Autodesk job interest increased by 400% after remote work push | Fortune - "In the last 12 months, we had a 58% increase in job applications. In the U.S. alone, we’ve had an 82% increase in candidates identifying as female and a 45% increase in candidates identifying as belonging to underrepresented groups. Since launching our new flex forward campaign in January, we’ve had a 400% increase in the number of people viewing job postings. We have lower attrition than before the pandemic and are in the 25th percentile of our tech peers in that space."
This executive has a unique return-to-office strategy. Here’s how it’s going - "British-born human relations executive Pearce was one of the loudest voices at C-suite level meetings advocating for Flex Forward. “I’m cursed with being a futuristic optimist,” Pearce, who is based in Cornwall, England, told CNN. Having spent most of her career in hybrid working arrangements across the globe, she knew she could be just as productive working from an office as she was working from anywhere else... “Our early analysis of performance data suggests that engineers who either joined Meta in-person and then transferred to remote or remained in-person performed better on average than people who joined remotely,” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote in a March blog post. “This analysis also shows that engineers earlier in their career perform better on average when they work in-person with teammates at least three days a week.” Around 60% of JPMorgan Chase’s workforce — including all managing directors — are working in person five days a week, CEO Jamie Dimon said in July. “I do not believe you can be a leader and not be accessible to your people,” he said, adding that remote work “doesn’t really work for creativity and spontaneity.” “When you’re in person, people tend to be more engaged, observant, and attuned to what’s happening in the meetings and the cultural clues being communicated,” Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote in a company-wide memo in February. Among the many other reasons he gave for why Amazon would be soon be mandating a return to offices, Jassy said, “collaborating and inventing is easier and more effective when we’re in person.” Autodesk wanted workers back, too. But it took a different approach. Autodesk commissioned a satirical video urging an employee who initially appears to be Zooming in to a meeting to join their employees at Autodesk’s Portland, Oregon, office in April last year. “You should come, you should come,” an office-based employee says in the video. “This office is way cooler than anything you have at home, don’t be a dork,” an employee says to the Zoom employee, who appears to be anxious about coming to work in person again. Then they proceed to show him all of the perks around the office, including massage chairs and free snacks... Pearce said there are times early in an employee’s career when Autodesk may ask them to work in person temporarily “because it’s going to accelerate your success and it’s going to accelerate our success.”... Voluntary attrition rates are down 7% year to date, compared to the same period a year prior"
Workers to Employers: We're Just Not That Into You - "Despite a historically tight labor market, pay until recently wasn’t growing much faster than inflation. One reason is workers aren’t just bargaining over money. They are also demanding more nonmonetary compensation, such as paid leave and flexible hours. As a result they often put in fewer hours, or accomplish less in the hours they do put in. This seems to have made for a happier workforce. The Conference Board in May reported that worker satisfaction rose sharply in 2022 from 2021 and reached its highest since the survey began in 1987. This isn’t because workers find their jobs more fulfilling, but because their jobs are consuming less of their life. Among the 18 components of the survey, “interest in work” made the smallest contribution to this year’s increased satisfaction; work-life balance made the largest. (Wages were somewhere near the middle.) Memes such as “work your wage,” “quiet quitting” and “lazy-girl jobs” attest to the lesser priority many people today place on career. They are on a collision course with the chief executive who typically worked ungodly hours, sacrificing leisure and family time, for the sake of the company and assumes others should, too. The result: Executives who try to force employees back to the office often have a revolt on their hands. The conventional wisdom is that happier workers are more productive. That isn’t necessarily because happiness increases productivity, but because an employer, to keep its most productive employees, must keep them happy—even if that means taking steps that make them less productive. There is nothing unusual about workers favoring something other than money. “Over the last century, the average job has become more pleasant and less onerous,” Valerie Ramey, an economist at the University of California, San Diego, said in an email. One reason is government regulations, “but part is…workers’ real income has risen over time and they have decided to ‘spend’ (by accepting lower wages) part of that income on better job amenities.”... There are signs that in the wake of the pandemic, Americans, like Europeans, are putting more priority on the “life” part of the work-life balance, and employers are responding. According to SHRM, the share of employers offering paid time off has risen from 63% in 2019 to 70% now, and the share offering paid parental leave has risen from 28% to 39%. Leave averages seven weeks for fathers and nine weeks for mothers, according to human-resources consultants WTW. Employees are also taking more vacation. Since 2021 some have enjoyed the first new federal holiday in four decades, Juneteenth... international chess players perform worse remotely, despite the motivation of prize money and rankings, proof that “overcoming potential self-control issues may not be easy.”... employees value working from home two or three days a week as equivalent to an 8% pay increase. It will take more than the threat of unemployment to undo this shift in values."
