Major Employers Scrap Plans To Cut Back on Offices (reuters.com) 186
Most major global companies no longer plan to reduce their use of office space after the coronavirus pandemic, though few expect business to return to normal this year, a survey by accountants KPMG showed on Tuesday. From a report: Just 17% of chief executives plan to cut back on offices, down from 69% in the last survey in August. "Either downsizing has already taken place, or plans have changed as the impact of extended, unplanned, remote working has taken a toll on some employees," KPMG said. Many offices in London, New York and other Western cities have been empty for months after health authorities ordered staff to work from home where possible, but the roll-out of vaccines means some firms are now planning for a return. Most chief executives said they wanted vaccination rates to exceed half the population before they started to encourage staff back to the office -- a target which is close to being met in Britain but remains distant in much of Europe. More than three quarters of chief executives also wanted the government to encourage people to return to offices before employers themselves started to request it.
Turns out WFH is great (Score:2)
until it isn't
Business Bling (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is for most Companies, having a big office building(s) full of people is sign on how successful a company is.
As well when we check up on a company you may never heard of before, and see if it worth your investment, you will go and see the Office HQ or near by ancillary offices as a way to confirm its success and stability.
A modern software company, can be successful and extremely wealthy, hiring thousands of workers without any physical building. And when the HQ is looked up. It could go a modest residential home where the CEO lives. (not all super wealthy people will want to live in opulence). However for someone who wants to see how strong that company is, may want to see a nice large building, Full of happy buzzing workers.
The Office is really a Business version of Spinning Rims, it is just a way to show that they have money and they are a stable company. (Where in reality it may not be the case at all)
Re:Business Bling (Score:5, Interesting)
The thing is for most Companies, having a big office building(s) full of people is sign on how successful a company is.
As well when we check up on a company you may never heard of before, and see if it worth your investment, you will go and see the Office HQ or near by ancillary offices as a way to confirm its success and stability.
Well, at least that helps explain how "tech" companies can valuate themselves at billions while losing hundreds of millions, never stand to actually make money, and yet take their company public with massive rewards.
They must have huge profi...er I mean buildings.
Re: Business Bling (Score:3)
Huge tracts of land.
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The thing is for most Companies, having a big office building(s) full of people is sign on how successful a company is.
Possibly. Personally I think the issue is these businesses are finding there are reasons they can't just drop their offices. For example, a buddy of mine was saying the place he works at has empty offices but will need to rent two more because of power concerns.
That's just an anecdote so take it with a grain of salt. But pls consider that moving from a large place is expensive. Gotta store stuff, gotta unload stuff, gotta move stuff, gotta coordinate all that, server's gotta move meaning noone can work
Re:Business Bling (Score:5, Interesting)
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With contracting, I've been working from home 100% of the time for at least the past 8 years...with Teams and the like, we have fully functioning meetings and everyone loves the flexibility.
Hell, I"ve not had to buy work attire in almost a decade...its nice to work in a t-shirt, boxer shorts and bunny slippers.
And no, we never find the real need to turn the cameras on (security issue anyway).
What is the problem people have?
If you have a problem with your kids...well, that means you nee
Re: Turns out WFH is great (Score:2)
Thanks for the epic parenting advice. Now I know what Iâ(TM)m doing wrong. I didnâ(TM)t even imagine it would be so easy. Thanks for that.
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IBM studied the problem and what they found was that people on the bottom (those doing the work) saw big productivity gains.
Unfortunately, those that manage them who preferred a "collaborative process" saw 92% declines in productivity. They needed the interactions to work effectively.
Personally, I think it just exposed how little middle management does vs all the meetings they need to talk about what they'll get others to do.
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Unless you are Jeffery Toobin doing the five knuckle shuffle. DOH!
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. . .or that you're a German Shepherd. . .
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Not in the way you are describing...we really aren't selling anything.
On any given day, from 15-50 I would guess.
I'll grant it, some jobs lend itself to 100% WFH better than others....but I have to think in general,most professional level jobs would work for it most of the t
Re:Turns out WFH is great (Score:5, Insightful)
until it isn't
Turns out middle management is worthless.
Until middle management says it isn't.
