RTO is about controlling labor, nothing else. Everything else is a smoke screen. Ask yourself the following questions and you'll understand what happened:
- why did RTO happen seemingly right after salaries jumped and labor became scarce?
- why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment?
- why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!)
- why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work?
- why did RTO happen at the same time that outsourcing ramped up? If businesses are so opposed to remote work, why are they outsourcing so aggressively?
It's not about AI. It's not about CRE. It's not about "synergy" in person. It's about disciplining labor. Businesses will happily tank productivity to prevent the power balance from tipping towards the employee.
In that 2020-2023 period, people started talking seriously about how much value they bring to the table. They started making demands of their employers (especially around diversity, equity, inclusion). They started interviewing at multiple places, seeing their worth, demanding more, and giving only as much effort as strictly required to get the job done. The sudden, overnight, incredibly strong reaction to this period, the hard right turn, that is the whip cracking down on labor.
When you also consider the nation as you know, a nation, and not a rat race of individual interest, the best thing the government could do is encourage working from home. Break the hell up these "hubs" of white collar industry and let's disperse this work and compensation across the country. I'm betting we would see quite a lot more growth anyhow if these jobs were distributed across the country vs just concentrated in like sf/nyc/boston. like there are limits to how much growth little old south san fransisco can sustain. there are finite amount of office space. only finite amount of housing accomodations in the bay area (forgetting for a moment the rampant NIMBYism).
And what else is that everyone loses in this present situation. People in the job hub in SF also lose, because they are operating in this fundamentally broken local economy, way too enriched for high income workers making their home cost 2.5m and their compensation actually pretty poor as far as what it can get in the local economy. West Atherton would be a 400k median home neighborhood in most of the midwest. Literally same floorplans, lot sizes, fit and finish. Same country club down the road. Same private school up the road. Boutique shopping and steak dinners still available.
WFH aside. Any company that hits a certain size, starts to be broken up into multiple offices, buildings, floors, etc. and becomes de-facto remote. Meetings all become phone calls. and the team itself is mostly co-located. I am always a big confused at that point, why have a 20k person campus and 2 10k person campuses. Why not have 40 1k campuses? They are all effectively remote anyways.
On our end COVID also turned every single meeting into a videoconference anyhow, because that is how IT set up the AV inputs for our conference rooms for slideshows. No more direct AV input, ipad in every room now and you start a video conference on it, join with your laptop and share your screen. Most of the time some people had to join in remote anyhow for various reasons. Still, pretty ironic using teleconference software to sit in the same room. 95% the way there, just got to get out of the building lease.
> why did RTO happen virtually in lockstep across all of white collar employment?
This makes sense when you consider that all of these big companies are run by leaders who talk in similar networks and listen to the same consultants (McKinsey, BCG, etc). I know someone who is going through a McKinsey run structural re-org, that is identical to one they ran (and failed horribly) at a company I was in 8 years ago.
> why did RTO happen at the same time that critical equity/diversity viewpoints were increasingly being discussed at work?
There was a decent lag between the peak of equity nonsense and RTO, plus the evidence is that DEI/Equity/etc hurt workers and disrupt organizing tremendously.
> why did RTO happen despite no evidence that productivity had anything to do with it? (and in fact, lots of evidence that it made employees more productive!)
Company I was went from 1 quarter talking about the increases in productivity WFH brought to the next quarter town hall talking about RTO for the culture and productivity.
Correct. Workers were starting to get power, people had seen through the fog at what was actually happening and were acting out against it. Agency is a direct threat to the owner class.
It is amazing how much the constraints of working in the office shackle people to positions or locations. So many people working below their worth due to spouses ability to get a job in some location for example. Maybe you do land a job in your line of work in this little corner of the earth where your spouses jobs are more a plenty. Now you have to hold on for dear life to this company, do whatever the hell they ask of you and take whatever offer they give you because you have no leverage at all.
The fact that people completely miss this fact and just go "well I like talking to people in person" I mean at a certain point belies ignorance that borders on stupidity with how hard people cling to the "ability to talk to people in the hallway" against even just the obvious negative externalities like the commute and limited home choices. No one ever talks about this career side and juggling a two body problem.
What if I actually like the office?
It is a nice building in a nice area.
I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride.
I like my colleagues. Sometimes you need to meet and solve problems face to face, and not have it be planned.
I like dressing up a bit, not a full suit but nice pleated pants and OCBD/sweater/blazer.
I have a shift schedule, sometimes I am the only one in the office, that is bliss :)
But my work is 100% in office. But not being shut at home is nice.
For me it's about choice. Forcing either isn't necessarily good, but why not just allow people to choose?
I sometimes go into the office, but maybe only once or twice per month. But I am allowed that choice, I can work from my house, any of the company's locations, a cafe, or anywhere else I feel like it on any given day.
