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The smartest insight and analysis, from all perspectives, rounded up from around the web:
Stop me if you’ve heard this before, but “businesses are ready to get serious” about getting workers back to their desks, said Emma Goldberg in The New York Times. Actually, more than serious: They’re desperate. After “three years of scattershot plans for returning to in-person work,” a wave of big companies — including Disney, Amazon, AT&T, and Meta — recently announced firm intentions (for real this time) to call workers back in. Employers have largely accepted “that hybrid work is a permanent reality, with just over a quarter of full workdays in the country now done at home.” But business leaders also say that the work-from-home experiment has made them “feel emphatically that they need some in-person time.” Salesforce — which in 2021 had declared the 9-to-5 workday “dead”—announced last month that “it will give a $10 charitable donation per day” for 10 days on behalf of in-office employees. Google is trying the opposite tack, announcing that it will begin tracking badge swipes and punishing workers on performance reviews for unexplained office absences.
Work-from-home proponents note the 13% productivity bump early in the pandemic, when offices were closed, said Allison Schrager in City Journal. But that’s not sustainable. “Innovation and problem-solving” rely on spontaneous collaboration. “In-person workers also provide valuable services like mentoring, training and advocating for younger colleagues,” who get less feedback when they’re working from home. Businesspeople say this creates habits of laziness, said Samantha Delouya for CNN. Take it from the still hardworking 81-year-old Martha Stewart. All of France, she reminds us, is “off for August.” Look at their level of success. “That,” Stewart reminds us, “is not a very thriving country.”
That’s just another example of the “false belief that the office is the secret sauce to productivity,” said Gleb Tsipursky in Fortune. Since when do you get more work done in the office? As anyone who has ever worked next to a chatty colleague knows, desk jobs can be more like “a productivity black hole” where “focused work gets sucked into oblivion.” Forcing workers back into the office is even worse for productivity. A recent Gallup study “found that workers who could work remotely but are mandated to go to the office” have the lowest engagement of anyone. Certainly, if you want your company to have mentoring and training opportunities, you should create mentoring programs. But mentoring won’t “magically happen” by just “packing employees into an office like sardines.”
The shift to remote work was inevitable, said Dror Poleg in The Atlantic. “Once the quality of online collaboration crossed a crucial threshold, the internet itself” was going to become “the premier facilitator of human interaction.” And once white-collar workers could earn a nice living anywhere, cities were going to be in trouble. Only the speed with which this has happened was unpredictable. We’re on the threshold of a major urban crisis, with offices at half occupancy and $1.5 trillion in commercial loans coming due. We need to rethink what cities are about, not try to push white-collar workers back in into “boxes of glass and steel.”
This article was first published in the latest issue of The Week magazine. If you want to read more like it, you can try six risk-free issues of the magazine here.
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Senate Republicans want to send state employees back to the office at least four days per week.
The proposed change would prohibit most state employees from working at home for more than eight hours in a work week. There are limited exceptions for judicial employees and those with accommodations under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act. It would not apply to state university or college employees.
More:Do you have questions about Ohio’s August constitution issue? We want to answer them
“You do more work, you do more effective work when you’re physically present at your workplace,” Senate President Matt Huffman, R-Lima, told reporters last week. That’s particularly important for state workers interacting with legislators, Huffman said. “In-person meetings are almost always more effective with the complexity of the issues that we deal with.”
But Rep. Jay Edwards, R-Nelsonville, says remote work saves taxpayers money on renting office space, helps attract qualified candidates and allows people to work outside of city centers.
“I plan to fight against it. I think it’s a bad provision and I think it’s something we’ve got to get fixed,” Edwards said.
Research from Owl Labs on remote, hybrid and office work found 62% of workers feel more productive when working remotely. Two-thirds of workers said they would start looking for another job immediately if they lost the ability to work from home, according to the 2022 survey.
The proposed in-person work schedule was added to a Senate-passed version of the state’s two-year budget. The final budget, which will include input from House legislators, is due June 30. Gov. Mike DeWine can then veto ideas he doesn’t like.
