I’m writing this diary as a companion piece to Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s diary titled, “New research doesn’t support return to office mandates, and neither do workers”.
Corporations are struggling with work from home issues and paying for costly office space, as workers have made it clear they don’t want to come back to the office. But it didn’t need to be this way. The pandemic brought it to a head suddenly, but the solution was available as far back as the 1970s. Tech workers were working from home using modems then, and as technology spread, corporations could have embraced a work from home model, which would have saved tremendous money on office space, rather than denying wage increases and doing layoffs to cut costs. More and more workers could have transitioned to a hybrid or total work from home model, preventing the pain corporations are going through now. To a degree, it was already happening from the 1990s on, but only rarely and only for a select group of workers, as corporations required the majority of their workers to be on site every work day. Thus, with typical short-term thinking and lack of foresight, corporations missed the boat.
There are two major reasons corporations want workers back in the office now: (1) to justify all that expensive office space, and (2) to oversee the workers since they don’t trust us and have to make sure we’re not goofing off. This latter is the point of Aldous’ diary. Productivity is actually rising with the work from home model, as he states, proving you don’t need to hang over workers like a vulture to get them to do their jobs. Many’s the time I heard my co-workers say they got a lot more work done when their manager was out of the office.
As office workers make it clear they prefer to work from home, now corporations have to figure out what to do with all that expensive office space and the leases they’ve signed for it. I worked in San Francisco’s Financial District most of my adult life, including the leasing department of a major corporation. Those buildings don’t come cheap, and office vacancies are continuing to rise. Indeed, a December 18, 2023 article in the San Francisco Chronicle (www.sfgate.com/...) stated office vacancies in San Francisco’s business district reached a new height of 35.4% in the fourth quarter of 2023. A little planning and foresight starting fifty years ago would have cushioned the sudden drop in occupancy and — oh, right — they wouldn’t have had so much office space in the first place because they’d implemented a hybrid work model years before.
Corporate America made a huge investment in office space for generations, and the pandemic upended that in less than two years. It’s one of those economic shocks no one could have anticipated. I understand why they want people to return to in-office work. Unfortunately, corporate America failed to take advantage of the technology that was already making work from home possible for the last several decades, and instead, it was forced on them by the pandemic with no preparation. Workers have made it clear that the work from home model is here to stay, and, although it will take years, the corporate office space will be repurposed — into living spaces, performance spaces, classrooms. I wonder if, in the meantime, some struggling corporations will ask the government for a bailout?