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The back-to-office backfire: Companies ending WFH perks lose out on top talent
(www.businessinsider.com)
this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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Top talent has options. Others are hesitant to leave where they are comfortable.
It is hard to tell if the bourgeoisie fail to see what the real impact of moves like killing off WFH are. Or if they do see that impact but it doesn’t matter as much as us worker bees think it does.
If an engineering company loses their top brass, how long can they go without a real impact to the bottom line? Are the top folks the ones causing expensive change? Or confusing lower level employees? Does having top folks around inspire others to be better or make them feel inadequate and less efficient?
Maybe losing top performers isn’t permanent and you need to cycle through some of them here and there to make more money.
I hate all of this but I’ve watched a company seemingly purge their top performers with bad policy change again and again. There is no way they didn’t see a mass resignation coming.
I work in accounting which has some analogous characteristics to what you describe. The difference I see is that in the present, top talent is replaceable. And let's be honest. If it's replaceable today and we make our quarterly goals at the expense of some resignations, well, champagne all around!
Where the industry isn't looking is that they've created such a toxic environment, that the pipeline of students and young up and comers has dwindled to a trickle, putting the future of the industry in dire straits. We accounting parents are vehemently discouraging our children from considering this soul crushing career path.
But for today, goals were met, so break out the bubbly!
Myopia is going to kill everything.
Definitely agree. That's the entire global capitalist platform, with the last ~50 years dialing that mentality up to 11. Profits today above everything else. Publicly traded corporations will be one of the primary causes that leads to downfall of everything (and yes, I realize they're not the only problem plaguing our society and environment, but they're a damn big one).
My workplace stock price plunged 80% when the earnings report was lower than previous year. Not loosing money, but earned slightly less than previous year.
A company that makes hundreds of millions in revenue, every single year for decades, had a single year where the revenue decresead ever so slightly, not even close of going into red numbers.
Stock market is the most irrational thing
The best thing is when companies make less more profit than the year before and headlines read like they lost money when the profits still went up just not enough up.
The remote work cat is out of the bag. Headlines like these are clickbait. I can go apply for jobs in my field (software engineering) right now and have no issue scoring a remote job.
Large companies may crack down on remote work, but smaller-midsize companies and startups are happy to allow it.
There’s a reason why IBM cratered relative to companies like Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the other Silicon Valley type firms, and a very big part of it was culture. IBM had a number of business-related problems, but it also had a reputation for a corporate culture that was completely at odds with what was happening in California.
I think that a lot of the pressure is being felt because of the massive post-covid layoffs and hiring freezes. People are feeling a bit less mobile these days, and it changes the equation as to whether or not you think where you are is good enough for now, at least through the next vesting period.
I do suspect that the big tech company who moves first in terms of opening things back up is going to be able to scoop up a lot of top talent by poaching them from their butts-in-seats-no-matter-what companies.