I have posted this on Reddit (askeconomics) a while back but got no good replies. Copying it here because I don’t want to send traffic to Reddit.
What do you think?
I see a big push to take employees back to the office. I personally don’t mind either working remote or in the office, but I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit and I haven’t seen a convincing explanation yet of why they are so keen to have everyone back.
If remote work was just as productive as in-person, a remote-only company could use it to be more efficient than their work-in-office competitors, so I assume there’s no conclusive evidence that this is the case. But I haven’t seen conclusive evidence of the contrary either, and I think employers would have good reason to trumpet any findings at least internally to their employees (“we’ve seen KPI so-and-so drop with everyone working from home” or “project X was severely delayed by lack of in-person coordination” wouldn’t make everyone happy to return in presence, but at least it would make a good argument for a manager to explain to their team)
Instead, all I keep hearing is inspirational wish-wash like “we value the power of working together”. Which is fine, but why are we valuing it more than the cost of office space?
On the side of employees, I often see arguments like “these companies made a big investment in offices and now they don’t want to look stupid by leaving them empty”. But all these large companies have spent billions to acquire smaller companies/products and dropped them without a second thought. I can’t believe the same companies would now be so sentimentally attached to office buildings if it made any economic sense to close them.
there is really no logical reason. Working “in the office” is basically a bunch of distractions from idiot coworkers who don’t know that email / instant messaging apps exist + trying to figure out what is for lunch and planning how to spend the hour+ coming in / going home.
Frankly the push is likely just because so many companies have invested in the real estate and infrastructure to make a physical office function that they feel they need to make that investment worth while, plus the inertia of old people not willing to just accept that things can be done differently. Similar thing with a 4 day work week, countless studies and actual implementations have proven that it is vastly more productive for companies and preferable for employees, but it will never be implemented in the US because we are conditioned to think running yourself ragged for your job is somehow a moral necessity.
In my personal opinion, anyone who is a wage slave that claims to “prefer going to the office” is probably someone who doesn’t now how to do their job without bothering their coworkers with basic questions they should know the answer to and/or is so devoid of meaningful personal relationships they only have their coworkers to interact with.
Work is for chumps.