There's a Big Problem with Return-to-Office Mandates: Enforcing Them (yahoo.com) 185
"Friction between bosses and their employees over the terms of their return shows no signs of abating," reports the Los Angeles Times.
But there's one big loophole...
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 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...
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."
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."
Conflict of Interest (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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> 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 they'll make more money renting out a smaller number of sqft for $X than renting out all of their own
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Dude imagine you built the biggest building downtown for your HQ, you totally ripped off the city and the county making deals to get you there. The building has storefronts and restaurants, the surrounding area is full of business that makes all its money on the lunch shift.
You play golf with those guys, you're fucking their wives, you made promises, you did blow and hookers together to seal the deal.
Yeah man I'll get people back downtown for you buddy.
I don't get why you're pretending its not the case wh
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Um, most commercial real estate is not owned by Big Tech, not even close. It's in private hands: a mix of PE and completely private money. Blackstone is the world's largest landlord, with about 2 trillion of real estate assets on its books. It tends to hold properties for about 3 to 5 years before flipping them. But property is incredibly fragmented because it's so capital-intensive, and BX only owns a small fraction of the world's property. The UK's largest REIT, Landsec, is a FTSE 100 yet owns a negligibl
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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
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I'm no real estate magnate but it seems to me that if enough office staff WFH that reduced demand would cause supply to outstrip the remaining demand.
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Tech CEOs have zero loyalty to their companies. They're loyal to their other buddies.
I read an article about some rich guy "starting from nothing" just to prove how easy it was.
Pretty much first thing he did was shake down his buddies for speaking engagements and he was bam, instantly back in the upper middle class.
IIRC he still wasn't able to make his million and he got bored but basically you're asking if they'd do the right thing at work or enhance powerful connections that can get them money, judicial
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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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)
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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.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/b... [forbes.com]
The time I was reincarnated in a just world. (Score:2)
PoV: You have been Isekai'd to a world where the ruling class membership is in fierce competition with itself instead of gleefully engaged in active collusion against normal people, who they loathe and believe must be kept busy lets their idle hands cause problems.
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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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Think about a typical family where the two parents work and have two cars so they can go about their business. If even one of them is working from home - most likely they won't need a second car. Remote work saves on fuel, tires, general maintenance of the cars. Saves you expensive lunch at cafeteria/ restaurants near the office, saves you on clothing that you have to buy just to be presentable at work. A
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Why would a software billionaire care about real estate?
Because they are invested in real estate as well as software.
Big Tech wants you back in the office because THEY think it makes you a better employee
Big Tech is not one thing and it does not have a brain, it does not think anything.
Amazon is a 2 trillion dollar company. They told everyone to RTO because the leadership thought it would make their employees more productive.
I don't think they did. I think the leadershit thought it would make themselves look more productive when they are walking around bossing people, having meetings which don't need to be had when an email would suffice, etc.
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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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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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Kind of a funny thing - there are meeting rooms available, and people who are in the same meeting are in the office, but they're still at their desks on Zoom rather than using said meeting rooms. I've heard meetings in stereo and surround sound as participants in it sit all around me answering questions.
I've seen this as well! I've specifically tried to schedule meetings for when I and others are on campus - I've even adjusted my schedule so I could be on campus as the same time as the people I want to meet with. But everyone still just wants to do Zoom meetings - even if we're all within a few hundred feet of each other! And this includes the higher-ups... at least at my job.
I find it rather hilarious because "meetings" is one of the few non-hand-waving arguments people give as a reason for wanting people
Re:Conflict of Interest (Score:4, Insightful)
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. All we can do is plan for the worst and hope for the best.
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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
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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.
Who are these tech CEOs and board members that are renting out office property?
This claim gets repeated all the time but there's never any evidence of this supposed conflict of interest. The only case was with that WeWork dipshit and well that's no longer an issue.
They can just be dumb and/or control freaks.
