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The fight over return-to-office is getting dirty

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Michael Ejercito

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Nov 12, 2023, 1:53:54 PM11/12/23
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https://www.reddit.com/r/LockdownSkepticism/comments/17ssrey/the_fight_over_returntooffice_is_getting_dirty/

The fight over return-to-office is getting dirty
Two watchful eyes over an employee.
Return-to-office mandates indicate a failure of imagination on the part
of management and a refusal to do the work necessary to create a
positive company culture. Chelsea Jia Feng/Insider
Ed Zitron
Ed Zitron
Nov 7, 2023, 2:43 AM PST
Amazon has built its $1.3 trillion empire largely by tracking and
evaluating almost every aspect of a customer's life. From a new TV to a
toilet-paper refill, Amazon knows what a customer wants and when they
want it, and it's always ready to serve it to them.

This obsession with metrics and data, however, does not appear to extend
to certain parts of Amazon's workplace. Over the past few months, the
company has aggressively pushed employees back to the office. In
February, Amazon announced that employees would be required to come into
the office three days a week and since then, the e-commerce giant has
escalated its battle with remote employees: sending emails to employees
about their attendance, creating internal dashboards to display how many
days a week each employee was coming into the office, and telling
managers in October that they could begin firing employees who weren't
meeting the return-to-office requirements.

When perturbed employees have pressed executives for the reason behind
the mandate, supposedly data-obsessed higher-ups have seemed to have no
data to justify it. Asked in August about this, Mike Hopkins, a senior
vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, offered a vague
response, saying that he had "no data either way" on whether mandating
in-office work made people more productive but that executives believe
Amazon's workers do their best work when they're together.

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It's reasonable to wonder why Amazon, a company that has data on
hundreds of millions of people and their decisions, is struggling to
come up with hard numbers to back up its dictatorial push back to the
office. Perhaps the reason is that the data supporting Amazon and other
companies' RTO policies is threadbare, relying mostly on a few studies
that use sample sets of questionable usefulness to back up their claims
that remote work is less productive.

But the weakness of the evidence won't stop bosses from making these RTO
mandates. They indicate a failure of imagination on the part of
management and a refusal to do the work necessary to create a positive
company culture.

Evidence is as evidence does
As the return-to-office battle has heated up in the past six months,
there has been a marked increase in declarations that remote work is
less productive. But diving deeper into this evidence reveals flawed
logic — and a media industry obsessed with proving bosses right.

The study that has most often been used to argue for the necessity of
in-office work is a July working paper from researchers at the National
Bureau of Economic Research, which randomly assigned data-entry workers
at a company in India to work either from home or in the office for
eight weeks. The researchers determined that remote workers were 18%
less productive than their in-person counterparts. Journalists have
consistently cited this study without, it seems, taking a moment to
consider its findings. First and foremost, it's farcical to use the work
of entry-level data workers in India — who were recruited specifically
for the study — as a proxy for all employees in all industries around
the world. Secondly, the measurement of their productivity was "net
speed," or the number of correct entries they made in a minute. The
"drop in productivity" is really about how fast people could put numbers
into a sheet — but that's not what most people do at work.

Other outlets cited a study that examined the productivity of 10,000
workers at an Asian IT-services company. The central claim seems to be
tailor-made for RTO advocates: The researchers estimated a productivity
shortfall of 8% to 19% when workers transitioned from working at the
office to working from home. The study's authors found only a "slight
decline in output" but acknowledged workers were stretching out their
working hours at home; those things together showed up as a drop in
productivity. Here too, there are issues. "Output" in this case refers
to "performance against the semi-annual goal on a key performance
metric," like lines of useful code written by a developer. The authors
described these metrics as "objective" and tracked, but the actual
composition of these metrics is still pretty vague and based on
managers' interpretations of their value. Additionally, hours worked
were logged by an employee-surveillance software — but these sorts of
tools come with plenty of problems that should make anyone skeptical of
their efficacy.

These studies — and the RTO push — often betray an utter ignorance of
the workplace and work itself, both its structure and its outputs.
You'll notice a lot of these studies focus on call centers (the Stanford
researcher Nicholas Bloom cited two in his roundup of productivity
research), and that's likely because these are extremely controlled and
heavily micromanaged environments — ones rife with labor abuse. Crude
measures of productivity might indeed slip when workers are able to get
away from horrible managers or torrents of abuse, but "productivity" in
these studies is always a rigid metric, like "calls answered," rather
than something more meaningful, like whether a problem was fixed or
whether the customer was happy. These studies are relatively useless
when it comes to evaluating most companies' return-to-office strategies,
but that's just fine for the managerial elite.

