Office Mandates Don't Help Companies Make More Money, Study Finds (spokesman.com) 70
Remember that cheery corporate video Internet Brands tried announcing their new (non-negotiable) hybrid return-to-office policy (with the festive song "Iko Iko" playing in the background)? They've now pulled the video from Vimeo.
Could that signal a larger shift in attitudes about working from home? The Washington Post reports: Now, new research from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh suggests that office mandates may not help companies' financial performances, but they can make workers less satisfied with their jobs and work-life balance... "We will not get back to the time when as many people will be happy working from the office the way they were before the pandemic," said Mark Ma, co-author of the study and associate professor at the Katz Graduate School of Business. Additionally, mandates make workers less happy, therefore less productive and more likely to look for a new job, he said.
The study analyzed a sample of Standard & Poor's 500 firms to explore the effects of office mandates, including average change in quarterly results and company stock price. Those results were compared with changes at companies without office mandates. The outcome showed the mandates made no difference. Firms with mandates did not experience financial boosts compared with those without. The sample covered 457 firms and 4,455 quarterly observations between June 2019 and January 2023...
"There are compliance issues universally," said Prithwiraj Choudhury, a Harvard Business School professor who studies remote work. "Some companies are issuing veiled threats about promotions and salary increases ... which is unfortunate because this is your talent pool, your most valuable resource...." Rather than grappling with mandates as a means of boosting productivity, companies should instead focus on structuring their policies on a team basis, said Choudhury of Harvard. That means not only understanding the frequency and venue in which teams would be most productive in-person, but also ensuring that in-person days are structured for more collaboration. Requiring employees to work in-office to boost productivity in general has yet to prove itself out, he added.
"Return-to-office is just a knee-jerk reaction trying to make the world go back to where it was instead of recognizing this as a point for fundamental transformation," he said. "I call them return-to-the-past mandates."
The article cites US Bureau of Labor Statics showing movement in the other directionRoughly 78% of workers ages 16 and older "worked entirely on-site in December 2023, down from 81% a year earlier" — and for tech workers only 34% worked entirely on-site last month compared with 38% last year.
"Still, some companies are going all in on mandates, reminding workers and sometimes threatening promotions and job security for noncompliance. Leaders are unlikely to backtrack on mandates once they have been implemented because that could be viewed as admitting they made a mistake, said Ma."
Could that signal a larger shift in attitudes about working from home? The Washington Post reports: Now, new research from the Katz Graduate School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh suggests that office mandates may not help companies' financial performances, but they can make workers less satisfied with their jobs and work-life balance... "We will not get back to the time when as many people will be happy working from the office the way they were before the pandemic," said Mark Ma, co-author of the study and associate professor at the Katz Graduate School of Business. Additionally, mandates make workers less happy, therefore less productive and more likely to look for a new job, he said.
The study analyzed a sample of Standard & Poor's 500 firms to explore the effects of office mandates, including average change in quarterly results and company stock price. Those results were compared with changes at companies without office mandates. The outcome showed the mandates made no difference. Firms with mandates did not experience financial boosts compared with those without. The sample covered 457 firms and 4,455 quarterly observations between June 2019 and January 2023...
"There are compliance issues universally," said Prithwiraj Choudhury, a Harvard Business School professor who studies remote work. "Some companies are issuing veiled threats about promotions and salary increases ... which is unfortunate because this is your talent pool, your most valuable resource...." Rather than grappling with mandates as a means of boosting productivity, companies should instead focus on structuring their policies on a team basis, said Choudhury of Harvard. That means not only understanding the frequency and venue in which teams would be most productive in-person, but also ensuring that in-person days are structured for more collaboration. Requiring employees to work in-office to boost productivity in general has yet to prove itself out, he added.
"Return-to-office is just a knee-jerk reaction trying to make the world go back to where it was instead of recognizing this as a point for fundamental transformation," he said. "I call them return-to-the-past mandates."
