My company recently spun out of a much larger corporation and has just implemented a 4-day week policy after nearly 5 years of flexible work (ie. come in when you need to be in to do your job).<p>Since then, my team has halved and the senior leadership at the site have almost all left to competitors except for a couple of people closing on retirement anyway. We're struggling to get the bare minimum done and have to ZBB almost everything that isn't core work. It's miserable.<p>It's just the most baffling time to force such a radical shift, and the executive team were pretty much entirely against it; except for the new CEO who was a transfer from the bigger corp. During the midst of a spin-off where everything needs migrating from systems the wider organisation used - HR and legal, our internal Wikis, product tracking systems, Salesforce, customer comms, forums, documentation, the whole bloody lot - this new CEO decides to make their mark by hamstringing the company in the middle of one of the most important projects of the companies history potentially. They've had to cut a couple of things off the product roadmaps that have been worked on for years simply because we now don't have the staff to drive them to completion. Just madness.
Curiously this ¹ is not the case in Norway.
Pretty much everyone returned ot work as they did before Covid.
A majority enjoyed getting back to work and back to the office.
Many do have more of an opportunity to work from if they need to.<p>In our bigger cities we have public transit that is popular.<p>A large percentage of people have to switch between different
routes to get all the way home.
And my commute is quickly more than an hour, between
ride time, waiting for the next ride.<p>Some are fortunate to live in immediate proximity to lets say a
subway station that has a line that takes them directly
to the office, that can be super efficient.<p>¹
"""This is playing out now in companies around the globe. And with neither side willing to give in, the fight will continue to bubble up this year and perhaps even next, leaving employees frustrated and on the hunt for new jobs — and companies in danger of undermining their best assets: their workers."""
"Study finds a quarter of bosses hoped RTO would make employees quit"<p><a href="https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/09/rto_quit_study/" rel="nofollow">https://www.theregister.com/2024/06/09/rto_quit_study/</a>
Nobody wants to prop up the board's other investments in commercial real estate and nobody has to care that they're losing their shirts either. Make big cities safe and clean and affordable again, or they will just rot away and collapse in on themselves. I've been reading about the terrible situation in commercial real estate especially in large cities which are unaffordable and crime-ridden, it sounds like there's no escape for the people who have their wealth trapped inside the walls of buildings nobody wants to visit.
Most companies requiring in-office work, at least for most tech and many other skills, are showing themselves as being poorly managed places that one should avoid working at.<p>Tech management is often bad, for any number of reasons (not the least of which is non-technical peoples' complete lack of understanding about what their people are doing). At least when these managers are beyond physical reach of their workers, the workers have a better chance of creating a productive environment and shielding themselves from distraction and nonsense interactions.<p>Many of these managers actually do very little beyond low-value talking and meeting. They are figureheads who are recognized by figureheads who likewise provide little actual value.<p>Meanwhile, a team of 1 product/project management skill + 2 devs + 1 designer, when all agreeing on the goal, can do what a corporate organization of 100 people cannot do.<p>This is why most new value is created by small independent teams who are then bought up by laggard giants that can no longer do anything beyond manipulating the system to maintain some form of monopolistic control.<p>Therefore, if your company is demanding you come back to the office, you can bet they are not a place you want to work at (unless your goal is _only_ money).
I recently had this interesting conversation with the CEO of a local company. After the pandemic, he pondered on RTO/WFH. His company is still growing and he needed to hire more people.<p>If he ordered RTO, he would surely lose some people, but if he kept WFH, he would be able to hire the talent escaping RTO at other firms.<p>So he kept WFH and all went fine.
The University of Chicago research was a little confusing. They added a May 2024 date to the top of the official paper, but they show most people moved to Meta and Snap. 2 companies who have been aggressively forcing people back to office and are also generally higher paying than their previous employer<p>They should have at least added a note that their data was 1+ years old and that RTO mandates changed during that time<p>It’s not surprising that people left MSFT for companies that pay double or triple. The part that’s more interesting is if people are willing to take a 50% pay cut to go remote. I haven’t seen any research on that yet<p>So far the data shows RTO makes people leave, but it makes them leave to other RTO companies, not fully remote ones
> At a time when employee retention should be of a top concern<p>First line of the page. The entire development of the article hinges on this being true but I see no sign of justification or reasoning behind this affirmation.