As somebody who's been writing about this subject for years (and who's
worked remotely since 2012), I've yet to read a single piece of research
that convincingly backs up the assertion that we need to be in the
office. And yet major media outlets have continued to feed bosses'
narrative that we "do better work together." The existing studies
continually fail to evaluate real work. Instead they prioritize speed,
betraying the same corporate ignorance forcing people back to the
office. These studies — and the RTO push — often betray an utter
ignorance of the workplace and work itself, both its structure and its
outputs.

Just the vibes
Despite the limited evidence against it, corporations are increasingly
trying to kill remote work. Corporate statements about these decisions
never seem to justify the shift beyond platitudes about "togetherness"
and vague references to "culture." Look deeper, though, and they reveal
the rotten core of the mandates.

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Roblox, a company that derives its revenue from digital worlds, reversed
its flexible work policy in October, telling employees that if they
didn't work at least three days a week in the office they'd be laid off.
The reason for the about-face? Based on its CEO David Baszucki's blog
post announcing the move, it seems mostly about vibes.

"I personally hoped that for our culture and our type of work, it might
be possible to imagine a heavily hybrid remote culture," he wrote. "But
there was a pivotal moment for me when we had our first post-quarantine,
in-person group gathering. Within 45 minutes I came away from three
separate conversations with spontaneous to do's and ideas to put in
motion, something that hadn't happened during the past few years of
video meetings."

Nike's four-days-a-week policy points to "the power and energy that
comes from working together in person." Geico said its return-to-office
program was meant to "foster a sense of community and connection" — but
offered little data to support the decision. The only numbers in the
announcement appeared to be about layoffs: Geico said it was letting
2,000 people go to sustain "long-term profitability and growth,"
suggesting that while layoffs can be evaluated with data, in-person work
can only be backed up with mood rings.

Managers and executives make calls based on perception rather than
hands-on experience or data.
These announcements are almost always issued by executives who probably
won't be subjected to the same kinds of check-ins as the rank-and-file
workers the mandates apply to. Nobody's asking Amazon's Andy Jassy or
Geico's Todd Combs how many days they swiped into the office, and
there's no chance Oracle, which instituted a return-to-office policy in
May, would punish Safra Catz or Larry Ellison for spending too little
time at their desk. This irony combined with vague justifications
exposes the reality of the RTO push: Managers and executives make calls
based on perception rather than hands-on experience or data. The modern
CEO has become a figurehead reaping the rewards of a work process they
don't meaningfully participate in, so they make their choices based on
macroeconomic conditions, their own biases, or, evidently, a single
45-minute meeting that left them feeling good.

Nowhere is this more obvious than at Meta, where workers are required to
return three days a week. The only problem: Employees can't find the
space or the privacy to actually do their work at the office. The issue
is almost too on the nose. The honchos calling the shots at Meta, a
company that has caused global discord through its handling of people's
data, appear to be unaware of how people at the company do their jobs.
More frustratingly, Meta's corporate guidelines say that anyone who has
worked at the company for 18 months or more can apply to become a
permanent remote worker — a nice idea, except for the fact that hundreds
of people have applied and have yet to hear back.

Because I said so
Creating and sustaining a positive, productive corporate culture takes
work. It requires managers and executives who truly understand the
product their employees are putting out — and what is required to create
that product. That's what makes the move to kill off remote work so
frustrating. It's not clear that the return-to-office move is about
making workers more productive or building a better culture. Rather,
it's becoming obvious that these mandates are mostly an attempt to
reestablish a surveillance society that allows managers to skip over the
tough task of building a company where people actually want to work.

The RTO push is eyewash for investors to prove that drops in revenue and
profitability aren't a result of poor managerial decisions but the
result of lazy workers sitting at home in their pajamas. In some ways,
it's a genius move for executives — a way to establish control over
workers during an unprecedented societal awareness of labor rights
(thanks to the striking workers of the Writers Guild of America,
SAG-AFTRA, and the United Auto Workers) while also shifting the blame
and consequences of poor stock performance onto those least responsible.

Real management takes responsibility and makes thoughtful decisions
based on what makes a company stronger.
I would perhaps have more sympathy if companies made even the lightest
attempt to demonstrate the efficacy of office work through relevant data
or definable productivity metrics, rather than vague references to hours
worked or office attendance. But seeing this type of data is unlikely as
corporations have mostly turned modern managers into hall monitors. And
if, as some have suggested, the return-to-office push is an attempt at a
"soft layoff" — instituting unreasonable policies to make people quit
(or accept severance) — it's corporate cowardice. It's restructuring a
company based on who's most willing to tolerate wrongheaded
inconveniences, rejecting great workers who don't live close to an
office, and galvanizing sycophants who are willing to uncritically cheer
on every executive mandate.

