There's a Big Problem with Return-to-Office Mandates: Enforcing Them (yahoo.com)
- Reference: 0175334103
- News link: https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/10/27/2317213/theres-a-big-problem-with-return-to-office-mandates-enforcing-them
- Source link: https://www.yahoo.com/news/back-office-orders-become-common-100031656.html
> About 80% of organizations have put in place return-to-office policies, but in a sign that many managers are reluctant to clamp down on the flexibility employees have become accustomed to, only 17% of those organizations actively enforce their policies, according to [2]recent research by real estate brokerage CBRE. "Some organizations out there have 'mandated' something, but if most of your organization is not following that mandate, then there is not too much you can do to enforce it," said Julie Whelan, head of research into workplace trends for CBRE...
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> The tension "is due to the fact that we have changed since we all went to our separate corners and then came back" from pandemic-imposed office exile, said Elizabeth Brink, a workplace expert at architecture firm Gensler. "It's fair to say that we have different needs now." A disconnect persists between employer expectations for office attendance and employee behavior, CBRE found. Sixty percent of leaders surveyed said they want their employees in the office three or more days a week, while only 51% reported that employees work in the office at that frequency. Conversely, 37% of employees show up one or two days a week, yet only 17% of employers are satisfied with that attendance.
In the article, one worker complains about their employer's two-days-a-week of mandated in-office time. "I feel like I'm back in grade school and being forced to sit down and do my homework."
The article also notes some employers are also considering changes in the other direction: "calculating whether to shed office space to cut down on rent, typically the largest cost of operating a business after payroll."
[1] https://www.yahoo.com/news/back-office-orders-become-common-100031656.html
[2] https://www.cbre.com/insights/reports/2024-americas-office-occupier-sentiment-survey
Conflict of Interest (Score:5, Interesting)
CEOs and Board members who are personally heavily invested in commercial property are going to take a bath if/when companies start shedding office space due to employees working from home consistently.
This is a direct conflict of interest, as the corporations they run would certainly be more profitable without renting all of that office space, and with happier, more productive employees working from home.
Shareholders need to keep an eye on this, and should be punishing CEOs creating return to office mandates as they are reducing corporate profitability in order to keep their (the CEO's) personal commercial property investments afloat.
Re: (Score:2)
[1]https://www.abc.net.au/news/20... [abc.net.au]
Remote working may lead to 20pc drop in Australian office property prices
But I'm sure it will be different in your country.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-18/commercial-property-work-from-home/102611124
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I'm not saying that commercial real estate prices would not fall. Obviously it makes sense they would. I'm saying that inventing some kind of grand conspiracy theory where the upper management would sacrifice the profitability of the company they work for in exchange for inflated real estate prices because they personally are invested in commercial real estate sounds like an invented situation that probably is rare if not nonexistent. I just watched 60 Minutes, and they were not discussing this scenario
Yes. Conflict of Interest (Score:2)
CEO level executives need to keep their own company working and profitable.
The companies need loans and line of credit from Wall Street and the investment banking companies.
It is a two way relationship where CEOs need investment bankers and investment bankers need CEOs.
There may not be a direct conspiracy though a CEO asking for a line of credit from Goldman Sachs also has an interest in Goldman Sachs has an interest in commercial real estate loans.
The CEO level executives also need places to land as corpor
Re: (Score:2)
So in that scenario workers who took up residence in the former office building and WFH would indeed have returned to the office. I say win - win.
Re: Conflict of Interest (Score:2)
What an insanely child-like solution - just turn their old office into an apartment, then they can live in the offices they refused to visit.
Out of curiousity, once you start turning office buildings into apartments, where will the children go to school? Where will families go to get outdoors? Got any nearby hospitals? Grocery stores?
Office buildings are typically surrounded by other office buildings, not open fields, parks, elementary schools, etc.
Oh and the conversion of existing office space to residenti
Re: Conflict of Interest (Score:1)
I'm living in a recently converted office right now
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Wait, what?
So the people who own the real estate don't rent it out and instead put people on the street so they can make more money by not renting it out?
Is that your theory?
