Major employers scrap plans to cut back on offices

Re:Major employers scrap plans to cut back on offices – KPMG by monkeydreams on Monday March 22, 2021 @11:33PM (#26550772)

The pendulum of remote-to-onsite work is swinging back away from full-remote, yes, but I think this type of report has the air of "buggy-cart vendors in the age of the Model T" about it.

Major (or a subset of) employers do not like losing centralised control of their employees, but there are a large cohort of employees who wish to see remote or hybrid models of work and, critically, this trend was growing prior to COVID-19. COVID merely accelerated this trend, as it did with a lot of pre-existing social and industrial changes.

> And lastly I'm just not convinced that businesses actually act based solely on hard figures.

Correct. Large, Big-5-hiring, corporations are probably going to be the last companies to move to true hybrid models. They are behemoths that cannot be turned quickly. They have slow bones, vast inertia, and long memories, and will have been optimised for reporting chains that require face-to-face interactions and strong visual signaling. All of this takes time to change.

But I wouldn't expect that this return to all-onsite work will be completed before the pendulum begins to swing back again the other way.

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Re:Major employers scrap plans to cut back on offices – KPMG by patrickk on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @04:20AM (#26552388)

> COVID merely accelerated this trend, as it did with a lot of pre-existing social and industrial changes.

My perspective is quite different. Perhaps for more innovative companies this is true that it accelerated the trend, but there are plenty of stuck-in-the-mud companies where COVID-19 forced their hand to move to remote quickly, and they would've never done this without COVID. That's was I saw (outside the FAANG, outside the US) in a traditional industry.

There was a telling survey posted some months back (can't find it unfortunately) "What accelerated digital transformation in your company?" and the answers were management or COVID, the response was overwhelmingly COVID.

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Re:Major employers scrap plans to cut back on offices – KPMG by ghaff on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @08:49AM (#26554374)

Not the survey in question but we did one last year that showed a significant acceleration of digital transformation. https://www.redhat.com/en/global-tech-outlook-report/2021

Also lots of anecdotal stories from senior IT folks. A pretty common theme is that COVID forced a lot of experiments that were on the maybe someday/probably risky pile and a lot of them turned out better than expected.

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Re:Major employers scrap plans to cut back on offices – KPMG by monkeydreams on Tuesday March 23, 2021 @05:21AM (#26552775)

Yeah, the shift was no means universal in breadth or depth, but it was there beforehand (remember Wework?) and this pushed more traditional industries to take it up.

Another example would be ties; already in Australia it was becoming common to see professionals wearing business casual rather than suit-plus-tie (especially in summer). A walk around the CBD of Melbourne recently suggested to me that COVID has hit suit-plus-tie very hard, but suit and no tie appears to be going strong.

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Re:Major employers scrap plans to cut back on offices – KPMG by phillipcarter on Monday March 22, 2021 @11:44PM (#26550853)

Yeah, I largely agree that all-onsite will be a thing of the past. Eventually enough talented folks will just work elsewhere and businesses will react. I guess the real question in my mind is that if you work for a place doing a hybrid approach, are you at a disadvantage? Unless senior management folks also do the same, that lack of visibility is devastating to a career.

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