Google and JPMorgan have each told staff that office attendance will be factored into performance evaluations. The US law firm Davis Polk informed employees that fewer days in the office would result in lower bonuses. And Meta and Amazon both told employees they’re now monitoring badge swipes, with potential consequences for workers who don’t comply with attendance policies – including job loss. Increasingly, workers across many jobs and sectors appear to be barrelling towards the same fate.
In some ways, it’s unsurprising bosses are turning back to attendance as a standard. After all, we’ve long been conditioned to believe showing up is vital to success, from some of our earliest days. In school, perfect attendance is often still seen a badge of honour. The obsession with attendance has also been a mainstay of workplace culture for decades; pre-pandemic, remote work was largely unheard of, and employees were expected to be physically present at their desks throughout the workday.
Yet after the success of flexible arrangements during the pandemic, attendance is still entrenched as a core metric. What’s the point?
It’s a game that has nothing to do with workers, but real estate instead. If workers don’t go to the office, there will be no need for the company to rent an office the size it does, making it “lose” money. If they cut on their offices, real estate starts losing value (as we can see in some articles that start popping up), and that’s something that bothers a lot of big players.
But then people will start clamoring about retrofitting the empty skyscrapers into housing and then all the NIMBYs houses lose value, and that’d make tax revenue decrease.
THAT is why.
retrofitting the empty skyscrapers into housing
“Too expensive. Too difficult” they say… it’s fucking bullshit. Those are stalling words. They’re waiting on a plan to maximize the investment. My guess, money and/or tax credit from the government.
To be honest, that’s most likely a valid concern. Office buildings don’t meet the criteria for normal housing. If you look at the distribution of bathrooms and kitchens in these skyscrapers, you need to do quite some construction work to meet the requirements of apartments for housing.
It’s a consern buy it’s not impossible. Take greed out if the picture and it wouldn’t be an issue. We’ve got to stop encouraging this maximi return on investment shit.
If the developers, that attempt this, all go bankrupt, it does not help at all. If you want to push private companies into doing something unprofitable, you need to subsidize it or the government to do it on its own. For some of these buildings its cheaper to just build a new apartment complex instead of retrofitting them.
A while back someone in the know said how it could be done at a reasonable cost: each floor has small apartments built on the outside walls (one bedroom, two bedroom and family units … possibly different floors for each) with the interior centre section as a common space with a large kitchen, rec room, small kids area, etc. Bathrooms should already be on each floor, just need to tie in showers (and add more stalls if required).
There are towers doing this in a few areas, but the naysayers yell loudly when riled.
Unpopular opinion: Teams collaborate better in presence. Remote attendance is inferior to being in the same room even with the most expensive Cisco board or meeting owl.
However if you’re working on your own, processing to-dos, a team around you will be a hindrance. However, creative processes just don’t work that way and require interaction and variability to occur.
I agree with this to a certain extent.
I do think it’s easier to be creative and brainstorming with other people when I am in the same room as them, but ultimately it should be a mix of both for that kind of stuff to accommodate for everybody - that way, people can start their to-dos in peace either at the office or at home, wherever they’re already at.
My counrerpoint is that it doesn’t matter if it works better for business when it works so much better for everyone and everything else.
if workers arent in the office, then potentially billions of dollars in office real estate is no longer a good investment & will directly impact their revenue. any manager or e-level who is responsible for that kind of financial hit will be immediately fired and blacklisted… ergo, employees will return to the office effective immediately.
And they will love it, OR ELSE!!
