Here’s a rare sight: a CEO of a large company has spoken out in support of remote work for employees, slamming those firms that drag staff back into the office against their will. Dropbox boss Drew Houston compared RTO mandates to trying to force people back into malls and movie theaters.
Speaking on an episode of Fortune’s “Leadership Next” podcast, Houston said what most people have long thought: that returning to the office is a waste of time and money when employees can do exactly the same tasks at home.
“We can be a lot less dumb than forcing people back into a car three days a week or whatever, to literally be back on the same Zoom meeting they would have been at home,” he said. “There’s a better way to do this.”
RTO is either companies looking for a way to cut jobs or a way to utilize their commercial real estate.
I also want to think it’s a little bit the management/CEOs who think their employees are their friends who get lonely realizing the stripper doesn’t actually love them. Meanwhile they refuse to develop a personality or real friendships.
I didn’t think that managers like Michael Scott actually existed.
RTO is now just a tactic to force people to quit.
Step 1: Create one of the greatest tools in human history, one of the benefits being that it can allow a ton of people to work from home, increasing their quality of life, reducing traffic, and improving air pollution.
Step 2: Get forced to experience a worldwide pandemic in which we are made to utilize this tool for such a function so we can see that it actually works as intended.
Step 3: Ignore all that for the profit of the few, to the detriment of the many.
Humans = Trash
Capital beat Labour to death 40 years ago but can’t get enough of the taste of victory and they keep digging up the rotten corpse of the Workers to screw it some more.
“Tell me you’re not invested in office real estate without telling me you’re not invested in office real estate.”
say it with me: GET OVER IT CORPOS, MEATSPACE IS DEPRECATED.
The entire population knows it’s a real estate issue. They still have to pay out the agreements that they foolishly made years ago. This is, yet again, another attempt at a lie. How are they so out of touch? As if I have to ask.
Make your own businesses. Be in control. Be happy.
When a significant part of your economy is commercial real estate and every surrounding business that supports it (transportation, retail, restaurants) it’s very hard to reverse course.
It’s certainly difficult to admit that the world has changed.
Sears’ real estate holdings didn’t save it.
This reasoning plays in my mind on repeat whenever I’m stuck in traffic, wondering how much I’d be getting done if i didn’t have to stop working so i could drive to work.
There’s also that period before you leave when you prepare to be away from home all day, and the period after you return home when you decompress. Most people aren’t magically relaxed after dealing with the commute home.
It used to take three hours of my waking life per day. About 18% of my weekday life. 540 hours per year. At $40/hr that’s 21k of free money to the house. FWIW I’d rather have that time to myself and family, but there’s the number.
Sounds like somebody doesn’t own any commercial real estate.
or tax benefits for hiring x amount employees, plus govts also dont want WFH, because then they wouldnt get tax revenue from cars, roads, businesses.
People generally don’t give up their car or stop buying things when they work from home. Those taxes just shift away from commercial districts and toward residential ones.
Dropbox were really smart and went for it early, they closed offices completely and sent plenty of workers to full remote. Savong money for the company on office rent, and money and time for the workers.
they saw the profit in it. most of the other companies wernt doing it because: ceo, managment love to have power over the lowly worker, + govt tax benefits, business from commuters
I would still go to a mall if they didn’t have overstock on slim fit clothing. I would also go to the theater more if they had reasonable pricing and actually showed movies I want to watch. There’s nothing wrong with either of these things, it’s just that capitalism has yet again, ruined them to appease the 1%.
I am in a situation where the return to office was a 6k decrease in wages.
This the one who hired Condi Rice to sit on the board?
Didn’t some Dropbox executive demand their workers come back to the office after covid? Was it someone else at the company or maybe a different cloud company?
