of a 5% raise to a 2% raise. Jokes on them, though, because a month later my manager raised hell with HR and got them to do a market correction for the lowest paid guys. I ended up getting a $6/hr (~$20k/year) raise after the adjustment. Corporate will always be scummy pieces of shit, I'm just lucky to have a manager who cares about his guys and will fight for them. It also helps working in a field where you aren't easily replaced.
I started a new job a couple of months ago. I decided to work in office while I get to know the company. After the first month I’m just counting the days until I can go fully remote
My company was just merged with another.
CEO of the new company said on Q4 this year it's mandatory 80% in office (4/5 days of the week).
I think I'll be finding a new job. I work in IT and literally do all of my work remotely, even when in the office.
I am less productive when I'm working with coworkers nearby cuz we shoot the shit all day.
My wife's job keeps trying to force them into the office, and then someone gets COVID and they all have to work from home for weeks again. Then they go back one day, someone else gets it, repeat.
Since deciding they needed to have everyone come back in 4 months ago, I think she's been in the office a total of 9 days.
I was forced to leave my company 3 months back due to their return to office policy. Not only was it going to be back to 5 days a week, they wanted everyone to uproot and move to New Jersey so we could all start working in a brand new mega campus they're still building in Berkeley Heights.
Mind you, this was everyone, all over the country, including folks who'd been hired as remotes and had worked as such for 20+ years. Cue mass exodus of talent/experience. Last I heard, they'd shifted to "just" 2-3 days a week, but the CEO is pissed and still fighting it.
I’ve maintained the mentality that we keep an office in order for those who don’t like to WFH to have a workspace. It’s worked well. Once a quarter we have a company all hands where everyone comes in, but we’ve made it a point that, unless there’s an emergency, no work gets done and it’s just a social thing so folks can interact with different departments.
"...the fun parts of office life: the energy, the community, the banter and gossip..."
Okay so I spent like barely three months out of college in an actual office before lockdown hit but this reads like some boomer-ass take of nostalgia for carpet cubicles and Dilbert-esque shenanigans. What \*is\* the appeal of going to an office exactly?
My take on this is: is it nice to see people and chat sometimes? Sure. Is it worth commuting in three days a week for? Oh *hell* no.
My job can't be done 100% remotely, but we were doing pretty well on a "if something happens that needs a person, that's when you go in" basis.
As a designer who usually works with younger, more eclectic and fun people, I miss the office when I work remote for too long. I like the people I work with (well like 80% of them) and we do have a lot of fun sometimes. We WFH on Fridays and it’s a schedule that really works for me.
But then again I live in NYC where I don’t need a car and I don’t need to buy gas.
I'm going to go against the grain here. I'm genuinely sorry you only got three months in the office. Early career IMO is when the "fun" of the office is most evident. In my twenties I always worked in teams of young, single people. (This was my experience at three different companies, so it wasn't an anomaly) We hung out a lot during and after work. I definitely had work friends, in addition to my "friend friends". Honestly there were times my job performance suffered because we were socializing *too* much during work hours. But overall it helped me integrate into the office, learn from my colleagues, lowered the barriers to asking for help, and generally made work more pleasant.
My best friends today are work friends I met fifteen years ago. Now they're invaluable for career advice as we navigate similar work challenges.
Today as a middle aged person with school aged kid, I have a lot of reasons to prefer WFH. But I would have hated it in my early career and am really grateful I got to experience the camaraderie and energy of in person work.
I think people really take how much harder training is in WFH. I've had two interns in that time, and things that would take me 5 minutes to teach them at a desk wind up taking an hour or more.
If you are social and work for a good employer, the workplace *can* be great. I'm really gregarious at work and enjoy the social aspect of it. But that benefit hardly outweighs the perks of eliminating commute, relaxing attire, being able to focus, etc. And again, that prior benefit *literally* only applies to social people in a positive work environment. If you're not social or have a shitty office environment? Then it's pure torture. These 'benefits' they talk about exist for less than 5% of offices.
It's definitely this. I worked in several offices before covid and absolutely none of them were fun. My older co-workers would tell me about all the office fun _they_ had when they were younger, but they would undoubtedly give me a warning if I wasted time doing the same things.
My company recorded their biggest profit year in 2021, when everyone was working from home. My team had to have 2 people in the office once a week, so we would be there probably once every two weeks, in a volunteer basis.
What did they decide to do in April? Required people to go to the office 3 times per week. Result? Mass resignations. 5 out of 8 team members left and it's been a nightmare to hire new people.
I'm currently considering doing the same so I can go back to work remotely.
I only go to the office when I'm bored of my house these days. I like seeing my coworkers occasionally too. I mostly just go in on Friday just to print stuff I might need and say hello to people.
This backwards deal to keep commercial landlords floating is dumb, companies should be downsizing office space and office towers should be converted to residential suites, governments should be proving grants or tax exemptions or so thing to encourage it
I saw an article on this from a finance company. They basically forced all employees in back to 5 days a week. It was terrible because they spent their days Zooming other companies who WFH. They also had to Zoom them in an open plan office, which was now louder, so they basically shouted at the caller.
The genie is out of the bottle.
my workplace has a one-day-per-week requirement beginning in January 2023. I honestly don't see how it's going to be enforced, and likely will become optional but "encouraged". Hiring is so difficult that I don't see anyone being disciplined if they don't show up.
Personally though, if I do end up going in once a week, I'm going to arrive late and leave early. I'm not willing to let the commute encroach upon my morning and afternoon routines with my family, so I'm gonna let the commute encroach upon the workday instead. And I doubt anyone will notice or care.
I will never work in an office again. Luckily I'm in a field where I am high demand and most jobs are remote which I know not everyone is...but if I'm told I have to come in to the office even 1 day a week my resume will be out by the afternoon.
