Posted on 03/08/2024 7:10:43 PM PST by Tolerance Sucks Rocks
According to a survey from Resume Builder of over 1,000 decision-makers, 90% of companies plan to urge employees back to the office by the end of 2024. Almost 30% of these leaders say they will threaten to terminate employees who don’t oblige with the new return-to-office plans.
These sentiments couldn’t be more at odds with the preferences of employees. In a Bankrate survey of 2,000 workers, roughly 68% of full-time employees prefer a hybrid work schedule.
Ultimately, I believe the real reason leaders are trying to force workers to return to the office is not because they actually believe it will make teams more productive, but rather because they want their workers to quit.
“Hire slow, fire fast.”
It’s a well-worn adage that many first-year MBA students have drilled into their heads. And yet, every day brings another story of a CEO choosing to fire workers awkwardly, painfully, and slowly through a backdoor policy shift: return to work. As a CEO myself, I strongly believe CEOs know exactly which employees will self-select out of a job. For instance, it’s not hard to deduce that someone who moved their whole family from New York to Whitefish, Montana, is probably going to find another way to survive.
The change in policy from operating remotely, to hybrid, or to in-person, is not the issue. The issue is the passivity and lack of transparency. Let’s rewind.
In a once tight pandemic labor market, many companies made self-congratulatory proclamations about pivoting to a permanently remote workforce. Their goal was to retain talent and compete with lax office requirements at tech giants like Google, Meta, and Amazon.
(Excerpt) Read more at fastcompany.com ...
If it works for your company, GREAT!
But we are talking macroeconomics here. It's clear that remote work is a failure.
This in fact seems to be happening.
It seems to work well for me. Am I surrounded by bozos in the remote workforce?
Very few jobs can be adequately performed remotely.
IT may be one of them. Don’t know what else.
You are ignorant. Let me guess...middle management?
Remote work is not a failure where I work.
And these “hybrid” work arrangements are not going to be long for this world … because they are even less practical than a 100% in-office business model.
17 of 24 federal agency headquarters are mostly empty.
Givernment work can be done from Fiji....
Most jobs require supervision and collaboration that cannot be done remotely. Maybe you can get away with it if you work in IT.
It's a way of getting people back in the office. The party's over. They'll let employees work a couple days of week in the office.
But eventually they will require everyone to work five days a week. We used to be productive before covid. We'll still in a transition period.
The last holdout may be the federal government even if Donald Trump is able to win the election in November. The federal government employees will just continue to refuse to show up to their designated office and there's no way that they can be fired for insubordination.
I read an article about this the other day. There were two main reasons. One is its a stealthy way of firing people. The second is that many managers are simply control freaks and are greatly bothered that they don’t have the ability to stand over other people’s shoulders anymore even though productivity was just as high.
Some companies will be able to get away with this in the current crappy economy. But several of their best employees will stay only until they can find another company willing to let them work remotely.
I work as a consultant for banks. I’ve been 100% remote since Covid. I’m not going back to the office. If the role is not 100% remote, I’m not interested. You can always find more cheap labor but if you want people who have degrees and decades of experience, you’re going to have to be flexible - or you simply won’t get them.
Depends on the situation.
Been 100% teleworking for years very effectively (IT Training Management).
I should
1) get up an hour earlier, to
2) spend an hour commuting each way, to
3) go to a place where my
3a) supervisor is 1,800 miles away, and the people I supervise are
3a1) 760 miles away, and
3a2) 128 miles away?
My team, although remote, is by far the most effective and efficient in our organization.
Being required to go to the office would improve that how?
This guy is completely clueless if he thinks ceo’s know anything about the employees.
With each passing month, you’re going to see more and more companies scaling back their office operations considerably — especially as office leases in major cities come up for renewal.
I'm working toward my 33rd year with my current employer. I'll turn 68 in August. My wife retired in Dec 2023. There is already a little friction with her acclimating to being retired and my longish workdays at home. If pressed to return to a physical office just for "the hell of it", I would probably process my retirement papers and wrap it up. I do have a CAC card for doing customer site visits if required and that is part of the arrangement with my customer. I haven't made a site visit yet, but it would be perfectly Ok if necessary.
Sounds like a good way to weed out people who aren’t serious about their job.
I've successfully run remote software development teams since 1983. The advent of high speed networking has just made it much easier. It was challenging logging into the UNIX development system with a 1200 baud modem and a VT100 at home, but the only difference was where I was sitting. At the office it was still a VT100 terminal and a 212A modem at my desk. The office environment included lots of people wandering around speaking loudly, ringing telephones, long walks to the cafeteria to get a cup of coffee. Not conducive to productivity.
In my current arrangement, I have a 1 GHz fiber optic connection. My laptop has an i7 quad core CPU, 64 GB RAM, 2 TB nvme SSD. I have my own 34 inch monitor and decent speakers. Microsoft Teams provides a medium for meetings. The customer maintains a VPN protected set of servers with GitLab repositories, JIRA and Confluence and a test environment. Every team member has a CAC to access the VPN. We are located all over the US from Hawaii to Vermont to Florida. It doesn't matter where the customer servers are located. We have 2 x 30 minute "scrums" each week to coordinate development activity. The build/test team has a separate system that feeds off the GitLab server for the source code. They build, test, issue bug reports when found, perform cybersecurity scans and package deliveries suitable for use by the customer.
Working from home means no wasted time or expense commuting. No exposure to sick co-workers. I had COVID in Jan 2022 and Jan 2023. I didn't miss any time from work. My wife DID lose 20 days because she must work in a police/fire/EMS dispatch office with one or two co-workers. Every time we got sick, it was a "gift" from her co-workers who have small children bringing diseases home from school and daycare. Now that she has retired, we are isolated from that source of infection.
Everyone is working five days a week and many are more productive than ever. Our remote employees run circles around the locals. It's not even close.
There is no going back to the office for workers who were never working in the office in the first place.
As for the opinion piece written by Matt Higgins, the co-founder and CEO of RSE Ventures, a private investment firm that focuses on sports and entertainment, media and marketing, food and lifestyle, his blatant bias is showing. His firm, and likely his investments, are in one of the few remaining industries that require the customers to congregate. He and his clients have likely been losing their shirts with remote work.
He's opines that companies require should staff to return to the office but the same companies are not renewing leases and are unloading entire office buildings from their portfolios.
A Canadian investment firm just recently sold their 30% stake in a New York City office building for $1. Yes, that's one dollar.
https://money.ca/news/canadian-pension-divests-commercial-real-estate
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