A nonprofit I’m on the board of is stuck in a lease until 2026 in a downtown building but is vacating anyway and taking up a smaller digs in a storefront type office suite. Just the parking costs at the old place we’re over $5000 per employee downtown and it’s “free” at the new location and everyone’s commute when they do need to come in (twice a week) is 30-45 minutes shorter. Most of them happened to live in the same direction from downtown, which made the deal work.
They still have to pay a share of the Common Area Maintenance at the old location though, in addition to the rent.
Basically the organizations they do business with have transitioned to a lot more WFH themselves and don’t place as much of a premium on a nice downtown location in a glass tower any more.
If management starts coming into the office 100% of the time, I think workers will follow due to how promotions and choice work assignments get doled out. Whether intentional or not, people who have good relationships with their manager seem to be treated more favorably. Since it’s much easier to create a personal relationship with someone in person, the employees who go into the office with the managers are likely going to be the ones who move up and make more money. There will probably still be WFH people, but they may be more marginalized.
One thing I think is ironic is that our management is not coming back in the office even though they are asking us to come in 3 days a week. The managers are often doing meetings from home. Even the all-hands presentations have some of the upper management doing their presentations from home. If the company really wants people back in the office, they need to force the managers to come in 5 days a week. If the managers themselves are sticking with WFH, then the employees will too.
That was certainly THE central argument against WFH in the pre-COVID era. Management was in the office 100% of the time, most workers were too, and the few who WFHed whether full- or part-time tended to be forgotten on the periphery.
If there’s one thing COVID taught everybody with a pulse, both worker and manager, is that all that is pure bullshit. It really was that way, but it doesn’t need to be that way going forward. The mold has been comprehensively broken and we don’t need to pour everyone back into that same miserable contorted one-size-fits-few shape again.
The workers won’t stand for it, and intelligent managers and executives (oxymoron in many cases I know) won’t stand for it either. I predict a lot of managers and companies will die rather than learn that WFH as the norm is the only way going forward.
Due to the extended duration of most commercial space leases, the bloodbath in commercial real estate will be like a Hawaiian volcano eruption: very slow-moving. Here comes the lava inch by inch, foot by foot and no human force can divert it. All your shit will be burned then buried; the only question is exactly when.
Ten to fifteen years from now downtowns and other big office tower clusters will be very different than they were in 2019 or even in 2023.
Health insurance company - 3,300ish employees, I’m a professional paper-pusher.
My employer is all in on work from home. They sent us all home with big dual screen monitors, a stipend to purchase office furniture (company wide, not just certain grades/departments of employees). We heard not too long ago that they are officially clearing out and selling buildings. At one time some years ago we had a sort of campus occupying 8 buildings. Now it will be one building. We have been told that on any given day there is an average of 250 employees who come into the office.
We also have a program (started pre-covid) called summer Fridays we can take a half-day on all Fridays during the summer months without using any paid time off. Only subject to management approval. For my department it means only one of us needs to be available on any Friday afternoon.
My office is full time back with WFH as an option if something comes up.
My wife loves WFH. She is supposed to go in once a week but it’s not tracked.
I hate WFH. If I am home then my wife constantly wants me to get her food, let the dogs out/in, chat about something…
On the topic of converting office buildings to residential, my grandmother moved into an assisted living residence (at 95, having lived in the same home for 75 of those years) which had been converted from a downtown department store. The residents’ apartments were built around the perimeter of each floor (with, as I recall, some spaces left for light to get in) and the central area of each floor was a common area, for socializing, activities, and such. Not sure how they handled plumbing for bathrooms and such, but they may just have run everything under a false floor.
This is a design I’ve often thought about, glad to hear someone actually did it.
Really, if we’re going to re-purpose old buildings, we need to re-think some of the things we assume about what “an apartment building/condo” is. Like this example of a large common area on each floor. No one wants to do that in a new apartment building because this reduces the floor space available for units, which can be sold. “Who’s going to pay for all that empty space?” people cry. But if the empty space is already there, maybe we can re-think this notion.
We’re at an unprecedented time in our society. Maybe let’s do a bit of out-of-the-box thinking?
My company is being split up for eventual sale, and my division closed out the office where I used to work. I’m perminent WFH now, and I haven’t complained about that once.
The space is only “empty” if the (re-)developer can’t think of some way to rent it. It’s still economically inefficcient.
Now the individual space to communal space ratio is very different in, say, elder assisted housing, a hotel, and single-family apartments. So if there is a bunch of difficult-to-rent space, then (all else equal) it makes more sense to convert the space to elder housing than ordinary apartments.
I might to eat a little crow here. There’s a good possibility my employer will require workers to return to the office soon. From an organizational standpoint, apparently we’re at a low point so far as efficency goes and it’s possible management is going to want us in the office 2-3 days a week. Personally, I think management needs to start holding underperformers accountable for shoddy work, but we’ll see.
I was out of the workforce before the Covid lockdowns.
I do not know how I would have been able to WFH . Accounts Payable, bills in mail, checks written, sent to Management for signatures and review, Information held for review for audit . Cash and checks received, logged , allocated, reviewed,deposited in a bank 30 miles away. Payroll, more automated but still paperwork, files, reviews, putting out fires. It must have worked over hundreds of scenario because that’s what needed doing. I am not surprised that management wants to get their ducks back in a row.
This one should be a gift link - but the article is about why older buildings are easier to convert to apartments. Basically due to the need for windows to provide light and ventilation, they were operable ( as is often required in residential buildings) and no interior space was more than about 30 ft from a window. Newer buildings have more leasable space on each floor , which means that the interiors are deeper and dividing them into apartments will result. in windowless rooms. One building is described where a courtyard was cut out of middle of the building to provide windows and the equivalent volume was added to the top of the building.
Pre-covid, one of the legitimate arguments against remote work was the lack of network infrastructure to support it. But now that their arms have been twisted and millions have been spent on upgrades and training, the new design is just as valid an argument against requiring people to start commuting again. They would have all this very expensive equipment being severely underutilized while at the same time they would have to spend money on maintaining offices. Rent, heating/cooling, housekeeping, general maintenance, etc.
So yes, there will be a significant number of people that will be required to return for good reasons as well as reasons of managers developing twitches because their minions aren’t under their direct observation. But I think the majority what want to work from home and have demonstrated that they can will be allowed to. The economics supports it.
Honestly, that all sounds like a system that just wasn’t interested in trying to modernize, at all. All of that can be done paperless now, and if you can do it paperlessly, you can do it remotely.
My job used to be very paper-intensive. I was part of the pilot project, long before the pandemic, that started moving us to a paperless system, and also using laptops in place of desktop computers. By the time the pandemic hit, we were all using these new systems, so switching to full WFH was just a matter of telling us all to take our laptops home one day.
We had a few months of slow networks at first, but once everyone realized this crisis was going to be much longer than the few weeks we originally expected, it was just a matter of paying the money for better systems, as mentioned above. Now it all just works.
A lot of that was paperless and can therefore be done remotely but not all of it - checks that are coming in the mail can’t be handled remotely and cash that has to go to the bank can’t either. There is no business in the world that is going to tell customers to send payments to the accounts receivable person at home or have bills sent to the accounts payable person at home.
Except that payments and billings can all be done online these days. I suspect most of these kinds of things are automated now.
And really, for customers who are also stuck with paper, all you really need is a mail receiving office, who scans things into the system the accountants and such people then actually access for their work.
That’s how we do things now. Used to be receiving and scanning documents in the mail was a huge part of our process. Now, almost all of that is done digitally, and we only have a small remnant of our original mail scanning team in-office for the few clients who want to do things the old way, for whatever reason.