Tax regulators catching up to growth of remote working
A new era of workplace inclusion: moving from retrofit to redesign - "The small minority of Black people who are employed as knowledge workers are even more likely to reject the office-centric model. Of those currently working remotely, 97% want a hybrid or full-time remote working model (compared with 79% of white knowledge workers in the U.S.). Only 3% of Black knowledge workers want to return to full-time co-located work (vs. 21% of white knowledge workers in the U.S.)."
Golf at 3 p.m. Thursday? Sure, It’s the Afternoon Fun Economy. - The New York Times - "“We call them the remote guys,” Mr. Mills, 48, said. “These were guys we used to see running to the golf course after work. Now they’re able to come out leisurely and get their golf done, instead of changing in the parking lot.” The leisure industry is facing a surge in demand for afternoon services, especially in fitness and cosmetics. It’s the rise of the “afternoon fun” economy... A new study from Stanford shines a light on the rise of afternoon leisure. Using geolocation data near golf courses in the United States, the study found there was 278 percent more people playing golf at 4 p.m. on a Wednesday in August 2022 than in August 2019. And there were 83 percent more golf games being played on a weekday in August 2022 than in August 2019, according to the researchers, Nick Bloom and Alex Finan, who studied data, from the company Inrix, at more than 3,400 golf courses. “We’re turned into a student economy,” Mr. Bloom said. “You’re in the library in the evenings, and in the afternoon you’re sleeping off your hangover.” The rise of afternoon leisure could be playing an under-examined role in driving America’s economic rebound since 2020... Historically, productivity in the manufacturing sector has grown at a faster rate than productivity in the services sector. Service sector productivity tends to grow slowly even as its wages rise quickly to keep pace with other industries. That’s because the amount of time people can devote to services — shopping, entertainment, beauty treatments — has long been constrained by the rigidity of a nine-to-five grind. Remote work partly did away with that constraint... Some golf course managers also noted that remote work had coincided with a push in the golfing world for shorter games... her clients are treating the salon like an office. “I’ve had a client sit outside with foils in her hair hosting a Zoom meeting,” she said, adding that she often has to adjust the position of people’s heads so they can look at their laptops while she styles their hair. “It’s funny seeing people sit up and try to be professional.”"
From 2023
Overemployed Man Busted For Using Mouse Jiggler To Work Multiple Jobs At Once - ""Mouse jigglers" come in two types — an actual physical piece of equipment that literally jiggles your mouse, and apps or software that keep your computer appearing as if you're online on things like messaging apps and email. The man on Reddit made what now seems to have been the huge mistake of choosing the latter, causing the security team in one of his company's IT departments to be alerted to him using an app called "caffeine.exe." "[My boss] asked me if I had a business purpose for this and I was at a loss for words," he wrote. And suddenly, the jig was up. "Is this so your computer doesn't fall asleep?" his boss asked him. Busted. His boss presented him with a PIP — a "performance improvement plan," usually the last stop before being fired at most companies — right there on the spot. "Apparently the mouse jiggler was the last straw," he wrote, after a string of mistakes he'd made while trying to juggle his multiple jobs. "I had been missing standups and having 'thunderstorms' and 'power outages' since I started."... an "over-employed" IT professional describes his life working five different full-time jobs — and making well over $1 million a year doing it"
Gen Z loves office work as 92% ditch remote work in February - "91.8% of U.S. workers aged 16 to 24 did not work remotely at all in February. Of the 18.7 million Gen Z workers counted in the survey, only 3.2% worked fully remotely, while the remaining 4.9% completed hybrid work. Of course, many young workers hold service or retail jobs that require showing up in person, Sean Smith, an employment economist at the Bureau of Labor Statistics, told Fortune. The 16-24 age group may include high schoolers clocking in for their shift at the ice cream shop or college students completing work-study at the campus library. Meanwhile, jobs that offer remote work tend to be in professional industries and require a college degree... For office workers in particular, opportunities for face-time with bosses, friendships with “work besties,” and “yassified” cubicles are drawing younger professionals back to the workplace. According to a report from professional services firm Seramount, only 11% of Gen Z workers would prefer to be fully remote, compared