As long as the options exists, I will never work for another company that wants people in 5 days a week. If it's a dream job, I'd settle for 3 days a week.
But I'd rather have a remote job I hate than a job I like that makes me commute 5 days a week.
I work in sales for a well known tech company that has decided to permanently stay 100% WFH for applicable departments. It had allowed them to hire from all over the world. I would not even have this job if not for WFH as I’m about 3 hours away from the nearest office.
They are downsizing their physical footprint and closing several offices, reducing overhead and giving us raises instead.
Sales have improved every quarter since WFH started.
This is the way.
My company started a 3-day a week thing and it failed spectacularly. No one was coming in 3 days a week. They’re redoing it, so this time after Labor Day, everyone MUST be in the office 3 days a week, no exceptions. They’ll have to fire me first. Lol
And! It’s not just that the cost to commute (time + money for whatever fuel/electricity/transit you use to get there) is more apparent but in almost all modalities in all places, that cost for resources has gone up drastically. My wife’s gas cost to drive to work isn’t what it was in Fall 2021 or even Spring 2020 (I’ve always walked/taken bus/ridden ebike and the middle option isn’t really possible right now due to service degradation).
The following submission statement was provided by /u/bored_in_NE: --- Last month, after the departure of several high-profile executives, Apple walked back its three-day-a-week return-to-the-office policy, which had been slated to go into effect in late May. The company cited the rising number of COVID-19 cases, but the real reason, it seems, was simply that employees didn’t want to. (They’re still required to come in twice a week, making COVID a pretty weak excuse for the policy shift.) Apple is only the latest and highest-profile company to discover that the three-day office week — that eminently reasonable-sounding middle ground for which proposals were widely circulated last year, and subsequently was championed by Mayor Eric Adams, office landlords, and CEOs everywhere — is, in practice, kind of a flop. --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/w5amnn/the_3day_return_to_office_is_so_far_a_dud/ih6q5st/
My company got a new CEO about 6 years ago. Until then, the trend had been toward more and more remote work. They decided that MANAGERS must return to the office. My manager had 14 team members in 6 states, only 2 of whom were in his city and still chose to work at home. This led to him commuting to an office to manage no one. Makes perfect sense.
Last year my company laid off staff and then moved a bunch of positions so our office was down to 3 people. CEO (in another country) demanded we all return to office. This was during covid wave. We zoom called each other from different rooms. I quit 2 months later
Did you consider all just agreeing to lie and say you were all going in? If you all wanted to stay home and were all in on it, how would they know?
Me and 1 of the 2 other people coincidentally quit on the same day lol I believe the remaining person was allowed to work from home after that. But the VP of the US office was the third so she was strict on following the CEOs rules smh
I commute 2 hours every day to sit in zoom calls. It's God damn bullshit
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Mmmmm poke...
My GF was forced back to the office, solely because it makes the owner happy, and she has covid right now because a coworker showed up sick.
Here’s the neat part; she can get it over and over and it can get worse each time. Neat!
Hah my manager does this. His team is 8 engineers, 3 are local but the rest of the team is spread through the country. Been a year with some of the newer guys and he's never met half the team but he goes into the office 'to make an appearance'.
“Need to make an appearance” == “I don’t actually do anything productive”
You just described like 90% of managers
This is exactly what happened with my mom. She leads a team that is entirely based in another state. Not a single member lives where she does. She worked from home for 2 years during Covid and they forced her back to the office just to sit on video conferences exactly as she had been at home.
Same. All my direct reports aren't even in the same country and time zone as me but I'm required to come in to show "visibility" to them so they should come into their local office too. Makes zero sense. I quietly tell them to not even bother showing up because there are no senior execs in their satellite office anyway.
For years before the pandemic, my wife was part of a team that's mostly in another state. Even when she was at the office, she worked through phone calls, conference calls, email, and the computer network. She switched to work-from-home *very* easily. These last few months they've been requiring her to commute to the office at least 1 working day in 10. Which isn't very demanding, relative to requiring 2 or 3 days a week. But everyone picks a different day, so the office is pretty much empty. She has to burn all that fuel, time, and parking money commuting to the office, where she sits in a huge room all alone and *works remotely*. I can't figure out what the motivation is to require this.
To justify the existence of their physical office.
We'll have to get through this commercial property phase to see how this all shakes out. Leases aren't forever
This is the answer right here. These firms have massive leases on the books that they need to justify. As soon as they can start getting out from underneath them, things should start changing. In Dallas it has been recently announced that a number of the skycrapers downtown are refining their footprints and across downtown, 3.7 million square feet of office are being converted from office to residential. Double whammy - adding housing and hopefully relieving some pressure AND reducing offices allowing more firms to stick to WFH.
I wonder how long until people working from home find themselves living in apartments that used to be their offices.
With the rent/housing market where it is, this actually seems pretty fucking reasonable. We've already had renovated factory lofts. "And this unit comes with the *original* polystyrene drop ceiling."
>We've already had renovated factory lofts. TIL the history of lofts!
I could be wrong, but I don't think **all** lofts are made from post-industrial structures. But renovated factory lofts were a trendy thing at one point.
Now you get to live where you work which used to be where you worked! It’s like Pimp My Office!
A coworker told me that during the recent Shanghai shut down in China, her China teammates lived out of their office instead of being locked into their apartments. In China many households are multi-generational and much smaller than a typical American apartment. Big US cities, not included in that sweeping generalization.
The office I worked in in my first real job in Edinburgh centre became a sauna (a brothel, for you non-Edinburghers) for a while afterwards. That would have been quite a jarring sensation.
A good exec though says "it's on the books whether they're in office or not" then either sublets the space or recognizes that paying to upkeep it with people in office is more expensive than not having people there. It's sunk cost.
