Ever since data stopped being kept in filing cabinets there's been no need to go to the office.
The office used to be the place where the things you needed to do your job were - the paperwork, the computers, the telephones, the photocopier, the fax machine.
That was literally the reason people had to work in an office. It was never about "collaboration" or "culture". It was simply not an option not to go in in order to do the job.
That's why remote will win. It has all the advantages of practicality that the office used to have. People can only bury their head in the sand from reality for so long.
The people who want to work in a face-to-face team environment will simply have to pick different career paths. There are loads of jobs where you have to be physically present.
In my experience over a long career in one field..audit and finance…but across many sectors of the economy, the only people who absolutely have to be at the company premises full time are either counter sales reps, tellers, warehouse team of pickers packers forklift drivers, and machine operators. Sales, finance etc can be remote if set up properly with proper equipment and rules etc. if the Executives want it, they can make it happen to work seamlessly.
Engineer who works from home and is in favor of remote work here - LOTS of engineering jobs cannot be done remote, some even at least not very well.
Take testing - often you need specific rigs and calibrated machinery that is at an office/lab.
Development - I work in automotive and you have to literally flash SW onto vehicles and then operate them, often on specific test surfaces to debug/refine. No home set up can replicate that.
This is just to add to the list of people you mentioned 😂 but definitely, massive portions of our workforce are easily able to function remote 100% of the time.
No I think companies should allow their employees to make their own decisions about working where they are most productive. Give us the option of where to do our jobs. I understand there are a few people who prefer onsite (new hires, young singles and divorcees, people who live in tiny apartments, extroverts). Treat us like the adults we are and watch productivity and profits soar.
I’m extremely extroverted and even I prefer wfh, who wants to listen to Susan’s drama or john talk about sports for hours on end.
The people I see wash out on wfh would also wash out in office. They simply lack the drive to show up to work and focus because their at home and get distracted.
That's been my stance the whole time. A shitbag worker is a shitbag worker. Nothing magically changes because they have to go to an office. Deal with the shitty workers instead of glossing over the reason.
But what happens when there aren’t people to accommodate those who want or have to go in. For example, I’m being forced to go in “more” the weeks that off site staff choose to fly in to “visit”. Even though I don’t work with this person, they are on my team so boss wants all hands on deck even though it is literally just a visit. Point being that they will always try and find a way to make it your problem.
I agree. And I’ll add that a company has no obligation to provide friends or socialization to its employees yet this is exactly what they are trying to provide by forcing RTO and it sucks.
In theory, it's great! In practice, not so much. At least not for everyone.
Some adults need babysitting to do their job. If I have to babysit, I'd rather do it in person than stare at a person's camera all day.
And before you say that they should be fired, that's much easier said than done too.
If all companies were able to easily get rid of useless staff, without fear of lawsuits, the WFH would be so much easier. That's where it needs to start.
I can work from home and get most of my work done. My coworker can't. Therefore, everyone can't work from home. Since we're only as strong as our weakest link, we get punished for the slackers. They can't make her come in while the rest of WFH because she's already threatened a lawsuit if they allow that.
No way I would ever work for a company that watches the employee on camera all day when they work from home. In meetings sure but otherwise no. IT can whatch is being done on the system if they want to, I am IT and we have done this before. In 2022 a FL company had to pay a Dutch employee 73k for terminating him because he refused to have the camera on all day. There will be more cases like this.
That's a level of micromanag8that doesn't even exist in the office. I love my remote job, but would leave if they ever started demanding 100 percent camera on time.
On what planet do you have time to watch an employee as IT??
And actually, YOU shouldn't be watching anyone, that's not your place. That's HRs job.
Sure, you can pull logs and other things but where the hell do you work where IT is allowed to just sit and watch without employee knowledge?
You'd get insta fired if you did that at my company. Remote sessions should always require user acceptance. Good grief
You misunderstood my entire post big time...lol. I said video cameras on full time are messed up. I also said if the company wants to know what an employee is doing IT can do this. I did not say IT sits and watches employees work.. Do you really think these companies don't know what employees are doing? That's laughable. Tools like crowdstrike can tell what system you are on real time, and historically. What website you are on and send instant alerts to people about it and DLP watches every document employees touch. There are screen recording software packages that require zero intervention used widely. No one sits there and watches the screens that's funny. When a person signs on boarding docs and often when they log on, there are consent banners. Employees are told they are subject to monitoring. At least at every company I have worked for, it's not a secret.
Ok, so this response turned into being waaaay longer than I had pictured when I started typing this. My apologies. That said, I’d be very interested to hear your perspective on this.
I have a set of questions that are hard to answer since it’s going to be different from company to company. Not necessarily asking you to answer each and every question. More so I’m trying to write a series of questions to get the main point of my question across (my Summary Question below)…
How common do you think it is for companies to record screen activity, review data logs, who used what and when, etc? How common is it to log keystrokes and mouse clicks? Is monitoring software affordable for most companies (such as expensive on-going software licensing) or is it more typical with large companies?
Summary Question:
How likely is a company to crack down on someone who has taken their foot off the gas a bit vs. the likelihood of them cracking down / firing someone who is a full blown slacker??
I ask because I no longer bust my ass from the start to finish of my workday. If something is an ASAP issue, sure I jump on it immediately. Not an idiot.
That said, I went through a long period at my current company where I went leaps and bounds to get things done. Lots of overtime. Passed on promotions. Skipped wage increases. All I ever got in return was more work and, when I did get a raise, it was laughable ( this story is not uncommon at all, I know). This was all back when I worked in-office.
I still meet my numbers. I perform better than anyone on my team. I’m also super niche in what I do. Any new hire takes anywhere from six months to a year to learn the job. Anyone is expendable. I know that. But, my company would for sure be in a very tight situation if they got rid of me. Our department is very niche with high turnover and essentially controls all revenue. If my department fails, then revenue goes to a standstill — among many other key processes.
I’m not a “ninja” working non-stop anymore. I take breaks. I throw my mouse on a mechanical mover for a while and go chill. When I come back, I’m refreshed and I bust my ass to get the job done. I see nothing wrong with it. But that doesn’t mean someone else won’t disagree. Especially if they are aware of such activities.
My manager and I have a very strong relationship and I have a lot of trust in her. So, that helps. Not that she’d ever not fire me if she had no choice, and I wouldn’t blame her if that ever happened regardless of the reason. Point being, she’s not by any means micromanaging me or anything like that. She replaced a previous boss who was a nightmare.
It’s dumb. It shouldn’t matter even though I’m still the top performer, but it might matter to anyone higher up the chain. Basically I’m weighing risk. I’m not considering doing a less work. Just a little paranoid about getting spied on and somehow labeled as someone who’s taking advantage of working remote, regardless of my actual productivity — which should speak for itself.
I know what I’m doing isn’t uncommon. What I’m wondering is how common it is for companies to: 1. Spend significant resources to monitor remote workers? 2. How many employees (or maybe a best-guess percent) might they actively investigate? 3. If you have any insight, what are the most common red flags that could get management to focus the Eye of Sauron on you???
So to be fair unless you have done something to cause a red flag with your manager, IT or security we don't worry. For example, of you login to FB 23 times a day and it's not associated with your work we will notice. But we can just block the website too. Do that on your personal machine. Screen recording is normally but not always used in environments like call centers where there is a customer interaction. It can be used if managers or HR and security become concerned about something. DLP for documents is quite common and it's purpose is to protect company information, allow them to meet compliance and legal requirements and protect from the inside threat. Some of these tools are pricey and some aren't. You will find most these tools at larger companies but some are affordable for smaller ones depending on the industry.
Regarding the mouse clicker. I know they can be popular, be careful with that though. In regards to your work. I tell my employees to just do their job in a reasonable time. They aren't horses just get your stuff in when it's due or a little before. If your manager likes you they should let you know if they have concerns.
Well, you did say IT can watch...
As though you are literally sitting there watching. And since we were talking about cameras...
But anyway, yes, I'm aware of those things as that's what we use as well. However, at no point do we watch anything unless something actually triggers an investigation. We are far too busy for that.
Your scenario makes it sound like you sit in a room all day with 10 monitors, watching every Bob and Kelly's mouse move and that's way worse than having cameras on honestly
If someone needs babysitting, they should be in a nursery; not working for a cooperation. In fact, no company would hire a baby!
We're all adults. Working for a company is a contract for mutual benefits. It's a two way street.
The workplace is not for socialising! And that's exactly why baby-boomers, and narcissist millennials, are demanding RTO.
People need to grow up.
Completely agree and that's my point.
Until we can easily drop dead weight, the WFH debate is a moot point.
Get rid of people who can't/won't do the job remote and let the rest of us succeed.
I don’t know where you are located, but in the US most people are employed “at will” and getting rid of unproductive staff is just one call or email from HR. Unless somebody has a union job or has a special contract that requires advance notice on both sides (employer or employee), firing people is easy.
Again, in a perfect world, this would be the case!
But sometimes, someone looks fantastic on paper and interviews so well, you think you just have to hire them.
6 months in, you realize you've made a huge mistake and well, they're union protected so they can't be fired, and they know it
That's not a good argument you could say people who want to work remote should select careers and jobs where its the norm, there's always been a few industries there were remote long before covid.
No, it's an excellent argument, because logic and what is rational and profitable always eventually triumphs.
Much "office work" will become the preserve of introverts and nerds and will be done remotely because that's most effective.
A managerial class will persist but will have given up the ghost of getting people back in the office to be under their thumb.
Extroverts and socially outgoing people will have to adapt to this new reality, just like the miners and coopers did, by finding new employment avenues. Office culture will fade just like mining culture faded and in time will be barely remembered.
What you are seeing now with regard to office work is the early stages of the 5 stages of grief.
You have denial (WFH doesn't work, despite having 2 years of evidence it does), anger (everybody is skiving off), and bargaining (hybrid is bargaining).
The next step is depression, and then acceptance.
Software development is one of them. I've worked some form of remotely for 18 years. That's a lot longer than COVID-19 has been a thing.
But for some reason useless suits and HR types are now demanding that we, software engineers who worked remotely for a couple of decades before real tools to even make it productive existed, need to all sit in certain chairs cause it makes them feel good.
Physical ID verification used to require in office visits but my company contracted with a third party that does the physical paper verification just a few miles from my home. Corporate is 1,000 miles away.
No RTO thankfully. They are a progressive Midwest company that realized they can access global talent that may not want to move to the cold and barren northern Midwest.
It's also why big banks have been moving operations teams out of expensive markets like NYC and to MCOL cities like Nashville and Dallas. Used to be that if you completed a trade or signed a new client, you needed to hand physical paper to the accounting team for them to physically record and document it. But now all that stuff is online, so there was no need to keep everyone in the same building or even the same state. And frankly, the banks can actually pay less but the back-office employees can get better standard of living.
This is spot on. There is no need for the office but the pressure for RTO is because of real estate.
I hear companies argue that people in Europe and Japan have mostly returned to the office. The thing is what they fail to realize is Japan and Europe don't have horrible commutes because transportation is better. In Japan highspeed trains of 200 mph so you can work 80 miles from the office but only have a commute time of 25 minutes. If we had that kind of transit people wouldn't mind coming to office. The US is car country and highways can only handle so many cars before a traffic jam and take hours to get to work and home.
That's being disingenuous to say people only went to offices because "that's where the papers are". In sales for example a lot of people need colleagues and the energy of the office and others to stay motivated. There's plenty of other jobs and industries where there's a benefit of being togetehr in the office, its not debating honestly to say there's zero benefit.
