why are companies trying so hard to have employees back in the office?

They're wasting money on big buildings and rent.

Also, they want control of your activity while your on the clock. It bothers them if you're more productive, get the same amount of work done but can relax more at home. Which is the way it should be. If I can do the same work in 4 hours than I can in 8, I should get paid the same, and be able to relax, instead of being made to stay at work for 8hrs and be given even more things to do to just stay busy.

First, a lot of studies have shown the productivity boost for WFH may not be uniform or actually exist. Whether the possible productivity boost is worth the money on office space hasn't been answered, it is likely more in that gray area than WFH proponents want it to be.

Second, while generic work productivity is about the same level, teaching new skills isn't. We have data showing educating from home has been worse for students, and that seems to be filtering into the office place. Junior staff aren't picking up skills fast enough and are probably a major reason why WFH productivity measures are lower than expected. It isn't because new staff are lazy, just that they have fewer people to ask questions to and don't ask as many questions in general.

Third, building and maintaining a work network has fallen apart. People don't know others in an office, which can be a problem in flat company structures where communication is not expected to go through the boss only. So you have people who feel like they are doing productive work, but aren't talking to others. This can cause a lot of rework that the managers see in slipping deadlines.

That said, the answer seems to be hybrid for these jobs as workers won't tolerate full time in the office anymore. However, hybrid has been a clusterfuck in a lot of companies because the hybrid model is new and not everyone knows how to manage to it.

Here's the fun part:

When execs were hyper focused on outsourcing, not once did they say productivity was a problem

Second local workers wanted to do the same though, suddenly if you're not in the office you're useless.

Which is it? Outsourcing is trash or WFH is just fine?

A comment I've seen a few times is that remote work highlights the minimal value that middle-managers provide to companies.

If you're employees work from home with little interaction with their managers and they do it well/better, then why have those managers? Like you said, companies want to be cost effective. So the push back to the office could be coming from managers who don't want a light shined on their lack of value.

The people in the boards of directors, the major investors, people who run large investment funds etc. are the same or very close to the owners of commercial real estate.

They don’t want to fuck themselves.

Also many times corporate rent is used as money laundering, to hide profits etc. Like the building is owned by company A, which is incorporated in the Virgin Islands, but is actually owned by the same group that owns company B that rents the building. So they pay money to themselves. So company B is not profitable and doesn’t have to pay taxes. Presto pronto.

Just a very obvious manoeuvre, there are certainly many more.

Look: a lot of companies would suffer from an office real estate crash.

• the businesses that own the office real estate
• car manufacturers
• tire manufacturers
• petroleum companies
• coffee franchises
• fast food franchises lining freeways on the way to work

And most importantly, funds invested in all of the above.

People who own businesses also own stocks in other people's businesses. Meaning they all fall and rise together. Trying to keep the "work commute" and "office rental" industries alive is just an attempt on the part of those who hold capital to keep their portfolios growing.

In secret, they are probably also trying to hedge their bets, diversify and make themselves immune to the coming collapse. They'll try to position themselves and their capital in such a way so that the working class is the only group hurt when it happens.

But in public? They are not going to devalue their assets by standing by, complacent, as an office apocalypse approaches.

On the subject of remote working being more productive or not, my anedoctal experience is that when remote working is fully embraced, the productivity skyrockets, but when it is embraced half-way it may have a negative effect.

When 2/3 of the employees are in an office, they tend to reach out to one another to discuss things and remote workers often get out of the loop. When everyone is working remotely, these discussions happen on slack channels for everyone to see. And if they are written down in a channel, folks can read it as many times as they need to ensure nothing was missed.

This may seem not to be too important, but it makes a massive difference at the end of the day. And you could try to make that happen without remote working but people will not stop walking out to someone else's cubicle for small questions when they have that option.

There are apparently some industries where there's less production at home, I work in an industry where this isn't the case though and it seems to be extrovert admin people pushing it, I think they think we're all sad and lonely at home?

"It's nice to come in and have people to talk to!"

Is it? Or are we all just being dragged in because you want chats?

My theory is they're attempting to keep real estate values high.

