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.
For me Hybrid is a good compromise too from a work-life balance perspective (and job security too, now that you made me think of outsourcing…)
However, it tends to result in focusing in-office days on the “social”, meetings-heavy part of my job, so it’s challenging for the management of office space. I want to be in the office in the same days as my team (but hopefully not in the same days when some other larger team are also in and using all the meeting rooms).
For now this isn’t much of an issue in practice, but just because my company still pays for a full office that is on average only less than half full (even when meeting rooms are full, there is still plenty of space to talk). However, I don’t know how long they’ll want to keep doing it if hybrid becomes the permanent arrangement.
I see some smaller companies started switching to temporary, WeWork-style office spaces, with no permanent desks. So you need to reserve your desk and meeting rooms in advance on the days you’re planning to be in. I don’t know how that works in larger companies where your whole team wants to be in or WFH at the same time, though…