Company I work for implemented more RTO recently and when someone asked in an all hands for data showing that the first RTO decision was leading to an improvement in productivity or some other key metric and the CTO responded saying (paraphrasing) “this isn’t a data based decision leadership is making. It’s because we want to build a culture where people are working next to each other more frequently. We FEEL that the company benefits because of this.”
People got bristly that we’re all routinely forced to prove any decision we as employees want to make with data. But was a fascinating moment of transparency, even if a lot of people hated the decision.
If I had the guts (no way) I’d ask “is this a planned forced attrition to get people to quit to avoid having to conduct layoffs?” But I’m at a point in my career where I kinda just keep my head down.
Why? That was a very honest Statement, that die especially bot hide behind some nebulous studies of productivity, but the emotion to have people in the office. What do you find dishonest about that Statement?
I’m inclined to believe factors such as headcount, shareholder / rich person pressure to raise commercial real estate value, something about foot traffic in commercial real estate issues, and personal insecurities of individuals about their roles rather than cultural aspirations are relevant.
Something as simple as the office manager being penalized for low utilization of the office.
I can't wait for the irony where they do build a culture where people all want to be working next to each there - not for the company but only to brainstorm and work on their own startup ideas (not necessarily tech) as a big final FU!
The C-Suite is so highly paid and lives such a comfortable life that they can't even fathom how much productivity is lost by the average individual commuting for an hour and having to bounce for kids/family/home/medical issues.
They truly don't understand why people may want to leave work, be at home when they themselves have ZERO chores to deal with.
And they also don't understand why people are not as passionate as themselves about the work - when they make millions every quarter but the average person just gets by.
Empathy is not what C-Suite operates on because they have lost those empathy brain cells by virtue of living a life SO PRIVILEGED that even a basic middle class life with no help, appointments, kids, schools, rent, is unimaginable to them.
> They truly don't understand why people may want to leave work
Exactly. Leadership typically sees the workplace as a rewarding experience where they exercise control and get lots of dopamine. They truly can't understand that it's the exact opposite for everyone else.
I would frame what I think is the same observation as, leadership optimizes for the experience of passionate people who find work rewarding. If you’re just putting in your 40 hours so you have money for the stuff that really matters, yeah, I don’t see how anyone could dispute that remote work is better for that.
Management roles certainly filter for people who find workplace dynamics rewarding. As much as technical roles filter for people who like to solve problems and dislike social games.
Let's not be too hyperbolic here. The average mid-level dev at Amazon is making over $250k while the average senior makes over $400k (source levels.fyi) so they're hardly "just scraping by" and can afford many of those same life comforts.
> Let's not be too hyperbolic here. The average mid-level dev at Amazon is making over $250k while the average senior makes over $400k (source levels.fyi)
This $400k guy still pays an enormous mortgage, still struggles to pay $2.5k for daycare, still can't call a concierge to take care of medical appointments, can't just hire Uber eats for every meal, can't just hire a service for everything, still has to commute in traffic for work, still has to take cars for servicing, still has to call handyman and play scheduling poker for fixes in the house.
Compare this to Andy Jassy making $7 million in the NEXT 3 months. He's going to be able to hire services for everything, helicopter into work, get catered food, have schools, house, kids, services all taken care of. His life is literally just work in the most comfortable setting possible.
It is not even comparable. Higher compensation does not compensate for shithole lives imposed by an employer who themselves are living the most lavish life possible. The $125k/quarter person will NEVER be as motivated as $7m/quarter person. It is delusional to expect the same level of work for such wide pay disparity.
I’ve been WFH 100% (aside from the occasional 1-week remote offsite) for over 10 years. I will always want to work somewhere that is at the very least supportive of distributed teams, if not remote-first. I also chime in on HN articles like this with an endorsement for remote work.
And I also agree that execs are biased, and either ignore or are blatantly against any supporting evidence for remote work.
Having said all that, I’m not 100% sure that we have enough data to prove remote work is a benefit or detriment to long term success.
I think, without a doubt, there are a number of benefits to employees. And, if for no other reason, happy employees definitely help a company be successful.
But I can’t say with 100% certainty that that’s enough to offset the benefits of being together — for the company.
I’ve worked with people that I’m convinced don’t put in near 8-hour days (or even the equivalent in productivity), but it’s very hard to prove, and not enough evidence to support taking action (e.g. PIP/firing).
I also personally, without a doubt, feel disconnected in ways I didn’t when I used to work at the office.
I think the whole “work remotely” debate and trying to come up with evidence of how it impacts the success of a company is about like trying to determine whether eggs are good for you, or whether the occasional drink of alcohol/coffee is beneficial vs. abstaining — there will always be conflicting data, and we may not know for decades. There are just too many variables.
And we probably know way less about how remote work affects success vs. how eggs/coffee/alcohol affects our health.
But since I know the impacts of remote work are more beneficial to me, that’s more important to me than the impacts it has on the success of the company.
