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.
They are looking at it from a productivity per hour basis.
With offshoring, the individual worker is cheaper, so they can be less productive yet still worth it.
With full remote, you are still paying the workers the same amount of money, so keeping productivity up may be worth it.
I saw someone else pointing out in the thread that fully remote companies would, in time, probably adjust their salaries too. (EDIT: ah, oops… it wasn’t someone else, it was always you!! Sorry!)
As an employee, in the short term, I like to e.g. keep a London salary and save on housing and commute by moving to Manchester. But in a fully remote company there would be no “London” salary or London office at all, so salaries would be likely reflecting a blended national job market.
The transition is certainly awkward for existing companies, though, as nobody wants a salary cut (which by itself could be a good explaination for them wanting to maintain the previous in-office status quo).