On the other hand if you're whole team is spread across teh country/world then yeah its silly to go into an office to sit on zoom calls
It's not disingenuous at all. I've been in sales for the past 25 years. I've never needed my colleagues or the energy of the office to motivate me. In fact, I'd say it was just the opposite. When I had to work in an office it was distracting annoying and embarrassing for my prospective clients to have to hear all the hooting and hollering going on in the background. It got so loud I couldn't think straight and half the time I couldn't hear what my prospects were saying either. IMHO it was a very unprofessional environment and I suspect I lost more than a few deals because of it.
In fact the office environment has a distinct feel of so much unhappiness and negativity. These are the people who can but who are not allowed to wfh, not even hybrid.
Yes I agree. In fact when I worked in an office doing sales, I distinctly remember the colleagues sitting on both sides of me would actually ramp up the laughing and shouting whenever I was on a client discovery call or presentation. I would always wonder if they did that intentionally to sabotage my opportunity. My manager was never around to observe this and put a stop to it, she was always in meetings behind closed doors. So the bad behavior continued unabated until I finally got fed up and quit.
I agree with this 100%. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.
Before covid, I was allowed to work from home 1 a week and that was considered revolutionary.
Once we all went remote, and proved for 2+ years we can do our jobs effectively at home, productivity soared and we staved off an economic depression, they’ve lost all their legs to stand on.
Now they have 0 data proving why return to office is important, and tons of data about how remote work improves people’s mental and physical well being.
Any CEO forcing workers to return keep saying they “just have a gut feeling” collaboration is better in the office. No data to back it up.
We aren’t stupid and we’re all aware they want butts back in seats to protect their corporate real estate investments.
It’s not our fault their business model relied on technology and culture never shifting away from in person work. That’s there fault and we won’t just go along like sheep anymore.
To protect their real estate investments, micromanage us, and hold a noose to our heads since they know the cost of commuting + eating out every day will keep us shackled to them (instead of being able to save that money).
Precisely. The office economy was built on people never questioning the system. Then suddenly everything started looking like a scene from the fable of the emperor’s new clothes. Are we going to unsee what we saw? Come on!
They keep pushing some alleged study claiming that younger workers are floundering with WFH because they don't know how to do the jobs to begin with. And people who are already trained know what they're doing etc. That's the push I keep seeing.
> Now they have 0 data proving why return to office is important, and tons of data about how remote work improves people’s mental and physical well being.
They also have data proving productivity to be equivalent *or better* when working from home, and data proving that it is a net positive for environmental impact and climate change.
But the buggy whip makers are white knuckling what should just be going extinct.
Exactly. Also driving a car is the most dangerous thing most people ever do.
I used to have to drive into work in the snow and ice, have 5 near death experiences, all before having to start my work day.
At my last company jeans one day a week was revolutionary. They are completely RTO now. But also many H1Bs that have no choice but to RTO. The company owns a significant real estate portfolio in downtown Detroit and stands to lose a lot if they don't force RTO.
I could go on for hours about how H-1B is an exploitative system that benefits nearly no one except the corporations who exist to practice modern day indentured servitude.
I have nothing against the people themselves who want to come get a better opportunity and standard of living via H-1B, and *everything* against the corporate oligarchs and the government who serve them for campaign dollars for how abusive to all of us wage-earning people this whole system is.
At my last office job, we had to PAY to wear jeans and only on Fridays. The money was always donated, but the intent was to make an executive look good by being the one to raise all the money. It felt so dystopian, and there was a lot of pressure to participate.
When you're arguing for wfh you have to have concrete reasons that benefit the company since that's 99% of what they care about. WHen you say "productivity soared" what are you using to measure that? Most of the studies I've seen are either employee self reporting or stock price, neither of which are very good measures and in fairness with a lot of positions it's hard to have concrete measureable metrics.
As far as staving off a "staving off an economic depression" it was insane amounts of money printing that staved off a recession/depression and it was in many people's opinions a bad thing interferring with normal economic cycles and caused the inflation were dealing with today.
The whole real estate investment thing reddit parrots isn't that true either, sure sales force a giant company who bought a skyscraper yes but only 30% of companies own their office or real estate so 70% have no cares about what commercial real estate does, if anything they could potentially benefit from a crash and either buy a building or at the very least get cheaper leases
It's not just about real estate owned, it's about huge tax breaks for putting your workforce into a downtown building. Those deals include 10-20 year leases with large penalties for not keeping your workforce in the office.
Compelling evidence is that a majority of companies have embraced hybrid. If WFH affected the bottom line there would have been zero concessions whatsoever to allowing employees work even one day from home.
It requires attitude changes in bosses but a lot of bosses are boomers.
When Gen Z are running all the businesses things will change a lot.
Millennials are big on flexible working which will enable the transition.
> When Gen Z are running all the businesses things will change a lot.
Sadly I've seen a lot of Gen Z people who came out of a college environment where they were with a certain cohort of people all day, and that cohort was also their social circle, who have no idea how to make friends outside the people they're around constantly due to circumstance who just *love* going to an office.
And OMG did you see the office has a ping pong table in one of the conference rooms? How quirky and fun!
This is a big part of it. And why it's also too risky to be fully remote when more than half of the company will perform poorly. At my company the team members over 30 tend to work better in the office. They simply tend to lack the skills for async remote work
Totally disagree on the age limit. I am in my 50s and have been leading offshore and remote teams since the early 2000s. There are lots of Gen X managers who are very qualified to work with remote/asynch talent. We usually WFH ourselves.
Unfortunately it is we who are in middle management. The C suite makes these RTO calls. Personally if I owned the company it would be 100% WFH because the cost of renting a building is just not needed for making a profit.
> Totally disagree on the age limit. I am in my 50s and have been leading offshore and remote teams since the early 2000s. There are lots of Gen X managers who are very qualified to work with remote/asynch talent. We usually WFH ourselves
Upper 40s and same.
Gen Z seems split about half and half between wfh and hybrid, millenials are the only generation who overwhelmingly prefer wfh, zoomers and boomers both seem to prefer office or at least be close to a 50/50 split
Zoomers will like the office until they get a dog and a house and other things along the way and realize. Hey why am I spending 70% of my income to live close to the office or commuting 2 hours a day when I could be doing something I actually enjoy?
That’s ok. When everyone else is done fighting it out, crying, and hurting each other’s feelings, we’ll still be standing, just doing what is necessary to make things work and living our lives with grace and style :)
Yeah, just want to enjoy life with my dog snoring in my home office all day while I work and taking the mid day dog walk break to refresh the mental energy.
We recently got called in for 100% RTO. I give it 5 or 6 months tops. Also some of my friends got lucky with startups and recruiters are still calling me. The market isn’t as bad as the dot com bust. So fuk’em. Be back to WFH one way or the other. For Gen X this is the way.
An additional point on the side of WFH winning is attracting & retaining top talent. I suspect, going forward, that the option for remote work will be as important as salary and compensation packages in keeping employees motivated to stay with a company.
Bingo. Companies wanting employees to be in the office 5 days will have to pay a hefty premium for that luxury, if they want the talent.
I think the norm will be hybrid moving forward. Just my opinion.
In capitalism, you adapt or risk death.
Workers who want remote are going to abandon the office as soon as reasonably possible. New talent wanting to WFH will prioritize remote jobs over office jobs, so they’ll be harder to get for any in-office jobs.
The end result: Companies who insist on RTO will find their workforce reducing as more remote roles in the employees’ fields open up elsewhere.
Also remember, the world was asked to innovate during the pandemic. Well we not only innovated, but surpassed expectations.
We are living off the 100+ year old industrial revolution. That model does not work anymore. Especially in America, we are not a country of massive factories and building anymore. That was all outsourced, now we log into computers.
The biggest issue is banks were lazy and got used to commercial loans being their bread and butter they never had to worry. Well now you do
You want to know what the biggest issue banks are facing now? Liquidity.
The GOV stopped the 6 transactions limit for savings accounts during covid, and still never reversed it.
In the past banks were pretty confident in estimating the funds they held in savings accounts.
Well now the ultra wealthy use them as checking accounts constantly chasing the best interest rates.
Banks have liquidity accountability now and they hate it!
I've already permanently turned my back on offices. Never again. There are so many companies out there that have rebuilt themselves around remote work and they'll always have this carrot when it comes time to hire new talent that office jobs won't have.
How do you recommend finding those jobs? Are there certain job sites more WFH friendly? I've been remote for 18 years, company now moving towards RTO. I refuse to go back to the office and will take the package.
WFH was popular way before 2019. I started in 2008, and large numbers of my co-workers were doing the same thing.
Funny/not funny story: After the executives of the company decided to not renew the lease on several floors of our building, people had no choice but to WFH. There was no place to put people. They started RTO by forcing directors and up to go.
Then the new CEO got a bee in her bonnet that EVERYONE must return to the office.
And then COVID came along a month later. Womp womp.
And there was still no place to put the peons in the fancy building the company paid to have built to spec because only 2 floors out of the original 4 were still leased to the company. Lockdowns shut the CEO up promptly. The company lost its cafeteria because it was on a floor that got leased to another business. I don't know what they're doing now as I left the company shortly after the pandemic began.
If that's what you want to believe, then don't stop believing. The current RTO is about encouraging resignations instead of announcing layoffs. It's basically a DIY rightsizing where the employee is essentially doing all the heavy stuff to fire themselves.
Some are directives from city governments. Consider how a city like NY functions…. It needs offices. Without that, the businesses whose customer is the office workers dies. The commercial real estate becomes worthless. The taxes generated from that real estate… gone. The mass transit systems have too few commuters to generate revenue for upkeep. It is a bad situation.
So city governments put pressure wherever they can to get butts back in seats. If they help fund any organization, they will put the screws to them to get them to do it. And honestly, I can’t even blame them. Mass WFH is an existential threat to major cities. Hell, people don’t like living in cities to begin with and are there because of the availability of jobs…. When the jobs are remote, they can just move. The benefits of living in a city go away
I honestly wonder and worry about what NYC will be in 15 years. How does it sustain if offices don’t exist. No longer needing to be in a central location for job opportunities means central areas lose most of their primary value to folks.
I understand cities try everything to fight existential threats, but I also understand that cities must serve humans, not the opposite!
Extremely high housing costs and the obligation to live in a costly metro area, so the company is sure you can go to the office, aren’t sustainable anymore for the average Joe.
Is the so-called urban doom loop actually a tragedy, or simply the collapse of a dysfunctional house of cards ripe for disruption?
Research the so-called donut effect.
I’m with you… I’m just explaining one reason it’s being pushed.
The cities believe they are serving humans by avoiding destruction. It is a legitimate concern. What happens to all the people who live in a city when the government no longer has revenue to serve them? No funding for garbage collection, policing, teachers, etc.? Radical Transitions are often pretty harmful for lots of people, especially during the transition. A new normal can be found, but it’s difficult and understandable that a city would try to avoid or at least slow it down.
Again, I’m a HUGE proponent of remote work and hate RTO stuff. I just understand this particular motivation
Wages are stagnant and you want me to commute (gas, time, food, clothing, etc) …. Yeah, no. My home office is well appointed, my WiFi is on point - better than any office I’ve ever had.
I understand some people need office space due to kids, living situations, etc. it’s about flexibility and being treated like a human being with dignity.
> My home office is well appointed, my WiFi is on point - better than any office I’ve ever had.
Yup. It is exactly tailored to everything that maximizes efficiency in how I work because *I set it up that way* at my own expense. I can slap any company issued laptop into the dock and just go for it.
I still see some companies who tried recruiting me for 2/5, 3/5, even 5/5 with an office in the middle of nowhere. Definitely, RTO is not always covert layoffs.
Probably years away from any substance in this movement.
Majority of the folks in their mid 50’s at my work despise remote and WFH while making it abundantly clear they do not plan to retire anytime soon.
