Return to Office: A Nightmare Scenario

First, an origin story.

The day is something something 2020. It's 10:32am and you're on your way to one of the happiest place on Earth. The bathroom in your office for five minutes of ass blasting aloneness. You are cherishing every moment you don't have someone stopping by to ask for a status update on the thing they just emailed you 4.5 seconds ago. You finish up and steel yourself for the walk back into the cube farm you spend most of your waking life in when you hear a commotion from the common space. Thinking it's just another impromptu standup routine from Carlos the office close talker, you head back to your desk. There awaits an email with an important announcement saying, "Come to the common area at 11am". Concern grows. Not just over what this impending news could be but also on the realization you just spend 25 minutes in the bathroom. Not exactly a personal best but not far off. You mosey over to the kitchenette and there's the CEO. Well not the CEO but his assistant's intern, giving everyone the news. "Everyone go home. This beer virus is apparently worse than we thought so the CEO wants everyone to work from home until further news." You grab your laptop and sprint out of that place so fast people thought you were stealing stuff. BEST. DAY. EVER.

If you are like many people across this planet, you probably lived a similar experience. At least if you had an office job and weren't labeled essential like a longshoreman, critical logistics specialist, a Starbucks barista or the guy that runs a taco truck. Also, if you were like most non-sadistic employees, you reveled in that time at home. You cracked joke about how you can't tell if anybody is wearing pants while you were coincidentally not wearing any pants. You wore pajamas, leggings or gym shorts all day, every day. You started to view bathing as non-essential as the government deemed your job. Life was somehow better.

But Then...

Things went on like this for months. Companies feared the worst as employees flew out of the office in droves. "Will we last a month," every CEO muttered to themselves from their Maserati on the way to be injected with a cocktail of medicines only available to the governments top donor tier. But a funny thing happened. Productivity soared. Profits were through the roof. Everything was peachy. But there was a stick up the ass of CEOs that just couldn't be jostled free. "What if Jill isn't giving me 110%? I can't physically see her working and I have no other metric to measure her by than by seeing her at her desk looking sad".

And just like that. Return to office mandates.

Who's doing it?

Everybody is doing it. It's all the rage for CEOs of megacorps really looking to take a bite out of work life balance and assert some good ol' fashioned face-to-face dominance. But because we love you, we compiled a sampling of the folks mandating it.

• JPMorgan Chase - Dbag Daimon is mandating a return for all employees.
• Amazon - Andy just wants to know that all your pretty faces are locked up securely in the basement when he talks to you over zoom.
• AT&T - Mr. Stankey thinks something around here smells and it's the fact that nobody is giving up 2 hours of their day to see him in person.
• Meta/Facebook - Zuck was ahead of the curve and started pushing for this in 2023 including tracking daily attendance.
• Starbucks - This one involves two CEOs. Howard Schultz dictated a return for employees within commuting distance. Then a new CEO, Brian Niccol, took over in Sept 2024 and kicked it up a notch, dictating attendance would be tracked and people would be fired for not complying with the RTO policy. Even Niccol complies by taking his private jet on the company dime every day from his home in California to the HQ in Seattle.
• And so many more...

Ok, But Why?

Moral of the story is that A LOT of places started with these mandates and nobody can really explain why. So far, no CEO has given what sounds like a real explanation. There have been lots of CEOs citing arbitrary messages like lack of face-to-face time for growth, inability to track employees performance, declines in performance, and missing break room chatter.

Something often speculated but not really cited by these CEOs is building ownership and leases. A lot of these companies pre covid built buildings (Salesforce's giant dick tower) or took out massive multi-year leases on office space. While some companies saw the boosted productivity and happiness of their employees as a net gain, others just quietly strolled their empty cube farms in despair as their expensive office space went to waste.

Some companies took the opportunity to look at ways to break their leases or simply didn't renew as they became remote only companies and retained their best employees. Others decided to go nuclear and force everyone back into cramped offices that couldn't accommodate all the people they hired during Covid causing people to have to share desks.

Conclusion

As per usual, I don't know where I was going with this. Mostly, I guess, is that the fragility of a CEO is staggering and the need for attention is unfathomable from a grown-ass person. Also, an inability to have any idea what the people working for you is slightly amusing but also incredibly disturbing.

However, if you find yourself being crammed back into the nightmare factory, always remember, if you can't find a better job, there's always MVP+1.