Company executives have a message for their employees: return to work

[Brett]

Company executives have a message for their employees - return to work

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/24/business/return-to-work-office.html


Antsy executives have a message for their employees: Plans to return to in-person work are real this time.

(fingers crossed)

“We noticed other employers were saying, ‘We’ll be back in April.’ ‘We’ll be back in June.’ But we said we need some certainty,” said Sean Woodroffe, the head of human resources at TIAA, which has 12,000 U.S. employees. “This March 7 date is only the second time we announced a date.”

And Mr. Woodroffe is facing this new return-to-office date with optimism, he explained, seated at his desk in front of a glimmering cityscape, high above what he described as the bustling “vibe” of Midtown Manhattan. After all, the firm has a 98 percent Covid-19 vaccination rate, employees have been supplied with at-home tests and the line at the Third Avenue Wendy’s has been inching longer during lunchtime.

“With Omicron we realized that we needed to pivot from thinking about coming back into the office when Covid vanishes,” he said. “We recognized we have to pivot to how do you responsibly cope with Covid?”

Return-to-office plans are real this time (fingers crossed). Managers are hanging up welcome balloons and dusting off monitors with a sense of confidence. Coronavirus tests are widely available, including some provided by employers. Many businesses know the majority of their employees are vaccinated. Many workers have recovered from Omicron and are resuming indoor social activities.

 

[ScoopKona]

I have a message to employers. It involves a finger. Guess which one?

 

[geekette]

Again, the annoying tone of it all. We want your butts in chairs in the crowded cube farm while we count profits from our spacious private offices. We own you, make us happy.

if I did it from home, I’ll keep doing it from home. I am more effective in a private office, too.

While I might be “too young to retire”, I am far too old to want to deal with corp crap ever again.



I think the title was actually more abrupt and condescending than the actual quotes from the boss.

 

[MrockStar]

Its about time some of us on the front lines never worked from home, we made it so can you.

 

[ScoopKona]

Its about time some of us on the front lines never worked from home, we made it so can you.

Sounds to me like you are basically saying, "Since I had to suffer through it, everyone else should, too."

Thanks, no.

(I admit, I'm putting punctuation into your sentence. Breaking it into three, so that it reads, "It's about time. Some of us... We made it..." That's how I'm parsing this, at least.)

 

[MrockStar]

No, just agreeing with TIAA Corp.

 

[Brett]

Bosses dangle perks to return to work, but employees still stay away

Sorry, Bosses: Workers Are Just Not That Into You
American workers are going back to bars, movies, sports arenas and weddings—pretty much everywhere but their offices.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-workers-not-back-to-office-bosses-11645640418

What is holding up the return to the office right now? Plenty of workers simply don’t feel like it. They’re dining at restaurants, going to movies and taking trips, but offices aren’t on their itinerary. That is delivering a reality check for bosses, who’ve been hoping the plunge in Covid-19 cases meant workers would finally—finally!—come back.


Big banks like Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Jefferies Group LLC recently recalled much of their staffs, and tech giants like Microsoft Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc. , the parent company of Facebook, are planning March returns for some employees. There are people eager to resurrect their office lives, just as many business leaders have let go of the notion that face-time five days a week is the optimal way to work. Nationwide, however, office occupancy rates are hovering around one-third, according to an estimate by Kastle Systems, which tracks building-access-card swipes.

Sure, employees like catered lunches, lounges filled with beanbag chairs and the masseuse who sets up in the conference room every other Friday. But they aren’t ready to recommit to a five-days-a-week relationship—or even a three-day one.

“You’re not going to get me on the train for two hours for free bagels,” says Jason Alvarez Schorr, a 36-year-old software engineer who quit his job in New York in January, when his

Bosses are surveying seas of empty seats and quietly noting employees who are going to packed sporting events, posting sun-drenched photos on Instagram and helping the latest Spider-Man movie set box-office records—basically, going about every facet of their daily lives from the Before Times, except coming in to work.


Not all workers are back to their old routines. The U.S. is still in a pandemic, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and many working adults care for small children who can’t be vaccinated or elderly or immunocompromised parents.

Yet new research shows the office reluctance is less about Covid-19 and more about convenience. As of this month, 61% of U.S. workers who telecommute most of the time are doing so by choice, according to a recent Pew Research Center poll. Among this group, more than three-quarters simply said they prefer working from home.

