Always look for an agenda
Always look for an agenda
Bosses, real estate owners push for return-to-office
I try not to get into fights with people on the internet. It doesn’t change anyone’s mind and isn’t worth getting riled up. But it’s also hard for me to walk away when the person is just… wrong…
I made a comment on a LinkedIn post about productivity and how productivity isn’t tied to an office. If CEOs want their people to be most productive and efficient, they would let them choose where and how work gets done.
Some dude commented back and said, “That may be true, but the focus of a CEO should be to make the organization productive as a system. Sometimes making the whole system efficient means making some individuals in it less efficient.” I replied that I have yet to see any study that definitively links in-office work to increased productivity and, in fact, most say the opposite. The person commented back with multiple paragraphs about relationships with coworkers and how the whole system is “suffering.”
I wanted to reply, “Do you own real estate, by chance?” But I didn’t. I let it go.
Real estate is on the verge of a meltdown
Back in 2020, when we were about a month into the shutdowns of Covid-19, the banking industry (my industry, at the time) was worried about the impact on their loan portfolios. If businesses couldn’t operate, they couldn’t make their loan payments. Loan defaults en masse would have a ripple impact throughout the economy (to say nothing of the employees of those companies, their ability to pay their mortgage, etc. etc.)
But that didn’t happen, largely due to the Paycheck Protection Program in the United States, which gave small businesses an infusion of cash. It was enough for most of them to survive.
Now, three years later, we’re on the brink of another collapse—this time, with commercial real estate. Office occupancy in the top 10 most populated U.S. cities is at just under 50% of its pre-pandemic levels. The share of people in the office full-time dropped from 49% in the first quarter of 2023 to 42% in the second quarter.
Why is this a problem now? Many office leases are multi-year. Which means businesses had to keep paying, even if they weren’t using the space. Now, many of them have to make a decision about renewing a lease. If they don’t, we’ll see the cascading impacts. Owners of the buildings won’t be able to pay mortgages without the rental income. Or companies that own real estate outright are left with an asset that’s not worth much since they’ll have a hard time selling with so many empty office buildings on the market.
According to a paper written by Columbia Business School, this could lead to an overall decrease of $500 billion in real estate valuations across the U.S. I’ll make a wild assumption that people who own commercial real estate in large cities have a lot of money. They want to hang onto that money. Hence the coordinated effort between real estate owners, business owners, and many media outlets to convince people that remote work is “bad” and everyone needs to head back into the office.
But workers aren’t buying what the owners and bosses are selling.
Manufacturing a crisis
At first, many arguments against remote work hinged on productivity. People aren’t as productive at home! Work doesn’t get done!
And people working from home looked around, wondering, “What are you talking about?” In a survey by Microsoft, 87% of employees report that they’re more productive at home. Bosses don’t feel the same, with 85% saying that remote work has made it “challenging to have confidence that employees are being productive.” An odd argument: if the results of work are the same (same amount of work getting done), then the only thing that’s changed is that bosses can’t see employees working.
Martha Stewart summed up the Boss Mentality perfectly in an interview: “You can’t possibly get everything done working three days a week in the office and two days remotely… Should America go down the drain because people don’t want to go back to work?”
Even if an argument can be made that workers are less productive, that doesn’t benefit the worker at all. If I were to make a guess, I’d say that workers are getting the same amount done in less time — and the bosses think that “extra time” belongs to the company, not the individual who is more efficient. Couple that with commuting costs and the time lost commuting, and the “productive” argument becomes even weaker.
And so a new argument has emerged: remote work is bad for you, the employee. That there’s an “epidemic” of loneliness and remote work has a detrimental impact on the employee’s physical and mental health. And the only antidote, according to bosses and real estate owners, is the office.
Offices haven’t served people well
People can be lonely and disconnected, but it’s a leap to think that they’re lonely as an employee. It stems from old-school thinking that jobs are a source of socialization.
But a shift began to occur long before remote work. The connectivity of the internet has fostered relationships with others, whether in-person or online. Meetup, for example, thrived on niche groups of people coming together with shared interests. Putting the office at the forefront of social connectedness was fostered by proximity, nothing more.
In the article Flexible Work is Feminist - and Women Won’t Return to a System that Hasn’t Served Them Well to Spare the Feelings of Powerful Men, Erin Grau writes:
The case for flexible work has a social and moral imperative. Ninety percent of women want the ability to work remotely, including fully remote or hybrid-work options, and with it have experienced an increased sense of belonging, greater psychological safety, and, thanks to less unstructured time with colleagues, fewer microaggressions. This is even more pronounced for women of color, LGBTQ+ women, and women with disabilities.
Support for flexibility and the ability to work remotely is inextricably tied to gender equality and benefits us all: women, men, and marginalized genders.
Many of the CEOs pushing for return-to-office are those who benefitted most under “the way things were”: white men. It works in their favor to return, because they are not part of the groups who suffered under the old system. I’ll be generous and say that maybe they’re not aware that they benefitted so much at the expense of others (generous, indeed) and instead are pushing an agenda because return-to-office feels comfortable and familiar.
Whether motivated by real estate valuations or systems of power (or both), the chorus to return to office has been increasing in intensity. But the song has shifted: rather than arguing “you’ll be more productive” the argument is now “you need to come back to the office because it’s lonely at home and loneliness is harmful.”
True, there is a legitimate surgeon general’s warning about the detrimental impacts of loneliness, stating that loneliness leads to “increased risk for individuals to develop mental health challenges in their lives, and lacking connection can increase the risk for premature death to levels comparable to smoking daily.”
But the answer isn’t to shove people back into spaces that don’t suit them or remove the ability for parents, disabled folks, neurodivergent folks, people of color, people from different socio-economic backgrounds, and more to earn a living. The answer is to make it easier for these folks to connect in real life — if and when they want to and with people of their choosing.
It’s always baffling to me when companies and CEOs argue against progress (and this extends far beyond return-to-office antics). We know remote work is more inclusive. We know it provides more opportunities. We know it’s better for work-life balance.
Yet the people in power say, “We need to go back to the way things were. Because that’s better for us, the CEOs and real estate owners. Not you, the employees.”
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