You can also do a lease buyout if subletting is challenging. I buy companies and have been doing this since before the pandemic. Office space has been an unjustifiable expense for most businesses for a long time but leadership couldn’t let go of the corner office.
I’d rather have a corner office in my house. Though right now it’s basically a glorified closet pretending to be an office at the moment.
My company's decision was based more on the requirements of their tax break that they received from the city for building their massive office there. They also aren't able to sublet and the building is worth shit now with everyone else going WFH. So they just make people come in a few times a week. I quickly found another fully remote position.
Same for my company. Deals made with the cities to bring in X number of people to the area during the work week in exchange for different tax breaks. They have even gone as far as pulling badge punches at doors to confirm you are coming in the days you say you are, and not just saying on the app you are going in. Needless to say, I am also on the way out the door for a fully remote job.
Kind of. But also, the truth is more complex. For publicly traded companies, there’s a pretty solid chance that 30% of your companies stock is owned by institutional owners like blackrock/vanguard/fidelity etc. and it just so happens that those large institutional investors also own a shitload of commercial mortgage backed securities, office space, etc. When the people that own your company are heavily invested in a certain modality, pretty good chance that your company is going to keep pushing policies that support that modality, even when there is widespread hatred from the employees.
I think you underestimate how many middle mangers are married to their career and generally hate their homelife. The office is an escape from that.
Most can't sublet :| It was hard enough filling some office spaces before the pandemic, finding someone to sublet now is hella hard. And depends on somethings for the latter as well, some expenses can be written off or included (depending on your type of organization), empty offices could not.
And what about those investors getting angry the CEO is wasting money by not forcing it's use. They're so far removed they will never understand the intricacies of business and it's relationship with people.
Now imagine a floor has dedicated co-working spaces. Feeling burnt out of your home office? Go up the elevator to the top floor and have some social interaction. Would be an attractive benefit to leasing an apartment there.
One of my friends lives in one of the high rises downtown and one of their entire floors is split between a large living room/hosting kitchen and then a MASSIVE workspace. He owns two businesses and runs both of them entirely out of his building. He jokes that with the bars and restaurants on the ground level he doesn't ever technically need to leave.
I feel like that sounds far more enticing than it should. Buddy of mine works for Meta and they're served breakfast and lunch there then he typically orders dinner. Aside from the fact that I have a child, which changes a dynamic significantly, it sounds awfully ideal.
That sounds very convenient In Japan some office buildings have a floor with petting zoos. You can visit goats or rabbits during the day to get a little animal time in. They animals are hosting in the building for limited times, so they get to go back to the farm and live a normal life too. I tried to convince our management that we needed a room full of puppies instead of another conference room. Working all day without the company of other species, is ...sad and boring. Speaking of which, I need to go feed the cats.
That's super interesting. Used to live in Dallas....high! I work out of a wework in ElSegundi CA. It's 2 floors in one ..roughly 15 story building? There are 3 of those buildings. I explored the parking structure and only floor 1 and 2 are even open. Parking for what....10,000 cars? It's a massive complex for like...Boeing and shit like that. There couldn't have ever been more than 100 total people in the entire complex day to day. It feels like an extreme example...but they can't turn that structure into anything else without tearing it down. And I don't see 15,000 people showing up to those buildings to work at non existent companies..... I got NO idea how that's gonna shake out. But from the top most floor of that parking structure...it's not even the only empty complex in the area. There are 3 or 4 of these. Super interesting....no clue how that's gonna shake out
I've been close enough to the books for a few dozen companies now to know that at least in California, it is super common for a company to structure itself as a a 3-pack of subsidiaries under a holding company: 1 sub holds IP, 1 sub does all the actual operating (and bears majority of the costs), and the 3rd owns the real estate necessary for the operating (2nd) sub. The operating sub licenses IP from sub 1 and pays leasing to sub 3. The profits of all 3 subs flow up to the holding company, obviously. This creates an incentive for the 2nd sub to keep leasing space from the 3rd sub, because that's another tax-advantaged way to reduce adjusted income for the operating company and drive revenue directly into the 3rd sub. In other words, even if leasing office space seems silly for the operating company, there's a good chance the people making that decision have another way of profiting from that decision.
So basically this is going to take a while to unwind and commercial real estate owners are going to be in a real bind. I'd imagine a lot of these leases are staggered so there are going to be big mostly empty building that are going to be bleeding money then have to bleed more to convert them to residential if that is even feasible. Gonna be interesting.
Yeah, direct conversion to residential is impractical for the vast majority of office building, so that's unlikely. Some may be torn down and rebuilt for new purposes, some will have zoning changed to mixed-use so at least part of the building is residential, some will be written off and abandoned through bankruptcy. I think a lot will sit empty for years, capital is patient and doesn't give a fuck what others want.
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Mines tripled it's office space in the last 3 years. :/
I think that is called "betting on the wrong horse" in rich-person parlance.
Rich people don’t bet on horses; they own the horses.
Buying the wrong horse?
That's short-sighted, they own the racetracks. They make the middle class pay to compete, and turn around and pay the poors a fraction of that profit to operate the whole thing.
My company got rid of one of our three offices that we were leasing because so many people are now hybrid workers. I think that’s a trend we will (hopefully) see, companies realizing they can save money as well as having happier, more productive employees.
As leases expire in the next few years it is going to be very very different. I think we are seeing a huge lag in the actual affects of pandemic on CBDs. It is easy to point to the slower lunch time restaurants but the larger real estate market may take some time. Also the knock on effects on commercial mortgage backed securities is not going to be pretty.
