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The Absurdity of the Return-to-Office Movement::The return-to-office demands make little sense from an overall economic perspective, while working parents, in particular, benefit from not having to waste time commuting to an office, writes Peter Bergen.
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Biden just did this to federal agencies…
For no real reason, Republicans wanted it, but as soon as Biden did it, they shut up about it. Democrats don’t brag about it, because democratic voters hate it.
There was zero reason for it.
The number one thing conservatives hate is “Other People Having Agency” and other people not “Living By My Rules (that I don’t actually follow myself).”
People working at home and not having to be treated like a child who has to ask permission for a bathroom break is just too much for them to bear. If employees aren’t risking health issues by holding their piss in or just straight pissing themselves, they can’t handle it.
The reason Biden did it is because his donors wanted it..
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Someone’s clearly never been hit with a handful of overdraft fees at once
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The ownership/management class sees Return To Office as a symbolic fight over class power. Who has the power, the worker class or the ownership class?
It has nothing to do with real hard numbers, efficiency, or really anything to do with rational choices at all. It has everything to do with the politics of who is considered to have the power in the modern workplace. The workers or the boss?
The ownership class knows how much they are stealing from the worker class so they really don’t want workers to start realizing how much agency and power they really do have if they work together as a class…
I think everybody needs to keep the conversation on forced RTO focused on this. Yes there are arguments that forced RTO is about commercial real estate property values and I am sure there is truth to that but we really need to see this story for the simple, broad collective story it is; we are in a class war, the rich know it and that is exactly why they don’t want to give in to the extremely reasonable accommodations of allowing workers to do their jobs remotely.
All they care about is the message it sends if they agree to worker demands, everything else including the reasonableness of the demands is noise to the people with the power and money.
I feel like they’re fighting an up hill battle against startups. If you’re a tech startup, you don’t have to invest in physical office space. You can hire competent people from anywhere. Pay them competitively and not have to drop 50K a month on a corporate office lease. It’s a minor edge in the long run, but something of an inevitability I think. Anyone genuinely competent realizes that if you force people to go into the office, you’re just gonna have people who dick around in the office and make idle conversation while staring at their phones instead of doing honest to God work.
Remote work forever, and repurpose the useless office buildings into conveniently located downtown living space to help ease housing shortages and drive urban density.
Then you need mass transit to pick up the slack, otherwise there’s just as much pollution and waste.
Correct. And that’s what will follow. Not a fast process, but it’ll happen.
I don’t get it. You need mass transit to stay home?
Fortunately those transit systems are densest in the urban cores so that may not be such an issue.
Living downtown typically means a lot more walking, biking, and public transit, precisely because you’re there in the middle of everything. When you’ve got everything from grocery stores, pubs, cafes, parks, cultural attractions, etc all within walking distance, your need to drive anywhere becomes occasional at most.
Who wants to live in a city centre though?
The only appeal is that it’s close to work, and we no longer need to go to that.
Because all the shops, museums, restaurants, music venues, and public transit hubs are there?
Museums and music venues, sure.
But the other things exist in small towns too. And if I do want to go to a concert, or the football or a museum, I can just go. It’s not like you go to these places every day.
I work from home and still prefer living in the city center, despite being more expensive. Not due to the museums but due to the closeness to restaurants, pubs and clubs. How am I supposed to go back home if I am drunk and I cannot drive. The city center is for the people not for office buildings.
This is me. I can just go outside and do the things, then I’m back in time for my next meeting.
Do they? I just moved back to the rural area I grew up in after spending ten years in Cleveland.
Cleveland’s not the greatest, but there’s dick around here outside of Walmart. I can drive 30 minutes into the nearest small city if I need a Home Depot or something, but Cleveland had tons of choices by comparison. Not a ton of restaurants, most are same ish or eaten up by Applebee’s. Fast food is even pretty limited.
Back in the day we had small shops, but most are dead now…
It’s also close to groceries, bars, theaters, museums, social services, and jobs that need you to be there in person, like working at any of the above.
