this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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I haven't looked into why they're doing this, so maybe this insight is obvious and well known, but I imagine it has to do with the fact that they spend a shitton of money on these spaces/leases that they can't easily get out of, so their way of dealing with it is by forcing employees to use it. My company is going through a similar situation, but they're accepting the responsibility of eating the cost of the office space lease with several years left on the contract and don't even try to entice people to use it. "Come in if you want, it's going to be here for awhile!" is about as far as it goes, haha. Fuck Amazon.
Why would Amazon want to pay for office space when its entire business model is being cheap as fuck with spending money?
The last company I worked for intelligently renewed their leases during the pandemic after sending everyome home "temporarily". Three years later and they are requiring everyone go back into the office a minimum of two days a month. This applied to everyone who was within 50miles of an office regardless if they were hired as remote or if none of the rest of their team was even in the same state. The only reason to make this mandate is to make use of the office space they stupidly continued the lease on.
In less than a month I had a better paying permanently remote job. I'll go back to an office in a coffin.
Execs making decisions like this are a red flag.
Office leases are a sunk cost, if there's no value add to using it, don't. Even a profit-chasing ghoul knows you don't throw good money in after bad.
Source: was a profit-chasing ghoul
Ps: they could be doing this to lay off employees without severance, or to signal to shareholders that they're still God and the rest of us are peasants, that would make more sense for the ghouls
Even better they renovated the offices and made them more "open concept/shared workspace/no assigned desk" offices with lockers to stuff your equipment in once you are off work. Built an online reservation system for it as well you were required to use.
Do you work in my office?
Not only did they so that during the shutdown, but they scrapped all the old desks and filing cabinets (contents and all) without informing the people who had stuff in those.
Apparently they put up signs for a week in the empty office alerting people to empty their desks, but nobody was in the office ro see those signs in 2020 when they were doing the renovation.
It's crazy to me that bigwigs see office space as a sunk cost, but not employees.
They'll drop and burn employees like going through tissue paper, but useless buildings? Nah, better use it even if it's worthless.
Having long time tenured employees does nothing but benefit a company since they can perform tasks that would take a new employee hours to weeks in minutes to days, hell, it even lets you employee less staff due to that efficiency that can only be acquired through experience. It baffles me how those at the top just refuse to think efficiently.
To the coffice!
Did you work for Amazon?
How did you come to the conclusion that I could have worked for Amazon based on what I posted and the related article?
Because I was talking about Amazon specifically.
Our place agreed with the landlord that if they did the legwork to find a new tenant they could teminate the lease early.
Even the smaller place (barely a cupboard) they rented afterwards to give a business address/phone is going away quite soon.. there's just no need for our company to have physical presence at all.
The unspoken bit is the reason the productivity is up so much is there isn't a manager wandering into the office and saying 'I had a great idea!'. Now they send an email, and those of us with the seniority to get away with it tell him to GTFO so by the time most people read it it's history. But the advantage of working with peoples lives can't be understated.. You can schedule your work around your life, parents can pick their kids up from school, you can have an 'off' day without feeling you have to stare uselessly at a screen for 8 hours (and, a tad more controversially, you can work whilst ill, which we've caught a few people doing.. no risk of spreading disease any more but it's not healthy).
But if you all are happy at home, who am I going to micro manage? And when I'm lonely, who will listen to me in an enforced (and useless) meeting?
Do you even think of the shareholders?
^^
I'm not certain, but I remember hearing companies like that get tax incentives to move to certain areas to boost jobs. I wonder if maybe that affects it? Landlords want their rent, and local businesses sell stuff to commuters. But I think we should just turn all the commercial not being used into residential
What drives me nuts about my job, although it's better than no WFH at all so I stick with it, is that I have a hybrid home/office schedule when there's zero need for me to ever come in and the space will be used anyway because I'm in the office part of an industrial facility. In fact, if they got rid of the office, they could put in more machinery. Seems like a win-win. But they don't see it that way for some reason.
I know people who work in IT at places they have installed surveillance on wfh machines and the stats show that people really aren’t working as hard from home.
I’ve been wfh with optional in-office work for over a decade and I know it can be done well. But I know there are a lot of people that you have to stay on top of who would be fine in an office.
So I don’t think these companies are going back into the office for no reason.
That said, I think this will backfire because the best employees will find work at places where they can work remote unless compensated far better than they can get at remote shops.
A lot of the complaints about people "being lazy" while working from home comes from managers that don't know how to deal with WFH.
Management and team leads don't need to unduly spy on people or micromanage them. They need to figure out a reasonable measure of productivity and track it, i.e. "What did an employee get done today/this week/etc?" The employees would probably be happy to help figure it out if it means they don't have to come back in to the office.
From there, basic management skills apply. If it looks like someone is slacking off verify that's actually the case, then go from there.
Agreed. And that’s why a lot of smaller companies will stick with remote work. But you can also get your productivity back by just calling everyone back into the office, and these big companies already have all the resources they need to do it. So they are.
I think there's some critical information they're missing. They need to establish a control group by using that same surveillance software for in office employees. And it's pretty easy to tell when people are inattentive from home, but not as much when they're in the office. You still need to find a way quantify that data though. Otherwise it really isn't a fair comparison.
They did use it during wfh and after work from home. So it didn’t inform their decisions to call people back, but it did validate it.
It's a good thing it's impossible to goof off at the office!
No one said it wasn’t. I said they have evidence that people don’t work as much when they work from home.
Are they still getting done what needs to be done in an appropriate amount of time? Because that should be the only metric that matters for WFH employees as far as I can tell. "You aren't working hard enough" is "Protestant Work Ethic" capitalist bullshit.
Determining what people should be able to get done is not simple and will always be imprecise. In a lot of professional jobs, you aren’t paid to get x done. You’re paid to get as much s as you reasonably can during working hours and that’s nearly impossible to determine when everyone is remote.
So when everyone who works for you works remote, there are some tough situations that come up. The biggest one is if someone isn’t getting many tasks completed over a free weeks. Is it because they aren’t working or because a lot of roadblocks really did come up or is it because they aren’t really working? It’s easier to give that person the benefit of the doubt if they’ve been at the office and you can see them working.
I’ve worked remote for over a decade so I know it’s possible for a team to get work done, but it would definitely be easier and more effective to manage people in office. And some people who have fallen behind may have been given more leniency in office than they get while wfh. So I get why some businesses don’t want to deal with that. I think they’ll lose out on the best workers unless they’re willing to pay significantly more for them to work in office though. But we’ll see how it goes.
Ah the old "let's measure our workers", I'm a programmer and I have seen them all or at least a whole bunch of stupid ways to try to measure our "effectiveness". None that works.
Spoiler alert: hitting away on a keyboard for 9h straight per day is not productive.
So what does work? You can set up sprints with what seams like reasonable amounts of work and engineers will still miss their target occasionally. Sometimes weeks in a row. And sometimes for very good reasons. It’s a lot easier to gauge if someone is actually working when you can actually see them and give them the benefit of the doubt.
But even if your only metric is how much people are banging away on a keyboard, then you would have to be being purposely obtuse to not be suspicious when a company working from home does way less than they do in the office and they get significantly more story points complete in the office than they did working from home.
One thing that works is having faith in the people working and being a good leader. Treating people like numbers in a spreadsheet never does.
The slacker will slack everywhere he's just a good excuse, everyone else will be most productive depending on what they like and need, and that is obviously not the same for everyone so the whole thing about everybody has to be in the office for productivity is so BS and backwards.