Originally published at: Microsoft cuts office space, bucking "back to the office" trend - Boing Boing
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Recall a “obligatory attendance” christmas party where i got stuck next to one of the half dozen “vice presidents”, who (partly in his cups), declared “…can’t reduce meetings! Without meetings what is there for middle management to do!?”
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The existential self-justifications of no-value-added middle managers and HR drones ultimately won’t be enough to convince executives and shareholders to pay for square footage they don’t really need.
One commercial real estate broker I know is now focusing exclusively on spaces where employees have to be on-site every day to do their jobs (e.g. medical offices). Even there he says the market has shrunk radically.
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Telemedicine really does reduce costs and physical office space needs. If done correctly and a patient is regularly “looked in upon” remotely it helps curb costly office visits or emergency room care. It has to be fairly proactive care though to sway the need for the space reduction across healthcare. Hence the more stable real estate.
Also, many states require a physical office in the state to practice medicine there. There’s many empty medical offices with two computers and a fax machine in them to satisfy that requirement.
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My neighborhood is surrounded by pharma and biotech labs. I hope those guys are not taking their work home with them.
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I have seen too damn many stories about programmers whining about their corporate overlords wanting them to return to the office. I am starting to feel like every single one of these overprivileged, overpaid whiners needs to be back in the office. If you want the pay that comes with a regular office job then your ass belongs in the office. If you want to be free from those shackles then take the risks that come with being a broke-ass freelancer like me.
Get back in your cars, minions. Go work in the open-plan cattle pens where your overseers can look out over you from their offices with doors that close and feel smug about how many people work under them. You chose your fate, stop whining. You bought a house in the suburbs that requires five hours of your days are spent commuting? That’s a problem you made your own damn self.
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This is only half the story.
Microsoft makes Teams, true, but part of that entire enterprise suite are boss micromanagement tools. They’re trying to turn the whole thing into a tweakable panopticon.
They’re more comfortable with remote work because they think they’re the best at controlling people. They produce metrics of what you do on your computer all day to help pinpoint every opportunity to squeeze more out of you. That’s far from productive “pull” management.
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Wow. So employers can make demands of employees for no actual reason, and they should just suck it up, because that’s the condition for getting paid? Why do we even have things like weekends then? If you want time for yourself you should freelance, otherwise you deserve a horrible life.
I don’t think you’ve figured out who your enemy is here.
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I’ve seen two comments today on stories about return to work/commuting that just totally seem to lack empathy. This is one of them.
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Do you think anyone wants to be in that now-discredited and unnecessary situation, full-time or freelance? Because you do seem to believe that full-timers deserve it because they dare to want salaries and steady work and somewhat affordable homes that, by their nature, tend to be a long commute from city centre offices.
The response to the pandemic put lie to the MBA/HR Culture’s long-standing claim that employees need to be together in the office to be productive. And now, despite all evidence to the contrary, they’re trying to roll that back mainly for the benefit of crappy managers, control-freak bosses, and commercial landlords. Comments and attitudes like yours enables them, to the detriment of all workers. I’d suggest that you re-visit this concept in regard to labour:
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It’s the chemists inventing explosives you don’t want working from home or in any built-up area really. /s
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I’ve seen The Andromeda Strain, you don’t want that in your neighborhood either. 
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I think one of the major challenges here is that companies often struggle to quantify productivity in a meaningful way. I know we do in the engineering consulting world where every little project is different and unique. If you knew that real productivity stayed up then you could be confident that you weren’t sabotaging things for the future.
Another challenge is that every survey comes back with complaints that employees (especially young ones) don’t feel like they belong and want to feel like they have friends at work and are more part of the team. Workplace culture is very difficult to cultivate when people don’t come together in person. Remote work really favours a mercenary attitude about employment.
Another challenge is training green workers. Engineers come out of school with good fundamentals but zero ability to do the work industry needs them to do. There is so much learning that has to happen in the first 24 months out of school and it’s hard to do that when they’re remote. Sure there are collaboration tools but they aren’t as effective as putting them in the same room as someone with 4 years more experience and putting them to work on the same project.
Remote work is great for experienced staff who can operate independently and don’t rely too much on a team. It is much less good for new staff who need to learn things from those more senior people, much of which can often take place by listening to ad-hock technical discussions and problem solving discussions.
I think it’s great that companies are working to be more accommodating but I’m pretty insistent in our org that working from the office is the default with easy exceptions because flexibility is also important for the team.
As opposed to forcing people into open offices like cattle, which definitely makes them feel like respected parts of a team, until of course they are fired to impress investors. 
Companies have a mercenary attitude to employment. So long as that’s the case, employees are going to pick it up too, no matter how many lunch meetings you demand they attend.
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Lol, I’m one of those “overpaid” whiners. I don’t know where you get your idea about people you describe there but I don’t think it represents all of us. I can’t afford to buy a house, still live with my parents, have to commute 20 miles one way, work in the lab without sunlight… For one of the “whiners” you complain about, there is dozens of us who keep our heads down to make a living. Even if they complain, so what. That’s their right. If their complains can make all of us better off, I’m all for it.
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Have you ever had a boss make you attend a lunch meeting? I haven’t and I have never done so to anyone reporting to me. You don’t have to be an asshole to people but maybe this is more of a symptom of USA attitudes (or huge company attitudes) towards work and workers that gets lost in translation to a smaller company in a different country.
I work in a services based industry where the only money we’re making is from the billable hours logged by staff who work on projects. We’re about 30 people strong across two main offices and nobody is a full-time people manager. Our incentives are all aligned in building people up and helping people do more and better work because people drive revenue rather than just cost.
You build effective teams by caring about the people who report to you and working on those relationships. You build people’s skills and help them achieve their goals. You make them set goals to achieve and push them forward. You break down barriers in their way.
I’m not sure what’s wrong with the companies that have these problems but it seems like lazy and uncaring management practices is a significant problem.
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Full disclosure: I am fortunate enough to have the job I’m about to describe.
So why did my employer just refresh my old laptop with a new one? Why do I have software-based collaboration tools installed on it? (Teams and Citrix).
COVID squeezed the proverbial toothpaste tube into the sink and we realized that the old office model could, in fact, be truly mobile.
Companies now want to get that proverbial toothpaste back in the tube, but we (the proletariat) are now asking: why?
Other than “because I said so”, why do I need to be in an office when I can do all of my work where I sit?
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