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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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If the CEO of Zoom is asking for staff to go back to the office, it may not just be a desire to control.
I find that a lot of people who defend full remote tend to speak past issues like coordination and mentoring. You may have some CEO's seeing that people are doing individually productive work, but the organization as a whole isn't productive.
Yeah bruh, this is 100% about making sure the poors stay in their goddamned place.
Coordination, mentoring, and culture are intentional. The problem is that in an "in person" work place, deficiencies in those areas are very easy to sweep under the rug.
What I will call "churn", rather the flurry of activity generated by masses of employees coming, going, and doing is frequently mistaken for productivity when instead it's professional level time wasting. The "ship" is making a lot of bubbles and waves but in reality it's just doing very wide donuts in the middle of the ocean and not generating any real forward momentum. Hence, "churn."
I've worked for fully remote orgs with excellent culture, fully in person orgs with horrible culture and vice-versa. In my experience, remote work has benefits for employees and the company. It's saves both money and can (not necessarily does) improve the quality of life of the employees. Not all jobs can be remote. That's understandable. White collar office jobs don't usually fall into the "can't be remote" category.
While remote work can impact the org culture, it usually is more of magnifying glass in that all the existing deficiencies in the orgs culture bubble to the surface and get put in display for everyone to see. CEO's and other senior execs who are embarrassed by this, incompetent, or just don't care immediately blame the magnifying glass instead of the root problem. Identifying and dealing with the root problem would require time and effort that they aren't willing to invest. They'd rather sweep it back under the rug again and continue ignoring it.
And, as is now common, especially in corporate America, the attention span is so short and general state of corporate governance so poor that the only thing that matters is the stock price right at this very moment. No one cares if they're company is even going to be here in 20 years.
So if you work for a company who's CEO is whining about the need for "culture" and "water cooler moments" as a means to being people back into the office, rest assured that when that happens, the company will have the same shitty culture it always has, except maybe a little worse (since lots of layoff or constructive dismissals tend to damage the culture and erode trust). Nothing will change except the guys at the top will get back to pretending everything is fine, even if it's really not.
They are, but you may have issues with keeping up these with full remote, where people don't get all the social cues that they would get in an office.
Hell, listen to a lot of the criticism here. Executives and management are trying to "control" workers instead of blindly following individual productivity measurements, even if those individual productivity metrics may not be good for the company.
You may also have cases where the culture role was given to a senior member that no one longer listens to because there isn't a direct chain of command and the duties aren't made explicit to everyone.
Full remote can work, but I feel like a lot of companies are finding that it isn't working as advertised compared to being in office and there isn't a known way to do so that they can implement. So, they are going back.
My main point was that often the idea that things were working just fine when everyone was "in office" is an illusion and nothing more. Companies that are finding that remote work "isn't working" don't know what "working" is or looks like. If they're blindly calling employees back to the office, then they've successfully solved nothing. Other than maybe adding value back to someone's commercial real estate portfolio. They've just convinced themselves and everyone else further up the ladder that everything is fine while squandering vast amounts of talent and institutional knowledge so someone on the top floor doesn't have to ask or answer the question of why their performance metrics are so bad. Don't have to worry about performance metrics when butts in seats is the only metric.
There are organizations out there where the HR department is responsible for curating a high quality workforce and establishing a foundation of culture, including practices, that reflect the organizations principals and values as well as path to integrating that culture with the workforce. These organizations often have good leadership that understands how to successfully leverage a large distributed workforce to achieve measurable goals. The focus is on performance and there is a high degree of trust between different levels in the organization.
Then there companies where the workforce is treated like cattle and HR's role is to just shuffle the paperwork. They don't value their employees and have a highly rule and/or power driven culture.There is a general distrust between the levels of the org. These types of organizations tend to spend vast amounts of resources simply maintaining the bureaucracy instead of actually getting things done. Management perceives this as "productivity" but here again, it's just a big ship going in circles in the middle of the ocean.
There are also a lot of organizations that hover somewhere in between those two examples.