AMZN is a 2 trillion company, real estate is small (Score:3)
> CEOs and Board members who are personally heavily invested in commercial property are going to take a bath if/when companies start shedding office space due to employees working from home consistently. This is a direct conflict of interest, as the corporations they run would certainly be more profitable without renting all of that office space, and with happier, more productive employees working from home. Shareholders need to keep an eye on this, and should be punishing CEOs creating return to office mandates as they are reducing corporate profitability in order to keep their (the CEO's) personal commercial property investments afloat.
WTAF? Why would a software billionaire care about real estate? I get that most of /. likes to work from home...but this is an unfounded and incredibly stupid conspiracy theory. Big Tech wants you back in the office because THEY think it makes you a better employee...not because they want more rent money from these non-existent investments. You know most companies lease their office space....it's in their financial interest to reduce their office footprint....but you know what's more expensive than rent?
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Someone has to own office buildings and industrial parks and I doubt they’re poor.
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"Someone has to own office buildings and industrial parks and I doubt theyâ(TM)re poor."
Very true, but irrelevant. The rich guys owning the buildings for the most part *not* the tech companies. The tech companies lease their offices; for them it's pure expense, not an asset. The people owning the buildings get no say in whether the tech companies mandate working in the office or not.
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> "Someone has to own office buildings and industrial parks and I doubt theyâ(TM)re poor."
> Very true, but irrelevant. The rich guys owning the buildings for the most part *not* the tech companies. The tech companies lease their offices; for them it's pure expense, not an asset. The people owning the buildings get no say in whether the tech companies mandate working in the office or not.
Actually, A. the first part is not true, and B. even if it were, it still wouldn't mean that the tech company execs aren't impacted by real estate prices.
Lots of big tech companies have bought large numbers of buildings over the last decade, and currently lease them out to smaller companies through property management firms. The idea is that eventually, they'll need the space, and when they do, they won't renew their tenants' leases, and after the last one moves out, they'll bulldoze several tiny buildings
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Wait, are you,saying those big companies are requiring their employees to RTO because then the smaller companies they lease to will uh... what? That makes no sense.
You think these big companies would rather RTO and then their REITs will be worth more because they're paying their own management company to house their own employees and making money by uh... what?
None of this makes any sense.
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> Wait, are you,saying those big companies are requiring their employees to RTO because then the smaller companies they lease to will uh... what? That makes no sense.
I'm saying the big companies are requiring RTO because allowing WFH means needing fewer offices, which means A. they end up with more office space to lease out, which means greater supply for the same demand, and thus potentially less income from leasing them out, and B. if other companies follow their example, WFH means those companies will need less office space, further driving down income.
> You think these big companies would rather RTO and then their REITs will be worth more because they're paying their own management company to house their own employees and making money by uh... what?
Except in rare circumstances, they don't pay their own management companies (but this does happen sometimes). But n
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Actually the last big tech company I worked at DID own their buildings and additionally leased excess space to other organizations. For a while the X Foundation was even one of the orgs that leased from the tech company IIRC.
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One of my companies did exactly that. How does my company requiring their employees RTO make any difference to their leases to other companies?
Wouldn't my company want to have everyone work at home so they can fully cash in on renting to other companies?
RTO looks like a bottom line loser no matter how you look at it, the best bottom line impact is to not have any real estate owned or leased and have everyone WFH. Leasing out space on the side to someone else would be a nice side gig but adds additional r
Re: AMZN is a 2 trillion company, real estate is s (Score:2)
Banks own office buildings, borrowers pay them mortgage payments. When the properties go under-water (worth less than the outstanding loan balance) payments will stop, banks will foreclose, and then banks start failing... then guess what? Politicians will bail out the banks to save citizens (voters) bank accounts... and who will pay for the bailout, the tax payers... great plan.
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Aren't the tax payers also the people with bank accounts?
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Where does TFA talk about Amazon or software billionaires? It's a discussion about corporations in general.
With the exception of some very few tech billionaires who were vested initial stock in unicorn companies they started up, most millionaires and billionaires have most of their money in two things - general stocks and real estate. That's a fact. Their current salaries pale into significance compared to their assets.