“Do we want to have most people back working (in the office)? Well, sure,” DeWine said. “But it’s a case-by-case situation and we are an employer. We have an obligation to hire the best people we can, fill the positions and to get the job done. We have to have some flexibility to do that, just like any other company.”
DeWine added that to compete for the best workers, the state might need to allow them to work from home or live outside of the city centers. “That may be the only way we’re able to fill a particular position.”
It’s not clear how many state employees work in the office four days a week currently. Each department sets its own policies based on the work required. Ohio State Highway Patrol and Ohio prison guards, for example, report to in-person work more than information technology professionals.
In March, Ohio Department of Job and Family Services got the green light to discontinue six leases, saving the state $1.3 million, according to the Department of Administrative Services.
At the Ohio Department of Development, 83% of staff work in the office two or more days per week. Starting Sept. 12, the department is phasing in a return to the office for all employees, a spokeswoman said.
Ohio Attorney General Dave Yost told employees that he would “stay involved” and point out any unforeseen consequences, according to a video sent to staff.
“I understand that this is going to, if it were to become law, create a lot of complications. Many of you have children or aging parents or family members that are sick and this is going to impact, it’s going to complicate your life if it becomes law,” Yost said in the video.
If approved by the House and DeWine, the change would take effect on Oct. 1 for most employees.
Another Senate-approved change would increase the number of weeks that state employees can take paid parental leave from the current four to eight. The first two weeks would be paid at 100% and the next six at 70%. However, the number of weeks is a decrease from what DeWine proposed: 12 weeks of paid leave at 70%.
Jessie Balmert is a reporter for the USA TODAY Network Ohio Bureau, which serves the Columbus Dispatch, Cincinnati Enquirer, Akron Beacon Journal and 18 other affiliated news organizations across Ohio.
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Earlier in March in a blog post shared with the Meta employees, CEO Mark Zuckerberg hinted at the policy change.
Photo : IANS
The IT giant, that owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has asked that employees currently assigned to an office return to in-person work three days a week starting September 5, 2023, as per CNN report.
However, those employees of Meta who are designated as remote workers will be allowed to keep their remote status.
A Meta spokesperson, in a statement to CNN, said the company’s updated policy was not set in stone.
“We’re committed to distributed work, and we’re confident people can make a meaningful impact both from the office and at home. We’re also committed to continuously refining our model to foster the collaboration, relationships, and culture necessary for employees to do their best work,” the spokesperson said.
“Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely,” said in the post.
“This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively,” he wrote.
“This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week. This requires further study, but our hypothesis is that it is still easier to build trust in person and that those relationships help us work more effectively,” Zuckerberg added.
Amazon had earlier announced about the end of their full-time work-from-home policy for corporate employees beginning May 1. Disney too earlier this year began requiring workers to show up in person four days per week.
In September last year, TCS informed its employees they must come to the office for at least three days a week which accounts for a total of 12 days in a month.
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After the upheaval the pandemic created in the world of work, there’s been fierce debate about what workers really want. Demands for flexible work, better pay, opportunities for mentorship and advancement and connection with co-workers all played into the shake-up that caused the Great Resignation — and those desires have continued to reshape the labor market.
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The COVID-19 pandemic brought many changes to society, one of which is the increasing popularity of remote work. Although the pandemic is largely in the rear-view mirror, many workers continue to enjoy the flexibility of working from home.
Real estate mogul Sam Zell is not a fan of this trend.
“All of this discussion about work from home is basically a bunch of bullshit,” he said at the 27th Annual REIT Symposium hosted by the New York University’s Schack Institute of Real Estate.
The problem has to do with people’s productivity when they are not in the office.
“One of the biggest lies in the world is that people working from home are more productive than people working in the office,” Zell said. “You have much less productivity if you’re working from home in your pajamas with three little kids running around than if you’re in an office.”
Don’t miss: Why Warren Buffett’s Investing Strategy Is More Relevant Than Ever In Today’s Real Estate Market
While technology enables people to communicate and collaborate from virtually anywhere in the world, Zell believes there is still value in being in the same room.
“There’s an enormous difference between a Zoom board meeting and a meeting in person,” he said. “A Zoom board meeting is a board meeting where everyone sits and listens to recitations. An in-person meeting is where the real discussion takes place.”