We had cities before we had cars for a reason. Let’s make them somewhere we want to live.
It’s so nice to have everything within a 5 block radius. Everything I need is there. No cars, no traffic, just lots of constant exercise and fresh air. When I want to go to a museum, I go to a museum–no gas, driving, parking. When I want to go to a concert, I jump on the subway and go to a concert. But go on, tell us how living in suburbs and breathing the fumes from the car in front of you is better.
Nobody drives in the city, there’s too much traffic.
The one thing i disagree about is the fresh air
This isn’t 1980. Cities are really not polluted. Those who live in the suburbs tend to be less healthy due to lack of activity and increased exposure to the pollution emitted from cars.
If you are in the US or EU, maybe? Look at the third words though. This fresh air claim does not apply to everywhere in the world: especially when talking about downtown.
We’re going to take the exception and apply it to the whole, gotcha.
Looks like you love opening your mouth without thinking much so here are a few Actual stats before i block your ass.
I was not even disagreeing with you as a whole but apparently even arguing one point with you makes you entitled to a point you become defensive stale and resort to indulge in the mindset a 5 year old would be ashamed of.
https://www.unep.org/interactives/air-pollution-note/?gad_source=1
https://earth.org/data_visualization/pollution/
Now tell people again exactly how the air is actually fresh in cities, downtown, nonetheless where traffic is peaking. Adios.
Who said anything about living in the suburbs?
We didn’t all build our towns wrong.
Downtowns can become very nice neighborhoods once all those offices and car space are transformed in housing, parks and walkable spaces.
Students
I generally don’t care about going to the office, it’s not a problem, but what my company did was to hire 3x as many people as before the pandemic and simply move to hot desk system instead of expanding the office. So now we have more people but less desks and less parking spots. We have to use some app to make reservations and it’s just a constant struggle to book a desk so that I can sit next to guy I don’t know talking on a video call all day. What’s the fucking point?
Ooof fuck that.
Your bosses are idiots, gotcha.
What if one were to… reserve a desk and proceed to work from home? Possibly with a custom background that looks like the office :P
Ours made everyone come back to work at one office if they live within 60 miles. Datacenter floor is collapsing. Two areas are closed due to vermin being exterminated. Charmed life.
my wife has to go in 3 days a week as of January. she’s off this week as she said, quoth: “The fan that kept making more and more noise finally stopped working so I’m home all this week”
This is the best summary I could come up with:
We have met in person only twice in the year that the production has been up and running, and we have put out dozens of highly produced episodes, often featuring multiple guests, which go through many rounds of edits.
Banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase and tech giants like Meta are demanding that their staff be back at the office several days a week.
Those return-to-office demands are often couched in non-falsifiable claims about the necessity of having chance encounters at the office where folks bounce creative, productive ideas off of each other.
The return-to-office demands also make little sense from an overall economic perspective at a time when a third of Americans who can do their job remotely now only work from home, up from only 7% before Covid, according to the Pew Research Center, yet the economy is very strong in terms of low unemployment and GDP growth.
This arrangement gives me a lot more time to spend with my kids, and if there is any kind of unforeseen emergency, I can be there for them in a way that, during the era of the office, I couldn’t be.
In fact, I have written several hundred of these columns over the past dozen years and I have never met most of the editors I work with, and yet I still have a warm, productive relationship with them.
The original article contains 820 words, the summary contains 219 words. Saved 73%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Did we really need spmeone to say this? Is it not self evident? If a company requires hybrid work for me it’s a huge red flag
Rich people are having their fee-fees hurt because no one wants to (unnecessarily) come to the office
Rich people’s real estate investments would lose value if we suddenly didn’t need massive office buildings.
I’m really in a “don’t give a shit” phase because there’s valid reasons for WFH as well at RTO and I’d argue those in the extreme on both sides are idiots.
That said, pragmatically everyone needs to understand the complexity of how we got here and no it’s not fully “the ruling class” demanding this. If we can’t justify commerical retail prices the economy is fucked and I mean that with a capital FUCKED.