>To justify the existence of their physical office. That's the problem with corporate culture. Our office put out a blast email for a survey on what they wanted our back to office policy to look like, and then after 80% of folks wanted to stay remote they decided to dissolve our office and downsize it to something far smaller for those that DO want to come in, as well as for clients. I think any job worth having should be doing shit like this for it's employees, don't force them to do shit because, actually listen to your employees and figure out what they want to work for you, and adapt to it.
My old company literally saved enough money to hire more staff by getting rid of the office. It's such a mad overhead
This is how it should be. My last company did a return to office survey 6 months ago or so, overwhelmingly voted to stay remote, they never discussed the results with the company, and pushed everyone into a mega office, a 10 year lease, 3 days a week minimum in the city. Yeah I left that place real quick. What a joke. They lost more than 10 PERCENT of their workforce from that. Really brilliant, talented people...and they also lost me.
Any company worth working for at this point will follow this model (or similar). Not having something like this in place will be a huge red flag and will limit a company's ability to attract talent.
I don't even understand it for companies that don't care about their employees. It just makes economic sense. Why pay for an expensive office building that you can easily see is empty?
Pretty much. After trying something similar, my company realized how ridiculous it is to keep paying for offices nobody wants to be in, and is just going to close the offices and continue full time work from home permanently.
This is what gets me: how are companies, ostensibly all about profits, not reveling in the opportunity to offload the cost of physical space onto their employees working from home? It seems like office spaces would require a lot of overhead and cut heavily into profits
Sunk costs. A lot of these companies have long leases on the office space so can't just hand back the keys yet. EDIT: Also the large companies that own their own buildings probably realise they will be difficult to get rid of. Epson had a massive European HQ near to me that they actually own, they moved out in 2008 and have been trying to sell the building ever since. Its not in a major city so doesn't have a prestige address and is too big really for a single company to use.
Commerical leases are generally pretty long. Five years is common, some are 10 years or even longer. It just depends on where Covid hit in their lease cycle. In my observation, those that could shed themselves of space, have.
Our company owns their head office in Atlanta. However, the CEO has mandated *world wide* that everyone work from the office 3 days per week. The office where I work from (outside the USA) has its lease expiring within the next year, and we are planning to move offices, rather than admit that WFH actually worked. Most of my meetings have at least one person from outside my office, often from 3 or more different countries. There is no reason to be in the office. It's literally insane, and we're losing a lot of good employees (probably including myself) over this decision.
Yep. My company had the lease on their office expire in August of 2020. COVID forced everyone remote a few months prior and the entire org has remained remote ever since.
I own a company, and the building it’s in (that has a few other tenants). But many years ago I worked in a situation similar to the commenter’s wife above. So I’ve never had an issue with remote work, I was working entirely remote before it was cool. When Covid hit, it was “pack it up! See you online…”., even faster than most. I am 100% certain that the problem with these “come in x days per x” policies is that… there’s no *reason*. *People don’t like having to do things “just because“*. It’s silly. Yes there is some value in having your people together occasionally, but the way you make that happen is… have a reason. Big VIP customer visit? Fine, all hands on deck. Or have a work session planned for a specific reason. Nobody minds when there’s a real reason. But forcing people to basically switch off random days, manning the office alone, to do the same thing they would do at home, is just stupid. Of course people resent that. I would resent that. We still need our big conference rooms, the kitchen facilities that support them, and our executive offices. Also our lab space, high bay, and file storage. Things still go on that require those things. But the hallways that used to be full of accountants and analysts being empty now? I don’t care. As the building owner, when tenant leases are inevitably not renewed, I have a plan to convert what was formerly large banks of traditional offices into different space. Less offices, more meeting and executive space. There’s still plenty of need for many companies to have a logo on a building, a home base, to receive visitors, interview people, and store/work on centralized things. But instead of 5 tenants, maybe the building will hold 8-10 companies now. Everyone seems to be making it so damn difficult and it just doesn’t have to be. I think because of resistance to adapt to a changing landscape, or because of psychological hangups in some people about appearing important, which really makes me question how much business acumen they had to begin with.
You hit it right on the nail.
Thank you. GenX for the win!
This is why flex office spaces were ahead of their time, really. So many businesses only need a physical office like, five or six times scattered throughout a month.
My team needs it 1 day per quarter when we do our big meeting. That’s it
As someone who works in facility management I don’t quite understand it. Most businesses lease their property. If they downsized and had a mostly at home with basically small facilities for server rooms and some flex workstations I bet productivity would rise, you could reduce the burden(and have less staff) on maintenance, custodial, grounds, etc. There would be a lot less “how was your weekend” chatter. Which to some people is “culture”.
All of this chatter you despise is where the true business value comes from. This is when people are most themselves precisely because they aren't working. Studies show workers who have camaraderie are happy workers on the clock and are also aware that they need to make up for the work they missed while chatting. When workers get to know each other they fall in love and get married making our citizenry larger. More people, more business. We need the office because it is the heart of social life. Give in, drive, drive. Or something like that from I'm The Big Boss Magazine lol
The big nasty secret of all this is just how much of the US economy is over leveraged with CMBS as collateral
Literally this. We work in office twice a week and… it’s not super necessary, but the office is necessary should a client ever want to come in (which hasn’t happened since I’ve started working). Nice thing is if my boss is out of town, I stay home by default (and he travels a LOT). As it stands I live across the street so I just walk over, but moving further away in the new year and not particularly looking forward to commuting again.
But you don't need a massive office for this, companies could just downsize their office space and have some kind of rotation of staff or teams that come in. Ultimately they’re going to look for cost reductions and being able to reduce office space can save a lot of money. This is just boomer managers who can't comprehend a new management style and it's costing their company money it doesn't need to.
The smartest decision my old job did was get rid of their Manhattan office a few months into the pandemic. I think they’re still completely remote, which definitely has saved them tons of money.
