Honestly office space should be used for collaboration and social activities. There is no reason to drive to work to sit in front of a computer all day.
and since office space is only needed sometimes, it can be rented, and even better it can be located near public transport nodes.
round here there’s a company that’s started renting out conference rooms literally inside train stations and i hope that becomes the norm.
Good. It’s dumb to pay for office space if a Zoom call would work just as well. Managers that think they can’t track their employees productivity that way are telling on their own incompetence.
And yet in my country and even some people in my company are aiming to have full office attendance mandatory, despite knowing that our team is 45+ people but we only have space for 17 since the renovation of the offices.
This is the second order effect that doesn’t seem to have been at the centre of the conversation. It’s all very well if you are an established company who took out an office lease at the beginning of the 2020s, you have a bunch of boomer managers who basically need daycare, and the HIPPO at the top is also a boomer acting all entitled about having people come back to the office.
It’s something else. When you’re starting a new business and seeking investment capital, do you think your investors are going to want to spend their money on office accommodation and ability staff like receptionists, cleaners etc, if they think they can get equal or better results without it?
Not only that, but if you insist on being in an office you restrict your pool of potential employees. Not only can you only look in within 1-2 hours of the office, you are also only getting people who can’t find WFH positions. So you have a smaller pool of worse talent.
And if you’re in a big metro area you need to pay them a lot more just to live there, whereas a fully remote position can hire people who live in the middle of nowhere and pay them less for better work.
What I’m curious about (as a self employed tailor, so I have no personal interest in work from home, just curiosity) is whether or not employers are paying employees for the use of their homes as offices. Who pays the extra housing costs, internet, etc. that the employee can’t claim on their taxes. And even if they could claim it, the amount claimed would not cover all the associated costs. If for instance you set aside a room in your house, and get away with deducting the rental value, claiming that value in the USA covers about 1/3 of the actual expense.
I’ve worked remote for three different companies over the past 15 years and all of them let me expense my internet and cell phone.
One big change that happened was the loss of the home office deduction, which I used to be allowed to take. That sucked.
