Bosses mean it this time: Return to the office or get a new job! — As office occupancy rates stagnate, employers are giving up on perks and turning to threats::undefined
deleted by creator
Same. The only reason I took the role I’m in is for fully remote. If that’s gone I’m out. That being said I still go in once in a while just to get out of the house. I’ll try and go in more in the summer to save on turning on the aircon at home. If companies are reasonable so will employees.
I highly doubt the push is due to anything but the profitability of commercial real-estate, hospitality, probably councils etc, and a range of other businesses that benefit from millions of daily customers coming to their locales — all the businesses built around a high level of centralization, and refuse to adapt to the changing world.
Micromanagement and extroverts who love the social routine are the minority being used to distract us from the scared capital.
Bold strategy cotton let’s see how it plays out for them.
I can tell you the headline the bossman will have in the coming months.
No one wants to work anymore
But, lets me honest, that’s basically the free square in bingo now.
No one wants to work anymore
We just don’t wanna work for people who don’t get it when so many other people do.
Natural Selection.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
The new pushes for in-person work mark a major shift as executives directly acknowledge the challenges with the model — in some cases saying productivity has declined, and citing fewer opportunities for spontaneous collaboration, mentorship and connection-building.
President Biden recently called on Cabinet officials to urge their employees to return to offices this fall, as downtown D.C. struggles to regain its pre-pandemic crush of commuters.
The goal, Patel said, is to “get people excited” to come into the office to connect with their colleagues without overburdening them or limiting their ability to do focused work — something that’s been a struggle in the age of ballooning Zoom meetings.
Free food, great tools and attractive workspaces are a big draw, but HqO’s data shows that “the number one thing people want out of a workplace is concentration space,” Garbarino said.
With President Biden calling for federal workers to return to offices this fall, she may soon have to brave a two-hour commute through Chicago rush hour and rework her child-care plan — or consider a more drastic change.
The company now funnels energy and resources that used to go to stocking offices with coffee and snacks and determining operating hours toward creating intentional (and less frequent) opportunities for employees to connect in-person.
The original article contains 1,552 words, the summary contains 211 words. Saved 86%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
Do that and I’ll find another one just to spite you.
It’s funny how at least American employers act like we’re not at full employment. While the market isn’t as good for employees as it was about a year ago, the employees still have more leverage than the employers.
It’s not quite that simple. The job market is pretty wonky right now. Around 180,000 tech workers got laid off at the beginning of the year (including myself) and even in high-level somewhat niche roles, I see job postings that have 300-1200 applicants.
We posted for a support team member. Got over 200 applications. Many were programmers. Some quite senior. This is in Australia.
That’s crazy. We can almost never fill our support positions. Granted, the pay is nowhere near development salaries, so why would decent devs lower themselves to support roles?
Source: been in support for almost a decade, not good enough to be an actual dev
From certain perspectives it’s very hard to feel like it’s a job-seeker’s market. Programmers clamoring for a support role is a sign of people desperate to get a paycheck.
Indeed. The position went to the most appropriately qualified for the job (great people skills, self managed, loves writing, good phone manner, etc). The overqualified / differently qualified (programmers for example) didn’t get a look in.
As it should be. But I feel bad for people who are forced to jeopardize their career to keep food on the table. The tech industry has some serious problems right now with the massive stock buybacks and executive salaries at the same time as layoff after layoff is happening. It’s all optimized for short-term stockholder value but not establishing a stable and cohesive workforce.
I’d be curious to see how many of those programmers are overemployed (working multiple jobs secretly) and just blast their resume out to every IT job.
I know that’s a thing that happens but man, I like my free time too much to imagine ever doing it.
With all those laid off people searching at the same time it’s also very hard for anyone with pretty much zero work experience on their resume trying to break into the workforce.
100%. A ton of people are being forced to downvalue their experience just to start getting a paycheck again. It’s gotta be brutal for the entry-level set.
