(1) Executives with emotional attachment to certain leadership styles that are enabled by physical presence,
(2) Interest in the investor class for the commercial real estate market. The business impacted may not be invested in it, but the businesses’ shareholders in sufficient numbers probably are, and so are the influential constituents of the politicians they want favors from, in a time of increasingly naked political corruption and cronyism.
(3) Backdoor layoffs. RTO is unpopular with large swathes of the work force, and people will quit because of it. That’s good for a firm likely to be cutting positions anyway; there’s no need for severance, regardles of scale there’s no WARN Act notice requirement, and if you still have to cut more positions afterwards, it makes it less likely that those cuts will hit WARN Act thresholds. And while the people that quit may not be the ones it would be your first choice to cut, they are the ones that would be most likely to quit in the kind of less-employee-friendly and financially leaner (in real terms) times likely to exist for a while after cuts.
With Microsoft its probably mostly (3), with maybe some degree of (2), with (1) maybe, especially in the political salience, being a plus in the eyes of some decision-makers but not really driving the decision.
There are firms (and public agencies) where the relationship between those factors is very different in driving RTO mandates.
Why not extend the baseless paranoia and say it is because they want to see auto company profits go up? And also support petroleum companies?
Or is it just real estate that is boogeyman secretly running the country behind the scenes?
Now, I would imagine that there are quite a few in the top management who originally signed off on that expense. Probably the same people who were talking about replacing offices with cubicles since 2015, which means Satya and his inner circle. So now they've spent a lot of money, they have to do something to show to the board that it wasn't wasted. Which means filling those buildings with employees, whether they like it or not.
It's not an explicit decision making factor, just something that's in the background that has contributed to the overall idea that "RTO = good"
These decisions are all being made by vibes, after all, not by a cold rational analysis
Just follow the money, it usually works very well. Sometimes, people are just dumb on their own and/or as a group but I don't think thats the case here. Tens of billions if not more in lucrative real estate is at stake.
These executives don't like looking dumb and these billions in useless investment are statues to them looking stupid otherwise.
When leadership decides their velocity is too slow for whatever reason, they look for deck chairs to move. RTO is one big deck chair they can move and many will assume it will improve performance and velocity.
The problem is that I've never seen anyone actually prove that out for RTO with solid data. And that goes both ways, I haven't seen anything to prove that remote-first is universally better for performance.
I’d agree that “do-something-ism” is a factor, both on its own and as an accelerant for any pre-existing bias in that direction that packed an impetus or pretext without bad results.
So you're doing backdoor layoffs, but you're laying off the people you'd most likely want to keep, leaving the company with the less experienced/talented people.
The corporate structure is not created around talented people, but around mediocrity. In Dilbert land you have no use for brainiacs.
In my current environment one line bugfix takes 3-4 workdays to release. Does it matter one bit if you will do the fix in 10 or 100 minutes if it will be overshadowed by the time THE PROCESS consumes.
There is no way for somebody like Nadella to have an understanding of most employees' performance, and the chain of management is so long that he doesn't trust anyone else's ability to ascertain individual performance. This leads to the introduction of "objective measurements" of performance, which further undermines trust, as everyone now starts trying to manipulate the numbers.
I think at some point, it's just inevitable that C-level management takes decisions based on the assumption that people are replaceable and that the difference between a great performer and a poor performer is essentially irrelevant.
a.k.a Dead Sea effect
company will probably write exceptions for those people into their contracts; my neighbor, a talented senior dev lead at BigTechCo, has it in his contract that he can WFH regardless of RTO calls
There's no reason to covertly plot convoluted "backdoor layoff" schemes when they're openly doing layoffs on a regular basis. "Backdoor layoffs" is a silly meme loved only by the sort of people prone to falling for conspiracy theories.
I can have the call in the background while looking at something else without it being impolite. I can eat, drink, or use the restroom at will. I can wear comfortable pants. I can throw laundry into the wash in the couple minute gap between meetings. And when the last meeting ends, I close the laptop and I'm already home, no miserable drive in rush-hour traffic.
Of course, there is something worse than in-person meetings. Which is meetings that are hybrid, with a groups calling into zoom from two different conference rooms in different locations. Those manage to be far worse than just everyone individually joining the zoom. And ironically, that's the type of meeting that becomes common when you force your distributed workforce back to offices split across a dozen locations.
This works great when you are one of a dozen anonymous people on a zoom call. less so when you are the senior person in the meeting who everyone is actually talking to and expecting you to make a decision.
