Why are CEOs still so intent on taking worker attendance?
Why are CEOs still so intent on taking worker attendance?
In the ongoing return-to-office battle, showing up to your desk is becoming a performance metric – just like it was in grade school.
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?
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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.
I think the real estate thing is big, but also they'll be god-damned if we get a benefit for free.
Once it's a benefit they have control over, they can use it as leverage for those that want it back. They can cut our pay, increase our hours, both.
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.
Would still be nicer to have sunlight for the communal areas, but that sounds like a working solution. Probably profit goes into the drain though, because you get less units you can rent out and people will pay less for apartments with only a shared bathroom and kitchen.
If it's a choice between not having a place to live or apartments like that, which would you choose?
I mean Canada is accepting refugees who end up on the streets because there's no housing for them!
It’s a game that has nothing to do with workers, but real estate instead.
Don't forget tax incentives offered by cities and states to locate lots of office workers in those taxable areas. No workers there, no payroll/sales taxes collected. No revenue derived from workers forced to go there where they will eat, shop, and consume services. Those cities and states what their money.
This reason doesn't really make sense to me. The company pays the same for the office whether there are people in it or not. Forcing people into the office isn't saving them any money, in fact they probably pay more when you factor in utilities.
They do pay more. The issue comes in because many executives are really doing two jobs. Job one is the company exec. They want to save money and downsizing office space is kosher with that job. But their second job is being landlords for commercial office space. Their portfolios will be negatively affected by companies (including their own) getting rid of office space.
They are choosing to prioritize their personal wealth (commercial real estate investments) over the health of their company.
Modern business is full of this type of stuff. The priority is always personal benefits over the health of the company. Run it into the ground while extracting as much as you possibly can and walking away from any consequences.
If you pay for a building that can house 100 workers, but only 20 come into the office and the other 80 work from home, you have way more space than what you need. You could probably rent a place half as big for half the price and still have room.
Would you rent a 5 bedroom, 4 bathroom house with a 3-car garage as a bachelor? I mean you can but you're paying for way more than what you actually need.
When that's all they build, do you really have a choice?
It's an interconnected issue where the value of real estate is dependent on people having a use for it.