| > Do employees hold firm on these demands or just return to the office grumbling? My career long experience has been that with any major hits to quality of life at a company: not every employee follows through, only the good ones. While the switch to WFH might be a new issue, there have been continually waves of quality of life changes at companies durning different stages of growth. An obvious one is direct cuts to benefits, but others include rapid decrease in perks offered, change in vacation policy, change of office location etc. In my experience good employees are quick to change whenever the signal from employers changes from "we respect you are want to reward you" to "we obviously don't care, or can't afford to care". This happens all the time in startups that lose their trajectory. Snacks disappear, flexible work hours become more rigid, bonuses shrink etc. So long as there are competitors out there who still offer these perks, good employees will leave often within a few months of the change. This causes a cascading effect where there are less good people on the team, so more and more people leave. Even if you don't care about perks, you care about good team mates. I have seen multiple companies where after a major shock like this nearly all of the best and brightest are gone within a 6 month window. What's funny about WFH is that the people that like it, like it so much they'll take a lower total comp to WFH. In the case of all the other perks I mentioned, a company has to pay more to keep them (and top talent). Sometimes it's just not possible to do this. With the return to office you're effectively spending money in drive out your top talent. I'm sure plenty of companies will still do it, but I also suspect many companies that are looking for an edge will get an easy win by remaining remote friendly. |