I have posted this on Reddit (askeconomics) a while back but got no good replies. Copying it here because I don’t want to send traffic to Reddit.

What do you think?

I see a big push to take employees back to the office. I personally don’t mind either working remote or in the office, but I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit and I haven’t seen a convincing explanation yet of why they are so keen to have everyone back.

If remote work was just as productive as in-person, a remote-only company could use it to be more efficient than their work-in-office competitors, so I assume there’s no conclusive evidence that this is the case. But I haven’t seen conclusive evidence of the contrary either, and I think employers would have good reason to trumpet any findings at least internally to their employees (“we’ve seen KPI so-and-so drop with everyone working from home” or “project X was severely delayed by lack of in-person coordination” wouldn’t make everyone happy to return in presence, but at least it would make a good argument for a manager to explain to their team)

Instead, all I keep hearing is inspirational wish-wash like “we value the power of working together”. Which is fine, but why are we valuing it more than the cost of office space?

On the side of employees, I often see arguments like “these companies made a big investment in offices and now they don’t want to look stupid by leaving them empty”. But all these large companies have spent billions to acquire smaller companies/products and dropped them without a second thought. I can’t believe the same companies would now be so sentimentally attached to office buildings if it made any economic sense to close them.

  • VanillaGorilla
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    201 year ago

    Talking to people isn’t really boosting my productivity. I need peace and time to think. The office is the last of all places where I can find that.

    • Devi
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      21 year ago

      Absolutely, we have whatsapp groups now so if I have a question I can fire it over to anyone or everyone if needed, it’s so much easier and I can ignore it until convenient.

    • HobbitFoot
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      11 year ago

      Talking to others may not boost your productivity working, but it can give you a better understanding of what to do when you are productive.

      • VanillaGorilla
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        41 year ago

        Sure, clearing and refining tasks is important. But we’re talking about your colleague or boss talking for talking’s sake.

        • HobbitFoot
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          11 year ago

          Not all talking needs to be work related only.

          I’ve seen a lot better productivity between staff that will talk to each other about non-work tasks than those that don’t. People aren’t robots.