This leaked today from inside webmd, the most bullshit corpo HR video I think I’ve ever seen.
To break down the obvious ones:
- Employees who are obviously either drinking wayyy too much company koolaid or who know that their jobs will end if they aren’t in this video
- An extremely out of touch CEO who wants things back the old way without giving any concrete data proving that it’s better beyond conjecture
- A company with “internet” in the name who literally doesn’t understand the concept of the internet
- Threatening and bullying language to force people back in office.
- and just a nice touch, the office is of course not near mass transit or anything and requires driving in
- Did anyone notice they were all on green screen, kinda proving that there was no need for them to be in person?
I agree the video is cringy AF, but I don’t have a problem with the company demanding its employees return to working in the office rather than remotely. There are a whole host of tangible benefits (for both companies and employees) from coming into work and I don’t see a problem with a company insisting on it. There are some industries and/or jobs in which remote work is probably fine, but most organizations benefit more from having people come into a shared workspace.
People always say there are tangible benefits, but then rarely ever give any actual evidence. (Note the CEO in the video said the exact same thing and then also did not provide any evidence backing it up, unless you count someone drawing a graph on a whiteboard in an “up” direction evidence)
Covid forced anyone who could work remotely to work remotely, and the economy went through the roof. Tech especially had some of their best years - ever.
I also want to call out that a lot of employees that were hired during the pandemic were hired out of region - in other states, across the country. Most “return to office” mandates are veiled layoffs hiding behind the need for employees to be in person for arbitrary reasons. By forcing them back in office they get to claim employees failed to show up for work, neglecting the whole “They work in Arizona and the job is in Tennessee” bit.
The brass tacks is that:
- Employers pay sometimes by the decade to rent office space and are annoyed that it’s sitting empty and
- Bad managers don’t know how to manage if they aren’t micromanaging their employees. Good managers have no problem managing remotely.
- It’s an easy way to cut costs by forcing people working out of state to quit while claiming they were never fired.
As a manager, here are my observations. They’re qualitative, not quantitative.
- When my folks are working on something independently, most are more productive at home, as long as home has fewer distractions and not more. They don’t get sucked into hallway chatter, there’s no walking to conference rooms, etc.
- When they’re doing something collaborative, they’re more productive at work. People will yell over the wall or drop by to ask things that they won’t make a phone call for, or even an instant message. And the communication is better and faster in person.
- Collaborative stuff isn’t just more productive in person, it’s better. People get into a riff of bouncing ideas back and forth and the end result is better.
- In my opinion, the results aren’t so stark that everyone needs to be in everyday. Productivity and quality is at least adequate when people are remote, and there are other benefits. Some of my people commute like an hour each way, so a 9 hour day becomes an 11 hour day, and that’s a big difference. Some also do things like walk the dog at lunch, connect with their kids, and other things that improve their quality of life.
- Most (but not all) of my people will choose to work from home when they have a choice. That being said, I’ve lost count of the number of times people have said something like “I’d forgotten how much I appreciate connecting with people in person to solve problems, or even just chat about the weekend.” The balance might be in favor of work from home, but for most it’s not all good.
- I’ve noticed that when I’m on site, employees drop by to talk about things that they almost never do when one of us is home. Even though I personally also prefer working from home, I don’t do it as much because I think being a manager is more effective when I’m there.
- Overall, I think a hybrid arrangement makes the most sense for the work we do. You can debate what the right ratio of on site vs off is, but I think some in person collaboration mixed with some affordance for people working from home works best overall.
Thanks for the anecdotes.
Unfortunately in most sectors the data disagrees with whatever bullshit you decided to make up for the sake of argument.
I actually really agree with you on these points. I’m hybrid right now and it works well for me. In office I get to socialize, I do have better meetings, and I do feel like we come out with good ideas. But then the other days I’m at home, and those are my heads-down get shit done days. I get more done at home, but we come up with better ideas on what to do in office.
I’m in software, so I push for our scrum process to allow for that. I schedule meeting days in office, where we have sprint close, sprint plannings, retros and everything in office - and then you can go home for the rest of it.
Finally, a sensible comment. Also a manager for a bunch of years, and I completely agree. The best is a hybrid setup, and my team comes into the office together on the same agreed days. I think this is a good balance, and I personally wouldn’t want to work in a fully remote role, as it makes collaboration an informal human connections very difficult.
I don’t think I’m a terrible manager and I’m definitely not a micromanager. One problem I had managing a remote team was how to deal with people who were clearly not working when they should have been. I could never prove it so I could never do anything about it.
People had no tangible tasks? Wouldn’t the proof be that their work was not getting done?