It's estimated that work from home could wipe about $US800 Billion from office valu
Real estate folks are already in the office (Score:2)
The people with a public financial interest in real estate went to the office long ago. The RTO news is much more around big tech companies because everyone knows they don't absolutely need you in the office and they can be flexible if they wanted to. If you're selling commercial real estate, nor doing most real estate related jobs, you can't do that over Zoom, Slack, or WebEx. If you're writing code for Amazon, Twitter, Facebook, etc....most of those jobs can be done from anywhere. The Venn Diagram of
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> They have publicly stated they think it's better for productivity. There are logical reasons to believe them. If you think they're lying...
What are the logical reasons to believe them? Every study I've seen shows that WFH increases productivity. I don't believe executives when they say WFH decreases productivity because I haven't subjectively seen it in either my or my wife's workplace, and every objective study I've seen says the same. These executives ARE lying.
[1]https://www.forbes.com/sites/b... [forbes.com]
[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2022/02/04/3-new-studies-end-debate-over-effectiveness-of-hybrid-and-remote-work/
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> Why would a software billionaire care about real estate?
Because no one, not Elon Musk, nor Donald Trump, nor Bill Gates, or any other rich guy worth a ton of money is like Scrooge McDuck and sitting with a huge vault of cash so they can swim in it.
All those billions of dollars are in investments in order to make more money. Real estate is an investment, and commercial real estate is generally a good one to be in because there are fewer regulations involving its purchase, sale, and use than residential real
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Of course, in the short-to-mid term it gets a bit more complicated since businesses typically sign fairly long leases for office space - they can't just walk away from those payments, regardless of whether there are people making use of it.
Not to mention that the largest businesses (e.g. Amazon) often have built and own the space themselves.
And then there are mayors and city councils who are driven by 1) a legitimate desire to protect the ancillary businesses that were created to support all those in-city w
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> And then there are mayors and city councils who are driven by 1) a legitimate desire to protect the ancillary businesses that were created to support all those in-city workers; and 2) probably aghast at the impending loss of their own power and prestige which will follow if these companies don't drive their employees back into the skyscrapers.
Turns out return to office mandates don't really work out for such businesses. Sure, the workers are back, but they're also PO'd and not really in a spending money kin
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The company I at closed an office in Tampa, FL during the pandemic back in 2022. We just closed another one in downtown DC, a few blocks away from the Capitol. We're about to close another one in Baltimore. Every single one of these office had no one coming in and since we introduced a lot of new workflows to accommodate WFH it made more financial sense to continue on and let our commercial leases end and not renew saving the company a decent amount of money.
What is going to happen in 2025.... no one knows.
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It could also be that these gray hair shareholders believe in collaboration errrr I mean micro management where you can count attendance, tardiness, youtube usage, and cell phone time when they can be supervisered in person. So if you lay off 1/3 of employees they can ensure the last 2/3 will be 30% more productive now.
I am not saying that this is true. But it is the believe from the banking WallStreet guys who actually own the company especially if they are over 50. They will never say this out loud but co
The amount of effort (Score:2)
... someone puts into enforcing a policy tells you how much they think they can get away with forcing a group of people into compliance. It sends a message about how serious they are and how much they're willing to lose to enforce a policy.
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Bollocks.
When did employers start treating employees as adults? Hint: they never did. If this were true then there wouldn't need to be so much printed in employment handbooks.
People do what's in their and their families best interests first. Employers' interests come in a distant third after family. Most people will comply because they lack strong finances, buy there will be a few who will push the boundaries of policy, and see what they can get away with.
If you're going to make a rule be damn sure you are
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You thought the handbook was there to teach you how to behave?
Hardly.
The handbook is there strictly for legal liability reasons so you can't sue them when they fire you for being a jackass violating norms of adult business world behavior.
No one actually reads the handbook. We all know what's in it. If you don't know how to behave then this entire discussion isn't about you anyway.
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>> ... someone puts into enforcing a policy tells you how much they think they can get away with forcing a group of people into compliance. It sends a message about how serious they are and how much they're willing to lose to enforce a policy.
