It's also a justification for the millions of dollars they already spent on office space that isn't necessary anymore.

Wait till you hear about Word!

I blame people more than Microsoft. People were either duped or too lazy to say "Microsoft Teams" in full. It's not too crazy to have services like "Apple Music" because people aren't allowing Apple to control the word by just saying "Music" casually. People need to go back to saying "Microsoft Teams." Alas, it will never happen. 😒

Also:

Gotta keep the commercial real estate market from imploding.

Whole lotta corpo money and financing tied up in that, sure would be a shame if most office space just wasn't actually needed for most office work.

Also also:

Most managers just personally need the ability to neg employees in-person, even if it is detrimental to actual output, that doesn't matter, what matters is sating their need to feel powerful and important.

Anyway, Zoom did basically the same thing either earlier this year or last year... yep, Zoom employees, the people who make and sell business oriented virtual collaboration software... all need to RTO.

Found it: https://fortune.com/2024/07/09/remote-work-outlook-zoom-return-to-office-chief-people-officer/

It's frustrating because management are so colossally, transparently, stupid but they get the big paychecks and the workers get fucked. And then like half the workers sit there going "Well this is just and fair. this is a good world. If the people actually doing the work had more of a say, that's communism and thus axiomatically bad"

During COVID my workplace had to go fully remote

IT has (left over from waterfall) some skills stronger in some states, so IT teams were reshuffled to get people from all over to balance them

So when we were allowed to return to the office, we were required to be there 3 days a week

With the spread out teams we had no in person meetings, we rarely saw team members even if they were on the same site

So we felt very much like the difference was to commute to do MS Teams meetings in the office on small screens three times a week, and have no commute and do MS Teams meetings on our own screens twice a week

We are lucky enough now to have full time work from home

Edit to add: management aren't on the same agreement as the rest of us, they have individual contracts. Very few of them have access to remote work

Office Space. But also, Been in all those. It's weird to remember that your employer doesn't actually want you to be productive and fix the problems to be profitable. They want to appear to be doing that. You'll go further in your career by playing those games rather than working. I, unfortunately, like doing the work to keep the company going instead of the games, which is not as profitable for myself, but it keeps the company from dying even though they don't realize it, and keeps them rich. Win? I'd rather be planting corn at this point.

you gotta leave 15 minutes before and it takes 15 minutes to get back and settled and you did not work on anything during.

I forgot about that. Also, where is Meeting Room X again? Is it upstairs, in the other building, or is it the weird one down the hall and two lefts two floors down?

A task that would have taken 1 person a few hours to do remotely, has now taken 8 people, 3 weeks of in office meetings and status updates and endless interruptions and discussions over every aspect of the project over and over again to finally complete.

You're loving the RTO now, but then half a year later the management decides to fire dozens of people and replace them with this flashy new thing called AI, which gets the job done in 6 hours instead, even if buggy, and causing even more problems with unnoticed misinterpretations, but hey, 6 hours is so much less than 3 weeks, and we saved a lot of money!

And then the reduced staff will have to do even more work, get swamped, then gets replaced by AI (which still leads to inferior product), and by that point the management won't even consider RTO being the reason for all that inefficiency.

You could have done the job at home in 3-4 hours, but instead they shot themselves in the foot and still considered it a win.

Oh, and the office that they are renting and that is now half empty because of the reduced staff...? Suddenly it's not a problem like it was with remote working.

If being proficient at using teams means people can work from where they prefer, it's my opinion that it's your duty to do it, so everyone has better choices.

Obviously that isn't the opinion held here, but that is more indicative of companies trying to reduce headcount because their growth has slowed. Growing companies are meeting people where they are. Broadly speaking of course.

Was it Teams or Teams (New) or Teams (School & Work) or Teams....

Teams wasn't specifically built for remote work though. It was built for internal chat/messaging, document sharing, planning, etc. It is 100% used internally at MS even when people aren't working remotely.

I know because people at MS have been complaining about it since a few years before the pandemic.