First we had the "Great Resignation." Then "quiet quitting." Now we have "Revenge of the Bosses."
The great trend these days seems to be that even CEOs and managers who once supported working from home are souring on it. The Wall Street Journal today has what feels like the hundredth piece I've read about this over the past couple of weeks:
“There’s a lightning-in-a-bottle effect that rallies people together,” says Allan Jones, founder and chief executive of Bambee, a human-resources software and consulting firm in Los Angeles. “But lightning strikes and then it dissipates.”
....Alone in the office when we spoke by video, he picked up his phone to check how many clients were signing up for Bambee’s HR software and management service. “Our new subscribers today are half of what they normally are at this time,” he reported, adding that a 30% drop is typical when everyone is at home. It isn’t principle or personal preference that sours him on remote work, he says. “It’s in the numbers.”
If Jones isn't exaggerating, this is an amazing stat: On days when everyone is working from home, subscriber signups drop 30%.
As regular readers know, I'm skeptical that the WFH revolution will last. There are several reasons for this. First, humans are social creatures and we like to congregate with each other. Second, managing workers remotely is difficult for most people.
Third, and most important, WFH is really, really hard on new employees if they have jobs that require them to work closely with others. An accounts receivable clerk, for example, might do fine. But a new product manager? I've been one, and I can't even imagine what it would have been like trying to learn what I needed to know if everyone I had to work with was available only via Zoom or phone or Slack. It's one thing for existing teams to continue working well from home; it's quite another to get a new member of a team up and running.
In the end, I think the pandemic forced WFH on a lot of companies, and some of it will work fine and stick around. But most of it won't work fine, and both managers and workers will end up wanting to get rid of it. A couple of years from now, my guess is that WFH will be maybe a third higher than it was in 2019—in other words, a rise from around 7% to 9%. We'll see.
I think you're right, that there will be substantial reversion to the mean.
That said, I don't see the WSJ article as anything other than yet another sop thrown at the CRE whiners.
And then there''s my experience. I'm a manager of a team that is now completely remote - my company chose to drop geographic restrictions when the plague hit, although they want one day a week in office now. My team is in California, Colorado, Utah, Maryland, Florida and Bangalore. We have offices in three of those; which one do you suggest I go to?
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The WSJ article is just another hit piece that quotes managers and CEOs and "disrupter" types, all of whom (the ones who are quoted) just want their little office fiefdoms back.
These generalized takes are also so dumb. For some jobs, sure, full time remote work doesn't work very well. For lots of jobs, full time remote work does work and the only people talking about this "lightning in a bottle" bullshit are the people at the top.
Like +10.
Agreed.
Surrounded only by drones and proles must put the shivers into their spines.
Cultural lag usually means that it takes a decade or three for technological breakthroughs to be reflected in accepted workplace practice. Lots of pundits predicted people would never embrace online banking, or automatic teller machines, or self-checkout at supermarkets, or filling up their own tanks at gas stations. People valued the personal interaction too much, whether it be with the bank teller, the checkout operator or the kid at the gas station. And the idea that managers and professional staff would have to get rid of their secretaries and learn to type their own documents on a keyboard was preposterous! Nevertheless, here we are.
We're only just now seeing the first generation that grew up online, entering middle management positions. The first generation that prefers texting to calling, and regards email as a cumbersome, dated medium. They'll devise new ways of working that they're comfortable with, and change will happen incrementally, as it usually does.
That's a good analogy.
Certainly feels as if there is a coordinated effort to flood the media zone with stories about the sorry state of working from home. Some execs dont like it and they get the megaphone.
Anecdotally I have been surprised how many senior leaders/execs in my own network view WFH as an employee benefit similar to wages, vacation time, transit passes or paid lunches. Literally none viewed the office cubicles and chairs in that way. I dont know how widespread this view is, but it certainly might explain how the issue is discussed.
Seriously. Getting lectured by Steven Rattner, hedge fund manager, in the NY Times about how we have to work 50 hrs/week in the office or the Chinese will destroy us is pretty annoying.