Why is it that every pandemic-driven remote worker, is viewed as "suffering"? IMHO, this remote work bashing is nothing more than middle managers desperately clinging to a job justification. And it's rather pathetic that the overall success story of remote work will be corruptly swept under the rug and forgotten about now, in favor of herding the human cattle back into their cube farms and policing their every move.
Environmentalists are ready to lay waste to the "toxic" oil industry, and yet forcing millions of humans to pointlessly commute, is met with a deafening amount of silence? Mind explaining your stance hippi, er I mean hypocrite?
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The worst part of working from home for me is management. They have no idea what they're doing. They are flailing about like morons, and every month there seems to be some other draconian requirement to document our work. Literally nothing has changed about our jobs other than not sitting in the cubes, and all the work is still chugging along, despite all the hurdles due to COVID.
But everything working fine isn't good enough for management. They suddenly need all sorts of work tracking and logging that they
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Problem is a lot of businesses have so much bureaucracy to the point where there is no objective way to track effort to results.
So they settle for 'hours seriously worked' as the best proxy for that.
In theory an efficient company would streamline those organizations to have fewer disconnects between business results and the actions of the employees. However every participant of that bureaucracy is actively working to make that impossible to know how to do.
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They are worthless. WFH is the great equalizer. Suddenly everyone has a corner office. Nobody is wearing a suit and tie anymore (not that many were in the first place but it always conveyed executive status).
Old school middle managers (meddle managers?) are being exposed for what they are - sniveling, boot licking corporate backstabbers. They are trying to sell this narrative of the poor suffering wfh employee when really it is them that are suffering. The vast majority of the people on my team love working
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It isn't just the middle managers which love looking at the people at desks and bootlicking their superiors. Upper level management is used to having their boots licked and that's hard to have happen if the middle managers aren't in the office.
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While I'm a moderate introvert my stress comes from the fact that I'm rarely alone enough to recharge. I never really realized how much I needed that short time I was in the car or walking to/from work to help me balance out everything else. Now that I don
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Why is it that every pandemic-driven remote worker, is viewed as "suffering"?
Because pain and suffering are newsworthy whereas contentment is not.
As a sustainability professional (which I'll consider in your "environmentalist" category), I'll go ahead and say that about 95%+ of us are working to make remote work a more permanent tool in our toolbox. We've had a 1-year test phase and it's proven workable in a pandemic and thus will be genuinely GOOD when people aren't managing kids at home post-pandemic.
Ya, there are concerns that other sustainable transportation industries will take
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Why is it that every pandemic-driven remote worker, is viewed as "suffering"?
The only two classes of workers I have seen stories claiming they are suffering are parents of young children doing remote learning and young workers having trouble building their network early in their career. I haven't run into news stories claiming other groups are suffering under remote work, and haven't heard that from actual coworkers or friends who don't fall into the two groups I mentioned.
Sure there are stories about general isolation, but that has more to do with lockdowns than working from home.
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And those with young children will have a much easier time of it once schools reopen. After all, what did their kids do while they were at work? They were either at school, or in childcare.
Just because you're working at home doesn't mean you need to have the kids there with you, any more than you'd expect to take the kids into the office with you.
When it comes to isolation, people should spend more time getting to know their neighbors.
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When it comes to isolation, people should spend more time getting to know their neighbors.
I know I'm an introvert, but I've never been too keen on this advice. I grew up in a rural area with about 20-30 kids in my grade and the grade above/below me. It was hard forming strong friendships with such a small group of people. Sports was generally the main common interest most of us had. Once we all went to high school, I don't think anyone's friendships from grade school lasted (so it wasn't just me). Having 400 kids in just my class alone provided far more options to find friends with much greater
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until it isn't
Going to have to disagree with you there.
WFH is 100% pure unadulterated awesome!!!
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The only thing I don't like is the inability to go do fun stuff after. When I can WFH and then pop off to the pub after work, it will be amazing. Or pop off to the pub and monitor emails for an hour or so at the end of the day.