The article cites US Bureau of Labor Statics showing movement in the other directionRoughly 78% of workers ages 16 and older "worked entirely on-site in December 2023, down from 81% a year earlier" — and for tech workers only 34% worked entirely on-site last month compared with 38% last year.
"Still, some companies are going all in on mandates, reminding workers and sometimes threatening promotions and job security for noncompliance. Leaders are unlikely to backtrack on mandates once they have been implemented because that could be viewed as admitting they made a mistake, said Ma."
Nope (Score:4, Informative)
Could that signal a larger shift in attitudes about working from home
No. They just learned that they get mocked for trying to sell their "come to office or else" bullshit as anything but a tone-deaf "do as we say or else" threat.
Now we have data. (Score:5, Insightful)
Studies like this show that people do not pay attention to studies like this. Objective data does not have the same persuasive power as one's own intuition or pettiness.
Well, it does for some people. There ARE people in the world who are genuinely interested in cultivating objectivity in themselves and making wise decisions based on actual facts and good statistics. But they are few, far between, and it seems like they are not highly represented among management.
People who don't trust their employees will continue to distrust them, and continue to push for return-to-office mandates. People who like being controlling or bullies will continue to like this and continue to push for return-to-office mandates. People who need office workers to justify their jobs will obviously keep pushing for it. Extroverts who hate being alone (or who believe that forcing introverts into the office makes them become better people) will continue to push for such mandates. Company profitability is not what motivates the return to office push, it's just the last argument used to justify it.
So, we have data. And it won't do any good.
Re:Now we have data. (Score:4, Insightful)
If you don't trust your employees, fire them. There is no way to keep them from slacking off, unless you put a manager behind them 9 to 5 who whips them into shape. And even then, you have to trust the manager to not collaborate with the worker in the goofing off. What do you want to do, hire a slave driver to watch over both of them?
I feel that the projection is strong in the people who do this. It seems that they would gladly goof off, so they expect everyone else to do the same. Guess what: Engineers love their work. They chose this profession because they LOVE doing that. There's a reason I'm still working at 9pm when sitting at home, and it's not that I don't have a hobby.
This IS my hobby! You just happen to pay me to do it!
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>If you don't trust your employees, fire them.
I tend to agree... but the kind of people who don't trust their employees don't trust ANYONE. I assume this is because they're utter bastards and can only understand human interactions in terms of dominance and subservience.
I've seen companies where you can tell someone's ranking in the power structure by how many other people they're authorized to electronically monitor. I don't know how they get anything done while watching everything everyone else is doi
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but the kind of people who don't trust their employees don't trust ANYONE.
Then they are unfit to run a company. Or work as a supervisor for me.
A German proverb says "the knave thinks the way he is" (der Schelm denkt wie er ist), meaning that people will assume that everyone is the way they are. So what am I supposed to think of someone whose default position is that everyone is slacking and ripping them off?
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I like that proverb. That's been my assumption for a long time, but I didn't know there was a common phrase for it.
Re: Now we have data. (Score:1, Troll)
I think you guys are missing the point. Return to office mandates help San Francisco make more money. Though Market Street has been taken over by the homeless from what I understand, which I guess is a good thing...or something...because they need a place to stay, and this is California, where putting homeless people in a tent on a sidewalk is what compassion looks like according to the Democratic party.
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It becomes blatantly obvious that the campaigning started. How else could we explain why mouth-frotting partisan drivel like this could get an "interesting" upvote instead of being downvoted "offtopic" into oblivion?
Re: Now we have data. (Score:2)
Slashdot moderation is very subjective. I always try to add just enough snark to my posts that they end up with Score 2: Troll.
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The thing is, I couldn't even vote in a US election if I wanted, so guess how interesting the whole astroturfing bull is to me.
