Survey finds 'return to office' demands falling as hybrid work becomes new normal

I listened to one of these c-suite apes give a whole discussion justifying bringing people back to work. His points were that having an amazing work culture and 75k a year is more than enough to get people back. When it came to why people didn't want to return there was no mention of having more free time, avoiding commutes, etc.
These fucks are unbelievably out of touch.

Who on earth wants more people on the road?
Everyone should be against mandatory rto especially those that cannot work remotely and have to commute, such as labourers.
- Wealthy corporations want you to spend money (car, bus, train, real estate). How is this still not obvious to you?
  
  Yes, obviously there are vested interests as you mentioned that would like things as they were, the question is why would you think it’s in your interest to publicly declare it as a vote winning talking point?
- Republicans hate WFH.
  
  But why?

I switched companies to avoid RTO. I happened to move closer to my mom during this time and not a month later they released Hybrid. Thank God I was out of range, but people were pissed. Funny enough, my company offered full WFH as long as metrics were being met, so there were some people who hadn't been to the office in years that were now told to go. And the limit was "50 miles as the crow flies," so people were going to have nice commutes. 🙃
I've had meetings where literally only one person is in the office (and it'll be empty behind them), while the entire rest of the team is remote. How can you tell people hybrid is necessary when the rest of their team is at home? We had people who were just hired, who came to my company specifically for the remote work, that had the rug pulled from out of them. When they complained, they were just told they agreed to work for the company under their terms and the terms had changed. Every single survey since then says the same thing: We what WFH.

Maybe we finally showed them enough times how quickly the team it took you years to assemble can evaporate into nothing.
- Doesn't matter to them. But hey, I'll gladly see them burn to the fucking ground or re-hire for 20% higher while having to give a month or two for people to find out all the hidden gems in the software with noone to explain it to them.

Yeah i'm definitely in team "flexibility". I really don't mind going to the office, tbh, even mostly, but rush hour commuting can go fuck itself and I'm just not subjecting myself to that anymore. I can start up at home and then move to the office when less people are moving themselves around.
- Wake up 9am, get a cup of joe, some pastry, take a mandatory shit, work for two hours, arrive to office just in time for lunch with colleagues, four hours of work, go back home, work some more if needed.
  And still be more efficient than being forced to work on site and being watched by your boss all the time.
  
  This, entirely. Although I dont even wake up later. In fact I'm ready to act on things earlier than I would be had I immediately gone to the office, because I'm already looking at mail and tasks when I would normally leave.
  Hybrid working is only a problem to people stuck in the eighties.

This article is megacorp paid bullshit.
Literally nobody I know, nobody I work with across multiple contracts with multiple companies and none of my friends or their coworkers want hybrid work or full RTO.
Now, in full disclosure, I did run into someone the other day at a cafe that 100% misses going to an office and commuting and social lunches and whatever. But...that's just one person.
- Here's my take on it:
  On days when I'm working at 100%, I'll admit, I do better in the office than I do at home.
  However, I don't always work at 100%, and I have MORE 100% days at home than I do at work.
  In an average week, I will get more accomplished working from home than I will at work, simply because I am more motivated and energized while at home.
- Eh there are legitimately those that want hybrid. My husband is one of them, he needs the physical work/home divide.
  Me? I've been wfh full time since 2015, get fucked.
- Your sample size seems skewed, or at least it doesn't match my experience.
  Mostly my younger colleagues, those in their 20's and early 30's, miss the office and actually go voluntarily about 2-3x a week. They enjoy the flexibility of choosing when to go, but they need to meet new people around their age, bond, go out for drinks, all the "normal" things we old timers used to do before COVID.
  Nowadays I don't care for all that, I have my own family and social circles, but I totally understand their point. I just don't want to be dragged back to the office because of that.
  
  Same here. I do 100% remote but many of our customers have hybrid models or even total freedom and some people choose to go tue-thu to the office. Especially younger people, without family, and living in smaller apartments in city centers (bad wfh setup, not enough space, roommates).
- Add another one person to the list. I am a software engineer, I have ADHD and I go to the office 3 days of the week instead of the mandated 1 day. It's just much easier for my brain to focus when I'm in a work environment than at home. Part of it might be how my working space at home is set up, but at home, I have never matched my productivity at the office. Plus, commuting to work is a large majority of my outside time and social time. I touch grass and attend social events relatively rarely and I know I need to work on that, but the fact remains that commuting to work is good for my sanity.
  EDIT: Regardless, I understand why people don't want to commute to the office and when given the opportunity, I will always advocate for people's right to choose one, the other, or anything in between.
  
  Interesting! I also have ADHD and find working in an office impossible due to random noises and distracting visuals.
  That said, I hyper focus when working from a busy diner or a bar. Is your workplace bustling?

My office transition from WFH to Hybrid. A lot of people quit over the last year. We’re severely understaffed and we have had trouble hiring.
We had our worst internal survey results for the entire 10 years of my employment.
Management doesn’t seem to correlate the RTO rules as the problem though. 🙃
I’ve been trying to quit too, but I haven’t be able yo find a job yet (i was trying to change careers)
- Clueless execs are always the problem, ultimately. They have their real estate obligations and simply cannot fathom that social norms around working have changed.
  Companies which are heavy RTO will fail. Some of the hybrids will survive. Fully remote companies are thriving.
  
