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.
There is the wonder why hold value on office space ersus the smaller companies that are bought and dropped with no sentimental value. The big difference there is that purchasing out a company doesn't usually come with a years-long agreement to keep it in place, use the products, etc. Office space has that. A years-long agreement to use the space and pay for the use. And to drop the use before the agreement is done costs more than it's worth. And it's even worse for a company that owns property. It costs money to keep the office space usable, money that comes from leases. If someone is going to back out of a lease, the owner of a building now has to pull from other sources of money to upkeep a building.
I know developers have spent years building and growing office buildings and regions to put said office buildings, and now a massive push to work remotely makes all that effort not just for nothing, but a very costly nothing. And then there is the secondary economy around office buildings. Many stores and restaurants spring up where there are plenty of people working. If there are no people, no reason for those businesses. I used to work in a downtown area with plenty of restaurants that I would eat at. Now that I don't work there, I don't eat at those restaurants anymore.
The push and call for remote work is going to change literal landscapes in cities and industrial regions in ways we cannot predict, or prevent.
Correct, my (large) company was literally getting bullied in the newspaper for no longer "contributing to the local economy by letting its employees work from home*.