Defeated CEOs are now conceding hybrid working is here to stay

Hybrid work is the worst of both worlds. Can&#x27;t move out of a HCOL and now you have to co-ordinate with your co-workers to reap any &quot;benefits&quot; of being in-office.<p>What would be really cool is reconceptualizing hybrid work as quarterly retreats, where the company provides housing and other amenities for 1 to 2 weeks every quarter. This gives everyone time to bond and work on harder problems.<p>I get this wouldn&#x27;t work as well for those with families because being away for that long is tough, but this would be great for say juniors and seniors with greater flexibility. It also solves some of the other issues, ie I could move to an MCOL and just fly in once a quarter to work together with everyone. The &quot;retreat&quot; aspect of it would also incentivize more people to be there.<p>On the company side of things, instead of leasing out a building for a long time, they can just rent short term and use the money they are saving to make the retreat more fun and productive.

I have ADHD and am autistic so loud open floor plan offices are a challenge. I&#x27;m in the category of people most likely to benefit from remote. Honestly it&#x27;s been a much bigger challenge trying to collaborate and connect with coworkers in the new world than trying to cope with an office. People often don&#x27;t perceive you as an actual human if you&#x27;ve only ever been a video square to them. And quick collaboration just doesn&#x27;t happen anymore, or happens in a much slower and more frustrating way on Slack. Juniors especially struggle and I watch them take many times longer to ramp up than pre-pandemic. I honestly desperately wish my team worked in a room together 2-3 days a week.

My boss (middle management) is very staunchly opposed to more than 1 day per week of WFH. She spends about 90% of her time on video calls, so I was always confused by that until she was telling me that when she does WFH she&#x27;s always distracted by other things which doesn&#x27;t happen in the office.<p>Maybe a lot of the WFH opposition is really just managers projecting their own work ethic onto others?

A lot of business executives fall into the demographic that heavily invests into commercial real estate, which is facing some substantial depreciation. Telling everyone they need to get back to the office would help to keep those prices up. To everyone else, they have no incentive to keep fighting traffic every day (and paying for it) to go to an uncomfortable place full of maybe awful people.

I question the competency of any CEO that enforces people return to the office on a whim.<p>We have crossed the rubicon on remote work. The shift has been well and truly paradigmed.<p>To choose to restrict your candidate pool to a small geographical location, pay relocation, pay higher salaries, have a lower employee NPS, have higher company carbon emissions, whilst your competitors have a much larger non-geographically constrained talent pool, with more attractive, flexible, family-friendly working conditions and pay less for those employees, making their companies more competitive.<p>It’s a no-brainer. The status quo has completely shifted. Any CEO that doesn’t yet realize that should consider quitting.

I agree that there is a real difference between being at work vs working from home. You build a connection to the workplace. Your brain shifts into &quot;work mode&quot; by default. People talk to each other, culture develops, etc. These are obviously all good things.<p>The problem is, most jobs people do have an element of mindlessness and aren&#x27;t cutting edge, innovating spaces. Most white-collar jobs people work in are satellite offices of large companies where the day-in day-out is simply maintaining and attending to larger systems, applying general verbal reasoning, keeping up appearances, etc. A lot of it is bullshit work, as has been articulated before. This work, stripped to its productive essence, can be done faster, more efficiently and in a fraction of the 9-5 work day at home, but part of the charade is for employers and managers to not admit this truth.

Offices or remote, nothing is perfect, it&#x27;s a tradeoff.<p>And the habits and practices are far from settled at this point.<p>I think that most companies are doing remote wrong, too many meetings, not enough async communication, not enough written communication overall.<p>The open source world is a good example of the possible efficiency.

If <i>just one</i> of them had improved ventilation, maybe some of us might have felt safe enough to give a shit.

Where I currently work we have only office work. I wouldnt mind it if it wasn’t for my manager who loves the sound of his own voice and who doesn’t give us peace to finish the damn work, always interrupting... In my current situation hybrid would literally enable me to work.

Then they aren&#x27;t defeated enough yet. Hybrid is fine for the people who want hybrid working, but fully remote still needs to be an option for people who want to be fully remote.

