Amongst white collar workers there is a definite regional divide.
IMO, the regional disparity is going to continue to grow due to the cost of office space. I know multiple people in management roles who are involved with the calculation on how much office space is worth it. Once you start implementing a hybrid model, then you are paying a lot of money for office space that is only used a few days a week. When your lease comes up for renewal, you start asking questions about how much space, at $50-$80 a square foot, is worth it
I know multiple government agencies in DC are having this same debate. During Covid they were forced to develop a way for white collar people to work virtually. Now that they are back to the previous baseline of 2-3 days per week of teleworking, they are thinking about what kind of physical footprint makes financial sense.
In tech, WFH is still the norm at most pure tech firms. Not sure about other industries but I’m also curious that once hybrid work is accounted for, there’s going to be a lot of excess commercial office space. I’m genuinely curious how companies will handle it. I know firsthand of two companies that moved employees from permanent cubes to “hoteling” where you just find a place to sit. While it sounds great from a space management perspective, you’re even less likely to go in if you have to pick a random spot.
Anecdotally, many WFH people don’t need a vehicle per person.
I think a better question is what percentage of “office jobs” pre COVID were work from home and what is that figure now. It could have been less than 1% and now, just for example, 28%, which is a massive difference.
Also, office vacancy/rent is a good indicator of WFH rates.
There are more and more companies who are requesting that employees return back to the office. Tesla is one of those companies that had that mandate not long ago. I have some friends in finance who are still working remotely. I’m in the Northeast, btw.
I understand that for certain roles and industries, being remote is not an option. Over the past couple of years, I have seeing more and more remote roles being advertised by employers on sites like LinkedIn.
The point I was trying to make was in response to someone who posted that covid led to the work from home cat out of the bag and how it will also lead to the obsoletion of the dealership model. The implication was that work from home is now a permanent trend as a result of covid. While I agree that this might be the case in some industries, the overall numbers speak otherwise and things are reverting back to pre covid. Same thing with dealers’ inventories/discounts. I was disagreeing with the poster that dealerships will cease to exist in 10 years.
There’s definitely a power struggle at my company on the return-to-work vs WFH. SoCal housing went sky high and our wages only saw slightly elevated rates of increase this year. WFH was the saving grace for every non homeowner at my company, because they could move further away and save on commuting. It’s basically gone like this:
Upper Management started with 3-days per week in-office. Couldn’t WFH Monday and Friday every week - People started quitting in droves before it even started.
UM softened it to any 3-days per week in-office with 1-day set by your group manager. People still quitting and vocal opposition to GMs. Most groups are at critical mass at this point
UM leaves it to department managers to enforce per-department/per-group. Debatably worse when one DM doesn’t care and just wants to keep his people, but the other sister group’s DM is trying to cook by the book (dude threatened to offshore his departments jobs to india because people wouldn’t come in - lol what?)
The bright side is it looks like it will stay this way for a while, so my manager only asks that I come in when needed for in-person tasks (like once every other week). Plus UM finally woke up and gave us salary adjustments + bonus % increases next year.
Many companies are definitely not comfortable with the current WFH environment. They are telling employees what they want to hear while the labor market is tight. However, if/when we get a recession you will start seeing a lot more people go back to the office. A friend of mine works at a mid-size semiconductor company. They were having trouble hiring people and keeping their existing employees, so they hired remote and allowed people to work from home. However, their executive team feels the labor market is shifting and they just mandated 2 days in the office. Yes Snap is abandoning their offices but they are struggling and can’t afford to pay rent. I wouldn’t want to work for them even if it was full- time remote.
Just a brief diversion… You may understand but, from the sh*t that I occasionally read on Nextdoor, so many in my area (West LA) do not. It’s really bizarre. I want to (metaphorically) slap them (the people on Nextdoor) to ask, “WTF are you thinking???”
At any rate, to keep me somewhat on topic, I’m self employed (and I’m my only employee), but my work heavily depends on predictable quiet, so I still keep an office not too far from where I live. The WFH shift was nice, in that regard, b/c I was able to give up a 2nd office lease in another part of LA County (and nothing pleased me more than telling that horrific landlord that I was not going to renew my lease).
