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.

  • Saneless@sh.itjust.works
    1·
    1 year ago

    Here’s the fun part:

    When execs were hyper focused on outsourcing, not once did they say productivity was a problem

    Second local workers wanted to do the same though, suddenly if you’re not in the office you’re useless.

    Which is it? Outsourcing is trash or WFH is just fine?

  • OwenEverbinde@lemmy.myserv.oneEnglish
    1·
    1 year ago

    Look: a lot of companies would suffer from an office real estate crash.

    • the businesses that own the office real estate
    • car manufacturers
    • tire manufacturers
    • petroleum companies
    • coffee franchises
    • fast food franchises lining freeways on the way to work

    And most importantly, funds invested in all of the above.

    People who own businesses also own stocks in other people’s businesses. Meaning they all fall and rise together. Trying to keep the “work commute” and “office rental” industries alive is just an attempt on the part of those who hold capital to keep their portfolios growing.

    In secret, they are probably also trying to hedge their bets, diversify and make themselves immune to the coming collapse. They’ll try to position themselves and their capital in such a way so that the working class is the only group hurt when it happens.

    But in public? They are not going to devalue their assets by standing by, complacent, as an office apocalypse approaches.

  • Phen@lemmy.eco.br
    1·
    1 year ago

    On the subject of remote working being more productive or not, my anedoctal experience is that when remote working is fully embraced, the productivity skyrockets, but when it is embraced half-way it may have a negative effect.

    When 2/3 of the employees are in an office, they tend to reach out to one another to discuss things and remote workers often get out of the loop. When everyone is working remotely, these discussions happen on slack channels for everyone to see. And if they are written down in a channel, folks can read it as many times as they need to ensure nothing was missed.

    This may seem not to be too important, but it makes a massive difference at the end of the day. And you could try to make that happen without remote working but people will not stop walking out to someone else’s cubicle for small questions when they have that option.