A lot of times, when people discuss the phenomenon of employers ending work-from-home and try to make their employees come back to the office, people say that the motivation is to raise real estate prices.
I don’t follow the logic at all. How would doing this benefit an employer in any way?
I think all answers so far are either wrong, only rationalizations after the fact, or just minor contributors. I’m pretty sure the real main reason to get people back is a feeling of control and superiority.
It’s harder to do something else than work when you’re at the office. So they want to at least be able to look over the shoulder of their employees, which gives them a feeling of being in control.
The other is superiority, how are managers going to feel superior, like their higher status means something, if there is no one there that’s deferring to them? “Wfh superiority” does not feel as real as seeing real people react to your presence in some way.
Achieving high social status is one of the base desires of being human, and it’s being applied to the workplace majorly. Even if technically nothing changes for bosses regarding status with wfh, it still feels like status is lost because the effects are not as visible, which has to be avoided at almost all costs.
This is correct. Real estate prices don’t mean anything to the vast majority of companies since most of them are not in the real estate business and likely even lease their office spaces. It could have a minor impact to the balance sheet if deemed impaired but it doesn’t amount to something that matters in valuation which cares more about P&L, cash flow, and working capital.
Business leaders are human, they don’t know what the fuck is going on, or how to “increase shareholder value”. So for lack of better ideas they can just tell employees to go back to the office.
Basically, if you don’t know how to stop a ship from sinking, you can at least change the curtains on the windows so you look busy on the way down.
They first, make the decision to go back to the office, second, they tell their team to go find reasons to rationalize the decision. There isn’t a nuanced logic to arriving at the conclusion, they make these calls off-hand on gut feelings. The thinking comes in later from the direct reports trying to fill in the logical gaps, even if the decision wasn’t a logical one to begin with.
I’m pretty sure a lot of these reasons you discard are actual reasons that in some way make sense, they’re just not the main ones. Behavior is rarely dictated by just a single reason, it’s always some kind of combination.