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.

    • @No_Eponym@lemmy.ca
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      111 year ago

      This is the truth. Or someone is and those someone’s are putting pressure on bosses who are amenable to it anyway because they like control/lack empathy for employees/etc

      • @some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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        101 year ago

        Or someone is and those someone’s are putting pressure on bosses media

        Bosses are convinced by articles in mass media that this needs to happen. For real estate.

        There are a bunch of new buildings in my city that have apartments with retail space on the ground level. All the retail spaces are empty, never used. I live in one. Someone is taking a bath on all the losses on these investments.