Just wait, in about 10 to 20 years, people will be complaining that not enough young people are doing those jobs anymore. (Some people already are to an extent, lol. They probably have no idea about this though.)
What a horrible situation. I hope that everyone is able to find sustainable work. I can’t imagine suddenly losing most of my salary while being left with the same bills.
Sorry kids, not enough bootstraps to go around.*
* this will not excuse you from being held accountable for your station
I’ll go ahead and tell you. It’s absolutely terrifying. Especially when you have a mortgage. I was laid off on July 5th and took an entry level tech job just to pay the bills. I try not to think about the 49% pay cut and I’m just glad my wife and I don’t have kids.
worker: Gets new job
Employer: Shockedpikachu.jpg
Yeah, companies that are sticking to optional office attendance are going to snap up the best employees. Look for innovation coming from them.
This exactly.
A year or two back there was an article about companies trying to return to office- the CEO of some upstart engineering company had a quote like ‘every time one of our competitors announces return to office we kick our recruitment into overdrive. We get all the best people that way’.The companies that push return to office aren’t going to keep their most productive and intelligent workers. They’re going to keep the ones who can’t find anything better.
It’s really kind of funny… this is a combination of short-sighted management who think that being able to physically see their employees working somehow makes them more productive, and real estate- lot of dollars invested in commercial real estate and CEOs don’t want to admit their flashy new HQ in Silicon Valley was wasted money.
This is why big business and the government want a “mild” recession so badly…unemployment is below 4% right now so employees have the upper hand in a lot of things (wages, union negotiations, working from home). Push the unemployment back to 8% or so and big business is hoping the workers lose most of their leverage on these issues.
Of course Biden wants a recession now, that looks sooo good on the campaign trail.
/s
I wish I could say you’re wrong and that’s tinfoil hat paranoid… but sadly maybe not.
Right now there’s a resurgence of the workers rights and unionization movement, and low unemployment helps push that. Businesses need their employees more than the employees need their employers and the smart employers are skimming the cream of the crop.
I don’t think federal government gives a crap but local governments in business districts are pushing return to office as hard as everyone. They see their (way overvalued) commercial office districts sitting empty, and every worker that doesn’t commute is a worker not riding the metro / buying Starbucks / buying a paper / otherwise stimulating the downtown economy.
Smarter cities are starting to realize that their downtown property values are a fucking bubble that is not sustainable, and they’re exploring turning office space into desperately needed apartments. But that takes time and isn’t easy and it involves hosing a lot of commercial real estate developers and their investors who invested on absurd property values.
Fact is though- real estate (especially in downtown districts) is a bubble that’s long due to be popped. There’s no valid reasons humans have to cluster together like that, the country’s more than big enough to spread people out and not have people paying through the nose for shitty apartments.
Regarding the unionizing, for me, a big push towards it was seeing what’s happening in many companies without one. A good union can help in so many ways. I’ve seen the writing on the wall with some situations that have happened over the last 5 to 10 years. Bad companies are trying to remove a lot of worker protections, and it feels like we really need to remind them that they aren’t invulnerable.
My union for example, has some of the best employment lawyers in the country, and we don’t have to pay on the spot if we need one. Previously, fighting a wrongful dismissal over unsafe working conditions would have taken time and money that many of us don’t have. Now, we know we won’t be screwed.
I would argue that a good company should want a union. They protect and guide both “sides”, and if they’re doing everything right, a union really shouldn’t be a hassle for a company to deal with.
I heard a great quote once- this came from a guy running a maintenance operation for JetBlue back before they had labor issues. He proudly talked about how they paid their people well and treated them well and thus were one of the last non-union aircraft maintenance shops in the area, and in his words, ‘Every shop around here that’s gone union has deserved it’.
