Why are CEOs still so intent on taking worker attendance?
Why are CEOs still so intent on taking worker attendance?
In the ongoing return-to-office battle, showing up to your desk is becoming a performance metric – just like it was in grade school.
Google and JPMorgan have each told staff that office attendance will be factored into performance evaluations. The US law firm Davis Polk informed employees that fewer days in the office would result in lower bonuses. And Meta and Amazon both told employees they're now monitoring badge swipes, with potential consequences for workers who don't comply with attendance policies – including job loss. Increasingly, workers across many jobs and sectors appear to be barrelling towards the same fate.
In some ways, it's unsurprising bosses are turning back to attendance as a standard. After all, we've long been conditioned to believe showing up is vital to success, from some of our earliest days. In school, perfect attendance is often still seen a badge of honour. The obsession with attendance has also been a mainstay of workplace culture for decades; pre-pandemic, remote work was largely unheard of, and employees were expected to be physically present at their desks throughout the workday.
Yet after the success of flexible arrangements during the pandemic, attendance is still entrenched as a core metric. What's the point?
If you manage professionals and can't tell how well your team is doing unless you see them in person daily, you're a terrible manager.
Alternatively, If I have to bring the people who report to me into the office for them to get their shit together, they're a lost cause anyway.
Got a better one:
If you're a professional and need to be managed, you're not actually a pro.
A good manager is like the coxswain of a row boat. Their job isn't to provide more power, or tell the rowers how to row. Their job is to keep all the rowers synchronized, and pulling in the same direction.
A good manager does a similar thing. They keep the team both aligned with each other, and pointed in the required business direction. There are a LOT of bad managers out there, however.
It's a game that has nothing to do with workers, but real estate instead. If workers don't go to the office, there will be no need for the company to rent an office the size it does, making it "lose" money. If they cut on their offices, real estate starts losing value (as we can see in some articles that start popping up), and that's something that bothers a lot of big players.
I think the real estate thing is big, but also they'll be god-damned if we get a benefit for free.
Once it's a benefit they have control over, they can use it as leverage for those that want it back. They can cut our pay, increase our hours, both.
But then people will start clamoring about retrofitting the empty skyscrapers into housing and then all the NIMBYs houses lose value, and that'd make tax revenue decrease.
THAT is why.
It’s a game that has nothing to do with workers, but real estate instead.
Don't forget tax incentives offered by cities and states to locate lots of office workers in those taxable areas. No workers there, no payroll/sales taxes collected. No revenue derived from workers forced to go there where they will eat, shop, and consume services. Those cities and states what their money.
This reason doesn't really make sense to me. The company pays the same for the office whether there are people in it or not. Forcing people into the office isn't saving them any money, in fact they probably pay more when you factor in utilities.
They do pay more. The issue comes in because many executives are really doing two jobs. Job one is the company exec. They want to save money and downsizing office space is kosher with that job. But their second job is being landlords for commercial office space. Their portfolios will be negatively affected by companies (including their own) getting rid of office space.
They are choosing to prioritize their personal wealth (commercial real estate investments) over the health of their company.
Modern business is full of this type of stuff. The priority is always personal benefits over the health of the company. Run it into the ground while extracting as much as you possibly can and walking away from any consequences.
If you pay for a building that can house 100 workers, but only 20 come into the office and the other 80 work from home, you have way more space than what you need. You could probably rent a place half as big for half the price and still have room.
Would you rent a 5 bedroom, 4 bathroom house with a 3-car garage as a bachelor? I mean you can but you're paying for way more than what you actually need.
It's an interconnected issue where the value of real estate is dependent on people having a use for it.
What’s the point?
Middle management needs something to do to justify their useless existence.
Idk what podcast or whatever uses "middle management" as a scapegoat, but this is the dumbest fucking meme.
Like CEOs and middle management are the problem but SVPs and department heads are totally cool? How does that make sense? Whoever initiated this just had one shitty boss and 0 professional corporate experience.
I absolutely guarantee you that middle management is not making "return to office" decisions.
Commercial real estate mortgage backed securities
CMBS is the new MBS.
'08-'09 didn't stop, the can just got kicked. And kicked. and kicked and now the can is so dented and crumbled they have to pick it up in order to drop it and kick it.