 

[Snazzylass]

Company executives have a message for their employees - return to work

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/24/business/return-to-work-office.html


Antsy executives have a message for their employees: Plans to return to in-person work are real this time.

(fingers crossed)

“We noticed other employers were saying, ‘We’ll be back in April.’ ‘We’ll be back in June.’ But we said we need some certainty,” said Sean Woodroffe, the head of human resources at TIAA, which has 12,000 U.S. employees. “This March 7 date is only the second time we announced a date.”

And Mr. Woodroffe is facing this new return-to-office date with optimism, he explained, seated at his desk in front of a glimmering cityscape, high above what he described as the bustling “vibe” of Midtown Manhattan. After all, the firm has a 98 percent Covid-19 vaccination rate, employees have been supplied with at-home tests and the line at the Third Avenue Wendy’s has been inching longer during lunchtime.

“With Omicron we realized that we needed to pivot from thinking about coming back into the office when Covid vanishes,” he said. “We recognized we have to pivot to how do you responsibly cope with Covid?”

Return-to-office plans are real this time (fingers crossed). Managers are hanging up welcome balloons and dusting off monitors with a sense of confidence. Coronavirus tests are widely available, including some provided by employers. Many businesses know the majority of their employees are vaccinated. Many workers have recovered from Omicron and are resuming indoor social activities.

Gee whiz! Is the NYT recycling headlines? Sure seems like old news to me.

I'm the old dog on my team trying to offer a bit of wisdom to the young pups. I successfully got everyone on my team to hang around after 2 revisions of our compensation plan in the last 6 months, though I'm beginning to have my doubts.

For what we do, we actually get energy & shared wisdom being wedged in the cube farms. We are back to sitting side-by-side. I'm getting props from my new team about the things they are learning from me by overhearing my convos. And, I shamed one who is approved to WFH F/T to coming in yesterday. She's starting to see what she is missing out on.

Still, we are grateful for the flexing and WFH part of the week. A lot of corps are adopting this model to keep employees happy - working from home P/T and going in the office part of each week. Best of both worlds for employer & employee.

 

[HitchHiker71]

No, just agreeing with TIAA Corp.

What TIAA corp will come to realize - just as many other employers who have attempted to enforce office work requirements during the latter part of 2021 - is that many of their employees will leave - and they will end up having to pay 20-30% or more to replace that same employee who left due to the labor force crunch that isn't going away when the pandemic eases due to mass retirements from the Baby Boomers that don't have any desire to put up with any shanigans any longer with respect to workplace politics and forced office work requirements. I work from home full time - have for years now. I'm more productive at home without any doubt. I've got friends who are in management that were forced back into the office in H2 2021 - along with their fellow workers. They have endured 30-50% attrition over the past six months as their employment base - in many cases their best workers - left for other jobs that offered work from home in comparison - and for higher compensation to boot. It's a no brainer. There will be employers who don't adapt to this sea change - and they will continue to suffer from markedly higher turnover rates and associated higher compensation costs along with the significant lost productivities and loss of institutional knowledgebases from long time employees leaving. Congrats on the failure to adapt - your competitors that have already embraced the new reality of the labor markets are going to put you out to pasture eventually. Best to adapt now while you still can. Now is not the time to practice resistance IMHO.

 

[geekette]

What TIAA corp will come to realize - just as many other employers who have attempted to enforce office work requirements during the latter part of 2021 - is that many of their employees will leave - and they will end up having to pay 20-30% or more to replace that same employee who left due to the labor force crunch that isn't going away when the pandemic eases due to mass retirements from the Baby Boomers that don't have any desire to put up with any shanigans any longer with respect to workplace politics and forced office work requirements. I work from home full time - have for years now. I'm more productive at home without any doubt. I've got friends who are in management that were forced back into the office in H2 2021 - along with their fellow workers. They have endured 30-50% attrition over the past six months as their employment base - in many cases their best workers - left for other jobs that offered work from home in comparison - and for higher compensation to boot. It's a no brainer. There will be employers who don't adapt to this sea change - and they will continue to suffer from markedly higher turnover rates and associated higher compensation costs along with the significant lost productivities and loss of institutional knowledgebases from long time employees leaving. Congrats on the failure to adapt - your competitors that have already embraced the new reality of the labor markets are going to put you out to pasture eventually. Best to adapt now while you still can. Now is not the time to practice resistance IMHO.

