Keep Up With The Times Or Pay The Price

Allow me to tell you a story about a big (well, big in my country) company that decided, during a very well-known worldwide event that had it scrambling to send its workers to home offices that, hey, our offices are empty, and we don’t need them. Let’s sell them!

That part was the smart part of the whole deal.

But since no good things last forever, that global event eventually ended, and that company decided that it would be awesome to push their workers back into the offices. Not that any workers were too fond of that idea, mind you, but apparently, the remaining offices were losing value and the C-Levels didn’t like that, so let’s stuff the workers back into the offices so we can pretend these offices still have value!

Alas: we only had about 60% of our office floor space left.

So, the bigwigs hatched a great idea: 40% home office for everyone! This was announced with much fanfare at an all-hands meeting at the office. (Yes, the obvious irony was lost on them.) Why we should celebrate 40% home office when we had 100% before was also not exactly something anyone below C-Level understood, but hey, free food and drinks, so let’s humor the dorks — I mean, the C-Levels.

At this point, I already knew I was leaving the company for one that offered 80% home office. (And I was by far not the only one… but I get ahead of myself.) And nobody is more free to voice their opinion than someone who you hold no sway over. So, I had zero problem expressing myself, albeit presumably originally only to a coworker.

Me: “This is probably the stupidest idea in the history of this company.”

The CEO speaks up from behind me. He’s very obviously the source of the idea, judging by his reaction.

CEO: “What? Who are you to say that?”

Me: “You’ll see in a week. Two, tops.”

It didn’t even take two weeks. Ponder this: you get to work from home two days a week. Which days would those be? Take into account that there were many people who were “week-commuters”, i.e., they had an apartment in town where they stayed during the week and returned home to their family for the weekend.

The predictable outcome was that Monday and Friday, the place didn’t look much different than it (probably) looked during The Event, but Tuesday through Thursday, you had better come before 7:30 am, or you were hard-pressed to find a desk. And yes, of course, they were “hot desking”, the desk-equivalent to the previous torture for employees, i.e., open floor plan Hell.

C-Level’s response when asked for a solution: “You’ll figure something out among yourself to make this work.”

Well, we did. About 25% of the employees quit within a month. Another 25% quit when they noticed that they were supposed to pick up the slack with no extra pay and the demand for unannounced overtime. 

So, that company is now hobbling along with about 50% of the staff they’d need, and even back when I was still there, we were working on a skeleton crew, so I don’t even want to imagine what it’s like now. They’re pretty desperate to hire, but with a 60% office mandate, this isn’t going to fly in an industry that has a hard time attracting any talent with less than 80% work-from-home.

They could technically now demand 100% return-to-office; they sure have the office space for that. But I guess if they do, they will find that the rest of their staff will desert them.