Not to mention that I wouldn't vote for someone just because the other goofball is even worse. Earn my vote or fuck off. Quite frankly, with most elections lately, my general sentiment was "put them back to back so one shot is enough, neither of them is worth a full bullet".
Re:Now we have data. (Score:4, Informative)
My employer's CEO was largely against remote work pre-COVID, to the point they were actively closing even small offices. The pandemic forced the company to actually evaluate the productivity of remote work, and had to admit that it was mostly okay.
Re:Now we have data. (Score:4, Funny)
There ARE people in the world who are genuinely interested in cultivating objectivity in themselves and making wise decisions based on actual facts and good statistics. But they are few, far between, and it seems like they are not highly represented among management.
I expect a lot more people think they're part of this small group than is actually the case. From what I've seen, people are terrible at objectively evaluating themselves.
I'm the exception, of course.
Re:Nope (Score:5, Insightful)
It lowers the chance of transmission and the chance of a severe development, including the chance of having to go to the hospital and having to be put on a ventilator.
How this has anything to do with the topic on hand is beyond me, but since you asked [dw.com]...
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I can see the value of cities as a form of social pool of people you want to socialize with, with an infrastructure to do so. It makes sense if you want to have things like places of worship, places of entertainment, places to buy stuff... There are things you do have to do in-person because doing these things in-person is part of the reason to do them in the first place. Sharing a meal has a social function on top of the nourishing one. And congregating to collectively worship or discuss topics has an enti
Of course (Score:5, Interesting)
Like pretty much all things, there's no pure white or pure black. There are gradients.
Forcing everyone to come to the office is as stupid as forcing everyone to work remotely.
Let those who loke to go to the office go to the office, and let the ones who prefer working remotely do that. Why is this so difficult to understand?
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4 years ago very few people worked from home, nobody was complaining about it and nobody was threatening to quit if they couldn't work from home. This is is just childish bullshit on the part of childish, entitled employees. STFU and go back to work.
Bob Brisco, is that you??
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Re: Of course (Score:2)
Re:Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
Many people wanted to work from home but could not because cultural norms didn't allow it. Thanks to the pandemic, many people got to experience working from home and discovered that they like it, quite a lot.
Now, with high demand to work from home on the part of knowledge workers, cultural norms are shifting to have much greater tolerance for it.
There is nothing childish about any of this. Well, I suppose your accusation that the desire to work from home and the courage to insist on it is somehow immature is, in fact, a childish thing to say. But setting your pettiness aside, it is quite clear that this aspect of working life is presently being re-negotiated in the first world, and the negotiation is still playing out.
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Re:Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
4 years ago, we didn't know it works. Now we do. It works.
And I'm at work you fuckwit. So STFU and go micro-manage your dog.
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*Raises hand*
I was complaining about it. I was complaining about it for longer than that in fact, and I'm pretty sure I was even complaining here about it sometimes.
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Re: Of course (Score:1)
I remember a friend telling me pre-covid that they would refuse to take a new job with less than 50% WFH, when they already had a job with 20% WFH.
At the time, I thought he was dreaming. But now it's not that difficult to find.
He ended up finding a higher-paying job with 100% WFH in Fintech. He's still there. The WFH is costing the company almost nothing, and has gotten them the loyalty of a highly-skilled worker.
If I got an offer today for another job with more WFH but for slightly less pay per day, I'd se
Re:Of course (Score:5, Insightful)
If you are part of an executive team who invested billions in overpriced office real estate and are worried about having to take a huge write-down on it because it's been sitting mostly empty for the past 4 years, I'd imagine that might influence your judgement on return to office mandates.
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Let those who loke to go to the office go to the office, and let the ones who prefer working remotely do that. Why is this so difficult to understand?
Because those office building leases are expensive multi year contracts.
