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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.
Our Philosophies:
- 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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- We must not be divided and conquered. Workers gain the most when they focus on unifying issues.
Our Goals
- Higher wages for underpaid workers.
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- Better and fewer working hours.
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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.