Now the reasons for that are multifaceted but how it involves all of us not just the rich, many pension plans around the world have aggressively invested in real estate. Those pension plans are for average people like all of us here. If commercial real estate prices tank there goes social security. There goes your 401k. There goes your RRSP.
It’s very easy to blame an elite class but this problem is systemic and a result of how we have built the micro and macro economy.
So to those that are on the extreme on both sides, calm the fuck down.
I’m sorry but I’m not RTO because someone has made a bad investment. That’s between them and their bad investment.
The stone tools market will tank if we start smelting bronze!!!
Think about what it will mean to the economy if people can afford to buy a flat down town, though… it might make people’s lives better.
You realize if you pay taxes there’s a high likelihood that bad investment is on your head? If you are Canadian you contribute to the CPP. We have huge amounts invested in commercial real estate globally. If that value tanks there goes old age pensions for everyone. Is anyone ready to own that? Would you vote in someone that would make grandma and grandpa live on the streets? What about you when you reach retirement age?
There are solutions which include divesting in this poison pill but you think anyone can do that overnight?
I seriously question the expectations some people have. Try coordinating a get together with 20 people and see how hard it is then imagine that group exponentially increased. We are lucky we haven’t killed ourselves yet lol
The value of commercial buildings doesn’t go to zero. They’re just cut in half (based on recent sales prices).
Just because the price of an asset goes down doesn’t mean the economy crumbles. In fact, buyers / renters are now better off. I’m sure poor Grandmas are in that category.
Pensions are paid off based on the booked value. If the asset you own is worth half of what you paid for it that is a problem. If you bought a house for 1 million and you need to sell it to pay for something else and can only get 500k are you prepared for eating that loss?
Of course I can guess your answer because you probably feel you know better than the vast majority of governments and economists but that’s a moot point by now.
I’m not claiming to know the answer because I understand it’s complex enough to not.
What I am confident in is that despite what you or I say is but a drop in how serious the issue is. The difference is I’m not wasting energy screaming into the wind.
You really are invested in this topic, it’s odd.
No pension fund owns only commercial real estate. If anything, it’s like 5% of their entire portfolio. Still, it’s not necessarily a problem.
So in your simplified scenario, you have a pension paying retirees that owns 100% of a building. Say few businesses want to lease space in the building, and the value goes down.
They don’t have to sell the building. They can just refurbish it and put the retirees in it. That’s actually more tax efficient than paying the retirees who then pay their retirement home.
If governments and economists got us into this mess, then yeah, I guess we do know better than them.
My retirement position is 100% in the U.K, where state pensions (pitiful as they are) are pay-as-you-go (ie the contributions of the current labour market are used to pay the current retirees). There is no collective state fund that accumulates and then later pays out. I have a personal pension, like most, which doesn’t have a defined position in real estate (although I’m sure some of the stocks in the fund would be affected by a real estate crash, both up and down).
So yeah, like most people, I don’t want to socialise losses in somebody else’s investment nor do I expect anyone to come and rescue my personal pension if it tanks based on some global change.
According to the latest report from the CPP Investment Board, the Real Assets investment department managed $52 billion of real estate as of March 31, 2023 . This represented about 9.1% of the total net assets of $570 billion .
The CPP is considered to be one of, if not the best investment, and most stable option in the entire world.
This problem is systemic because the rich made it so.
LOL I can’t believe I just watched someone “both sides” the RTO argument.
I sympatize with folk that want to stay home, but I personally am functioning much better in an office environment with those talked-about chance encounters. I am interested to see where we will be in 10-20 years when it comes to working from home.
Return to office has nothing to do with the people who do better in an office environment. It’s about forcing those who don’t do as well in an office, and those who the commute or time away from the house isn’t feasible, back into the office.
Sometimes that “chance encounter” is really just one mouthy coworker cornering another coworker who doesn’t like saying no even though they have work they need to attend to. For those people, just avoiding chatty coworkers is a challenge and they get less done because people won’t leave them alone with tangential bullshit.
