Some staff members were alerted on Wednesday they were “not currently meeting our expectation of joining your colleagues in the office at least three days a week”, according to emails shared with the Financial Times. The emails were also discussed on the anonymous corporate message board platform Blind.
People have been hailing WFH after COVID as a lasting change. But it has always been clear that non fundamentally remote companies will never accept this as a permanent solution.
Hybrid is a really bad in between, the advantages seem marginal (more flexible remote days, less needed office space) to the disadvantages (people will still be mostly remote in meetings, commute times still a factor, work environments need to be duplicated between home and office).
To me, the biggest positive about remote work is that you don’t have to live in a crazy expensive location. That advantage is mostly gone with hybrid where you still have to come in every week.
Also, companies benefit from having employees in less expensive locales having lower salaries but still being able to pay more than what the employee would otherwise make in that location. Good way to retain talent.
Im to chicken to move to a cheaper location but remote work is still massively valuable to me.
I hear ya. The problem with moving to a cheaper location with a remote job is that, if you lose that job, you’ll probably have to move again because there may not be any other jobs in that location other than another remote job.
Especially risky if you buy your home and will have to sell quickly.
The real reason they want everyone back in the office.
Maybe for a small number of companies in a small number of industries, but most companies rent their office premises, even large companies.
I’ve worked at several multinational companies that sold their HQ buildings when they recognised that building management was not a core competence for them and tying up capital in real estate has a significant opportunity cost for them.
It’s no skin off their noses if commercial real estate plummets in value - if anything, it would be in their favour as their rent would decrease.
environments need to be duplicated between home and office
My work started “”“recommending”“” that we come in 3 days a week. Not required, just recommended. They expect us to just carry all of our stuff back and forth between work and home every day. We don’t have permanent desks. They are shared by design. We need to reserve them from a web page.
My team has been largely ignoring their “”“recommendation”“” but I know it’s only a matter of time before it’s a requirement.
Amazon will discover what the rest of the market discovered, that unless they’re paying a big premium, employees will just go somewhere else. This is the real reason the VC types have been wishcasting a recession: with an unemployment rate that starts with “3” companies don’t have as much leverage as they’d like
Hybrid works, but you need to make sure that all relevant people are there to make it work. That usually means everyone in a department has to be in on a certain day and that people who interact with other departments are also in on certain days.
You have to maximize face time to make hybrid work.