But this response kind of proves my point. If you are the principal in a meeting, the fact that everyone else in the meeting is zoned out and doing something else is not great.
At least with actual people, in person there's more to the communication... I miss lunch with coworkers. I now pretty much have to work from home (vision decline, so I cannot drive), I wish it weren't the case.
Again I do not have a good explanation for RTO.
I'm surprised this was not mentioned as a possibility.
My wife works at a multinational which has also decided to push RTO. Her closest team member works in an office 200 miles away from her office (in a different country), the vast majority of the rest of team are located between 3000 and 6000 miles away, on a different continent.
A friend of mine at AMZN has the same issue, his team is literally scattered around the globe.
I've also never seen a company that actually tracked that well enough to make a decision like RTO based on their own data.
They can't all love commercial real estate that much right? Not all executives invests in office buildings.
Unless you think all RTO is a conspiracy.
All else is nowhere near equal, of course. That's the real rub.
Yeah. No you don't. You're, somehow, a fraction as competent and professional as some teens and 20-somethings making toys in their spare time, if you do. Definitely deserve seven-plus figure salaries for that.
The money is there so that things that are desired happen mostly on time.
You are flipping this around: "companies pretend they need this whole fucking edifice", but they'd need to pick the winners first. those people need no management for them to do what they are motivated to do, but corporation have some people they are asking to do something they might not care much about - the same results aren't guaranteed.
It's far more likely a mixture of (1) and actual results - in-person/hybrid teams produce better outcomes (even if why that's true hasn't been deeply evaluated or ultimately falls on management)
I think a more reasonable answer is they think employees are more productive and a large swath of employees don't do anything. I wouldn't believe it unless I've seen it myself. At a large org, there is a significant portion of people that don't do anything meaningful. Sure they'll waste time in the office as well, but at least they're somewhat more productive or available. They're not watching Netflix in their underwear. Every large organization I've been at had these people.
It's really that simple. The alternative is really conspiracy level stuff.
For one the circles they run in are going to be full of like-minded people; i.e. people for whom work is the most important part of their life. People like that want RTO and don't understand those who oppose it. When those are your priorities and all of your pees share them, its going to produce an echo chamber where most executives want RTO.
Furthermore their lifestyle is completely different. Most are going to have chauffeurs so they can be productive to/from work. They are going to have aids that take care of the food shopping, laundry, picking kids up from school, cooking, helping with homework etc. RTO does not affect them nearly as much as their employees who still have to deal with all of this in addition to commuting time now.
Its really just as simple as that. They lead completely different lives than their employees, are surrounded by other executives in friend and professional groups who have similar lifestyles, and generally don't understand why someone wouldn't want to RTO.
I'm sure leaders believe this, I'm even sure it happens. Yet despite how obviously and deleteriously widespread this phenomenon is, isn't it amazing that we still can't seem to quantify notable efficiency and effectiveness gains from RTO mandates? And that's setting aside whether any hypothesized (at best) productivity gains are sufficiently high enough to justify the expense of office space rentals and office maintenance.
Let's also remember that the typical RTO experience is one where members of a geographically distributed team are RTO'd so they can remain geographically distributed, just working out of company owned or rented spaces instead of their homes.
No, quarterly earnings. In this case, retained earnings, but they want to show profits in a situation with high inflation, stagnant employment, and other issues where customers are not as spendy as they once were.
1 is spot on.
> And nobody is dumb enough to do RTO as a layoff proxy because anybody with a brain knows you're going to lose the people with options, who are exactly the people you don't want to lose.
Here is what our CEO told me once: layoffs always mean you loose more people then those you just fired. That is unavoidable and can amount to additional 30%. And obviously those will be those with options. He said that you can not avoid nor control this factor, there is no point in overly fretting about it. From his point of view, people always have agency to leave and layoffs and surrounding chaos always annoy people and weaken their ties.
These arguments based on "we do not want to loose good people in layoffs" are off mark. Company will loose good people in layoffs.
Source left since so I don’t know how much productivity has improved.
Advice to new grads: get into the office 5 days a week for at least a few years.
https://fortune.com/2024/07/24/return-to-office-mandates-lay... https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/its-offi... https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/12/why-rto-mandates-are-layoffs...
You are very ignorant of the real world.
I wouldn’t be so sure of that…
How is this not a net loss for them?
From their perspective, wouldn’t that just be moving money left to right, plus even more overhead?