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While executives may see a return-to-office push as a good thing, I
believe these mandates will only weaken their organizations, driving a
wedge between management and workers. Forcing in-person attendance
without clear goals and reasoning is going to create an outright
hostility toward higher-ups. This pointless and petty crusade does
nothing to make organizations better, leaner, or more productive — all
it does is temporarily help executives distract from larger
organizational issues.

Real management takes responsibility and makes thoughtful decisions
based on what makes a company stronger. The return-to-office move is the
exact opposite: an unproductive push for control that erodes the already
tenuous loyalty workers have to their employers while failing to address
core problems of managerial competency that will only get worse as
decent employees flee these dimwitted demands.

Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR, a national tech and business
public-relations agency. He is also the author of the tech and culture
newsletter Where's Your Ed At and the host of the "15 Minutes in Hell"
podcast.

About Discourse Stories
Through our Discourse journalism, Insider seeks to explore and
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provide thought-provoking perspectives, informed by analysis, reporting,
and expertise. Read more Discourse stories here.

HeartDoc Andrew

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Nov 12, 2023, 5:10:04 PM11/12/23
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In the interim, we are 100% prepared/protected in the "full armor of
GOD" (Ephesians 6:11) which we put on as soon as we use
Apostle Paul's secret (http://bit.ly/Philippians4_12 ). Though masking
is less protective, it helps us avoid the appearance of doing the evil
of spreading airborne pathogens while there are people getting sick
because of not being 100% protected. It is written that we're to
"abstain from **all** appearance of doing evil" (1 Thessalonians 5:22
w/**emphasis**).

Source:
https://biblehub.com/1_thessalonians/5-22.htm

Meanwhile, the only *perfect* (Matt 5:47-8) way to eradicate the
COVID-19 virus, thereby saving lives, in the US & elsewhere is by
rapidly ( http://bit.ly/RapidTestCOVID-19 ) finding out at any given
moment, including even while on-line, who among us are unwittingly
contagious (i.e pre-symptomatic or asymptomatic) in order to
http://WDJW.great-site.net/ConvinceItForward (John 15:12) for them to
call their doctor and self-quarantine per their doctor in hopes of
stopping this pandemic. Thus, we're hoping for the best while
preparing for the worse-case scenario of the Alpha lineage mutations
and others like the Omicron, Gamma, Beta, Epsilon, Iota, Lambda, Mu &
Delta lineage mutations combining via slip-RNA-replication to form
hybrids like http://tinyurl.com/Deltamicron that may render current
COVID vaccines/monoclonals/medicines/pills no longer effective.

Indeed, I am wonderfully hungry ( http://tinyurl.com/RapidOmicronTest
) and hope you, Michael, also have a healthy appetite too.

So how are you ?









...because we mindfully choose to openly care with our heart,

HeartDoc Andrew <><
--
Andrew B. Chung, MD/PhD
Cardiologist with an http://bit.ly/EternalMedicalLicense
2024 & upwards non-partisan candidate for U.S. President:
http://WonderfullyHungry.org
and author of the 2PD-OMER Approach:
http://bit.ly/HeartDocAndrewCare
which is the only **healthy** cure for the U.S. healthcare crisis

Michael Ejercito

unread,
Nov 12, 2023, 8:29:47 PM11/12/23
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I am wonderfully hungry!


Michael

HeartDoc Andrew

unread,
Nov 12, 2023, 9:05:22 PM11/12/23
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Michael Ejercito wrote:
While wonderfully hungry in the Holy Spirit, Who causes (Deuteronomy
8:3) us to hunger, I note that you, Michael, are rapture ready (Luke
17:37 means no COVID just as eagles circling over their food have no
COVID) and pray (2 Chronicles 7:14) that our Everlasting (Isaiah 9:6)
Father in Heaven continues to give us "much more" (Luke 11:13) Holy
Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23) so that we'd have much more of His Help to
always say/write that we're "wonderfully hungry" in **all** ways
including especially caring to
http://WDJW.great-site.net/ConvinceItForward (John 15:12 as shown by
http://tinyurl.com/RapidOmicronTest ) with all glory (
http://bit.ly/Psalm112_1 ) to GOD (aka HaShem, Elohim, Abba, DEO), in
the name (John 16:23) of LORD Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Amen.

Laus DEO !

Suggested further reading:
https://groups.google.com/g/sci.med.cardiology/c/5EWtT4CwCOg/m/QjNF57xRBAAJ

Shorter link:
http://bit.ly/StatCOVID-19Test

Be hungrier, which really is wonderfully healthier especially for
diabetics and other heart disease patients:

http://bit.ly/HeartDocAndrew touts hunger (Luke 6:21a) with all glory
( http://bit.ly/Psalm112_1 ) to GOD, Who causes us to hunger
(Deuteronomy 8:3) when He blesses us right now (Luke 6:21a) thereby
removing the http://WDJW.great-site.net/VAT from around the heart
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