Sell the desks, save money on the office, utilities, and office supplies?
That would require an admission of fault for the last year of these attacks on WFH. No no we don’t do that here
When the lockdowns happened due to COVID, it was just incredible at the sheer number of jobs that could have been done at home.
Some people, like Sam Seder from The Majority Report, speculated that people will use this in the future to leverage their power as employees for added privacy and flexibility in working.
The other thing is that businesses could save on massive costs by simply not, as others have mentioned here, leasing/building/renting/whatever large office spaces, and those former office spaces can be made into something else, like more afforable housing.
But everyone just kinda forgot, or seriously underestimated, at the desire for businesses to have control over their employees. This is one major reason why so many businesses want private healthcare. It allows them to fuck over their employees more than they would otherwise, even if it is much more expensive for them to do so than just paying a tax for public healthcare.
That’s so, so stupid… They really are the dumbest of morons. They lost money, so they waste even more money and make their best workers flee.
Bunch of real Einstein’s running these places, huh? Fucking morons, just don’t waste the money leasing large offices.
It’s all about status. Big building = big dick. And more buildings spread all over the place is the equivalent to them having tons of kids.
It’s such a primitive, ape-brain thing to do, but that’s how these psychopaths operate.
Seriously. Every job I had, the C-level were all about flexing the size of the company.
One Fintech company I worked at got a giant skyscraper in front of city hall as a Fuck You to the mayor because they had beef with them a few years back. Another tech company constantly bragged about how much square footage of campus they had, constantly comparing themselves to empires.
All just dick measuring.
In my experience CXX folks were all about being seen and having something tangible to show off to potential partners and customers. It’s one thing to give people a tour of your facility. It’s another to meet up at a co-working space and settle in for a PowerPoint presentation full of abstract numbers and graphs about your "virtual "company. I’m not saying that’s right, and I’m certainly not arguing for RTO, but it helps explain that motivation and total lack of confidence in WFH.
It’s still a “primitive ape-brain” thing to do though.
Unless they signed long leases with “commercial real estate” the company can just you know save a load of money not renting those spaces and just liquidate the office for quick cash.
Or if they own, they can always sell unless “it’s an investment” so we can sell it in the future for more.
But you can only sell if someone is buying, and the moment you list that huge skyscraper on the market and find out that the only offers you’re getting are 1/10 the asking price, suddenly the other massive commercial buildings you have on your balance sheets (and those of all your rich buddies) suddenly drop 90% in value, and it’s revealed the emperor has no clothes