RTO doesn’t improve company value, but does make employees miserable: Study::Data is consistent with bosses using RTO to reassert control and scapegoat workers.
RTO doesn’t improve company value, but does make employees miserable: Study::Data is consistent with bosses using RTO to reassert control and scapegoat workers.
One of the more honest arguments I have seen about RTO:
The company has rented an important building for operations.
That building is prime real-estate, which is now loosing value, because no one is using it and no one wants to buy it.
Since that can get very expensive, forcing use of the building to keep the investment stable makes sense on paper.
Result: Workers are forced back into office, to everyones detremend. Just because some guys asset is loosing value and now everyone else has to suffer because of it.
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It is one of the driving forces behind RTO. There is no small amount of worry over a total collapse of the commercial real estate market. When large companies announce RTO it helps keep the commercial real estate market going.
Counter point to that is that companies that force RTO end up loosing the good employees who actually liked remote work. So the real estate is “saved” and they get a “free” layoff with no severance payouts but the company gets a brain drain.
Companies, currently, are viewing this as a net positive.
Why would a company care about a rented property losing value?
Has less to do with companies who rent and more to do with ones whom finance the construction of the building in the first place. It was a lot more common back in the day for companies like sears to build sky scrapers as a vanity project that they could park money into. Trump wasn’t the only person in the real estate market advantageously overvaluing his properties.
Pretty much every sky scraper devoted to office space is a huge waste of money, and are rarely ever utilized anywhere near their capacity. It why so many NYC government agencies were located in the world trade center. The local government was basically helping achieve some of the capacity they approved for the project, helping make the wtc look more utilized that what it was.
There used to be a pseudo economic model that was surprisingly consistent. That anytime the newest tallest building in the world was announced, there would be some sort of recession within a couple years. It was seen as a sign that corporations were running out of productive places to stick their earnings.