Our company is on a hybrid schedule, where folks work from home M/F and come into the office T/W/Th. I choose to come into the office every day. But I find I'm not as productive when no one else is in the office. It's too quiet. But at home, I'd be in the fridge every 10 minutes, or looking out the window at the goats and pondering what to have for dinner.
Also, WeWork was destined to fail, for the same reason the S&Ls failed. They had a severe lease duration mismatch (S&Ls, on the other hand, lent long and borrowed short.) WeWork was leasing space for 20yrs at a time and effectively subleasing it for as little as 6 mos. They signed most of their leases during the market's heyday, when lease rates were astronomical. They're not anymore. Not sure how you overcome that mismatch.
I worked in the technology sector and never understood how WeWork could be considered a technology company. I predicted the ultimate bad ending many years ago.
I worked at NextSpace as a CFO during the turnaround. It was a decent business with a very well funded, irrational competitor. Sorry you lost your investment.
I'm with David Foster (and w/ KP, partially): very happy with my WFH.
For almost 3yrs starting in 2020 it was 100% remote, now we're required to come to the office min one day, and that is the worse day in my week. Since projects are all over the region and team meetings go on schedule, a lot of coworkers tune in - they cut off outside noise w/ headphones, but we are hearing their loud comments during the digital meetings. We no longer have an assigned desk but required to book any available one a day in advance, so I have no reference material around me, just a sanitized empty surfaces. It makes no sense to commute (in terrible NY crime atmosphere) to downtown - just to link to digital meetings on my laptop, the same way I do from my home office, to same project teams. That's for meetings and so called cooperation - now, for concentrated work, which is solitary by definition, office - even half-empty office - is a huge distraction. Beside, people come to chat - they are happy to see you in person, and you can't refuse out of politeness. Lunch is definitely unpleasant, what w/ the quality of bought food, and expensive like hell.
I can self-organize at home much better, as I can shift things w/o anyone's permission or control, and achieve much better productivity. It is laughable, to hear from micro-managing employers how distraught they are of lost control over our lives, and especially insinuations of getting people to the desk farms so they will "perform" better - as if we are circus animals. I never stopped working! The spring and summer of 2020 was the worst - I worked 60hrs weeks, and had to constantly refuse demands on my time from managers requesting endless reports.
As long as IT is doing their job and I have an uninterrupted access to network, I'd cling to my WFH for as long as possible, thank you very much.
Spot on. I agree with everything you posted here. Even in a co-working space, the distractions can be a problem. Lots of people with nothing to do trying to "network" while you're trying to focus. Noise cancelling headphones are a priority. Even in offices when collaborating, they can be helpful to really buckle down and focus. One trick I've picked up, is listening to brown noise instead of music or talking podcasts when doing focus work like financial modeling, or even routine GL entries.
Jeezy, guess I am lucky! I had four people working from home and we did just fine. It was me (set up in my walk in closet), my daughter (in the living room), my husband (in the updated basement), and my son-in-law in an office with an open floorplan, but he used headphones. My son lived here too and he was the only one that had to go into work.
We don't have dogs. We have one cat. When my daughter and son-in-law go into work it is an hour and a half each way. My husband chooses to go to work now, and his commute is 40 minutes.
I get a lot more done now, but it is the nature of my job. Before Covid, it was impossible to work with all the tech stuff with my coworkers because of conference rooms, small screens, etc. Now I can just call them up on Teams and I can show them things or they can show me things and it is SO much easier!
CRE investing...maybe. Interest rates increase is another major change from the past almost 2 decades that is going to screw up even performing assets. Hybrid schedules make some sense, so companies either still shrink their floor plans or reduce utilization.
A lot of good points as usual. I retired in June 2019, and am so glad I did not work during COVID. I think WFH will continue to decline and likely end up with some sort of hybrid model for many.
My son has a friend who has had two full-time, WFH finance jobs at once since he graduated from college in 2020. If he is requested to come into the office or one job becomes too demanding, he just finds another one.
At some point we will have a recession at which time leverage will swing back to the employer. This will force more workers back to the office.
Good thoughts. I agree no question that WFH is definitely lower productivity than office. However I don’t think the office market will see much rebound on a wide scale. The shakeout has only just begun. The trend was clear before COVID, which just accelerated it. And it will continue.
Companies are finding out that work from home may be somewhat less productive, but there's a lot to be said for using half the space in a suburban location instead of top dollar in the center of the city. WFH requires no commute, but driving to a suburban location with parking is a lot easier. This was already happening before the wfh trend. And the perception true or not that many downtown areas are dead commercially after rioting and looting and remain high crime doesn't help. Being downtown even at high rents had some compensations when there were lots of shopping and rec opportunities. The offices will fillup, but not at the same rents and not with the kind of employees most cities really need.
