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Return-to-office orders look like a way for elite, work-obsessed CEOs to grab power back from employees
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 28 Aug 2023
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Work Reform
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A place to discuss positive changes that can make work more equitable, and to vent about current practices. We are NOT against work; we just want the fruits of our labor to be recognized better.
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- All workers must be paid a living wage for their labor.
- Income inequality is the main cause of lower living standards.
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Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
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They really aren't losing money because:
a) WFH has been saving them money (i.e. lowered heating, water, electricity, stationary, toilet paper, food, janitorial, window cleaning, etc.).
b) Their WFH staff are more productive than their office staff.
Just let those leases expire when they do, and these companies will really be saving a ton of money from not having to lease large office space.
I don't get the desire to cling onto some outdated, unproductive, sad way of doing things.
The companies losing money are the huge companies who don't lease from what I've seen.
A company in my city JUST finished a $250-million expansion onto their HQ right as COVID hit. That same land area is in a central location and was even being highly considered for high density housing before the company bought the land. The parking lot for the new building never gets more than half full. Fuck 'em.
haha. Too bad for them. Just like how regular folks were/still are getting screwed by stuff over the last few years, it's hard for me to have any sympathy for a company that even has $250 million for an expansion.
Control. They call it office culture because it's a cult. They control the way you think and make it easy for you to be manipulated and keep you under their thumb. They can't make you think they give anahit if they can't bribe you with bullshit like snacks and pizza and a gym. They can't slowly take away your benefits because "hey look we gave you standing desks". Office culture needs to die.
How? If I own a building and I can't rent it out, I'm losing money. I still have to pay some bills and probably repay the loan that I took to build or renovate it.
Is there undeniable data proving that? I'd like to see a bunch of researches that support each other and have serious samples.
Majority of studies and measurements show that remote working leads to happier, less stressed workers spending more time on task. Previous studies have shown those are key factors in driving productivity.
The notable difference is that manager reported productivity often show worse measures as unchanged or lower productivity, even where less subjective measures show increases.
Some studies have tried to measure productivity directly, these commonly have unaddressed problems with methodology, and show more mixed results ranging from slightly less productive to significantly more productive.
I seem to remember a study measuring rate of completion of task lists as much more productive, including call centers, IT, customer service and sales. Whereas more nebulous tasks in management and group facilitation suffered slightly.
I'm thinking it's due time for a meta study on the topic though, maybe you could put one together?
To clarify, they may still be losing money (i.e. leasing/renting costs), but not nearly as much as if they had to maintain and pay for utilities for a building that's full of people.
It's still to their advantage to keep people home.
Yes and no... depending on the type of work and who wants the study to succeed/fail. 😂 Even having people WFH 1-2 days a week has been shown to be positive for productivity, employee happiness, etc.
I find that one caveat with studies that shows how WFH "fails" is that they tend to use some piss-poor setup that's not designed with the appropriate tools to allow people to be efficient. For example, no dedicated office space at home, lack of communication tools, etc. These are growing pains for the most part, and an effective WFH setup is distraction-free and made to be efficient.
One analysis suggested that a hybrid work but without specific corporate mandate seemed to see the best result.
If the business arbitrarily said "come in all the time" or "come in three days a week", they tended to not get good results.
If the business said "ok, no more office, all remote", they seemed to also not get good results.
The businesses that said "office is open and ready for you to use as you and your teams see fit", they seemed to have the best result. The optimistic will ascribe that to people thriving on the flexibility and respect of their employer. My somewhat more cynical view is that peer pressure works to get people into the office, and the employee is less pissed because it's "their choice" to come in. Just like when a company grants employees "unlimited vacation" and rejoice, as unlimited vacation tends to mean the employees take less vacation.
There are still productivity advantages to be had by in person with and meetings. I have meetings all the time, some are fine remote and others not.
It's good not to waste people's time in either case, however. Email can replace many, but not all communication. Often it can make it worse.
Our department of a couple thousands employees has seen an increase in productivity of 14% going from 3 days in office to full WFH, but our work is especially appropriate for it (lot of individual work where we can monitor productivity, team work is required just to answer questions when someone isn't sure what they need to do)
That's the difference between you and a company. You need a building to live. A company needs its employee to work in order to live.
The building is an expense that was budgeted. When it's bought or leased, it's paid. The money is already lost. What's left is the money you win. If the employee are already there, you still earn the money.
What the company doesn't pay is the energy, food, cleaning etc. Actually it's now the employee who are paying that.
For a company, the building is more comparable to a printer for you. Once you bought the printer, the money is lost. If you stop using it, you don't lose more money.
A family is not a company. Nor is a government by the way. These comparison are wrong but also usually dangerous, because they hint at extremely bad interpretations and decisions.
This probably varies place to place, person to person. However, over the course of, say, 10 years, productivity would likely drop in a 100% WFH scenario. People retire and the new hires never really find their groove without the in person experience.
Some of these leases are absurdly long, like decades long. Some own the buildings rather than lease, so they'd need to sell, but who would be buying?
I do see significant reduction in office space and more aggressive 'hot desking' to size a lower occupancy rate due to increased WFH. Before pandemic, our office planned to 80% occupancy, based on measuring generally 60% occupancy (between sick days, vacations, meetings, and travel, a lot of people aren't at their desks). I would not be surprised for them to size for, say, 50% occupancy if opportunities to exit lease for some of the buildings comes up.
Most of the empty office spaces are in the traditional downtown highrise locations. These locations traditionally have had low vacancy rates of 5-10%. Post pandemic the rates have risen sharply with over 30% vacancy in some markets.
When you move away from these downtown locations the vacancy rates are in the 8-15% range. Still higher that pre-pandemic but still sustainable and profitable for landlords.
Personally I predict a rise for smaller office spaces intermixed with residential locations. The traditional demand for the expensive downtown highrise office will permanently be reduced. Most of that space will need to be converted to residential in the future.