I have posted this on Reddit (askeconomics) a while back but got no good replies. Copying it here because I don’t want to send traffic to Reddit.
What do you think?
I see a big push to take employees back to the office. I personally don’t mind either working remote or in the office, but I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit and I haven’t seen a convincing explanation yet of why they are so keen to have everyone back.
If remote work was just as productive as in-person, a remote-only company could use it to be more efficient than their work-in-office competitors, so I assume there’s no conclusive evidence that this is the case. But I haven’t seen conclusive evidence of the contrary either, and I think employers would have good reason to trumpet any findings at least internally to their employees (“we’ve seen KPI so-and-so drop with everyone working from home” or “project X was severely delayed by lack of in-person coordination” wouldn’t make everyone happy to return in presence, but at least it would make a good argument for a manager to explain to their team)
Instead, all I keep hearing is inspirational wish-wash like “we value the power of working together”. Which is fine, but why are we valuing it more than the cost of office space?
On the side of employees, I often see arguments like “these companies made a big investment in offices and now they don’t want to look stupid by leaving them empty”. But all these large companies have spent billions to acquire smaller companies/products and dropped them without a second thought. I can’t believe the same companies would now be so sentimentally attached to office buildings if it made any economic sense to close them.
I WFH on permanent contract for one of the big ones. I never been at the office, I was recruited online, had my interview online and gotten about 4 months of training online , some more to come.
It works fine. I am more productive than in an office.
Equipment needed are provided and if I need anything I can just order it without much hassle, on the company dime of course. Knowledge is shared between everyone and all information is written down somewhere.
So why are they doing it this way? They get a bunch of well educated people from all over the world. Great pay for the job, not so good if I had an employment in my field.
But everyone are happy since they can WFH. The company get some really good people. At the same time they are forcing some back to the office in other areas. Because well realestate , but also because they didn’t have the organisation in place before the pandemic.
The surveillance part is really not a hard thing for them to do, we are measured on all kind of things. I assume it’s harder for them to do this in other areas.
And those are the ones they force back to the office and at tha same time weed out the ones who won’t accept it.
Never going to the office again , I almost would accept a sale position over that.