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https://nypost.com/2023/08/02/too-many-employees-are-still-working-from-home-michael-bloomberg
“Several federal agency headquarters have occupancy averaging less than 10%, including the Agriculture Department, the General Services Administration, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Office of Personnel Management, the Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration, according to the GAO.
“In other words: Federal offices are mostly empty,” Bloomberg said, noting that taxpayers shouldn’t be footing the bill for empty floor space and the cost of maintenance at federal agencies’ offices.”
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Our law firm (and most large organizations) are trying to rapidly downsize their real estate footprint. At the same time, a number of organizations are attempting to bring people back to the office. Most surveys I’ve seen indicate that a hard 40% of the populace prefers to work from home, and candidly, I fit into that category. All of our offices are impacted by traffic commutes (wash DC, LA, SV, SF, NYC, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc.), and when COVID hit, frankly, it was a godsend for my team. Our content burden literally tripled, and the only way we could have handled it was to find two extra hours in every day for every person on my staff…which we did. They stopped commuting.
The staff didn’t want to come in the office. Neither did the lawyers. Near as I can tell, they’ve settled on 40% time in the office. I don’t see it getting much better.
Audaces fortuna iuvat
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Being in person vs at home is like eating your vegetables. Not everybody wants to do it, but everybody is better off if they do.
that doesn’t mean people need to revert to a 5X9 schedule, but limited in person interaction saps team effectiveness in most functions.
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Sic transit gloria mundi (so shut up and get back to work) -
On Bloomberg, maybe he’s got REITS. He once wanted a congestion tax for NYC so go figure.
I’d say a lot of people can work successfully from home so long as performance is good. Outside sales people for example pay themselves. Lawyers and accountants to a large extent but not in the beginning. A lot of seasoned technical people can. I know a lot of engineers and they all say no way.
The problem with government people is that they are union protected and performance is hard to measure. They never get laid off and they know it. I’ll bet their unions to include teachers unions among others are trying to figure out a way to work at home all the time as a benefit. They will use lower carbon as a cover. They all should go to work.
I suspect academia is infected too. Know a young PHD physics candidate at Berkeley who told me that labs were quite often empty.
Get rid of tenure wherever it exists and you can probably use the work at home model efficiently.
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