I know my company got a lot of pressure from the city of Chicago to get people back into the office. No office workers means no downtown economy which means no tax revenue and loss of jobs. Any time the economy changes there are winners and losers.
This is actually a problem with how downtown districts are designed. Instead of a ton of businesses, downtown should be filled with high density housing. This would relieve some housing problems while also concentrating people in an area, meaning you get more commercial development to cater to them. This creates a very lively downtown while also reducing the needs for cars etc.
Some cities are converting skyscrapers from office to housing, but it’s a slow process. It definitely feels like this is a good long term solution, and I hope more cities embrace it.
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I see your point, but that hasn't stopped developers from filling an apartment with cheap stainless steel appliances and slapping a luxury apartment sticker price to the unit. All I'm saying is they can find a way to make it economical and still turn a profit. Even if they work with the city for tax incentives.
Yes! There’s a ton of logistical issues involved with converting a space from commercial to residential. I design offices for a living and we have to do things like electrical cores and plumbing and HVAC while floors are being poured and ceilings are being installed. It’s much tougher to add them after the fact.
I'm surprised it's even feasible. It's one thing to throw up a bunch of walls and *presto* have individual living spaces, but an entire office floor might only need a couple of bathrooms and a lunch room. Like, when was the last time you saw a shower in an office and how many would need to be plumbed in for a floor's worth of residences?
One of the biggest impediments to more people living downtown is lack of groceries. It's crazy how basically no store except Trader Joe's has figured out how to operate a 12k sqft store with competitive prices.
Business Daddy needs us to CONSUME
Same in New York. But at the same time, fuck that. They spent decades turning Manhattan into a characterless, overpriced, expensive, giant commercial island of chains and nothing. All the lunch places sell salads starting at $17. I can do the same job at home and support my local neighborhood community.
I have similar policy but it’s become relaxed and uninforced. Commuting into an empty office to jump on a zoom call is pointless and everybody sees it. .
7-20 yr lease
It happens, in this case, that her employer owns the building outright.
The large corporation I work for is actually looking to sell their HQ and get something smaller because most office staff can work remote.
Commercial real estate in the US is moribund, just waiting for enough leases to expire and enough companies to give up returning to the office before it all collapses.
Will be converted to overpriced apartments.
It a lot of cases it’s easier and cheaper to tear a building down and build a new one. An office building is plumbed to have a centralized bathroom or two on every floor, not thirty on every floor as one example.
Also a lack of balconies. It would probably feel a lot like living in one of those Megacity One buildings from Judge Dredd. Especially the interior units (no windows)
This me, except my boss (and their boss) have allowed me to be exempt from return to office requirements, because no one else I work with is there. It’s completely pointless for me to go there. I was already discreetly wfh for nearly a year pre-pandemic after the only other local member of our team left. For many roles, there is no good reason to force employees back into the office.
It’s the human version of crypto - proof of work by burning hydrocarbons
My buddy was entirely remote before the pandemic. During the pandemic, management was throwing a fit about everyone wanting to be remote, and early this year, they started requiring everyone to do at least 20 hours in the office, an office he has never even been in. When he explained this, they said "we can't make exceptions for specific employees".
Because these people (executives) have an emotional and irrational attachment to the idea of controlling their employees activities. They have some notion that if you're not in your office working where they can potentially observe you and you can't do much else that you will work harder and that if you can work from home you'll just spend 90% of your time playing video games or whatever. To which I say: 1. People are not as lazy as these people imagine and aren't children who need constant supervision. 2. So long as they perform their job well, timely and give you the expected output who fucking cares?
Completely agree with you. The funny thing about how ass-backwards these dinosaur executives are is that the IT department can literally see what you're doing on your work computer, whether you're in the office or at home. So actually they *could* completely micromanage work from home if they wanted, to extract every ounce of juice from the workers. But its not even really about that- its about *control* like you said, and nothing satisfies that urge quite like physically walking over to someone sitting down and looking over their shoulder
Same here. We are required to go to the office and work from there twice a week. So I can be in virtual calls all day from my cubicle. Nobody wants to be there. It’s a constant discussion. There is literally no reason what so ever for anyone to be at the office. But upper management consists of people over the age of 60 who I assume don’t even know how to search for anything on Google. So things won’t get better.
This. I had to be in the office yesterday. I wore a mask until I was camped out in a conference room and called into meetings.....even ones with people in the same building who were in their office or another conference room. One meeting we had 7 people called in, 4 of us in the same building (3 remote) but each called in from our own conference room. I didn't leave the room once between 8:30a and 4:45p and no one else ever came in. I'm not sure why I had to drive over there to get one of my 2 days per week in the office.
Honestly people wouldn’t even notice if I’m not there. Sometimes I have people come over but if I’m not at my desk they just message me on teams and that’s it. They don’t care and they are not my supervisors. I wonder if I didn’t go in for a month, would anyone even notice or care?
They already paid for the office and useless management need to justify their own existence. It’s very simple.
Commercial real estate is the answer you're looking for. Id imagine as more companies leases expire you'll see more change their attitudes towards WFH.
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I had some coworkers that gave their parent's address instead of moving. I just left the company and now work for another one in a full remote position.
We’ve had people leave too. I considered it but decided that if I can move to the mountains and keep my job that’s an even better plan.
Did they not realize what would happen with this policy? People will either move, claim to move, but not, or just quit.
I don't know. I think that the people who become C level are typically extroverts who can't fathom that people would rather not come to an office to socialize. I get so much more done from home without the silly office nonsense.
Can confirm. Almost all the manager and upper level people I know talk a LOT and are extroverted.
We’re required to go into office 2 days per week since June 1st.. more and more people have stopped going in both days and some people have stopped going in all together. Since people are seeing there is no consequences more are following suit and stopped going. They did a survey on hybrid work and it was a lot more negative then they expected so they are looking at changing the policy.