Yes. Because the three reasons quoted don't include the most important one: Bosses like having people around that they can control. And if they have to use technology to control people, and it's remote, it just isn't as satisfying.
Try it out. Attacking a subordinate over Zoom just doesn't give you the same warm feeling as in person, where your spittle can cover their chest. And you can see them sweat.
I was just discussing with my boss that we have taken a lot of withdrawals from the reserves of trust and collaboration that we built up prior to the pandemic. the strain is beginning to show.
But most of it won't work fine, and both managers and workers will end up wanting to get rid of it.
Managers, maybe. Not so sure about workers in general. Employees—who generally don't have major equity stakes—don't possess incentives that are massively aligned with their employers' interests. It's no skin off the nose of a typical worker if productivity is down a bit when they get rather huge benefits—more sleep, the elimination of commutes, a reduction in clothing expense, more time to do stuff at home—in return.
As always, a lot of this will depend on the labor market, and the bargaining power of individual workers. And of course many jobs can't be done at home. But quite a few can be done at home.
I don't necessarily disagree with Kevin's take that the WFH revolution may prove to be so much hype in the end (I say the same thing about the "death of cities"). But I really doubt any retreat from WFH will be driven by workers. It will be driven by capital.
Yep. Because making people come in is just another way to exploit their labor.
I was an accounts receivable clerk for [... wow] six years. Is that a routine job? Sure. Can you easily train a new employee of average intelligence on that job on a remote basis? No way. It's the exceptional situations - and, frankly, the "average intelligence" - that will trip you up.
Of course, "easily" is doing a lot of work in this comment. You'd get it done eventually, with more time and angst than if it had happened in person. I guess it's a matter of weighing the benefits of WFH against that time and angst.
Kevin, if you REALLY believe the WFH will sink to 9% in a couple of ("few?") years, then you should make a sizable investment in an Office REIT. You can buy them for 30 cents on the 2019 dollar these days.
This!
Excellent point.
Follow the money.
It sure looks like WFH is here to stay.
Even before COVID, we had a glut of office space. The newspapers were full of articles about empty office parks in the suburbs. With WFH, we have an even bigger glut. Since it is easier to build commercial real estate than residential real estate - people are more likely to push back against changes where they live than where they work - it is no surprise we are getting this desperate rhetoric. I expect a slow erosion in WFH with a related drop in productivity which will suit corporate management just fine.
Everyone going into the office just so new employees can be trained and socialized is a weird justification for eliminating WFH. My department goes for years without adding a new employee. So we’d all need to go into the office - each of us wasting thousands of hours of our limited time on earth in commuting back and forth - on the off chance that a new employee appears in our midst every 3-4 years? Yeah that’s ridiculous.
I would support departments or teams of employees going into an office for 6 months or so every time those departments/teams add a new employee. And I always support extroverts who feel they *need* social interaction to do whatever they want to get it, including going into the office. But saying “everyone should be forced to go into an office because some like to socialize and what about new employees” is a stupid justification, one which totally ignores the desires and preferences of introverts and other people who simply hate losing part of their life in commuting.
FWIW, I have never been as productive as I am right now working from home, precisely because I don’t have a bunch of extroverts dropping by my desk to just talk about nothing in particular. *That* is something managers never seem to account for in their whole “let’s return to the office” push.
Eliminating WFH will increase turnover. Problem solved.
Anecdotally I’m traveling for work this week, and getting the approval to do so for me and my colleagues took over 6 weeks. Seems that the same managerial class that strongly believes “we all benefit from face-to-face interaction” so employees should be forced to incur the time and monetary expense of daily commuting wasn’t so sure my team needed face-to-face interaction with our vendors if the company itself had to pay for our travel. Interesting dichotomy there: if the company is on the hook for travel costs, suddenly you hear “can’t you do this via email and Zoom?” from everybody up the managerial food chain. Almost like returning to the office (but only when it’s cost-free for the employer to impose such requirements) is just a managerial control thing, and not part of some concern for “new employees” or “humans needing socialization.”