I probably am in a different situation than most. The vast majority of people, at least in the office I was in, at my company worked from home at least one day a week prior to COVID. I worked from home two days a week, and I had some friends who were full-time telecommuters, due to location (some people live in Illinois, some in California, etc.) or because of kids.
Now, the entire company worldwide is on a hybrid model. There’s no set requirement to be in the office, and it’s more by group and/or manager. My office in particular was probably going to close/shift back to the city anyway, so they closed it at the end of 2020. My group and everyone in my office are full-time telecommuters. We can go into the office in Times Square when we want and just reserve a desk.
The company as a whole is extremely flexible. We can work from wherever in the country we want for 8 weeks per year, and 4 of those weeks can be in another country, so long as you have a work authorization there. For the US and Canada, we’re switching to unlimited vacation next year. Now, if we could get a cost of living adjustment, it would be awesome!
Interesting. I haven’t been working professionally long enough to experience a recession. But it sounds like “fear” is the tactic they’re relying on to get people back into the office. I wish companies would just come to grip with reality and understand not all job roles need to be in person. Instead of this emotional push to get people back in because “they miss the old company culture”.
My company and department likes having “Jack-of-all trades, master of one” engineers. I’m the “master” of structural analysis, but occasionally have design and testing projects. So 80% of the year, its structural analysis on a computer. The other 17% is design work (on the computer) and 3% would be testing physical parts (in-person). The 3-days per week in-office or whatever certainly doesn’t support that. It’s a waste of gas, time commuting and my personal life to come into work and gain nothing.
I used to be hard core “have to work in office” but like many, Covid forced remote work and then we learned to use technology and collaboration tools to make it work and it actually improved communication.
Granted, some teams/departments should be in office but there have been many days where I see them not doing anything anyways (not my team) so the company is just paying for extra overhead. It’s up to management to make sure everyone is doing what they should be and if not, you use the same procedures to enforce performance as if they were in office.
I know when my team is slacking off so if they complain that I’m making them work more to meet deadlines I gently ask them if going into the office would help. So they know what’s up. And I do think they are paid under scale so this flexibility keep them happy.
Now if only upper management understood this new dynamic. They had to lose a percentage of quality staff before they realized they need to be more open to remote schedules.
They still would prefer in-office but they just downsized several locations so they also know the cost benefit.
It’s going to be interesting to see what Elon does with Twitter’s remote policy.
Semi-related but this weekend I spoke with someone who is working on building out Amazon’s HQ2 in Arlington. Amazon got a lot of money to create 25,000 high paying ($150k+) jobs in Northern Virginia and are building a large physical presence in the area. But there are now question of how many jobs they are going to create in area. The pre-covid incentive package didn’t envision remote work. Virginia obviously isn’t going to pay $22k for a remote worker. The question is how many days a week does that worker need to report to the office to count as a “job” created in Virginia.
This guy’s thought was Amazon is likely to miss some.of their hiring numbers and therefore forego some of the incentive thresholds because it wasn’t worth paying hires more or getting lower quality people that would be required to get everyone into the office.
How does this relate to Twitter 2,500 miles west? I think it’s the same dynamic. Top tech talent is still in hot demand. And most of them don’t want to be in office five days a week. You either need to pay employees more or accept less qualified applicants if you want them in office 5 days a week.
No one wants to commute 5 days a week anymore. Why would they? The savings in time with being home with loved ones/children. Savings of personal time and having the extra time before/post work and the money not spending on gas/transportation.
I work in finance (not client facing) and there’s absolutely no need for me personally to be in my midtown NYC office. I’m saving $300 bucks a month by not paying NJ Transit by not having to go in/out of NYC but more importantly ~2hrs a day in TIME.
There are a lot of people in and around the Tri state area that have 1.5-2hr commutes EACH WAY and pay hundred of dollars a month in bus/train passes. Etc
