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Office mandates don’t help companies make more money, study finds (www.spokesman.com)

submitted 9 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Office mandates don’t help companies make more money, study finds::Three years after the coronavirus pandemic sent people to work from home in record numbers, U.S. employers are still struggling to get people back to the office.

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[–] [email protected] 6 points 9 months ago (2 children)

I don't know how this property values thing just became accepted knowledge, but it's nonsense. Most companies don't own their own office space, and for the ones that do, it's a cost centre they'd prefer not to have on the books.

I've also seen absolutely no evidence that this is a factor in their decisions, and you'd expect at least one CEO to let the truth slip if this was the case.

And yet people keep parroting it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Commercial leases are not always a 1 year lease though, like an apartment. They could be in a 10 year lease so I think it's still valid a lot of times. Obviously there are also additional factors but some companies are still stuck paying for a building they can't use.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 9 months ago

Sunk cost fallacy. This is not difficult to grasp. The money is gone regardless of whether people are in the building.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 9 months ago* (last edited 9 months ago)

It's parroted because it's correct. It doesn't matter if companies own the building or not, because leases are often on 7 or 10 year terms--sometimes more. They're stuck paying that and associated baseline heating, electrical, etc. costs.

That's exactly how the Sunk Cost fallacy works. CEO's don't let it slip because nobody wants to admit they've fallen for a fallacy; that's assuming they recognize where they've gone wrong in the first place.

Conversely, look at what evidence they're providing that return to office mandates are better. Lots of vague statements about "ideas coming out of random encounters in the hallway" with no actual evidence to back it up. It's certainly none of the reasons they provide, so we should go looking for others. Sunk Cost of real estate fits their behavior pretty well.