@austin I think nails it. Look at the money. If you could save a ton on real estate and keep a smaller footprint, the financial savings would allow you to be in-person when it's needed. New employee on-boarding, known crunch periods, a quarterly week for everyone in the office. Pick what works.
And to Kevin's point - yes, some jobs can't be done remote! But I bet a lot more can be done that way.
I've worked at the same University for 26 years. Crazy, right? But it's a big enough campus, and I work for a big department spread out over campus, so for the last 26 years, other than my direct team, most of my meetings were remote.
But the University still wants to try a "one size fits all". This is the problem. That, and the people who can't work at home look at the work at homes and think "this is bs," but if you want to work from home, then you need to change jobs.
Yeah. It just seems… disingenuous?… to hear that “you need to return to the office for camaraderie, new employee onboarding, whatever” at your own significant expense…. but then on a multimillion dollar contract, when you argue you need to visit the vendor to do user testing in person, senior mgmt dicks around for weeks on whether it’s worth it to spend a few thousand dollars on travel. I had to justify to 4 different people why I couldn’t do user testing remotely and needed face to face interaction… and at every step I wanted to scream “aren’t you the ones that insisted I had to leave my house where I’ve been productively working for almost 3 years to return to the office?!” The mental disconnect there - the company needs face to face interaction except if it costs them money - is immense, and frankly insulting.
Agreed! Fully remote does not mean never see your colleagues. Before the pandemic I was fully remote but saw my colleagues 3-4 weeks a year. That all basically disappeared post-pandemic. The huge reduction in travel costs during the pandemic was good for the bottom line but the wrong lesson was learned. As it became possible to travel customer meetings were the only things allowed. Not surprisingly, after not hanging out in person at all for 3 years, productivity went down.
I can vouch for what Kevin is saying on this. I started a remote job in a new (for me) highly technical and specialized field with a perfectionist boss in 2021 and it's been pretty rough going. If the work itself wasn't so interesting, I'm sure I would have left by now. Add a newborn at home and it's been far from smooth sailing.
If someone has been in their position for a while, and they don't have tiny kids at home, I could see how it would work. But WFH isn't fantastic for everyone. I realize commutes are garbage, but that's not the only thing that you do in a workday, you know?
That's more a problem with the boss and staff than it is with remote work itself. Just like in-person workplace practices, remote workplaces require their own set of skills and procedures that don't match up 1:1 with in-person skills and procedures.
After 9 years of cramming a tiny desk into my bedroom in my small home, I'm actually thinking I want to move to all in-person.
Our recent hires, who came in after we were all fully WFH, rarely stay a full year. It's harder to test their capabilities by pulling them into small projects or quick tasks, so they end up trapped in their jobs, and they know it. So they look for other jobs. And all the departments are siloed. There is no quick conversation with someone in another department - just boxes on a Zoom screen while the suits drone on.
WFH is nice when the kids are in elementary school. No worries about childcare on all the days that school is closed. But other than that, I miss being in-person.
The company wants to go hybrid, which may be fine. But I won't have my own desk, and I don't want to lug stuff around all the time. Maybe WFH is better if you can afford a big house with an office. Not so hot for the people at the bottom of the pay scale.
"It's harder to test their capabilities by pulling them into small projects or quick tasks, so they end up trapped in their jobs, and they know it. So they look for other jobs. And all the departments are siloed."
This screams leadership/vision problem. It is the responsibility of the leaders at the company (doesn't sound like there are many who are truly leading...) to facilitate and develop their staff, and to make sure staff aren't trapped in their jobs. If a company can't do that and the turnover is a threat, then Idunno, maybe the company should bear the pain and strain of failing.
"all the departments are siloed"
There's the problem. Has nothing to do with working from home.
I'm a software developer. I was able to work from home a couple of days a week at my first office job back in the early 90s so this is not a new phenomenon. I've been working from home almost every day for the past 20 years. I am also a manager and have been managing a distributed team for over 10 years. It's really not hard. We trained up multiple new employees in 2020 when we were 100% remote.