Get a hockey stick; it's a puck now.
Some of my coworkers love going into the office. They're also really bad at responding to slack. I wonder if these are related.
Anyway, we should all unionize and push back against this kind of nonsense
During the pandemic, when we were all forced to work from home, one of my coworkers would incessantly bitch and moan about how he missed being back at the office.
He is the kind of person who pulls all sorts of bullshit out of his ass and starts treating it as if it's true. At some point he started going around saying that "productivity when WFH is ok but everybody is complaining that they can't make plans for future projects without face to face time". When our director got curious and asked him where he had heard about this, he changed the topic.
Basically this is a person who doesn't want to do anything and makes a career out of going around and pretending to be working and calling meetings when they're not needed. For this kind of person, WFH is deadly as it clearly shows that their "skills" are not needed for the company's success.
There was a time when I would have jumped at the chance to work for one of these companies.
Hell, I even interviewed with Google 17 years ago (for a position that I was thoroughly overqualified for).
But, these days I don't think they could offer me enough money to convince me it would be worth it... Unless there was a HUGE upfront signing bonus that wouldn't need to be repaid no matter what happens.
They're shooting themselves in the foot by drastically reducing the talent pool available to them.
It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see how it works out for them.
To be fair working there 17 years ago would've probably been ok. Like, hard work for sure, but very well compensated and still had the famous company culture. These days it'd be like willingly stepping into a meat grinder.
Thanks
If I remember correctly, didn't Google offer lots of staff facilities and benefits?
...oh right, now they also care about office attendance....... welp there goes the "don't be evil" motto
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Control freak management as the article says
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The two or three out of a hundred employees that get given an inch and take a mile, ruining it for everyone else that isn't taking the piss
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It doesn't have to be unprofitable. They just don't need to "maximize their return". They want tax credits and subsidies for low income housing so they can make the same profit as a bidding war for a luxury condo. It's greed.
Unpopular opinion: Teams collaborate better in presence. Remote attendance is inferior to being in the same room even with the most expensive Cisco board or meeting owl.
However if you're working on your own, processing to-dos, a team around you will be a hindrance. However, creative processes just don't work that way and require interaction and variability to occur.
That isn’t stopping executives from offshoring more and more functions… and yet, “you’re more creative in the same room”… yeah thought luck my devs are in fucking bengalore… 8000 km from our offices…
Then why have they spent the past 40 years outsourcing shit to other countries
Unpopular opinion: Teams collaborate better in presence. Remote attendance is inferior to being in the same room even with the most expensive Cisco board or meeting owl.
How do you explain the dominance of free and open source projects like Linux which are developed remotely by people all over the world?
There are plenty of examples of people collaborating effectively from different towns or time zones. If anything, I think too many organizations are too inflexible or have simply been structured in a way that they can't be efficient remotely.
Think of how much better the result would be if the workers had to commute, had less lunch options, couldn't take a nap, and had to work in a noisier environment
Cisco is fully remote besides any hardware production lines.
That's really funny in light of your comment.
Even collaborative teams frequently have individual work that does not require regular in person attendance on a regular basis and many of us can collaborate just as well on a video call as in person.
I work in IT and a lot of my peers are distributed geographically and of course most of my meetings are with vendors who are also not local. So I go into the office so I can get on Teams meetings and take an hour long lunch that I would have worked through at home. I have in-person meetings maybe once a month.
I agree with this to a certain extent.
I do think it’s easier to be creative and brainstorming with other people when I am in the same room as them, but ultimately it should be a mix of both for that kind of stuff to accommodate for everybody - that way, people can start their to-dos in peace either at the office or at home, wherever they’re already at.
Exactly.
If teams collaborate better im presence, why does everyone work in separate spaces? Even cubicles don’t make sense from your statement, get those people at picnic tables!
If your argument is “teams collaborate better with instant access,” then yes, but technology has bridged that gap.
Studies have shown that worker preferences are somewhat evenly split between office only, hybrid, and full WFH. However, being on Reddit / lemmy is kind of a self selection towards the WFH crowd, so it's become a quite an echo chamber on this issue. Whereas management tends to the social crowd who prefer full office. And it doesn't help that management is pushing the return to office for other undisclosed but obvious reasons.