It's great to no longer have all the interruptions of office life. We all cringed when during a "I need to be doing something" meeting one of our big bosses talked about how she missed hearing phones ring, conversations in the halls, and the ability to come ask us questions at our des
Re:Turns out WFH is great (Score:5, Interesting)
until it isn't
I miss the "doorway effect" [scientificamerican.com] of working in an office. I walk out of the office door, and immediately forget about all of the problems I encountered during the workday. Same thing goes with home. I walk out my front door, and forget about all of the problems with my personal life. It frees me up to focus on work.
When I work from home, I feel neither here nor there. My brain is thinking about work and personal stuff at the same time, and I don't have the bandwidth to do both. I find it very stressful.
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When I work from home, I feel neither here nor there. My brain is thinking about work and personal stuff at the same time, and I don't have the bandwidth to do both. I find it very stressful.
I have the same issues. It's hard to "switch gears" from Work Think to Home Think. Honestly, the best advice I have is to do a virtual commute: When you're done working for the day, shut down Outlook, Teams, phone, and/or whatever work-comms you have. Then do as close to whatever it is you used to do on your ride home from your home office for a half-hour. For me, it's reading the news or watching dumb YouTube videos.
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A friend of mine takes a 10-minute walk at the start and end of her WFH day. That's enough to trigger the doorway effect for her. YMMV of course, but it's worth a try.
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A friend of mine takes a 10-minute walk at the start and end of her WFH day. That's enough to trigger the doorway effect for her. YMMV of course, but it's worth a try.
I might give it a try. It was easier last summer when it was nice outside. I would naturally go outside for 10 minutes after work. We had a couple feet of snow this winter, and it was really a drag. Especially with it being dark at 4:30.
It's still hard when someone goes walking through my basement "office" with a load of laundry though.
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Going to be interesting to see (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Going to be interesting to see (Score:5, Insightful)
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Still they are Hybrid options where business can downsize their offices. So if employees are at the office 2/3 of the week. They can sell or lease out 1/3 of their office building, and "hotel" office/cube space. Where you Cube is no longer assigned to you and only you. But you get a different cube every time you get in the office.
Re: Going to be interesting to see (Score:3)
A great way to destroy somebody's sense of belonging and make them feel insecure in their job. Which school of management teaches this crap?
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A previous employer instituted the 'hotelling' concept when we moved to anew building. It was linked to the idea that people could WFH a couple days a week as well. This was all well pre-Covid. You cannot imagine the cries of anguish about people who would be losing their 'permanent' desks. I will admit while not super upset, I was not fond of the idea.
However a couple months into the process it was all fine. The hybrid model worked great. There were a few people who where intent on having their own d
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Re:Going to be interesting to see (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess I could see going back in the office 1-2 times a year maybe?
But really...why?
I've worked remote for 8+ years....no problems at all, with major projects, etc.
The workforce is scattered all over the US....its great.
What is causing you so many problems?
What do you not like?
You miss having to buy office attire?
You miss having to worry about the volume of the the stereo or tv on in the background?
You miss assholes that just drop by your cube to chat, messing up your concentration, etc?
You miss all the office politics?
You miss having to take vacation time to come home for the plumber or other maintenance guys?
You miss being there to accept your packages and having to worry about porch pirates before you get home?
You miss having to get up earlier to drive to work?
You miss the drive...the traffic?
You miss time missed at home with family and stuff you want to do in the evenings spent driving home, etc?
Seriously...WTF is driving you up the wall?
What exactly do you miss?
People without WFH capability (Score:3)
With WFH they've all got VPN access now, so they're constantly getting bugged to do after hours work they didn't used to. They're hoping that if they end WFH they'll go back to the good 'ole days where they put in their 40 hours and that was that.
It won't happen of course. They'll end up with the worst of both worlds. But that's what they're hoping anyway
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> so they're constantly getting bugged to do after hours work they didn't used to
"No."
IT people need to study the Prisoner's Dilemma.
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If someone is calling me after hours, I ask about the OT forms that need to be filled out.
I've done that in the past with W2 work. I contract....they KNOW I bill if they call, and they generally don't call for any work that can wait unless it is an emergency.
You have to have a little backbone, they don't respect you if you don't stand up for yourself.