with 34% of non-Gen Z. So it’s more than just a retail jobs story... From a career development perspective, working in person can help early-career Gen Zers get ahead. Halstead cited a survey from LinkedIn that found that 76% of Gen Z professionals want more learning opportunities at work—which are more accessible to employees who are in the office and closer to colleagues. “Remote working favors those who already have a wealth of experience in their roles and can create difficulties for those who are still learning the ropes,” Halstead said. There’s also the draw of the “work bestie.” The workplace is one of the few places where Gen Z can get the critical face-to-face connections amid what the U.S Surgeon General is calling a “loneliness epidemic,” Halstead told Fortune."
In the October 2022 data tables, 93.6% of US workers aged 16-24 did not work remotely at all. So that's a significant increase of 25% in those going fully in-person from 6.4% to 8.2%
The death of the great American city - "The shift to companies offering some remote work seems to be on the increase. As Stanford researcher Nicholas Bloom notes, the number of job postings for remote-friendly roles is hitting record levels. In fact, according to the Flex Index, the share of people in the office full time dropped from 49 per cent in the first quarter of 2023 to 42 per cent in the second quarter... This is not merely an American phenomenon. In London, office attendance is still down 35 per cent on pre-pandemic levels. Canary Wharf in east London is being hit particularly hard, as employers like HSBC and Barclays downsize their operations... In some ways, this reverses the patterns of the industrial age, as portrayed in Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England or in Jacob Riis’ How the Other Half Lives. As factory labour swelled, and artisanal industries declined, workers left their more bucolic towns to live in cities, as Engels put it, amid ‘the most distressing scenes of misery and poverty’... In 1950, the core cities accounted for nearly 24 per cent of the US population; today, their share is under 15 per cent. Suburbs have accounted for about 90 per cent of all US metropolitan growth since 2010. The decline of the office represents a threat to the very economic function of cities. The so-called transactional city, a phrase coined by Jean Gottmann in 1983, was built around high-rise office buildings. From those perches, elite professionals were to occupy ‘the commanding heights’ of the economy. Until recently, cities like London, New York, San Francisco and Chicago seemed to be on the up. They were widely hailed by academic researchers as presaging a high-tech economic future. Urban advocates like former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg described the city as ‘a luxury product’, designed around the needs of wealthy elites and professionals. Some even imagined a world controlled by these cities and their mayors. Yet reality was undermining the great ‘urban renaissance’ even before the pandemic. Office occupancy has actually been declining since 2000. By 2019, the construction of new office space had dropped to one third of the rate of 1985 and half that of 2000. Meanwhile, wealth and educated people continued to shift to the periphery... Demographer Wendell Cox has found that virtually all the migration gains since 2020 have been outside the dense cities, which have lost population. Surveys suggest that the rise of remote working has fuelled much of this movement out of the city. This lockdown-induced trend intensified further in the wake of the riots and crime wave that followed the murder of George Floyd, which diminished the appeal of certain urban areas. Indeed, in some parts of Chicago and Philadelphia, young men now have a greater chance of being killed by firearms than American soldiers did when serving in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq... There is clearly a difference in how the elites and the lesser ranks experience offices. It’s one thing for Jamie Dimon, who can afford a luxurious apartment, country homes and access to private air transport, to cheer for five-days-a-week office attendance. It’s a different story for the young parent powering in on the subway in Queens, or the middle-aged man coming in on the long ride from Ronkonkoma on the Long Island Railroad. Little wonder Gallup has found that only six per cent of people in ‘remote capable’ jobs want to come in five times a week, while 60 per cent favour hybrid work and another 34 per cent prefer staying at home exclusively... In one McKinsey survey, more than a quarter of employees indicated that ‘they would consider switching employers if their organisation returned to fully on-site work’... one clear consequence of working from home will be the gradual decline of the core cities – which are almost all run by progressive Democrats – and the continued rise of the more politically mixed periphery. Big city mayors face the consequences