Some of your coworkers have sensory issues that are constantly irritated and distracted by being in a loud, bright, and chaotic office.
This isn’t about you. You were always allowed to be in the office (save for pandemic lockdowns). So don’t make it about you.
I’m not going to down vote you - some people do like the social experience at work. I just respectfully disagree. I’m at work to make money and to keep my skills sharp - I don’t (and have never really) enjoy hanging out with coworkers outside of the normal work related areas.
As a mostly introverted person, work from home has been a godsend. I can focus on communicating with my manager and coworkers in ways that are more comfortable for me - and thus result in a more positive experience for everyone.
Plus the amount of work I get done at home is easily double what I was doing when working from the office 5 days a week.
This is me. No distractions = more work getting done, more time to think on emails and project plans, etc. In the office, I go home exhausted by the 15th person that interrupted my train of thought that day.
You mean those times the boss scolds you about because you’re just chatting in the hallway instead of working at your desk as it should be. Oh, you’re having a quick in person discussion with a colleague with the white board? Did you book that room a week in advance? No? Well, do that meeting somewhere next to people trying to focus. And why are you all standing around the desk for? Showing each other’s work? It’s gossiping more likely. Back to your own desk!
That was my experience for the last decades until work from home really happened. I had the impression many bosses liked to stop chance encounters so you just did your best keeping quiet and pretending to be busy. Encounters happened despite the environment, not because of it.
And then suddenly in the last year talks in the hallway were the most important stuff ever. Sure.
Losing 3 hours of your life per day stuck in traffic, polluting the planet, spending money you dont have in gas and downtown lunches so your colleague can tell you all about the weather and you can assist to the same meetings on video calls with people that are in another country… yay…
ok? and they aren’t, that’s the point. it’s absolutely bewildering seeing so many people now defend the hellish grind that previously was at most grudgingly accepted as most of adult life - working 5 days in a row, out of the house all day, commuting, up early, no matter the weather or your mood or health. insane.
You don’t deserve to be downvoted for your reasoned opinion. I do really disagree with you, though, and think that people will look on the pre-pandemic times with a similar eye to the 1500s. Just backwards.
There are certainly jobs that will always be in person–healthcare could be a good example. Most probably don’t need them for any reason at all. The real question is deciding which is which.
What chance encounters have you experienced? Generally interested, since I’m stuck enforcing a RTO plan while being full time remote.
Just meeting people in the hallway for a quick chat where we stand on different projects, what other teams are planning and so on, as well as personal stuff. Just your average office chats.
I have all of those too, just online lol. When in the office people shouldn’t be stopped in the hallway anyway, if they’re in the hallway it’s because they have some place to be. By stopping them you’re disrupting their work.
For me, while I have worked from home in past jobs, I enjoy going to office as it puts me into a different mind set all together. I have found that I need a separation of environments, otherwise I would spend my off time at home working into the late hours. Also, I would easily spend the entire time sat down in a chair instead of walking around every now and then in an office setting. But that’s me and how I function. I know not everyone is like that.
Having a dedicated “office” space in your home helps a lot with that environment separation. If you have kids, that space needs to have a door that can close, too.
Don’t work in your pajamas on the couch, that’s the worst thing ever for your mental health.
Yes, I can attest that WFH was a hell of a lot easier when I didn’t have kids. It was 100 times harder with them around. Unfortunately while I carved out a space in my house for WFH, it didn’t prevent my kids from interfering with work tasks lol. It may be a little different now that they are both in school for the day.
That’s an education issue. The kids need to learn that mom/dad is working and to avoid disturbing them. I’ve WFH for almost 10 years now, and I’ve had homeschooled kids at home the whole time. Yes, they had to learn to leave me alone at first, but it only took a few months.
I had a separate wardrobe for work, had a separate phone that I turned off when I went to bed, separate laptop, all that.
It really helped me keep a sense of separation.
But most of the time my commute was on a bus so I could work the whole way in and out. Commuting by car would have suuuuuucked.