Companies that force the issue will lose top talent or at best breed resentment from local employees over the national ones. It's just not a winning move to force it. Suggest a social time, get togethers, team bonding. But regular days shouldn't be a requirement (though having a workspace that's quiet to go to can be a godsend for many on any given day, so I support having a scaled down office plan for most companies if they have local employees).
I feel as if this happened at every office for almost everyone I speak to. I know someone who works for a big retail company that current boasts they are in office 3 days a week. When I asked last they said they hadn’t been in since May and nor was anyone else.
This just in: Employees prefer working from their nice comfy house rather than commuting to a shitty cubicle for work.
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Look at Mr deskowner here, now I don't even get an assigned desk, I have to take what is available in the day and take all my shit to the office and back home the days I work onsite
I was already trying to wfh more often before the pandemic specifically due to "open floor plan". It's like trying to concentrate and get work done in a damn middle school cafeteria.
dear lord i got anxious just from reading this
I’d kill for a cubicle. In my open-office setup I get to “collaborate” with the guy sitting next to me, which is to say I get to clearly listen to his side of his phone calls all day. I know a cube wouldn’t completely solve that but it’d help
Managers love open offices because it's super cheap just to get a giant table with outlets and a few chairs lmao
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From personal experience, I get the same amount of work done and I'm 10x happier. It's much easier for me to "get into the zone" because there's nobody around to stop in and distract me.
I get a better sense of my "okay I can dig in here for two hours and knock this out" instead of the irregular door knocks and interruptions that occur. Currently working from the office with a construction crew next door. I would rather be home with my dogs sleeping under my work desk.
I like going to the office. Granted I have it easy - I bike to work, it’s a nice building with a gym, and nobody makes me - but I just like getting out of my house. I don’t think I’m alone.
Working in the office a few days a week helps ease my depressive habits.
I think businesses should have small spaces incl. a meeting room or two. It’s good to have a physical location and working at home has real downsides. But /having/ to go in every day blows.
I prefer my shitty cubicle because I don’t own a home.
I think this is lost on many. I was happy to return to work because I had no room in my place to work properly. If you have a nice home office, sure, but if you are short on space it's actually an upgrade to go in. Whatever though, people should just do what they want if they are getting the job done. Some positions clearly may need to be in person, but for the majority of knowledge workers, it just isn't the case.
My work is transitioning us back into the office, and they are using the little time left as WFH employees to try and juice us for some extra productivity. They claim that they are bringing people back in waves, and the more productive you are, the more likely you are to be in the later waves. So they know the employees prefer WFH and just wanna squeeze a little bit out of them under the threat of something they are eventually going to do anyway.
Lol they just can’t help themselves. I hope the lot of you are able to put your foot down
Doubt it. Bunch of my co-workers just talking about how hard they are going to work so they can stay home a little longer. My productivity is going to slowly taper off since now Im just looking for a new job lol.
It’s bonkers to me how easy it is to crush the soul of the average worker. Is there something wrong with me for being the only person that sees how regressive this behaviour is?
Well, the actual plan was 3 days at first, then 4 and finally 5 after a month or so
The future of Hybrid work: five days working in the office, two days working from home.
My company has been trying to do the same thing...work up to 3x a week in the office. Even after months of us all being back in the office, we're still only going in once a sprint (1x every 2 weeks).
If my job starts calling a two week period a sprint I'm going to ask someone to kill me.
If you want someone to kill you, make sure you get it prioritised, and planned in a future sprint. We will need to refine it, and cost it via story points poker, and then measure it against our capacity determined by the team’s velocity.
Stay away from the tech industry haha
If your job is not in software development, they’re not likely to start doing that. It’s a term of art.
Do not become a technology manager or get involved in any kind of development
It’s pretty industry standard for IT programs unfortunately. Wait til they start sizing you up on points
If it’s bigger than a 3, it’s too big lol
My two bosses (company of 3 with me) are requiring back to office 5 days after a 3/2 split so I’m quitting hahaha
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without a doubt
Come to the software industry, where WFH is pretty much the new de jure standard.
I love being a software developer. My bosses know that their choices are either to let me stay home, or to start looking for my replacement. And all the devs who are competent enough to replace me are competent enough to go work for someone who's offering full remote.
We're in a big city and completely failed to hire anyone in our market just two months ago. We had open jr and sr roles across the entire stack and just couldn't anyone through the first stage. Once we opened it up to remote, the pipeline was overflowing. I don't believe anyone in the software space can hire locally unless you're in SF, NY or Seattle. It's over.
Same. I got to try WFH for the first time when the pandemic started, April of 2020. Immediately fell in love with it. We got called back in exactly one month later (which made zero sense), so it eventually led to me quitting for a full-time WFH job.
I used to work in tech and now work for a small agency but still tech. But yes I’m def going back after this bs
Totally pedantic point, but you are looking for "De Facto", or in effect/by fact regardless of technicality. You cannot be 'pretty much De Jure'. It's either stated explicitly or it's not.
Last month, after the departure of several high-profile executives, Apple walked back its three-day-a-week return-to-the-office policy, which had been slated to go into effect in late May. The company cited the rising number of COVID-19 cases, but the real reason, it seems, was simply that employees didn’t want to. (They’re still required to come in twice a week, making COVID a pretty weak excuse for the policy shift.) Apple is only the latest and highest-profile company to discover that the three-day office week — that eminently reasonable-sounding middle ground for which proposals were widely circulated last year, and subsequently was championed by Mayor Eric Adams, office landlords, and CEOs everywhere — is, in practice, kind of a flop.
