- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
The study (PDF), published this month by University of Chicago and University of Michigan researchers and reported by The Washington Post on Sunday, says:
In this paper, we provide causal evidence that RTO mandates at three large tech companies—Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple—had a negative effect on the tenure and seniority of their respective workforce. In particular, we find the strongest negative effects at the top of the respective distributions, implying a more pronounced exodus of relatively senior personnel.
Dell, Amazon, Google, Meta, and JPMorgan Chase have tracked employee badge swipes to ensure employees are coming into the office as often as expected. Dell also started tracking VPN usage this week and has told workers who work remotely full time that they can’t get a promotion.
Some company leaders are adamant that remote work can disrupt a company’s ability to innovate. However, there’s research suggesting that RTO mandates aren’t beneficial to companies. A survey of 18,000 Americans released in March pointed to flexible work schedules helping mental health. And an analysis of 457 S&P 500 companies in February found RTO policies hurt employee morale and don’t increase company value.
You must log in or register to comment.
One of the funniest things about most of these companies enforcing RTO is that their “on-site interviews” are still virtual. So you believe being in-person is more effective except when it comes to paying for travel expenses for interviewees.
Just shows the massive hypocrisy behind these RTO mandates.
You see how that’s more convenient for the interviewee too, right?
Especially when you’ll need to move to be in the office, a trip for the interview includes an extra day or two to see if you’d enjoy living in the area where the office is. .
I would imagine most of these remote interviews are just an initial conversation and an employer would insist on a formal interview in person if they have a policy on physical presence. My policy is to advance the requirement that there be hot chicks in the office if I need to be in that space.
A survey of 18,000 Americans released in March pointed to flexible work schedules helping mental health.
It’s almost like the work force actually values the quality of their lives more than … umm, honestly I’ve never been able to figure out a positive side for companies pushing RTO. Report after report show remote work improves productivity, employee retention, is perceived as a significant perk to attract new talent, and reduces corporate overhead (that last one is just an assumption on my part).
Seriously, what is the attraction for RTO?
It’s bosses who are sick of Teams meetings. “You just can’t collaborate like you can in an office setting” is what I heard most during my job hunt.
Which is true only in the rare case you only have one office that everyone is in. As soom as you don’t have everyone in the same room teams is better. So once you have more than 50 people
You absolutely can’t. You just can’t. Standing around the empty coffee pot yakking about the sportsball game over the weekend for 45 minutes and then spending three minutes agreeing you need a meeting to coordinate brainstorming just doesn’t work over Teams.
They just refuse to admit that’s a good thing.
Office politics with plausible deniability is also so much harder to do when leaving behind an electronic trail.
Ohh man - that sportsball game was nuts amirite
I dunno. I got a dumpster and forced three families to finally clean their houses some. And only sportsball I watch is Calvinball but we’re in the off season sadly.
(Am I doing this right? I always avoid the coffee pot because it was garbage coffee so missed all the collaborative talk)
Probably the satisfaction to micro manage people and oversee their work over their shoulders.
They get to use all that cheap real estate they bought during the pandemic. What more reasoning could you ever need!
A lot of them around me don’t even own, just rent. They’d save money by just not having to keep that infrastructure up and running at max and getting out of their contract when it ends.
Daily commute and sleep deprivation that derives from it is mind numbing. The only reason leaders want people to work at the office is so they don’t pay for empty offices.
Want people to innovate ? Give them free time to do research on a subject your company could benefit from.
Want people to meet with their teams ? Organize team activities once in a while. Everyone will benefit and be happier for it.
They don’t want people to innovate. Innovation is a buzzword that they use to market themselves as something other than parasites.
Most companies want to safely follow market trends to suck away large profit margin with minimal payout to workers. If they make a product that doesn’t work, they just assert that it does and that the customer is wrong.
That’s also why they intentionally quiet fire seniors like in the article. They don’t give a fuck about quality or innovation. They want the cheapest labor possible while hiking service/product pricing.
They don’t want employees to be happy. They want them to be cheap and exploitable.
That is literally the base form of businesses in the flawed reality of capitalism.
Just let employees choose what works for them
employees
choice
That does not sound corporate enough.
I don’t blame anyone. It doesn’t work for me. I have my own space and can be productive at home. I don’t need to be at the office getting coughed on or dealing with air temps.
My company does badge swipe checking, checks whether you connect to the corporate wifi with your laptop, and monitors you with motion sensing / heat tracking software fron the moment you walk in the door. 3 days a week mandatory
Heat tracking software? Damn, that’s creepy as hell.
Wait, when did the heat sensing get added
Baaaaaarf
malicious compliance: getting your team to wear this and stay as still as possible at the office
deleted by creator
Everyone suffers. Now that work has ramped back up post pandemic, it is very apparent how our talent pools have been impacted.
It’s the worst kind of problem: hard to fix and slow to show fairly significant consequences.
But will they learn…
Learn what? This was the intended outcome: layoffs without severance or unemployment.*
*Unemployment benefits aren’t totally off the table due to the companies changing of job requirements, but that’s going to depend on local laws and individual employee circumstances.
My hope is that companies would learn from the brain drain side effects in the long run. You’re absolutely right that greater profit is what drives this and it was intentional, but it is short-sighted.
The company I work for just terminated a substantial percentage of its workforce. It was done without truly understanding the effect on many programs. I’m now standing on a desert island, alone, trying to figure out how to continue satisfying a customer with nearly all the knowledge and talent to best do that stripped away. Doing the job of three people was hard enough before. Now I’m doing the job of X people, a variable I can’t even adequately quantify now. And a lot of that work is so wildly outside of my sphere of knowledge.
Decisions that these large companies are making are causing side effects that they may not feel for many years, but they will… And it won’t matter because those executives have accomplished everything they wanted for themselves in those first moments.
Don’t be evil. Heh.
I really do hope a few of these companies learn. I’d love for people to not be treated as expendable assets that can be ground into dust, but as people to nourish and develop. I’d love to cheer for them. I’d love to contribute to their work.
Short sighted for who? Executive compensation is tied to stock performance via options. If their actions boost the stock price in the short term, what do they care about the companies performance at a future date after they’ve cashed out?
We’re currently in the extraction phase of our neoliberal economic system’s lifecycle and it’s only downhill from here.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
A study analyzing Apple, Microsoft, and SpaceX suggests that return to office (RTO) mandates can lead to a higher rate of employees, especially senior-level ones, leaving the company, often to work at competitors.
In this paper, we provide causal evidence that RTO mandates at three large tech companies—Microsoft, SpaceX, and Apple—had a negative effect on the tenure and seniority of their respective workforce.
In particular, we find the strongest negative effects at the top of the respective distributions, implying a more pronounced exodus of relatively senior personnel.
Apple representative Josh Rosenstock told The Washington Post that the report drew “inaccurate conclusions” and “does not reflect the realities of our business."
Yet some companies have struggled to make employees who have spent months successfully doing their jobs at home eager to return to the office.
Dell also started tracking VPN usage this week and has told workers who work remotely full time that they can’t get a promotion.
The original article contains 705 words, the summary contains 157 words. Saved 78%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Can’t drive a bus or make a burger remotely. You can fly a plane remotely but you probably don’t really want to do that if it has passengers in it. Can’t clean remotely but you can definitely do paper pushing remotely, design work, meetings, management etc remotely. The key is landing the right job that can be done remotely.
Pretty sure none of the people working those jobs are part of the RTO demo