If you are worried about job security — layoffs have been happening a lot these days — you might want to spend more time in the cubicle.
“We’re all reading about layoffs in the newspapers. It will be interesting to see what percentage of those who lost their jobs worked from home and what percentage of them are people who came into the office,” Zell said.
Zell founded Equity Group Investments in 1968 and made billions in real estate. Notably, he sold Equity Office Properties Trust to Blackstone in 2007 for $39 billion.
The work-from-home trend has impacted occupancy at many office buildings. But if more employers share Zell’s view and bring their employees back on site, office properties could see better days ahead.
For investors looking to gain exposure to the segment, here are two real estate investment trusts (REITs) that Wall Street finds particularly attractive.
Boston Properties Inc. BXP: Boston Properties has a portfolio of office buildings concentrated in Boston, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco, Seattle and Washington, D.C., totaling 54.5 million square feet. They are 91% leased with a weighted average lease term of 7.6 years. Evercore ISI analyst Steve Sakwa has an Outperform rating on Bosto Properties and a price target of $66, implying a potential upside of 24%.
Alexandria Real Estate Equities Inc. ARE: Alexandria Real Estate Equities is a pioneer in the life science real estate niche. The company owns, operates and develops life science, agtech and advanced technology campuses in innovation cluster locations, including greater Boston, the San Francisco Bay Area, New York City, San Diego, Seattle and the Maryland and Research Triangle. The REIT’s operating properties in North America have an occupancy rate of 93.6%. Mizuho analyst Vikram Malhotra has a Buy rating on Alexandria and a price target of $145, around 17% above the current levels.
If you want to invest in real estate but don’t share Zell’s view on remote work, remember that there are other types of income-generating properties aside from office buildings. And you don’t have to risk too much to get in the game. With crowdfunding platforms, it’s easy for retail investors to buy shares of more resilient real estate assets such as multifamily properties or farmland.
Photo credit: “Sam Zell Shares The Secrets To His Success” via The Ross School of Business – University of Michigan on YouTube.
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TORONTO, April 23 (Reuters) – A strike by about 155,000 Canadian federal government workers is closer to a resolution, with progress made on remote work and wage increases for Treasury Board employees, the union said on Sunday.
The strike is scheduled to continue for now amid ongoing talks about a deal for revenue agency workers, the Public Service Alliance of Canada (PSAC) said in a statement. The union has said it will “escalate” its actions on Monday.
A wide range of public services from tax returns to passport renewals have been hit since last Wednesday, when 120,000 Treasury Board workers and 35,000 revenue agency staff represented by the PSAC went on strike.
“At Treasury Board we made some headway on remote work language, and both sides have moved in order to get closer to a resolution on wage increases,” said Chris Aylward, National President of PSAC.
The talks with the government about wage increases for revenue agency workers, who oversee tax returns, have not made progress, he added.
The revenue agency workers wanted a pay hike of 22.5% over three years, while the Treasury Board workers who oversee federal government administration were seeking a 13.5% pay rise over three years. The government offered both groups a 9% increase over three years.
Canada’s annual inflation rate peaked at 8.1% last year but has since come down to about half of that.
In addition to higher wages, the union is also demanding flexibility to work from home.
A government spokesperson told Reuters on Sunday that it had received an offer from the union the previous evening and presented a counter-offer in response, without providing further details.
Reporting by Divya Rajagopal; Editing by Lisa Shumaker
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
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It has been three years since workers started telecommuting in vast numbers, but state tax laws still haven’t adapted to the new remote-work paradigm and individual taxpayers are paying the price with exasperating state tax-filing procedures.
Many taxpayers who work remotely in a different state than their employer’s must prepare multiple state 2022 tax returns and account for precisely how many days they worked in the company office versus locales in other states—whether at home, at a vacation house, at the in-laws, or elsewhere.
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New research from Slack highlights the ongoing disconnect between UK business leaders and employees when it comes to hybrid work, with the average worker only spending the equivalent of one day a week focused on deep work.