  Execs who hate their spouses are always the problem
  FTFY
- Management doesn’t seem to correlate the RTO rules as the problem though. 🙃
  It's not that management doesn't correlate. It's that they planned for RTO to diminish the workforce and then they can start hiring (offshore*) remote workers for a fraction of the cost. At least that's what my company did
  
  Damn you’re right. We have been outsourcing more work to Accenture.
  
  I see your point, and at the risk of coming off as a dick I will say I think that our next industrial revolution will be when AI replaced a large portion of work force. If you can work entirely from home, odds are what ur doing can be replaced by AI or offshore workers both at a fraction of what your being paid

Office buildings should not be investment vehicles.
- Do you even American bro?!
  Cries in eagles
  
  crying bald eagle. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fajjJrY8ab8
- Wait till you hear about hospitals.
  
  Jails too

I will never work in an office again. I will starve to death before that happens.
- I will hunt and eat people before I'll starve to death but agree with you about the office thing

Why would I waste time going to a place with a shittier keyboard and monitor than I have in my quiet private office, with my cat, and zero other annoying coughing humans.
- Not everyone is so fortunate, some people have the good monitor, keyboard and chair at the office and a dining table at home.
  
  That is totally fair
  I’ve been working remote or hybrid since well before the pandemic, so I’ve had a long time to prioritize setting up my home office.

Fuck. I just had a really promising interview, but it was three days in office, three days remote (5 days a week, so the days gradually rotate). I've worked remote for 15 years, not including three months in a terrible office job that I promptly quit.
I'm making a mistake considering this, aren't I?
- Depends on how good the offer is I suppose.
  If it offsets the inconvenience and additional cost by a significant margin, or if there's other reasons why it would be good to take it (ceiling at current job, better progression prospects at new company, other quality of life perks, ...) then you shouldn't ditch it outright.
  But 15 years without going to an office, it could be a jarring experience. Consider well how this will affect your daily routines: force yourself to go to a shared workspace and work from there 3x a week, then evaluate if it works for you or not.
- Sigh. Dunno. The money's good and job market appears to be tightening up again, around west coast US anyway.
  Maybe take it and negotiate an extra day remote?

Too bad there's a ton of bootlicker red state governor's forcing their workforce back to the office at the taxpayer's massive expense.just to appease the dipshit who forgot this even happened within a minute of being told about it
- And to save commercial real estate values.
  
  It had been 5 years. There was nothing left to save after that long.

I don't even do hybrid work anymore. I just end up doing contractor roles because contractors can almost always do remote work.
Because of this I'm constantly on and off projects.
This has broken the "my work cares about me" or "I'm going to retire here"spell they put on you.
Corporate doesn't care about you. You must be selfish at work or nobody will care about you.
- This was the best thing about contract work for me. I suddenly stopped caring about downsizing, poor performance announcements at all hands meetings, annual raises, and whatnot.
  At any given time I have 2-4 contracts going at once and if they want to get all demandy, IDGAF anymore. I have told managers "no", and it's amazing.
  
  It's feast or famine. But honestly, I rather have this than actually going into the office.

I'm okay with 1 day a week in office. I'd prefer every other week, but it's good to have face to face conversations on occasion. But the office needs to understand I'm going to be much less productive those days. I'm leaving at 2 to beat rush hour, and I'm not making up that 1.5 hours of commute time after I get home (I will eat the morning commute though). I'm taking a lunch with my coworkers instead of working through it.
When everyone understands that the office days are performative rather than productive, it's not the worst thing. That said, keep fighting, my WFH brethren. Not everyone benefits from office time, and any time not spent in meetings it's fucking ridiculous to see people sitting in a cubicle with headphones on trying hard to emulate the peace and productivity of just working from home.

Hybrid is the worst. I mean its better than making me be there all the time, but it also lets people get away with all the bad habits: mixed in office / at home meetings, lack of documentation, unclear directives, favoritism, etc.
Hybrid means that the people are still unable to figure out how to communicate effectively, that they are going to start saying nonsense like "institutional knowledge" because they let people get away with it.

No one I know wants to go into the office just-because, but they also don't want to starve. When the choice is yield or die, it's not much of a choice.
I really dislike that the incompetent dolts who can't adapt to the internet are dragging everyone else down. I don't want to be in an uncomfortable office, losing hours a day to a commute, so someone can walk up to me and say "Hey" instead of using slack.

My employer tried to start an RTO program, likely as pressure from the owners.
My savvy manager had already deduced that existing checks were compiled on a monthly database query, so that's what I was doing; I also managed to skirt other checks by not claiming a permanent desk at my local office, which, as I predicted, kept me off of a separate query's shit list. I also compiled a point-for-point rebuttal to their bulleted reasons for implementing RTO as it would affect me and my work, and held on to that just in case.
They gave up the push not long after, and just ensure that butts are in seats when the owners visit so we all "look busy."

If you pay me well enough to maintain my current standard of living within 20 min transit/cycling/walking commute of the office, I’ll do hybrid. But I suspect I’m not going to get a mid six-figure USD raise.
Keep resisting RTO and the demands will continue to drop.

Also as jobs become the new abnormal.