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RTO doesn’t improve company value, but does make employees miserable: Study::Data is consistent with bosses using RTO to reassert control and scapegoat workers.
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Misery and perpetual exhaustion drives desperation and suppresses political action and participation and capitalism relies on that
The fact that the George Floyd protests happened during this time of WFH and actually took hold for a while completely support this claim.
If most companies didn’t get so horny for “open floor” plans and/or cubicles maybe nearly everyone wouldn’t hate their fancy expensive real estate holdings so much.
The worst is “high-efficiency seating” which is just a long table where you sit elbow to elbow with your colleagues and try to work. Even cubicles are too fancy for these companies.
If it looks like a sweatshop, and smells like a sweatshop….
If I was still working for The Man there’s no way I’d RTO. Nothing enkindles my rage faster than the idiots saying “COVID is over” when it’s more infectious than ever. Well, nothing except the ones who say COVID won’t kill you (I’ve got over a million reasons to show how that’s bullshit). There isn’t an office in the world that isn’t a de facto COVID infection party. ESPECIALLY the ones where you sit elbow to elbow. Frak that, I’m not going to die to make a living.
https://www.who.int/data/stories/the-true-death-toll-of-covid-19-estimating-global-excess-mortality
More than 3 million in 2020 alone. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it were closer to 14-15 million worldwide at this point.
And the worst part is most of those deaths were totally, tragically preventable. “Muh economy” lol you can’t produce shit with dead workers…
Covid is over in the same way the flu was over in 1923, its still there, it’ll still kill people every winter but its endemic and there’s no getting rid of it and no point upending all society with all the other problems that causes in order to try and bring it down a few percent.
It’s endemic because people had exactly that attitude. China for instance had COVID totally under control until they adopted that “no point upending blah blah” mentality. China and India locked down hard and even COMBINED they didn’t hit the death rate America had.
Of course I’m sure Facebook Conspiracy Theory Center has the big top secret scoop on how China and India had tons of invisible people dying of COVID until they opened up, lol.
China opened up because despite the intense government control and suppression they started having spontaneous demonstrations verging on riots against the restrictions which spooked the government.
And look what that got them. A bunch of Chinese citizens who never got another chance to participate in anything because they’re dead. SMDH at a government responsible for Tiananmen Square. They got balls when it’s time to be evil but not when thousands or millions of lives are at stake.
If you’ve ever worked at one of these big companies with fancy buildings, it’s interesting that in the end, they’re the same depressing row after row of cubicles, or “shared working spaces”
The architecture might look neat outside and upfront, but otherwise it’s just sad and boring inside the actual working area.
Big thing about RTO is that these places just suck to be at. Quality of workspaces have been going down for years as they try to cram more and more people into less space.
We finally get a reckoning that a lot of people can just work from home and the economy won’t blow up, but instead, rich folks want people back in the torture zones.
I read an older book called “The Mythical Man-Month” a while ago, and one thing that stuck with me is that the guy is speaking about engineers having offices.
I never had an office to myself!
From an access to information request, I was able to obtain the documents related to the decision to undo the 4-year long WFH decision. It ultimately came down to corporate real estate values. Many pensions within my country are heavily invested in corporate real estate.
If downtowns were to lose traffic to businesses and people stopped being in office, the values would decrease over 40% and these pension funds would be on the verge of collapsing, with high political and economic consequences.
Our entire world is built on lies. So fuck it, enjoy your life and do what you want.
You requested that from a company or government? I don’t doubt it’s true I’m just surprised that they would be able to coordinate something like that or that massive businesses would do something in the best interest of pensions?
I think occums razor here is just that companies want to pay people off without the expense. That’s the thing that has more of an immediate impact on the companies and their bottom lines.
Occam’s razor :) Occums razor sounds like a porn version of it haha
From an access to information request, I was able to obtain the documents related to the decision to undo the 4-year long WFH decision.
What does this even mean? Information request to who? Are you sure you didn’t just read it in one of the hundreds of reddit or lemmy comments about this?