Despite 28% of UK workers being defined as hybrid workers, and 16% working from home, Slack’s new How Productivity Platforms Can Power Business Impact report shows that while 87% of leaders say they are investing in improving the hybrid experience, only 50% of workers believe that expectation has been met.
The report is based on a survey of 1,650 UK knowledge workers and 350 IT decision makers, with the aim of identifying the barriers and opportunities that are presented by hybrid work.
Since the global COVID-19 pandemic forced offices to shut, hybrid working has become the default model for many office-based companies, with research from Slack’s Future Forum finding that 56% of IT decision makers and 54% of knowledge workers believe having flexibility in where and when they work helps them to be more productive. Flexible remote work policies were cited as the number one factor that has improved company culture over the past two years.
However, despite both executives and employees acknowledging the benefits of hybrid work, some business leaders are still struggling to make sure the hybrid work polices they’re enacting are helping to drive meaningful connections and foster better collaboration.
Thirty-three percent of respondents to the survey said that their firms’ current approach to hybrid work has created greater silos and fragmentation of knowledge.
Remote and hybrid workers — 35% and 37%, respectively —were also more likely to feel concerned that they connect less with co-workers due to hybrid working while 34% of 18-34 year olds surveyed by Slack said they were concerned about a lack of connection and opportunity to learn from senior co-workers.
Meetings are also proving to be a threat to business productivity, with 60% of employees surveyed for the report stating that they are a time drain.
According to data provided by Slack, UK workers spend an average of seven hours and 42 minutes a week either coordinating or attending meetings, with 36% of respondents saying they spend more time on video calls now than they did 12 months ago.
In comparison, knowledge workers spend just over nine hours a week on deep work, a figure that drops to seven hours and one minute for IT decision makers, who are now averaging 10 hours and 58 minutes a week in meetings.
In order to address this, 34% of employees surveyed said that cutting down on the number of meetings they’re required to attend would help boost productivity as it would given them more time to focus on the work they were hired to do. IT leaders also expressed a willingness to make work days less meeting-heavy, with 27% saying that replacing 30-minute meetings with shorter, asynchronous audio clips would make them more productive.
When IT decision makers were asked how they see technology driving productivity in the next year, 37% said it could improve collaboration among cross-functional teams, while 31% said it could offer more flexibility over where people can work.
Additionally, while 47% of IT decision makers said automating mundane and repetitive tasks would also help to boost productivity, only 27% of employees agreed with this statement, showing that more needs to be done to help workers understand where simple automation can be deployed and the areas of work where these specific productivity gains can be achieved.
Providing a good digital experience is critical to success in today’s digital-first world and it’s clear there’s a disconnect between IT leaders and employees on that front, said Stuart Templeton, head of UK at Slack, commenting on the report’s findings.
While Templeton acknowledged that this is the first time most businesses have faced tough economic headwinds since the adopting a hybrid work model, he said that it was clear from the research that this shouldn’t stop business leaders from seizing on opportunities to “improve alignment, efficiency and productivity across their teams no matter where or when they work.”
Copyright © 2023 IDG Communications, Inc.
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Remote workers are taking a cue from college students. Rather than working 9 to 5, they’re spreading work out to off hours. That means that late afternoons, for instance, are fair game for doing something fun. If you’re planning to work later that night, after all, why not?
More from Fortune:
One beneficiary of the shift to remote work, it appears, is golf courses. According to Stanford researchers, working from home “has powered a huge boom in golfing.”
The researchers, Nick Bloom and Alex Finan, studied data from the company Inrix for 3,400-plus golf courses and shared their findings in a recent research paper entitled “How Working from Home boosted Golf.”
Comparing Wednesday in 2022 to the same day in 2019, they found a 143% increase in golfers playing more golf on that day, and a 278% jump in them playing on that day in the mid-afternoon.
The most likely explanation, they write, is that “employees are golfing as breaks while working from home.”
But that doesn’t mean productivity takes a hit, they note. “If employees make up the time later, “then this does not reduce productivity. Indeed, national productivity during/post pandemic has been strong.”
