[wwind123]

Also...allow people to work from home more. During the Covid pandemic, most white-collar employees work from home, and the commute and the traffic is usually not a big problem. But now more and more companies ask employees to go back to office, and traffic jam is becoming a headache again.

[rob74]

Yup... hours of commuting time just to sit in Zoom/Teams/Slack/whatever calls while in the office instead of at home makes no sense at all, and is bad for the environment (even if you use public transportation, not going to the office still emits less CO2 than going there). But because RTO is just a way of trying to get rid of employees without severance costs, these and other points will invariably fall on deaf ears...

[gampleman]

I wonder if a very small tax for RTO (perhaps with exemptions for manual jobs) would do the trick?

I think it would help with making companies handle that externality.

[Ntrails]

> I think it would help with making companies handle that externality.

This is backwards, companies do not choose where employees live. Employees do. That they choose to live with long and unpleasant commutes (typically in exchange for more space, cheaper housing etc) is in general terms on them not the company. I'll allow that the rowback of wfh from a previously fully remote job is on the company - but certainly outside of that I have little agreement.

[Cthulhu_]

While true, there's (often, not always) an inverse correlation between location of work and cost of living. Few people can afford to live close to the office.

What would work (at least in my country, and in my head / from my armchair) is sattelite offices. I live in a neat suburb with an industrial estate with some office buildings, if my job opened a sattelite office there I would be much more inclined to go to the office.

But then, they would need to make sure that only people that live nearby go to that office. Given that a lot of teams are multidisciplinary, that would be difficult. Plus, the job would need to offer long-term stability, and only few jobs in software can promise stability for more than a year. If they want people to move close to work, it has to be both affordable and guaranteed stable for at least 5-10 years.

I looked into it once, there was an office for a software company across the street and I applied there. But the two offers they made were both lower than what I was earning at the time, to the point where I wouldn't be able to live there. And second, after the pandemic they closed the office and became a remote-first company.

[inigyou]

Companies as a collective also choose the geographical distributions of offices and housing and the price of each.