Depending on which country you live and applicable labor laws, those type of information are available to employees. In France for example, we got CE and CSE who have monthly and special topic meetings with HR and WFH and one of the topics discussed there among a lot others. There’s a third party meeting secretary who notes everything and two weeks later we are sent the full exact write down of the discussions, who was there, who was absent and excused and who said what. It’s usually 30-50 pages long, really instructive and a must read if you want to know what is going on in the company. From negotiations regarding raises, open jobs, services where there are management issues and what’s done to tackle them, wfh, even the state and price of the canteen, input on company results, strategic 5y plan, etc.
I’m leaving my management job in the city next month to move north 6 hours away and live in a small town with a mortgage that will be half as much for an acre instead of a townhouse with no grass. I wrote a proposal to do a order entry job for less money but work from home but my boss wants everyone in order entry to work in the office. So they chose to lose 9 years of company and product knowledge because they don’t want me to work from home in case people who have been there less time might want to work from home too.
Any kind of mandate that tells employees where they need to sit to be effective at their job is misguided. The office should be a place where people can meet to share ideas and work on things together and socialize. They should be available to employees to use when they need them. Not everyone has a quiet space to work at home and some people enjoy the separation between their home and work lives of going to the office. Some people need quiet time to focus on their job without interruption and can do that better at home. Some people need a bit of both and the flexibility to enjoy both makes them more productive.
I don’t get why this conversation is so binary. Why not just focus on flexibility? Create spaces in the office that are appealing and productive and focus on shared work and team projects. People will use offices if they are useful. Put some walls back up in the office and create good focus spaces so even if someone is in the office for a team meeting they can still get their quiet time.
I am on zoom all day with coworkers around the world. I’m not going to go to an office and sit in a 2‘ x 2‘ phone booth all day just for the one meeting I have that’s in person. But if I had a comfortable private office with walls and a little space to pace around and some natural light where I didn’t have to wear headphones all day and fight distractions, I might actually go to the office for that one in-person meeting and spend the rest of the day there being productive. 
You make great points, and basically make my argument for me.
One thing I’d add is there are some of us (me included) who resist the social angle of work. It’s how I’m wired, and it’s taken me a long time to acknowledge and support the efforts to make teams cohesive.
Building great teams is probably the hardest thing in business - the technical stuff can be figured out. And I say this as someone who’d rather work with the technical stuff, and I schedule meetings in my calendar, and reserve small meeting rooms, just to have quiet time to get work done.
It’s incredibly difficult to foster great teams, build connectivity between people, when you’re not in-person. Being in-person is also where those spontaneous conversations happen that do things like bring people together, or come up with solutions to troublesome issues.
Motivating someone like me to actually be in the office is sometimes necessary.
You nailed it that finding the balance point is the answer. I’ve been fortunate to work in businesses that understood this, and trusted everyone to do what was needed.
Yeah it’s down to the individual really. A guy I worked with did WFH 99% of the time. Only saw him in the office maybe 3 times a year. That dude got a lot of shit done, it was crazy.
Personally I found during the pandemic when I was WFH for many months I found it difficult to keep motivated. After a while the concept of work became abstract. But if I’m going into work once per week, that seems to avoid that.
Other people just can’t work at all from home at all. Too many distractions.
Then there’s cases like someone I know who WFH all the time and gets a lot done, but simply doesn’t like. She wants to come into the office to talk with people sometimes. But the company she works for doesn’t want that.
But I think it’s simply management doesn’t want to think of people as individuals. Instead they just want a blanket policy so they can just say “the rules are the rules” and not have to think about what works for the individual. They don’t want to, you know… manage people.
If I had a job where I could work from home I think I’d rather be in the office most of the time but I would appreciate the flexibility. I just really hate zoom meetings. I find most in person meetings can be done a little more spur of the moment and you are in and out in 5-15 minutes where the scheduled zoom meetings are an hour of some upper manager droning on in an attempt to justify their existence.