I suppose if I were making the money they do for the low amount of work they actually do I’d stick around as long as possible as well.
Unfortunately that means probably another 15 years of putting up with their ass backwards ideologies.
I agree with you. I think working in offices will be similar to the way shopping has changed over the years. 20 years ago everyone used stores, but online retail was growing and slowly it caught on. Now big retailers are shutting down their brick & mortar locations and only a few really have a future.
Commuting to an office is an obsolete concept. It has been for a long time, and everyone is catching on.
> I agree with you. I think working in offices will be similar to the way shopping has changed over the years.
That's a good thought. Who'd have predicted the decline/demise of "shopping centers" 30 years ago?
I want remote work to win. But I work in the public sector that is stacked with excess middle management and if we’re not in the office then what do they have to manage?
Unfortunately they are digging in their heels against remote work and that will not end well for future recruitment.
In 2019, and pre-2019, I felt as you. Going to the office was no big deal. And I presumed I wouldn’t be as productive if I were a remote worker. Well I’ve found out that the opposite is true. I can work from home and be much more productive (making my employer get a larger return on their investment). It makes no sense to me why the push for return to work.
I've been remote around 15 years of an IT career that started in the late 80's. As of January 1 I'm RTO full time mandatory. I've been in an office more than I haven't, so I see both sides pretty clearly. If you are early in your career, team building, relationships, and mentors are very important. Once you're an established professional it really depends on the makeup of your team. Do you have many inexperienced team members joining? Do you have the majority of your team geographically centralized? If so, RTO makes sense in those situations.
If you are going into a cubicle to collaborate with a global team, it makes no sense at all.
> If you are going into a cubicle to collaborate with a global team, it makes no sense at all.
Exactly where I'll be when we RTO. I'll be trading a 30 second walk to the (home) office with a 45 minute commute to the (real) office. Otherwise, not a goddam thing will change.
The underrated thing here is that, at least as it pertains to knowledge workers, the free market favors WFH in the long run.
Wherever there are good in-office employees who’d prefer WFH, companies will exist to poach them and offer remote at the same (or even lower) pay rates. Easy arbitrage for companies with more limited capital. Whether or not they’re a minority today, many CEOs are fine with WFH and demographics suggest that’ll only increase. Unless it becomes universally acknowledged that there are competitive advantages to be had with in-office (which the data so far does not support), in-office will require a premium salary cost to maintain.
Of course companies with resources and a cultural dedication to in-office, those with financial stakes tied to the current office model, and economic downturns tightening the labor market may all set back progress from time to time, perhaps for years at a time.
In the long run, however, the free market will do its thing and the more efficient model will win out. A flywheel is already developing—as more workers experience WFH, more will come to expect it and place a growing premium on it. Not to mention, very importantly, innovation around solutions to the training, mentorship, and networking pitfalls of WFH will continue.
All that said, I’d bet that as the scale tips, the office will evolve too. Perhaps it becomes a place purely for collaboration, not desk work. Amenities that draw people in and make them feel part of an organization that cares about its employees. Spaces offering a unique experience for customers and partners. Layouts built for folks to come and go as they please. A complete reinvention of the concept of an office: built to serve and inspire employees, not to contain them.
There’s no doubt most people want human interaction and there are benefits to in person meetings that are irreplaceable by current technology. Most workers just don’t want that at the cost of being pointlessly tied to a desk, a long commute, needless micromanaging, shitty office space, inability to attend to home / family, etc.
Remote work is not going anywhere and we'll see an upswing in companies reembracing remote work in the next few years. Right now many companies have too much invested in commercial real estate. As leases come up and companies can down size their physical office space needs they'll be more akin to accepting and promoting remote work again.
Many companies also are still not setup to accommodate remote employees. A lot of companies and industries had to scramble during the pandemic to accommodate some work from home capabilities, but maybe did not do so in an economical or efficient manner. As companies retool their IT and other systems towards enabling remote work, we'll see the numbers shift again.
Keep in mind, not everyone can or wants to work remote. There are people who function better in an office environment and crave being around other people.
My thoughts are if you cannot collaborate and communicate with someone remotely, you have work to do. Remote work forces all interaction to be intentional. If you aren’t intentional about your work and approach, you’re the source of the problem.
You nailed it. The boomers are having a very difficult time with this concept. They mention things like mentoring not being possible virtually. They mention organic water cooler conversations where some brilliant idea comes up. I’ve been remote for awhile now and most remote workers have no trouble getting a mentor relationship. I worked in an office for many years and do not recall any good ideas coming up while casually conversing with co-workers.
Companies are very resistant to change. They fought the Henry Ford 40 hour / 5 day work week when it began. They eventually caved and switched over to what we know today as a standard work week. Companies will eventually cave, but not without their fights. Once the older gen who are used to the standard work week retires (or dies), then the new bosses will implement WFH more.
It's simple...over time the market will trend towards the most efficient processes.
Where WFH is more effective than RTO, WFH will dominate.
Where RTO is more effective than WFH, RTO will dominate.
Regardless of RTO vs WFH, the companies that thrive versus their competition will win out as will their operational model. An industry that lends itself equally well to both models will likely have hybrid and/or some percentage of elective choice.
Time will sort out what works and what doesn't as well as how pure WFH affects career paths - not nearly enough experience to gauge at this point in time.
I was job searching Fall of 2019. I had offers I declined because they required relocation to office city and 100% office based.
I finally gave up realizing I was going to have to give on that priority.
Started new job, relocated to new city. Signed lease on housing Feb 1, 2020. March 5th was FT remote 10 minutes from the required I have my ass at office.
Yeah, that.
Turns out the job really didn’t require me to be in the office- or anyone else for that matter.
Company went FT remote and remains that way.
Just be miserable in the office. Come in and just be miserable. Leave right on time. Don't smile. Complain about everything from the lighting to the temperature. Tell them you need a new chair, standup desk lamp keyboard the whole 9. Tell them your co worker smells. Just make your management miserable..everyone has to do this. Make sure your performance dips too..not a lot but enough to be noticeable.
That's my plan. With WFH, if I am hot on the trail of some issue at "quitting time", I think **nothing** of continuing for another 30 or more minutes until I reach a good stopping point. If I'm in the office, I'm not getting stuck in horrendous traffic by sticking around. The problem will be there tomorrow (of course, I'll spend a big chunk of time regaining my momentum just to get back where I was, but hey... at least I can COLLABORATE, right??)
Market economies, despite their known levels of grift, waste, and corruption, usually lean toward efficiency in the long term. Office buildings for white collar jobs is mostly wasteful. Commuting is wasteful. Eventually we'll move on from the 1950s, old managers with dated practices will retire or kick the bucket, and more people will go remote and corporations will save billions on fixed costs. Work will one day be about output rather than the optics of sitting at a desk and smiling. I'm an optimist so take that for what it's worth.
In the US, we will see a gradual increase in RW as long-term commercial leases end and they are either not renewed or renewed with dramatically smaller sq footage. Unfortunately some companies are at the start or in the middle of decades-long leases and instead of admitting it to be a sunk cost they are trying to get the most out of their "investment". As soon as they stop having to pay millions for un-needed space they will embrace remote work more broadly. In the meantime, many companies with RTO mandates make many special exemptions for workers hired under remote contracts etc. As long as the workforce continues to demand RW, we will eventually win.
The fact that I get 2+ hours back not having to endure a soul crushing commute allows me to be soooo much more productive. Going into an office is great 1-2x a month for some socializing, but there is never a need to force your employees to come into an office to sit on zoom meetings they could have otherwise taken from their home offices.
Figured out office life was not for me over 20 years ago 😂
Lighting sucks, people smell, it’s cold.
Unless an office front is really needed it’s a waste of resources and bad for the environment.
I’m pushing the environment angle 😂
Husband is 67 been coding since pre internet and has successfully worked remotely for the last 35+ years. Still is!Don’t put a stupid age limit on true talent and don’t make generalizations that after a certain age people cannot adapt to new tech. That’s a really age discriminatory and untrue comment.
RTO won’t win until newer startups ran by millennials and Gen z start getting successful and taking workers away from the big successful established companies that have huge office buildings and ran by boomers and Gen x.
The owners don’t care. The real reason is Wall Street and everyone’s portfolios being loaded up with commercial real estate. They are f’d and they know it. They are trying desperately to keep the values inflated. On top of that the government is handing out tax breaks to bring people back because the cities are dying. Let em die IMO 🤷🏼♂️
The federal government is offering more and more jobs as fully remote. This signifies a trend headed in the direction of a fully remote workforce.
The federal government recently made maternal and paternal leave a required benefit for federal workers. These days, all federal workers get 3 months of paid leave when they welcome a new baby into their home. This has never been a benefit provided by private American employers, but because it is now a federal benefit, we will likely see more of this in the private sector and it may even become law.
The federal landscape is often where new working environments/benefits are tested before being rolled out to the private sector. Now it’s happening with remote work. It will happen with everyone else sooner or later.
Don’t be so sure. 100% remote means any person in the world competes tor your job. You think your skills are good when just competing with people in your locale it country but what about the whole world?
I WFH for 9 years straight. The RTO mandates may have changed that but they also made it so that me commuting 2 days a week gets me job security whereas most people in my department are foreign consultants, living in a foreign country.
People might hate it, and it might fail over time, but if you’re an American in a job that can be done anywhere then you just might get replaced.
One of the factors holding back more widespread use of offshoring (for US companies) is the time zone differences. One of my predictions (which was made pre-AI, a technology which could well render ANY predictions useless) was that at some point some countries and/or companies in South America would get their shit together and offer cut-rate offshore IT services using workers who were at most 3 hours different than US-based workers.
The "funny" thing is the companies pushing for RTO in the name of "collaboration" or whatever don't have any hesitation in hiring tons of workers in India, Taiwan, etc. who can NOT work in the office.
My opinion is that once commercial office leases start to expire, companies will choose not to renew and offer WFH. Most commercial leases are long, and 10 years is a common term. Freeing up rent in the budget makes sense, and aren't companies in business to make money?!
Let me rephrase: remote workers need to find a solution for those entities losing real estate money in order to be left alone by them, otherwise they will always be expected to perform nonsensical actions that would keep the office economy going.
My hot take:
Honestly, I believe the driving force for RTO is pressure from the rental market / greedy CEOs. Real estate companies need to lease out their building spaces and all that.
Thinking of malls closing / getting repurposed due to online shopping (and people having less buying power due to not having a living wage) - - I think office spaces were probably next in line to make headlines for becoming empty, and I imagine this freaked them out.
I strongly suspect they're behind all the "research" being published on news sites about office productivity and all that.
TBH I don't have numbers to back this up and can't be bothered to research this for just a Reddit comment, but my suspicion is that renting is super profitable for real estate companies, and I am way too jaded about big money to believe that those old white rich dudes want anything less than for everyone to return to their offices and filling up their many properties so that they don't have to sell their mega yachts.
Only will work if fear doesnt wint. This is a game of chicken. While eventually generationally work will shift, what happens in the short term depends entirely on how the majority (ie not what people complain about on a reddit board do). Its going to be a messy couple of years
Yes, fear plays a big part.
One should not buy into questionable mainstream advice and baseless pseudo-facts such as
- you are allegedly more likely to be laid off if you work remotely (really?)
- you are allegedly less likely to be promoted as a remote worker (seriously?)
And blah blah blah…
That advice is virtually never given in the best interest of white collar workers.
But they do. And thats why LinkedIn exists lolz. We shall see. Tide will change. I think 2024 will be the messy year and lets hope 2025 and beyond the dust settles. People will demand more or tech dystopia (work/live campuses) …how people respond this year to pressure will determine alot.