> Are you some teenager rebelling against the assistant principal at your high school? This is your job, act like an adult. If your boss wants you in Tuscon tomorrow, either book a ticket or find a new job.
Horses**t. I'm an employee, not a slave. Employment is a contractual agreement negotiated by and agreed upon by both parties. If my boss wants me in Tucson, the timing and duration of that trip will have to be a similarly negotiated agreement between me and my boss, taking into account the fact that I have a life, and work is not the sum total of that life.
If an employer chooses not to do that, and instead, tries to act unilaterally, the employer should expect the employees to tell that employer to go f*
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If your boss needs you in Tuscon tomorrow and you don't go, that's your call. You don't have to go. You can get a new job. They weren't spending money on your travel and accommodations for funsies. They -need- you there. If you aren't there then they don't need -you-.
When the next applicant asks what happened to you, the answer is, "they decided to move on". You think they're going to give some long dramatic story about how you shit a brick over emergency travel and got canned for it?
Where do you guys
The change has already happened (Score:5, Insightful)
Working in an office has been a brief aberration for a short part of recent human history. Agrarian societies obviously largely worked from home. Pre industrial tradesmen and artisans worked from home. With the industrial revolution people got pulled into factories and offices. We're now at the point where a significant number of jobs don't have any intrinsic requirement for workers to be in any specific location. It's been covered over and over but there isn't any data to drive return to the office, it's all 'management feels'. Countered with the enormous and documented benefits for individuals and the environment from allowing WFH. Whenever you see an RTO mandate, it's always from the C-Suite, never the staff. It's like Canute trying to hold back the sea. The change has already happened and the genie is out of the bottle. Just done people haven't read the memo yet
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> Working in an office has been a brief aberration for a short part of recent human history
It's similar with performance arts - it's been interactive with a live performance in front of a live audience since the first fireside story, then suddenly we're all sitting like zombies in front of a bright screen that doesn't alter based on audience feedback.
I think we're going to see that change soon with AI-generated live variations on stories adjusting for our reactions in real time.
It is difficult to realize
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> ... since we generally only experience 8 decades of it ...
Not enough time to learn to play bridge, properly (to paraphrase our species greatest sage, Terry Pratchett).
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Working in an office was a necessity when your signal carrier was an actual carrier, who took your messages and walked/ran/rode to the intended receiver. And that means offices came into being as soon as there were messages to transmit, because shorter distances between sender and receiver means lower round trip times. Offices thus started as soon as we had societies. The only difference today is that so many jobs are office jobs, while people working on the farm and in their own shop are a minority. If I r
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You all think you're brilliant for daring your boss to fire you. Do you think millennials were stupid? They just happened to graduate when there was a glut of people in the labor market, and they had to work side gigs just to get by. But the boomers have mostly retired (you should thank them). It's possible that the birth rate will stay low and politicians will cave to pressure and keep immigration low in which case maybe the labor market will stay tight, but if it doesn't there's going to be a huge wake
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Ignoring the fact outright that the shift from nomadic to agrarian culture was also stupidly recent as regards to evolutionary time periods, in neither agricultural nor nomadic societies did the workers sit at the tent/home and instead went somewhere else to work, generally soon after the sun rose. The men especially wouldn't return to the tent/home until their work for the day was done.
Re: The change has already happened (Score:1)
So will they office monitoring your every move while at home be acceptable? It is not unimaginable that a particular workplace needs to know you are not somewhere out of webcam view doing something you are not supposed to be doing.
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> Working in an office has been a brief aberration for a short part of recent human history.
That is actually an excellent point!
It's just stealth layoffs (Score:2)
they're not enforced if they want to keep you.
Re: (Score:3)
Ah, selective enforcement. This can expose a company to legal risk and get then in a whole heap of trouble in certain states (such as California).
Of course, the employment-at-will card could be played: "We can fire anyone for any reason or no reason so long as it isn't an illegal reason". The burden of proof is on the fired employee to prove otherwise.