I value the freedom and flexibility. I'd be miserable being told "You must be in the office" and I'd also equally hate to be told "you must work from a desk in your house only"
> I have a 40min walk to it or 10min bus ride
Sounds like you are taking 80 minutes away from your family every day. I would not be so proud of that. And you'll likely regret it on your deathbed. #1 regret is not enough time with fanmily.
True, but not everyone even has a family.
I can't speak to your sector, but from the perspective in my management role (in law) the explanation is quite simple: managing remote workers is more difficult and less pleasant than managing workers in the office. I actually hate it. And even granting that remote and in-office workers are "productive" in the sense that they bill hours (though not even this seems true in my anecdotal experience), we find that people with less in-office time tend to have qualitatively worse performance. At least in my field, being in the office, spending time with your co-workers, and getting to know them has value.
Of course, other things have value too. Often, our folks who prefer to work from home do so because they have small children who they want to spend time with, more fully share parental responsibilities with their partner, etc. I'm glad that they have the opportunity to do that, but it does generally seem to come at some professional cost.
>we find that people with less in-office time tend to have qualitatively worse performance. At least in my field, being in the office, spending time with your co-workers, and getting to know them has value.
I think you are confounded by the fact your most overeager overachievers are going to return to office no matter what.
I'm not persuaded that's the only thing going on here, but I'm sure that is part of it. Nonetheless, I think this is why many employers pushed for RTO.
I have the opposite experience (in tech at small or medium companies). Managing remote workers is much easier since outcomes (and outputs) are necessarily more visible.
Before working remotely (pre-2019) when managing teams in person, I found myself necessarily having discussions to get synced with folks. At my most recent role (and previous remote first roles), team members were excellent at providing updates on Github issues (the sources of truth for work items). Of course, this required buy in at all levels and trickling company objectives down through the program(s) and linking work items to OKRs etc. It was very obvious when folks weren't hitting objectives and easy to gather detailed written evidence of this.
And regarding getting to know folks. Most recent offsite was at a villa in Croatia where I got to both meet my team members and ended up getting to know them like friends. Now that I think about it this has happened at previous companies as well during remote offsites.
I wonder if it's field-specific. Sounds like there are multiple anecdotes across a wide distribution of outcomes.
Get better or quit then, I don't give a shit about managers, do your job and let the dozens of people you manage live their fucking lives, we're not here to please you or make your job easier
> we're not here to please you or make your job easier
I don't mean to be a jerk but ... if you are one of the people I manage, you literally are employed to make my job easier. That's not the only thing that matters -- which is why we (like many employers) do still allow some remote work. But making management more difficult is absolutely an impact that a rational workplace would take into account.
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> qualitatively worse performance
How does their quantative performance compare? Is there an opportunity in the differential?
It's worse in the sense that a more senior person has to spend more time fixing it. I guess that's an opportunity in the sense that it allows a firm to bill more hours, but there is generally a reason we wanted that more junior person to do the work originally. (Client cost sensitivity, teal workloads, training, etc.)
Interesting thanks!
or was it capital becoming more expensive as that happened during the same period...
I think these conspiracy theories about RTO are really unhelpful and actually harmful to the viability of hybrid work arrangements.
Please work in a day as a oil rig technician or a nurse. "I should be able to work anywhere and my employer must accommodate me" is an extremely privileged and elitist view of thinking.
A few of your notes are actually just wrong as well. Salaries jumped during covid due to over-hiring and software booming. "Productivity" is not a number, but a business-by-business decision. The vast, vast majority of people don't want politics at work, and it's exclusively the viewpoint of the laptop class who demand that stuff. (Again, people who work toiling jobs for 10 hours a day don't create petitions and demands like that)
At the end of the day, if you don't want to work in an office, you don't have to. But, believe it or not, many many people, including young people, like the office environment.
Do you understand how rig work or nursing is? These are very flexible jobs. There is demand for nursing everywhere. You can be a travel nurse and go find work in HI or CA or Las Vegas right now if you want. Temp agencies that place you so you don't even need to really hunt either.
Rig work it is weeks on weeks off sort of deal where you then get off that rig back to, quite literally, anywhere in the world where you live otherwise. You could live in the middle of the Amazon rainforest and make six figures a year on a rig in the middle of the ocean (well, maybe US jurisdiction is preferred from a tax perspective for employer payroll).
I'm not sure I understand the point. The vast, vast majority of jobs simply cannot be done remotely. So I have little patience for the entitlement of people thinking they "deserve" it or yell about conspiracy theories about why it is going away.
There is a reason YC is in person. There is a reason why the top companies are in person.
What say you to the fact that there are companies that work remote today and are competitive and doing fine? Anomalous? Or maybe your prior assumptions need adjustment?