> However, if I know anything about high performing teams, it’s that you need to have mutual trust (which breeds psychological safety), and a shared model of what success looks like (metrics anyone?). Without these you’re going to struggle to produce results office or no office.
Hear, hear.
Note that these points are interdependent: Staff must trust management will collaborate and iterate on metrics, and management must trust employees will not game the metrics. If those things are true, then success measured against those metrics (that flows into business health and employee rewards) will reinforce mutual trust. The opposite is true, too.
It's good to see them adopting a stance instead of weird half-measures.
Remote vs in-office tends to get wrapped up in all kinds of narratives: it's a thrilling tale of the Evil Corporatocracy vs the Common Man, or perhaps it's the Future of Work, or even a dark conspiracy driven by Big Real Estate.
The fact is, it all comes down to personal preference: some people like WFH and some prefer in-office. It's best that companies pick one and stick with it, so people can work in whichever environment they prefer.
I consider those people to be on the "I want to work in an office" side.
Companies with RTO policies still usually give the option to work from home a couple days a week, right? Just not every day. You still need to live within commuting distance of an office, which is a pretty big restriction.
Making up excuses instead of telling the truth is an issue with everything CEOs tend to say.
They never tell you the real reason for anything. During the various tech layoffs, I honestly wished CEOs would just lean into the "I am doing this because I'm greedy and I want more money" angle instead of trying to pretend they had to do it due to some phony line reasoning.
I think that a companys ability to do full remote heavily depends on its culturenas the article also points out. I worked for Red Hat for ~2.5 years as an engineer and not once have I been to an office or even met anyone else from the company. However, my manager for most of the time was an old school RHer and really treated work as work and had his social life outside the company. We got a ton of work done in that time with a minimal amount of meetings.
I've also been in teams/departments that were heavily concentrated in certain offices, had a tendency to hire from that area, or needed frequent offsites. The people in those departments were much more pf the sociable kind, spent much more time in meetings, even when doing so remotely. They also tended to do much less in writing. Working remotely and in a documentation-first fashion was a lot more difficult here, but given their line of work (closer to the customer) this is not exactly surprising.
It doesn't work for everyone, if you want a remote company you, you have to hire and organize accordingly. YMMV.
I've been slowly perusing the job market since May or so, and the number of remote jobs in the area I'm looking has certainly decreased. I wouldn't call it a U-turn either though... The opportunities are still orders of magnitude better than even 5 years ago. From that perspective, we're still way ahead (for those of us who want these opportunities, at least).
In my experience, it seems every tech company around has let their office lease expire. We have been pushing for a while to get a coworking space for ages but management refuses because it costs money they don’t have to spend. Pretty depressing but I’m having a hard time finding any job listing that has an office available.
Anecdata: the previously “remote first always” startup I work for has recently started to backpedal on that and target onsite hiring. So at least in VC land there seems to be push from investors to shift more to hybrid or onsite
The very same. They also curiously laid off almost exactly 20% at my company several months ago which was suspiciously like a lot of other VC funded companies’ layoff amount
I am not sure that the primary usage of public transit is commuting. Perhaps it is more prevalent in some regions of these United States, such as NYC and environs, and perhaps it is prevalent for certain routes. Certainly, most metro areas provide special "Express" lines with prices, routes, and hours geared for commuters.
But what I've found in transit authority policy is that they typically disregard workplaces when planning routes and schedules. The terminus and transfer point for a typical local bus route is in a shopping mall. Sure, this is a workplace for many people, but for every mall worker aboard a bus, I see 10-20 shoppers, and 10-20 students, and 5+ homeless people.
Furthermore, public transit service levels are not determined by payments of fare, but by taxpayer funding and ridership levels, etc. So if ridership dwindles on commute-oriented lines, those lines could die out. And certainly, WFH will reduce the number of people traveling and the miles we travel as well.
But transit as a whole will still be OK. There will be less private ownership of vehicles as time wears on. People will opt for ride sharing more, and those who get rid of their cars entirely will probably want to take a bus or train, once in a while, for a doctor's appointment, a mall visit, a baseball game, you name it.
The primary usage of public transit is 100% commuting. Malls are often used for bus hubs because they have ample parking. If you're seeing shoppers and students on the bus, then you're not riding the bus at rush hour.
