As most of you know to your sorrow, I have an obsession with certain non-computer subjects. The origins of COVID and remote work are two examples. Oddly, those two subjects have collided recently. With the end of COVID lockdowns, many companies are reconsidering their work-from-home policies.
A certain amount of the pressure to return to the office is driven by venal real estate concerns: both exposure to the real estate market and in some cases community requirements to have a certain number of employees present in the “downtown area”. That and that fact that hideously expensive office space is lying fallow provides a powerful financial motive for wanting employees back in the office.
Gleb Tsipursky has an article in Fortune that posits that a large part of the problem with the return to office movement is CEOs relying on the opinions of other CEOs and their gut feelings rather than data. He uses Amazon’s Andy Jassy as an example. When asked why he was insisting employees return to the office, Jassy’s answer was essentially that that’s what all the other CEOs were doing.
Some companies are making more nuanced decisions. For example, Salesforce looked at the data and discovered that new hires do better by being in the office and meeting their colleagues so they tailored their approach to take the data into consideration. They ended up with happier employees by fitting the policy to the individual.
As I’ve said before, work-from-home is here to stay and CEOs who wage a battle against it are risking their careers and the fate of their companies. As Tsipursky says, some positions require more on site presence than others and intelligent management will look to the data to discover what those positions are rather than instituting a one-size-fits-all policy.