Asklemmy

43939 readers

425 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

411

why are companies trying so hard to have employees back in the office? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by andallthat@lemmy.world to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

236 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have posted this on Reddit (askeconomics) a while back but got no good replies. Copying it here because I don't want to send traffic to Reddit.

What do you think?

I see a big push to take employees back to the office. I personally don't mind either working remote or in the office, but I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit and I haven't seen a convincing explanation yet of why they are so keen to have everyone back.

If remote work was just as productive as in-person, a remote-only company could use it to be more efficient than their work-in-office competitors, so I assume there's no conclusive evidence that this is the case. But I haven't seen conclusive evidence of the contrary either, and I think employers would have good reason to trumpet any findings at least internally to their employees ("we've seen KPI so-and-so drop with everyone working from home" or "project X was severely delayed by lack of in-person coordination" wouldn't make everyone happy to return in presence, but at least it would make a good argument for a manager to explain to their team)

Instead, all I keep hearing is inspirational wish-wash like "we value the power of working together". Which is fine, but why are we valuing it more than the cost of office space?

On the side of employees, I often see arguments like "these companies made a big investment in offices and now they don't want to look stupid by leaving them empty". But all these large companies have spent billions to acquire smaller companies/products and dropped them without a second thought. I can't believe the same companies would now be so sentimentally attached to office buildings if it made any economic sense to close them.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] TheRealGChu@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago

I think it should be on a case-by-case basis. I'm in the legal field, and there's definitely days I don't need to be in the office as almost all of our work is online now. State and federal mandatory efiling, e-discovery is online, and even our document management system is headed to the cloud, so no need for remoting in, just log into Microsoft 365 from any browser. Don't even need to own any Microsoft apps natively anymore.

On the other hand, there are days that I do need to be in the office: depositions and prepping witnesses, trial preparedness, and sometimes, you just need to touch base with everyone to see how things are going. I work in securities litigation, and those are frequently very complex, document and fact intensive cases.

We have a entire practices that are 100% remote now. The partners are either elderly, or they live far away from the office and were hybrid remote before the pandemic. The paralegal that works with those attorneys is also 100% remote.

Lastly, I am much more productive at home than in the office. I do not have ADHD, and do not have a problem with attention, and do not get distracted easily. On the other hand, I'm an introvert, and really loathe the interpersonal nonsense and constant interruptions of ppl barging into my office, more often enough that just to chat. Last month, I had to do a major document review of going through 10s of thousands of emails, and to just plow through that at home, comfy in my bed, where my bathroom is just a few steps away, made me so much more productive than being stuck in the office.