My manager didn't care for it when I pointed out that making us go into the office three times per week was equivalent to an approximately $5,000 pay cut. Not including wear and tear on the car.
the most insulting part of this is 'people' suddenly pretending like we love and always loved the office, when it's been a fundamental symbol of stagnation and boredom and misery in culture ever since they became widespread. NO ONE would voluntary want to spend 5 days in a shitty building after a commute wearing clothes they don't want to with bosses sniffing around their necks all day leaving maybe 4 hrs a day to yourself in your home. 'top talent' or not, everyone deserves to be able to work where they feel most comfortable.
People used to make sardonic jokes about cubicles. Then cubicles disappeared in favor of the open office and somehow the jokes stopped, just as things got worse.
Through the course of my career I've somehow lost office space as I've ascended the corporate food chain. I had a private office/technician room in my first job out, then had an eight foot cubicle with high walls, then a six foot cubicle with low dividers, and then the pandemic hit. The operations guy at the last place was making noises about a benching arrangement after RTO, like people were going to put up with being elbow to elbow with Chris The Conference Call Yeller and Brenda The Lip Smacking Snacker while Team Loudly Debates Marvel Movie Trivia is yammering away the next row over.
Hell, if it meant getting a space to myself with enough privacy to hear my own thoughts I might consider giving up my current WFH gig. But everybody's obsessed with building awful office hellscapes and I don't have the constitution to put up with that kind of environment.
Studies have found that that those who work in open offices are more likely to take short term sick leave or a sick day. Those employees might be using 62% more of their sick days due to the environment. Employees with this office layout are also more prone to headaches and respiratory problems due to weakened immune systems.
I work for a 350k+ company doing grid mod for energy utilities. The head of our division had an "all hands" meeting earlier in the week saying based on client requirements we all need to be in an office or on the clients site.
The head of our group of ~20 (my bosses boss) scheduled a meeting right after and said ignore that. Our team is kicking ass and our current client has not such requirements (other than onsite at their location for training/go-lives which is reasonable). Furthermore, he said unless it was out of his hands this could be the normal with new clients.
We have a killer team from all over the US (many of whom are nowhere near the client or our company offices). This team would dissolve quickly if that mandate ever hit us.
My point is, there ARE still people in upper(ish) management that understand to keep top talent you have to be willing to accept or embrace work from wherever. Hell, during the last go-live last hear he basically said unless absolutely required he didn't WANT any of us on-site with the client. He wanted us all comfy, no jet-lag, in our normal settings to be able to troubleshoot issues. Granted, I worked nearly 80 hours that week, but that's not a normal week. I usually work 30-40.
lol and holy wall of text batman. I didn't mean to write that much but it's here and I don't want to delete it.
Yeah our CIO started talking bringing cubes back. My manager, his manner and our director are pretty opposed to this. We do well remote and there are things we literally couldn’t do in the office. We’re in once a week-ish if it works out and if this forced our director would have to move back from multiple states over…. I don’t think they’ll make that move back if pressed and one co-worker expressed “fire me” sentiment if it comes.
Yup. We got a new CEO, and they did a big push for productivity and enforcing our 3-day in office policy. My team had been on 2-day since the pandemic WFH policy ended, and my boss said we'd give it a try, and if it sucked we could go back. We had worse productivity, so we went back to 2-days in-office. The company policy is still 3-days in office, we just ignore it.
It really depends on your boss. A good boss can ignore stupid company policy, and a bad boss can ruin good company policy. My boss is one of the main reasons I took the job, and it's also why I'm still here (I'm pretty sure I'm underpaid, and my boss is upfront about that, but I like my boss so I'm sticking with it for now).
Similar to my case. My manager is based in Europe, and he basically said that to him, I’m a remote employee whether I wfh or go to the office, so it doesn’t matter. And even for other team members in the same location as him, he doesn’t force them to come in.
Our director (my boss’ boss) moved out of the US so it doesn’t make sense for him to ask us to come in when he himself is remote. And he also told us that he doesn’t care where we work from.
We’re lucky our bosses aren’t old heads with outdated work principles. Barring any explicit orders from the very top, I expect to keep the status quo. And even then, I’m sure at least up to our VP will defy those orders.
My company ordered back to office, and as I was told, I was the only one to say no.
I generate too much value and have tolerated being underpayed enough that they can't justify firing me.
I'm also not some MIT AI machine learning savant. I come from a business analyst/ QA background, and I have made a SQL/Java/VBA system for virtually free that does the work of a team of 10 every day, but it's just my underpaid ass running it.
When I lose this job, honestly, I'm fucked and it will be a nightmare because I'll probably need to go into an office, and I'm in no shape for that.
You give your top talent what they want. The problem is that they hired a consultant to find out what that was. The consultant, knowing on which side his bread was buttered, told the board what they wanted to hear, which is, after all, why they hired a consultant instead of just asking.
It's a balancing act though. A lot of top talent is going to leave either way, so over focusing on them hurts everyone else. Mandatory return to office was a lot more costly than most companies hoped for though. It was essentially a lay-off, but it left companies with pretty much only the bad employees compared to a more traditional approach.
We can't claim to know it left them with "bad" employees. I think there's vanishingly little evidence that recruiters actually go after the "good" employees effectively -- I'm pretty skeptical that a pro recruiter actually gets you better employees, they just make the process of getting employees way less stressful. We also have no reason to assume that a good or bad employee is correlated in any way with caring about not returning to office -- it's possible very bad employees are just as likely to quit as very good ones. How do you even tell good from bad, anyway?
What this "return to office" stuff definitely DOES do is preferentially retain the most obedient/desperate employees. Which may be part of the goal, along with low-key downsizing.
Problem is that post-pandemic market is ripe for a layoff. Companies purposely over-hired during the pandemic and then in the past couple years the layoffs achieved 2 things: 1) Thin the staff to show shareholders a higher short term profit in an age where they cant get cheap loans and show they're undertaking new risky ventures (interest rate is high from the fight against inflation), and 2) They can use the layoffs to undermine the leverage of employees to create a "hard pull" back to office policy. It makes laying off people much easier when they "volunteer"
That's exactly what the consultants are for and hiring them is an easy, low-cost (in the grand scheme of things) way of shifting responsibility aka "I don't want to do any decision making that may and will be detrimental to the company so I will hire an "expert" to do it for me".
This is absolutely to be expected. If I was able to work from home remotely and then was told I'd have to go back, I would look for another job with the specific requirement that I must be able to work from home.
Return-to-office mandates at some of the most powerful tech companies — Apple, Microsoft and SpaceX — were followed by a spike in departures among the most senior, tough-to-replace talent, according to a case study published last week by researchers at the University of Chicago and the University of Michigan.
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