The five-day office is back in force, with big employers like Truist requiring everyone onsite all week while other bosses — including California's governor — keep delaying their own mandates under pressure. Managers insist culture and training die over video; employees say they've shipped the work for years from a spare bedroom. Is anyone still convinced by the commute?
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Add your commentHere's the thing nobody wants to say out loud: this is about commercial real estate. Full stop. The CEOs who own stakes in downtown buildings or sit on the boards of companies that do — they need those buildings filled. This isn't about your career development, it's about their balance sheets.
Gavin Newsom telling state workers to come back five days a week while he keeps delaying the actual mandate because his own unions pushed back is the most perfect encapsulation of how this whole debate works. Rules for thee.
The person who said mentoring is harder remote is correct, and I say this as someone who fought hard for permanent remote work. I started my career in 2020 fully remote and I missed things. I didn't know I was missing them at the time, which is kind of the point. I changed my mind on this over two years and it cost me something to admit that.
My commute is 2 hours and 20 minutes round trip. That is not a minor inconvenience, that is 11.5 hours a week of my life gone. Nobody has ever once explained to me what the office provides that is worth eleven and a half hours.
I spent 22 years in the Army. We showed up. Rain, 120 degrees, didn't matter. I'm not saying office work is the same thing — it obviously isn't — but I do think the cultural expectation that your employer can require your physical presence isn't some invented oppression, it's kind of the baseline of what a job is. Save the outrage for the commute length and the pay, not the concept.
I work in commercial leasing. Yes, some of what's driving this is real estate pressure, I won't insult you by denying it. But it's not the only thing. I have clients who genuinely believe their culture degraded and have the turnover data to back it up. Both things exist simultaneously.
I have shipped literally every project on time for four years from my home office. My manager has zero complaints about my output. So someone please explain to me what exactly I am supposed to absorb by sitting in a fluorescent box for eight hours that I am not getting now.
The person asking about the 11.5 hours — I hear you, and I don't want to minimize that. But when you took the job, didn't you know where the office was? I'm not saying the policy is right, I'm asking a genuine question about expectations at hire.
I'm a manager of 14 people and I'll say what the comment above won't — mentoring genuinely is harder remote. Not impossible, not zero, but harder. The junior analyst who sat near me in 2019 learned more from overhearing my client calls than from any Zoom I've scheduled since. That's real and I won't pretend it isn't.
If you disagree that productivity is comparable remote, explain how you square that with the fact that corporate earnings through 2021 to 2023 — peak remote — were by most measures excellent. The productivity didn't fall off a cliff. It didn't even stumble. So where is the performance case?
With respect to the veteran — and I do mean that — the Army also houses people on base precisely because presence is required. You don't get to demand someone show up and then make them pay $400 a month in gas to do it. If five days matters that much, make the economics of five days work for the people doing it.
I'm 61, been in finance since before half this thread was born, and I genuinely think both sides are right about different things. Collaboration and spontaneous problem-solving are better in person. Focused execution and deep work are better at home. The answer is obviously some kind of hybrid and the fact that we're still fighting about zero vs five days suggests nobody in charge actually wants to solve the problem.
okay but "I learned from overhearing phone calls" is an argument for open floor plans, not for five days a week. Make that distinction or your whole mentoring argument falls apart.
I keep waiting for someone in this thread to mention what happens to the people who quietly quit rather than comply — because that's the real story. The workers with options leave. The workers without options stay and resent it. You don't improve culture by retaining the people who had nowhere else to go.
Nobody has addressed the obvious elephant yet: the people loudest about "culture in the office" are almost always the people with the corner offices and the closed doors. They are not the ones sitting in the open plan doing focus work under fluorescent lights. Why do we keep taking the word of the group that has the most comfortable office experience about what offices are good for?
Truist specifically: I had a friend there who relocated based on a written flexible-work agreement and then got hit with this reversal. That's not a philosophy debate, that's a broken contract. There has to be legal exposure there and I'm surprised more people aren't talking about it.
culture dies on video lol tell that to my team that launched three products during the pandemic without ever sharing a conference room
@the Newsom comment — this is the part that actually gets me. If you believe in the policy, enforce it on yourself first. You don't get to be the vibe-setter and the exemption at the same time.
the person who said corner office people push RTO hardest is absolutely right and there's actual survey data on this if anyone wants to look it up, seniority level correlates strongly with enthusiasm for in-person mandates, make of that what you will
earnings ≠ individual productivity, a rising market covers a lot of sins, this is econ 101
lol "you knew where the office was" yeah and then they told us it was fine to move an hour away and now they want it back, so
some of us never had the option to work from home and watched office workers act like this was the greatest injustice in history while we showed up to warehouses and hospitals every single day during covid so forgive me if i dont have a lot of tears
my kid is 7 and the fact that i can be home when she gets off the bus is not a small thing to me. i dont know how to put a number on it but its not nothing.
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