We Still Brawling About RTO?

The short answer is that work is about control , especially to mid- to high-ranking managers, and that’s why there’s been a push back into offices of late. The air cover is “collaboration” or “needing impromptu ideas to pop up,” and while those have some validity, I can also tell you I’ve worked in offices for a chunk of 20+ years now, and I’ve seen true collaboration happen maybe six times, and an impromptu idea happen maybe once across decades. Those are not normative things. A lot of people barely want to speak to their co-workers, no lie.

So the big reason more people are coming back in is control. But there’s another reason tied to fundamental understanding of what work even “is.”

To executives and decision-makers, there’s the control aspect of course — being able to essentially grab a warm body passing you in a hallway and say “Hey, you don’t look busy. Hop on this for me.” That’s a big deal in office cultures, and executives love to flex it. And they can — because if you question them, you get fired. And since most of white-collar work is “hurry up and wait” anyway, no one really questions this stuff that much.

The other thing, though, is that most mid-level and up managers have their entire calendars blocked with meetings by Monday at 8:55am. Most of these meetings (60%?) are completely useless or outlasted their relevance several years ago, but they remain on the schedule in the guise of “getting the right people on the same page.”

Because their lives are so consumed by meetings and in-person events (i.e. perk parties), they long since stopped remembering an era where you come in and sit in a cubicle bored all day. But at a lot of jobs, if you lack meetings, you will do that. You will sit around bored all day, while others tell you “I’m so slammed!” and run to their meetings.

The real reason most white-collar could be remote is because a lot of “cog” workers are judged and potentially advanced on tasks, and tasks can usually be done from anywhere with at-scale platforms. But … the people making the decisions often spend their days running from conference room to conference room and office to office, and they forget what the boredom of desk life can be like because they’re so unnecessarily over-programmed. Thus, they believe everyone has to be in-office. I mean, those people must have tons of meetings too, right? That’s the way!

When you add “control” to “not thinking about the work experience of people who work for you,” you end up with most of us back in office. A distant third reason is: “A lot of decision-makers at companies live in the same neighborhoods as big commercial real estate guys, and they want to make sure the downtown core is an attractive leasing option so their friends can make money too, and so that’s why they pull back workers.”

Takes?