The dirty secret about RTO is that no one can put the WFH back in the box.
Now all office workers know there's a better way to work. This is why, fundamentally, RTO will fail and of course the devil is in details.
The financial cost to employees is great. Added gasoline, extended car insurance and car maintenance, office clothing, purchased coffee and meals away from home, expenses related to children (day care, clothing, etc.) and a host of others. Then there's the time expenses. Getting up earlier which translates to less sleep, having to get kids up and possibly driving them to school, time in dangerous traffic, parking, walking around the office, bumping into people and having meaningless conversations. None of these things were issues when working from home. All of them translate to unhappy workers who are less proactive and less productive, which WILL be measured and compiled for analysis.
There will be human resource issues with all of those unhappy employees. Imagine the impact that will have on the enterprise, let alone the lawsuits from HR issues, work accidents, slip & fall, etc.
Then there's the business cost. Aside from said productivity lost, there are building costs. Maintenance workers, janitors, heat/water/electricity, office supplies, office equipment, road maintenance, and so on.
Now think about how other corporations will be carefully watching those companies who RTO and analyzing their successes and failures during a deep recession. No corporation wants lost productivity, lawsuits, huge overhead from real estate, etc. during a recession. They simply can't afford it and to be frank, it's a disservice to the shareholders and stakeholders.
So this is the Bright Future: RTO will simply fail and those companies who forgo it will have a competitive advantage. Nothing motivates corporations more than image (who needs/wants RTO failure?) or a competitor with a competitive advantage. We will be seeing WFH as the way of the future because it saves companies money due to the happy employees, smaller overhead and minimized legal issues. After RTO is perceived as a failure by the business world, most office jobs will evolve to WFH.
There you go. Go back to the office. Give it your best and be patient. If you can survive the layoffs, there's a brighter future waiting for you! There will be business studies in the future that go over all of this. We are all a part of history.
12 replies (most recent on top)
With all the disrespectful comments about people who don’t want to go back to the office, it’s easy to understand why they don’t want to go.
You make very good points. I guess I was inferring in my post that the IT leadership should be contracted out too. Sooner or later though you hit GM management and that's where things start to break down.
GM will probably sell every car they make for years to come - at the end of the day, the company will survive and make money.
@3fgm+1jCEf5VN
Point is, more and more companies are calling folks back to the office and laying weak performers off.
The employees bitch1ng on Yammer put a target on themselves. Can’t be undone now.
The game is over. Tantrums will not reap anything but unemployment. Time to pay the fiddler.
#learntoweld #wouldyoulikefrieswiththat
The people laid off from Twitter and Meta are in Silicon Valley and other high tech centers, not in Michigan. And since GM is stopping remote work and they're not going to want to move to Michigan, I agree that GM won't be able to hire them
The individuals let off from Twitter and Meta all got severance packages totaling $50,000-$90,000. Unlikely that they'll all be clamoring for work immediately, and they definitely aren't applying for companies like GM.
With all the layoffs at Twitter, Meta, and other places, there are a lot of techies on the market who would be happy to have a job right now
I don't think techies have the same leverage they did 6 months ago
Many companies are RTO right now. As you mentioned OP, people will have expenses like daycare, oil changes, tires, lunches, etc and many other items that have not circulated in the economy in the past two almost three years. The companies who have ripped the RTO bandaid off while worker bees are kicking and screaming like little brats all the way back to their desk where they will eat a slice of like it or GTFO, because believe it or not you are nothing but a number that can EASILY be replaced tomorrow.
A few years ago GM did contract out software development and IT.
The quality was poor, the contractors were unmotivated and slow to produce, and they nickel and dimed every change or request. Outsourcing was extremely costly, both in money and what you got for your money.
Then one of the VPs who was brought in as a change expert insourced everything.
It got much better at the beginning, but then GM mismanaged it all and a lot of the same problems crept back.
Turns out the problem was really GM's management, which seems immune to change or improvement, regardless of whether IT are contractors or GM employees.
Competitive advantage.
Software is the future.
When it's as intrinsically tied with the work and you plan to be a dynasty it does not make sense to contract.
@1mwe+1jCEf5VN
Which reminds me of a point I made here a few months ago. Why is GM trying to do software development in-house? It's a manufacturing culture and it's not a good draw for IT talent. It would make more sense to contract this work out.
It turns out that a lot of people at GM are actually there to design, build, and test the cars that the software goes in.
There's another context for RTO failing. While many GM tech workers make idle threats to leave for greener WFH pastures, mass layoffs are occurring that primarily affect tech workers. Facebook announced 11,000 layoffs today. We've seen other mass layoff announcements from other tech companies, including Peleton, Stripe, Twitter, PayPal, HelloFresh, Hyperloop, Coinbase, Robinhood and more. The same people threatening to leave GM are now going to be in direct competition with tens of thousands of freshly laid off people with the same skill sets.
WFH being 'the norm' also means that tech workers are more threatened by low cost offshore labor than ever before. Once the mass layoffs die down, there's nothing stopping these companies from hiring outsourced labor. We will see tens of thousands of tech workers displaced, looking for paying work. Remember #learntocode? The new slogan will be #learntoweld
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