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.
While this is a nice idea, adoption of this kind of knowledge sharing is known to be extremely difficult to accomplish without a massive cultural shift in a company or department. Not to mention it requires those who are knowledgeable (typically older workers with less social media or computer experience) to be tech savvy enough to be active in a space dominated by younger employees asking questions.
I am a proponent of trying to bring knowledge capture software and methods into my department and company but the struggle is real. Getting people on board with this idea will basically require those who aren’t interested to leave by attrition for the culture to change enough to accept this idea. But those people who retire are exactly the people we want to capture knowledge from! It’s really a difficult situation.