Interestingly, it is not easy to find numbers on how many transit riders are commuters; rather, the surveys and statistics are all about things like the percentage of workers who commute by public transit.
Malls are not typically places where transit riders are encouraged to park. In fact, I believe that anyone who isn't shopping in a store at a mall would be subject to having their vehicle towed. There is no designated transit parking in malls. There are, however, designated "Park and Ride" centers with dedicated parking spaces that are not used for anything else, and are patrolled by transit security. Riders need a transit pass to park here, and overnight parking is generally not possible.
Malls want transit centers because they wish to attract more shoppers without cars, not clog their own lots with people who aren't shopping there. Capitalism, remember?
Anyway, I can safely concede that commuting is the top usage of public transit because it seems to be assumed by the sources. However, I do see students at rush hour. The HS and university students have deals for passes, and so if I board the bus around 8am or 3pm, they are dominated by the HS students (for a very short ride). Around 5pm, plenty of university students are boarding, if I find myself on or near campus. Evening classes are becoming really popular now, so some are even coming in at that point, to attend a class from 6-9pm or so.
In fact, there is a special class of passes for the university students; it was the first foray into NFC "tap" passes on the farebox. These students ride the train a lot, and they really crowd into the free neighborhood shuttles. To the point where some of the shuttle routes are practically exclusive for students, because, well, nobody who commutes to work rides a neighborhood shuttle because they hardly pass any places of employment.
The main selling point of the neighborhood shuttles is that they connect riders from their neighborhood to the main transit system. That's the theory. But in practice, due to their lack of fare, the homeless will fill up any space not taken by students, and head to the library, or park, or whatever.
Interesting. I have a pretty different experience. Where do you take public transportation ?
Also, don’t student start classes roughly at the same time as offices ?
It seems that traveling to a school is commonly known as "commuting". However, let's look at the way transit authorities structure bus and rail routes. Any given school, especially a public school and high schools, are really, really likely to be well-served by transit. While middle schools may be nestled in a residential or suburban neighborhood, they also tend to be nearer to the major arteries, and so you're likely to find a bus to ride. Also, the number of schools in a city is always smaller than the number of workplaces, so it's fundamentally easier for transit to serve schools than to cover all manner of possible workplaces.
I don't know about office workers. It's not easy to identify them by sight on a bus! There are a few types of commuters-to-workplaces that I can usually identify: construction workers, who have their vests, hard hats, and sometimes even a shovel on board with them; there are restaurant workers, who wear distinctive trousers and company tee shirts; hospitality workers, who are always headed way out to the resort hotels near the end of the line; and there are civil servants who are headed downtown to the Capitol and environs.
There were many, many office jobs I needed to turn down due to impractical or nonexistent commute. That's the reality. When data centers, call centers, tech offices, construction sites, and all sorts of workplaces are far from the reach of public transit, you're just not going to have those office workers ever consider public transit. That's a reality of the route planning and the limitations of a transit authority's funding and manpower.
Thank you for the link to MTA's statistics, but as I say, I regard NYC and environs as an outlier. They are not representative of other US urban centers in terms of adaptation to public transit. Denizens of NYC often eschew personal vehicle ownership and rely on subway/taxi/commuter rail sort of lifestyles. It's normal to see every walk of life on NYC transit.
Then the public transit in your city / country was already a failure.
Public transit in a lot of places does more than just getting people to office jobs. The bigger problem sounds like your city is not attractive and there's no reason to visit it physically or that everyone is forced to drive because the public transit is terrible.
I don't know about you, but many of us living in walkable European cities highly value public transit as a day-to-day amenity, regardless of whether we're commuting or travelling for leisure. It sounds like you live somewhere with poor quality infrastructure and car-dependent city planning.
We don't need to waste resources moving people around that can work at home so that politicians can pretend to justify public transportation budgets.
We have the money. California alone had tens of billions of dollars sitting around last year. There is no reason public transport should be a concern other than building more.
Not every public service needs to be profitable. Building roads isn't directly profitable either. That's why we have taxes.
Hear, hear.
Note that these points are interdependent: Staff must trust management will collaborate and iterate on metrics, and management must trust employees will not game the metrics. If those things are true, then success measured against those metrics (that flows into business health and employee rewards) will reinforce mutual trust. The opposite is true, too.