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Start turning office space into housing. What do the little people really need? A cot in a cubicle sounds like a riotous good time for peons. Think of the parties they can have in the evenings? Camp fires in the hallways! Weenie roasts every night! It'll be like a campout inside a building!
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Remote working may lead to 20pc drop in Australian office property prices
But I'm sure it will be different in your country.
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
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I'm pretty sure the banks would rather lend to the more profitable/cash flow positive company that to the one that's holding real estate.
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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
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What a stupid comment. Have you ever been to a city? Your objections make no sense.
He goes to cities on vacation and has his family spread out on the busy sidewalk and take pictures during the morning foot traffic rush. He was scared of getting mugged the whole time and a little disappointed that he wasn't able to visibly trigger any effeminate men with his MAGA hat but he's sure they were just intimidated by his rough suburban cowboy exterior.
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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?
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That's the reality [unitedwaynca.org]
We have more empty homes than homeless people in this country. Nationwide, there are 28 empty homes for every homeless person. This happens because companies price the properties out of reach of anyone with low income.
When you have far more housing than people, the only way to keep demand up and prices high is to create an artificial homeless crisis by either not listing properties or listing them at higher prices than most people are willing to pay.
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Yes that would probably sound stupid but you're thankfully the smartest guy in the room and understand how something so seemingly nonsensical is actually highly profitable and thankfully nobody needs to explain the historical precedents or basic explain the very basic economics at play.
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There's definitely some of that.
If you leveraged to buy a building your valuation will be based to some degree on prevailing rent.
If you start renting out space 20% less it can drop your valuation and cause issues for financing, while if you instead keep a space empty but rents higher you can keep your loan from getting reexamined.
This falls apart when the vacancies gets too high, but it's definitely a thing.
Re: Conflict of Interest (Score:2)
No, this is a real thing. Many small business owners also own the buildings their business is in, and the value of those buildings has dropped a good 20% since Covid happened.
The place where I worked leased most of the office space to new tenants, basically insuring that I'll be working from home for years.
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*
Re:Or...they're treating you like an adult (Score:5, Insightful)
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-.
If my boss needs me in Tucson tomorrow, that's a strong indication that my boss didn't plan very well, and I'll likely have a pile of evidence ready to drop on the desk of someone higher up in management, showing that whatever catastrophe my boss claims was caused by me not playing a hero and flying down to Tucson was actually caused by my boss's gross incompetence, and that a panicked emergency flight to another state would have done little more than delay the inevitable.
That said, if my employer concludes that they don't need me because I was unwilling to drop everything else in my life and be their little lap dog at the last second, then I sure as f**k don't need that employer. Life's too short to work for complete a**holes, and most educated people realize this.
There will always be better jobs that don't abuse workers. No one should stay in a hostile workplace. More to the point, most people will not do so for a long period of time, and this tends to result in negative workplace ratings, which results in lower-quality applicants, which eventually results in a death spiral. So those companies tend to get exactly what they deserve in the long run.
When the next applicant asks what happened to you, the answer is, "they decided to move on".
And when the next applicant looks on GlassDoor, they're going to get a very different answer, conclude that the company is being shady, and look for work elsewhere. If you honestly think that the way companies behave towards their employees doesn't meaningfully affect the number and quality of applicants, then you haven't worked in this industry for very long.
Firing you will have minimal negative impact.
If this were one person, you'd probably be correct in most cases. But we're talking about O(80%) of their staff, in most cases. Firing thousands of people tends to make national news headlines, and not in a good way. And people are wary of companies that do this, particularly if the reasons for doing so involve a power-tripping boss.
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There will always be better jobs that don't abuse workers.
Only if you are in the top 10% of beautiful and/or competent workers. The real world is unsuitable for the majority of workers and their options dry up quickly without luck.