CEOs who don&#x27;t want to allow full remote work &quot;concede&quot; that you only need to be in the office <i>most</i> of the time.

FYI: Meta is de-facto insisting on RTO and not offering a remote option for new employees.<p>This trend has nothing to do with productivity and is all about the egos of control-freak managers &quot;maintaining control&quot; over employees in a way that wastes employees&#x27; time and money and harms the company&#x27;s reputation.

Brought to you by the people who promised us offshoring would have no effect on productivity.

I’ve been WFH for over a decade, but still make effort to meet up with colleagues across the country and indeed world on a regular basis.<p>Pre covid I would be able to doorstep them, book a trip to Glasgow or london or singapore or whatever and catch up with all number of people reliably with just a quick “you free for coffee” message.<p>Since covid it needs effort on both sides to be at the same location. It’s not impossible, but it does need people to appreciate the benefits of meeting physically and make it happen.

So many CEOs will lay people off (or implement mandatory attrition policies) at any time.<p>Employees have learned to look out for themselves and themselves alone. CEOs and productivity can go die.

Ehm, no thanks. REMOTE work YES, hybrid no. Hybrid, short workweeks etc are made as kind of cadeau to keep people in cities, witch is at all illogical and unsustainable. People in cities in the modern time means just service slaves who live spending the 100% they earn in services, as human puppet of some large puppeteer.

&gt; It’s a complete 360 on their stance last year,<p>whoops. who’s reading these before pressing publish in wordpress?

I think that there&#x27;s value in in-office work, <i>if</i> you can build up the proper work culture. Sadly, it seems like that culture has been lost, and it&#x27;s going to be a long time before people rediscover it. (Hint: it&#x27;s not about the boss looking over your shoulder every 5 minutes, it&#x27;s about the conversations that happen only at the air hockey table over a pint of beer.)

“Research has echoed that nearly half of companies with return-to-office mandates witnessed a higher level of employee attrition than they had anticipated, and 29% of companies enforcing office returns are struggling with recruitment.”<p>Excellent! Vote with your feet people. That’s the only thing CEO’s will respect. I will <i>only</i> send my CV to a non-WFH company if there is literally no other choice available to me.

I think a lot of executives are part of the boomer generation who had a stay-at-home partner as they climbed to the top. They have no idea how much more complex the workplace is when two partners work and have kids. We have to work in open floor spaces while they have a private office. Their reality isn’t our reality.

I would never accept a job without a flexible WFH policy. Unless there is literally no other choice. I am not the only one. So companies that are not flexible will be less competitive in the job market.

People brazenly defy the RTO requests at my company. I suppose management could start turning the screws on people, but I have a feeling enough people are still willing to quit to make that impractical.

When the interest rates finally come back down and we&#x27;re in the middle of the Greater Resignation, these CEOs will be admitting that getting rid of fully remote work was a mistake.

The best part about hybrid work and, even more so, fully remote work is the benefit to the business’s productivity. The ability to lay off or replace employees without ever meeting them in person allows for rapid adjustments to the work force and faster replacement of low performers. Better yet, replacing employees with AI solutions is much easier and more convenient without worrying about a physical element. The APIs for the AI based workers have effectively been established already.<p>I think it’s very brave of employees to recognize the writing on the wall and help make themselves more easily replaceable.

Don’t even understand what they are fighting for. The lowest cost option is there to stay

&quot;Hybrid&quot; is such a scam. What does it even mean? You come in to work 3-4 days a week? Cool, that&#x27;s called &quot;working from the office&quot;. If I still have to live in the same city&#x2F;region as the office building and still have to commute most days of the week then what have they changed exactly?<p>Most tech workers I know would do random WFH days when they needed to without a problem pre-Covid, and now that is just branded as &quot;hybrid&quot; and sold as a perk. Give me a break.

I still opt to go into the office two&#x2F;three days a week. It&#x27;s a bummer that nearly none of my old workmates are there anymore.<p>And yet, I can&#x27;t help to acknowledge that there&#x27;s no going back. And of course I can see that some things are remarkably convenient when working from home. So even though I miss the way things were, I understand this is here to stay.

There is no reason to count them as defeated.<p>They are just properly informed.

Or they just outsource jobs to cheaper markets.

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