80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans: ‘A lot of executives have egg on their faces’::As some business leaders accept hybrid work as a permanent reality, others are backtracking on earlier pledges to let employees work from home.
Those assholes should have never pushed the shit in the first place. Giving people the freedom to work from home and still live their life at the same time, then trying to snatch it away and force a return to the office, is clearly going to cause some serious push back. But these fucks were more worried about justifying their expensive office leases, than actually listening to and respecting their employees. A lot of those shit companies got what they deserved, empty offices, weakened workforce, and less overall productivity. Good job assholes.
Working from home is a benefit that is worth money. People are willing to get paid less for the benefit of working from home all else equal. Effectively, if you got to work from home, you got a raise. Forcing people to come back to the office after allowing working from home is like giving a raise and then taking it back. I agree that this is shitty and sucks.
However, when you negotiated your pay it was for a particular job with certain benefits. Complaining about your company not giving you a benefit that wasn’t initially part of your hiring negotiation is basically asking for a raise that they aren’t obligated to provide.
Edit: I guess this isn’t a popular opinion. I felt I was contributing to a conversation that seemed a little one sided by offering an alternative look at it. From an economic perspective there’s nothing wrong about what I’ve said. I don’t agree that it’s a nice or even ethical thing to do, but the backlash (against companies that push for RTO) seems overly dramatic to me.
The way you keep employees and build a strong team is by giving them things you aren’t obligated to provide.
Honestly, I’m playing devil’s advocate here. I love working from home and feel that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks in almost all ways. I agree with your sentiment, but without a good understanding of what companies are giving away and whether they can afford it is a big part of why back to office was hurried along.
HR has to basically rewrite the book on everything after such a big shake-up in the culture of employment. New calculations for salaries, new requirements for liability, new hurdles for IT, infrastructure, and security. These are all costs to companies because the culture shifted. Working from home was mandatory for a short time, but it wasn’t obvious that companies could make it all work without time to sort out how to best do it.
Yeah the problem is there would never be any reason for companies to even try to make working from home work unless some life or death event like COVID forced them to.
There was never going to be an easy transition for them. It was either nothing or against their will.
They weren’t obligated to provide it, no. The local Taco Bell never did (essential).
But once given (out of necessity), it becomes baseline. It is now the basis of comparison and part of the competition for talent. As many CEOs are finding out.
basically asking for a raise that they aren’t obligated to provide.
Well, employees aren’t obligated to not resign either.
Yeah, that’s how employment works.
Doing the best work in the best place shouldn’t be considered a benefit given to you. It’s a benefit alright but mutually so.
“We believe that a structured hybrid approach — meaning employees that live near an office need to be onsite two days a week to interact with their teams — is most effective for Zoom”
If only there was some kind of chat/video conferencing software you could use to collaborate with your team anytime you wanted…
employees that live near an office need to be onsite
Sigh, why are you punishing people based on where they live?
That’s a great way to ruin moral. Create 2 classes of workers.
Brb moving to another state
There is this farmhouse that is going on the market in the middle of nowhere soon. If my work had that policy I would already be getting ready to list my current house.
Divide et impera? it’s not always about morale.
I’ve had a department head who thrived on low morale. People mostly unhappy, yet the she always got what she wanted, be it overtime or information on the state of things ‘under the table’. Also very good at misdirection, since she always had a mad dog under her command that people could freely hate. If you were good at what you did, you got it a bit better than the ‘plebs’ but it was a very high stress work environment that took quite a toll on my mental health. Getting a raise was the best thing ever.
Being privy to how the ‘plebs’ were considered and participating in meetings where you’d basically reallocate people to projects like pieces of meat was a very interesting experience. Cultivation of individuality and ‘fuck you, got mine’ attitude.
It’s an… interesting… management style. Not for the faint-hearted but for sure a good experience to have at least as a baseline.
Someone should create it, they would be millionaires, think of all the money these guys are missing out on. Some of these bosses should bring their teams into the office and get right to it.
80% of bosses regret their initial return-to-office decisions and say they would have approached their plans differently if they had a better understanding of employees’ office attendance, their usage of office amenities and other related factors
In other words, if they’d tried, even just a little, to actually do their jobs.
Bunch of clowns.
If they had even tried to talk to people, gather data, think about it…
In response, EY announced a fund in February 2022 to reimburse up to $800 per year for commuting, pet care and dependent care costs for each of its 55,000-plus U.S. employees.
Sorry… a < .5% raise isn’t enough to get me back in an office.
800 per year? My god what are these execs paying their nannies that they think this is anything substantial for such a massive sacrifice of time and energy to be in an office.
Yeah $800 would maybe cover my train tickets. Probably not quite. Pet care expenses? I don’t even really know what that means.
But dependent care??? They must be high.
Pet care… Dog walking, cat feeding. I assume.
$800 wouldn’t cover childcare for 1 child for 1 month.
Knowing an exec who has a nanny, they’re paying them around $7,000 a year and trying to make them feel like they never do enough
Their nanny works around 75 hours a week
Jesus Christ that’s cruel.
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I suspect they were ‘advised’ by the Banks and perhaps the government, to put the brakes on.
Every Corporation would be delighted to dump expensive city real estate, and “externalise facilities costs” to the workforce. ( which is what working from home is, from a balance sheet point of view). It’s what they teach at business school.
However, it would only take a handful of big players to to do this in succession to collapse the real estate market in most cities.
The knock on effect would likely include some large defaults by landlords and developers and who knows where that ends.
A secondary effect is house prices. certainly in London, where people pay a 2-5x premium to live within an hour of they high paying job.
If people no longer need to live near the office, why would they spend so much on crappy housing ? It would likely trigger an exodus away from the capital, collapsing the housing market.
In the UK if the housing market collapses, the economy follows it down the tube in massive way.
Hence the half hearted ‘push’ to get people back in the office .
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I bought my current house, 5 years ago, in a MA town a little closer to Providence than Boston (but still rather convenient for both cities).
My real estate agent called me yesterday out of the blue to see if we were considering any moves. We’re not, because we refi’d a couple years ago at a great rate, and even moving into a similar value house now would mean a significant increase in our mortgage.
I’m sure she’s heard that same story a lot of times. Nobody wants to sell because they then have to buy, and we’ve all got great rates from a couple years ago.
Regret how they went about implementing back to work.
Glad the bosses are seeing this.
Yes but since in their minds they can never be wrong they are not gonna learn anything nor admit defeat.
Yes but since in their minds they can never be wrong they are not gonna learn anything nor admit defeat.
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The whole farm, really, lining up to defecate upon their grins.
Remote good. On-prem bad.
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