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Why? I like and need the social interactions at work... In person... Talking to people through a screen all day is extremely demoralizing and demotivating. I'm not a hermit who wants to live and work from their basement subsisting on hotpockets. Then again, I work for a large company with a great campus and amenities and social functions/outlets - I might feel different if I worked somewhere that didn't provide that.
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You don't have any real friends that you spend time with, in person when off work?
I'm a very nice and sociable person, and when I had to work insight, I'm amiable, but those are work people, not friends.
I found it is not a good thing to have personal relationships at work...it can get messy.
I have a LOT of close personal friends outside of work and that is where I get my social interactions done...friends are friends....workmates are w
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Well, I can't speak for the original poster. But I'll comment on a few things I've heard from co-workers...
You've been working from home for 8+ years. I'll bet you have a home office. With a door. That you can close. And a requirement to all others living there that they stay out unless it's an absolute emergency. You may have some kind of light that goes on when you're in a meeting so people know not to yell obscenities outside your door. After 8+ years, you've probably set up a pretty nice environm
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You don't have a spare bedroom you can set up in?
I guess my bad...I mean, except when I was really young and in school in an apartment, I've always lived somewhere where I had at least one more room in the house I was renting or owned that was an office/music room, etc....
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I don't want to go into the office at all because I don't want to live in the cities where the jobs are. I'm done with big cities, or even medium sized cities. It's possible for me to do my work remotely without any meaningful loss in productivity; there's no physical component to my job, and being able to go to someone's desk isn't as necessary as it used to be.
The hybrid model feels like a terrible compromise in a lot of ways—you have to maintain your own home office, keep on top of your equipment a
Re:Going to be interesting to see (Score:4, Interesting)
I think my employer is investing in real estate anyway and would rather keep us in sight. I personally have seen neither a toll taken emotionally, nor a toll taken to productivity organizationally. It's about 100% less bullshit, the only way it could get better is being able to send my kids back to school (which seems a long way off).
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But I think over time the usual forces will align to drive them to accept more and more office time, because that is what most managers and up still want. The electronic surveillance tools that are applied to WFH will grow, and they'll watch a correlation develop between time spent in the office and promotions. There are enough ambitious people out there to get that culture started up once again and quickly.
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How many of them are slashdot members? You may see a lot of comeback both because of the unemployment rate as well as the number of remote jobs isn't high enough to support everyone that wants it.
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old school management (Score:2, Insightful)
It's interesting to watch the companies that have embraced the validation of a remote workforce while you see others insist on going back to the everyone (or most everyone) must be back in an office once we've all gotten "the shots" mentality. One would think the commercial real estate market would be crashing, but there are enough corporate luddites out there to keep things afloat.
Re:old school management (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:old school management (Score:4, Insightful)
Always interesting to note how managers are supposed to justify their salaries by doing this or that, yet somehow programmers think they should be paid in the middle six figures for the lousy code we have to deal with every day.
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Always interesting to note how managers are supposed to justify their salaries by doing this or that, yet somehow programmers think they should be paid in the middle six figures for the lousy code we have to deal with every day.
Whoa, lousy code justifies ops salaries too, we need the WHOLE pyramid of bad software and management to justify just about everything in IT. Thank god for open source and the devops movement too, we no longer rely entirely on in-house crapware to spend months integrating one bad idea with another. You used to have to pay big bucks (other people's money, thank the bad managers) for some really bad enterprise software, but now I can git clone some random go project, read stackoverflow until I'm a go expert
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Taylorism is like a horror movie serial killer that becomes a zombie where even when you cut to zombie into pieces, the pieces still crawl toward you.
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You nailed it.
But it's even more complicated than that. Understanding the value of the productivity of the employee is key too. One place I worked we had a bug-finding expert. He didn't work very hard, but anytime someone was struggling with a bug, he'd figure it out seemingly instantly. He knew the quirks of the language very well, and could often deduce from odd issues the root cause, then poke about in the code looking for places where it would happen.
Same place had a guy who just did manual data entry,
Re:old school management (Score:5, Interesting)
We have been pretty successful with remote work, but about half the team really wants to be back in the office at least 2 days per week. Their primary issues are work/life separation and social connections with co-workers. About 10% will stay with WFH full time for the next few years until they retire. Two people out of ~40 have moved away from the metro areas of our offices.