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Indeed, the fact that the parent got modded up and you got modded down is indicative of the type of problem that many employers are likely trying to solve with RTO mandates. When there's an emergency that will affect the long-term well-being of the business, it's not time to point fingers. It doesn't matter whose fault it is. What matters is that getting the situation resolved is everyone's problem. Nobody is perfect. Maybe a boss did make a mistake. Once the situation is resolved, a post-mortem to try to prevent it from happening in the future is a good idea. But refusing to help during a serious situation because "it's not my fault" is something we alls should have learned better by about the time we start kindergarten.
Let's be clear here. When there's an emergency, it shouldn't ever require someone to physically travel by several states to fix it, much less someone whose job title is anything other than SRE or similar. By the time I could get there, the damage would likely already be in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
A functioning company would have personnel in that location who are capable of fixing it, or make it possible to fix it remotely, or (realistically) both. If a business has gotten into such a
The change has already happened (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: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
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 how odd our existence is compared to our history as a species since we generally only experience 8 decades of it and even then we really only pay attention to the 'now' unless we're reminiscing.
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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).
Re:The change has already happened (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not too long ago when the time to walk with a stack of paper into the neighboring office was still faster than sending it per e-mail or fax or sharing it it a common network folder. And at the time, it actually made sense to have people working physically close together. Maybe 10 years ago, we for the first time had enough tooling available to have remote collaboration a viable alternative for most office jobs. And the pandemic caused most of us to actually learn those tools and design work flow around them. And that's the main reason why today, people working from home are actually on a comparative productivity level than people in the office.
RTO is one of the many "back to the old times" nostalgias. While I think they will be around for the foreseeable future, I also think they will become more and more of an item on a wish list than an actual, enforced mandate. And that has nothing to do with the office being unnatural, and all with cheaper ways to reach the same productivity level. Working from Home is another BYOD. Let's call it BYOO - bring your own office.
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Why does no one ever discuss an upper age limit on voting? This would solve so many problems of the next generations being fucked over by old people. Something reasonable like state retirement age +3 years or average life expectancy -5 years?
We don't let people who are too young to vote because they're selfish, short-sighted and don't really have the mental faculties to understand it properly. This description applies to a lot of old people too.
Re:The change has already happened (Score:5, Insightful)
We don't let people who are too young to vote because they're selfish, short-sighted and don't really have the mental faculties to understand it properly. This description applies to a lot of old people too.
If you want to disenfranchise a group based on finding some idiots among them I would say abolish voting altogether. Most old people are not senile and are perfectly fine. You point to the average life expectancy, shit the overwhelming majority of old people are perfectly lucid at that age, it's usually only a small subset with medical conditions who are not.
The reason we treat young people differently is because the entire group collectively doesn't have the ability to understand the wider world around them, and it would be an exception rather than the rule for someone to be able to make an educated decision about the future of a country at their age.
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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.
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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)
Re:It's just stealth layoffs (Score:5, Interesting)
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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I remember talking to a
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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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And they're wrong! That's what the B Ark is for.
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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:5, Interesting)
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.
Employers, if they have any sense at all, will realize the same is true for them. What are the odds that the nation's best talent lives within 60 miles of their office? Why pay SanFan wages when equal talent lives all over the USA, eager to work remotely? Why pay for office space- when people sit alone in cubes doing Teams calls?
Cities should press for remote workers. It keeps tax dollars where people live. It reduces traffic. It frees up commercial space for other uses- almost like inventing more land in the heart of cities.
I've spend thousands of hours commuting. Wasted. Spent away from my family. For nothing.
I've been paid low local wages, because employers knew I had nowhere else to could go.
I will never work in office again. At any price.
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I will never work in office again. At any price.
Same here.
Just cut the VPN (Score:2)
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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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.
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Air gap everything for security, very few places find that economically viable as doing business gets harder when people can't order over the internet.
Sensitive work environment (Score:2)
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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?
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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:5, Interesting)
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:3)
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 competent people to fill those jobs. Yes, you will get thousands of resumes for each job, but 2/3 of those will be recruiters doing pray and spray, and good luck finding anyone who actually knows what they put on their CV.