I work 95% remote, and I'll be the first to admit, there is value in working physically close to your teammates. Discussion and camaraderie can happen organically, which allows people to better understand each others' strengths. There are also fewer things to distract you, and the reality is that many people these days are experiencing a sort of internet-induced ADHD, so being in an office can make it easier to concentrate. All of this allows you to be and feel more productive.

That's the best argument I've got, but I wouldn't mandate it on anyone. The only people mandating working from office are people who are insecure with their workforce and hiring methodologies. They don't trust their workers to do the job, so they feel the need to micromanage their workers like children. If you're a manager, and you don't feel like you can trust your employees, you've already lost.

Because a bigger company did it.

You'd think there'd be abetter reason but the corporate world is surprisingly uncreative. Signed: Someone who saw trillions being burned by IBM's Wattson despite a sea of red flags.

why are companies trying so hard to have employees back in the office?

Managers generally don't know how to manage people, so point fingers at WFH (or anything else that's handy)

A lot of large companies and executives have investments in real estate. If everyone stopped using offices all of a sudden, they would lost a bunch of money because the space wouldn't be in demand anymore.

It's easy, a lot of companies have board members who are also board members in office space companies.

Imaginary feeling of loss of control.

There are a few reasons.

1. The people who own the buildings are going bankrupt and so to help out their rich friends CEOs are trying to force people into using office buildings.
2. Companies don't want to let go of their power over an employee.
3. They don't trust their employees.
4. They can't watch their employees.

Permanently Deleted

Managers find it easier to micromanage their employees when they are at the office.

I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit

Yeah..well no. Companies are run by managers who aren't necessarily rational about human resources.

Control.

The answer that is common but I don't see here is it's a soft layoff result. It allows the company to reduce their employee spend because a percentage of them will resign without the publicity of doing a layoff.

Without internal intelligence I feel like that's what zoom is doing for example.

I suspect they were ‘advised’ by the Banks and perhaps the government, to put the brakes on.

Every Corporation would be delighted to dump expensive city real estate, and “externalise facilities costs” to the workforce. ( which is what working from home is, from a balance sheet point of view). It’s what they teach at business school.

However, it would only take a handful of big players to to do this in succession to collapse the real estate market in most cities.

The knock on effect would likely include some large defaults by landlords and developers and who knows where that ends.

A secondary effect is house prices. certainly in London, where people pay a 2-5x premium to live within an hour of they high paying job.

If people no longer need to live near the office, why would they spend so much on crappy housing ? It would likely trigger an exodus away from the capital, collapsing the housing market.

In the UK if the housing market collapses, the economy follows it down the tube in massive way.

Hence the half hearted ‘push’ to get people back in the office .

As an anecdote, I work at a midsized software company as a product manager. I have an international team of about 20 that I manage from home (full-time remote). Overall there is some loss of speed and agility versus having a full-time in-office staff. I'm not a fan of trying to quantify productivity per se, but for things like estimations and deviations there's no question that in my environment at least, things move a little slower and take a little longer. Now personally, the fact that we can hire engineers anywhere across the globe (including in LCOL areas), don't have to pay rent and related fees, and that some of the best engineers specifically want full-time remote more than outweighs the reduced agility (putting aside all of the other potential QOL benefits) -- and if needed, some of the savings from reduced rent and salaries could be used to expand the team anyway. Thankfully my management team agrees and has continued to pursue a remote/hybrid environment. But for those places that value speed and agility most it could be a bit of a problem.

Sunk cost fallacy of big offices.

My work place doubled down on work from home and they allow work from anywhere. They still encourage to gather at the workplace sometimes for socialization and general good vibes.

A couple of extra ones to add to the list:

"Work you don't see didn't happen"

I think a lot of it is down to the assumption that employees are working less because less work is seen.

"A tired employee is a loyal employee"

That one might sound dystopian, but it's also true. Commutes make people feel worse, and contribute to burned out feelings by reducing recuperation time. People in that kind of space are unable to look for new opportunities as easily.

I am on team work from home personally, but the reality is we will have to compromise a bit, and I think a hybrid environment is where the sweet spot is. I still work remote about 90% of the time, but realistically I think 60-80% remote, 20-40% in office is ideal and tenable for just about every work type where remote work is feasible.