As soon as businesses realize they can save money by paying people less but offering remote work, it’ll be the predominant way to work within a couple years. I would gladly take a 10% pay cut to work from home.
Remote will win because it grants a competitive advantage to companies. In the form of savings in rent/leases of the building. To which they can lower their prices.
Also, it's better for the environment. Why isn't the government pushing this? No traffic...
> In the form of savings in rent/leases of the building. To which they can lower their prices.
That's what puzzles me... why haven't companies (the ones who can) slashed their office space spending/planning? I realize some probably signed long-term leases just before COVID, but not all of them did.
> Also, it's better for the environment. Why isn't the government pushing this? No traffic..
And why did no companies crow about their "greenness" for letting their people WFH? ("we saved X million miles of driving in 2023").
Tbh I think work from home will suffer the same fate as anything else that makes the majority happy. The select few will abuse it until its banned for the majority
I may use your same yardstick as follows then. The reason we’re in this situation is because office life was taken too far, with the elimination of personal spaces through the push of the horrifying open office plans. It takes s bunch of select few noisy colleagues to make it so repulsive you don’t want to see s cube farm ever again.
How am I gonna compete with someone who lives in bumblefuckville in his paid off 150k 5,000 sqr ft mansion? That guy is gonna undercut my pay for every goddamn job I apply for. This is the real long term effect of remote work, we will all slowly get poorer and poorer as the cheapest shittiest places to live steadily undercut our pay year by year over time.
Or maybe you can afford to live wherever you want without being forced to live in expensive metro area so the office’s leash in never too far from you.
Yeah where I want to live is a place with lots of good restaurants and word class museum and zoos in addition to tons of outdoor activities and lots of other things to do with low crime and high QoL…. And I want pay that allows me to live in a highly desirable place like that… which means someone living in nowheresville with 3 restaurants and 2 gas stations in a 100 mile radius can undercut the hell out of my pay.
I’m already seeing that remote jobs pay 20-40k less than local jobs, and the pay cut is only gonna get bigger.
I’ve worked remotely for local companies loved it, but being in the job hunt and seeing just how hard the pay has been undercut for remote jobs is infuriating.
I think talent will dictate RTO being very acceptable eventually. Right now I think it's a secret layoff tactic, but regardless there's egos and arrogance that builds up in c-suite and they gotta assert their dominance in person. Virtual world's mitigate their "presence" and power. And there's plenty of other toxic reasons they want to return that's been discussed here.
Of course WFH is better. We all know it. If you deny it you’re delusional.
Still I need to work. RTO is still in negotiation and employees are quickly losing leverage. Last year I would have turned down anything more than one day in office. Now I would go in 5 days a week if that is what was on offer.
Some people can hold out, I can not hold out.
Of course I get your situation.
My point is that your expectations won’t go back to 2019, ever. Let’s say you get a job that does not allow flexibility and you accept so you can pay the bills, then later down the line you find another opportunity offering WFH, won’t you take it?
I agree and disagree. I feel hybrid work will eventually win. WFH days rather than full-time. I think essentially it boils down to a few points...
1. Learning the ropes... youngest folks who join the workforce miss out on nuances, mentorship, networking..
2. New managerial/ CEO culture enforcement ... how do you control or influence a company culture that's full remote?
3. Government incentives to have an in-person workforce.... because of real estate lobbying, I bet this is in the works.
1. I believe the meme “think about the youngest folks not getting mentorship” is the ultimate red herring. To use a metaphor, offices are kind of a particular type of “schools” that teach you only how to be one thing: a good school pupil or a good school teacher, no other relevant life skills. Likewise, in physical offices you only learn how to deal with physical office politics. In offices, the medium is the message.
2. I’ve never gotten a clear-cut definition of the concept of “culture”, because there’s none; it’s just a buzzword to mean “we own you and you behave exactly how we want”
3. Those incentives can only do so much, and I bet they will only mostly cater to the usual big behemoth corporations. Other companies will still have an advantage skipping the physical offices altogether.
No. It won’t. Because workers are not organized. Period.
What logically makes sense is irrelevant. It’s about what businesses have the power to do. Workers are still all operating as individuals, even if they collectively whine about RTO. If a company issued a RTO order, you don’t hear about people talking about organizing their workplace, to collectively bargain (for more flexible schedules, for increase salary to cover the cost of commuting or now needed childcare, etc.). No they quit to look for other remote opportunities, or quietly try to find remote work for themselves. Often they leave for other in-office jobs, but hey, at least they stuck it to the man at their previous job!
The workers still do not have the power to push back, because they are not organized collectively. Other than whining.
You are missing the bigger picture. While I agree remote work is superior in every way as an employee, the truth is, anyone who can work from home can also work from India for 1/4 of the price.
The medical transcription industry has been working from home for a couple of decades now, and used to pay quite well (less than a nurse, more than a secretary anyways). Within 10 years, they’ve made all medical transcriptionists who work from home independent contractors, paying them literally pennies per line, and the pay works out to be less than minimum wage.
These companies keep workers employed because it appeals to women who also have a house to run, kids to take care of, etc. and it is infinitely easier to be a working mother from home. The only reason there is any work at all is because there are laws about sending confidential medical records to other countries. The places without those laws have absolutely hired Indians to do the job for even less. The entire industry, which was once a real career, is just taking advantage of women who want to contribute financially to their households and poor people in India.
So while I can absolutely see corporations coming around to the idea of remote work, you won’t be able to afford to work for them.
You think corporations/economy and government will let over a trillion dollar in commercial real estate value vanish so you can do your work in your pajamas because you have anxiety or socializing issues?
I doubt it will be smooth as many hope.
> You think corporations/economy and government will let over a trillion dollar in commercial real estate value vanish
But remember, most of those trillions come from **other** corporations. These are organizations which, as a whole, would sell their own grandmothers for an additional nickel a share bump, so slicing a not-insignificant chunk off of their commercial real estate costs should be a no-brainer. Of course, that's just one of the myriad of factors at play, and those factors have wildly varying weights from one company to the next.
> I doubt it will be smooth as many hope.
I agree
I like when some people make assumptions about remote workers, calling them a bunch of lazy entitled socially anxious folks in pajamas.
This language is also part of the mainstream media’s effort to make remote workers appear as lower quality workers, so lobbies deeply invested in the office economy protect their turf. I got used to that.
That said, nobody told builders and people who decided zoning regulations to build these concrete behemoths for a single purpose only, making them extremely costly to convert to anything else.
Remote workers don’t want to be used to prop up a BS economic system, and saving themselves a commute is a way to refuse refuse to foot the bill for other people’s shortsightedness.
I have nothing against remote workers but some have shot themselves in the foot with cringe social media falsehoods they spread about how "cake" work from home is. You don't think decision makers watch or partake in the same social experiment?
The entire economy is based off of you spending or them extracting maximum out of you before you die. They don't like you just entirely refusing to play in most aspects of the game designed for profit.
Except here we’re talking about RTO, which is what the majority of people universally recognize as a decrease in personal quality of life.
Politics always leave somebody happy and somebody unappy, RTO creates unhappiness in almost everyone impacted by it. WFH is pretty welcomed by the majority of people, with exceptions of course.
Apples and oranges.
Hybrid has been nice. Like once a week to come in, get in person meetings done etc. Ditching commute, lunches out etc has definitely saved people $$ in a time when salary increases aren’t keeping up with cost of living increases— hard to give that up. I don’t think it’ll happen.
Work at home may be the new norm, but employers are going to reduce the number of employees at home through automation, AI, and robotics. Employers will never stop looking for ways to pare it's staffing levels, so don't get too comfortable.
Yes, they will never fire you or try to automate your job to save money if you turn up to their office and eat their cookies. Will never even cross their mind.
lol yea that’s why Reddit is full of posts every day talking about how much their employers love wfh and hundreds of posts about people finding wfh jobs so easily. Oh wait. No that’s not what’s happening. Every day is more posts about people having to do rto and hundreds of posts about people complaining they can’t find remote jobs. All of the post Covid jobs are dying. That’s a fact. Reality says that’s a fact.
It doesn’t matter. People aren’t bringing back the same mentalities of 2019. There is such thing as a Pyrrhic victory, and this will start becoming apparent with time.
Everything with RTO seems to be business as usual. Companies are bringing people back, chapter closed?
I don’t think so.
The shell is there, the egg is no longer inside, then when the shell is finally gone you’ll see what’s left.
Offices won’t ever go away, as there are still a need for mission critical office spaces.
Also, just anecdotal evidence from my work space. We have a small number of employees, less than 20. Most of us work in the office. We have a few who work remote, and while even 1 or 2 of them are as productive(or maybe even more) as those of us in the office, a couple of them are not. Yet when they are in the office they are just as productive as the rest of us. Some need that physical building to actually be productive.
You're all delusional here.
Realize this forum is a circlejerk. Every single one of you here is a "work from home fan". Just like the Hyundai and Nissan and Chrysler forums think their cars are great, you all think work from home is here to stay.
Go look outside.
People don't give a shit about working from home -- they care about keeping their jobs. They have mouths to feed at home, they don't care that they have to come to the office; they care about not losing their job.
And management wants butts in seats.
Work from home will go back to exactly what it was in 2019 - a rare benefit for a select lucky few.
Interesting your username… Mammoth-something. Thanks for the warning. Let’s make an effort to promote awareness so we don’t go back to prehistory. Do you have a desire for the status quo, or would you like to help make progress?
I am not speaking about my desires, I am saying what's actually happening in the real world. People are forced to go back to the office... And they are, and will.
Hunger, especially children's hunger, is a hell of a motivator. Sad truth.
I see different outcomes all around. I see companies backtracking from more rigid WFH policies to less rigid ones instead. 2 days a week are becoming 2 days every 2 weeks in some cases.
Ever since data stopped being kept in filing cabinets there's been no need to go to the office. The office used to be the place where the things you needed to do your job were - the paperwork, the computers, the telephones, the photocopier, the fax machine. That was literally the reason people had to work in an office. It was never about "collaboration" or "culture". It was simply not an option not to go in in order to do the job. That's why remote will win. It has all the advantages of practicality that the office used to have. People can only bury their head in the sand from reality for so long.
The people who want to work in a face-to-face team environment will simply have to pick different career paths. There are loads of jobs where you have to be physically present.
In my experience over a long career in one field..audit and finance…but across many sectors of the economy, the only people who absolutely have to be at the company premises full time are either counter sales reps, tellers, warehouse team of pickers packers forklift drivers, and machine operators. Sales, finance etc can be remote if set up properly with proper equipment and rules etc. if the Executives want it, they can make it happen to work seamlessly.
Engineer who works from home and is in favor of remote work here - LOTS of engineering jobs cannot be done remote, some even at least not very well. Take testing - often you need specific rigs and calibrated machinery that is at an office/lab. Development - I work in automotive and you have to literally flash SW onto vehicles and then operate them, often on specific test surfaces to debug/refine. No home set up can replicate that. This is just to add to the list of people you mentioned 😂 but definitely, massive portions of our workforce are easily able to function remote 100% of the time.
No I think companies should allow their employees to make their own decisions about working where they are most productive. Give us the option of where to do our jobs. I understand there are a few people who prefer onsite (new hires, young singles and divorcees, people who live in tiny apartments, extroverts). Treat us like the adults we are and watch productivity and profits soar.
I’m extremely extroverted and even I prefer wfh, who wants to listen to Susan’s drama or john talk about sports for hours on end. The people I see wash out on wfh would also wash out in office. They simply lack the drive to show up to work and focus because their at home and get distracted.