And, they note, the shift helps golf courses as well: “Golf courses are getting higher usage by spreading playing across the day and week, avoiding weekend and pre/post work peak-loading. This will raise ‘golf productivity’—the number of golf courses played (and revenue raised) per course.”
But, Bloom noted in a tweet on March 11, fully remote work-from-home “is declining. Some jobs are going hybrid as bosses drag employees back 2 or 3 days a week.”
As Fortune reported in January, more CEOs, including at Disney and Starbucks, are demanding that workers start returning to office.
In the long run, Bloom estimates, hybrid work-from-home arrangements will be 50% of jobs, fully in-person 40%, and fully-remote 10%.
As a result of shift, he says, the economy has been “twisted” in some ways. He noted in a tweet on Thursday: “Office use, public transport and city center retail has shrunk into Tue-Thurs, generating peak-load problems. Leisure, sport and suburban shopping has spread out to the whole week, easing their pre-pandemic Sat-Sun peak-loading.”
Not all bosses are against the idea of employees who work remotely taking some time off for recreation during working hours.
Stephanie Cunningham, a 27-year-old marketer, told the New York Times, that her employer is supportive of her signing in earlier or later in the day to free up time during working hours for other things, like getting her hair done or running errands: “My boss allows me to take time for myself. As long as I get my work done.”
Shark Tank investor Kevin O’Leary recently said on CNN that managers need to change their strategy given the shift to remote work, noting that a “new generation” of employee has never worked in an office.
He said 44% of the employees across his venture portfolio work remotely but that it “hasn’t changed anything” in terms of productivity.
“You say to somebody, ‘Look, you gotta get this done by next Friday at noon.’ You don’t really care when they do it…as long as it gets done.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com
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RIGA, Latvia – The bank worker logs into work each day around noon – 8 a.m. in Moscow – from his rental in Southeast Asia, where he enjoys tropical greenery, warm, humid air and, most important, more than 2,000 of miles of physical distance from the nearest Russian military enlistment office.
His employer, Sberbank, thinks he is home in the Russian capital, thanks to a reprogrammed router blinking in the corner, which always assigns his laptop a Russian IP address to trick the corporate systems.
The bank worker, who is in his late-20s, is one of thousands of highly skilled workers who sought safer havens in response to the war in Ukraine, and whom Russia is trying to coax home with a mix of incentives and threats. More and more the emphasis is on the threats, including potential dismissal for unauthorized remote work abroad.
“There were cases when people accidentally logged into work apps with their real IP addresses, and they got detected, so you have to be very careful,” the bank worker said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to avoid losing his job.
While the Kremlin seemed happy to see dissident artists, activists and journalists flee the country, the exodus of IT workers has become a major headache for top managers and officials as they struggle to fill key positions, keep the economy afloat, and prevent security breaches at companies that keep the country functioning despite the bite of Western sanctions.
Sberbank, for instance, is Russia’s largest financial institution, holding roughly one-third of the country’s bank assets. It was sanctioned by the United States and European Union shortly after President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion last year.
Earlier in the war, the focus was on incentives, including lower income taxes and mortgage interest rates, which were offered to IT workers. But they failed to reverse the outflow, and the military mobilization announced by Putin in the fall to replenish Russia’s depleted forces in Ukraine led thousands more fighting-age men to flee in a panic.
Many did not tell their employer that they were leaving, aiming instead to continue the pandemic-era work-from-home trend but from several time zones away.
Now, some of Russia’s top employers, like Sberbank and other government-linked enterprises, are imposing a blanket ban on remote work from abroad and threatening to dismiss employees found to have left Russia.
Vkontakte, Russia’s Facebook-like social network, has recently banned all remote work from outside the country, leaving employees with few options but to return or quit.
“VK is a Russian company,” the company said in an internal memo shared with Russian state media and independent outlets. “And our products are largely tailored to the Russian market. It’s important for us to be in the same context as our users and to understand their needs.”
Yandex, Russia’s answer to Google, has taken a softer approach. In May, a person close to Yandex said that the company was planning to create new foreign offices or expand existing ones to avoid a “brain drain” of top talent.
Ten months later, thousands of Yandex employees have left the country over the course of several emigration waves, and are working in new offices opened in Russian diaspora hubs: Serbia, Armenia, and, most recently, Turkey.