The pandemic has shown us the value of being flexible with work arrangements, but it has also showed us the cost of doing so.
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We have been pretty successful with remote work, but about half the team really wants to be back in the office at least 2 days per week. Their primary issues are work/life separation and social connections with co-workers. About 10% will stay with WFH full time for the next few years until they retire. Two people out of ~40 have moved away from the metro areas of our offices.
The pandemic has shown us the value of being flexible with work arrangements, but it has also showed us the cost of doing so.
It wouldn't surprise me if productivity is generally higher in office as well. The number of people who claim they work as well or even better with minimal supervision isn't nearly as high as the number of people who actually do.
Companies also have a bit of an ulterior motive in the fact that the stronger your social connections at work the less likely you are to seek employment elsewhere.
I think there's also a big loss in communication with remote work. What do employees do to waste time around the office?
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Part of the issue is only viewing life through one lens. ...
Yes, work is work. The boring exchange of money for services.
Work is also social connections.
Work is also professional development.
Work is also gamesmanship (competition)
Work is also going out for drinks outside of work.
It's a lot of things. I'm definitely in the camp that misses going in to work at least 1-2 days a week. Like it or not most of us spend 8 hours a day at work.
It's no different than any other area of life.
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It might be cheaper to help them out with some furniture or even a pay bump so they can afford a better place to live. Or maybe if WFH is permanent they could move somewhere cheaper.
Companies could also pay for small offices at shared locations for those who want them. Work remote but out of the house.
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What is so hard about this?
When you are "on the clock" for work...you are at the work computer and you do your stuff.
What it is quitting time, you turn the fucker off.
You do know where the off button is, don't you?
This is not rocket surgery.
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That's an oversimplification. Yes, you can close the lid on your work laptop and mute your work phone but unless you have a separate "office" at home that you can close the door on you're often left without the space cues a lot of people need to make the mental transition to "home".
A lot of people are working in the same space they live in and have been trained since Kindergarten to put on the "work face" when they left home in the AM to go to school/work and to take that off when they came home in the PM.
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Ok...you have me puzzled about this one.
I've never heard of such a thing...are you not the same person that leaves the house for work that arrives at work?
If not, why? I'm pretty much the exact same person anywhere I am....I may curse a bit less, but that's certainly not something I have to "unwind" from in a different environment.
I"m
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It's interesting to watch the companies that have embraced the validation of a remote workforce while you see others insist on going back to the everyone (or most everyone) must be back in an office once we've all gotten "the shots" mentality. One would think the commercial real estate market would be crashing, but there are enough corporate luddites out there to keep things afloat.
Those luddites you speak of, are called middle management.
Otherwise known as that worthless layer of old-fashioned business that doesn't give a shit about the commercial real estate market, and only cares about saving their own ass.
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Sounds like (Score:2)
the middle managers have started their rearguard action!
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Yup and the real story is the massive glut of middle managers that add little or nothing of value. Some of them actually think that their job is to sit and watch other people work.
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Worse than that! One of our managers is having the secretary go into each of our daily work logs and copy and paste all the entries into some master file.
So monitoring someone consolidating the monitoring of people working.
It's fucking just bafflingly stupid. We have Teams, so all our calls are logged. Outlook so all of our email activity is logged. All of our meetings are on our calendars. All of our tickets are available for them to look at. We have a company-wide Google drive, and most of our documentati
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Wow that sounds really excessive to me. I mean, yes, some oversight is required to make sure things get done but good grief...these folks are out of control. I wonder if your executive team knows about this. In my experience the most senior executives actually work really hard and might be shocked to see this sort of needless harassment.
I've been a manager before and my rule of thumb is to trust your team to get things done. Treat them as professionals and in most cases they will respond that way. If you fi
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Yeah, this actually comes from the top. Our team just has the worst implementation for some reason.
But hey, at least they schedule morale boosting meetings for entire divisions. Nothing like a mandatory meeting with your camera on while someone tells you that they're here for you but won't actually make anything better to boost morale.
Coward CEOs (Score:2)
"We want the government to tell people to go back to work. We don't want to look like the bad guy!"
