Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

OH NO! WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE! 

And there are cases of companies that, even before the pandemic and certainly since then, have decided that they don't place high value on personal employee interaction, so they've allowed employees to move further away from corporate HQs and engaged in hiring practices where they've hired large amounts of remote workers without ever having the intention of expecting them to come into any office whatsoever.

But there are also a very large number of fortune 500 companies, and a lot of government jobs, where WFH flexibility that was once allowed, either because of the pandemic or because of a move toward cutting overhead and opex or even because of the expectations of the labor pool, is now being rescinded, and those employees are being recalled to the office.  During the intervening years, many of them have moved far away from corporate offices.  They're now being asked either to absorb the commute no matter how long, or move.  The alternative beyond that, is almost certainly eventual termination.

The last batch is the one I'm primarily focusing on, and indeed is the category in which I find myself at this point.

As I've said, before the pandemic I was already 95% WFH and my employer was pushing more and more employees toward that end.  Now, post-pandemic, there's a 5-day work-from-office policy.  My remote status was revoked and I am now 100% in-office.  There are some advantages and some disadvantaged to this, and I'm not really making any statement regarding the relative merits of this policy, but rather just observing that this is a major trend right now, and the labor pool is going to be forced to adjust to it.

That's fair. I guess I'm perpetually wondering if that juice will be worth the squeeze, assuming the natural downriver effects (higher labor costs, lower worker quality) come to pass. But companies seem to want to do it, and one way or another, they'll find folks who will make it happen.

Going forward, I assume the hiring process will be key in changing attitudes, and that will take a few years to take hold.

The biggest issue I have with WFH vs RTO is that it's a very asymmetric concept. I've been at this company 17+ years. I know my stuff. I don't gain very much from being in an office. YET, I also remember when I was much younger and more green in my career. I benefited tremendously from having access to people who were then in the same position where I am now. I benefited from mentors much more than I'm benefiting mentees today. I think that's hard to have those sort of organic interactions when it requires putting a meeting on a calendar or asking to talk over Zoom, rather than just popping over to someone's office and asking a question and shooting the breeze.

The local company part is pretty interesting. Do you want to be a local company or not? If you want to with lots of folks together, that's super. If you want to be regional with operations spread across many cities and states, you dilute the value of being at a desk at 9. 

And I agree with the quoted part I left. I honestly love going into an office. I don't love it when I need to be in by a certain time, but I like having one to go into, people to have lunch with, etc. But I live a life where it doesn't cost me much to do that. And the pullback is reaching into workers' pockets. So my thought with all the pullbacks is how do these things balance out? And I don't have a great answer. I'm not the one losing hours with my kids so I can sit in traffic.

(I had several previous jobs where there were times you went into the office for odd shift reasons that ended with me just working on other things waiting on someone to do something. Those seemed suboptimal since much of my work was on-call/do-anywhere kinds of things)

I don't believe there's any consistent evidence that the overall labor cost will be higher than it is currently (in many cases those buildings are still being paid for, they've just been sitting empty) nor that the overall worker quality will be lower (perhaps some loss of efficiency, but perhaps some gains in velocity and nimbleness).

I was thinking from an individual company point of view. 

If I can only hire people within 50 miles of the Austin area, or willing to move within 50 miles of the Austin area, my labor pool is much smaller. Basic micro econ would say that I'm lowing supply, so thus prices go up. And because my pool is much smaller, I'll be missing out on a bunch of quality potential prospects. 

Similarly, people with full freedom of movement and choice of where to live can maximize the value on that front. If a company creates impositions there, it rises the worker's cost. A worker with higher cost on balance has higher demands and possibly more ability to say no and stay put. 

Going to remote work creates a lot of value off the bat, on both sides. When that value is taken away, there are almost assuredly going to be downstream market effects, likely shown in decision-making and preferences. 

Been there done that
What else ya got

That's what I'm saying.
Media falling into fainting couch over this.

They never want to say, is this a lot of cases?  What's a normal year what does this look like historically?  I talked about this w my folks this weekend. ' we all had measles, there was no vaccine. ' at the time.

I was thinking from an individual company point of view.

If I can only hire people within 50 miles of the Austin area, or willing to move within 50 miles of the Austin area, my labor pool is much smaller. Basic micro econ would say that I'm lowing supply, so thus prices go up. And because my pool is much smaller, I'll be missing out on a bunch of quality potential prospects.

Similarly, people with full freedom of movement and choice of where to live can maximize the value on that front. If a company creates impositions there, it rises the worker's cost. A worker with higher cost on balance has higher demands and possibly more ability to say no and stay put.

Going to remote work creates a lot of value off the bat, on both sides. When that value is taken away, there are almost assuredly going to be downstream market effects, likely shown in decision-making and preferences.

I don't think this hypothesis is sound.  The "restriction" of only being able to hire within the Austin area is minimal, because it's still a vast pool of potential employees.  I disagree with the frictionless model you're assuming in the remote worker labor pool.

In short, once again, I don't think it's statistically significant for very large companies.

And smaller companies don't have vast economies of scale, so any incremental gains aren't likely that great.

And that's not even counting the potential offsetting benefits from in-person work, some of which we've already touched on here, like quicker ramp and more thorough education and deeper understanding provided to new workers, when they have access to older more experienced coworkers.

As a remote employee in a hybrid company , we now place an extraordinary high emphasis now in only hiring new employees in our 9 domestic markets and 3 overseas markets for purposes of 3 day a week in office roles.

We're pretty much done hiring anyone new fully remote.

Yup pretty much the same here.  New fully remote workers won't be a thing for us, at least for a while.

I know it probably sounds like I'm very pro return-to-office and that's not the case.  I just don't think the fully remote model is clearly advantageous.  There are advantages and disadvantages to both and I think overall they balance out.

And I've worked extensively both ways, the past 7 years almost fully remote, and the rest of my career mostly in-person.