Yandex has been particularly shaken by Putin’s decision to launch the war. As Western investors rushed to distance themselves from Russia, the IT giant’s market value dropped almost overnight to less than $7 billion from about $20 billion. Its international projects face an uncertain future.
Once Russia’s biggest internet success story, Yandex is now splitting its business into Russian and international entities to spare some departments from the fallout. It also sold its homepage and news aggregator, which served as primary news sources for tens of millions of Russians, to Kremlin-controlled VK following criticism of censoring news about the war.
For most of 2022, individual companies have sought to avoid government pressure by setting their own policies to retain workers. But recently, the Russian government signaled that it may take matters into its own hands, though there is no consensus on what to do.
After Putin made public comments calling Russians who left as “traitors” and “scum,” senior officials have floated a variety of potential retaliatory measures, including stripping “unpatriotic” Russians of citizenship, designating them as foreign agents or seizing their property in Russia and giving it to soldiers.
The debate over how to retain, or reclaim, IT talent has ignited a feud between Russian members of parliament and the Ministry of Digital Development, with fierce Putin supporters clashing with more liberal-minded technocrats.
Senators such as Andrei Klishas, who long held top posts at Norilsk Nickel, the metals mining and smelting company, proposed in December to punish workers who continue to work for domestic employers remotely by adopting legislation that “would make being abroad less comfortable.” Russia’s Finance Ministry previously said it was considering a plan to raise the income tax for workers abroad to 30 percent from the 13 percent rate at home.
“Many of them ran away, but continue to work in Russian companies remotely, so can we change the law in this regard and limit schemes that allow people to work from abroad and receive money from here,” Klishas said in an interview with Vedmosti, the Russian business newspaper. “Can we check if they pay all taxes? We can.” He added that Russia should impose industry-wide bans on remote work from abroad by employees of “sensitive industries.”
Andrei Isayev, a member of parliament from the governing United Russia Party, said that workers abroad pose potential security risks. “People who work, let’s say, in transport organizations, finance, banking, they have access to corporate mail, to a customer database, and so on,” Isayev said. “If they access them abroad, from unfriendly countries, then we understand our citizens may pay a big price.”
Russia considers the United States, Canada, Britain and the entire European Union, among others, to be “unfriendly” countries.
Ministry officials, however, pushed back on the blanket ban, warning that such restrictions will only drive more IT workers to quit and leave Russian companies less competitive – unable to innovate or keep up with technological advancements.
“This will, of course, encourage them to take jobs in foreign companies and reduce the likelihood of them returning to our country,” Maksut Shadayev, Russia’s minister for digital development, recently told a government panel, adding that restrictions should be applied in cases of workers involved with state information systems under government contracts.
Klishas clapped back, criticizing the ministry for not doing enough to prevent data leaks “that have become almost the norm.”
Shadayev estimated that by the end of 2022, about 10 percent of Russia’s IT workforce had left the country, a figure that some experts said seemed low. “About 100,000 IT specialists are now outside our country,” Shadayev said. “At the same time, 80 percent of them continue to work for Russian companies while in friendly countries.”
Shadayev’s ministry urged the government to exempt IT specialists from military mobilization and advocated for lower income tax rates. And in November, the ministry said that it was working on a “reverse relocation” plan, which, according to Kommersant business daily, would included offering prepaid flights home and deferrals from military conscription.
“They must understand that they have nothing to fear,” Shadayev said.
In interviews, however, Russian IT workers said the efforts would likely prove futile no matter what path the authorities choose.
“My lawyer told me that [the military deferral] is a flimsy piece of paper and if the enlistment officer wants to, he will call you up anyway,” the Sberbank employee said.
“It may come as a surprise, but when it comes to Sberbank, I’ve found that none of my colleagues support the war,” the worker added. “So I think this is all pointless as it’s much easier for us to get a job at a foreign company than come back and be drafted at any given moment.”
A software engineer, who quit his job in Moscow and moved to the United Arab Emirates, said there was one surefire approach the Russian government could adopt: “The only thing they can do to bring us back is to stop the war.”
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