Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who has since moved on to greener and perhaps more dangerous pastures, told an audience of Stanford students recently that “Google decided that work-life balance and going home early and working from home was more important than winning.” Evidently this hot take was not for wider consumption, as Stanford — which posted the video this week on YouTube — today made the video of the event private.
Did some companies really go back to the office100%? We sure did not, going to the office is more of a social thing, maybe for all hands meetings, customer presentations and that kind of stuff.
The company wins because they can have a shiny office in the city that does not need to have workplaces for all employees but maybe 20% of them at a time.
With all the weird stuff that people do at home, productivity is still higher. In times of crunch working from home has saved me more than once. Etc blabla is this really still a discussion nowadays?
I think it’s been proven time and time again that return to office mandates are a way to avoid severance packages. People end up leaving voluntarily. In the age of tens of thousands of layoffs at all the big tech companies this has to have saved them thousands of salaries worth of compensation packages.
They don’t care about the “quality” of workers because if someone is truly important they get exceptions, everyone else is imminently replaceable.
In my time managing a team of about a dozen WFH employees, I had 10 of the 12 overworking every damn week. They were putting in time off-the-clock just because they were sitting at their desk without anyone coming in to shut off the lights and because they were comfortable at home. In the four years or so that I did that job, I had more problems with people overworking themselves than slacking off.
There were a couple times employees were obviously doing the bare minimum and playing video games. Since I managed in-person teams as well in the past, I know that this is normal, there will always be some percentage of employees that cannot stand working and try to do anything to avoid it. This happens WFH as well as in offices, but when it’s WFH the company managers and owners don’t have visibility on it, and thus feel not in control, and that’s the very worst feeling for most of these folks who run companies.
How do you work the office only having space for 20% of employees? Makes a lot of sense but would be annoying to hot desk. My office only has us in two days a week but has not cut down on the number of desks at all, giving up the potential savings.
You book a desk in an online tool a week in advance or so. Not sure I get the question. Maybe it’s 30% I made that number up.
I think you got it and effectively answered it, thanks.
If the company grows they don’t need to have desks for every new person, so they won’t run out of space as quickly, saving the cost of relocating to a bigger office for further down the road.
My last two companies have been mostly fully remote, we’ve done all hands meetings, we’ve done regular scheduled meetings, and everything in between all remotely. It works well, employees are happier and we produce better work as a result.
We do a day a week just to catch up and remember how to speak.
We might occasionally have to come in for a few days if the owner is in the country. That’s like once or twice a year.
I was asked how I felt about coming back full time and I told them straight. There’s lots of places that don’t demand that, and they pay more than we do. Don’t lose good staff to nonsense policy.