There is benefit to being in person with your colleagues, there is benefit to having a centralized area for congregating, meeting with outside stakeholders, etc. However, there is absolutely no reason to be in the office all day every day. It makes no sense. The bulk of employees spend AT LEAST 50% (rank and file probably closer to 85-90%?) of their time working alone, by themselves. Let them do that wherever the fuck they want. If the work is getting done, leave them the fuck alone and let them work in their PJs or on their couch or whatever.

A hybrid environment also keeps your work force local and prevents us all from being outsourced. If we all insist on working remote full time then there is absolutely no reason for employers not to offer our jobs to someone living somewhere that's cheaper to live. Sure, we could correct over time and move to a lower cost of living place to compete, but is that really what you want? Do you want to leave your home, friends, family, etc just to chase the job you already have solely because they won't pay you what they already do to stay where you are? If you own a home do you want the value to tank as demand plummets? If your rent is cheap do you want it to skyrocket because displaced remote workers are flooding your town in a rush to capitalize?

I am no exoert

But i have read of 2 reasons.

1: the boss thinks people who sit at home, are lazy and get nothing done. When they are in the office he can keep an eye on them!

2: nobody using their expensive office buildings means waste of rent money. Not wanting to let that go to waste... makes sense. Inviting potential clients to your empty offices would also seem awkward.

Im sure there could be more reasons..

Found out today that some executives are afraid of leaks and digital records of certain conversations that could happen in person instead.

Companies that overhired the last few years might just wanna increase the attrition rates without explicitly saying so.

To verify you're spending every minute on actually working

Remote work threatens the status quo.

Two basic reasons:

1. Middle managers rate themselves (and others) by how many direct reports they have and it's harder to keep score when you don't see people in person.

2. Companies have spent billions on office space they can't easily get out of. Look at Apple:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Park

$5 billion dollars. They are deep in the sunk cost fallacy.

Reaction?

https://fortune.com/2023/03/24/remote-work-3-days-apple-discipline-terminates-tracks-tim-cook/

It’s always good to step back from “companies” and think of companies as just a bunch of people.

Is it good for companies to force employees back to the office? Nah, probably not. Is it good for the guy who has to explain why he signed a 10-year lease on all that office space, and now it’s sitting empty? Yup. Is it good for the lonely manager who wants to be surrounded by people, and has the power to make that happen? Yup. Is it good for the exec who has to find some reason why his department is underperforming, and decides remote work is a good scapegoat? Ehhh….

Like people said, a lot of companies have stake in real estate.

WeWorks, for example, was supposed to be big IPO and big payouts for these companies. And because of WFH, WeWorks is near bankruptcy with 12 cent stock.

Only way to avoid further real estate losses is to force employees back to office.

Relevant Article 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans: ‘A lot of executives have egg on their faces’ -- CNBC

Control, plain and simple. I am a software engineer, could work 100% remote, but damn if they don't want me in the office for some bs meeting or something. Also, fuck reddit.

there is really no logical reason. Working “in the office” is basically a bunch of distractions from idiot coworkers who don't know that email / instant messaging apps exist + trying to figure out what is for lunch and planning how to spend the hour+ coming in / going home.

Frankly the push is likely just because so many companies have invested in the real estate and infrastructure to make a physical office function that they feel they need to make that investment worth while, plus the inertia of old people not willing to just accept that things can be done differently. Similar thing with a 4 day work week, countless studies and actual implementations have proven that it is vastly more productive for companies and preferable for employees, but it will never be implemented in the US because we are conditioned to think running yourself ragged for your job is somehow a moral necessity.

In my personal opinion, anyone who is a wage slave that claims to “prefer going to the office” is probably someone who doesn’t now how to do their job without bothering their coworkers with basic questions they should know the answer to and/or is so devoid of meaningful personal relationships they only have their coworkers to interact with.

Work is for chumps.

My hunch is that we're seeing an influence campaign by people who own lots of commercial real estate swaying bosses. I don't have any actual info about who owns or has a stake in commercial real estate, but my gut tells me it's likely to be really wealthy businesspeople who a bunch of CEOs probably look up to/play golf with/whatever.