If they aren't being used to their fullest, office buildings are a liability to shareholders. The problem is that with so many corporations discovering that liability at once, it's a lot harder to get out of those leases. As neither the landlords nor the banks who own their (very heavily leveraged) mortgages want to be left with empty office buildings that make no money. So the mandates ensue: "Get your ass back in that chair so we
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I understand that, but I don't understand this:
rented office space is still there and paid for, regardless whether it's empty or full. If anything, it's cheaper to have it less populated, unless the lease is at a flat rate and power usage is included in the lease. At any rate, it's not more expensive than if everyone would come to work.
They could just as well wait until the lease expires, then not renew, or renew for a smaller surface, or move to a much cheaper building.
Same goes for owned buildings, them b
Re:Of course (Score:4, Insightful)
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All true, but a monthly out-going for rent on a building that's empty makes you look bad. Even though it was the right decision back then, it's not right now - thems are the breaks, it's why the big boss gets paid the big money.
Smart companies are remodelling one or two floors to be "shared work spaces" - not offices, but places where it's possible to collaborate with colleagues and not disturb everyone else. The rest of their offices are either just closed off, or they've negotiated some (expensive) exit f
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All true, but a monthly out-going for rent on a building that's empty makes you look bad.
Not to anyone with an IQ of over 70. It's not as if one specific company is the only one which got the shaft, they all did, they are all in the same boat.
But yeah, I get it. Seen through the filters of high-ranking suits, it looks bad. Goes to show how removed from reality they are.
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The thing is, it's not just personal preference. Most people who prefer to work in the office don't prefer it because of the office itself, they prefer it because their co-workers are there. Myself, I'm one of those people. I prefer the office because I find value in overhearing people talk about work-related issues. Fairly often I happen upon a conversation
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In the end, it's a long-winded way to say you like/prefer going to the office. The reason(s) shouldn't necessarily be "ah, the office".
Me and my team work for a client who's located in a different country. Going to the office has zero advantages.
It isn't about efficiency. (Score:4, Insightful)
It isn't about efficiency.
If it were, they would never have crowded people into cubicles in the first place - something which was a failure at the onset and ever since, but made better use of their costly real estate.
And therein is the issue: it's their real estate investments driving these RTO mandates, nothing more and nothing less. You can unpack it quite a bit, but at the end of the day, it's all the money tied up in corporate real estate, taxes, the deals they have with cities, and so on, driving these efforts.
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> they would never have crowded people into cubicles in the first place
Interesting point - WFH people all have their own office again!
But are you saying the CEO's adherence to Sunk Cost Fallacy is so strong that they would sacrifice talent and profit to enforce RTO ... because of leases?
I would think "control freaks" is more parsimonious.
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It's not -just- the lease, though that's significant. Imagine a company like Amazon or Google, which effectively own a huge swath of downtown Seattle and San Francisco. There's a huge cost in property tax they need to justify.
It's also the tax writeoffs on taxes that the local city and state municipalities have given them for headquartering or having an office there.
Think of it like a RTS game, where if your area is occupied by the enemy, you lose control of it: buildings catch fire, etc. That's effectively
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Reading comprehension is important. I didn't say they still do, I just said that cubicles were created despite the fact that they were detrimental to efficiency...
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"it's their real estate investments driving these RTO mandates"
Either a corporation cannot unload their real estate, in which case it is irrelevant if their own employees occupy the real estate or not; or they can unload the real estate in which case their employees need to be elsewhere.
A corporation specifically in the business of leasing commercial real estate may WANT their lessees' employees to be forced back into the office, but a lessor cannot force their lessees' employees to do a damn thing.
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The leasing company is often owned by the same parent company that's leasing the entire building...
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You can unpack it quite a bit, but at the end of the day, it's all the money tied up in corporate real estate, taxes, the deals they have with cities, and so on, driving these efforts.
Yep. The cities are probably important too - they want the workers coming into the city so they can be taxed, and so they'll go out to lunch, etc.
