Asklemmy

43947 readers

618 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

413

why are companies trying so hard to have employees back in the office? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

236 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I have posted this on Reddit (askeconomics) a while back but got no good replies. Copying it here because I don't want to send traffic to Reddit.

What do you think?

I see a big push to take employees back to the office. I personally don't mind either working remote or in the office, but I think big companies tend to think rationally in terms of cost/benefit and I haven't seen a convincing explanation yet of why they are so keen to have everyone back.

If remote work was just as productive as in-person, a remote-only company could use it to be more efficient than their work-in-office competitors, so I assume there's no conclusive evidence that this is the case. But I haven't seen conclusive evidence of the contrary either, and I think employers would have good reason to trumpet any findings at least internally to their employees ("we've seen KPI so-and-so drop with everyone working from home" or "project X was severely delayed by lack of in-person coordination" wouldn't make everyone happy to return in presence, but at least it would make a good argument for a manager to explain to their team)

Instead, all I keep hearing is inspirational wish-wash like "we value the power of working together". Which is fine, but why are we valuing it more than the cost of office space?

On the side of employees, I often see arguments like "these companies made a big investment in offices and now they don't want to look stupid by leaving them empty". But all these large companies have spent billions to acquire smaller companies/products and dropped them without a second thought. I can't believe the same companies would now be so sentimentally attached to office buildings if it made any economic sense to close them.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Teleconference is, at best, good enough and will never have the quality of in person discussion.

I am not aware of any teleconference software that uses perfectly lossless audio. Those small losses, though hard to hear, can increase the cognitive load of participants. Even with expensive headsets and good software, audio volumes will vary from speaker to speaker. Automatic volume leveling loses even more audio fidelity.

Due to physics (i.e. we cannot send a signal faster than the speed of light) and processing, there will be additional delay. It makes it hard for people to talk without speaking over each other. It makes discussions trickier since people are hesitant to talk right after one another. Instead of interrupting with questions, they will hold questions until the end, when the context may be forgotten, or don't ask questions at all.

Even assuming that everyone has good lighting and has their camera pointed perfectly, body language is often lost. Every meeting software I have used hesitates to switch the focused speaker too often. If two people are talking back and forth, one will be religtated to a thumbnail video. When someone is presenting, they cannot easily scan the room to see reactions.

So, when talking on a meeting, the participants hear (almost) everything being said, but they miss out on all of the non-verbal communication and even some subtleties of the sound.