Then your real problem is you don’t have an effective way to set and measure goals.
If you can’t prove that someone isn’t doing anything then that’s on you, the manager. You shouldn’t punish everyone else because of one person not doing their job.
Real talk - There are many metrics you can use to gather info on what your team is doing. That’s your job, to know if they’re working or not. If they aren’t, it’s your job to prove it and carry out the punishments. If you can’t do that then that’s your failing, not the team’s.
For software I hold my teams to their point commitments. If they commit to so many points of work then that’s my metric. Teams will always slip, and miss targets, but there are obviously people who only get one or two points done a sprint. That was my job to collect those metrics and make a case.
Do you have any data to back any of that up? Cause the data, by in large, contradicts that: https://www.computerworld.com/article/3711386/why-return-to-office-mandates-fail.html#tk.rss_all
That was a good article with lots of great sources. But my tinfoil hat is telling me that all of these large companies demanding return to office aren’t doing it because “beliefs”. They’re doing it because the people have gained too much power in the last few years and this is the strategy to put them back in their place. Lay people off in hordes while interest is skyrocketing and demand more from them if they want to keep their jobs. Make them afraid and vulnerable so we can control them better. But again… that’s the tinfoil hat talking.
Beyond self-reports and perception-based outcomes, most extant studies that I’m aware of have found decreases in real output. For example, a randomized controlled trial published by the NBER found that productivity of employees randomly assigned to work from home was 18% lower than employees randomly assigned to work in the office:
https://www.nber.org/papers/w31515
Another study found that output decreased by around 13% when employees worked from home, even though hours worked increased:
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/721803
Cognitive performance may also decline in remote settings:
Another study found that output decreased by around 13% when employees worked from home,
Ah this paper again.
If you look at the paper itself (especially graph 1B) and if you look at normal output levels for basically any complex job, you’ll see that this conclusion can easily be reworded as “during WFH, output reduced to levels equal to those of a year before, continuing a trend that had started months before Covid/WFH”.
It’s basically a useless measurement, and the authors themselves even suggest they should maybe compensate for periodicity, but then don’t do that.
Cognitive performance may also decline in remote settings:
Your claim is you’re stupider when you work from home? And you’re basing that off of online chess tournaments?
There are plenty of benefits from remote working too, as well as drawbacks from office work, and it hasn’t been decisively shown that at-office work is always better. For some management styles, sure, I guess. The sort of work they do - website development, I’m guessing? - has been shown to be amenable to a remote work style. Advantages include being able to hire people from all over, not have to spend big money on an office, employees can save money on housing and cost of living (don’t have to live near a city center) and automobile (don’t have to pay for gas to drive in or maybe even have a car) and time of commute - rather than get up, shower, drive for an hour and park, they can just start work. If the employer makes tasks and time flexible, also child care, which can be crucial for some people (it can be very expensive). And if the employer really wants, they can pay people less and save those costs themselves.
Of course, some employees like it, some don’t - there are people who work better remote and some prefer being around colleagues. I agree the choice of offering remote work belongs to the employer.
There are a whole host of tangible benefits (for both companies and employees) from coming into work and I don’t see a problem with a company insisting on it.
There’s nothing backing this. Just a bunch of CEOs saying they’ve “noticed” productivity. Which they have to say. The only actual study I’ve ever seen said there was zero benefit partly because having to host all the workers and provide amenities for them counters any benefit that could possibly happen, with company annual performance not showing any increase.
I worked a hybrid schedule at my last job. There was not one single benefit for me to come into the office half the week. I achieved nothing there that I didn’t achieve at home because all I needed was a computer, an internet connection and two monitors, and, despite it being open plan, we still did all of our communications on slack and all of our meetings on zoom. I just wore noise-cancelling headphones all day. I was interrupted maybe once a week at most and usually by someone who wanted to know where someone else was.
It didn’t even benefit the company because it was an office in a large industrial space and they could have removed the offices and put in more equipment if they just made all of us, not one of whom needed to be in the office to do our work, work from home.
And if you tell me that socialization is a benefit, you can fuck right off. I already have friends and a family if I want to socialize. If I make a friend at work, fine, but if they’re all just polite acquaintances, I’m happy to live with that. I can count on my fingers the people I’ve worked with in the past who I’ve lost touch with that I’d even remotely care about if they got back in touch with me.
" Internet Brands did not respond to a request for comment, except to say that people were busy with meetings. "
Lololololol
Fuck them. It sounds like they’re too bust having meetings instead of getting work done.
WebMD, the site that gives a diagnosis of ‘cancer’ for everything.
I was coughing and had a little congestion. Now I’m getting chemo, thanks WebMD!
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