Onboard with your entire post, but I’m glad you included “institutional knowledge” as that is not something replaceable. It must be grown over many years. Employees aren’t interchangeable chess pieces, they are fully unique individuals with their own bag of talents, skills and experiences.

seems to me that smart CEOs would have identified key people at all levels and made a move to retain them.

 

[ScoopKona]

seems to me that smart CEOs would have identified key people at all levels and made a move to retain them.

Pointy-Haired bosses gunna pointy-hair.

My wife is still on the mainland. Still working her career. And this year was the last straw. She'll join the great resignation and move to the farm in a few months. (She's under contract.)

Claude Rains voice: "I'm shocked! Shocked! That people don't want to work themselves to death in a soul-crushing office, at a pointless job, with no benefits for less than a living wage!"

 

[Brett]

Pointy-Haired bosses gunna pointy-hair.

My wife is still on the mainland. Still working her career. And this year was the last straw. She'll join the great resignation and move to the farm in a few months. (She's under contract.)

Claude Rains voice: "I'm shocked! Shocked! That people don't want to work themselves to death in a soul-crushing office, at a pointless job, with no benefits for less than a living wage!"

My wife joined the "great resignation" last year and retired.

 

[HitchHiker71]

Onboard with your entire post, but I’m glad you included “institutional knowledge” as that is not something replaceable. It must be grown over many years. Employees aren’t interchangeable chess pieces, they are fully unique individuals with their own bag of talents, skills and experiences.

seems to me that smart CEOs would have identified key people at all levels and made a move to retain them.

Unfortunately most CEOs are no longer compensated for long term thinking, at least for public companies. They are compensated for relatively short term quarterly metrics and associated planning all to bolster stock prices. This has been an unfortunate consequence of the law passed in in the early 1990's that limited tax deductions for executive salary and bonus pay of over $1mm per year:

The Executive Pay Cap That Backfired

A while back, Congress voted to curb soaring compensation for corporate officers by limiting tax deductions. Here’s how it went wrong.

www.propublica.org

This legislation is at least partly responsible for the shift to 95% of executive pay being tied to restricted stock grants - which work around this legislative tax deduction limit. The consequence being that executives are now directly incented, from their own pay packages, to push stock prices as high as possible during their tenure. Oftentimes some of the most strategic long term decisions for public companies won't result in short term stock gains. This includes how employees are treated and valued. If keeping employees on during a downturn puts stress on the bottom line that will result in the stock falling even further due to bad quarterly and annual reports, then the CEO is more likely to endorse mass layoffs in an effort to bolster the stock price. This is an excellent example of legislation producing unintended consequences that have gone unaddressed and have since fundamentally altered corporate leadership incentives for public companies - stressing short term performance over long term stability in many cases.

 

[Pompey Family]

I have a neighbour who works for the government, he has been working from home since the start of the pandemic and has yet to return to the office (union intervention). He actually spends most of his day undertaking jobs around the house and garden and in the summer, spent a significant amount of time sitting in his garden reading (I'm medically retired so I can afford to spend my time curtain twitching) so I'm not surprised that he has no enthusiasm to return to the office and I'm certain that he's far from alone in feeling this way.

Conversely my wife is working considerably longer hours now that she's working from home. The company she works for is happy for her to work from home, it saves them money from not having to run an office, colleagues think it's appropriate to schedule meetings at 07:30 am and to make business calls at 9 pm on a Saturday.

Personally I don't think the widespread move to working from home is a good one.

 

[TravelTime]

Sounds to me like you are basically saying, "Since I had to suffer through it, everyone else should, too."

Thanks, no.

(I admit, I'm putting punctuation into your sentence. Breaking it into three, so that it reads, "It's about time. Some of us... We made it..." That's how I'm parsing this, at least.)

This is inconsistent and insensitive on many levels.
1) During Covid, we have all been asked to suffer for others.
2) Just because some employees are being called back to work, it does not mean you are being asked to suffer because others have suffered.
3) It is insensitive to say that others suffered for you but you should not have to suffer.
4) The front line workers went to war for the stay at home workers. Now people are protesting going into a safe office? Talk about entitlement.

 

[ScoopKona]

This is inconsistent and insensitive on many levels.

