re: Microsoft orders employees back to the office

WFH works if companies do it right. Know a guy that works for Oracle in Minneapolis.

After COVID, Oracle figured out they were as/or more productive with a remote work force. They took that opportunity to reduce overhead by selling their building in downtown Minneapolis and their employees work remote.

For training they have a center in Texas that new hires attend for a couple weeks for orientation and for periodic staff trainings.

RTO is all about using investments companies have made in real estate, nothing more. It has zero to do with productivity.

If offices have to be used because management needs to justify their investment in real estate, then a hybrid model works best, but don't BS employees about the reasons.

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3 in office days is perfect. You get 2 days at your home and 3 days for collaboration, especially if you get Monday home T-Th at the office and Friday at home.

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Why not just let individual people managers decide the best working arrangements for their direct reports?

You put them in these roles to make those decisions. No need for a hamfisted blanket policy for the entire enterprise.

Is their “tech support” required to come in

WFH tears sustain me

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WFH tears sustain me

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I quit a mostly WFH job (since Covid) for a new job that's full time in the office. It wasn't really a factor in the decision, it's just that working at home wasn't all that important to me. Granted, my commute is like 10 minutes.

My company went fully in office starting September 1st. Granted we only had one official WFH day, but still sucks to go in on Fridays now. All it does is make me take more FTO instead of WFH whenever the kids have school holidays or I have a doctor appointment.

Just once in these threads I want the guy that comes in and admits that he’d be fricked going to the office because he doesn’t do shite.

I fully support WFH for the 10-20% at most that can actually do it. Anyone that acts like anything below the top 5% of businesses in their field can hire mostly employees that don’t need any supervision has not been in leadership. There’s just a lot of people that will be shitty employees. Being in the office doesn’t by any means solve that, but it sure helps.

The problem is that while you can certainly offer WFH as a benefit, it’s not always that easy to have a split workforce like that.

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RTO is all about using investments companies have made in real estate, nothing more. It has zero to do with productivity.

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I find the commercial real estate theory fascinating. I haven’t been able to find good data on this, but I would bet money that the majority of office space in the US is leased, not owned by the occupants. In that case, the “investment” is equipment and furniture.

That obviously doesn’t really apply to companies like Microsoft who have huge campuses that they own. But even putting that aside, do people really think companies are willing to shoot themselves in the foot - accepting lower morale, lower productivity, poorer performance, and everything else folks say about in-office work on top of the added overhead associated with RTO - purely to justify having real estate?

I think it’s absurd. It sounds like some crackpot Reddit theory that’s gone viral. I think in reality it’s a combination of two things:

1. Companies do actually see benefits to in-office work. Without rehashing all of the things that get mentioned every couple of days when one of these topics come up, I’ll just say that there are pros and cons. Those pros and cons vary by industry, role, and individual. Companies are attempting to navigate that minefield, and inevitably the best solution overall will not be the best solution for every employee/group.

2. With recent layoffs at tech companies, in particular, it also presents an opportunity to downsize without needing to formally lay more people off.

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Employees will have to spend at least 3 days in the office per week starting in February. That's still hybrid-ish, but it’s pretty clear that the dream of many for a revolution in working culture is pretty much done. Traditional office culture has reasserted itself. I expect that MS and other companies will soon be back to an all-week policy, allowing remote work only under limited circumstances.

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I go into the office about once a quarter despite the fact its less than 10 miles from my house. Our firm wants us at client sites, we physically don't have the office space to house everyone anymore due to cutting our real estate footprint and I doubt the clients are jumping at the chance to pay our travel costs each week.