Return-to-office orders look like a way for elite, work-obsessed CEOs to grab power back from employees

Plus they have a ton invested in commercial real-estate and office buildings. They literally losing money and makes me happy.

They really aren't losing money because:

a) WFH has been saving them money (i.e. lowered heating, water, electricity, stationary, toilet paper, food, janitorial, window cleaning, etc.).

b) Their WFH staff are more productive than their office staff.

Just let those leases expire when they do, and these companies will really be saving a ton of money from not having to lease large office space.

I don't get the desire to cling onto some outdated, unproductive, sad way of doing things.
- Just let those leases expire when they do
  
  The companies losing money are the huge companies who don't lease from what I've seen.
  
  A company in my city JUST finished a $250-million expansion onto their HQ right as COVID hit. That same land area is in a central location and was even being highly considered for high density housing before the company bought the land. The parking lot for the new building never gets more than half full. Fuck 'em.
- Control. They call it office culture because it's a cult. They control the way you think and make it easy for you to be manipulated and keep you under their thumb. They can't make you think they give anahit if they can't bribe you with bullshit like snacks and pizza and a gym. They can't slowly take away your benefits because "hey look we gave you standing desks". Office culture needs to die.
- a) WFH has been saving them money (i.e. lowered heating, water, electricity, stationary, toilet paper, food, janitorial, window cleaning, etc.).
  
  How? If I own a building and I can't rent it out, I'm losing money. I still have to pay some bills and probably repay the loan that I took to build or renovate it.
  
  b) Their WFH staff are more productive than their office staff.
  
  Is there undeniable data proving that? I'd like to see a bunch of researches that support each other and have serious samples.
- b) Their WFH staff are more productive than their office staff.
  
  This probably varies place to place, person to person. However, over the course of, say, 10 years, productivity would likely drop in a 100% WFH scenario. People retire and the new hires never really find their groove without the in person experience.
  
  Just let those leases expire when they do
  
  Some of these leases are absurdly long, like decades long. Some own the buildings rather than lease, so they'd need to sell, but who would be buying?
  
  I do see significant reduction in office space and more aggressive 'hot desking' to size a lower occupancy rate due to increased WFH. Before pandemic, our office planned to 80% occupancy, based on measuring generally 60% occupancy (between sick days, vacations, meetings, and travel, a lot of people aren't at their desks). I would not be surprised for them to size for, say, 50% occupancy if opportunities to exit lease for some of the buildings comes up.
No this isn't right. It's cheaper to have an empty building than a full one so companies who own their buildings would still make more money letting their employees work from home.

Also, even if it was true, no company is going to try to solve a problem like that. Companies are selfish. They'd rather everyone else go back to work to boost the value of commercial real estate while they continue to work from home to increase their profits everywhere.

The only reason companies are forcing people back is because upper management simply prefers that work environment. They like to sit in their corner office, surrounded by their peons. A sense of power.

Or, they have the kind of personality where they thrive surrounded by people and can't understand how anyone could be productive at home, data be damned.

It has nothing to do with real estate.
- I 100% agree there are people in management who just like to have a sense of power over people, but there are big corporations losing money over real-estate.
  
  For starters, if you're a firm who owns a lot of rental office space, you're losing money on the businesses not renewing their license (which I'm not saying this is a bad thing).
  
  Then, you have the huge corporate business who have a huge amount of office space which they own. A company in my city JUST finished a $250-million expansion onto their HQ right as COVID hit. That same land area is in a central location and was even being highly considered for high density housing before the company bought the land. The parking lot for the new building never gets more than half full. Fuck 'em.
They try to rent those spaces where I live and its hilariously not working.

No CEO is working a 100+ hours a week.

No CEO is working
You know it's a BS job if A Certain Someone is like 5 of them at once!
And even if they were, it still can't justify orders of magnitude differences in compensation.
- I'd accept a 5 to 1 ratio or salary.
They count golfing and flying to some guy's private island as work too. I would love to see them keep timesheets.

commercial real estate values are one rationale but I don't really buy that unless you own the property. Lots of companies that don't own their property are doing it.

