Office Workers Still Fighting RTO (Return To Office) Policies

I’ve been watching this societal drama play out with some real interest…

Employers who are into controlling and micromanaging their employees don’t like work-from-home. Also the schmoozers and salespeople prefer to do office work, because in-person working spaces allow them to either hide the fact they don’t actually work that much or to meet more casually to work deals. Middle managers also have no real reason to exist in many cases, because workers police themselves quite well, it turns out. (For private companies, not governmental work, where apparently hiring “bad” workers and then not being able to fire them is an ongoing issue…)

But most office workers prefer to keep working from home, obviously. Especially when there’s no real reason to be in the office at all.

Executives who say they want their workers back in the office themselves are working from home more often, not less. And the hypocrisy has not gone unnoticed!

Here’s one article that makes the point quite well: www.vox.com/recode/23161501/return-to-office-remote-not-working

Essentially, employers keep trying to bring people back into offices, but they had to make it only 1 to 3 days a week, because NO ONE wanted to return to the office full time. In addition, many people are just ignoring the mandates and only coming in a single day a week or less, and as of yet no one is getting fired for it because… hiring people to replace them is much harder these days.

(See information on how many people left the workforce due to Long Covid– it’s around 10% at LEAST.)

Which means that workers are upsetting the old status quo and instituting some real changes whether the people who pay them like it or not. And the rebel inside me is tickled by this. I think it’s odd how few articles have come out about the OTHER elephant in the room: Companies that realized it was a LOT cheaper not to have an office at all and gave it up to save on the overhead. Office spaces are emptying out. Commercial real estate is about to take a nose dive. Between delivery services replacing brick & mortar stores and companies realizing paying for an office is too expensive, you can expect a lot more places to close in the near future.