This is *pragmatic* on many levels. Keeping as many people as possible out of public reduces the chances of transmission.

Despite our leading the world in ignoramuses who ignore basic hygiene standards during a plague, only 25% of our citizens have been infected. That leaves nearly 250 million of our neighbors who have not caught this virus. Piling them into offices, cubicles and trading floors needlessly will lead to precisely one thing: more needless death.

It puts our additional pressure on our already strained health system.

It is just another example of vainglorious ignorance on the part of our knuckleheaded citizenry. That's why we lead the world in cases and deaths.

No country has botched its pandemic response as badly as the US. And this is just another example of us making unwise decisions.

 

[1Kflyerguy]

Personally i have been going into the office since last July, at least a few days a week. But our main campus is still pretty deserted.. Probably less than 10 people on my floor most days. But the recent numbers have been increasing.

Our management is encouraging us to return, but so far we are not being forced. Though that may change at some point in the future.

Going into the office breaks things up, and does help me to focus better. One of my teammates came into the office earlier this week and we actually collaborated in person for the first time in two years... kind of an amazing feeling

 

[DrQ]

Our work environment has changed. Gone is an assigned seat in a cubicle farm. We now make a reservation in an open seating environment.

I'm classified as an occasional in office FTE and my management has us in the office for one day a month.

We are now Bedouins in the office desert.

 

[MrockStar]

Hot desking. Fun.

 

[MdRef]

Hot desking. Fun.

Sounds like an after hours game but, is this an all singles game?

 

[joestein]

So, I recently lost 2 people who work under me. Not only is the replacement cost much higher than what the previous employees made, but many do not want to return to the office.

If you want employees to come back to the office - you will have to offer a premium salary and benefits. My job is currently hybrid at 2 days a week in the office, but subject to change.


I will guess we will see what happens. We have been trying to recruit a manager for 3 weeks with not one resume. We are also trying to get a staff person and we have gotten a bunch of resumes, but only one or two good ones.

I think my firm would like everyone in 5 days a week, but they realize that will not work today.

 

[geekette]

This is inconsistent and insensitive on many levels.
1) During Covid, we have all been asked to suffer for others.
2) Just because some employees are being called back to work, it does not mean you are being asked to suffer because others have suffered.
3) It is insensitive to say that others suffered for you but you should not have to suffer.
4) The front line workers went to war for the stay at home workers. Now people are protesting going into a safe office? Talk about entitlement.

#4

Front line workers did not go to war. Front line workers did not go to war For work from home employees. Front line workers are those with positions that cannot be done from home, not people drafted to be crammed into a foxhole with inadequate food, clothing and weaponry. The pandemic is not a war.

I‘m staying away from the word “suffer” because, what the heck does that mean in this context? Suffering is a characteristic of having a non-mild case of COVID. If doing a job a person agreed to do is “suffering”, then perhaps find a new job.

 

[Pompey Family]

Despite our leading the world in ignoramuses who ignore basic hygiene standards during a plague, only 25% of our citizens have been infected. That leaves nearly 250 million of our neighbors who have not caught this virus. Piling them into offices, cubicles and trading floors needlessly will lead to precisely one thing: more needless death.

It hasn't nappened in the UK. WFH has been abolished albeit many employees are reluctant to relinquish the often cushy aspect of working from home but for those thousnds who have returned to the office the covid infection rates, hospitilasations and deaths are still falling on a daily basis. Save another deadly variant it would appear that the UK has very much reached an endemic stage.

It's also worth noting that Scotland who maintained the strictest and vigorous covid restrictions in comparison to England fared far worse with their infection, hospitilasation and death rates. This is despite vaccination rates being similar between both countries and actaully lower in certain communities in England.

 

[MrockStar]

Thanks for the comparison between Scotland and England in covid rates, the deniers can't hide those ad much as Sweden and Michigan or Quebec.

 

[Superchief]

I think there are two key barriers to keep workers from wanting to return to work in the office:

1. The open office concept is not conducive to productivity. I don't know anyone who prefers an open office over private offices. There are too many distractions and you feel like you are working in an open sweatshop with people always looking over your shoulder.
2. Gas prices are double what they were prior to the pandemic. Many people also have to pay for parking.

I doubt that things will change until companies rethink totally open offices, and our government removes restrictions and encourages US production (and easy shipping) of oil.