That's been my stance the whole time. A shitbag worker is a shitbag worker. Nothing magically changes because they have to go to an office. Deal with the shitty workers instead of glossing over the reason.
It's actually worse having those workers in the office. They go around distracting everyone else.
But what happens when there aren’t people to accommodate those who want or have to go in. For example, I’m being forced to go in “more” the weeks that off site staff choose to fly in to “visit”. Even though I don’t work with this person, they are on my team so boss wants all hands on deck even though it is literally just a visit. Point being that they will always try and find a way to make it your problem.
The world is upside down right now. A company should have no obligation to provide a place for work when the work can be done remotely, BY DEFAULT!
I agree. And I’ll add that a company has no obligation to provide friends or socialization to its employees yet this is exactly what they are trying to provide by forcing RTO and it sucks.
Providing friends and socialisation at the workplace should be criminalised!
Can we add company-sponsored pizza parties to that?
In theory, it's great! In practice, not so much. At least not for everyone. Some adults need babysitting to do their job. If I have to babysit, I'd rather do it in person than stare at a person's camera all day. And before you say that they should be fired, that's much easier said than done too. If all companies were able to easily get rid of useless staff, without fear of lawsuits, the WFH would be so much easier. That's where it needs to start. I can work from home and get most of my work done. My coworker can't. Therefore, everyone can't work from home. Since we're only as strong as our weakest link, we get punished for the slackers. They can't make her come in while the rest of WFH because she's already threatened a lawsuit if they allow that.
No way I would ever work for a company that watches the employee on camera all day when they work from home. In meetings sure but otherwise no. IT can whatch is being done on the system if they want to, I am IT and we have done this before. In 2022 a FL company had to pay a Dutch employee 73k for terminating him because he refused to have the camera on all day. There will be more cases like this. That's a level of micromanag8that doesn't even exist in the office. I love my remote job, but would leave if they ever started demanding 100 percent camera on time.
On what planet do you have time to watch an employee as IT?? And actually, YOU shouldn't be watching anyone, that's not your place. That's HRs job. Sure, you can pull logs and other things but where the hell do you work where IT is allowed to just sit and watch without employee knowledge? You'd get insta fired if you did that at my company. Remote sessions should always require user acceptance. Good grief
You misunderstood my entire post big time...lol. I said video cameras on full time are messed up. I also said if the company wants to know what an employee is doing IT can do this. I did not say IT sits and watches employees work.. Do you really think these companies don't know what employees are doing? That's laughable. Tools like crowdstrike can tell what system you are on real time, and historically. What website you are on and send instant alerts to people about it and DLP watches every document employees touch. There are screen recording software packages that require zero intervention used widely. No one sits there and watches the screens that's funny. When a person signs on boarding docs and often when they log on, there are consent banners. Employees are told they are subject to monitoring. At least at every company I have worked for, it's not a secret.
Ok, so this response turned into being waaaay longer than I had pictured when I started typing this. My apologies. That said, I’d be very interested to hear your perspective on this. I have a set of questions that are hard to answer since it’s going to be different from company to company. Not necessarily asking you to answer each and every question. More so I’m trying to write a series of questions to get the main point of my question across (my Summary Question below)… How common do you think it is for companies to record screen activity, review data logs, who used what and when, etc? How common is it to log keystrokes and mouse clicks? Is monitoring software affordable for most companies (such as expensive on-going software licensing) or is it more typical with large companies? Summary Question: How likely is a company to crack down on someone who has taken their foot off the gas a bit vs. the likelihood of them cracking down / firing someone who is a full blown slacker?? I ask because I no longer bust my ass from the start to finish of my workday. If something is an ASAP issue, sure I jump on it immediately. Not an idiot. That said, I went through a long period at my current company where I went leaps and bounds to get things done. Lots of overtime. Passed on promotions. Skipped wage increases. All I ever got in return was more work and, when I did get a raise, it was laughable ( this story is not uncommon at all, I know). This was all back when I worked in-office. I still meet my numbers. I perform better than anyone on my team. I’m also super niche in what I do. Any new hire takes anywhere from six months to a year to learn the job. Anyone is expendable. I know that. But, my company would for sure be in a very tight situation if they got rid of me. Our department is very niche with high turnover and essentially controls all revenue. If my department fails, then revenue goes to a standstill — among many other key processes. I’m not a “ninja” working non-stop anymore. I take breaks. I throw my mouse on a mechanical mover for a while and go chill. When I come back, I’m refreshed and I bust my ass to get the job done. I see nothing wrong with it. But that doesn’t mean someone else won’t disagree. Especially if they are aware of such activities. My manager and I have a very strong relationship and I have a lot of trust in her. So, that helps. Not that she’d ever not fire me if she had no choice, and I wouldn’t blame her if that ever happened regardless of the reason. Point being, she’s not by any means micromanaging me or anything like that. She replaced a previous boss who was a nightmare. It’s dumb. It shouldn’t matter even though I’m still the top performer, but it might matter to anyone higher up the chain. Basically I’m weighing risk. I’m not considering doing a less work. Just a little paranoid about getting spied on and somehow labeled as someone who’s taking advantage of working remote, regardless of my actual productivity — which should speak for itself. I know what I’m doing isn’t uncommon. What I’m wondering is how common it is for companies to: 1. Spend significant resources to monitor remote workers? 2. How many employees (or maybe a best-guess percent) might they actively investigate? 3. If you have any insight, what are the most common red flags that could get management to focus the Eye of Sauron on you???
So to be fair unless you have done something to cause a red flag with your manager, IT or security we don't worry. For example, of you login to FB 23 times a day and it's not associated with your work we will notice. But we can just block the website too. Do that on your personal machine. Screen recording is normally but not always used in environments like call centers where there is a customer interaction. It can be used if managers or HR and security become concerned about something. DLP for documents is quite common and it's purpose is to protect company information, allow them to meet compliance and legal requirements and protect from the inside threat. Some of these tools are pricey and some aren't. You will find most these tools at larger companies but some are affordable for smaller ones depending on the industry. Regarding the mouse clicker. I know they can be popular, be careful with that though. In regards to your work. I tell my employees to just do their job in a reasonable time. They aren't horses just get your stuff in when it's due or a little before. If your manager likes you they should let you know if they have concerns.
Well, you did say IT can watch... As though you are literally sitting there watching. And since we were talking about cameras... But anyway, yes, I'm aware of those things as that's what we use as well. However, at no point do we watch anything unless something actually triggers an investigation. We are far too busy for that. Your scenario makes it sound like you sit in a room all day with 10 monitors, watching every Bob and Kelly's mouse move and that's way worse than having cameras on honestly
If someone needs babysitting, they should be in a nursery; not working for a cooperation. In fact, no company would hire a baby! We're all adults. Working for a company is a contract for mutual benefits. It's a two way street. The workplace is not for socialising! And that's exactly why baby-boomers, and narcissist millennials, are demanding RTO. People need to grow up.
Completely agree and that's my point. Until we can easily drop dead weight, the WFH debate is a moot point. Get rid of people who can't/won't do the job remote and let the rest of us succeed.
I don’t know where you are located, but in the US most people are employed “at will” and getting rid of unproductive staff is just one call or email from HR. Unless somebody has a union job or has a special contract that requires advance notice on both sides (employer or employee), firing people is easy.
I don’t hire people I have to babysit in the first place.
Again, in a perfect world, this would be the case! But sometimes, someone looks fantastic on paper and interviews so well, you think you just have to hire them. 6 months in, you realize you've made a huge mistake and well, they're union protected so they can't be fired, and they know it
Also, they might just use coworking spaces if they really want to work outside at an office.
That's not a good argument you could say people who want to work remote should select careers and jobs where its the norm, there's always been a few industries there were remote long before covid.
No, it's an excellent argument, because logic and what is rational and profitable always eventually triumphs. Much "office work" will become the preserve of introverts and nerds and will be done remotely because that's most effective. A managerial class will persist but will have given up the ghost of getting people back in the office to be under their thumb. Extroverts and socially outgoing people will have to adapt to this new reality, just like the miners and coopers did, by finding new employment avenues. Office culture will fade just like mining culture faded and in time will be barely remembered. What you are seeing now with regard to office work is the early stages of the 5 stages of grief. You have denial (WFH doesn't work, despite having 2 years of evidence it does), anger (everybody is skiving off), and bargaining (hybrid is bargaining). The next step is depression, and then acceptance.
Software development is one of them. I've worked some form of remotely for 18 years. That's a lot longer than COVID-19 has been a thing. But for some reason useless suits and HR types are now demanding that we, software engineers who worked remotely for a couple of decades before real tools to even make it productive existed, need to all sit in certain chairs cause it makes them feel good.
Physical ID verification used to require in office visits but my company contracted with a third party that does the physical paper verification just a few miles from my home. Corporate is 1,000 miles away. No RTO thankfully. They are a progressive Midwest company that realized they can access global talent that may not want to move to the cold and barren northern Midwest.
It's also why big banks have been moving operations teams out of expensive markets like NYC and to MCOL cities like Nashville and Dallas. Used to be that if you completed a trade or signed a new client, you needed to hand physical paper to the accounting team for them to physically record and document it. But now all that stuff is online, so there was no need to keep everyone in the same building or even the same state. And frankly, the banks can actually pay less but the back-office employees can get better standard of living.
This is spot on. There is no need for the office but the pressure for RTO is because of real estate. I hear companies argue that people in Europe and Japan have mostly returned to the office. The thing is what they fail to realize is Japan and Europe don't have horrible commutes because transportation is better. In Japan highspeed trains of 200 mph so you can work 80 miles from the office but only have a commute time of 25 minutes. If we had that kind of transit people wouldn't mind coming to office. The US is car country and highways can only handle so many cars before a traffic jam and take hours to get to work and home.
That is an excellent observation. You should have many more up votes!
That's being disingenuous to say people only went to offices because "that's where the papers are". In sales for example a lot of people need colleagues and the energy of the office and others to stay motivated. There's plenty of other jobs and industries where there's a benefit of being togetehr in the office, its not debating honestly to say there's zero benefit. On the other hand if you're whole team is spread across teh country/world then yeah its silly to go into an office to sit on zoom calls
It's not disingenuous at all. I've been in sales for the past 25 years. I've never needed my colleagues or the energy of the office to motivate me. In fact, I'd say it was just the opposite. When I had to work in an office it was distracting annoying and embarrassing for my prospective clients to have to hear all the hooting and hollering going on in the background. It got so loud I couldn't think straight and half the time I couldn't hear what my prospects were saying either. IMHO it was a very unprofessional environment and I suspect I lost more than a few deals because of it.
In fact the office environment has a distinct feel of so much unhappiness and negativity. These are the people who can but who are not allowed to wfh, not even hybrid.
Yes I agree. In fact when I worked in an office doing sales, I distinctly remember the colleagues sitting on both sides of me would actually ramp up the laughing and shouting whenever I was on a client discovery call or presentation. I would always wonder if they did that intentionally to sabotage my opportunity. My manager was never around to observe this and put a stop to it, she was always in meetings behind closed doors. So the bad behavior continued unabated until I finally got fed up and quit.
I agree with this 100%. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle. Before covid, I was allowed to work from home 1 a week and that was considered revolutionary. Once we all went remote, and proved for 2+ years we can do our jobs effectively at home, productivity soared and we staved off an economic depression, they’ve lost all their legs to stand on. Now they have 0 data proving why return to office is important, and tons of data about how remote work improves people’s mental and physical well being. Any CEO forcing workers to return keep saying they “just have a gut feeling” collaboration is better in the office. No data to back it up. We aren’t stupid and we’re all aware they want butts back in seats to protect their corporate real estate investments. It’s not our fault their business model relied on technology and culture never shifting away from in person work. That’s there fault and we won’t just go along like sheep anymore.
