"Return-to-office mandates at some of the most powerful tech companies — Apple, Microsoft and SpaceX — were followed by a spike in departures among the most senior, tough-to-replace talent."
And regarding managers, one person posits: "Maybe managers leave shortly after mandates ... 'because it’s easier to manage a team that’s happy.'"
"In other words: Forcing employees to work in an office doesn’t benefit companies, but does harm the lives of employees — at least in the short term.
More to the point: Most companies cannot show actual monetary benefits from RTO mandates. But most employees can show actual and significant monetary costs from RTO mandates.
In essence, these kinds of mandates represent a transfer of wealth from employees that their employers don’t even benefit from."
Yep. #ReturnToOffice was never about productivity. #RemoteWork#FlexibleWork has obvious benefits that don’t affect work productivity; there never was a cogent argument about which arrangement is better for workers’ well-being while preserving or even increasing work output.
#RTO is about #CommercialRealEstate and the preservation of capital, and it is about satisfying the bosses’ lust for CONTROL. Not just control over workers’ productivity our output, but control over where they are, how they behave, where they can live, and what opportunities they can seek outside of their office. https://tech.lgbt/@deilann/110884985364053944
An observation re. #ReturnToOffice: I sense that there is a huge disconnect even within the C-suite about #RTO in large corporations. In most BigCorps, I think the number of people in executive management who are truly invested in having everyone return to a daily commute can be counted on one hand.
There seems to be a pretty sharp drop-off even across the CEO, SVP, and VP levels. By the time it gets to VPs and Directors, support for #RTO is at most lukewarm (when they’re not being forced to be a public cheerleader for the ever-tightening the company policy, that is).
I think everyone can smell the bullshit. The wasted hours. The expense. The pollution. The traffic. The crappy office environment. The fact that you have to be on video call to talk to anyone anyway.
NOBODY likes this, not even senior management.
Only CEOs seem to want it. Why? I don’t actually know.
Desperate to hold onto their ever-shrinking workforce, but still unwilling to walk back their ignorance and lose face, Dell management thinks, “hey, let's screw our healthiest, most productive employees using whatever leverage we have left,” is the way?
🔥 Companies’ hard-line stance on returning to the office is backfiring
— Washington Post
"Thousands of employees at Europe’s largest software company, SAP, have signed a letter saying they feel “betrayed” by the firm’s “radical change in direction” on its back-to-office directive, with many threatening to leave rather than return to offices or work on-site with customers at least three days a week starting in April."
As I transition from a fully-remote company to a remote position at company that still has offices, I begin to understand the less cynical motives behind the RTO movement.
If you treat remote work as an afterthought, of course you're going to have problems with engagement, mental health, and productivity. Remote work culture must be intentional. I think this is scary for some C-suites, but the benefits are worth it.
Embrace remote culture and you'll reap those benefits.
The #RTO bullshit continues. Seems like corporate leaders are determined to collectively forget all the skills we learned in the past three years.
Look, I love meeting people at work, and I deliberately go to the office once in a while to socialize and bounce ideas with a group of colleagues, but mandatory, habitual commuting is just not good for anyone. Not for workers, not for the environment, not for cities.
Let workers figure out the best rhythms for their life/work and communication style. Stop treating them like drones.
“Meta is requiring employees to come into the office 3 days a week, marking a sharp turn from the company's pro-remote work culture”
Just your regular reminder that the real money behind #RTO is commercial real estate. Downtown areas — especially those like #SanFrancisco that steadfastly refused to build high-density housing and mixed-use areas for decades — are now suffering because the commuters they depend on for income are no longer showing up.
What a shame that $800B of “value” will be lost, but hey, that’s business, right? Surely we’re not going to nationalize the losses by forcing people to commute against their will, right? What’s that? Oh, we are?
“Remote work could cut the value of office buildings by $800 billion by 2030 — with San Francisco facing a 'dire outlook,' McKinsey predicts”
"Return-to-office mandates at some of the most powerful #tech companies — #Apple, #Microsoft and #SpaceX — were followed by a spike in departures among the most senior, tough-to-replace talent...
Rockstar Games has asked its staff to return to the office five days a week, starting in April. The Edinburgh-based company says this relates to completing development on GTA 6 “at the level of quality and polish we know it requires,” and to mitigate security breaches. GTA 6, which is not due to ship until 2025, experienced leaks in September 2022 and December 2023. IGN reports that Rockstar developers are accusing the company of "broken promises," and are concerned about crunch as well as overall impacts to health and wellbeing.
I’m trying really hard not to go Full Conspiracy Theory on why major corporations are going #ReturnToOffice#RTO despite the widespread unpopularity of this policy among their management and workers, but the whole “RTO must happen to prevent a collapse of commercial real estate” angle is becoming more and more believable.
This FB comment is from someone who has a long career in nonprofit and governmental work, and currently works for a city government agency in #SanFrancisco#sfba. They seem convinced that SF’s mayor is pushing to get workers back in the SF to save her donors’ investments from collapse.
2023 in #software was a year defined by anxiety - seeing our employers copy one another's "strategies" of #layoffs and forced #RTO without a clear logic or goal in sight beyond hope that it would make the numbers go up and to the right.
Meanwhile, we also saw our favorite tools and apps take off the "user centered" mask to launch headfirst into squeezing more money out of the user base, and jamming in ill-defined #AI features driven by investor expectations rather than real use cases.
#RTO mandates are about control. If you work from home, you have more control over your time. You aren’t forced into a long (and costly) commute, you aren’t forced to take unpaid (or additional if you’re salaried) time away from family to accommodate work. And companies can claim they’re not wasting money on real estate they can’t get rid of.
“Going to the office is no longer a necessity. It's a choice. And we wanted to know what, if anything, would cause people to voluntarily choose to go back to the office when the entire rest of the world (including the comfort of their bed) beckoned. And we're happy to report that the results are in:
Mostly no.
Recall that we went absolutely all out – we did everything possible to make the office as attractive as we possibly could. Drinks delivered straight to your desk. Gigabit wifi. Call rooms. We took this concept further than any company reasonably could at scale, to leave no stone unturned.
…
You heard it here folks:
The Boss’s New Secret Weapon: Pumping Perfume Into the Office.
#Employers are using scent to boost moods and get workers to come in. Just be careful about the combo of lavender and pumpkin pie.
"For the millions of #workers who find going into the office stinks, some real-estate executives say they have a remedy: Make the #office smell better."
Study on return-to-office mandates gets international attention | University Times | University of Pittsburgh
"The results showed that while many of the companies said they were bringing employees back to the office to improve the bottom line, there were no significant changes in financial performance or firm values after the mandates were implemented. But there was a sharp decrease in employees’ job satisfaction."