of declining real-estate values that threaten their key sources of revenue... This is potentially a huge blow to large and politically connected investment funds, including Blackstone, which is now the world’s leading backer of office space. And things could get much worse – the Atlantic reports that $1.5 trillion in commercial property loans is due for repayment by 2025. Many debtors could default on these loans... The top executives may hope to lure workers back to the office with inducements like higher pay. But employers may not be in the driver’s seat amid a demographic drought, with the US workforce growing at a much slower pace than in the 1980s. This has been made worse by a persistent shortage of skilled or even motivated workers, many of whom prioritise their living situations and families over higher pay. Even as they push the idea of a ‘return to the office’, the multinationals plan to reduce their office footprint by 10 to 20 per cent"
Posthaste: Canadians ready to return to the office, but say there's one problem that still needs fixing - "A majority, or 64 per cent, of workers say they’d support a mandate from their boss ordering them back to the office, according to a new survey from Cisco Systems Canada Co. More than half say they’d be willing to make the trek so they can collaborate with co-workers, while 28 per cent would do so for the social interaction. That comes as more than three-quarters of companies have decided to tell workers to return, whether for five days a week or less. Company leaders say they want people back for productivity and workplace culture reasons and, not unlike employees, think teams will find it easier to collaborate on-site. But many workers say their offices aren’t designed for quality collaboration in a hybrid work world , and only 40 per cent deem their workplaces “very well prepared” to meet their needs. Indeed, 83 per cent of employers say half their offices are still made up of individual desks, instead of offering more space for meetings and collaboration. Employers appear to be taking note of the disconnect. Two-thirds have either redesigned their office space since the pandemic began or are planning to in the next two years, the survey said. Still, many seem to be dragging their feet on incorporating artificial intelligence into their operations, something workers say they want, the survey said... Right now, 29 per cent of employees prefer a mix of remote and hybrid work, 34 per cent want to come into the office more often and 30 per cent want to work more at home. Employers are largely on board with those desires, with 24 per cent preferring hybrid work, 34 per cent in favour of mostly in-office work and 30 per cent preferring more remote work"
The office market is so bleak that Canada's largest pension fund sold its stake in an NYC building for $1 - "Commercial real estate concerns have escalated thanks to the pandemic's work-from-home boom and high interest rates in the wake of the Federal Reserve's inflation fight, and the gravest fears center on what some described as the office apocalypse. Office vacancies hit an all-time high in January and remote work looks like it's here to stay, darkening the outlook for investors in the space... Goldman Sachs said it expects office vacancies to rise from 13.5% this year to 18% in the next decade"
Housing Market Outlook: Empty Offices Can't Fix the Shortage of Homes - "Real estate experts have theorized that office-to-residential conversions could be a promising solution to the supply problem, but strategists at the bank caution that would be neither simple nor cheap. Office vacancies have climbed four percentage points in the last three years to hit 13.5% — the highest since 2000 — and Goldman expects that to surge to 18% in the coming decade as buildings become older and less viable workplaces... a combination of high mortgage rates and home prices with limited housing inventory has frozen the US housing market. Current homeowners are reluctant to move and give up lower rates they secured during the pandemic, which leads to fewer buyers and sellers on the market. This has been dubbed the "lock in" effect... a February report from real estate outlet ResiClub found that office-to-residential conversions have surged 357% since 2021. Yet, according to Goldman Sachs, only about 4% of office buildings look viable for conversion, based on occupancy and whether the property is operating at a loss. Notably, only about 0.4% of office space was converted to multifamily units in the year prior to the pandemic. That ticked up to 0.5% in 2023, which points to both minimal traction and significant barriers to more conversions. "The office-to-multifamily conversion rate is quite low, suggesting that there may be substantial financial and physical hurdles to conversion," the Goldman team said. "If the conversion continues at the current pace, it will take another 8 years to convert the 4% of offices that are currently nonviable by our definition.""
