Reply to RTO in many cases is the height of hubris.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What I think is absolute hubris is thinking that working from home has no impact on team engagement, cohesion, creative problem solving, company culture, and general communication. I am in No Way championing RTO to prepandemic norms, but I think there is significant value for being in person once a week. With natural fluctuations for people / kids being sick, holidays, school breaks, dentist appointments, etc. I feel like this averages out to employees coming in 3 days a month. If you truly think you are an independent contributor and that you gain nothing from going to the office in person occasionally, I would argue you don’t understand your role in your organization or you are shortchanging your org in the value you could contribute and short changing yourself in terms of career development and refining your soft skills.

Two stories to make my case:

I manage several teams in the procurement department of a large IT company. We worked remotely pre-pandemic, but came together once a month for required training. That day counted towards the recommended 1 day per week. As a team lead I was very lenient with that “day” and my team probably averaged 2.5 days per month with some people coming in at 10am or leaving at 3pm for traffic or kid related pick up / drop off. When the pandemic started we didn’t do any extra video calls or engagement activities. We thought “we know how to be remote!” Around 6 months I noticed we were just less connected as a team - despite taking every day. Around a year, little cracks started to show because people didn’t know about special projects or certain initiatives that they would have wanted to participate in. Even though these things are announced in meetings, I think people were missing out on the coffee maker / lunch time chats to say “let’s work on that together”. In Year 2 people started leaving. I had to start arrranging coverage when previously team members naturally stepped up to cover each other, knowing it would be reciprocated. Without a personal connection, it was just a job no different than the same function at another company. It has been a long hard fight to build a team back to a fraction of the connection and camaraderie we had pre-pandemic.

Second example - I once worked in Chicago and had a client in Vancouver BC back when FaceTime/video calls didn’t exist yet. We worked on the project for months before meeting in person. We were a consulting company delivering services to an internal department and the travel expense was considered extraneous and unnecessary. At a mid-point we went out to the client for 3 days. Just 3 days over 6 months. Somehow taking in person and also sharing meals with the team and getting to know them was SO impactful. It felt like when we got back to Chicago that all of our meetings went so much more smoothly, we communicated more efficiently and solved problems more collaboratively.

[b]TL;DR - A small amount of face time is priceless. It doesn’t take much to establish and maintain that connection, but it’s short sighted to think in person time is useless. [/quote][/b]

Absolutely agree.

But Amazon, Apple, Google, Meta, etc are demanding a lot more than 1 day per week. And its silly, since those employees are hosting Zoom meetings with staff all over the world. So they are trudging into an SV campus 3 days+ per week to just sit in front of a computer screen. It's dumb and not worth the hassle.

Again, management of these companies are in cost cutting mode and are using RTO metrics to figure out which folks to lay off first. So really the exercise is just one big facade. And these companies need to justify spending billions on amenity-rich campuses that no one wants to inhabit. Shareholders demand accountability.

If I was a major shareholder, I'd be demanding that management look at ways to reduce RE footprint and find cost savings. For example, converting a sizable portion of campus RE into housing for younger employees.

WFH is here and it works with guardrails and a certain degree of in-person time to build relationships. Real estate is expensive and lays under-utilized for 50% of every day.[/quote]

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