Here's a napkin-math breakdown my colleague gave me. Prior to lockdown he had the following:<p>1 hour commute every way.<p>2 hours every day, where he was stuck behind the wheel.<p>260 workdays = 520 hours, every year.<p>That's 65 8-hour workdays, just spent commuting.<p>He just recently bought an EV, but drove a car that used around 0.8L / 10 km. His daily commute was 150 km in total. So he roughly spent 12L of diesel every day.<p>In a year, that's 3120L of diesel. 1L of diesel here is currently 21 NOK, or approximately $2. So in a year, he spent over $6000 in fuel alone. Not to mention all the other wear and tear on his car.<p>He can use his lunches more effectively. Instead of spending all 30 minutes in the lunchroom, or surfing the web, he can do housework, do his daily errands, shopping, or what not.<p>All in all, by working form home, he saves money and time. And lots of it!
This is pretty funny. You’re also more likely to get a raise by finding a new job.<p>So basically management is just providing more incentive for the top performers to quit? How is this a good idea?
What I am puzzled about is companies that are sending mixed messages. On one side they want people to return to the office because people are just more productive. On the other hand they want to save on office real estate so are not providing enough desks for everyone to be in the office, mandatory hot desking (so you can't customize your desk or leave anything at the office), and so making it unpalatable to work in the office. And they want people to come on different days of the week, which negates one of the principal benefit of an office: seamless access to people / informal conversations.
I did not quit, I stalled. I was looking for a house to rent, my wife needed to find a new job, kids had troubles at school... RTO deadline was like 8 months ago, nothing happened so far.<p>My contract says "my place of work" is at my home and I work remotely. It is illegal to move employees thousands of kilometres.<p>Company should not expect some sort of honest answer to this illegal action. Employees should not fall on sword and quit, they should get fired with compensation etc... Also in my country if you quit yourself, you lose right for unemployment support!
My company now mandates 2 days in office per week.<p>What for? Well, nothing speacial, really. Just to have your Teams meeting from office rather than from home.<p>IMHO this is what pisses off people. There is no plan nor thought put into it for management to be able to explain the reason to be in office and why that is beneficial.
In some places I've seen the return to office mandate issued, with management knowing it would cause people to leave, which they were fine with. It's sometimes a cheaper form of cost cutting without redundancy pay.
Who'd have thought that workers who have the security of being able to walk into any other job don't like inflexible, cargo cult management workplaces
“16% less likely to want”<p>So a tiny effect, not even measured on what they do, but on how they feel.<p>Again, being a “top—performer” gives you very little negotiating power in itself.
From most of the RTO policies I’ve seen I’m convinced it’s an alternative to an officially layoff. Depending on how deep they need to cut will determine how strict the new policy is. While a layoff can, but doesn’t always, target low performers… RTO seems to accidentally target top performers.
I had to click through to the original study to see the actual numbers. From the source:<p>> Intent to stay among average employees was 8% lower with strict RTO mandates. Among high-performing employees, their intent to stay was 16% lower with these RTO mandates, double the rate of average employees. Among millennials and women, the intent to stay was 10% and 11% lower<p>So the self-reported “intent to stay” ranged from 8% lower to 16% lower depending on the group.<p>The way they cherry picked it sure does fit nicely into the “RTO makes high performers leave” narrative, but I’m actually surprised that the “intent to stay” was only 16% lower in the most cherry-picked group they could find. That’s honestly not much, and I can see why such numbers aren’t threatening to companies who are downsizing and doing RTO at the same time.<p>I think the narratives that RTO is nothing more than a downsizing mechanism are overblown. The downsizing is more likely to be the window of opportunity to let employees self-select out if they don’t fit the company’s new RTO direction, but most of these companies <i>also have layoffs</i> around these periods.<p>I work remote and have for years, but even I have to admit that moving everyone to WFH during COVID all at once created a lot of really bad situations with a lot of people who couldn’t handle it. It’s frustrating for those of us who can and do handle remote well, but the mass migration to WFH without preparation or filtering for WFH ability really poisoned the well.
Why are folks still writing these articles? Everybody knows this.<p>Companies can no longer shocked-pikachu their way through this. If you enforce RTO, your top performers (who are top performers wherever they are) will leave for somewhere that allows them to maintain a decent work-life balance and no commute to a soulless office.
I just don't understand a full 100% RTO.<p>Hybrid works so well. You get best of both worlds, so to speak.<p>If you NEED to have facetime with your co-workers five days a week, I can only assume that your main task is to manage/oversee them.
If all the top workers of the world come together, they could start a company where everyone could work from home. Surely, the top workers can figure it all out right?