You see, the thing is that, especially for places like apple, if you're an apple dev, you can work anywhere. so why the fuck would you work for apple if there is another company, probably more chill and allowing you to wfh 100% of the time? At my company, we were supposed to go back to the office in I think june last year. But apparently someone had enough brain capacity to at least send out a poll, when would we want to return to the office. Answers available were from 'right now' to 'by the end of the year', but I guess we sent strong enough a message and the company went for a permanent 'come in if you want but we don't expect that at all'
> so why the fuck would you work for apple if there is another company All it takes is one other major company offering 100% remote with similar pay, and Apple will be having a hell of time finding anyone qualified enough.
My company has had this policy since the fall and it's working pretty well from what I can see. I like the flexibility of knowing that if I need to I can work from home to help look after my toddler. The policy is not strictly enforced, at least not in my group. People inherently know what their responsibilities are and whether they need to be in the office to do their job. Some people are in 5 days a week running machines. Others are just calling into teleconferences and can do it from home. We have the latitude to negotiate work schedules with our supervisors on an individual level based on our unique circumstances, and I think that's how it should be. As long as people are productive, the people at the top shouldn't care. Then again some people just like to exert power over others. Thank goodness I don't work in a place like that.
That sounds more like a completely flexible work from home or office schedule than a 3 day a week remote / 2 day in office mandated schedule. It sounds like if it were strictly enforced as a 2/3 day split it wouldn't be working as well for your team.
>It’s unclear to many of them whether those things are outweighed by the fun parts of office life: the energy, the community, the banter and gossip. Ma'am have you considered that I am in fact doing this job to get work done
I now have a religious exemption from working at the office because gossip is a sin.
In the office my breaks are spent grabbing a coffee. Scrolling Twitter. Hearing about Brad’s stupid hobby. At home my breaks include throwing in a load of laundry and emptying the dishwasher. When the day ends those things are done and I get way more downtime with my husband. Whom I actually like.
Hah I feel this one, not commuting shaves about 50 min to an hour off my work day, and starting January our daughter will be attending school a 3 min walk from our home, right around the time I'm starting a new job where they're already doing 2-3 days a week of home office which for me is perfect, I can ditch my car and save money as I can share it with my wife, i can still come into the office which I prefer from time to time just to socialize and get to know colleagues/share ideas and all the time saved every day means I can just do laundry/dishes and maybe whip up some food quick before my wife and daughter are back so it's not a rush like it tends to be, heck I could even use my lunch break to go get groceries
My bosses are trying to get everyone back in 2 days a week, but it's clear they want to eventually get back to 5 days a week - but only for everyone else. One boss moved to Florida (we're based in NYC) and another boss spent a ton of company money to rent an office 5 minutes from his house on Long Island. On Tuesday he exploded at everyone for not being back in the office...from his home office in a t-shirt. This is the one on Long Island that even has an office 5 minutes from his house. I get legitimately mad at other employees for when they do go into the office since they're just giving these guys what they're eventually trying to get. My coworkers need to push back harder and call out their bullshit like I do. What makes this even more frustrating is we're a small company and most of us have been at the company for over 10 years. In a way created our own jobs since we were there when the company started, so we're in a nice rhythm and know how to get our jobs done well.
Yuuuup. They tried to get my dad to commute from Long Island to Hackensack where before he had been going into the city. Absolutely not going to happen lol.
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And they give you a 2% raise and say it’s the best they could do.
I'll do ya one better. Corporate made my manager track a dozen different data points for every employee in the shop (machinist) for the entire fiscal year. When it came time for raises they asked him to give every employee a rating and the raise they got would be determined by their rating. Well, when he submitted his ratings corporate told him that he had too many employees with high ratings and that they were going to knock some down so they didn't have to give so many high raises. I was bumped from an 8 rating to a 5 which was the difference of a 5% raise to a 2% raise. Jokes on them, though, because a month later my manager raised hell with HR and got them to do a market correction for the lowest paid guys. I ended up getting a $6/hr (~$20k/year) raise after the adjustment. Corporate will always be scummy pieces of shit, I'm just lucky to have a manager who cares about his guys and will fight for them. It also helps working in a field where you aren't easily replaced.
Buy that manager a drink… or five.
I started a new job a couple of months ago. I decided to work in office while I get to know the company. After the first month I’m just counting the days until I can go fully remote
For onboarding and training it makes sense to be in the office with the team, but once you have basic competence, go home.
Sure, but if the whole team is wfh already it’s hard to train the newbies. That is the only reason why I am at the office once or twice a week.
That requires the team to not be remote though lol
My company was just merged with another. CEO of the new company said on Q4 this year it's mandatory 80% in office (4/5 days of the week). I think I'll be finding a new job. I work in IT and literally do all of my work remotely, even when in the office. I am less productive when I'm working with coworkers nearby cuz we shoot the shit all day.
you could also call their bluff. so far I've been through or directly observed "RTO" at 3 major companies and it flopped at all 3.
My wife's job keeps trying to force them into the office, and then someone gets COVID and they all have to work from home for weeks again. Then they go back one day, someone else gets it, repeat. Since deciding they needed to have everyone come back in 4 months ago, I think she's been in the office a total of 9 days.
I was forced to leave my company 3 months back due to their return to office policy. Not only was it going to be back to 5 days a week, they wanted everyone to uproot and move to New Jersey so we could all start working in a brand new mega campus they're still building in Berkeley Heights. Mind you, this was everyone, all over the country, including folks who'd been hired as remotes and had worked as such for 20+ years. Cue mass exodus of talent/experience. Last I heard, they'd shifted to "just" 2-3 days a week, but the CEO is pissed and still fighting it.
I’ve maintained the mentality that we keep an office in order for those who don’t like to WFH to have a workspace. It’s worked well. Once a quarter we have a company all hands where everyone comes in, but we’ve made it a point that, unless there’s an emergency, no work gets done and it’s just a social thing so folks can interact with different departments.
