A lot of times, when people discuss the phenomenon of employers ending work-from-home and try to make their employees come back to the office, people say that the motivation is to raise real estate prices.
I don’t follow the logic at all. How would doing this benefit an employer in any way?
I think this is it too. A lot of big business is just a game of follow-the-leader. My small company recently instituted a return-to-office program when before they were encouraging employees to work remotely if they wanted since our jobs can be done from anywhere. When I asked about why they were doing this move now during my performance review, the answer I got was “A lot of other companies are making the same request of their employees.”. When I asked why those companies were doing it, they couldn’t give me a good answer.
It’s pretty infuriating that it took a global pandemic to finally prove to these corporate whip-crackers that you can indeed work from home and still be productive, and now they are trying to claw that back away from us a day or two at a time until we’re right back where we were.
In my company they closed down the main office in the city center since almost no one was actually going over. (Think whole floor and there’s maybe 10 people there at once). 4 months later they announced people would have to go back to work 2 days a week and they’re already planning for 4 days a week as it was pre COVID.
Luckily in IT they’re only demanding this of senior leadership and up since they know we’ll jump ship quickly. But the threat looms just so they can look for their investors who only care about their stock going higher.
The remaining office is the original startup building tiny as fuck, loud and uncomfortable with bad wifi in the outskirts of the city. I think the only reason they haven’t forced people to just go back is that they physically can’t fit all of them into the shitty office at the same time