I am currently working several jobs (yes, they all know about each other) where they would love to have a full time employee, and I am actually trying to help two of them find a full time employee to replace me, and it's hard. And I am legitimately trying to make this happen, I would like to lose at least one of these jobs and have more free time!
So anyhow, it's going to take a truly consequence blind executive to actually pull the trigger on firing everyone who refuses to come into the office five (or more) days a week who has any job skills, because you can't just instantly replace them with J. Random Schmuck. But there are lots of those execs, so I'm sure it will happen.
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,
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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,
I can't relate with this perspective. Being told to come to the office *is* having a bad boss. And it is quite likely that this bad boss does other bad boss things like micro-managing or other silly power moves.
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.
Re: I'm ok going to the office but... (Score:3)
I think that someone has been watching too much Fox News again. The decline of progressive places like San Francisco is really overblown, most of the neighborhoods are still very nice places to live.
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
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Weird that you're choosing that path when you could go the other way, the one where we don't find it normal to terminate someone who was late a few minutes three times. We're all humans, nobody wins when we all pressure each other more.
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I'm satisfied (Score:2)
My employer (Software company on the upper-end of medium-sized) gave everybody the choice to go back to the office or not. When almost nobody actually did, they started closing offices when the leases ended to save money. They basically let the employees decide what happened.
Why do CEOs care? (Score:2)
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Land investments in the area one presumes
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... Or quiet firing
Vanity and Leases (Score:2)
Then comes vanity. Company leaders are proud of their office. Either the office itself is beautiful, or the image of workerbees keyboarding away, gives leadership a power trip and a symbol of vanity when showing off the office to visitors (guests, potential investors, etc).
I can understand (but don't agree with) the former bit, if only until
I'm one of those uncooperative managers (Score:3)
My company has remote employees and on-prem offices. For those who live in an area where an office is located, employees are required to come in to the office five days a week. For those who live far from any offices, and whose offer letters specified that they are remote employees, they don't have to come in to the office, ever.
This division naturally causes some envy and frustration, from those who are required to go in. My team has some of both. For those who are required to come in to the office, I tell them plainly, "I don't monitor where you work. If you choose not to come in, I don't care, I'm not checking. If you're doing your job, I'm good with wherever you choose to do it."
This attitude seems pretty common at my company, though not universal. Guess what...people working under those other managers, keep trying to come over to my team! And for those who are good at what they do, I work with them to make the transfer. Win-win!
Re:Consistency⦠(Score:5, Insightful)
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 spotted a bunch of mice. Maybe we'll see at least a slight average increase in quality of life as more people realize you can do something other than commute to a miserable cubicle just because the pinhead down the hall wants to feel more powerful.
One of the reasons - Who is more likely to not RTO (Score:5, Interesting)
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:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news... [yahoo.com]
‘The system is not working for women’: Companies with return-to-office mandates are hemorrhaging female talent
- by Jane Thier July 23, 2024
- one more so than caregivers, lower-income workers, and women, who are more likely than men to fall into both of the first two categories.
- “The system is not working for women, so they’re opting out” in favor of alternative, flexible career paths, Kelly Monahan
- Upwork’s new research, nearly two-thirds (63%) of C-suite leaders whose companies have mandated an office return of some sort say the policy has led a disproportionate number of women to quit.
- hemorrhaging of women employees tanked company productivity. (They surveyed 2,500 global workers, including over 1,500 C-level executives.)
- “We’ve lost decades of female workforce participation leading up to the pandemic,”
- Per the Center for American Progress, over the past 30 years, every G7 nation saw at least 10% growth in working women. The same metric remained mostly flat in the U.S., which CAP estimated will cost the U.S. 5% of potential GDP growth.
- many women (over half, in Upwork’s survey sample) have taken to freelancing; nearly 30% of those women said no amount of money would lure them back to full-time work.
- “That doesn’t mean you have to be 100% remote—and women aren’t always asking for that—just time for life outside of work.”
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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".
...said the troglodyte [cambridge.org] troll.