The problem is now the same thing it was in the early to mid 1900s when the labor movement first took off- companies view employees as disposable cogs in the machine, so the more work they can get out of each worker for the less pay, the less overhead they have to spend on adequate relief staffing and healthcare and PTO and whatnot, the better. Thus the best situation is high unemployment with desperate workers, where everybody NEEDS the job so they can balance the pay rate with hiring so people get fed up and quit at the same rate as they hire new people. And that way if someone gets sick they can just lay them off and not pay extra healthcare or whatever.
Of course that situation is great for the company, but shitty for the country. It requires a nation of wage-slaves. And that’s a bad way to run a ‘prosperous’ nation.
“The pendulum has shifted from employees having all the power,” wow how could that have possibly happened
Executives: But we have a 20 year lease on this enormous office building! You guys have to come back! Besides, we can’t breathe down your necks or waste 6 hours of your day (plus commute) if you’re at home actually being productive! Wait, why am I telling the truth? I never tell the truth. Not too my wife, my mistress, my kids, my parents, or the IRS, much less you parasites! Don’t you know how much more money I could have if I didn’t have to pay you ungrateful peasants?
Should’ve known my company would never let work from home be permanent. They own the building and the land.
My partner’s employer recently tried this. He works for a mental health agency. That mental health agency has issues with compensation, recruiting, and retention. Yet the CEO insisted that everyone come back, despite the fact that productivity has improved with remote work. In fact, a lot of their patients prefer telehealth.
“Take a title demotion, come back into the office, or quit. Pick one.”
The mass exodus has been astounding. There’s no chance they’ll be able to fill in the gaps left by senior clinicians. Demand for psychologists is sky high right now, and just about every other employer pays more and allows telework.
The patients will be the real victims of this attempt at a “power play.”
“Take a title demotion, come back into the office, or quit. Pick one.”
“No, I think I’ll keep working from home until you fire me despite you dramatically altering my working requirements.”
They just disabled my VPN access and demanded I come back to the office. I had to quit at that point. I suppose they could’ve fired me for job abandonment eventually, though.
I had to quit at that point. I suppose they could’ve fired me for job abandonment eventually, though.
No, you were constructively dismissed at that point. Their choice, not yours. File for unemployment.
That was a year ago, and I got a full time wfh job with better pay in the same industry. Much happier. Should’ve left years before.
The best you can fight for is severance. It’s really bad.
Please keep us updated on this situation
return to office or get a new job
I’ve chosen the latter twice and have been thrilled with the results every time
You mean you switched to a job you thought would remain remote and they too were like, “Okay, play times over. Back to the office.”?
Yep. Also turned out they owned the parking garage next to the office and were counting on us as a revenue stream
Things like this should be outright illegal.
That’s what unions are for, so that when the bosses figure out a way to turn you into a revenue stream you can say “Get fucked, suit, we’ve got a contract!”
I am one of those folks that simply doesn’t have the personal discipline to work from home. There are literally dozens of us. While office life is lonely now, there’s no way that people who don’t need to be in the office to be productive should be made to come in. That said, my GF has a coworker who is WFH for a company that is based in the South but they chose to live in NYC (they didn’t live there at first) and are getting paid NYC wages, which somehow doesn’t seem fair.
I’ve got a weird and kind of opposite experience to your GF’s coworker: I started my current job as a remote employee this year. I think the median wage in my area is like 50k, but I’m making more than twice that because of my role’s market rate in areas like Silicon Valley and NYC. So I’m living relatively large considering my area. But I’m also not actually living large right now; we went for a 15 year mortgage term to minimize interest and allow us to actually live it large when we own our home at a relatively young age. It’s definitely weird to know I’m making baller wages compared to a lot of folks around me, but living within similar constraints as them.
For such “genius” “business leaders” they sure can’t understand the concept of supply and demand
They just want to make people they view as lesser than them suffer.
