The main thing I don't get is that the top talent at your company are the ones that can easily find another job instead of putting up with your BS. The people that aren't competent enough to leave on a whim are the ones you're going to be keeping.
I don't think being fickle and being competent are necessarily linked.
Some of the best workers i've met over the years are making way less than some of the worst workers i've met, just because the ones who could talk the talk and play the bullshit made way more money and swap jobs way more often.
The highest paid company hoppers are undoubtably the first ones to go, that doesn't mean they are the most important, talented people though.
If bad people are aware that they're bad, they're strongly incentivized to not risk their livelihoods by voluntarily ending their employment.
If people are clinging to a job tightly even as working condition deteriorates, it's an indicator that they don't think they'll fare well on the job market.
The disconnect has more to do with perception of their own value. Good people who underestimate themselves awill be inclined to stay. Bad people who know they're bad will be more inclined to stay.
Bad people who think they're good, and good people who know they're good will be the most likely to leave.
So, the strategy of intentionally tanking your conditions to prune bad people actually only successfully prunes bad people who think they're good.
On the other hand, you loose good people who know they're good, entrenches the bad people who know they're bad, and demoralized the shit out of good people who don't realize they're good.
Yeah, but you're thinking about when the company picks people to fire. Forcing people back to the office decreases worker satisfaction across the board, and workers will respond individually. I'd argue that those highest paid will be most willing to suffer the inconvenience of commuting, regardless of their talent, so the "make working here annoying" plan will tend to retain higher paid employees while losing lower paid people through attrition. Likewise, workers are more likely to tolerate the annoyances if they don't have any other options. Good people can more easily job-hop, so this strategy is also likely to retain the lower-performing employees while the top performers go elsewhere, not considering pay rate. Total labor costs will decline, because there's fewer people working, but it's not an efficient selection process.
Long story short: pissing on your employees results in a smaller, lower quality workforce.
Yep. One of my friends works in sales and has worked from home for 3 1/2 of her 4 years with her current company. She's in the top 10 performers out of 250-ish people in her division and her company is going to lose her if they stick to the demand that people return to the office. She's waiting to see what happens, but she's already had recruiters put out feelers once the tentative plan got out, and there are other top performers ready to jump ship too.
Buddy of mine straight up laughed at his boss when they told him to return to office, and strangely it has never come up again.
When you know the value you bring, it's hard to muscle you around.
Have you ever had a middle manager above you who constantly has to interfere as if to prove how necessary they are?
This is similar. It's not always about the amount/quality of your work or even about the money; sometimes it's just about control. Those who don't actually do much (again, managers and CEOs, etc) want desperate people they can rule over.
They don't see workers as people, they're a commodity like everything else.
Even better, the competent ones ask for more money
Seriously the actions of all these big companies shows they don't really give a shit about retaining top talent. Unfortunately, for big name companies, they'll always have an inflow of talented new grads who are willing to give up their dignity to get their name on their resumes, and it's cheaper (in the short term, which is all shareholders care about) to churn and burn them then to invest in long term talent
We are all freely interchangeable widgets in their calculations. They don’t have time to consider that some people might be better than the job than others.
Because profit is in the tail.
They're betting that some will leave, most will stay, and even if the some that leave are the best, most of their money is made by the vast majority of people behind them.
They're looking at trends, not individuals. Individuals don't matter to them.
That’s part of it. Another part is middle management can’t function without seeing you. Finally, it’s not worth it to a company to maintain a lease on a building if nobody works there and it’s not easy getting out of those leases.
What doesn't make sense is why they're not firing the useless middle managers.
Where I work, it’s the middle managers who make a list of useless people. They obviously won’t put their own names on the list.
Even a structure that is only a house of cards still depends on the cards of the middle tiers to hold itself up.
Then middle management is either incompetent or like micro manage.
There are so many fucking managers and administrators in modern organizations.
The lease is already paid, or the money is planned to be paid. You can't recover this money anyway. But you can still save on energy and cleaning.
