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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]RTO is going to cause some agencies to hemorrhage decent young-ish employees. One day a week already led to us losing a few attorneys for the private sector. They can’t afford to live close in and as soon as they have kids they can’t manage a commute that’s an hour plus. I’m in a weird boat where my spouse makes a lot of money so we live close in but has garbage health insurance which doesn’t work because one of our kids is SN. [/quote]

+1. Some of the posters are delusional about how much it costs to live reasonably close in with kids, where there is access to safe public schools and housing. I bought my house in 2013 and prices have since skyrocketed, and I still had nearly an hour commute downtown from within Fairfax County. Why would I want to spend nearly 1.5 - 2 hours a day commuting when I could spend that time with my family, driving kids to activities, exercising, cooking a healthy meal, etc. Life is too short to waste it in a car to spend 8 hours in the office on Teams meetings. Furthermore, I am a Federal manager and most of my younger, hard-working staff all want telework - for the exact reasons I do, so they can balance their careers and home life. I don’t want to lose them and I certainly don’t want to force them in the office more. Our work is computer based and can be completed effectively from home. I also have staff more willing to work on an issue later in the day or earlier in the morning when they’re home. Staff is flexible and more engaged in the work because they have a manager who is flexible regarding where they do the work. For computer based work, RTO is not the answer. The genie is out of the bottle and it’s not going back. [/quote]

I understand but has this all changed dramatically in the last 3 years since the pandemic started? My whole office used to commute 4 days a week deal with traffic or public transportation, figure out kids activities, etc and now just doing what they used to do is intolerable? I get that we had a few years with more flexibility but we're being asked to do what everyone did for decades and suddenly that's too hard and everyone will quit?[/quote]

No, it’s that in the past three years, people discovered that [b]by working from home, we can balance work and family demands much more easily.[/b] We used to also have no child labor laws. Should we go back to that?[/quote]

And why should govt care about that? It's your personal choice/life isn't it? [/quote]

NP. [b]Because it's like putting toothpaste back in the tube[/b]. No one who enjoys it is willingly or for long going to give up that newfound flexibility now that they know it is possible. So basically you have a critical mass of people in every white collar industry who don't want to go back to the office. Most RTO efforts have fizzled out after a few weeks or months. I think that is likely to continue, because there are just so many people who like WFH. It's just the way it's going to be. Do not stand against the wind...[/quote]

Don't assume Govt will try to put it back. Getting a new one is always an option (i.e., let those who want to leave, leave). [/quote]

[b]Problem with that is the number of people who like to WFH.[/b] Sure there will be efforts to RTO, but I believe over the long term they will all fizzle. Because sooner or later people rebel, find ways to make exceptions, change policies, etc. It's human nature.[/quote]

Why is that a problem? The number that matters is the number of people who leave. For every 100 WFH "I'm gonna leave if you make me come back", I doubt more than 10 would actually leave. Govt is a big system. It will chugging along with or without those 10 folks. And others will love to join even then[/quote]

You may be right that most people who claim that they’d leave won’t. But to think this isn’t a problem is myopic. They’ll be the better people, and they’ll take expertise and familiarity and corporate memory with them. They’ll be replaced with people who don’t care about WFH or aren’t able to compete for the more desirable WFH/flexible jobs. That’s a cohort that is on average not going to be as good as the people who left, even when they get up to speed (however long that takes). And the turnover cost of a government employee is ballpark half a year’s productivity.

So if you’re right, and of 100 people only 10 leave, then you’ll end up with something like the top 10% going, replaced by people in the bottom 50%, and paying 5% that year for the privilege. If you owned a 100-person company this kind of maneuver could tank your business. The government will survive but will get worse, and people will complain about how it’s worse and not realize that it was not a bug but a feature. [/quote]

PP you are responding to. I don't know. I think people love to create theater over these situations. I honestly don't think people leaving the agency over this issue will be the top people or we are going to see mass exodus of workers. And, even if you end up losing some of the top performers, it will be hardly noticeable. Institutional knowledge will be maintained (thanks to older workers) and new hires will be trained. Govt will keep moving with or without those people. [/quote]

PP. yeah, I agree that it would be amazing if a lot of feds actually quit. But I wouldn’t be amazed if preferentially the more capable ones do, and the rest slack off a bit out of foot-dragging. I think all we're struggling with is hot to estimate how much less effective government workers will be in total, and whether that decrease will be offset by the increase productivity of the increased RTO time. None of us can know whether that balance is an overall improvement or degradation of government performance. The policy isn’t data-driven anyway. It’s ideology-driven.

So all this talk about the good and bad of a blanket RTO policy can be summed up as follows: nobody can prove that it’s going to make the government more efficient, or that is isn’t. [/quote]

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