I do go into the main office about 2 days a month. Some face-to-face time is essential. But there is no need for most workers to go sit in the same office 5 days a week.
Second, managing workers remotely is difficult for most people.
This is the real issue as training new employees can be done with an intensive couple of weeks in the office. Do you know why managing workers remotely is difficult for most people? It’s because most managers actually suck at managing people. I’ve been in HR for 30 years and let me tell you, management fads have come and gone but the overall all quality of managers remains abysmal. Most people get promoted into people management because they’re good at process management and they require two very different skill sets.
Why offices?
So middle managers have a reason to exist. Otherwise, they are superfluous. And America is FULL of middle managers. They will not go quietly into the night.
This. There are tons of managers who did nothing pre pandemic except babysit lower level employees. Making sure they came in on time, didn’t stay too long to earn overtime, filled out paperwork correctly, etc. Once those lower level employees proved they didn’t need constant babysitting by successfully working from home for years, suddenly the manager class was exposed as embarrassingly redundant. But instead of asking themselves “huh maybe we don’t need as many managers as we thought” they instead circled the wagons and were like “we need employees to return so we can return to our rightful roles of babysitting them.”
And the right claims capitalism is flawless at wringing out unnecessary costs in the pursuit of profits…
I would argue with remote you need more middle managers. OK, perhaps not middle managers but more first level managers. Done well, individual contributors are more productive working from home but it takes more coordination and individualized attention. Also in larger companies above the first or second management level managers were probably responsible for people in multiple office locations even before the pandemic...
I'm a software engineer in Big Tech I've been doing WFH since the bug hit, and transitioned to "permanent" WFH some time back.
It works for me, but I'm near the end of my career and I'd already built relationships with my colleagues. The work goes well, but I feel very isolated. I'm drawing on relationship capital I built up with in-person work, and I think I've got enough to get me to retirement.
I can't imagine starting my career this way, though. Sharing a physical space builds camaraderie in a way that remote work just doesn't, however many video conferences we do.
Agreed. I’ve worked from home about half my career. There are pluses to both. Working from home I felt isolated and cut off. I often missed out on things the office people new about. Those working in the office usually had first chance at promotions and new projects.
I also worked in the office for the first twenty years or so. That experience carried me through the rest of my career.
I'm a software engineer in big tech, and I was doing WFH 3 to 4 days a week before the bug hit and now doing work from home all the time. It works well for me, and I haven't really built any relationships with my colleagues. I'm not at all isolated. Seems like everyone in the company knows that if you have a question about the thing I work on, then you ask me about it. Being in the office isn't going to help me communicate with colleagues across Europe and India. And we have plenty of tools for communicating with each other: email, chat, video, docs, code reviews, ...
I'd far rather teach class in person rather than Zoom. You just can't do those rapid crowdreading scans to see who gets and who doesn't, when someone has fallen behind because of tech glitches, etc. Plus, I imprompter talk _much_ better on a white board with than with the so-called 'whiteboards' offered up by the various meeting apps.
I've tried to make lesson plans more interactive, but writing/coding them up is, um, time-consuming.
My niece is a new product manager at a software startup. She works from home and does just fine. The company has people working around the country, so she travels now and then for personal contact. The company is doing well. It even has a growing income stream and new products in the works, and all that without having everyone waste time commuting to an office and putting up with office distractions.
This is another example of romanticizing office life. The thing most people hate about their jobs are meetings, the times they have to work with others. The rest of the time, they work alone and other people are sources of distraction. People working at home, without having to commute, are more productive. That's a simple fact. They can organize their lives and work to get more done in less time. Despite this, companies are willing to take the productivity hit to make sure the workers know who is running the show. (It's also about bailing out the office real estate market.)
It's related to what they call the "edifice complex". Managers love fancy buildings. It's like the pharaohs building pyramids. What often happens is that a company decides to move its office closer to its CEO's home - that's the usual reason for an office move, cutting the CEO's commute time - and all the top executives get excited about the big project and start squabbling over who gets what wing, special feature or particular office. Meanwhile, the company goes down the tubes. The CEO and managers do just fine, but the workers get laid off and the shareholders lose out. They console themselves knowing that management tried to fix things by firing all the employees.