One big rationale behind forcing return to office is that it causes soft layoffs from all of the people who do not want to return to in person working. It's a great way to downsize without announcing layoffs and taking a share price hit.

A part of that real estate equation is that the municipalities give tax breaks to the companies because they anticipate the extra people in the area getting them more money from gas stations, lunches, etc. Those contracts usually state that the building needs to have a certain occupancy for them to maintain the credit... and now municipalities are coming knocking for their back taxes since buildings haven't been full.

Thats what's happening around me, at least
- Then I have the perfect solution! Burn the offices! :)
Sunk cost. No matter if they buy or lease their building, it seems like a waste to have it empty all the time. But that money isn't coming back whether employees come in or not.

Hold out a couple more years for leases to expire. Office real estate market hasn't seen its bottom yet.

Well. Getting more and more obvious that employers want to "own" their employees. Just a number in the grid - pro tip: Don't mention that at work to a manager, ends terribly. Dead man talking.

It's really there from the beginning: you don't get paid to do work, you get paid for your time. What happens when you finish all your allotted tasks in 4 hours instead of 8, you think you can just go home?
- That's why I don't finish my tasks as fast as I can :D

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I'm actually surprised that no one has blown up one of these ugly corporate campuses overnight yet, just so they can't be forced back in the office. God knows if there was a way for me to WFH when I was a sous chef, and a chef for 20 years I would have.
i just wish sycophants in the general public wouldn't believe them

Once you have enough money to buy anything, all thats left is power and high scores. That's why we should eat them.

Commercial real estate will tank and the economy will too.

The people who are in charge are shit planner’s because they just love money and pay to win at universities.

It doesn’t matter anyway because the environment collapse is cascading.

GLHF.

i love how we're supposed to accept the premise that because big companies starting gambling on office buildings (???? why would you do this???? why is it built like this?? why is this allowed??) everyone's life has to be measurably worse
The piece I love is that commercial real estate near me has not really even decreased since 2019, meaning, commercial real estate greed isn't abiding by supply and demand and they're trying to push their losses back on businesses. Workers need to stick it out until lease contracts loop back around and then we'll see who gets left holding the bag.

It's interesting that we've had the tech to work from home for many jobs since probably the 70s or 80s and something like covid finally forced the hand of so many obstinate "leaders".

Grab power back? I wasn't aware the proletariat had made any real true legal progress for their rights in the first place, in, well, many decades. Especially not compared to everything we've lost in that time:-(

Did you forget to log into your lemmygrad account, comrade?
- You're aware that the working class exist outside of the long gone Soviet Union... right?
  
  (I assume you're mocking me for supporting workers rights)

Justify middle management headcount, and keep commercial real estate (and all the ancillary businesses like medium/high end center city restaurant chains) investments up

I think this speculative take is so popular because it gets a rise out of people, but it's much more likely that corporate real estate is just a real big asset on corporate balance sheets, and if everyone panic sells their offices at the same time that market will crash leaving corporations to hold the bag.

I know we want to believe that every senior manager on the planet is fragile masochist who needs to see their employees to feel big and strong and in control, but it's much more likely that this is related to finances.

It can be multiple things.

Real estate costs that they are stuck with. For example, my employer committed to a 20 year lease shortly before the pandemic. They don't have a good exit clause so either those office towers are going to be empty or used, but either way, my employer is paying for them, might as well get use out of them.

Managers that have such a poor understanding of the work that they can't comfortably tell if the work output from their employees is good or slacking. At least being able to see them in person they feel more comfortable that the employee looks more likely to be engaged. It's still possible a slacker is conning them, but at least they aren't as obviously doing so. They may not be masochistic as much as they hired people that know more than they do, and are therefore at a severe disadvantage when evaluating an employee.

As others have pointed out, one mans annoying distraction is another employee's great help. A new hire that needed mentorship. A colleague stuck on a little thing without going out of their way to ask for help in a remote context.

Realistically, having some work from home for morale/better work life balance, and focused individual work and some in person time is probably the most productive scenario.
They get tax breaks from the city to maintain a minimum occupancy. The cities were waiving those requirements during covid, and now they're not. It's that simple. The government and the corpos want their extra money from your pocket and they're insisting on behavior that will get it for them.
Agreed. #1 advice from anyone is "invest in real estate because it's the only thing they're not making any more of." So even if a huge corporation owns nothing and just rents every inch of office space, most likely their investment strategy includes commercial real estate.

