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.
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.
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.