Here’s a rare sight: a CEO of a large company has spoken out in support of remote work for employees, slamming those firms that drag staff back into the office against their will. Dropbox boss Drew Houston compared RTO mandates to trying to force people back into malls and movie theaters.
Speaking on an episode of Fortune’s “Leadership Next” podcast, Houston said what most people have long thought: that returning to the office is a waste of time and money when employees can do exactly the same tasks at home.
“We can be a lot less dumb than forcing people back into a car three days a week or whatever, to literally be back on the same Zoom meeting they would have been at home,” he said. “There’s a better way to do this.”
It’s actually:
It’s the 2008 housing crisis, but with corporate real estate. COVID forced work from home, which caught banks with their pants down, having no way to actually drive the demand back up for these buildings that will continually house less and less people from less and less businesses (Work from home + businesses not surviving Covid, now Tariffs.)
Our entire banking system is backed up by debt packaged with corporate real estate that’s rated as AAA, but is just more toxic cat shit no one wants wrapped in dogshit that banks need. It’s a bomb that’s been growing as giant corporate buildings become ghost towns, and city centers become more horizontal than verticle.
Big companies with big loans from banks know they’re fucked if the corporate real estate market collapses. So they force work from home as a band aid that gives their corporate property some value, or at least justifies it on paper. In reality, the cost to force workers into the office always offsets the billions in losses if their corporate office real estate ever followed real market forces and depreciated in value.
I still don’t understand how this talking point makes sense. So businesses are purposefully incurring costs to prop up an industry that they’re not involved in? A business will stop leasing a building and save money if they can, hell mine did.
Lots of Fortune 500 companies own buildings and both they and their executives have big investments in commercial real estate. They don’t want the market to collapse because it’ll hurt them all personally.
See my other comment in this thread.
Companies Renting offices are usually not pushing for RTO. Definitely not full time RTO.
Lots of businesses own their offices. Those buildings are assets on the company balance sheet. If no-one uses those offices they become worthless and the company visibly loses money.
Wouldn’t those businesses that own their offices still prefer to sell or rent a property if the business will run without it? Artificially filling a property with employees to “make use of” the property rather than get money out of it is a good way to be left holding the bag when other companies ditch their properties to save money and crash the market anyway. To your point, the property is still the same asset whether employees are in it or not; it costs money. I guess I’m not really buying the notion that businesses are banding together to lose money for the greater good of the business real estate market. The same companies that won’t even invest in obvious long-term profitability plans? Really?
That is a lot of it. Companies with office assets don’t want to be left holding the bag. They have sunk costs (x year leases) and there are some benefits to the business of people being presentatial, so from the employers PoV everyone should return until the lease expires.
If they own the property then not having it fully used means that it will sell for less when they are finally able to do so.
Some jobs also need a proportion of the workforce to be present, so hybrid becomes the best balance for them.