But again, the problem isn't remote work. Remote work works just fine. The problem is poor management, a lack of accountability, culture that fosters distrust and fails to set quantifiable performance goal. An organization like that is certainly prone to accept the bullshit excuse of "RemOtE wOrK iSnT wOrKiNg" rather than trying to find the real source of the problems. Especially since poor leadership is probably problem number one.
The issue may not be "just fine", but which one is showing better results.
And some of the CEO's are communicating why they think that full remote is failing. The Zoom CEO cited that Zoom meetings aren't creating the environment for collaboration that in person meetings are. You can call him a liar, but he is giving a reason why he wants people back in the office.
And I think that this is happening across a lot of companies. It isn't that working in the office is "good", but it is apparently giving better results than the other option within their organization.
Show it, the studies have shown that workers are more productive when remote. Evidence would help make things easier to stomach with this insane RTO push. Covid is still kicking around, and the dramatic return to commutes is damaging to our planet.
Coordination comes from competent leadership regardless of location. Any company larger than 10 people needs some way to handle coordination. Async coordination is really under trained and under utilized as a result but works really well with remote workers. You can't async everything tho so synchronous coordination happens the same way remotely as it does in person, with a meeting and sequential execution. This is basic stuff for people who work with logic often like programmers who have had remote work opportunities for decades now.
Mentoring, you're worried about that when most companies won't pay for training or provide time or bandwidth for mentorship. Assuming leadership is onboard with the actual costs and output reductions that come with mentorship, you collaborate mostly the same way IRL as you do remotely: by looking at a screen together. Which is far easier over zoom / teams. Or you ask questions in a call or through chat.
I've posted in other comments that a lot of the initial studies were based on self reporting surveys, not actual measurements of productivity. One study that used actual measurements from a call center later revised their report as there were issues found like increased call backs.
And as for in-person versus virtual, I've seen a lot of staff don't ask as many questions online as they do in person, even with video conferencing and chat being widely available. You also have some cases where senior staff used to do mentoring and providing some technical direction on projects they aren't working on no longer doing so either because full remote tends to push everything up to the lead, which ends up getting drowned in more communication than hybrid. Sure, the senior staff may be more productive by some metrics, but the department isn't and senior management is going to to try to fix issues on the department level. And as others have noted, there is a shortage of qualified staff, so you can't have everyone be senior staff.
Why RTO makes sense,
People working at companies like Zoom typically get large sums of RSUs. These RSUs typically start to vest at 1 year and then continue to vest for 2-3 years. By forcing people to go into the office, some of these people will leave, forfeiting any non-vested RSUs. This allows companies to do layoffs without the cost associated.
Salary. These companies will just hire new bodies with lower salaries and higher RSU packages that will vest over longer time with the goal of saving money in the immediate now that debt is no longer cheap.
Training/Mentoring require more effort remotely.
Corporate real estate.
Why RTO doesn't make sense,
Many companies like Zoom have offices scattered across the country. The tech company I work for, for example, me and 3 colleagues are the only ones near my local office in a team of 80. My manager is in another state and most of my 80+ member team are in other states or countries (follow the sun posture). Any internal meeting I have to have would have to be done over Zoom.
Consultant companies like PWC are doing much more consultant hours virtually instead of traveling to clients because clients don't want to spend the extra billable for the travel, which is a key indicator that remote work isn't the detriment that it's being made out to be.
Open office floor plans make productivity worse.
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Personally I will never take a job again that requires office time, I much prefer meeting up with coworkers for dinner every couple months over forced "teambuilding"
I mentored remotely just fine even back before the pandemic. There are all kinds of tools for communicating with people.
people have lives far, far beyond the scope of offices and business. people have dreams, desires, goals that matter a trillion times more than 'mentorship' or 'organizational productivity' ever, ever could.
centering these discussions around business-school shit is being fundamentally blind. the fact that we have to cloak everything in 'productivity' language is a sick show of penance.
That's fine that people have lives outside of work, but employers aren't paying people to have good lives. An employer isn't going to self advocate for less productivity.