Almost as if they only believe in a free market when it benefits them
This meme illustrates by example one of the key failures of capitalism:
Upper management doesn’t see itself as responsible for overseeing staff to maximize their productivity via data-driven methods (e.g. let them have human lives while they work)
Upper management sees staff as their courtiers and garden hermits there to emphasize how important the execs are.
Hence RTO mandates rather than letting them telecommute or giving them sweet workspace at the office.
Upper management sees staff as their courtiers…
My compliments to your vocabulary and effective word choice.
We need to start taxing companies more that put undue burden on the infrastructure and environment. Do you require your employees to come in to an office for work that could be done from home? You should have to pay a double employer payroll tax for every employee you do this to. We need to start taxing the vanity of CEOs.
Their mortgages have clauses that cost them when tenants are not operating onsite. It devalues restaurants and stores in the area. I’m not saying it’s right. It’s just how it works. Tenants have to do business on site during the lease or they pay fees and their landlords have to pay the banks.
Source: I work in commercial real estate.
How do they define “operating”? Percentage wise?
I’ll try to look some up today but I think it varies by lease and by loan. You can’t apply the same rules to a warehouse as an office as a grocery store. Also, big spaces are different than small restaurants. Might not be consequences for a Chipotle but there could be for a grocery store in the same strip mall. The leases negotiated between the landlord and the tenant also have to be approved by the lender.
The whole thing is called “going dark”, meaning they are still paying rent but not operating on the premises. It causes the borrower/landlord to go into something called “cash management”. They lose the ability to collect rents directly. It all gets sent to a special lockbox that the lender has access to. They use those funds to post the payment and other things like that. They send a portion back to the borrow for operating expenses then hold onto the rest. The borrower also has to pay cash management and bank account fees when this happens.
I remember there was a big fight at a shopping center near me because a grocery store wanted to move the grocery location and open a giant liquor store in its place but the landlord didn’t like that. I believe they ended up terminating the lease and a different grocery store moved in. My company didn’t handle that loan so I don’t know the details but I knew that the loan was likely the real reason for the fight.
Oh also, the zoning and type of property matters too. A strip mall has different requirements than an office or hotel. Obviously
This is exactly what my wife is experiencing in her state gov position. It’s a hybrid state/corp department and the CEO says they need to RTO even though he admits they are more productive at home. He literally said it’s because they are still paying for the building and feel it’s being underutilized. They have been remote for 5 years and some of the employees moved across the state and most have said they are quitting.
moved across the state and most have said they are quitting.
Let me fix this for you: “genius CEO stealthily does layoffs by convincing people to quit on their own. Hires cheaper replacements”
Don’t quit. Make them fire you. Work a second job while you wait. Fuck em.
This CEO should be immediately canned for incompetence. Anyone who can’t understand the sunk cost fallacy has no business running any organization.
You think this is about RTO? He knows they’ll quit. That’s the point. You don’t pay severance to quitters. Anyone that’s truly critical to the company will somehow get an exception.
But the company has already invested so much into the CEO, they can’t just let him go because he doesn’t understand the sunk cost fallacy! /s
He literally said it’s because they are still paying for the building and feel it’s being underutilized.
He’s just saying the quiet part out loud. That’s always what RTO mandates were about. Companies were trapped in long rental contracts with office buildings, and wanted to use the space they were renting. And office space owners had zero incentive to actually release those contracts, because they saw the writing on the wall and realized their land value was going to plummet if office space demand dropped.
I think it has more to do with lazy management. Before WFH their job was basically just making sure the employees were sitting at their desks at a specific time and didn’t leave until after a specific time. So 9am, you’re sitting at your desk, at 5pm you’re sitting at your desk then they’ve done their job for the day.
WFH means they need to know that you’re actually working. So they have to know what you do (many bosses don’t actually know what their employees do) and have some way to measure that you’re doing that thing in a reasonable amount of time. It’s actually their job to do this even if you’re in the office, but it’s easier to just make sure you’re in a location where work is the only thing you can do and assume you’re doing work because there’s nothing else to do.
Also bosses are hesitant to verbally abuse employees over video chat as that can easily be recorded. RTO solves problems for managers that like to yell at their employees.
But they can’t say “we’re lazy and we want to be able to yell at you” so they come up with other reasons.
Sure, sometimes the real estate thing can be a factor when a company got massive tax breaks from the government under the promise of that the new Amazooglesoft “campus” will be a big economic driver for a city with a bunch of cities competing to give the biggest tax breaks to entice those companies to go there. The governments that gave those incentives will probably take them away (they should, those companies should be paying taxes) because there actually hasn’t been economic stimulus for the neighbourhoods of those offices spaces because of WFH. So in those cases you have to go to a place so you can buy lunch (and maybe go shopping after work) so your company can still get tax breaks.
But mostly it’s just lazy managers.
Why not just rent the space?
Hell, forget doing anything with the office. I don’t want to go back unless you have an on site private spa, massuese, catered food, and laundry service. Make it legitimately better than being at home and I’ll consider it.
Instead, the blue shirted girlfriend should be: “A valuable intangible workplace benefit that you can continue offering for free after you were forced to invest in it due to the pandemic”
People applying for my position will make job acceptance or denial choices off of whether or not they get to work from home. We’re already split across three “back office” physical locations when we are in the office and we’re more than capable of having a conference call going in the background throughout the day for chitchat and bouncing ideas around verbally if we really need to. We didn’t just survive during total work from home, we thrived. And we already have all the technical infrastructure, policies, and procedures in place to offer full work from home.
It’s like if they could offer health insurance to employees for free, but decided not to because upper management can’t figure out how to do their jobs when people have it.
Fuck this boils my piss.
To be fair, rto is mostly an assertion of control and an a chance to lay people off without legally laying them off. Your jail and execution chamber don’t have to do anything besides adhere to regulations.
We adopted a hybrid model. I’m in a technical role and most of my team is all very far away from me (1200 km). Some are in my local office however, but I don’t really work with them. Thus, I promptly ignored the emails encouraging us to return
Travel to my office is 35 mins; 45 to an hour in winter. No thanks. I do exceptional work, get my shit done, mentor juniors, and was hired on covid. You can drag me back to office kicking and screaming.
I’ll go if there is a reason for me to go: in-person client workshop? I’m there and I’m there early. Big wigs are in town and want to meet the team? I’m first in line to shake hands. Im not, however, returning to the office for the wonderful conversation at the urinal. I don’t project manage or people manage. Give me your garnliest technical issues, and I’ll lead a small team to complete them, but I’m not signing timesheets or pushing corporate messages so I don’t need to rub elbows with people.
Now if you’ll excuse, the basement isopods are getting lonely
The more you demand of an office to avoid RTO, the lower their salary offer will be when they decide you can either take a significant percentage pay cut or a 100% pay cut.
