California tech company films bizarre video pushing return-to-office plan — Internet Brands, an El Segundo-based tech company with subsidiaries like WebMD and CarsDirect::California tech company Internet Brands, WebMD’s parent, films a bizarre video pushing a return-to-office plan.
Notice how all the C-level management are the speakers in this video and they desperately need people to come back because otherwise they’d have to work themselves.
In theory the amount of work for people doing HQ levels administration (executives, accountants, etc.) doesn’t change when they work from home. The work is different because face to face communication is replaced with telecommunication, but the same tasks that were done in office are still being done.
My observation is that the people who want to see a return to office have one or more (but not necessarily all) of the following traits:
They think short term or buy into the sunk cost fallacy and want to justify long, expensive commercial leases that the company is locked into.
To understand that work is happening they need to see work happening. This can be driven by difficulty dealing with abstraction or generalized trust issues.
They don’t have a good home life. For a lot of people home is unpleasant and work is a respite. That respite has been taken away by a large, sudden societal shift.