Why are some employers so obstinate about requiring in-office work during COVID if it can be done just as well remotely?

The Quarantine Zone
1

Let me preface this by saying that yes, it was nice not to have to spend 10+ hours a week commuting since I started my current job nearly a year ago. Although I work in a field (legal services) that is considered essential in my state, my employer was quite flexible about only requiring people to come to the office to do things that could not be done remotely. The result was that I hadn’t set foot in my office at all until a couple of weeks ago. My state and city had not reinstated the indoor mask mandate that was lifted a couple of months ago, but being more conservative about these things than most, and having crappier lungs, I continued wearing a mask unless I was in my own office with the door shut. I wasn’t alone in that, and my employer required unvaccinated people to wear masks (and had everyone provide copies of vaccine cards to HR, and it’s a law firm, so I was reasonably sure that unmasked people in the workplace were actually vaccinated).

But I was going pretty stir-crazy being in the house all the time, particularly since my close friends and family have also all been quite conservative about COVID precautions, so there hasn’t been a lot of socializing going on, either. I mean I have an introverted side, but I do actually like being around other adult humans now and again. And I wanted to avoid public transit, so at least a hybrid schedule would force me to spend a few hours a week biking, and I could use the exercise and stress release.

Then two things happened: the relentless pounding of Delta, and the revelation that even vaccinated people can be infected and transmit it to other people. Someone vaccinated at my office got COVID and gave it to her infant. I asked HR whether any changes to the mask policy were in the works, and the answer was basically “don’t call us, we’ll call you.”

Finally last week the office mask mandate was reinstated in common areas. I would have preferred the stricter, pre-reopening mandate, which was masks required unless you are alone in a room with the door closed, but I could have lived with that. However, compliance has been 50% at best even if you don’t count people who work in open cubicles (mostly secretaries). I asked HR for guidance on how to handle noncompliance and expressed that I had talked to my doctor, who reaffirmed that with my crappy lungs, he recommended that if people were consistently unmasked in the office, I should not be in the office.

After some additional back and forth with HR, they sent me an accommodation form for my doctor to fill out, which I will deal with. But I can’t help wondering: what is the purpose of making me schlep halfway across a crowded city full of commuters just so I can sit alone in a room doing the same damn thing I can do at home, only with less infection risk? I might be willing to go into the office if I were doing something for which physical presence provided added value, but for 99% of what I do, that isn’t the case. And the same is true of millions of knowledge workers.

So maybe this is an unanswerable question, but WHY do employers do it when it’s not necessary? It would be nice if they would even acknowledge that I, and zillions of people like me, aren’t lazy or entitled; we have legitimate health concerns, especially when we are seeing significant long COVID symptoms among people who have mild or even asymptomatic infections. I hope they don’t give me a hard time about my accommodation request, but the moment may come when I have to draw a line in the sand. I’ve quit jobs before to protect my health, and I’m not at that point, but if I feel it’s necessary, I will quit or make them fire me. Plenty of other employers in my field are offering remote work for the duration of the pandemic.

2

MbWA, akak Management by Walking Around.

Many managers dont know how to actually manage.

If they can’t MbWA, maybe they aren’t necessary, right? They are looking out for their jobs.

Some are so old fashioned that they can’t believe you aren’t just goofing off, despite the work you do. (Maybe your dog does it for you?)

Elaine Varelas, managing partner at Keystone Partners says: “Many managers find it very difficult to manage remote workers, and are used to managing by face time and lots of reporting in quick meetings. They assess contribution by knowing you get in early and leave late. Because of their lack of skill, they choose not to offer or allow remote work, or even flexible schedules.”

  • Supervisors—untrained on how to properly manage and monitor remote workers—find it easier to manage someone face-to-face.
    Some supervisors—perhaps because they feel they must be in control or don’t trust their workers—are uncomfortable having employees work offsite.
3

They may well accommodate you so don’t jump to conclusions too early.

