this post was submitted on 09 May 2024
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Exactly how my office is doing things. All of us are tracked by our phones to ensure commutes and then by IP address pulled from Entra ID and company-wide VPN. They cross reference it with our seat booking system.
We were 100% remote for all employees since March 2019. Managers now encourage us to go out and buy food at the restaurants nearby (some even “jokingly” ask for receipts which some people keep).
It’s more important to hold up the economy than lower emissions and improve morale, employee happiness, and productivity.
Jesus, that sounds like hell.
I feel like helping local economy is the only valid reason against work from home.
But, you know. Not like better city planning wouldn't help this.
You should have a local economy where you live...
My city of 3000 people certainly appreciates us buying locally. Some other city that's 100x the size? They're gonna be fine. Is the real estate price really so important business would rather make us buy goods from nearby places?
Companies have heavy commercial real estate bags. They are justifying their investments by forcing RTO
I genuinely refuse to believe that it is more profitable for them to pay for AC, water and electricity that RTO would require. There has to be something else I am missing. Is it all just managers justifying their stupid decisions to other managers?
Part of it is management that can't handle their duties if they can't walk over and intimidate workers. The other bit is many companies have cash reserves invested in commercial real estate instruments, and can't handle the profoilo hit. And many of those company leaders are also personally invested in that same real estate.
It's like buying a very expensive pool, even though it costs money to run and service, you already bought it and will invite people to come and swim in it to justify the purchase, even though it's a giant money sink.
You can't just give it back that's also wasting money, so what are you going to do?
Imagine reading in a national newspaper that a government official wanted workers back downtown to fix the downtown economy and then learning 3 days later that you must start showing up to an office to sit on Teams calls with your nationally dispersed team.
Working from home does help the local economy, just not the right ones for the C-suite.
As much as I hate to admit it, the conversations that happen because I overheard another conversation a couple cubes over do have value.
If they have value to the company then how about sharing the costs of commuting? A 50-50 split seems reasonable to me. The company gets the value of those conversations, and the plebs get some help with all that fuel they now have to buy, at ridiculous prices due to high oil prices.