Suffer on the way to work, suffer finding a parking spot, suffer getting into the building, suffer working, suffer getting out of the building, suffer getting back to the car, suffer on the way home
Over and over your asshole bosses are getting off on your suffering
Well yeah, but also I think it’s just that the same people who own these businesses that people work for, and the friends and family of those people, also own lots of property much of which is office space which they don’t want to lose money. That and all of the businesses (e.g. Starbucks) and the property they’re in that partially make money from people on their way to work. And if you want to go even deeper, if people are WFM then they may not have to eat out as often, might not need to pay for a lot of things as often if they have more time.
So much money can be lost and rich people all know each other and have class consciousness, I think that’s why we’re seeing so much anti-WFM propaganda
What’s WFM? I usually see WFH.
Huh, yeah I meant WFH lmao. No idea why my brain decided the acronym should be WFM instead haha.
Work from homme
Work From Mansion
This is the key, and it cuts in different ways and needs planning strategy.
If we don’t go into town, then the businesses associated with going to work in town are in trouble, so coffee, lunch, snack, may as well get a book, after work drinks and then late food. All have less customers. Some of whom are themselves!
So a spiral of decline, less retail jobs in town, less secondary and tertiary employment “in town”.
Theoretically we can now spend some of that money locally IF the local has the supply and this is where political strategy is needed to replan where we sleep as always where we spend our casual cash. And in many cases these dormitories are not well planned for that.
So unfortunately we need to wait out this next phase of resistance in order to build political consensus for zoning and planning for more sustainable local hubs.
And they’ll win, eventually. They’ll take the L, replace employees over time and suffer for it but in the end they will win and we’ll all be back in office
Especially if the pay higher wages to get fresh blood.
If they pay me more to go back into office, then I’ll take the trade if the money is high enough. Everything has a price, as they say. But it better be worth all the extra shit you have to deal with, least of all being the sick people at the office. I haven’t gotten sick since COVID started basically
Yes, we can still go in but now we have measured the difference and can judge what it would take to make it worthwhile.
At this point businesses have two options:
- Bite the bullet, terminate lease agreements and pay the fines associated, then advertise yourself as a full remote company and attract global talent.
- Be penny wise and pound foolish, stomp your feet, slowly hemmorage the best employees until you’re left with people whose only talent is playing office politics.
We’ll see how this plays out in the long run, it wouldn’t be out of character for the owner class to start needling their pet politicians to devalue currency even more to put those pesky workers in their place.
There is another option:
- Downsize the office to better fit with the number of people who do actually want to be in the office, either full or part time, and don’t cause a huge ruckus about people who prefer to work remotely.
At my job, most people are in the office 2-3 days a week, but there are a few who are there nearly every day. We also have some people who are remote/WFH, including a few who are remote even though they live very near by.
Says a person that doesn’t know the difference between “you’re” and “your”. Not very persuasive.
ever heard of…typos ?
Np.
Yes.
cool
Says a person that doesn’t know the difference between “you’re” and “your”. Not very persuasive.
My brother in Christ, there is a way to correct someone’s syntax. This is not the way.
Not very persuasive.
Your sentence fragment invalidates your entire argument.
“not very persuasive” is not a sentence fragment. Sentences need a subject, verb, and a complete thought.
“Don’t do that” has an implied subject of (you). “Not very persuasive” shares the same type implied subject and is a complete sentence.
Bonus fun fact, the shortest complete sentence in the English language is “I am” but not “I’m” because contractions are inherently dependent.
“Don’t do that” is a correct imperative sentence, which as your link says does not have a subject. “Not very persuasive” is not imperative and is indeed a sentence fragment.
The first sentence is also a sentence fragment and the period should be placed before the ending quotation marks.
Does the period in quotation mark rule applies to quotes? I don’t think it does, but this stuff always confuses me.
It actually might be correct they way they did it since they were quoting a word rather than a complete sentence. It is indeed confusing. I figured if I were wrong, someone might correct me and I’d learn something.
I see no counter-arguments in your reply.
owner class to start needling their pet politicians to devalue currency
Literally no capital investment firm would ever do that. This severely weakens their positions for growth via M&A and limits their ability to globalize trade.