I’m a partner in a law firm and part of the firm’s executive so I am aware of the competing considerations. I like working from home and do so much of the time. So I am not at all unsympathetic.

As to reasons for wanting people to return to the office, some of it is no doubt just straight out conservatism. But I think there is a valid point of view that says that remote teams drift apart and don’t work as well together. And that long term intangibles like imparting culture and training by osmosis will suffer when people don’t see each other and casually socialize and so on, when they are remote.

I do feel that I learnt a lot as a young lawyer just from casual conversations in lifts and corridors about what other people were doing, who knew what, etc. And from seeing and overhearing conversations, interactions with others, client calls, etc.

It’s a bold new experiment. I really don’t know who if anyone is right and how it will turn out.

Edited to add since seeing DrDeth’s post - I don’t necessarily agree that it’s just to accommodate bad managers who can’t manage people remotely. I think management is only one aspect of it. I find it just as easy to manage remotely as in the office or perhaps even easier.

It’s the intangibles I mention above that concern me. I like to think I’m open to new ideas and am not reflexively conservative and I’m by no means convinced that a full return to office is necessary. However I do think that humans evolved over millions of years to learn and be socialized and co-operate in person and I am not convinced that this can be replaced by remote interaction (although I’m not convinced of the opposite either).

4

But the thing that gets me is that my work is quite quantifiable; I have to bill for it in six-minute increments, and I just had a very solid performance evaluation that was based entirely on remote work. And the actual partner for whom I do nearly 100% of my work is fine with my working remotely. Clients literally don’t know where I am unless they ask, and most of them are working remotely, too.

5

This is the “employees as automatons” theory though. You can just sit anywhere and do your work, you could be a robot worker in a pod on Mars. But I’m not sure this is how people work, in reality.

Also, I think about the future of my firm long term. Sure, you are great at your work. But from a managerial perspective, I have to think about where the next generation of Eve_Luna’s are coming from. And you can say “well they can just attend training courses etc remotely, so what difference does it make if they hardly ever meet me, or only meet me remotely?”. And maybe you are right. But when I look back on how I learned to do things, I’m not so sure.

6

My impression is a big part of it is older people who don’t understand how technology works, middle managers trying to justify their own jobs (if people work fine remotely maybe they don’t need as many managers) and the company being upset that they signed leases for expensive buildings that are sitting empty.

7

I seriously would be fine with being in the office, at leas most of the time, if not for COVID. I’ve done it for more than 30 years. But I really don’t understand why I should risk my health for some manager’s misguided ideas, particularly when the lawyers aren’t required to be there in person. My health is just as important as theirs.

8

There are so many old school managers who need to feel important. They do that by micromanaging their employees in person.

9

Another thread of mine in another forum discussing this generally: Is WFH an unfettered good? Should those who want it be deferred to?

(And I just realized I wrote “blue collar” instead of “white collar” in the very first sentence. Go me.)

10

The funny part is that I don’t even think this applies even to my theoretical manager (who manages all the paralegals, but isn’t involved in the substance of my work on a daily basis), or the partner I do all my work for, who says he doesn’t care where I work. I’m 99.44% sure that the policy is because management wants consistency in how people in large swathes of positions are treated, regardless of whether it makes sense in any given individual situation. So if I can get an accommodation, I damn well will do so.

11

And so you should.

12

Companies require workers in the office because they believe the work can’t be done just as well from home. They might be wrong about that, but it’s what they genuinely think.

At least, some companies. Other companies have decided it’s great, and that there’s no need to even have a physical office any more. And some are wrong about that, too. And yet others are somewhere in between, and some of them are wrong, too.

We’ll see how it all shakes out.

13

In our firm we know for a fact based on our metrics that this is absolutely not correct, at least so far. Our concerns are entirely medium to long term. As in - does what we believe to be an excellent and happy collegiate culture which has taken decades to build slowly fall apart? We just don’t know.