And execs know that (most) employees feel the same way, and they feel the need to fight it, especially if they sense that some (many?) take advantage of WFH, but can’t do anything about it.
The same way you'd measure anything else at a company: productivity. A company's purpose is to make products and money, not to build the culture the CEO wants.
If there's data showing that thousands of cumulative hours of commuting leads to more productivity or innovation or whatever, then by all means let's see it. But this is just the open office fad in new clothes.
With open offices, the thing which conveniently cost less money also supposedly improved innovation and collaboration. No serious research demonstrates this.
With RTO, the thing which conveniently gives middle- and upper-management warm annd fuzzy feelings about their life choices also supposedly increases innovation and collaboration. Again, no serious research demonstrates this.
But none of this matters. If this is what the company wants to do, then that's what it wants to do. The CEO can make decisions for whatever reason they want, and if the board are okay with it and the results, then that's the decision. I do wish more C-levels would be honest and just say, "I want to see you all here, because I'm not confident that work will get done if you're not here." At least then no one's insulting anyone's intelligence.
Executives are in those roles because their anxieties for control align with productivity for shareholders. The coercive threat is the whole point of executive management in private profit focused organizations.
Researchers on the other hand are not as interested in maintaining the power distribution bias. Rather they use “economic” factors like described in the article to describe what would seem to be a mutually beneficial situation.
So what’s so confusing? It’s because all these commenters are still stuck in the thinking that by default, incentives are aligned all the way from investors to line workers in a firm (otherwise why would they be there? They can just move in a “free market” - they are “rational actors” and other economics lies etc…)
As these studies show, coercive executives hate remote work because it reduces the frequency they can create pop-up tasks and break workflows to satisfy their desires. So productivity is up but control is down. It also makes bullying and intimidation much harder to get away with.
So the conundrum is simply executives throwing tantrums about their loss of structural methods of coercion they aren’t able to effect as easily.
Never forget, unless you are an owner of the company (eg. meaningful ownership, that has the ability to shut the org down) management, executives and investors are not only not your friends, but they are adversarial to your benefit.
Studies like these demonstrate that almost perfectly and yet everybody’s confused about why is it not the same?
It’s exceptionally simple and it’s something we’ve all known forever and it’s been captured in comic books and movies and everything else: middle management and above is incentivized to be antagonistic to non-ownership labor by function of the structure that it’s within.
The problem is everyone thinks Data will give you the answer. Does returning to office increase productivity? How do you measure productivity? Let me tell you how we increased productivity by 19% last year.
Our VP aimed to increase productivity by 10%. The Jira team went to work. They studied our workflow, found some inefficiency in our ticket statuses, and reorganized. At the end of the year, we resolved many more tickets, gaining 71 days worth of work, or 19.5%. Celebration!
The data clearly shows the improvement. But what they ignored is that on the previous year, we built a system. On the next year, the one with their Jira improvements, we used the system. We resolved more tickets after because those were small bug fixes instead of large architecture efforts. Nothing to do with the new ticket statuses. The lesson was add more ticket statuses and it will make developers more efficient...
When we are asked to return to the office and there is push back, it is someone's job to come up with metrics that will measure productivity. They will probably measure ticket completion for on-site and off-site employees, completely ignoring the context of the work.
A whole lot of CEOs and executives have highly inflated egos, and if people are remote, they don’t get all the attention, echo chamber and bootlickers, that they want.
Often behind a RTO there’s a weak person wanting to feel power over others
I actually like being in the office, but I'm in the bay area, so that requires hours of shitty commuting. I like the office, but I don't like it that much.
If I had access to an office that I could get to on public transit in like 20 minutes, that'd be a totally different story. But no, everyone has to have sprawling campuses in the middle of suburbia.
Professional Office Managers need an office to manage. It's like asking for Turkeys to vote for Christmas saying 'don't come and sit in and listen to my speeches all day'
It think it’s obvious CEOs have biases that make them want in person, since it allows them to feel more power and control.
On the other hand these studies are very weak and probably don’t actually mean very much. Productivity of individual employees is essentially impossible to measure correctly, and then how do to measure interaction costs like slower communication or lost opportunities in chance meetings and conversations?
So I don’t think we really can say one way or another how good it is for the company. Obviously employees do prefer remote work but the goal of a CEO isn’t just to make employees happy so it’s not like we should expect them to.
I was at a a certain company (not for long) that did quick all-hands stand-up meetings once a week, so everyone could touch base. About 30-40 people, all standing up, took about 15 minutes.
At the end of one meeting the CEO hosts a goodbye ritual for the CTO who is leaving for some other job or something. It was all blather about how great the guy is and how great it is that he's leaving and how that's great for the company even though he's great and we'll miss him, etc. etc. yadda yadda.
Here's the punchline: at the start of the ritual the CEO and exiting CTO pulled out stools and sat down on them. It's a stand-up meeting. The rest of us are all still standing.