I’m much happier that 99% of the time I’m physically working on machines and not in face to face or zoom meetings but that’s just been my experience.
Yeah but when you’re trying to get some work done, do you like having people interrupting you for 5-15 minutes?
There are days when I go into the office and the bosses aren’t there. On those days I think “good, I can actually get some work done today.”
I suppose it depends on the kind of work you do, but for many kinds of work, any kind of meeting represents a loss in productivity. Impromptu meetings, even if shorter, can be worse because it interrupts what I’m doing.
RTO for the company I work for is under the guise of “culture, vibrance, and collaborative work”, but really it’s that they own a ton of office space/buildings and invest in said retail office space.
It also works as a “lay off” without actually firing people because they know people will leave for other jobs that don’t have forced RTO.
they know people will leave for other jobs with forced RTO.
But, as per the Dead Sea Effect, it’s never the people they should want to shed. The earliest to depart are the most mobile, and they’re mobile because they’re talented, effective and marketable. This evaporation proceeds until nothing but salt remains.
There’s no way kickbacks from oil companies due to resumption of long commutes isn’t a part of this. They even said the local
businessesparasites thatfeed onprofit from employees needing to buy food during lunch benefit from this.
At this point, I’d assume RTO directives should serve as indication of a toxic work environment the way Facebook account password mandates were and time-theft remedies are. These show upper management doesn’t know how to manage (that is regard the workforce in order to maintain high productivity) rather see the staff as their personal service team.
For all information workers who can do our job anywhere, I thoroughly enjoy watching companies go to shit after they pull RTO. So, I definitely enjoy seeing studies that back this up with metrics, performance data, financials, etc.
Some people are stuck with these employers, due to some life circumstances. I am sorry to anyone who either lost their new found freedom and the work/life balanced they probably always wanted, but didn’t know they could have.
Some people are lucky and can move on, and every time someone does, it reenforces the idea that people won’t tolerate having a boot on their neck, or maybe they care less about greed and stuff and more about balance. To each their own.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
When the acute aspects of the pandemic receded, some who at first struggled began to settle into a work-from-home (WFH) groove and appreciated the newfound flexibility.
Many made the argument that the return-to-office (RTO) policies and mandates were better for their companies; workers are more productive at the office, and face-to-face interactions promote collaboration, many suggested.
Overall, the analysis, released as a pre-print, found that RTO mandates did not improve a firm’s financial metrics, but they did decrease employee satisfaction.
Drilling down, the data indicated that RTO mandates were linked to firms with male CEOs who had greater power in the company.
Although CEOs often justified RTO mandates by arguing it will improve the company’s performance, “Results of our determinant analyses are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance,” the researchers concluded.
Specifically, after an RTO mandate, employees’ ratings significantly declined on overall job satisfaction, work-life balance, senior management, and corporate culture.
The original article contains 588 words, the summary contains 166 words. Saved 72%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
What fun is capitalism without misery?
Shortened: What is capitalism without misery?
What good is ruling over the peasants if you can’t lord over them so they can bask in your superiority.
That seems to define a lot of things about corporate culture.
No, but it does put money in the pockets of real estate investors. The people who matter are getting money, so RTO is actually a good thing.
Oh, return to office.
Where I’m from RTO means rostered time off, which is a good thing.
This was so confusing. We are doing RTO at work but it means rotating time off not return to office. In general people are pretty happy here to get some extra vacation even if it’s unpaid (we can claim unemployment so it’s not that big of a hit). It’s manufacturing so there’s never been work from home except some management types during peak COVID.
The employee misery comes to the fucked up car centric infrastructure that made your first hour of the day a torture. I’m privileged and bike to work, and I prefer to work in the office because starting my day with a half an hour relaxing bike ride is fantastic, I been trying to convince my boss to left his car and buy an electric bike, but the part of town where he lives dosen’t have bike lanes, so he’s not going to risk his life for that.