14

My company has a significant manufacturing which supports and is supported by a huge office component globally and they have taken covid very seriously.

I have, since March 2020, been in the office about 10 times and only because I needed to. We are actively discouraged from coming in unless absolutely necessary.

So to answer the OP, I have no bloody idea but I am thankful for my company.

15

Two reasons, if they don’t have employees to wrangle, in house, they start to look redundant. Seeming less necessary each day, AND drawing a high salary, is a hard look to pull off.

Secondly, bosses love being deferred to, everyone smiling at them, asking if they need anything, offering to fetch that for you, being terribly agreeable and just generally sucking up. It’s a powerful drug. Withdrawal is a bitch.

16

I think this is much of it. The execs KNOW how business works when people come to the office every day. They don’t know how it works remotely, not really, not long term. They were forced into it last year, made the best of of a bad situation, but want to go back to what they know.

Maybe some of them are power hungry scumbags, but most I think just don’t want the company culture to fall apart on their watch.

17

One downside is that there is much less ability to create personal relationships with other coworkers. I’ve been working with globally distributed teams for many years now. Even though I had an office, I didn’t actually work with anyone at my site. All my team members are in different cities and different countries. As far as my team is concerned, it doesn’t matter if I’m in the office or at home since they are all 1000’s of miles away. As a consequence, I don’t really care all that much about them as people. They are valued for their skills on the team, but I don’t really care about them personally. If one of the leaves, oh well. If a new one is added, great. They are just cogs in the machine that makes up the team (just like me). As long as they are performing their function on the project, that’s pretty much all I care about from them. That’s not the case with people I see in the office. They are real people who I go to lunch with and care about them as people.

The downside for you being a solo WFH employee is that if your partner leaves, the other partners may not really know who you are and may not want to use you. They may prefer to use one of the other assistants which are in the office because they personally know them. A WFH employee may just be a random name they see on the employee directory. A person sitting at a desk is a real person that they have some connection to. To avoid getting viewed as an outsider, you may want to make extra effort to create relationships with the other partners so that they know you as a person.

18

The partner I support is the only partner founding a new practice group in my area of expertise. If he leaves, I would leave anyway, even if they offered me a job in another practice group, because my 20+ years of specialized experience will be essentially worthless. I would be starting from scratch.

19

This is a big strength for you WFH, even if you work for other companies. If you have a specialized skill, then it’s likely that no one in the office will have that skill, or even anyone in the local area. Rather than the firm trying to find a person locally who has niche knowledge, they can search for someone in the whole country and do the work remotely. If your firm doesn’t budge on allowing you to WFH, you might be able to go out on your own and work remotely for firms across the country who are in that practice group. If they aren’t able to find assistants locally, they will be more willing to work with someone remotely.

20

When I was a junior (Biglaw) associate, I did a lot of work for partners in other offices. And while I had no problem billing the appropriate number of hours, my career really hurt from that. I didn’t build really relationships with the people I interacted with remotely (no informal mentoring; no quick lunches; no happy hours – sometimes we traveled together and that was helpful, but it really underscores the point about in-person interaction) and it harmed my relationships with people in my “home” office (who didn’t really know what I was up to and, because I was busy, were less likely to staff me on matters).

It was very isolating. I suppose if I had stayed until the partnership decision, I would have been helped by being known firmwide, but I think the cons outweighed the pros. And I would worry about something similar in a remote-only environment. And, to the extent it matters, I think some of the harms would fall disproportionately on female or minority associates – my firm had a “program” to make sure that female and minority partners would travel around to various offices in order to make connections with female and minority associates since the partnership was disproportionately white and male (although the associate ranks weren’t really).

To the OP, another aspect (which probably doesn’t really apply in the law firm setting you’re in) is that, now as essentially in-house counsel, I provide (and receive) a lot of value from random meetings, drop-ins, hallway advice – situations where a phone call or video-meeting would be too formal and intimidating. We’ve lost a lot of that working from home.