If there were a genuine material incentive to do so then it would happen exactly that way, but it's not as simple as that. Remote work benefits employers as well as employees, and mandating everyone back to the office has real costs. The preoccupation with getting people back into the office is ideological, and the firms that lean into that ideology against the material reality will eventually lose out to firms that do the math.
Doesn't mean there won't be this sort of back and forth in the meantime, but remote work isn't a pure employee benefit like health insurance or paid sick leave (not that those don't also have overall benefits to the company, but that's a digression). It's more akin to the transition to BYOD vs company devices, where there are benefits and drawbacks to either choice for both employee and employer, and the "correct" answer is more about the industry and specific circumstances.
Yeah the two factors are ideological upper management, reinforced by incompetent middle management.
Upper management just imagines people leaning back on their porch, smoking a blunt all day, and it enrages them, it burns in their stomachs, and no eggheaded cost/benefit analysis will get them past the psychological burden of knowing someone might be exploiting them instead of the other way around.
Incompetent middle management doesn't organize people, doesn't plan projects, doesn't clear workloads to focus on priority work, doesn't move resources around to help people in need, and so on. They don't help their underlings. All they do is alternate between monitoring, reporting, criticism, or discipline. This doesn't do anything productive, and so their selling point to upper management is "something about my proximity obviously prevents chaos and slacking, somehow"
When there is no proximity, it's harder for incompetent managers to justify their existence.
Awful!!! I once worked at a pretty good place but my weird niche job position meant that I was the only person who reported to someone I didn't actually work with. It was the second in command.
So he had absolutely no clue what I did, and like in yearly reviews I'd get a sudden horrible rating in certain areas like "responsiveness" or whatever, based on literally 2 anonymous lines of a text message from someone 10 months ago, when 9.5 months ago I proudly fixed exactly the issue in question even though it wasn't my fault. Shit like that. The whole process of review was built around people who worked together daily, with their manager actually hands on and helping... except for me.
So even though the place was good, even though the CEO was one of the least CEO-brained people in that position, and almost everyone was nice, it became completely fucking unbearable and I quit
My point is that remote work isn’t a cut-and-dried employer vs worker issue. Firms that mandate workers back to the office for ideological reasons might find themselves at a competitive disadvantage in real terms. Mandating employees back to the office has increased overhead costs, shrinks the available talent pool, and doesn’t necessarily lead to increased productivity or profitability in the short- or long-term.
Remote work is sometimes framed as something that is a clear benefit to the employee with a negative or neutral effect on the firm, but that’s just not true. There are negative and positive effects to both employers and employees, and pretending that there is a clear answer that applies broadly to all or most circumstances is ideology.
Now, employers might want to frame remote work as a pure employee benefit so that they can extract concessions from employees in other areas, but we shouldn’t do their work for them by accepting that framing.
This, at least on IT, for every business that decides their employees should go back to the office, 10 tiny consulting services pop up as remote only. The advantage is obvious, it's really really cheap to start as a remote-only workplace. Being able to source talent from virtually anywhere on your timezone is a massive advantage too. My more cynical side says that surveillance software will just become increasingly more intrusive to alleviate whatever neurosis employers get when thinking of remote workers. Mouse jigglers can only do so much.
Exactly. It won’t necessarily be good for workers at the end of the day, but the toothpaste is already out of the tube on whether or not it’s a viable alternative.
Here in the UK the places that have tried that have seen their workforce walk out. The places that keep remote roles steal genuinely good talents.
I think it will be a mixed bag for a while until the places trying to force workers into the office end up getting eaten and merging into the competing companies within the same industry that do not.
It's a Pandora's box. Now that infrastructure is in place to support Work From Home and the recruiting pool is wider for remote workers, there's a strong incentive to cater to remote staff in order to competitively recruit.
I can see this as a generational thing. Younger workers need mentorship and training, so they'll be in office. And then they'll just never get released again. But veteran staff, contractors, and the like? Much harder to get them back to their desks, and they aren't easily replaceable.
Also, employers really don't like spending an arm and a leg on office space if they don't need to.