I didn't mind the office (Score:2)
I never really minded working in the office as I liked the home/work separation. It was much nicer though when the office was only 3 (city) miles away rather than either 12 (highway) miles or 45 (highway) miles across the HRBT (Hampton Roads Bridge Tunnel). When I was primarily an admin, I usually had to be there anyway for many/most things, especially back in the day, and especially when remote meant dial-up, (yes, I'm old) and when I was an admin *and* developer, the job entailed a security clearance a
Re:I didn't mind the office (Score:5, Funny)
I don't mind the office.
I do mind the humans there, though.
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I don't mind an actual good office. An office needs to be designed around the kind of work being done, and workers in it. If you need people to do deep work, they need to be able to put their head down for hours at a time and dive deep without being constantly distracted by cross-room banter, or random co-worker interruptions. If you want people to collaborate on a single screen you need to cubes/offices big enough for additional people to pile into comfortably. A one-size-fits-all ever shrinking cubicl
They run a lot of forums (Score:2)
I dont really like Internet Brands, they run lots of forums making huge dollars off all the nazi bs they pull and restrict others from talking about selling anything in the place that supposedly is the community courtyard for given enthusiast topics.
Screw that company.
It's about commercial real estate values (Score:2)
And no, that's something is not going and getting your mcse and getting out of this place.... You're going to need real power. A kind that comes with organization
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That's fine. They're just a source of money to me either.
And if a better source comes along, they're gone.
And? (Score:1)
It’s real simple (Score:3)
The entire planet is aging and young workers are gonna be scarce for the next several decades. In most industries, any company that unnecessarily pisses off their workers will find themselves outcompeted by a company that prioritizes it’s most important resource - people.
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In my country, about 80% of the workforce retiring every year gets replaced by new workers. For every 5 workers retiring, only 4 new workers start working. And that won't change until well into the 2030s when it finally tapers off. It doesn't recover, though. By about 2038, the workforce in my country will be at about 80% of the workforce we have today (barring immigration and other effects like that).
While this may at first look like an awesome development since it should take care of that 7% unemployment
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I'm not so sure employers want this to work out this way.
Hint: We have a very real and very severe shortage of key skilled labor. Don't fuck with it or be prepped to close your doors.
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That's the thing, though, it will be costly mistakes that may sink companies. That's not exactly something I would consider a good thing.
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Who the hell said anything about making money? (Score:2)
it is about not wasting the money they were already spending (and often have long-term contracts for, or in some cases, long-term mortgages on if they purchased property).
Garbage headline, answering a question nobody asked.
The real situation (Score:5, Insightful)
CEO: We spend $14m on offices, and nobody is here in them?
CTO: Well, studies show we make more money when people work from home.
CEO: The office is empty. It's embarrassing. Make 'em come in.
CTO: Yes, sir.
That's it. No one cares what's really profitable, productive, etc. It's worries about looking bad, looking dumb, have stock-holders ask questions, etc. Reality doesn't matter -- it's petty egos and fears that matter.
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Solution: Put CEO and CTO back to back, because neither of them is worth more than half a bullet.
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Does this mean (Score:2)
The corporate hacks at the top can be gotten rid of as well? After all, if there's no significant difference between people working from home or in the office then clearly there shouldn't be a difference if the guy making a few million dollars each year, plus bonus and perks, is let go. Performance should still be the same with the added benefit of saving the company millions of dollars each year.
Where was the study written? (Score:2)
I wonder if the study itself was written when the authors were working in the office or working from home....
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Do you mean did the author personally demonstrate that you can be productive while working from home?
Well (Score:2)
it's black & white (Score:2)
I will not work on-site. Final, said and done. I came onto this job as a remote, and if you change the conditions that's equivalent to a change of workplace, so you have to pay me severance. Yeah, really. I don't care what amenities your office has, because nothing will compete with the exhausting commute, having to live near a city, and your loathsome 'company culture' (which is essentially a pecking order with a side-dish of sports-team references). Even if you opened an office in my tiny town, I would no