I think most executives are pretty straightforward that their concern isn’t about the things most studies measure. Jassy sees the benefits as being:
> we’ve observed that it’s easier for our teammates to learn, model, practice, and strengthen our culture; collaborating, brainstorming, and inventing are simpler and more effective; teaching and learning from one another are more seamless; and, teams tend to be better connected to one another
These are all hard to measure through studies, and not really the same thing as productivity or job satisfaction.
Exactly, and it's been proven time and time again that such in-person collaboration leads to improved job satisfaction, retention, and overall employee happiness.
My entire team is in another time zone. And like many, I don't even have an assigned desk at the office. So, my RTO is commuting in, booking an empty conference room, and then dialing in to meetings with people on the other side of the country.
According to studies, thing $X leads to improved job satisfaction, retention, and overall employee happiness. According to studies, thing $Y which is the exact opposite of thing $X leads to improved job satisfaction, retention, and overall employee happiness.
Maybe those studies aren't saying what people think they are saying?
Is the Amazon meat grinder the paradigm of that? I like in person collaboration despite working remotely, but I don't think forcing everyone back is the right call. Maybe people forget the opposite; scolding emails about how their should be butts in seats at 7 pm when the pizzaman cometh.
My experience has been a bit weird since it is backwards of what most have experienced. For the five years leading up to the pandemic, our senior leadership had been pushing WFH heavily as we were shedding real estate and saving lots from it. Being in a legacy business with lots of aging physical infrastructure, there were lots of opportunities for downsizing infrastructure and our office downsizing just sort of piggybacked on that. The savings were a major part of the CEO's message to the Board each quarter, which seemed to make them and the investors happy.
Our division head however hated not being able to come into the office and see "my guys". We were mostly clustered in two metro areas with a few team members in random locations, but the division head was in our metro so we sometimes would meet up for dinner. Each time he'd start talking about having us RTO, even though our last office had been completely subleased to someone else. According to coworkers who were there longer than me, when we did have an office, the division head was only there one or two days a week. He liked parachuting in, doing the rounds, and then head back to his house in the mountains where he did much of his work (90% meetings) remotely. Eventually he was pushed out of the company though I don't know if his pushes on the CEO to do RTO was part of that or not but I assume their visions for the company simply were mismatched.
I have since left the company but they did well during the pandemic because the company was already on a remote first path. Wouldn't surprise me if they were able to take advantage of the situation and dump some more leases though I'd guess subleases probably are difficult to arrange now.
> “Leadership is a lot less fulfilling and a lot less fun when you’re doing it remotely,” Bock said.
There's also this, which makes a great deal of sense to me even as it angers me from the other end of the power gradient. Management likes to do things that feel good to management.
I dunno. I feel like if executives believed they were hamstringing their teams with RTO edicts they wouldn't see them as so fulfilling or fun.
Maybe I'm giving executives too much credit but I believe that, for the most part, they believe they're better managers when their employees are in the office. I think that's true in a lot of cases, but it also ignores that employees can be better workers when they're hybrid or remote.
> Maybe I'm giving executives too much credit but I believe that, for the most part, they believe they're better managers when their employees are in the office.
I don't know, I'd say a usual expectation of a worker is to learn how to adapt to a changing understanding of their work, but like, maybe I'm expecting too much. Why would I expect managers to keep up to date on management research, it's not like they're being paid for doing their jobs well or anything.
Edit: fun fact, it's been so far my experience that C levels are surprised management research exists.
tl;dr: Leaders who run massively successful and profitable businesses rightfully doubt research published by a random academic with zero entrepreneurial experience. If only someone could explain why.
the amount of times i have been asked to turn on my camera is ridiculous, i do not owe some old man a smile and i will gladly allow myself to be let go over it every time. the nerve of some people is astounding.
When leaders only give empty platitudes as their reason for the RTO and don’t even fund enough office space[1] for their workers why would anyone not?
Maybe they have a good reason but we have no reason to believe so if they won’t explain
[1]I, and multiple other engineers I know at different companies, don’t even have desks now. We have hot desking and whatever random locker with 1 cubic ft of storage that you can find, which get cleared out every several days. I rewatched office space with my boomer father recently and he could not believe me when I said I would take their office environment in a heart beat. “All Hands” meetings in the office also mean “please direct your team to only have 50% of them come in as we do not have enough desks for everyone”
Most of the comments in this thread are doing the opposite. They're saying that despite the research the intangibles are actually what matter (for RTO).
"It’s not practical. Hybrid work may be technically the best route, but it’s also complicated to oversee."
Who cares if workers are productive, when the leadership is clearly less productive? And the leadership's time is extremely valuable. If remote work makes workers more productive, while the leadership is less productive, then remote work is bad for a company, full stop, no other conversation is needed.
People got bristly that we’re all routinely forced to prove any decision we as employees want to make with data. But was a fascinating moment of transparency, even if a lot of people hated the decision.
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