The values of managers and business / capitalism. A manager should ideally be primarily focused on creating the conditions that allow their team to do their best work, but many people who get into management and I’m guessing most people at the executive level are people interested in power, influence, and control. Not being able to surveil their underlings takes away from that control. Managers also tend to be the types of types of people naturally suited to modern work culture - extroverts, workaholics, people who’s lives revolve around the careers. The kind of people who like being in the office. Then there is the capitalistic notion of infinite growth, improvement, and never ending increases in productivity, such that managers are pushed to squeeze their employees for every drop of their time, energy, and attention. Productivity gets defined by easy quantitative metrics like hours spent sitting still at a desk focused directly on work tasks, rather than ever being linked to things like a sustainable pace of work or work life balance or employees not living their lives with a constant feeling of dread and anxiety in their guts. Don’t expect managers to push for employee autonomy in forms like remote work when managers have been playing the game by a specific set of rules and motivations that have nothing to do with human quality of life.

Number of things at play.

Most companies can't take advantage even in theory of saving costs if they have an office today. If they own it, who is going to buy in this climate? (keeping in mind that if it is office space, then it pretty much has to stay office space, without exorbitant effort and money to change it to something else) My company has 10 years left on their lease, with penalties of vacating early so bad that they would be just as well letting the lease run. If there's one thing a company hates it's being forced to spend money/have assets that are not seeing use.

Contributing to the above, a lot of these folks have a big part of their portfolio invested in real estate, so collapse of the office space segment of real estate would be bad news for them.

A lot of management looks awfully superfluous in a remote worker scenario. Without the visual aid of dealing with people in person, it seems like maybe you could double the sizes of departments, maybe erase a layer of middle management. So management needs people in person to maintain the appearance of relevance.

Companies also like to give tours to clients and show a busy looking office space of people working toward their customers goals. You need people in person in order for those tours to look adequately impressive.

Some of their levers to get longer work out of people work better in the office. For example, my office had way less parking than they had people coming in, and an overflow lot dangling a literal mile away from the buildings. In response to complaints that there's no reasonable parking, that there's no shuttle, that folks have to cross a fairly busy street without a signal light, an executive said "if you cared about your work, you'd come in early enough to get a good spot". They considered people who came in at 8AM to be lazy slackers, because the real dedicated people came in at 7AM, even though office work technically started at 9AM for most of them.

Frankly, remote work isn't objectively more productive across the board. You can find/create metrics to "prove" either side of the argument (measuring "productivity" is really subjective, and many of the studies are self-reporting where employees decide for themselves their productivity, or even outright state how productive the workers feel. In my experience, individual productivity may see a boost with improved focus, removal of commute, fewer work social distractions. However, the relevance of the work may suffer (for example, in my group one guy spent three weeks doing something no one needed done because he didn't have the presence of others to remind him about what really mattered) and others that depend on collaboration may falter (for example, new college hire is left adrift because it's really hard for an early career person to get traction in a pure remote scenario). We tend to care less about folks who are little more than icons next to text most of the day, or a disembodied voice for select meetings. Ambient collaboration takes a hit, as the barrier to talk to someone is a bit higher when you have to explicitly go to the trouble of typing a message or calling. It seems more intrusive.

As to why the message tends to be softball, well a number of things.

They don't want to get into the "data" game because the employees can find studies with data saying the exact opposite. Employees have a vested interest in believing their favored data.

Other statements are too aggressive, and they want to try to maintain some semblance of morale by being the "good guys". At least at the company level. From what I can tell, the corporate level at my job gets to send the happy, gentle prods to come into office, but the managers are expected to go as asshole as needed to "fix" the attendance problem.

There is the wonder why hold value on office space ersus the smaller companies that are bought and dropped with no sentimental value. The big difference there is that purchasing out a company doesn't usually come with a years-long agreement to keep it in place, use the products, etc. Office space has that. A years-long agreement to use the space and pay for the use. And to drop the use before the agreement is done costs more than it's worth. And it's even worse for a company that owns property. It costs money to keep the office space usable, money that comes from leases. If someone is going to back out of a lease, the owner of a building now has to pull from other sources of money to upkeep a building.