*sigh*
This sucks (Score:2)
This is exactly what I was afraid of. The backstabbing politicking middle managers have figured out a way to stay relevant and "add value"...by forcing people back to the office. Large companies have massive bloated reporting structures with middle managers who do nothing but babysit employees all day.
I figured a couple of old school employers would get together and hire McKinsey or something to do a study saying how unproductive WFH employees are, how badly their companies need to transform digitally and c
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beer fridge
Wait, what?
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The beer fridge. Where you can grab a beer to make working well past a reasonable stopping time seem a little less shitty. Working 8-4 and getting the fuck out you don't need a beer fridge. Putting in 12-14 hour days and you do.
Anytime you see extravagant bonuses like beer fridges, free food, daycare, etc., you can place a very safe bet that these things exist to dull the pain of an absolutely unreasonable amount of work expected out of you.
They are in for a big surprise (Score:2)
It may come as a surprise to some of them but a lot of employees don't want to go back to the office. Now it depends on what kind of job you have but for a lot of us the idea of sitting in gridlock traffic only to arrive and sit in some soul sucking cube farm is the last thing we want to do. Oh and by the way, you'll need to wear a mask whenever you leave your desk. And subject yourself to daily temperature checks whenever you enter the building (including if you go out for lunch). And those family photos y
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I think it would be very difficult in most places for lobbying to have the government step in and say people *have* to go into an office, that would be bizarre.
It's going to come down to how widespread the sentiment is that employers demand in-presence after things subside. If pretty much all employers say 'that's it', then there isn't going to be a competitive alternative for those that would resist that.
I hope that while the enthusiasm for WFH from employers is obviously waning, that there's enough still
The question isn't, "are they cutting back" (Score:2)
What you'll see instead is them not adding more office space.
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Well, for one, a lot of lease terms come up at opportune times. For example this fall my company's lease will end and that's an opportunity to lease less, if they vacate one of the buildings.
For another, even when their lease wasn't up, at another campus they started subletting areas they didn't need.
So there are opportunities to cut back all the time without being in desperate circumstances.
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No more crying children in the back (Score:2)
During this year, the quality of phone service went down by quite a bit. When I call most companies CS - it's not uncommon to hear crying children, dogs, music, power tools and whatever else you can think of, in the background. Thats somewhat understandable. But also looks like many employees figured out a way to "take work with them" - carry their cell phone/tablet and go about their day (shopping, dr. appointments, you name it). That would be fine if the service they provide was still the same. But it is
Cutting back offices is a premature action... (Score:2)
It was a knee-jerk reaction in the first place, to state a cut back in offices would happen, before actually knowing what the overall impact will be.
You can hazard a very good guess that remote working will become more widespread than it was before.
Having said that, cutting back on office space before work patterns are evaluated as things very slowly return to normal, would be a foolish move indeed.
Another reasonable guess as to which sectors will change permanently, is going to be down to how much employee
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A lot of the cutbacks came alongside severe drops in revenue. So a nice spin on it is that they are adapting to the new state of things, when the reality is they can't afford to carry on. So while premature from an 'are we sure this works?' it wasn't premature from a 'we don't have the money to renew this lease'.
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Yeah - good point well made!
Also, further on your point, the ongoing economic fallout from this is absolutely going to either see many companies cut back on everything, including employees, or close their doors for good.
Some will, some won't (Score:2)
Commercial real estate must be saved! (Score:4, Insightful)
Or they lied (Score:2)
"Either downsizing has already taken place, or plans have changed as the impact of extended, unplanned, remote working has taken a toll on some employees,"
Or they were trying to keep their stock prices up by lying about the effectiveness their WFH plans.
Need Space (Score:2)
I've been working from home two days a week for a decade, but when I'm at work, I have a cube with a bunch of stuff and my own computer (with four monitors because I'm crazy). They're talking now about only having dedicated space for people who come back five days a week. I don't want to put my stuff in a locker. I'm not working off a laptop that I ferry back and forth (often on my bicycle). So I haven't yet signed up for a hybrid plan, even though they will give us $400 to help set up a home office (li
Well... (Score:2)
It might be true, or maybe KPMG has just invested a lot (and has many clients) in real estate.
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