The wardrobe is a good point! I would also add that if your behind computers all day that you spend the extra to make your home office environment comfortable as much as possible. You really do take climate control for granted in the office setting 😉
Yup, I’m one of about 6 people who work in my office that used to have around 100 in 2020. They all still work here, just from home. Great for me, especially with the reduced headcount. But many of my coworkers also like WFH, and I’d be first in line to threaten to leave if there was a return to office mandate.
I’m a “dont shit where you eat” type and just cant do any productive work in my home. Doesn’t mean i would force people to work in an office with me, but lots of people do benefit from a office environment.
Not sure why you’re getting down voted to hell. I don’t understand why people refuse to believe there is anything beneficial to human collaboration about being in person. It was a lot easier to help out teammates for a 10 or 15 minutes chat near a communal white board or on pen and paper as opposed to scheduling a virtual video call, and creating a diagram in power point or lucid chart in advance for something I could sketch by hand in 60 seconds in real time. Also those discussions did lead to SMEs overhearing and dropping in to provide additional help were great. Unfortunately this hybrid choose your own home or office location is just the worst of both worlds for those that come in.
A lot of people don’t like to drive 2 or 3 hours in a day for that 15 minutes around the whiteboard when you can instead do an hour inefficiently in an online meeting and still get ahead in terms of times spent on work.
It adds up when you have a lot of meetings where you need to do that. Also 2 to 3 hour commute is insane. And I’m not suggesting office work needs to be 5 days a week. Also the type of work really makes a difference as well. I’m also not sure wfh is more efficient. In the in office days meeting room availability dictated the number of meetings you could have a day. Virtual has created meeting hell for me at times.
In the in office days meeting room availability dictated the number of meetings you could have a day. Virtual has created meeting hell for me at times.
That never stopped people having meetings. Before virtual you had good ol’ teleconference and you were on the phone the entire day. You also had clients wanting a meeting or the company office in a different city/state/country/continent that wanted to discuss things so you travelled multiple hours for a one hour meeting in some cases. Fun times.
Time management and the ability to say no remain important, in office or work from home.
Also 2 to 3 hour commute is insane
A 2 to 3 hour commute (1 1/2 hours both ways) is unfortunately given the traffic situation and general suburban sprawl structure of the US not insane at all here. It is considered a long commute, but not super far out of the ordinary.
Of course there is something beneficial to being with other humans.
Is it beneficial even on the days when you’re just getting your head down?
Flexibllity is the key. Let the teams decide how they work best. Mandates, one way or the other, are silly.
Flexibllity is the key. Let the teams decide how they work best. Mandates, one way or the other, are silly.
I think that’s where it breaks down and the people in the office get the worst of both worlds. It’s actually less constructive to be in an office where you are taking calls all day with multiple remote employees that could be in the office. I don’t go into the office at all anymore, but I would be happy and happier to be back in the office 3 days a week if I knew the teams I worked with were also in the office. Pre pandemic I had a very flexible in office policy where the norm was to be in the office 3 or 4 days a week. But folks that had long commutes were able to leave the office early and work from their commuter trains to wrap up the day. Folks on the team would roll in anytime between 830 and 11am. I think the unfortunate thing about RTO policy is that coming down from HR in a 1 size fits all approach makes it less flexible and terrible with badge swipe counting and what not. And in order to be fair, some type of written policy must be in place, but teams, managers, etc. should have flexibility to make it work for their teams.
I agree completely that being in the office while 50% of the team is not is borderline useless. When I’m arguing for teams finding their own approach, I definitely also argue that teams should agree on days when they’re all in the office together (our team’s office day is Thursday - we organise 1:1s, brainstorming sessions and social gatherings on Thursday when we know we will be together in person).
As an non-office worker remote work is quite foreign to me to begin with but I imagine that if I had to do such work I wouldn’t get any of it done at home. For the very least I’d need a proper home office that’s only for work but I bet that even then I would just fuck around doing other stuff rather than put in the hours I would if I actually had to go to work.