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Toga companies (From Dilbert, I believe where Sales and marketing wore togas)
What about core competency in a tech firm? I think you need to have a CTO and some R&D ongoing unless you have a patent as your "moat" and don't feel the need to improve the product, or issue new patents to keep alligators in the moat.
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> ...functioning departments that keep things going like finance, sales, and marketing...
I see nothing that keeps these from being outsourced, too. If you can outsource the work of actually making your product, you can certainly hire an outside firm to handle creating all marketing for it. That's what advertising firms are. Add some customer feedback tracking and analytics work into that and there isn't really a need for an in-house group. Sales outsourcing is just called "hiring independent sales contractors", and I'm sure there are many companies that already outsource their financials. If y
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Everyone is replaceable including the CEO. With some difficulty even board members can be replaced but this is very rare.
No one getting a pay check is special.
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I remember reading this here ... in 2005. lol.
Guess what? The fad died last decade when IT projects were failing and no qualified workers were left because Indians took over all the all the market expect for the most seniror staff which caused wages to skyrocket to where they were in 2022.
Now all the sudden these new mellenials and Gen Z types discovered outsourcing and the cycle repeats. Sure the price will go up. But projects will fail, outages will happen, integration with leadership goals will never hap
Genie is out of the bottle (Score:2)
We have several years of hard evidence that many jobs can be done entirely remotely. There is no good economic or productivity reason to mandate return to office. (manager egos and corporate optics of office buildings are another thing)
Workers now know what it's like, and many strongly prefer it. There are 3, maybe 4 companies in my commute distance that could be potential employers for my job title. When I work remote, I have access to 10's of thousands of companies across the entire united states.
Employe
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> I will never work in office again. At any price.
Same here.
Just cut the VPN (Score:1)
Enforcement is easy for full 5 day RTO, if you want to go nuclear. Just disable remote access privileges for those that don’t show up without a reason, after a suitable period of time. Reinstate once they agree at actually show up. Fire them if they don’t. Require higher level management to sign off on reinstatement.
It’s just that very few want to go that far.
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cut it totally and completely, its a RTO they want, so make it so. its not RTO plus also WFH aftrehours/during downtimes etc. Just cut the remote access totally, regularly vpn appliances , gateway software and client software have huge vulnerabilities so its more secure to do that too.
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Sure. If you deeply desire to blow up your organization and end it, just do that.
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Just disable remote access privileges period. Then the workers have to be there during normal work hours, and they go home and are unreachable the rest of the time. No more unpaid overtime.
What, Management just excreted a hot steamy one?
It will now take an hour or more to call someone and get them back in the office so they can fix your emergency? Well wah. You could always hire one of the night owls to work night shift. They would be there alone and unsupervised and that is not acceptable? Isn't that the s
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> Enforcement is easy for full 5 day RTO, if you want to go nuclear. Just disable remote access privileges for those that don’t show up without a reason, after a suitable period of time. Reinstate once they agree at actually show up. Fire them if they don’t. Require higher level management to sign off on reinstatement.
> It’s just that very few want to go that far.
Breaking VPN breaks access to employees outside of normal working hours. I don't the micromanagers pushing for RTO are willing to give that up.
Sensitive work environment (Score:2)
I've never worked anyplace where most people can manage themselves. Those that can are usually called managers and they always have strategic vision past the people they manage. And micromanagement is usually due to the next line manager not having the strategic vision to plan for the unforeseen and it being privileged need to know. So many at home worker seem to want it all ways, the entire picture but with none of the responsibility.
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Remote work doesn't require self-management. As a remote manager myself of a largely remote team, I find that it's a bit different managing remote workers, but it's very possible to effectively manage people whether they are remote or in office. I use exactly the same techniques for all.
People who aren't self-managing can easily waste time at work, just as they might at home.
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No one wastes time at the office. Hey did you see that funny cat video Janet sent around?
Pointless mandates are difficult to enforce (Score:2)
Who would have thought?
RTO is as pointless as asking back office phone operators to wear suit and tie to work, or you must comb your hair a certain way, or you must shave in the morning. It might be the norm 30 years ago, but by now it is so obviously pointless that people would circumvent it continuously to reduce effort, unless the company waste even more resources to patrol the office to catch and punish offenders, which would do wonders to staff morale.