I often attribute this to free layoffs, but the problem is that if your _senior_ leadership and employees leave, the problem is that you're in a bad situation. Laying off some people who recently joined, are a bit underperforming, etc is a great way to do layoffs. But losing your top talent is the best way to sink yourself.<p>However the effects are felt a few years down the line, and these big orgs usually praise the CEO for doing this genius maneuver and saving a bunch of money, only to later leave in a few years when shit is about to hit the fan. Overall its a weird time. And to note, I do like working from the office, so I happen to be in the minority who likes hybrid. Though even I cannot deny the benefits of being able to WFH and get to a doctor appointment or take care of my kid when she's sick.
This guy is really misrepresenting the numbers. Take this gem:<p>> Gartner research released in early May found that 36% of <i>senior-level job seekers</i> who have received an RTO mandate from their current employer are leaving their jobs as a result<p>Versus the actual Gartner report:<p>“Gartner HR Research Finds One-Third of <i>Executives</i> Given a Return-to-Office Mandate Plan to Leave Their Employer”
<a href="https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-05-09-one-third-execs-given-a-rto-mandate-plan-to-leave" rel="nofollow">https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2024-05-0...</a><p>Last time I checked, “senior-level” is not synonymous with “executive”.
I’m still convinced that there is a distinct difference between companies <i>founded as remote from the start</i> and <i>companies that switched to remote because of COVID or social trends.</i><p>The first group will almost never go office-first, whereas the second group will revert to its “original DNA” unless a deliberate culture change is made. It has to be a complete change in operational procedures, communication culture, etc. It’s much much more than simply using Slack and having Zoom calls instead of office meetings. If that doesn’t happen, the switch to remote won’t stick.<p>So if you like working remotely, pick a company that’s always been remote.
Private bathrooms, better coffee, no annoying co-workers, no smelly co-workers, no commute, no chance of being mugged or stabbed, better decorations and access to cheaper / healthy homemade food are all reasons WFH isn't going away.
> Finding AI talent, which more and more companies are going to need, is already a search for the proverbial needle in a haystack. Adding strict RTO policies to that scenario won’t make the talent search easier.<p>Putting that question-begging aside, cynically, for a company on an AI kick it could be intentionally designed to make clearing out the old guard who aren't all in on AI easier and without severance.<p>In fact, it stands even without the everything-is-now-about-AI journalism gloss. The expensive, grumpy seniors with the pointed questions in meetings are largely the ones who feel most able to risk jumping ship in 2024 and treating them like naughty children or unreliable juniors really winds them up.<p>The wisdom of driving out senior staff, well, that depends on who you're asking and what are their metrics for success!
Here's one that's funny. I work at a F50 company, and the required "in office" days has slowly been increasing over the years.<p>Except if you're fully remote, which I am-they aren't requiring those people to come back. However, if I were badge in on-site, my employee account would get flagged and I would be expected to start coming back. Which is weird. I never go in, I am nearly 2 hours away so it doesn't make sense, but I can't go in for a day, even if I wanted to, or I'd have to keep going back in. Or ensue in a huge battle with HR.
My guess is most companies now believe they have procedures which can keep a somewhat quality output with average, cheaper people.<p>The industry (tech, others) has never given up trying to transform employees into a cog in the machine and, while software engineering has so far apparently escaped being caged onto a cog-like structure, I believe it's a matter of time.
Curious if anyone here has quit due to RTO and, if so, did you make it clear on the way out? I'm going through it right now. Our company is pushing RTO and the policy is really senseless. We're not purely a tech company and the CEO has gotten earfuls from across the departments and it hasn't budged him. I worry as much about the annoyance as I do about leadership being completely unstrategic. This is costing us cycles and we are just trying to understand what outcome he is trying to drive and there is no answer.
Good, right?<p>There’s nothing wrong with a company deciding it wants workers in office. It might be a decision with negative outcomes and it might not be.<p>Some senior employees may enjoy working in the office. Some may not.<p>I don’t see why remote work is treated as some sort of default-correct position here on HN. Just like in-office work, remote work is neither inherently right nor inherently wrong.<p>If your employer makes a decision you dislike it’s up to you to decide whether it’s something you can stomach and continue to work there over.
Who could possibly have seen this coming?<p>(... everyone. Everyone could have seen this coming. So much so that it's hard to believe this isn't a naked way for corporate America to legally loyalty-test their employees and clear their payrolls of what they imagine to be more expensive "dead weight" in favor of younger, cheaper talent).