Billionaire CEOs were quick to sing the praises of working from home at the start of the pandemic, calling it the way of the future — but over the last three years, they’ve slowly changed their tune.
Late last year, Forbes reported that 90% of companies will return to the office in 2024, with 28% threatening to fire workers who don’t comply.
But it turns out that the motivations for calling workers back to the office may have less to do with employee productivity or profit margins and everything to do with catering to the egos of controlling managers who want their workers back, according to a recent study published by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh.
Mark Ma, an associate professor of business administration from Pitt’s Katz Graduate School of Business, who led the study, told BI he started the research hoping to understand why some S&P 500 firms want employees to return to the office while other firms avoid calling them back.
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“One of the most common arguments management suggests is that they want to return to office because employee productivity is low at home, and they believe returns to office would help firms improve performance and ultimately improve the firm’s value,” Ma told BI. “That’s the reason they give — but our results actually do not support these arguments.”
What’s even more stupid about return to office is that we know that commuting is a major contribution to greenhouse gas emissions. So working from home would not only be an improvement in work conditions, sparing millions of individuals hours of wasted commuting time each week, it would also be an easy way to reduce pollution and mitigate global warming.
Laws should be passed that mandate employees can work from home whenever it cannot be demonstrated by the company that being on site is absolutely necessary to do the job.
The other stupid part is that WFH makes more sense from a business perspective. Having to pay less in office rent and utilities is great for saving on costs.
If you look around, fast food places and Pepsico and everyone price gouging, it’s a race to the bottom for a last cash-grab before what appears to be an inevitable recession – brought on by some of these same conglomerates. Mass layoffs (tech sector over 250k layoffs last year across the board), among inflation just murdering people’s wallets. Credit card debt is over 1 trillion now, people are “surviving” off of high interest debt to maintain life at this point, but it’s not sustainable at current rates.
We are witnessing companies engage in late stage capitalist practices because we are in late stage capitalism. Unfortunately I don’t see us flipping to socialism, so Imo were heading towards recession, depression, and collapse, all while the climate continues to fuck us.
You can move to North Korea and enjoy socialism!
Not so big on the dictator for life and beyond part, we can do better than that, why not a socialist democracy?
You wanted socialism. Can’t have socialism without a dictatorship.
Oh, you’ve been propagandized against an economic arrangement, that must feel strange. Hopefully capitalism will save you 🙄
all while the climate continues to fuck us.
To be fair, I believe the consensus is that we fucked the climate first.
My personal theory: boomer bosses are intimidated by new tech and don’t trust it.
Wasn’t this the cover story of Well, Duh! Magazine way back in 2021?
Eat shit, office complex moguls. Get a real job.
In other news: water is wet
Rto = return to office
but controlling bosses don’t care
…have they ever? This is par for the course.
Acting like its surprising that they’ll literally ignore the data because it’s about control should be the least surprising finding there could be.
I work from home and my boss frequently says he doesn’t mind us working from home but always follows it up by saying he really misses seeing people “sitting in the seats” and “working in the office”. It really is a weird ego trip, being able to visually see people working for you. Actually getting the work done is secondary to the power they feel of seeing their subordinates toiling away.
My boss constantly rode my ass about my coming into the office. I’m a consultant and work on site for various clients. I do a lot of driving that is not reimbursed in any way by my company so, whenever I have a break, I prefer to work from home. But no, my boss has set the expectation that any time I have no on site client work, I needed to be at the company office, a 45-90 minute commute each way (depending on traffic).
If I need to drive into an office every day, I’m going to get paid the most I can for it. She took away one of the main perks of my job, so I had no reason to stick around. So I found a new job that pays 50% more and I’ll be letting the company know in my exit interview that’s the primary driver for finding new employment. Oh, and the best part? I work from home at least one day a week. My previous employer can get fucked.
Or he could just enjoy being around people. I personally prefer going into an office and having people around. I know that is not the case for everyone though.
It’s fine to prefer that. But forcing your employees to work in the office is an ego trip and makes you a bad boss. Especially considering it’s been proven most people are more productive in a work from home environment.
This was obvious. Actual work involves focusing. WFH encourages me to focus more. The office is a distracting and annoying place to be.
There’s no need to use WFH as an acronym. Can we just stop using acronyms entirely at this point? I know I’m deviating from the point, but fuck acronyms!
I would normally agree with you, acronyms are way over used. But this is an article about working from home and returning to the office. There’s nothing vague or unclear about WFH or RTO here in the slightest, and no one is going to confuse those for a different meaning.