Anecdotally, I happen to know of some people who threw a ton of money into local commercial buildings pre-pandemic, because that was the way the investor-class herd was going. These are people that I consider very wealthy, but are small potatoes compared to most of these big corporate CEO types. Now that they own all these buildings, they're squawking because they can't rent them.
I think it can be both commercial real estate holdings, seeing what Big Tech and other prominent CEOs are doing and following their lead, and a way to cutt staff without official layoffs. (Since many people will quit rather than RTO since they no longer live close.to the office, or because they are close to retirement, or they take another position that is WFH or hybrid. I day this because those of some of the reasons my coworkers have quit rather than come in 2 or 3 days a week.)
- Very good point about forcing attrition, my only counter argument (for lack of a better word) would be that it's more dangerous than traditional layoffs since you don't get to choose which or exactly how many employees leave, and my guess is that there's reason to believe you'd lose a large number of senior employees who would have an easier time finding a different remote position.
  
  However the benefits of not having to admit to actual layoffs might outweigh these cons for a lot of companies for sure.
- Except that work is more than just tech companies and there are other industries with retention issues and they are still trying to get people back into the office because of coordination and training issues. In some cases, they have been far more aggressive than tech companies in this regard.
is there any meaningful difference? why should the lives of millions be worse because execs made fucking bets on office buildings?
- I don't think it's ok to post and share inflammatory bullshit to further your agenda, regardless of whether or not I agree with that agenda.
  
  Unfortunately in this case yes, there is a meaningful difference. At a very high level, jobs and the economy are tied to markets. A major upset like a crash in one sector can cause a domino effect as debt goes uncollected and collateral becomes worthless, remember the 2008 housing/financial crisis? Now I'm speculating here, but given that even the US federal government has a vested interest in employees returning to the office, I'm willing to bet that there's a lot more tied up in there than we realize. Corporations and financial institutions fuck up and the working class pays for it.
  
  Don't mistake logical thinking for apathy though, it is bullshit and you should be mad, but without understanding the actual working mechanics you're just giving ragebait articles more clicks. Without spreading the actual source of the problem it'll never be fixed. I'm personally not content with just shouting "eat the rich" over and over on the internet and hoping something changes.
Corporations don't hold real estate unless they are real estate corporations. This theory is a conspiracy theory.
- Lol lots of corporations own entire campuses dude.

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If the CEO of Zoom is asking for staff to go back to the office, it may not just be a desire to control.

I find that a lot of people who defend full remote tend to speak past issues like coordination and mentoring. You may have some CEO's seeing that people are doing individually productive work, but the organization as a whole isn't productive.

Yeah bruh, this is 100% about making sure the poors stay in their goddamned place.
Coordination, mentoring, and culture are intentional. The problem is that in an "in person" work place, deficiencies in those areas are very easy to sweep under the rug.

What I will call "churn", rather the flurry of activity generated by masses of employees coming, going, and doing is frequently mistaken for productivity when instead it's professional level time wasting. The "ship" is making a lot of bubbles and waves but in reality it's just doing very wide donuts in the middle of the ocean and not generating any real forward momentum. Hence, "churn."

I've worked for fully remote orgs with excellent culture, fully in person orgs with horrible culture and vice-versa. In my experience, remote work has benefits for employees and the company. It's saves both money and can (not necessarily does) improve the quality of life of the employees. Not all jobs can be remote. That's understandable. White collar office jobs don't usually fall into the "can't be remote" category.

While remote work can impact the org culture, it usually is more of magnifying glass in that all the existing deficiencies in the orgs culture bubble to the surface and get put in display for everyone to see. CEO's and other senior execs who are embarrassed by this, incompetent, or just don't care immediately blame the magnifying glass instead of the root problem. Identifying and dealing with the root problem would require time and effort that they aren't willing to invest. They'd rather sweep it back under the rug again and continue ignoring it.