Getting out of the lease is as easy as not renewing it.
I'm not going to quit or return to the cubefarm. These coprophagous donkey molesters can fucking well fire me and pay unemployment.
TIL the word “coprophagous.”
For the lazy
A coprophagous organism is one that eats the faeces/excrement of another animal. Many insect species are coprophagous and often specialise in the consumption of faeces from large herbivores.
It isn't, it's all the office space they own, if people are allowed to keep working from home the retail office market will crash pretty hard.
It can be both.
Ever see how much real estate companies like Google has? If all those bay area companies said fuckit let's be remote it would crash the market and rock the economy.
We should though, if possible.
No one cares about retail office market. A market bubble crashing is merely an opportunity to earn money for the others. Capitalism doesn't care about losers.
America only has capitalism for the poor. For the rich, it's socialism. You better believe retail office owners stand to be losers, and they have power to fight.
Copying my reply from another similar post -
I would lose my control over my minions... Why don't you understand?
Whoops, I meant, my staff can't be monitored...
Whoops, I actually meant, I will lose the one place in life where I can actually throw around my power...
/s
That's what I was thinking, it essentially makes bosses obsolete and they don't want the system to be deconstructed from the top down, ever. That's toppling capitalism, kinda talk.
What if I don’t return to the office and also don’t quit?
Then they get to fire you for non-compliance. And you don't get to collect unemployment. Basically the same as quitting for them.
That’s not what my employment contract says, last I checked. And those can’t be changed unilaterally.
You've got it better than most, then.
You should familiarize yourself with constructive dismissal
Nice, in theory, proving it is the real problem. Meanwhile you're not getting paid and they have an entire fund just for lawyering you into submission.
Middle manager here: they want you to quit, and me to do your job plus the jobs of the other 3 who just left after you're gone.
What do middle managers do in WFH jobs? Most companies I've worked in have as many "managers" as bottom level employees. It's hilarious
Still seems to me the idea of "if people don't come back into work the real estate market implodes" is the most convincing.
Commuters vaporizing and countless city blocks losing their purpose will cause huge upheaval in the real estate market.
And turns out a /lot/ of CEOs have a vested interest in keeping the real estate market artificially propped up.
Thus, they try and force people back to work as hard as they can.
It won't last, the big companies that don't give a shit about real estate due to being even bigger in scale will out compete and the international market will absorb most of the workforce.
If you shackle your success to real estate, then you can't compete with international megacorps that saw this coming awhile ago. Prepare to be acquired.
Or maybe…
CEO 1: “Our plan to force everyone back to the office isnt working. They’re just quitting”
CEO 2: “Ok new narrative, convince them it was our plan to get them to quit, and keep forcing them to return to office.”
Hey who knew that the best way to make money as a company is have very few workers and be an amazing talker that can dupe others into investing into your pile of shit. Oh wait, Holmes, Neuman and Bankman-fried already came up with that business model. The innovation on that model is just don't get caught.
Whenever they talk about "Business Innovation" this is the crap they are talking about
Or is this op-ed 3D chess reverse psychology to get you back into the office?
There's an often overlooked part that you could call the "extrovert factor." There's always plenty of coworkers that thrive in group settings. Some number, maybe most, middle managers are extroverts, and when forced to work the way the average minion does, they suffer. It's why they became middle managers in the first place. Their productivity suffers in isolation too, so when converted into a wage slave, they can't complete with less extroverted people. Unfortunately they're better situated to promote their own success, getting by in people skills while more competent people get screwed.
Extroverts also seem to suffer in productivity during WFH, even if they aren't managers. They are stuck in a situation that hurts their functionality, offsetting the statistics. If they actually broke down WFH productivity by job description, I suspect that the extrovert/introvert factor will be a huge determiner of productivity.
Optional office hours seem the best fix, but the corporate attitude of obsessively monitoring the workers to be sure they're not wasting time and therefore money is another factor that makes these companies want to favor their preconceptions. The confirmation bias kicks in and then we have to listen to them focus on it.
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