Leaders are perhaps experiencing more resistance than they had anticipated.
Amazon is perhaps the most documented example of how ugly the RTO battle can get: Around 30,000 employees signed a petition protesting the company’s in-office mandate, and more than 1,800 pledged to walk out from their jobs to take a stand.
The tech giant is still complaining that workers are dodging the three-day in-office mandate, over a year after it was announced.
"KPMG surveyed U.S. CEOs of companies turning over at least $500 million and found that just one-third expect a full return to the office in the next three years.
It’s a complete 360 from their stance last year, when 62% of CEOs surveyed predicted that working from home would end by 2026."
My job originally encouraged it. But we collectively ignored it. They tried to threaten us by saying, “We track your badges” and people laughing. Like, you really want to fire your best employees for that? I double dog dare you you POS.
There was even a brown nosing department lead who tried to bully people like, “I’m at the office, unlike X”. And now we all say, “We come on days when you’re not there.”
My previous company conducted a six week experiment in late 2022 having everyone come to the office twice per week. They compared the metrics and saw that it didn’t make a difference in productivity, told everyone they could wfh unless they needed to grab supplies, and rented a smaller office. We cut the space to around a third of what we used to have. In 2019, the owner was considering doubling our space. Some get it, some don’t.
This is absolutely the way. One of the companies I work with, a couple years ago had a great employee who was moving out of the state. They had an office, but they didn’t want to lose her, so they let her go remote. That employee became unintentionally a work from home trial. She did just as well remote as she did in the office. So when COVID happened everybody got a laptop and the exact same VPN setup she had. Business continued and the sky did not fall due to lack of ‘water cooler chat’.
So when lockdown lifted, it was ‘welcome back to the office everybody it’s great to have you back here, first order of business pack your shit and get it out of the building cuz we’re breaking the lease next month’.
They moved all their servers to the cloud and became a totally virtual company. Now they can recruit from anywhere in the country and pick the best people for the job no matter where they live. And what they pay for cloud costs is a tiny fraction of what they paid for office space.
My company reduced office space as well. This nailed the new 2-days office rule. They cannot roll it back
I love it that the norms are shifting. Can’t let the asskissers win.
One time I worked for a small company (300ish employees) that was well known locally for being heavy handed and micromanaging. I have never before or since seen so much intentional time wasting by so many people in one place.
Turns out if you micromanage your workforce and are constantly slapping their hands for not appearing to be busy enough, you’ll successfully create a bunch of actors who should get Emmys for playing the part of “productive” employees.
On the other hand, if you treat them well, give them the tools to do their jobs, and leave them alone most people will actually do their jobs quite well. Shocking, I know.
Can confirm, experienced this shift myself.
It’s worth noting that my job was kind of special in the sense that it was usually field work. I visited the office once or twice a year. The ones with “normal” positions were mostly in the office because it was objectively a healthy work place with nice people, and under such circumstances the “collaboration argument” is actually valid to a certain degree. However, nobody (except from the ones who actually needed to be on site to do their job, such as manufacturing and repair) were under any obligation to physically be in the office, as long as the job got done well. Once in a while us riffraff from the field service department would coordinate and visit the head office together, and that’s when it was pretty much packed, as it was one of the rare opportunities for everyone to meet. (This usually resulted in everyone getting an invite to a “technical meeting” at a pub nearby, with some department heads card in the bar)
However, then we were bought by a huge competitor, and they allowed none of this. I kept ignoring most requests that said I had to be in the office a certain amount of time. And when they began contacting me directly and insist, I made sure to select days that incurred the highest airline fees. That’s when they started to back off and mostly make demands that made sense.
However, gone were the days when people actually enjoyed meeting each other, be it in or outside of the office. Nobody truly cared anymore, especially since the new corporate overlords wanted to micromanage everything. I left that job a few months ago, and I hear from a lot of my former coworker that there’s a really big exodus.
My hope is that the new company ended up paying for pretty much nothing. The profit was in the people and their experience, and the people are taking their experience elsewhere for higher pay and less corporate bullshit.
I loved reading every bit of that. Esp the company waltzing in and then getting kicked in the dick
Another weird obsession with the new company was their brand and logo. When they bought our company, of course employees of said company wore and used a lot of merch with the company name. Mostly T-Shirts, but also some other stuff (us field crew got some nice travel stuff with the company logo on it, such as a water proof duffel bag, a pelicase, etc).
Some executive asshat in the new company threw a hissyfit about people wearing the logo of their former competitor, and to a certain degree I can understand this, except the new company NEVER handed out stuff like that. So whenever I was in the field I always had work wear on with the wrong (in their eyes) logo. Hell, sometimes out of spite I even wore a t-shirt from a long defunct competitor that I worked for back in 2011.
I love the cut of your jib
Because companies are planning to increase hiring soon. The fed is going to cut the interest rate, spurring growth. RTO was just about making employees quit to avoid severance payouts and other layoff perks back when the economy was more slumped.
This is the only correct answer
What about “we have this massive office and only 3 people use it” and “we want to micro manage our employees”
There’s some of that. I know companies in my city were given tax breaks for hosting their office building there. The theory is, the business brings more people into the area who will be spending money on lunch/happy hour/gas/etc. The tax income of that is more than the tax benefit they offer the company.
Well, people stop coming to the office, and their tax benefit of the employees being in the city dries up. The city was threatening the companies tax benefit if the people didn’t come back, and thus, RTO (in my city, anyway).
Why would they make employees quit when they are just going to hire again? Weeding out the job hoppers?
Quarterly profits were down. Next quarter is irrelevant.
First you cut the costs and get a bonus for that, then you fill the empty roles, and then get a bonus for that
I end up getting in late and leaving early on the days I’m in office and yet somehow I still get good reviews. That should be impossible according to c-level execs that are never in office, come and go as they please, and hold these thrice-rescheduled-hastily-engineered all hands meetings where there are never updates to the things they say they’re working on. They just say they’ve put a large group of middle-management on it right before they introduce yet another half-assed convoluted system to measure employee producivity that they don’t even understand. Gotta fire some people because the plan the execs heard about on a retreat didn’t work at all and they lost a bunch of money so they need cash to build that AI in order to fire more people!