It looks like remote workers are getting the boot once again - "A bunch of executives at e-commerce firm Wayfair singled out remote workers as the ones who were more likely to have been laid off in a fresh round of cuts"
The No. 1 challenge Fortune 500 execs say they're facing with employees right now, according to new research - "Only a third of executives with an in-office mandate said they thought their in-office policies have had any impact on productivity. Instead, 76% of the Fortune 500 executives surveyed said they are more worried about how their teams are working than where they work. It's not the first time executives have said they're worried that workers are getting less done — and evidence suggests their fears aren't unfounded. At the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, productivity soared to levels not seen in decades. Continue reading But that surge was short-lived... It's hard to assign blame for lowered output and morale. Some CEOs have pointed fingers at remote work, arguing that clocking in from home has made it easier for employees to extend less effort, but research has failed to draw definitive conclusions about remote workers' productivity. In 2022, Microsoft coined the term "productivity paranoia" to describe managers' anxieties about whether remote and hybrid employees are working hard enough because they can't see how people are working by walking down the hall or stopping by their desks. In the Atlassian report, executives revealed several major challenges in remote work, with decreased organizational loyalty and difficulties in coordinating tasks effectively being chief among them. Economists and human resource leaders have attributed the decline in productivity to everything from sluggish economic activity to higher job turnover. Gallup reports that employee disengagement costs the world $8.8 trillion in lost productivity, equal to 9% of global GDP. Plus, workers are historically stressed and unhappy at their jobs, leading to more burnout. The antidote to declining productivity is to focus less on output and more on how employees are structuring their schedules and collaborating, says Annie Dean, Atlassian's global head of Team Anywhere, the company's distributed work policy. Atlassian has run dozens of experiments with its 10,000-plus employees and found that encouraging employees to spend about 30-40% of their week in "focus time," which the company defines as uninterrupted time spent on work that requires deep thinking, helps boost productivity. Additionally, blocking off consistent "open collaboration" time each week to be responsive to messages, jump on a call, or just say "hi" to their teammates also helped employees work more effectively, says Dean."
Downtowns are still struggling, but there is a way to save them from becoming dead zones - "Cities that were once the envy of all for their success in generating wealth are struggling to attract people back to their downtowns. For example, social and economic activities in downtown San Francisco, one of the hardest-hit cities, were down 69 per cent from their pre-pandemic level. Downtown Portland experienced a 63 per cent decline... The study also found that recovery rates depended upon “the presence of lower commute times and a lower share of employment in professional, scientific, and technical fields, information, and transportation and warehousing.” The downtown recovery was also more pronounced in less populated Sunbelt cities in the United States. Bakersfield and Fresno, Calif., El Paso, Texas, and Salt Lake City were among the cities with higher-than-pre-pandemic activity levels. The other striking finding was that downtown recovery rates lagged the recovery in the rest of the city. That suburbs and midtowns were able to recover faster than the urban cores is a major concern for cities that have hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of commercial real estate . Office vacancy rates have remained stubbornly high since the start of the pandemic... Whereas less populous Sunbelt cities fared well, the same is not true for more populous cities with large office real estate portfolios... Cities have gone through boom-and-bust cycles in the past, but this time is different. Hybrid work is likely here to stay"
Why Is Everyone So Unhappy at Work Right Now? - "The share of U.S. companies mandating office attendance five days a week has fallen this year—to 38% in October from 49% at the start of the year—according to Scoop Technologies, a software firm that developed an index to monitor workplace policies of nearly 4,500 companies.