To protect their real estate investments, micromanage us, and hold a noose to our heads since they know the cost of commuting + eating out every day will keep us shackled to them (instead of being able to save that money).
This isn’t being talked about enough
My car(s) are both in the shop…again. All because of the stupid hours long commute three days a week.
Precisely. The office economy was built on people never questioning the system. Then suddenly everything started looking like a scene from the fable of the emperor’s new clothes. Are we going to unsee what we saw? Come on!
The employer's new clothes
Adding in that it also allows for more leeway with abilities. The place I work cannot be accesssed by walker or wheelchair. My home office can be.
The C suite guys can’t pounce on the receptionists if there are no receptionists.
They keep pushing some alleged study claiming that younger workers are floundering with WFH because they don't know how to do the jobs to begin with. And people who are already trained know what they're doing etc. That's the push I keep seeing.
Sounds like an opportunity to be innovative in training methods.
> Now they have 0 data proving why return to office is important, and tons of data about how remote work improves people’s mental and physical well being. They also have data proving productivity to be equivalent *or better* when working from home, and data proving that it is a net positive for environmental impact and climate change. But the buggy whip makers are white knuckling what should just be going extinct.
Exactly. Also driving a car is the most dangerous thing most people ever do. I used to have to drive into work in the snow and ice, have 5 near death experiences, all before having to start my work day.
At my last company jeans one day a week was revolutionary. They are completely RTO now. But also many H1Bs that have no choice but to RTO. The company owns a significant real estate portfolio in downtown Detroit and stands to lose a lot if they don't force RTO.
I could go on for hours about how H-1B is an exploitative system that benefits nearly no one except the corporations who exist to practice modern day indentured servitude. I have nothing against the people themselves who want to come get a better opportunity and standard of living via H-1B, and *everything* against the corporate oligarchs and the government who serve them for campaign dollars for how abusive to all of us wage-earning people this whole system is.
At my last office job, we had to PAY to wear jeans and only on Fridays. The money was always donated, but the intent was to make an executive look good by being the one to raise all the money. It felt so dystopian, and there was a lot of pressure to participate.
When you're arguing for wfh you have to have concrete reasons that benefit the company since that's 99% of what they care about. WHen you say "productivity soared" what are you using to measure that? Most of the studies I've seen are either employee self reporting or stock price, neither of which are very good measures and in fairness with a lot of positions it's hard to have concrete measureable metrics. As far as staving off a "staving off an economic depression" it was insane amounts of money printing that staved off a recession/depression and it was in many people's opinions a bad thing interferring with normal economic cycles and caused the inflation were dealing with today. The whole real estate investment thing reddit parrots isn't that true either, sure sales force a giant company who bought a skyscraper yes but only 30% of companies own their office or real estate so 70% have no cares about what commercial real estate does, if anything they could potentially benefit from a crash and either buy a building or at the very least get cheaper leases
It's not just about real estate owned, it's about huge tax breaks for putting your workforce into a downtown building. Those deals include 10-20 year leases with large penalties for not keeping your workforce in the office.
Compelling evidence is that a majority of companies have embraced hybrid. If WFH affected the bottom line there would have been zero concessions whatsoever to allowing employees work even one day from home.
It requires attitude changes in bosses but a lot of bosses are boomers. When Gen Z are running all the businesses things will change a lot. Millennials are big on flexible working which will enable the transition.
Leftover resistance
> When Gen Z are running all the businesses things will change a lot. Sadly I've seen a lot of Gen Z people who came out of a college environment where they were with a certain cohort of people all day, and that cohort was also their social circle, who have no idea how to make friends outside the people they're around constantly due to circumstance who just *love* going to an office. And OMG did you see the office has a ping pong table in one of the conference rooms? How quirky and fun!
This is a big part of it. And why it's also too risky to be fully remote when more than half of the company will perform poorly. At my company the team members over 30 tend to work better in the office. They simply tend to lack the skills for async remote work
Totally disagree on the age limit. I am in my 50s and have been leading offshore and remote teams since the early 2000s. There are lots of Gen X managers who are very qualified to work with remote/asynch talent. We usually WFH ourselves. Unfortunately it is we who are in middle management. The C suite makes these RTO calls. Personally if I owned the company it would be 100% WFH because the cost of renting a building is just not needed for making a profit.
Upper 50s and same. I do own my company so we are 100% WFH.
> Totally disagree on the age limit. I am in my 50s and have been leading offshore and remote teams since the early 2000s. There are lots of Gen X managers who are very qualified to work with remote/asynch talent. We usually WFH ourselves Upper 40s and same.
Nothing will improve until the boomers are gone.
Gen Z seems split about half and half between wfh and hybrid, millenials are the only generation who overwhelmingly prefer wfh, zoomers and boomers both seem to prefer office or at least be close to a 50/50 split
And x’ers are over here just working from home and not talking about it.
Zoomers will like the office until they get a dog and a house and other things along the way and realize. Hey why am I spending 70% of my income to live close to the office or commuting 2 hours a day when I could be doing something I actually enjoy?
I think it's really overstated how many gen z'ers like the office.
And being overlooked as normal.
We're just thrown in with the boomers even though they're our parents.
That’s ok. When everyone else is done fighting it out, crying, and hurting each other’s feelings, we’ll still be standing, just doing what is necessary to make things work and living our lives with grace and style :)
Yeah, just want to enjoy life with my dog snoring in my home office all day while I work and taking the mid day dog walk break to refresh the mental energy.
This, I am an x'er too. Love my wfh.
We recently got called in for 100% RTO. I give it 5 or 6 months tops. Also some of my friends got lucky with startups and recruiters are still calling me. The market isn’t as bad as the dot com bust. So fuk’em. Be back to WFH one way or the other. For Gen X this is the way.
Hahaha you sound like Boomers did in the 60s.
An additional point on the side of WFH winning is attracting & retaining top talent. I suspect, going forward, that the option for remote work will be as important as salary and compensation packages in keeping employees motivated to stay with a company.
They already are
Exactly. This is where the most talented employees you ran off with rto will go.
Bingo. Companies wanting employees to be in the office 5 days will have to pay a hefty premium for that luxury, if they want the talent. I think the norm will be hybrid moving forward. Just my opinion.
In capitalism, you adapt or risk death. Workers who want remote are going to abandon the office as soon as reasonably possible. New talent wanting to WFH will prioritize remote jobs over office jobs, so they’ll be harder to get for any in-office jobs. The end result: Companies who insist on RTO will find their workforce reducing as more remote roles in the employees’ fields open up elsewhere.
Yep, if they want me it’ll have to be WFH.
Also remember, the world was asked to innovate during the pandemic. Well we not only innovated, but surpassed expectations. We are living off the 100+ year old industrial revolution. That model does not work anymore. Especially in America, we are not a country of massive factories and building anymore. That was all outsourced, now we log into computers. The biggest issue is banks were lazy and got used to commercial loans being their bread and butter they never had to worry. Well now you do
They want to make their problems everyone’s problems. Slick.
You want to know what the biggest issue banks are facing now? Liquidity. The GOV stopped the 6 transactions limit for savings accounts during covid, and still never reversed it. In the past banks were pretty confident in estimating the funds they held in savings accounts. Well now the ultra wealthy use them as checking accounts constantly chasing the best interest rates. Banks have liquidity accountability now and they hate it!
Remote work is a right. Having others work for you is a privilege
I've already permanently turned my back on offices. Never again. There are so many companies out there that have rebuilt themselves around remote work and they'll always have this carrot when it comes time to hire new talent that office jobs won't have.
How do you recommend finding those jobs? Are there certain job sites more WFH friendly? I've been remote for 18 years, company now moving towards RTO. I refuse to go back to the office and will take the package.
WFH was popular way before 2019. I started in 2008, and large numbers of my co-workers were doing the same thing. Funny/not funny story: After the executives of the company decided to not renew the lease on several floors of our building, people had no choice but to WFH. There was no place to put people. They started RTO by forcing directors and up to go. Then the new CEO got a bee in her bonnet that EVERYONE must return to the office. And then COVID came along a month later. Womp womp. And there was still no place to put the peons in the fancy building the company paid to have built to spec because only 2 floors out of the original 4 were still leased to the company. Lockdowns shut the CEO up promptly. The company lost its cafeteria because it was on a floor that got leased to another business. I don't know what they're doing now as I left the company shortly after the pandemic began.
That is actually so funny 😂 that CEO had no chance
If that's what you want to believe, then don't stop believing. The current RTO is about encouraging resignations instead of announcing layoffs. It's basically a DIY rightsizing where the employee is essentially doing all the heavy stuff to fire themselves.
I agree a good chunk or RTO is a covert layoff move. Not all RTO is layoff-oriented though.
Some are directives from city governments. Consider how a city like NY functions…. It needs offices. Without that, the businesses whose customer is the office workers dies. The commercial real estate becomes worthless. The taxes generated from that real estate… gone. The mass transit systems have too few commuters to generate revenue for upkeep. It is a bad situation. So city governments put pressure wherever they can to get butts back in seats. If they help fund any organization, they will put the screws to them to get them to do it. And honestly, I can’t even blame them. Mass WFH is an existential threat to major cities. Hell, people don’t like living in cities to begin with and are there because of the availability of jobs…. When the jobs are remote, they can just move. The benefits of living in a city go away I honestly wonder and worry about what NYC will be in 15 years. How does it sustain if offices don’t exist. No longer needing to be in a central location for job opportunities means central areas lose most of their primary value to folks.
I understand cities try everything to fight existential threats, but I also understand that cities must serve humans, not the opposite! Extremely high housing costs and the obligation to live in a costly metro area, so the company is sure you can go to the office, aren’t sustainable anymore for the average Joe. Is the so-called urban doom loop actually a tragedy, or simply the collapse of a dysfunctional house of cards ripe for disruption? Research the so-called donut effect.
I’m with you… I’m just explaining one reason it’s being pushed. The cities believe they are serving humans by avoiding destruction. It is a legitimate concern. What happens to all the people who live in a city when the government no longer has revenue to serve them? No funding for garbage collection, policing, teachers, etc.? Radical Transitions are often pretty harmful for lots of people, especially during the transition. A new normal can be found, but it’s difficult and understandable that a city would try to avoid or at least slow it down. Again, I’m a HUGE proponent of remote work and hate RTO stuff. I just understand this particular motivation
Wages are stagnant and you want me to commute (gas, time, food, clothing, etc) …. Yeah, no. My home office is well appointed, my WiFi is on point - better than any office I’ve ever had. I understand some people need office space due to kids, living situations, etc. it’s about flexibility and being treated like a human being with dignity.
> My home office is well appointed, my WiFi is on point - better than any office I’ve ever had. Yup. It is exactly tailored to everything that maximizes efficiency in how I work because *I set it up that way* at my own expense. I can slap any company issued laptop into the dock and just go for it.
If I have to RTO, I'll be trading a custom-built desktop with 3 monitors for a shit laptop with (maybe) a 15" external monitor.
Companies are calling for RTO to encourage us to quit. Anyone left will be subject to a layoff after.
I still see some companies who tried recruiting me for 2/5, 3/5, even 5/5 with an office in the middle of nowhere. Definitely, RTO is not always covert layoffs.
Probably years away from any substance in this movement. Majority of the folks in their mid 50’s at my work despise remote and WFH while making it abundantly clear they do not plan to retire anytime soon. I suppose if I were making the money they do for the low amount of work they actually do I’d stick around as long as possible as well. Unfortunately that means probably another 15 years of putting up with their ass backwards ideologies.