This is not a black or white issue. The most economically efficient mode of work is probably some mixed approach: Core times at which everybody who is healthy must be "at work" (and work their one hopes). The rest of the time it can be everybody's choice.
This equilibrium will be quite different for different jobs. When I was working I needed a lab. I wasn't gong to build one at home obviously. So the only work I could have done from home would have been the reports that went along with it. But for jobs that are mostly paper pushing the home percentage may be much larger.
Work from home is a complicated issue, these are my thoughts and experiences.
One, it's harder to turn work on and off when you're at home. There's something to be said about going to the office as an activity to work, and then getting off and going home (or to happy hour). When you're home, there are inevitable distractions which vary from home to home, person to person, and the temptation is always there to skip out for a tee time or something else and make up the time at night, which can impact sleep. None of these are non-starters or non-solvable though, flexibility is good, but are people really productive with it?
Two, something is lost when it comes to teleconferencing over in-person meetings, and I don't mean 90% of the meetings that should never be scheduled and just cater to middle-managers. Design and architecture discussions just seem more productive when together in a conference room, with a whiteboard. Sure there are online whiteboard solutions, but my experience is that these discussion aren't as fruitful on zoom/slack/teams.
Three, don't underestimate the desire for control from leadership. As much as they were already surveilling you at work, now these efforts will be redoubled by analyzing laptop usage and so on. By being at the office, and things being interpersonal, there is a natural barrier and protection from intrusive analytics, which you lose when completely remote, and the resulting analytics will likely encourage harmful side effects like competing against other employees to who has the most laptop usage, when in reality everything should really be about measurable goal-directed activity via agile or other practices.
Overall, I favor a hybrid system, people should be in the office 2-3 days a week, and otherwise allowed to pursue work goals from home (or cafe) in a roughly equal measure.
Right, but a lot of this doesn't really make any sense. The company doesn't exist to make sure employees are sitting at desk for a set number of hours. It exists to achieve its goals, which are usually to provide a product or service to customers. If the employees can do that at an acceptable level to management in 8 hours a day, great. If they can do that in 6 hours a day, great. If they can do that in 10 hours on Tuesday and only 4 hours on Friday, great. I don't really understand why "time put in at work" or "number of emails sent" or whatever is measured by companies, when they can just have their ample army of managers set goals for production by each employee and then assess whether the employee has achieved that benchmark. The amount of time it takes for the employee to produce 100 widgets shouldn't matter (beyond some ceiling on slowness). If the company wants 100,000 widgets produced by its 1000 employees every week, and Employee A does it in 26 hours while Employee B does it in 33 hours, and Employee C does it in 40 hours... who cares? The company was willing to accept 100 widgets from each employee every week when it set the benchmark for "adequate" performance, and all the employees complied even if employees A and B only showed up for part of the workday all week long. If employee C issued 1000x more emails than A & B did, which might explain why they needed all 40 hours to produce their 100 saleable widgets, C still didn't provide more value to the company overall.
Arg. I felt forced to make an account to protest. I am an actual product manager. I have been for 10 years. My current job, which I’ve had for nearly 7 years was conceived as 100% work from home well before the pandemic. It was wfh during the pandemic and still is. Everyone on my team works from home from locations in various countries. My company doesn’t have nearly enough physical office space to hold everyone. We make lots of money nonetheless. The only barrier I see is massive time zone differences. It’s difficult for people in Ukraine and San Diego or New York and Tokyo to talk real time. But nobody needs to be physically together most of the time.
Welp, apparently we all need to suffer in traffic for upwards of 90 min or more each way every day, all so (1) new hires can be onboarded “properly” and (2) experienced workers can socialize in person. Doesn’t matter that productivity isn’t improved or money could be saved on officer rents.
I don't like to congregate with other people. Other people are assholes. I'll congregate with dogs after I retire.
"we like to congregate with each other"
What "we" white man?