Here's a headline from the Washington Post today:
Return to the office? These workers quit instead.
At the risk of being a bit of a dick, the text of the story really doesn't back this up. Here's a summary of the people interviewed in this piece:
- Example #1: Quit because they live in Brooklyn and were reassigned to Los Angeles.
- Example #2: Quit because her husband landed a job so she had to stay home and take care of the kids.
- Example #3: Quit because she got divorced and couldn't afford the commute any longer.
- Example #4: Actually did quit solely because of a return-to-office mandate (got tired of the long commute).
- Example #5: Quit because the company wanted him to relocate.
- Example #6: Quit because her reports lived in London and Singapore and she got tired of trying schedule Zoom meetings.
All of these are related in vagueish ways to remote work, but only one person truly quit solely over a mandate to report back to the office. Of the others, two are relocations; two are changes in personal circumstances; and one got tired of Zoom.
If so many people are quitting over return-to-office mandates, it ought to be easy to find half a dozen clear-cut examples. But apparently it's not, and that makes me wonder if there really are lots of people quitting over work mandates.
POSTSCRIPT: It's worth noting that people have long chosen jobs based on specific needs for flexibility. This is still happening, but has nothing special to do with either COVID or remote work.
How are you having such a hard time with this? Workers got hired across the country to work remotely. They may live in Ohio but got a job in a Bay Area company. Now that company wants them to start coming in to the office. That's "relocating" but it's entirely about workers having far more options when work is remote. That person's quality of life just took a major hit because some dicks want people to sit in cubicles.
This is your blind spot, Kevin. And it's a doozy.
Yeah, I don't understand how Kevin doesn't even think of this. It's so obvious.
Because - even though Kevin himself got to work from home as a professional blogger - he really doesn’t think most employees can be just as productive from home as they were in the office pre pandemic, and he also has zero experience with employers forcing people to do things that have nothing to do with productivity and all to do with demonstrating their authority. So he has massive blinders on when it comes to anything WFH, and defaults to assuming “employers wouldn’t require something if they didn’t actually need it.”
Kevin's point would be that it is not the demand that the workers show up in an office that is causing them to quit. It is relocating across the country. No matter how they got in the situation where the home office is 1000 miles away, to say that they are resisting RTO policies is to imply that they are part of a movement rebelling against in-office work altogether. The article he is citing tries to turn a story about remote work into a story about return-to-office.
Well, I think decisions to change jobs are often based on more than one factor. Being forced to return to the office may just be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
You skipped over the detail that all of these companies were going hybrid, returning to work for just 2/3 days a week, which isn't quite the narrative you've been chasing for the past year.
And the reasons these people cited were directly related to requirements to work in the office. If not for the requirement to work in office, they would not have quit -- they would have used the flexibility of WFH to remain with their employers.
Hybrid WFH is here to stay.
The ridiculous thing is, if the company can survive you working from home 2-3 days a week and survived several years of you working from home 5 days a week, why can’t they just survive you working from home forever?
After 3 years of WFH, I’m being forced to go in to the office 3 days a week now. I count all the time spent commuting as part of my work day because what the hell - I’m not personally getting any value for that time, so I might as well get paid for those hours of my life I’ll never get back again. And I love it when I get to work and find out, invariably, someone is WFH today so all my meetings will be over Teams anyway.
Being 100% WFH makes it difficult to onboard new employees especially the inexperienced. But other than that, I think companies overthink the benefits of "interaction". Most people see it as a distraction, don't they?
This is certainly the narrative.
My experience as a leader in a large US corporation along with my wifes as a leadership consultant for many small to medium size companies is that very, very little effort was made to examine why online onboarding was thought to be more difficult and whether or not in-person onboarding was actually effective.
The amount of time and effort spent on onboarding pre-covid was so laughably small it made sense that nobody wanted to spend time and effort figuring out online onboarding.....but it didnt explain why it suddenly became a concern among the 'we have to go back to the office types'.
Incredible how many times i heard this as a stated problem but there was no effort to work on this problem or identify a solution.
What's it like onboarding inexperienced?
Doesn’t seem to be part of the calculus when those same higher-ups outsource jobs.
But I guess the places they use are work from the office, so I guess that’s fine.
Is this English?
Hey, snark is supposed to be my thing.
What's your experience of onboarding workers fresh in the industry you're in? What training do they go through, do they have mentors assigned who guide them as they WFH?
I got handed a manual for the new programming language my first company used...
That headline smelled like clickbait a mile away.
There are two sides to the issue and everyone writes from their bias.
Team WFH has seen the future and they don't want to be tied to large, expensive cites and pay out the wazoo for housing or waste time sitting on a commute. They are invested in breaking the stranglehold of office/location work for jobs that don't need it.
Team Office is looking at the disruption cause by WFH, cities are losing revenue from office leasing, downtown service businesses are in trouble, big bosses see headlines about remote workers putting in less overall time, pundits remark on how remote work impacts company relationships and culture.
Ultimately, the quest for talent will determine who does what. People who like cities and like office work will work for companies that want on-site. People who refuse to work from an office will find plenty of jobs that don't require it. It doesn't have to be one or the other, choose the company that sees things your way.
Personally, I'd change jobs if told I had to show up in an office even two days a week.
It is implausible that employers give a tinker's dam about municipal revenue or downtown service businesses. This leaves concerns about productivity, and inchoate blather about culture. To which I respond, if you have no better way to measure productivity than how long the butt is in the chair, you have a bigger problem to solve. As for culture, whatever that means, butts in chairs is meaningless for teams spread across multiple offices.
The reality is that some jobs can only be done in person, some benefit from being at least some of the time in person, and some can be done equally well in person or remotely. It isn't always obvious which category any given job falls into, as pre-Covid we didn't really have to think about it. That has changed. A company that mis-categorizes the various jobs will be at a competitive disadvantage in hiring. At the same time, employees are going to sort themselves out. Some people prefer going into the office. They will be attracted to the sorts of jobs that require this. Others prefer--often strongly--working remotely. They will not only be attracted to jobs that work well done remotely, but they will be actively repulsed by any company that misclassifies such positions. This is before we even add in that such a company is limiting its potential recruitment pool to people who happen to be close by.
This will all sort itself out. In the meantime, it is fascinating to watch the bullshit propaganda war around the matter.
Our workplace differentiates between remote work and telecommuting. There are tax implications when someone works from another state, and that imposes additional paperwork and complications for the organization, so I can see trying to limit it to special cases. Telecommuting or hybrid options, where the worker lives nearby but works from home one or more days a week, is more straightforward. There are benefits for seasoned workers, but it is hard on newbies. I prefer a hybrid work schedule myself. I can get more done at home, but I do go into the office a few days a week to talk to my direct reports, who are young and inexperienced and really do need face-to-face time. I don't think there is a "one size fits all" approach to this that fits all cases, and there is going to be considerable churn until organizations figure this all out. Being too strict about demanding people return to the office risks losing skilled and experienced workers, but allowing everyone to work from home all the time may not be to the organization's benefit either. It will be interesting to see how it all washes out.
Example #6 quit because she had to go into the office in order to Zoom with reports in Singapore and London, so this is an actual example of quitting because of RTO.