Civil servants told to stop being ‘TWaTs’ - "Senior civil servants have been told to come into the office more than 60pc of the time to promote “strong visible leadership”. The Cabinet Office has set out expectations for senior managers across the Civil Service to work from the office more often in an effort to increase face-to-face contact with junior colleagues. New starters will also have to come into the office more than 60pc of the time under the new rules, while other staff have been told they must work from the office at least three days a week. It means some public sector staff will likely no longer be able to work in the office only on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays, a working pattern which has grown in popularity since the pandemic, also known under the acronym “TWaT”. Ministers are trying to force Whitehall staff back to the office following concern about drops in productivity... Previous reports suggested Jeremy Quin, the former Paymaster General who was replaced by John Glen MP this week, was considering limiting civil servants to just one day working from home a week... Despite the new expectation, civil service heads promised that flexible working would remain “fundamental” to professional working life. The letter, signed by the heads of civil service departments, added that not all civil servants would be able to return to the office three days a week owing to a lack of space required to accommodate them all."
A Gen Xer who worked from home for 7 years wants to go back to the office to combat loneliness - "Chris, a Gen Xer, is about to leave his remote position for what he hopes will be a hybrid job. His main reason for doing so: Loneliness."
The Fight Over Return-to-Office Is Turning Into a Disability Dispute - "Workers are filing more charges of disability discrimination to federal and state agencies, and an increasing share of the charges are based on mental-health conditions such as anxiety, depression and post-traumatic stress disorder"
Virtual meetings tire people out because they’re doing them wrong - "New research from Finland suggests that sleepiness during virtual meetings is caused by mental underload and boredom. Earlier studies suggested that fatigue from virtual meetings stems from mental overload, but new research from Aalto University shows that sleepiness during virtual meetings might actually be a result of mental underload and boredom... The team published in the Journal of Occupational Health Psychology under the title “Virtual Meeting Fatigue: Exploring the Impact of Virtual Meetings on Cognitive Performance and Active Versus Passive Fatigue.” "
Roblox Orders Staff Back to the Office 3 Days a Week – or Resign - "Roblox, the $19 billion gaming giant known for creating virtual experiences, has ordered employees back to the office three days a week or take a severance package, to move away from remote working... Roblox is just one of the tech giants that have walked back their remote working policies. Google and Meta told staff to return to the office three days a week, while Elon Musk quickly ended Twitter's remote working policies after taking control of the company now called X in October 2022."
For Commercial Real Estate Investors, “Urban Doom Loop” Is Both Crisis And Opportunity - "Fifty-four of the 88 largest-population U.S. cities reported population losses between 2020 and 2021, according to Brookings Institution data. By the end of July 2022, only 37 of the largest cities reported ongoing losses, but among them were Los Angeles, Portland (Oregon), San Francisco, and every major Northeast city — from Philadelphia to Boston, according to the Economic Innovation Group. City centers have hollowed out, with half-vacant hotels and acres of empty offices and storefronts. Offices now lead the distressed property category, surpassing even enclosed malls and suburban hotels. A new “Great Migration” is now underway... Decreased daytime population coincided with increased crime. Compulsory pandemic face masks enabled a crime wave of shoplifting, carjacking, armed robbery, and burglary that is ongoing. In Metro DC, 1000 people were carjacked in 2022, a rate of almost three per day. Brazen, organized gangs of shoplifters led essential retailers like CVS, Target, Walgreens, and Walmart to shutter stores, and lock up laundry detergent, toiletries and even ice cream. Cities including DC, Philadelphia and New York have no cash bail policies that return recidivist criminals to the streets hours after an arrest, demoralizing shrunken police forces. The lawful became fearful, the lawless, fearless... conversion is no panacea. There are many regulatory hurdles, although cities are changing zoning laws to make the process easier. Many office buildings have large internal floor spaces that makes it expensive to divide them into individual residential units that all receive outdoor light. And glass-sheathed buildings with windows that don’t open are prone to overheating. Another approach is making downtowns more alluring, through steps such as waiving fees for food trucks and small businesses, offering free parking at night and on weekends and promoting events and eateries. The city of Columbus gives out lunch coupons for downtown restaurants. Worcester, Massachusetts, offers financial aid for small businesses that move into vacant storefronts. San Francisco is considering a proposal to convert its downtown Westfield Centre Mall, formerly home to Nordstrom and other retailers, into a soccer stadium."