And, as is now common, especially in corporate America, the attention span is so short and general state of corporate governance so poor that the only thing that matters is the stock price right at this very moment. No one cares if they're company is even going to be here in 20 years.

So if you work for a company who's CEO is whining about the need for "culture" and "water cooler moments" as a means to being people back into the office, rest assured that when that happens, the company will have the same shitty culture it always has, except maybe a little worse (since lots of layoff or constructive dismissals tend to damage the culture and erode trust). Nothing will change except the guys at the top will get back to pretending everything is fine, even if it's really not.
- Coordination, mentoring, and culture are intentional.
  
  They are, but you may have issues with keeping up these with full remote, where people don't get all the social cues that they would get in an office.
  
  Hell, listen to a lot of the criticism here. Executives and management are trying to "control" workers instead of blindly following individual productivity measurements, even if those individual productivity metrics may not be good for the company.
  
  You may also have cases where the culture role was given to a senior member that no one longer listens to because there isn't a direct chain of command and the duties aren't made explicit to everyone.
  
  Full remote can work, but I feel like a lot of companies are finding that it isn't working as advertised compared to being in office and there isn't a known way to do so that they can implement. So, they are going back.
Why RTO makes sense,

People working at companies like Zoom typically get large sums of RSUs. These RSUs typically start to vest at 1 year and then continue to vest for 2-3 years. By forcing people to go into the office, some of these people will leave, forfeiting any non-vested RSUs. This allows companies to do layoffs without the cost associated.

Salary. These companies will just hire new bodies with lower salaries and higher RSU packages that will vest over longer time with the goal of saving money in the immediate now that debt is no longer cheap.

Training/Mentoring require more effort remotely.

Corporate real estate.

Why RTO doesn't make sense,

Many companies like Zoom have offices scattered across the country. The tech company I work for, for example, me and 3 colleagues are the only ones near my local office in a team of 80. My manager is in another state and most of my 80+ member team are in other states or countries (follow the sun posture). Any internal meeting I have to have would have to be done over Zoom.

Consultant companies like PWC are doing much more consultant hours virtually instead of traveling to clients because clients don't want to spend the extra billable for the travel, which is a key indicator that remote work isn't the detriment that it's being made out to be.

Open office floor plans make productivity worse.

.

Personally I will never take a job again that requires office time, I much prefer meeting up with coworkers for dinner every couple months over forced "teambuilding"
I mentored remotely just fine even back before the pandemic. There are all kinds of tools for communicating with people.
people have lives far, far beyond the scope of offices and business. people have dreams, desires, goals that matter a trillion times more than 'mentorship' or 'organizational productivity' ever, ever could.

centering these discussions around business-school shit is being fundamentally blind. the fact that we have to cloak everything in 'productivity' language is a sick show of penance.
- That's fine that people have lives outside of work, but employers aren't paying people to have good lives. An employer isn't going to self advocate for less productivity.
Show it, the studies have shown that workers are more productive when remote. Evidence would help make things easier to stomach with this insane RTO push. Covid is still kicking around, and the dramatic return to commutes is damaging to our planet.

Coordination comes from competent leadership regardless of location. Any company larger than 10 people needs some way to handle coordination. Async coordination is really under trained and under utilized as a result but works really well with remote workers. You can't async everything tho so synchronous coordination happens the same way remotely as it does in person, with a meeting and sequential execution. This is basic stuff for people who work with logic often like programmers who have had remote work opportunities for decades now.

Mentoring, you're worried about that when most companies won't pay for training or provide time or bandwidth for mentorship. Assuming leadership is onboard with the actual costs and output reductions that come with mentorship, you collaborate mostly the same way IRL as you do remotely: by looking at a screen together. Which is far easier over zoom / teams. Or you ask questions in a call or through chat.
- I've posted in other comments that a lot of the initial studies were based on self reporting surveys, not actual measurements of productivity. One study that used actual measurements from a call center later revised their report as there were issues found like increased call backs.
  
  And as for in-person versus virtual, I've seen a lot of staff don't ask as many questions online as they do in person, even with video conferencing and chat being widely available. You also have some cases where senior staff used to do mentoring and providing some technical direction on projects they aren't working on no longer doing so either because full remote tends to push everything up to the lead, which ends up getting drowned in more communication than hybrid. Sure, the senior staff may be more productive by some metrics, but the department isn't and senior management is going to to try to fix issues on the department level. And as others have noted, there is a shortage of qualified staff, so you can't have everyone be senior staff.