I know developers have spent years building and growing office buildings and regions to put said office buildings, and now a massive push to work remotely makes all that effort not just for nothing, but a very costly nothing. And then there is the secondary economy around office buildings. Many stores and restaurants spring up where there are plenty of people working. If there are no people, no reason for those businesses. I used to work in a downtown area with plenty of restaurants that I would eat at. Now that I don't work there, I don't eat at those restaurants anymore.

The push and call for remote work is going to change literal landscapes in cities and industrial regions in ways we cannot predict, or prevent.

Commercial real estate

I haven't had a normal job since before covid so i'm not super qualified, but:

I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit

I think they sometimes do, but not always. The reason being that companies are made of people, and people sometimes but not always think rationally.

In this case, my guess is middle management may be fretting about leaving employees unsupervised. What if they play games or browse Twitter on company time? You can't monitor them when they're not in the office!

Inspirational wish-wash like “we value the power of working together” strikes me as common corporate wish-wash. It's sort of along the lines of "we're a family here". They're trying to make employees emotionally invested in the corpo so they'll put up with more bullshit.

Because they don't trust us. They want to take control and monitor everything we do during the work hours.

I absolutely cannot find the article I read now, but it was about an employee tracking suite of tools that companies often use in workplaces. It allows them to gauge the productivity of employees using a combination of hardware and software. It’s apparently insanely expensive but useful for predatory companies that strive to squeeze every last remaining drop of hope from employees as long as it increases productivity. That’s the reason some companies want people back in office. So they can keep tabs on them.

Same reason they all had layoffs at the same time; activist investors want them to. Probably because these investors own a lot of commercial real estate as well.

Also, it's probably a good way for them to reduce their workforce without publicly announcing layoffs.

There are a whole lot of issues around commercial property and corporate taxes that interplay to mean that occupancy is heavily encouraged.

1% wealth is not pure money. It is stock and real estate. Also shares.

To keep the value of their wealth the 99% needs to spend.

There are a whole slew of ways to look at this depending on what "glasses" you like to wear, and also the type of work involved. I work in grocery logistics, moving groceries from where they are produced to the store where you buy them. Here's a few from my "lens":

• They are looking at the long term office space leases they are stuck with.
• In person training tends to be more effective ( I remember reading a study on this, but can't currently find it.)
• Most people suck at communicating effectively. Proximity seems to improve this. (Personal observation)
• Community (It is far easier to "other" someone that you rarely or never meet in person. Not so easy if they are showing you pictures of their kids every day. "Sally just got a new particle accelerator! Isn't she so lovely! This is her sinking Manhattan!")
• Leadership (I have to come into work to do my job. My boss's job though is mostly paperwork. He could do his job from home but why should I care what he has to say if he isn't in the same mud as me?)

My thought on this is if you want the flexibility of working from home, that's fine. But don't expect me to give a damn about what you think. The job is rough enough without an uninformed opinion trying to mess things up worse.

There is a tangible benefit in certain jobs from being in the same space. I work in a place where we are constantly training new employees with OJT. Continuous improvement and learning new things from peers is important for our future capabilities. Knowledge sharing is a big part of my job.

We rotate in-office and work-from-home weeks and there is a considerable reduction in questions asked and just general training-type or knowledge sharing interactions. Being able to ask a question or provide guidance directly, in-person, and off the cuff is easier than messaging or calling. I definitely get more work done at home, but sacrifice future efficiency of myself, my peers, and the department as a whole because of the reduction of knowledge sharing interactions.

I think we have struck a good balance with the rotation in the time being. We could certainly try to figure out ways to make knowledge sharing and training easier and more effective to do remotely, but as our culture is now, working from home makes it less effective.

Is retail near office buildings worth considering in the context of this post? That it’s worth having people return to the offices partially because the employees give business to the nearby restaurants, etc.?

You guys are still doing homeoffice? I've been back for over a year.

