[EFreethought]

> remote work isn't working for us

It is working out.

I looked at a few financial statements for a few companies pushing RTO (Amazon and a couple of Wall Street firms). Granted, it wasn't comprehensive or scientific, but: They all made more money in 2022 than in 2019 (the last year before COVID).

So I really do not see what the problem is.

[giantrobot]

> So I really do not see what the problem is.

WFH gave those damn individual contributors some agency and prevented dead weight middle management from Lumberghing. Pretty soon they start thinking they're people and having some work/life balance.

Private equity that owns companies also owns stakes in commercial real estate. If companies start breaking leases or renting less office space those private equity firms will lose money. The worst thing in the world is your economic betters losing money. How else will that money trickle down in warm little showers of gold?

A better acronym for RTO would be KYP: Know Your Place.

[uhhhhhhh]

See recent push for operating margins needing to be at arbitrarily high levels etc and companies facing activists investors groups this year.

It's not about making money. They need to make more of it, by pushing margin growth.

It's an absolute value extraction play from investment groups that hurts every company it touches.

[theonlybutlet]

And what better way than soft-layoffs.

[snotrockets]

Managers can't look out of the office and feel powerful by watching the people they control.

[ajmurmann]

Here are a few things that aren't working out from a management perspective:

Social bonding is much harder, but important for reliable collaboration, especially when there are disagreements. I also believe that conversations are more likely to derail when they aren't in person. I've also been part of so many lunch conversations in the office that resulted in someone being able to help out someone on a different team with an issue they had solved themselves previously, learn about activities on another team that were relevant to them etc. There are ways to achieve similar things in a remote setup, but it's hard, especially to deploy across large companies with thousands of people. For the record, I've worked fully in person, hybrid and remote and think hybrid is by far the hardest to make work.

[eropple]

IMO: skill issue.

Communicating effectively on camera is a learnable skill, it's not one most people in tech have. But making sure people are trained to do a good job is a management challenge and it's incumbent upon management to make sure people are doing it. If, after two years, your team still has trouble having real conversations over a teleconferencing solution? That's a management failure.

"Lunchroom conversations" are arguably the hardest thing to foment in a remote environment for sure, but between things like cross-teams with breakouts and the like, you can do it. And some people are going to do it naturally; I know what most of my director's peers' teams are up to and I have contacts in all of them, while also touching base with them on a regular basis. If your teams don't have people who do this naturally, assign it. If you don't, that too is a management failure.

"It's hard" is true, for sure. But "we decided we don't want to and never wanted to try, so we're going to inflict misery on our employees" is an abrogation of the employer's part of the social contract.

[ajmurmann]

There is something about in-person communication that's different for bonding. It's just human nature. Getting information across can be trained, but the social aspect will always be missing. That's ok if you make up for it.

Ones thing about meeting in physical space that I miss is directionality and locality of sound. If we are sitting with 4 people at a table at lunch, we can organically switch between having a single shared conversion or two different ones.

> "It's hard" is true, for sure. But "we decided we don't want to and never wanted to try, so we're going to inflict misery on our employees" is an abrogation of the employer's part of the social contract.

Agreed. Different from a power trip though. IMO it's just ineptitudes.

[snotrockets]

Just shifting from face to face to video conferencing won't cut it. You need to be efficient communicator in writing, which is harder to bullshit your through (or maybe requires different kind of bullshiting)

[eropple]

Also true. My current job has a lot of people whose survival mechanism to date has been "interminably long Zoom meetings where people tune out". Now that I have been on a "fewer, better meetings" kick, that is definitely springing some leaks.

I would stress the video capability, though, because that's the thing that impacts how people feel in pretty substantial ways. I have a weekly 90-minute meeting every Friday where my product teams bring questions to both ask me and to kick around with a group, and so far the feedback has been excellent--and a direct reason cited is that I'm not just letting the meeting wander but I am leading it, I'm standing up while on camera and projecting excitement and a reason to be engaged. When compared with the interminable-drone meetings the rest of the week, it really drives the point home that you have to talk to people like you want them to listen to you, and that is much harder on a camera but it is a totally learnable skill.

[LorenPechtel]

And managers ability to play dirty politics is greatly reduced. Remote is a big problem for managers who aren't actually competent and it's a problem for those who like to take credit for other's work.

[3seashells]

This is what I do not get. Just give them some un-skilled people as placeholders, so there social anxiety doesn't fire. Sit the janitors into the open office or the team building guys.

[ryandrake]

I think it would be a great business opportunity to offer paid actors who would go into a business, walk around, maybe give a few of them clipboards, have them have water cooler conversations, maybe write some technical looking stuff on whiteboards, and generally move around looking busy.

This would simulate the thrill and "buzz" of managing a busy office for these executives to cosplay without having to drag unwilling employees back.

[ryanwaggoner]

Better yet, just do it as discounted coworking space. Win / win.

[derefr]

Why are you comparing 2022 to 2019? Shouldn't you just look at YoY growth over 2021 — i.e. compare a year of full WFH to a year of RTO?