I for one am sick of WFH. There I friggin said it. It's isolating, lonely, and never stops, because there's no divide between work and life. I'm sick of working 12 hours and barely even leaving the house. I miss learning from colleagues who are discussing things I'm not super familiar with, looking over their shoulder to learn more. I miss forming real actual bonds with colleagues and becoming friends with them once we've quit whatever shithole company we met at.

I know this is the minority opinion but I'm really sick of EVERY SINGLE DISCUSSION being about how management is just trying to control staff. Some of us actually want to be in an office and genuinely dislike WFH. I can make a genuine argument for more efficiency in office too, even including commute. Etc. This is all debatable, it's not just about commercial real estate values.

WFH crowd isn't trying to make you WFH

Work from office people are trying to force WFH people in

You're welcome to your opinion and no one is hating you for it, just leave us introverts alone
- I'm an introvert too. Takes energy to socialize and I recharge sitting on my ass reading. Working on technical shit is easier when I can walk over to someone's desk and say "what is this, what happened here, did you consider such and such" etc. Trying to do that when everyone is remote is..suboptimal..
This is about orders to return to the office, not options to do so.
- You know something that really bugs me? People who demand full remote, but absolutely suck at communicating. If you're gonna be remote you need to go out of your way to be accessible and communicative. I have found it there is a ton of overlap between people demanding full remote and people who refuse to answer the damn phone when I call. Then they text me back two seconds later, unironically, not realizing they're demonstrating their shit communication skills. I've stopped arguing with staff years ago about turning on their webcam.
  
  It just really pisses me off and would really help the WFH argument if they improved communication skills and attitude.
I'm sick of working 12 hours and barely even leaving the house.

If you work from home, no one is forcing you to do that. I leave the house every day to buy groceries or play basketball.

I miss learning from colleagues who are discussing things I'm not super familiar with, looking over their shoulder to learn more.

Oh, you're one of those annoying people wasting everyone's time? No wonder it takes you 12 hours to do your own work.

I miss forming real actual bonds with colleagues and becoming friends with them once we've quit whatever shithole company we met at.

Have you heard of this amazing invention called a chat room? I think you are upset you can't bug people all day and call it "networking". If people want to talk to you, they'll do it after work too.
- See it's vitriol like this in every thread that is just so immeasurably irritating. I'm chiming in, in good faith, with my personal opinion on the matter, and you shit all over me like we're not all just trying to get our work done. I find it more efficient working together in an office, leave me the fuck alone will you?
While I acknowledge WFH isn't for everyone. It does take time to create healthy habits around WFH.

For example you mentioned no divide. Imo it is critical to create a "work space" within your home and to isolate work there if possible.

Same with "barely leaving the house". You have to manually create a habit to get natural sunlight. Be it a walk during your lunch break or before/after work.

As for "forming bonds" with colleagues. I built all of.my relationships entirely remote. It depends on the person but the collaboration and social aspect of remote work is capable of emulating ITO life.

That said, I do agree that "hybrid" is the way to go as it's a great "one size fits all". The issue is leadership using a hybrid model that mandates everyone comes into the office. Some people, including myself, just work better and are much happier working from home.

I completely agree with "anchor days" where everyone comes in but that it shouldn't be around work. Instead it should be collaboration and team social activities.
- The thing about hybrid is that if I'm at home while you're in the office, or vice versa, it's pointless. Anchor days are good like you said where everyone is in the office or everyone is at home. I disagree that those are good for team social activities. Personally I've never really gotten anything out of those forced fun type activities (falling exercises being the textbook cliche example). My field is super technical and complicated with a ton of back and forth. I can't just shove something in my staff's face and say here do this. The best training I've ever given and received is simply OJT working together on technical shit, sitting next to each other, looking stuff up, problem solving, making decisions, that sort of thing.
I'm sick of working 12 hours

Longer hours I feel are better suited to an office, at least that way it's not so draining with others around you