1. The companoes are locked into commercial real estate

2 ) Working at home is making the middle manager obsolete. I think google's ceo said that he didn't know how to promote managers he cant see. I personally think mamagement is corporate welfare.

In office communication is much more efficient. It is easier to understand (and pay attention to) people in the same room as you than it is to understand people on a call (especially since most people don't have a great microphone and Internet and LAN quality can vary). Some employers have adopted a policy of grouping meetings to designated meeting days and encouraging employees to come in on those.

There's a thing that cult leaders often do where they make increasingly stricter demands on their followers, it reduces the number of members, but the one who remain are much more easily controlled (because they self selected for that trait. I think something similar is part of the picture for these companies. The people who simply do as they are told and come back (as opposed to looking for new jobs) are more easily controlled by the company.

Also you can't always assume that just because a company is really big it's always making the most best, always correct choices. Like GE managed with "vitality curves."

I wonder this same thing about my company. The only rational theory I've heard - which is completely unconfirmed - is that they aren't willing to sell the building because it's still needed for the IT team and a few other purposes, but need a certain occupancy level to not be penalized on their taxes.

Power hungry middle managers mainly

Whether you like the idea of company culture etc not withstanding, it's easier to push in office where people are sitting in an environment that you have the power to craft and shape. As a predominantly call center based business our reporting has shown improvement moving from pure WFH to hybrid, I'm not going to apply that to other businesses, but for us it worked out that way.

If we don't lay off employees, how can the stock price rise? With the stock price rising, the cost of labor decreases, killing two birds with one stone.

Owners and executives may own companies that own the buildings and don’t want their investments to fail.

I WFH on permanent contract for one of the big ones. I never been at the office, I was recruited online, had my interview online and gotten about 4 months of training online , some more to come.

It works fine. I am more productive than in an office.

Equipment needed are provided and if I need anything I can just order it without much hassle, on the company dime of course. Knowledge is shared between everyone and all information is written down somewhere.

So why are they doing it this way? They get a bunch of well educated people from all over the world. Great pay for the job, not so good if I had an employment in my field.

But everyone are happy since they can WFH. The company get some really good people. At the same time they are forcing some back to the office in other areas. Because well realestate , but also because they didn't have the organisation in place before the pandemic.

The surveillance part is really not a hard thing for them to do, we are measured on all kind of things. I assume it's harder for them to do this in other areas.

And those are the ones they force back to the office and at tha same time weed out the ones who won't accept it.

Never going to the office again , I almost would accept a sale position over that.

Sadly, I suspect this is another case of "many people are not good at their jobs". Not necessarily the workers, but company leadership.

Most new businesses fail. Many established businesses fail. Some of that is skill, or lack there of, but a lot is also luck.

If one lacks skill and my company has a run of bad luck, then blaming the most recent change is rational. This is true even if one has refused to, or been ineffective at, adjusting to changed circumstances.

Blaming a failing business on something outside oneself is an ego saving move.

I expect the biggest pushers of return to office, that also have no clear business need, are not doing well. I anticipate many backward looking reports about a large number of projects and businesses failing due to a lack of ability to adjust.

Going back to in-person now would absolutely wreak havoc on my psyche bc no one at my company knows what I look like or what I actually do so I'd rather keep it that way

I know someone who works in IT at a place where they found that keystrokes rose 40% in office and significantly more work was completed as measured by story points. Keystrokes aren’t a great way to measure productivity, but it’s very suspicious that people somehow had to type less when they have to type to talk to anyone and often don’t have to in office.

It’s not perfectly scientific, but businesses pretty much never have scientific data to work with and the evidence they have says people overall are more productive in office.

Power over employee, since their life is empty without it. This is all they found as a purpose in life.

The real answer is that people are more productive in the office with more oversight and build relationships with their coworkers that help them to do their jobs better. Companies invest thousands of dollars in "teambuilding" events that benefit the company and employees in no way other than to foster these environments. It costs their employees more time and money for transportation, which means they have to pay them more. They are not stupid. They are not trying to upset their employees just to cost themselves more money.

There is no other rational explanation. Any other explanation is illogical, as it costs the company more money to have and maintain an office building. It's just based on people angry about the fact that they have to leave home.