The skeptic in me says the bourgeois will eventually force us all remote workers back into the office and no one will resist
If there were a genuine material incentive to do so then it would happen exactly that way, but it's not as simple as that. Remote work benefits employers as well as employees, and mandating everyone back to the office has real costs. The preoccupation with getting people back into the office is ideological, and the firms that lean into that ideology against the material reality will eventually lose out to firms that do the math.
Doesn't mean there won't be this sort of back and forth in the meantime, but remote work isn't a pure employee benefit like health insurance or paid sick leave (not that those don't also have overall benefits to the company, but that's a digression). It's more akin to the transition to BYOD vs company devices, where there are benefits and drawbacks to either choice for both employee and employer, and the "correct" answer is more about the industry and specific circumstances.
Yeah the two factors are ideological upper management, reinforced by incompetent middle management.
Upper management just imagines people leaning back on their porch, smoking a blunt all day, and it enrages them, it burns in their stomachs, and no eggheaded cost/benefit analysis will get them past the psychological burden of knowing someone might be exploiting them instead of the other way around.
Incompetent middle management doesn't organize people, doesn't plan projects, doesn't clear workloads to focus on priority work, doesn't move resources around to help people in need, and so on. They don't help their underlings. All they do is alternate between monitoring, reporting, criticism, or discipline. This doesn't do anything productive, and so their selling point to upper management is "something about my proximity obviously prevents chaos and slacking, somehow"
When there is no proximity, it's harder for incompetent managers to justify their existence.
This totally describes my boss, except he is almost never in the office. But he is essentially just there to criticize me. Which is pretty annoying
Awful!!! I once worked at a pretty good place but my weird niche job position meant that I was the only person who reported to someone I didn't actually work with. It was the second in command.
So he had absolutely no clue what I did, and like in yearly reviews I'd get a sudden horrible rating in certain areas like "responsiveness" or whatever, based on literally 2 anonymous lines of a text message from someone 10 months ago, when 9.5 months ago I proudly fixed exactly the issue in question even though it wasn't my fault. Shit like that. The whole process of review was built around people who worked together daily, with their manager actually hands on and helping... except for me.
So even though the place was good, even though the CEO was one of the least CEO-brained people in that position, and almost everyone was nice, it became completely fucking unbearable and I quit
deleted by creator
My point is that remote work isn’t a cut-and-dried employer vs worker issue. Firms that mandate workers back to the office for ideological reasons might find themselves at a competitive disadvantage in real terms. Mandating employees back to the office has increased overhead costs, shrinks the available talent pool, and doesn’t necessarily lead to increased productivity or profitability in the short- or long-term.
Remote work is sometimes framed as something that is a clear benefit to the employee with a negative or neutral effect on the firm, but that’s just not true. There are negative and positive effects to both employers and employees, and pretending that there is a clear answer that applies broadly to all or most circumstances is ideology.
Now, employers might want to frame remote work as a pure employee benefit so that they can extract concessions from employees in other areas, but we shouldn’t do their work for them by accepting that framing.
deleted by creator
This, at least on IT, for every business that decides their employees should go back to the office, 10 tiny consulting services pop up as remote only. The advantage is obvious, it's really really cheap to start as a remote-only workplace. Being able to source talent from virtually anywhere on your timezone is a massive advantage too. My more cynical side says that surveillance software will just become increasingly more intrusive to alleviate whatever neurosis employers get when thinking of remote workers. Mouse jigglers can only do so much.
Exactly. It won’t necessarily be good for workers at the end of the day, but the toothpaste is already out of the tube on whether or not it’s a viable alternative.
Here in the UK the places that have tried that have seen their workforce walk out. The places that keep remote roles steal genuinely good talents.
I think it will be a mixed bag for a while until the places trying to force workers into the office end up getting eaten and merging into the competing companies within the same industry that do not.
It's a Pandora's box. Now that infrastructure is in place to support Work From Home and the recruiting pool is wider for remote workers, there's a strong incentive to cater to remote staff in order to competitively recruit.
I can see this as a generational thing. Younger workers need mentorship and training, so they'll be in office. And then they'll just never get released again. But veteran staff, contractors, and the like? Much harder to get them back to their desks, and they aren't easily replaceable.
Also, employers really don't like spending an arm and a leg on office space if they don't need to.
But if all the veterans are remote who will mentor the in office workers 🤔
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