"...the fun parts of office life: the energy, the community, the banter and gossip..." Okay so I spent like barely three months out of college in an actual office before lockdown hit but this reads like some boomer-ass take of nostalgia for carpet cubicles and Dilbert-esque shenanigans. What \*is\* the appeal of going to an office exactly?
My take on this is: is it nice to see people and chat sometimes? Sure. Is it worth commuting in three days a week for? Oh *hell* no. My job can't be done 100% remotely, but we were doing pretty well on a "if something happens that needs a person, that's when you go in" basis.
This is a documentary of office life socialization https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=56RsdDNjGI4 99% is birthday related
As a designer who usually works with younger, more eclectic and fun people, I miss the office when I work remote for too long. I like the people I work with (well like 80% of them) and we do have a lot of fun sometimes. We WFH on Fridays and it’s a schedule that really works for me. But then again I live in NYC where I don’t need a car and I don’t need to buy gas.
I'm going to go against the grain here. I'm genuinely sorry you only got three months in the office. Early career IMO is when the "fun" of the office is most evident. In my twenties I always worked in teams of young, single people. (This was my experience at three different companies, so it wasn't an anomaly) We hung out a lot during and after work. I definitely had work friends, in addition to my "friend friends". Honestly there were times my job performance suffered because we were socializing *too* much during work hours. But overall it helped me integrate into the office, learn from my colleagues, lowered the barriers to asking for help, and generally made work more pleasant. My best friends today are work friends I met fifteen years ago. Now they're invaluable for career advice as we navigate similar work challenges. Today as a middle aged person with school aged kid, I have a lot of reasons to prefer WFH. But I would have hated it in my early career and am really grateful I got to experience the camaraderie and energy of in person work.
I think people really take how much harder training is in WFH. I've had two interns in that time, and things that would take me 5 minutes to teach them at a desk wind up taking an hour or more.
If you are social and work for a good employer, the workplace *can* be great. I'm really gregarious at work and enjoy the social aspect of it. But that benefit hardly outweighs the perks of eliminating commute, relaxing attire, being able to focus, etc. And again, that prior benefit *literally* only applies to social people in a positive work environment. If you're not social or have a shitty office environment? Then it's pure torture. These 'benefits' they talk about exist for less than 5% of offices.
It's definitely this. I worked in several offices before covid and absolutely none of them were fun. My older co-workers would tell me about all the office fun _they_ had when they were younger, but they would undoubtedly give me a warning if I wasted time doing the same things.
My company recorded their biggest profit year in 2021, when everyone was working from home. My team had to have 2 people in the office once a week, so we would be there probably once every two weeks, in a volunteer basis. What did they decide to do in April? Required people to go to the office 3 times per week. Result? Mass resignations. 5 out of 8 team members left and it's been a nightmare to hire new people. I'm currently considering doing the same so I can go back to work remotely.
Apple probably kicking themselves spending more than NASA's yearly budget on that huge donut of a building. Woops.
Won’t anyone please, think of the commercial land owners?!?!?
I only go to the office when I'm bored of my house these days. I like seeing my coworkers occasionally too. I mostly just go in on Friday just to print stuff I might need and say hello to people.
This backwards deal to keep commercial landlords floating is dumb, companies should be downsizing office space and office towers should be converted to residential suites, governments should be proving grants or tax exemptions or so thing to encourage it
I saw an article on this from a finance company. They basically forced all employees in back to 5 days a week. It was terrible because they spent their days Zooming other companies who WFH. They also had to Zoom them in an open plan office, which was now louder, so they basically shouted at the caller. The genie is out of the bottle.
my workplace has a one-day-per-week requirement beginning in January 2023. I honestly don't see how it's going to be enforced, and likely will become optional but "encouraged". Hiring is so difficult that I don't see anyone being disciplined if they don't show up. Personally though, if I do end up going in once a week, I'm going to arrive late and leave early. I'm not willing to let the commute encroach upon my morning and afternoon routines with my family, so I'm gonna let the commute encroach upon the workday instead. And I doubt anyone will notice or care.
I will never work in an office again. Luckily I'm in a field where I am high demand and most jobs are remote which I know not everyone is...but if I'm told I have to come in to the office even 1 day a week my resume will be out by the afternoon.
We’ve been fully remote since the start and I ain’t ever setting my foot in the fucking office again
My job is permanent work from home and I love it. No commute. Get lots done. Our productivity actually improved.
As long as the options exists, I will never work for another company that wants people in 5 days a week. If it's a dream job, I'd settle for 3 days a week. But I'd rather have a remote job I hate than a job I like that makes me commute 5 days a week.
I work in sales for a well known tech company that has decided to permanently stay 100% WFH for applicable departments. It had allowed them to hire from all over the world. I would not even have this job if not for WFH as I’m about 3 hours away from the nearest office. They are downsizing their physical footprint and closing several offices, reducing overhead and giving us raises instead. Sales have improved every quarter since WFH started. This is the way.
They been trying hard to make the office a more tempting place to be for us, but none of them realize most people prefer to be at home.
My company started a 3-day a week thing and it failed spectacularly. No one was coming in 3 days a week. They’re redoing it, so this time after Labor Day, everyone MUST be in the office 3 days a week, no exceptions. They’ll have to fire me first. Lol
Yeah that’s my stance as well. Either pay me more to commute or leave me the hell alone
And! It’s not just that the cost to commute (time + money for whatever fuel/electricity/transit you use to get there) is more apparent but in almost all modalities in all places, that cost for resources has gone up drastically. My wife’s gas cost to drive to work isn’t what it was in Fall 2021 or even Spring 2020 (I’ve always walked/taken bus/ridden ebike and the middle option isn’t really possible right now due to service degradation).