What's also not mentioned is that in multinational companies, especially since remote working became more widespread and attracting talent more difficult, teams are often made up of people from different locations anyway. So you won't have an in-person team, you'll just be joining Zoom (or in M$'s case, probably Teams) calls from the office rather than from home.

> teams are often made up of people from different locations anyway

My wife works at a multinational which has also decided to push RTO. Her closest team member works in an office 200 miles away from her office (in a different country), the vast majority of the rest of team are located between 3000 and 6000 miles away, on a different continent.

A friend of mine at AMZN has the same issue, his team is literally scattered around the globe.

This is also a situation where RTO has clear negative effects. If you have distributed teams, and everybody works from home, communication necessarily moves online. However, when parts of distributed teams are located in shared offices, they create islands of knowledge and personal relationships within the team, leading to all kinds of problems.

My org went for RTO two or three years ago. This year they've also started cutting locations from teams that are too distributed: you can either move or you can leave. There will still be a lot of people living on Teams, but a lot less, and mostly just management layers.

That's the key thing IMO; it's not "return to office" when quite a lot of the people never were in that office to start with. With the rate of turnover in most of these companies and the amount of time they were hiring for positions remotely, it's more "forced relocation, transfer, or 'voluntary' quitting without severance" for a large number of people. You can't return to a status quo that never existed for you.

I mean...you don't have to "voluntarily" quit without severance.

You can tell them, in writing, "I am willing and able to continue to perform the tasks I was hired for. If you insist that it be somewhere else, then you can fire me."

You could, and then presumably still not be paid severance despite being fired, and then have to decide whether it's worth trying to fight them legally. I don't pretend to know the right choice for everyone, but when presented with this exact choice, I pretty quickly realized that it wasn't going to be worth the effort. It sucks, but given the option to spend energy on fighting this battle or saving it to put towards finding a new job to support myself and my family (or trying to do both and likely burning myself out from trying to take on more than I could reasonably handle), it wasn't much of a choice. Sometimes being right doesn't mean that you don't lose.

Its a possibility, but I've never come across data that supports either approach reliably outperforming the other.

I've also never seen a company that actually tracked that well enough to make a decision like RTO based on their own data.

The evidence is that more companies are returning to old pre-covid policies than companies that are going remote only.

They can't all love commercial real estate that much right? Not all executives invests in office buildings.

Sorry I may have lost the thread a bit here. Are you proposing that as evidence that in office teams outperform remote teams?

This might be evidence of a belief, but that's no evidence that be belief is rational.

Would you sit in an airplane designed and built by a full remote workforce?

Would you download a car?

It’s not mentioned as a possibility because nobody has ever been able to substantiate that claim.

Nobody has been able to substantiate any of the other claims either but that hasn't stopped posters from endlessly repeating them.

False. RTO press releases have explicitly mentioned the benefit to nearby businesses.

Shouldn't we trust that the execs have this data and can see productivity metrics that aren't available to the public?

Unless you think all RTO is a conspiracy.

Why would they not use those metrics internally as part of the RTO policy then? Surely they would be picking particular stats out to highlight the benefits of RTO, talk about how well everyone is doing afterwards, etc.

Because they don't want the public/employees to misconstrue those metrics? Maybe they don't want employees to know how they view productivity?

Surely if they're presented with solid evidence that WFH increases productivity, they'd keep it. Execs make millions in bonuses if the performance of the company hits certain goals. It's baffling that people here still talk about real estate conspiracy theories.

If there were clear metrics showing that in-person teams “out perform” remote teams, we would be hearing about it constantly. The supposed rationale for keeping such data secret sounds far-fetched to me.

The rationale is that there is no upside and pure downside for releasing these metrics to the public. It opens them up to scrutiny.

The evidence is that there have been more RTO calls than companies switching to pure WFH post-Covid.

If more people eat hamburgers than vegetables, you'll start saying that that's evidence that hamburgers are more healthy?

It'd be evidence that people enjoy eating hamburgers more than vegetables.

Yeah, but managers enjoying RTO doesn't mean that it's good for the company

It’s absolutely all being done on vibes. The execs don’t have some super-secret productivity dashboard giving them a breakdown of employee output by work location. Maybe, if they’re really on the ball, they have employee profit contributions divided by that, but that would then immediately show all the support staff as unproductive.

I agree that a lot of smaller companies would do it on vibes. I don't think Microsoft would.

Based on what? Why do you trust Microsoft’s judgment here? They are fallible like anyone else.

You are talking about a company that shipped Windows 8.

> Shouldn't we trust that the execs

No.

> can see productivity metrics that aren't available to the public

I am an employee of a company claiming my productivity is higher in the office. Nobody has ever shown me anything even remotely resembling a productivity metric. They haven’t even tried.

Productivity metrics are a holy grail. If any company created one that works they’d be bragging about it endlessly to shareholders and correlating it with the enormous profits they’d be generating.

If they have one that works I’d like to see it so I can use it to measure changes in my daily habits and further increase my productivity.

Since they can’t articulate this metric at all I can only conclude that it doesn’t exist.

With how contentious RTO has been why haven’t the advocates published data on how big of a boost it has been to their KPIs?

> Unless you think all RTO is a conspiracy.

It’s possible RTO is just regular old incompetence. No need for conspiracy theories.

All else being equal, this is almost certainly true.

All else is nowhere near equal, of course. That's the real rub.