| > Every human is equivalent in their given role when it comes to planning/org structure. It's the Burger King approach to management: all employees are just generic worker bees, and you can just go down to Burger King and order a Whopper, some fries, and maybe six engineers. Problem solved! Anyone who bothers to think things through can see the huge, obvious flaw: people are not all the same and that these are human beings, not robots or drones. This flawed point of view, that you can just think of employees as widgets, fails again and again and again, and yet MBA schools apparently keep teaching it, and/or people keep trying to use it. And in this case, the failed RTO initiatives: really, I would love for one of these CEOs to explain to me what the point is. You don't think people are productive from home? Based on what, your gut feelings or conjecture? Because the opposite is true. People in offices waste a ton of time—just watch them. They stand around and bullshit. They get up and look for people to talk to (about non-work things). They make disruptive noise. What they don't do a lot of is actually get work done. Meanwhile, you're paying for their office space and electricity and everything else it takes to keep an office running. So what's the purpose of RTO? If I didn't know better, I would say it's 1- an attempt to justify sunk costs of office leases, and 2- a huge power trip. Doesn't matter: it will ultimately fail because offices are counterproductive to actually getting work things accomplished. |
It's funny - before the pandemic hit we'd already gone through a RIF. As things started booming back we've been hiring from all over the country. We now have teams that are wholly comprised of people from all over. There's no path forward to do an RTO at this point, and our productivity numbers are simply too high to warrant it.
My understanding is as our leases expire, we're not going to renew many of them. Where people are still in the office, and we have some of those folks and have had them all through the pandemic, we'll consolidate facilities in the same region.