Property holdings will always be more important to corporate America than the people that they employ.
Doing the bidding of the commercial real estate industry, which is one layer below the banks in the layer cake
That makes no sense. Commercial landlords collect rent regardless of how often employees are on site.
The real reason for RTW policies is that companies want to downsize without firing workers (and thus without paying unemployment). Hence:
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told staff they will need to be back in the office full-time, seemingly pushing 73% of his colleagues to consider quitting over the move
Stankey said 85% of them already lived near one of the offices. The remaining 15%, he said, will have to “make decisions that are appropriate to their lives.”
Commercial landlords collect rent regardless of how often employees are on site.
When leases come up for renewal, rational companies look at how much space they actually need and downsize their office requirements accordingly. That’s more or less what my employer is doing now. We own a vast building, but now we’ve sublet about a third of it.
Two of my previous employers went out of business or are on their final thread and moved out to some small office somewhere. Those buildings have each been vacant for about 2 years now. Can’t collect rent if no tenants
Right, but if you have a tenant then you don’t care what their WFH policy is.
Companies that are hybrid and go remote don’t renew their commercial real estate contracts.
If they are not planning to renew their leases, then they aren’t doing the bidding of their landlords as OP suggested.
In other words, if a company (for some reason) wants to please commercial real estate owners, it doesn’t have to end WFH.
And if it doesn’t care about pleasing commercial real estate owners, then it must have some other reason for ending WFH.
Commercial real estate owners need RTO because their stocks and assets are valued on feels. If most companies are paying for empty buildings, line goes down because they are perceived to be sure to sell.
And especially with really big corps who actually own their buildings, if it’s empty and perceived to be worth less, the company is worth less.
Oh yeah you do, since your revenue depends on how many asses they expect to be in those seats.
I’m happy my greedy company closed our office a year ago to save money on the lease. I don’t respect the people in charge but full time WFH is an excellent perk.
AT&T owns a lot of corporate real estate. Its fucking with their books so they have to punish everyone so execs look smart.
It’s more that toxic, sociopathic middle managers can’t torment remote workers as effectively.
Performative cruelty, corporate style. Know your place, peasants.
After the Black Death, laws were passed forcing peasants to remain on the land so that their landlords could keep wages down. But the numbers leaving were too great and enforcement was spotty because the enforcers also had staff shortages. So people gravitated to towns and wages rose.
Justifications to lose employees.
Not like China just totally owned you, right? Yeah, let go of your top talent. Good idea.
WhY cAnT wE rETAiN oUr TaLeNt!?!- greedy CEOs in the future
Future? It’s happening now
The future to CEOs is next quarter, next fiscal year is the distant future.
The real talent already built the good stuff. Now, all they need is someone to follow SOP’s to maintain and carry on. Improvements and new stuff will take the hit, and they will grow stagnant until someone else starts doing something better, and then they scramble and complain as they start losing money and that’s when they start looking for talent again. Except this time, they will just be hired to put in place whatever the other company did and probably be let go after.
AT&T hasn’t updated toll free routing control in almost 11 years. Their bvoip portal is similarly antiquated. What good stuff have they been developing?
Warner Brothers!
. . . wait
DirecTV!
. . . wait
“Nobody wants to work anymore.”
Retain who? Anyone not in a brick and mortar, or in HQ, is over seas.
Yeah. Just read an article explaining that you lose the best talent by forcing RTO and turnover jumps 14%.
What we need is one big union.
Yes. Soviet Union
Not like that >:o
And proper labor laws. This seems like a no brainer for your environmental goals and reduces congestion, and frees up real estate for re development to Appartments.
Gotta watch those wage slaves
It definitely sends a message that “we don’t know what those people are doing unless we can see the whites of their eyes and smell the fear-sweat.”
Meanwhile, they work from home themselves.
In my company we just went from 2 office days to 1 per week, and the wheel is still turning just fine.
Can anyone explain to me why companies are pushing RTO? Simply to justify some management positions? Or justify the big buildings they built? To me work from home would have so many advantages for a company and could actually be problematic for some employees. Not only can they save some costs on office space but it opens up their talent pool in a way that could lower wages. They could find someone living in low cost of living middle of nowhere that would do a job for 60k that someone in an expensive city couldn’t justify doing for less than 120k.
traditional middle management simply doesnt need to exist of you’re not baby sitting in person. everything else they can do could be AI handled or outsourced. except maybe training up and assessing for promotions. get used to training yourselves and self promotions by job hopping.
traditional middle management simply doesnt need to exist of you’re not baby sitting in person
I strongly disagree with that. Properly used, middle managers bring a lot. But I would say that, if a manager requires their staff to be on-site in order to manage them, they’re crap managers who should consider a career transition to frying fast food or gutting fish. They’re typically the ones who judge performance by perceived effort and how well the employee kisses ass, and their main focus is managing upwards by sucking up to their bosses. With remote workers, you need an effective way of assessing results or you’re hosed. I’ve been running remote squads since the 1980s, and for the most part, it’s only a problem if you’re an ineffective manager.
Its not all. I have found that companies that did not own much real estate have embraced wfh big time and have wound down any contracts they had. Ones stuck with offices they own or maybe long term contracts seem to but I doubt its going to be a good long term call. The only possible usage it might have is to encourage people to quit so you can reduce the workforce without lay offs but that is a crazy strategy as you are losing at best random folks and at worst the best you have.
I overlooked reducing workforce as a possibility. I’m not in the corporate world at all so I have no actual insight on anything. I’ve just been confused by something I’d consider a win-win being done away with by a lot of companies.
yeah everyone is confused with that. Many back to office scenarios have the people sitting in the office video conferencing all day because many of the folks they work with are not at the local office anyway.
And they’re in panopticon bull-pen offices where it’s impossible to hear yourself because the people next to you are also shouting on Teams.
That’s very much my situation. 3/4 of my staff are from contracting firms based elsewhere. So regardless of where I work, most of my meetings are via video conferencing.
“The majority of our employees and leaders never stopped working on location for the full work week—including during the pandemic,” a spokesperson told Fortune.
And you…you’re proud of this?!
The majority of my “leaders” have been full remote since pandemic. Of course, they stopped approving full remote immediately after they got theirs.
Even before
Hope they don’t like talent. The brain drain continues.
The slow march of the return to office has taken another step forward
No. 🤬 you ‘Fortune’. You’re just spoon feeding the rich what you think they want to hear.
Amazon and ATT are big but they don’t represent the whole and does not imply return to office is inevitable.
Back in the 1950s, Amazon and ATT would have been General Motors: an imagined safe, brain-dead corporate sinecure. Nobody entrepreneurial or innovative goes to work at such places. Just technocrats, cogs in the machine. Highly trained functionaries from brand-name universities keeping the juggernaut rolling on. Feeding Moloch.
Where im at, there is literally only two companies in town. Comcast and ATT. No other options. So yeah, I have a choice but not really. They get my money no matter what. Wish we didnt have a duopoly…