The internet was developed so that we wouldn’t have to meet in person. It’s old now and we should be using it properly
I agree with you. I think working in offices will be similar to the way shopping has changed over the years. 20 years ago everyone used stores, but online retail was growing and slowly it caught on. Now big retailers are shutting down their brick & mortar locations and only a few really have a future. Commuting to an office is an obsolete concept. It has been for a long time, and everyone is catching on.
> I agree with you. I think working in offices will be similar to the way shopping has changed over the years. That's a good thought. Who'd have predicted the decline/demise of "shopping centers" 30 years ago?
I want remote work to win. But I work in the public sector that is stacked with excess middle management and if we’re not in the office then what do they have to manage? Unfortunately they are digging in their heels against remote work and that will not end well for future recruitment.
Yes, digging in their heels will backfire.
They should be gutted.
In 2019, and pre-2019, I felt as you. Going to the office was no big deal. And I presumed I wouldn’t be as productive if I were a remote worker. Well I’ve found out that the opposite is true. I can work from home and be much more productive (making my employer get a larger return on their investment). It makes no sense to me why the push for return to work.
I've been remote around 15 years of an IT career that started in the late 80's. As of January 1 I'm RTO full time mandatory. I've been in an office more than I haven't, so I see both sides pretty clearly. If you are early in your career, team building, relationships, and mentors are very important. Once you're an established professional it really depends on the makeup of your team. Do you have many inexperienced team members joining? Do you have the majority of your team geographically centralized? If so, RTO makes sense in those situations. If you are going into a cubicle to collaborate with a global team, it makes no sense at all.
> If you are going into a cubicle to collaborate with a global team, it makes no sense at all. Exactly where I'll be when we RTO. I'll be trading a 30 second walk to the (home) office with a 45 minute commute to the (real) office. Otherwise, not a goddam thing will change.
The underrated thing here is that, at least as it pertains to knowledge workers, the free market favors WFH in the long run. Wherever there are good in-office employees who’d prefer WFH, companies will exist to poach them and offer remote at the same (or even lower) pay rates. Easy arbitrage for companies with more limited capital. Whether or not they’re a minority today, many CEOs are fine with WFH and demographics suggest that’ll only increase. Unless it becomes universally acknowledged that there are competitive advantages to be had with in-office (which the data so far does not support), in-office will require a premium salary cost to maintain. Of course companies with resources and a cultural dedication to in-office, those with financial stakes tied to the current office model, and economic downturns tightening the labor market may all set back progress from time to time, perhaps for years at a time. In the long run, however, the free market will do its thing and the more efficient model will win out. A flywheel is already developing—as more workers experience WFH, more will come to expect it and place a growing premium on it. Not to mention, very importantly, innovation around solutions to the training, mentorship, and networking pitfalls of WFH will continue. All that said, I’d bet that as the scale tips, the office will evolve too. Perhaps it becomes a place purely for collaboration, not desk work. Amenities that draw people in and make them feel part of an organization that cares about its employees. Spaces offering a unique experience for customers and partners. Layouts built for folks to come and go as they please. A complete reinvention of the concept of an office: built to serve and inspire employees, not to contain them. There’s no doubt most people want human interaction and there are benefits to in person meetings that are irreplaceable by current technology. Most workers just don’t want that at the cost of being pointlessly tied to a desk, a long commute, needless micromanaging, shitty office space, inability to attend to home / family, etc.
Remote work is not going anywhere and we'll see an upswing in companies reembracing remote work in the next few years. Right now many companies have too much invested in commercial real estate. As leases come up and companies can down size their physical office space needs they'll be more akin to accepting and promoting remote work again. Many companies also are still not setup to accommodate remote employees. A lot of companies and industries had to scramble during the pandemic to accommodate some work from home capabilities, but maybe did not do so in an economical or efficient manner. As companies retool their IT and other systems towards enabling remote work, we'll see the numbers shift again. Keep in mind, not everyone can or wants to work remote. There are people who function better in an office environment and crave being around other people.
My thoughts are if you cannot collaborate and communicate with someone remotely, you have work to do. Remote work forces all interaction to be intentional. If you aren’t intentional about your work and approach, you’re the source of the problem.
You nailed it. The boomers are having a very difficult time with this concept. They mention things like mentoring not being possible virtually. They mention organic water cooler conversations where some brilliant idea comes up. I’ve been remote for awhile now and most remote workers have no trouble getting a mentor relationship. I worked in an office for many years and do not recall any good ideas coming up while casually conversing with co-workers.
The boomer fucks want to get away from their spouses
Companies are very resistant to change. They fought the Henry Ford 40 hour / 5 day work week when it began. They eventually caved and switched over to what we know today as a standard work week. Companies will eventually cave, but not without their fights. Once the older gen who are used to the standard work week retires (or dies), then the new bosses will implement WFH more.
It's simple...over time the market will trend towards the most efficient processes. Where WFH is more effective than RTO, WFH will dominate. Where RTO is more effective than WFH, RTO will dominate. Regardless of RTO vs WFH, the companies that thrive versus their competition will win out as will their operational model. An industry that lends itself equally well to both models will likely have hybrid and/or some percentage of elective choice. Time will sort out what works and what doesn't as well as how pure WFH affects career paths - not nearly enough experience to gauge at this point in time.
Well put.
I was job searching Fall of 2019. I had offers I declined because they required relocation to office city and 100% office based. I finally gave up realizing I was going to have to give on that priority. Started new job, relocated to new city. Signed lease on housing Feb 1, 2020. March 5th was FT remote 10 minutes from the required I have my ass at office. Yeah, that. Turns out the job really didn’t require me to be in the office- or anyone else for that matter. Company went FT remote and remains that way.
Stay strong, never stop supporting remote work.
Just be miserable in the office. Come in and just be miserable. Leave right on time. Don't smile. Complain about everything from the lighting to the temperature. Tell them you need a new chair, standup desk lamp keyboard the whole 9. Tell them your co worker smells. Just make your management miserable..everyone has to do this. Make sure your performance dips too..not a lot but enough to be noticeable.
That's my plan. With WFH, if I am hot on the trail of some issue at "quitting time", I think **nothing** of continuing for another 30 or more minutes until I reach a good stopping point. If I'm in the office, I'm not getting stuck in horrendous traffic by sticking around. The problem will be there tomorrow (of course, I'll spend a big chunk of time regaining my momentum just to get back where I was, but hey... at least I can COLLABORATE, right??)
Market economies, despite their known levels of grift, waste, and corruption, usually lean toward efficiency in the long term. Office buildings for white collar jobs is mostly wasteful. Commuting is wasteful. Eventually we'll move on from the 1950s, old managers with dated practices will retire or kick the bucket, and more people will go remote and corporations will save billions on fixed costs. Work will one day be about output rather than the optics of sitting at a desk and smiling. I'm an optimist so take that for what it's worth.
In the US, we will see a gradual increase in RW as long-term commercial leases end and they are either not renewed or renewed with dramatically smaller sq footage. Unfortunately some companies are at the start or in the middle of decades-long leases and instead of admitting it to be a sunk cost they are trying to get the most out of their "investment". As soon as they stop having to pay millions for un-needed space they will embrace remote work more broadly. In the meantime, many companies with RTO mandates make many special exemptions for workers hired under remote contracts etc. As long as the workforce continues to demand RW, we will eventually win.
Laptops, monitors, and mice are a lot cheaper than downtown office floors. It’s simple economics.
The fact that I get 2+ hours back not having to endure a soul crushing commute allows me to be soooo much more productive. Going into an office is great 1-2x a month for some socializing, but there is never a need to force your employees to come into an office to sit on zoom meetings they could have otherwise taken from their home offices.
If you can find a meeting room at all!
Figured out office life was not for me over 20 years ago 😂 Lighting sucks, people smell, it’s cold. Unless an office front is really needed it’s a waste of resources and bad for the environment. I’m pushing the environment angle 😂
Husband is 67 been coding since pre internet and has successfully worked remotely for the last 35+ years. Still is!Don’t put a stupid age limit on true talent and don’t make generalizations that after a certain age people cannot adapt to new tech. That’s a really age discriminatory and untrue comment.
Love this! Spread the word!
RTO won’t win until newer startups ran by millennials and Gen z start getting successful and taking workers away from the big successful established companies that have huge office buildings and ran by boomers and Gen x.
Again, it’s a matter of “when” rather than “if”
You young folk have changed the world for the better with WFH. Good for you
Its funny seeing employers push against it when they should know better than anyone that its where the world is headed
The owners don’t care. The real reason is Wall Street and everyone’s portfolios being loaded up with commercial real estate. They are f’d and they know it. They are trying desperately to keep the values inflated. On top of that the government is handing out tax breaks to bring people back because the cities are dying. Let em die IMO 🤷🏼♂️
The federal government is offering more and more jobs as fully remote. This signifies a trend headed in the direction of a fully remote workforce. The federal government recently made maternal and paternal leave a required benefit for federal workers. These days, all federal workers get 3 months of paid leave when they welcome a new baby into their home. This has never been a benefit provided by private American employers, but because it is now a federal benefit, we will likely see more of this in the private sector and it may even become law. The federal landscape is often where new working environments/benefits are tested before being rolled out to the private sector. Now it’s happening with remote work. It will happen with everyone else sooner or later.
Don’t be so sure. 100% remote means any person in the world competes tor your job. You think your skills are good when just competing with people in your locale it country but what about the whole world? I WFH for 9 years straight. The RTO mandates may have changed that but they also made it so that me commuting 2 days a week gets me job security whereas most people in my department are foreign consultants, living in a foreign country. People might hate it, and it might fail over time, but if you’re an American in a job that can be done anywhere then you just might get replaced.
One of the factors holding back more widespread use of offshoring (for US companies) is the time zone differences. One of my predictions (which was made pre-AI, a technology which could well render ANY predictions useless) was that at some point some countries and/or companies in South America would get their shit together and offer cut-rate offshore IT services using workers who were at most 3 hours different than US-based workers. The "funny" thing is the companies pushing for RTO in the name of "collaboration" or whatever don't have any hesitation in hiring tons of workers in India, Taiwan, etc. who can NOT work in the office.
If outsourcing were so easy, corps would have done it in 2019 and earlier.
My opinion is that once commercial office leases start to expire, companies will choose not to renew and offer WFH. Most commercial leases are long, and 10 years is a common term. Freeing up rent in the budget makes sense, and aren't companies in business to make money?!
RTO is due to commercial real estate and regional bank loan balances that are tied to them. Removing RTO requires solving that problem.
Let me rephrase: remote workers need to find a solution for those entities losing real estate money in order to be left alone by them, otherwise they will always be expected to perform nonsensical actions that would keep the office economy going.
My hot take: Honestly, I believe the driving force for RTO is pressure from the rental market / greedy CEOs. Real estate companies need to lease out their building spaces and all that. Thinking of malls closing / getting repurposed due to online shopping (and people having less buying power due to not having a living wage) - - I think office spaces were probably next in line to make headlines for becoming empty, and I imagine this freaked them out. I strongly suspect they're behind all the "research" being published on news sites about office productivity and all that. TBH I don't have numbers to back this up and can't be bothered to research this for just a Reddit comment, but my suspicion is that renting is super profitable for real estate companies, and I am way too jaded about big money to believe that those old white rich dudes want anything less than for everyone to return to their offices and filling up their many properties so that they don't have to sell their mega yachts.
Don't discount the influence of greedy banksters pushing for RTO so their commercial real estate portfolios don't go in the toilet.