Sane managers define measurable productivity metri
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You can't develop measurable KPIs for software development. This makes some managers nervous about letting developers work remotely. But the lack of measurable KPIs does not mean it's impossible to effectively manage remote developers.
Companies keep spouting these notions of "chance encounters" that can't happen without on-prem work. But chance encounters are *not* the most effective way to produce results. 90% of the time, new ideas come from structured planning processes, not random encounters. If a compa
Companies have a problem to solve (Score:2)
It seems many of the employees they're threatening are calling their bluff.
Company:
Back to the office. Now.
Employee:
Or what ? You going to fire us all ? You've laid off so many there isn't anyone left to do the work.
We're it until you hire a new group of folks and train them up to do the job. Good luck hiring anyone
without a remote work policy in this day and age.
Company:
Well. . . . . . shit.
Obviously (Score:2)
Enforce this backward stupidity and lose key personnel and all high-performers. Managers that actually manage individuals are painfully aware of that.
The labor market is tight (Score:2)
The big problem with this (other than the stupidity of it being driven by worse than useless managers and executives trying to pretend they are doing something useful) is that the labor market is very tight. We have very low unemployment. And it's especially tight in the tech industry because actual skill is required for the important jobs - as someone who has recently been interviewing a lot of people for one job, you can't just fire half your staff because they won't come back to the office then find comp
Two things (Score:2)
"I feel like I'm back in grade school and being forced to sit down and do my homework."
Well, if being told by your company/boss to come into the office to work is the main thing that you object to, then that means that you have a highly desirable work environment. That means that you won't want to quit just due to return to office policies. Most workers have far more objectionable things, like bad bosses, unreasonable workloads, bad coworkers, bad work-life balance (beyond just return to office), bad pay,
I'm ok going to the office but... (Score:2)
...I'm not ok having to live in a crime ridden city that hates cops, punishes anyone that fights back against criminals, makes guns illegal, and has literal human shit on the sidewalk from the oceans of homeless junkies that wash up on its shores.
I'm not ok with the schools in said city calling my kids racist oppressors in school because of their skin color.
Solution is simple. Fire them (Score:2)
I am not anti remote work, but I am pro not tolerating disrespect from leadership and other workers. If you can not get in line with the organization then resign and go work elsewhere. It is not up to you to tell how to run someone elses company.
If you can't find a remote job then oh well your resume and skillsets are not as high as you think they are. Go up them then. In the meantime there are over 1,000,000 laid off American IT workers since 2022 who will be happy to come in the office and want to work if
Consistency⦠(Score:1)
Lead by example. If the c-suite wants us in the office they need to be too.
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They've never done that before, why now?
Something changed, and enough people are willing to say "fuck the consequences" now that in cases where companies are serious about getting their people back in the office (and not just using RTO as an excuse for stealth layoffs) can't enforce these policies without risking losing enough people to hurt the business.
Which is FUCKING AWESOME. Getting people to cooperate for better working conditions is like herding cats. Cats that have just OD'd on catnip and then spo
One of the reasons - Who is more likely to not RTO (Score:3)
Women are more likely to leave jobs when a return to office (RTO) happens. This is the unstated part of these RTO is good or bad news articles.
Here's the real reason: 30% of women have someone else paying their bills or remote work at lower pay is acceptable according to the article: "nearly 30% of those women said no amount of money would lure them back to full-time work."
A few quotes from:
[1]https://finance.yahoo.com/news... [yahoo.com]
‘The system is not working for women’: Companies with return-to-office
[1] https://finance.yahoo.com/news/system-not-working-women-companies-130500058.html
Re: (Score:1)
Cool, so once all the women quit, the men can get back to the business of business and most of HR can be fired because all they do is handle fake #metoo complaints filed by angry women abusing the system. No one in Iceland noticed the day all the women went on a one day strike. Number of HR complaints filed across the country that day: zero.
The headlines the day after all these talented and valuable women quit, "Women all quit, company values rise dramatically".