Comment by rachofsunshine

This is a legitimate thing to want, and I myself prefer remote work and run a distributed company...

...but I don't think it's engaging with the problems involved.

Management exists for a reason. I'm not going to speculate too hard on what that reason is, but it's a profession older than those practiced by just about anyone on this forum, found across every culture, in every part of the world, at every time in history. You could say that it's just the case that managers can abuse and extract value from their employees, and that certainly does occur, but in claiming that that's all that management is you would be arguing for the greatest market failure in the history of mankind. The market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent, but you better have some really strong evidence if you want to argue it's remained irrational independently and in the same way across millennia.

So taking for a moment for granted that management exists and is important, its ease of execution does matter, too. And I think it's more-or-less a truism that it's a lot easier to manage a group of people who are all in a room, who you see every day, whose facial expressions and mannerisms you have a chance to read, whose casual water-cooler (water-bag? why do you have a bag of water? i am so curious) conversations you can overhear or participate in.

Remote work has trade-offs, and like any trade-off, it's in principle legitimate for someone to decide the upsides outweigh the downsides. They might be wrong about the trade-offs they choose to make, but that's not the same thing as being a petty tyrant - it's just running into the limitations of your judgment, which is a very ordinary human thing to do. If you want to convince people to run remote teams, you need to figure out what the trade-offs they're concerned about are and address them, not pretend they aren't there at all.

As someone who spent half his career in executive management of globomegacorps management is for the most part total bullshit.

Every global company is already working remotely because teams are spread out everywhere. Even if your team isn’t your dependencies are. The more senior you get the more you work on zoom these days. Before the pandemic it was in conference calls.

In fact the half assed in office approach is worse because not everyone is on the same foot. The remote offices from the leaders don’t get to have the on mute influence with the leader. When the call ends the people in the local room with the leader have a little meeting to make the real decisions. That’s grossly inefficient and unfair, to the point it’s started to make me sick to my stomach when I see it happen and I refuse to book rooms for in the office meetings.

In fact a role I had prior to the pandemic was figuring out how to shut down most offices of a megacorp to save money. We called it “bring your own office.” We analyzed deeply the interactions and determined in a global corporation the percent of time we make better decisions in office was less than 20% or 1 day a week. When the pandemic hit our predictions came true. But our elderly CEO couldn’t understand how the strategy he agreed to to save money would work once his ideological hackles got raised so he mandated everyone return 5 days a week even tho we were then 5 years into the bring your own office plan he agreed to. There were no metrics or reason other than, basically, he likes working in the office because it made him successful in his career and he can’t conceive that anyone could do anything different.

There are people who work better in the office and having a small office with plenty of high quality meeting areas and private places to work is smart. Management should allow knowledge workers to work the way they work best and figure out how to maximize team efficiency as managers are required to do. It’s a hard job. I know. I’ve done it. But RTO is a short cut that fails to recognize the incredible inefficiencies inherent in the approach, especially in a global company.