That was a fantastic article, thanks for linking to it. I was a little surprised there was no mention of the cost of plumbing but not as surprised as I was to see they cored out an office building to convert it to apartments. I can see why such efforts might be economically viable in New York or Chicago, but I don’t know if that would translate so well here in Little Rock where space isn’t exactly at a premium.
Soon, I will have to return to the office a minimum of three days a week. The last time my company attempted a return to work policy, we hemorrhaged people so quickly they, well, they didn’t reverse their policy so much as they stopped enforcing it. Suddenly a flexible schedule meant we could come in if we wanted to but it wasn’t required.
I’m expecting layoffs this year and next Spring, so I expect the return to work is driven partly by a desire to drive people away to avoid having to pay severance. A lot of our employees are pretty salty about this and things are going to get interesting at work for me.
The article mentions examples from Philadelphia, Winston-Salem, Tacoma or St Louis. No idea how those compare to Little Rock. But it seems to me that an old office building might make for a desirable location for apartments, particularly if it has nice architecture brickwork.
I should have specified, I was thinking in terms of how they converted newer office buildings. The one I work in was constructed in the 1970s and converting it would likely be fairly expensive. And who the hell wants to live in downtown Little Rock?
I wouldn’t think it’s especially desirable real estate to convert. At least I don’t think there’s enough demand. The ones who can afford it live out in the west part of town, North Little Rock is deeply weird, and there’s space not far if one is willing to drive to what are the effective suburbs.
There’s really less a shortage of space and more about affordability. I’m not sure how converted office buildings would translate there. The high end market wouldn’t exist, and I don’t think the landowners would want to market to the ‘affordable’ sector.
Actually, I’ve spent a few weeks in downtown Little Rock over the past year, especially in the Little Rock Marriott and the Residence Inn Little Rock Downtown and it’s a nice downtown, particularly along President Clinton Avenue and the River Market.
Edited to add, my next project will send me to Hot Springs and the vicinity.
All of these converted office buildings everywhere result in a high-end cost per SF by local standards.
If you have enough yuppies & dinks in your town to support a vibrant downtown you’ve got a winner. Affordable (read “working poor people”) housing? That’s trailers two counties away.
Something not mentioned in the NYT article is that substantially all of the readily convertible early-mid 20th century buildings are asbestos-laden disasters.
“Remediation” often increases the risk to inhabitants while migrant labor sacrifices their lives removing asbestos badly.
I’m not sure why the study included an analysis of the motivations for RTO at all. It seems orthogonal to the analysis of the effectiveness of RTO. It’s also much more subjective and undermines the rest of the paper.
One flaw, which they acknowledge in the Conclusion, is that the financial performance was measured during a labor shortage. Wouldn’t that be a major factor in flat financials?
The tone of the study comes out of the gate subjective, and never stops; to answer your comment, it’s also trying to answer a bunch of questions at once, and advance an argument.
I hate studies that say “(this variable we are studying) affects financial performance, we can prove it by looking at a few years of data and ignoring confounding variables.” McKinsey loves these.
All that said, companies scrambled to make WFH viable, there’s no way the genie’s going back into the bottle now. The smart ones called out hybrid early and are making it as easy as possible.
Agreed. I had expected the editorializing to be from the news article and was surprised to see it in the paper itself.
I see WFH as a sub-case of global offices. If my team can work efficiently with coworkers in Brazil, China, and India; then why not Chicago?
Unfortunately WFH did remove the final barrier between work-life and home-life and legitimized the expectation that workers are always available. However that was probably inevitable; at least workers get some benefit too.
My grand boss was smart. He started consolidating our office space. I think there are a few cubes for wanderers as well.
He asked all of us '“What do you want to do?” Two of us want to work completely from home. I was already doing that in a way as I was taking care of my mom most weekends. That’s 100 miles from the office. The other guy live 1000s miles away taking care of his parents.
Now, my Wife and I are moving (we are getting real close to retirement). It’s easy for me to split my time between either house. My wife unfortunately can’t (she is an appraiser, she has to visit properties).
The rest of the folks in my department (17 of us) do some sort of hybrid thing. No real schedule, they plan their own week. Some just feel like they can’t focus at home I guess, this seems true with folks that have kids. Others prefer face to face meetings. I hate those meetings as my hearing is about half gone. I can put on headphones and CC it. Though I wish others would get headphones too.
When I first started WFH, I’d find myself logging in to check my emails and complete minor tasks between 9:00-10:00 PM. It wasn’t something I was encouraged to do or even needed to do, I’d just see my work computer and think, “Oh, I should get something done.” It took me about a year before I broke the habit.
My company’s call to return to the office is nigh, and we’re already losing people. So far we have more than twenty employees who have already had their last day or are scheduled to have their last day this month and I’m expecting more.
We lost 20% of our corporate staff in the first six months of COVID, mostly mothers who couldn’t manage with kids at home.
Then two years later when we started return to office two year later (2 days a week, then 3 another year later). We have had over 100% turnover in that time. Over 50% quit from the date of the announcement to three months in as people realized they were actually enforcing the in-person requirements.
The predominant reason for more experienced employees leaving is still more flexible work arrangements.
There is one department (the Controller, i.e. the accounting department) where they are allowing 9:30-3:30 to count as an in-office day. And not really enforcing the requirement that a team have at least two overlapping in office days (e.g. Accounts Payable must all be in on Tuesday and Wednesday). This is a heavily female workforce, and the controller feels she has no choice.
This is causing morale issues in other departments where flexibility means you can work either 8-5 or 8:30-5:30. And your boss (or their boss) decides which days you will be in the office. The more the department has to work with Accounting, the bigger the issue. Because you have people who have their calendar blocked off for 3 out of 8 hours of a business day for “commute after school bus” or “commute to meet school bus”.
Not to mention everywhere we have much more acceptance of child care issues being solved by Mom working from home, rather than having back-up arrangements. And it’s always Mom. I have a male employee whose spouse is a senior executive. My boss and our HR person wants me to warn him that his inability to maintain an in-office schedule reliably is not acceptable. While the female employee sitting right next to him is allowed even more flexibility. I didn’t think I’d be having this issue in 2025. I was shocked when I was faced with this issue almost twenty years ago years ago when my kid was little and my boss would ask “Can’t your wife do it?” every time I needed to leave at 5:30 to get to the daycare. Even more shocked when my boss was a female expat whose husband was the stay at home parent.
We lost thirty employees in August with about 26 of those being voluntary terminations for personal reasons or other job, three retirements, and one terminations for cause. The employees put in their retirement notice months ago, so that at least is not related to our return to the office. So far in September, we have nine terminations with only one being a retirement. We are hemorrhaging workers which I think was the desired outcome so they can layoff fewer employees.