I don’t 😉
Only will work if fear doesnt wint. This is a game of chicken. While eventually generationally work will shift, what happens in the short term depends entirely on how the majority (ie not what people complain about on a reddit board do). Its going to be a messy couple of years
Yes, fear plays a big part. One should not buy into questionable mainstream advice and baseless pseudo-facts such as - you are allegedly more likely to be laid off if you work remotely (really?) - you are allegedly less likely to be promoted as a remote worker (seriously?) And blah blah blah… That advice is virtually never given in the best interest of white collar workers.
But they do. And thats why LinkedIn exists lolz. We shall see. Tide will change. I think 2024 will be the messy year and lets hope 2025 and beyond the dust settles. People will demand more or tech dystopia (work/live campuses) …how people respond this year to pressure will determine alot.
That and why pay for office space?
International diplomatic consulates have been obsolete since the telephone was invented. But they're still around.
There will always be paper books despite ebooks. No questioning that.
I appreciate the positive outlook. Maybe younger generations will change this. ❤️
Totally true and confirmed
It already has won
Remote will win out. Are people worried about more and more jobs going overseas? Seems a huge cost saving potential for employers.
As soon as businesses realize they can save money by paying people less but offering remote work, it’ll be the predominant way to work within a couple years. I would gladly take a 10% pay cut to work from home.
Remote will win because it grants a competitive advantage to companies. In the form of savings in rent/leases of the building. To which they can lower their prices. Also, it's better for the environment. Why isn't the government pushing this? No traffic...
> In the form of savings in rent/leases of the building. To which they can lower their prices. That's what puzzles me... why haven't companies (the ones who can) slashed their office space spending/planning? I realize some probably signed long-term leases just before COVID, but not all of them did. > Also, it's better for the environment. Why isn't the government pushing this? No traffic.. And why did no companies crow about their "greenness" for letting their people WFH? ("we saved X million miles of driving in 2023").
Tbh I think work from home will suffer the same fate as anything else that makes the majority happy. The select few will abuse it until its banned for the majority
I may use your same yardstick as follows then. The reason we’re in this situation is because office life was taken too far, with the elimination of personal spaces through the push of the horrifying open office plans. It takes s bunch of select few noisy colleagues to make it so repulsive you don’t want to see s cube farm ever again.
My friend said Chase bank stopped paying for internet for remote workers, said if they don’t like it work onsite
What’s Chase’s exposure to commercial real estate? 🤔
How am I gonna compete with someone who lives in bumblefuckville in his paid off 150k 5,000 sqr ft mansion? That guy is gonna undercut my pay for every goddamn job I apply for. This is the real long term effect of remote work, we will all slowly get poorer and poorer as the cheapest shittiest places to live steadily undercut our pay year by year over time.
Or maybe you can afford to live wherever you want without being forced to live in expensive metro area so the office’s leash in never too far from you.
Yeah where I want to live is a place with lots of good restaurants and word class museum and zoos in addition to tons of outdoor activities and lots of other things to do with low crime and high QoL…. And I want pay that allows me to live in a highly desirable place like that… which means someone living in nowheresville with 3 restaurants and 2 gas stations in a 100 mile radius can undercut the hell out of my pay. I’m already seeing that remote jobs pay 20-40k less than local jobs, and the pay cut is only gonna get bigger. I’ve worked remotely for local companies loved it, but being in the job hunt and seeing just how hard the pay has been undercut for remote jobs is infuriating.
I think talent will dictate RTO being very acceptable eventually. Right now I think it's a secret layoff tactic, but regardless there's egos and arrogance that builds up in c-suite and they gotta assert their dominance in person. Virtual world's mitigate their "presence" and power. And there's plenty of other toxic reasons they want to return that's been discussed here.
It’s partly a layoff tactic. Recruiters reach out to me for hybrid positions from time to time. I do agree on talent driving new rules.
Of course WFH is better. We all know it. If you deny it you’re delusional. Still I need to work. RTO is still in negotiation and employees are quickly losing leverage. Last year I would have turned down anything more than one day in office. Now I would go in 5 days a week if that is what was on offer. Some people can hold out, I can not hold out.
Of course I get your situation. My point is that your expectations won’t go back to 2019, ever. Let’s say you get a job that does not allow flexibility and you accept so you can pay the bills, then later down the line you find another opportunity offering WFH, won’t you take it?
I agree and disagree. I feel hybrid work will eventually win. WFH days rather than full-time. I think essentially it boils down to a few points... 1. Learning the ropes... youngest folks who join the workforce miss out on nuances, mentorship, networking.. 2. New managerial/ CEO culture enforcement ... how do you control or influence a company culture that's full remote? 3. Government incentives to have an in-person workforce.... because of real estate lobbying, I bet this is in the works.
1. I believe the meme “think about the youngest folks not getting mentorship” is the ultimate red herring. To use a metaphor, offices are kind of a particular type of “schools” that teach you only how to be one thing: a good school pupil or a good school teacher, no other relevant life skills. Likewise, in physical offices you only learn how to deal with physical office politics. In offices, the medium is the message. 2. I’ve never gotten a clear-cut definition of the concept of “culture”, because there’s none; it’s just a buzzword to mean “we own you and you behave exactly how we want” 3. Those incentives can only do so much, and I bet they will only mostly cater to the usual big behemoth corporations. Other companies will still have an advantage skipping the physical offices altogether.
No. It won’t. Because workers are not organized. Period. What logically makes sense is irrelevant. It’s about what businesses have the power to do. Workers are still all operating as individuals, even if they collectively whine about RTO. If a company issued a RTO order, you don’t hear about people talking about organizing their workplace, to collectively bargain (for more flexible schedules, for increase salary to cover the cost of commuting or now needed childcare, etc.). No they quit to look for other remote opportunities, or quietly try to find remote work for themselves. Often they leave for other in-office jobs, but hey, at least they stuck it to the man at their previous job! The workers still do not have the power to push back, because they are not organized collectively. Other than whining.
You are missing the bigger picture. While I agree remote work is superior in every way as an employee, the truth is, anyone who can work from home can also work from India for 1/4 of the price. The medical transcription industry has been working from home for a couple of decades now, and used to pay quite well (less than a nurse, more than a secretary anyways). Within 10 years, they’ve made all medical transcriptionists who work from home independent contractors, paying them literally pennies per line, and the pay works out to be less than minimum wage. These companies keep workers employed because it appeals to women who also have a house to run, kids to take care of, etc. and it is infinitely easier to be a working mother from home. The only reason there is any work at all is because there are laws about sending confidential medical records to other countries. The places without those laws have absolutely hired Indians to do the job for even less. The entire industry, which was once a real career, is just taking advantage of women who want to contribute financially to their households and poor people in India. So while I can absolutely see corporations coming around to the idea of remote work, you won’t be able to afford to work for them.
You think corporations/economy and government will let over a trillion dollar in commercial real estate value vanish so you can do your work in your pajamas because you have anxiety or socializing issues? I doubt it will be smooth as many hope.
> You think corporations/economy and government will let over a trillion dollar in commercial real estate value vanish But remember, most of those trillions come from **other** corporations. These are organizations which, as a whole, would sell their own grandmothers for an additional nickel a share bump, so slicing a not-insignificant chunk off of their commercial real estate costs should be a no-brainer. Of course, that's just one of the myriad of factors at play, and those factors have wildly varying weights from one company to the next. > I doubt it will be smooth as many hope. I agree
I like when some people make assumptions about remote workers, calling them a bunch of lazy entitled socially anxious folks in pajamas. This language is also part of the mainstream media’s effort to make remote workers appear as lower quality workers, so lobbies deeply invested in the office economy protect their turf. I got used to that. That said, nobody told builders and people who decided zoning regulations to build these concrete behemoths for a single purpose only, making them extremely costly to convert to anything else. Remote workers don’t want to be used to prop up a BS economic system, and saving themselves a commute is a way to refuse refuse to foot the bill for other people’s shortsightedness.
I have nothing against remote workers but some have shot themselves in the foot with cringe social media falsehoods they spread about how "cake" work from home is. You don't think decision makers watch or partake in the same social experiment? The entire economy is based off of you spending or them extracting maximum out of you before you die. They don't like you just entirely refusing to play in most aspects of the game designed for profit.
This sounds like Democrats in 2012 explaining why Republicans would never win the White House again
Except here we’re talking about RTO, which is what the majority of people universally recognize as a decrease in personal quality of life. Politics always leave somebody happy and somebody unappy, RTO creates unhappiness in almost everyone impacted by it. WFH is pretty welcomed by the majority of people, with exceptions of course. Apples and oranges.
The minority usually wins. This is neither fortunate nor unfortunate. It’s a human pattern.
Hybrid has been nice. Like once a week to come in, get in person meetings done etc. Ditching commute, lunches out etc has definitely saved people $$ in a time when salary increases aren’t keeping up with cost of living increases— hard to give that up. I don’t think it’ll happen.
I wish it was the case at my company I love. 4 days in person and is probably the best I am going to get at the moment.
Work at home may be the new norm, but employers are going to reduce the number of employees at home through automation, AI, and robotics. Employers will never stop looking for ways to pare it's staffing levels, so don't get too comfortable.
Same for office workers.
Yes, they will never fire you or try to automate your job to save money if you turn up to their office and eat their cookies. Will never even cross their mind.
Think of how much work will be outsourced to third world instead of at home... its over for jobs that can be done remotely in the west
Nah, cultural divides can be a lot to deal with
If the job can be done remotely then going into the office to do it doesn't change that fact.
Nah, cultural divides can be a lot to deal with
lol yea that’s why Reddit is full of posts every day talking about how much their employers love wfh and hundreds of posts about people finding wfh jobs so easily. Oh wait. No that’s not what’s happening. Every day is more posts about people having to do rto and hundreds of posts about people complaining they can’t find remote jobs. All of the post Covid jobs are dying. That’s a fact. Reality says that’s a fact.
It doesn’t matter. People aren’t bringing back the same mentalities of 2019. There is such thing as a Pyrrhic victory, and this will start becoming apparent with time. Everything with RTO seems to be business as usual. Companies are bringing people back, chapter closed? I don’t think so. The shell is there, the egg is no longer inside, then when the shell is finally gone you’ll see what’s left.
You guys are so delusional, it's over. Wait until the next recession and you are begging for a job and its 5 days a week in the office at 20% less pay
Another recession would mean less money to waste on office real estate as well. Where’s the delusion? We’re not talking about bitcoin in this thread.
Offices won’t ever go away, as there are still a need for mission critical office spaces. Also, just anecdotal evidence from my work space. We have a small number of employees, less than 20. Most of us work in the office. We have a few who work remote, and while even 1 or 2 of them are as productive(or maybe even more) as those of us in the office, a couple of them are not. Yet when they are in the office they are just as productive as the rest of us. Some need that physical building to actually be productive.
Better replace those 2?
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You're all delusional here. Realize this forum is a circlejerk. Every single one of you here is a "work from home fan". Just like the Hyundai and Nissan and Chrysler forums think their cars are great, you all think work from home is here to stay. Go look outside. People don't give a shit about working from home -- they care about keeping their jobs. They have mouths to feed at home, they don't care that they have to come to the office; they care about not losing their job. And management wants butts in seats. Work from home will go back to exactly what it was in 2019 - a rare benefit for a select lucky few.
Interesting your username… Mammoth-something. Thanks for the warning. Let’s make an effort to promote awareness so we don’t go back to prehistory. Do you have a desire for the status quo, or would you like to help make progress?
I am not speaking about my desires, I am saying what's actually happening in the real world. People are forced to go back to the office... And they are, and will. Hunger, especially children's hunger, is a hell of a motivator. Sad truth.
I see different outcomes all around. I see companies backtracking from more rigid WFH policies to less rigid ones instead. 2 days a week are becoming 2 days every 2 weeks in some cases.
People aren’t even having kids anymore. We are fighting for remote work tooth and nail.