I’m quite afraid that AI is going to consolidate many white collar office tasks performed by large groups of workers into significantly smaller groups of workers that do little more than check to make sure the AI is performing correctly. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of the economic disruption this will cause. And that does not portend well for any kind of future office demand.
I think it depends on the company, the kind of work, and the specific job. One huge advantage of WFH (for the company) is that the area from which you can draw workers is vastly expanded.
There are jobs for which 'work from the office' leads to the question 'which office?' At lot of companies are international in scope, and many have grown by acquisition. I'm thinking of someone in particular, who works at a fairly high level, whose job involves interacting with customers and distribution partners all over the world and executive management in several US and international locations. He spends about 40% of his time traveling. What would be the point of requiring him to come into an office (which office?) for the remaining 60%?
I worked at NextSpace as a CFO during the turnaround. It was a decent business with a very well funded, irrational competitor. Sorry you lost your investment.
I think most companies are now looking at hybrid work - not 100% work from home.
Also, any number of economists and demographers are predicting a structural labor shortage going forward due to a confluence of factors such as: retiring boomers, low birth rates, declining immigration (southern border fiasco of irregular migration excluded - but those are mostly not office workers), smaller gen z cohorts. This changes the game in terms of what employers can demand.
One thing I am sensing is that Gen Z puts an extremely high premium on flexible work schedules. My wife did some consulting work where high paying ($90K/yr) manufacturing jobs were going unfilled because workers would rather drive for Uber or something else that gives them schedule flexibility. All those viral videos of Gen Z people talking about how they hate their "9-5" jobs" are in a similar vein. You and I might think this is crazy, but as you know, the market doesn't care what we think.
Structural labor shortages and Gen prefs could be a game changer. Maybe not - but I do think things have fundamentally changed. When I moved from NYC to Indianapolis I thought my network would atrophy. Turns out my network got better thanks to Covid facilitated work style changes. The world is just different today.
Our company is on a hybrid schedule, where folks work from home M/F and come into the office T/W/Th. I choose to come into the office every day. But I find I'm not as productive when no one else is in the office. It's too quiet. But at home, I'd be in the fridge every 10 minutes, or looking out the window at the goats and pondering what to have for dinner.
Also, WeWork was destined to fail, for the same reason the S&Ls failed. They had a severe lease duration mismatch (S&Ls, on the other hand, lent long and borrowed short.) WeWork was leasing space for 20yrs at a time and effectively subleasing it for as little as 6 mos. They signed most of their leases during the market's heyday, when lease rates were astronomical. They're not anymore. Not sure how you overcome that mismatch.
I worked in the technology sector and never understood how WeWork could be considered a technology company. I predicted the ultimate bad ending many years ago.
Wish I would have chatted with you before Nextspace
I worked at NextSpace as a CFO during the turnaround. It was a decent business with a very well funded, irrational competitor. Sorry you lost your investment.
I'm with David Foster (and w/ KP, partially): very happy with my WFH.
For almost 3yrs starting in 2020 it was 100% remote, now we're required to come to the office min one day, and that is the worse day in my week. Since projects are all over the region and team meetings go on schedule, a lot of coworkers tune in - they cut off outside noise w/ headphones, but we are hearing their loud comments during the digital meetings. We no longer have an assigned desk but required to book any available one a day in advance, so I have no reference material around me, just a sanitized empty surfaces. It makes no sense to commute (in terrible NY crime atmosphere) to downtown - just to link to digital meetings on my laptop, the same way I do from my home office, to same project teams. That's for meetings and so called cooperation - now, for concentrated work, which is solitary by definition, office - even half-empty office - is a huge distraction. Beside, people come to chat - they are happy to see you in person, and you can't refuse out of politeness. Lunch is definitely unpleasant, what w/ the quality of bought food, and expensive like hell.
I can self-organize at home much better, as I can shift things w/o anyone's permission or control, and achieve much better productivity. It is laughable, to hear from micro-managing employers how distraught they are of lost control over our lives, and especially insinuations of getting people to the desk farms so they will "perform" better - as if we are circus animals. I never stopped working! The spring and summer of 2020 was the worst - I worked 60hrs weeks, and had to constantly refuse demands on my time from managers requesting endless reports.
As long as IT is doing their job and I have an uninterrupted access to network, I'd cling to my WFH for as long as possible, thank you very much.
Spot on. I agree with everything you posted here. Even in a co-working space, the distractions can be a problem. Lots of people with nothing to do trying to "network" while you're trying to focus. Noise cancelling headphones are a priority. Even in offices when collaborating, they can be helpful to really buckle down and focus. One trick I've picked up, is listening to brown noise instead of music or talking podcasts when doing focus work like financial modeling, or even routine GL entries.
Jeezy, guess I am lucky! I had four people working from home and we did just fine. It was me (set up in my walk in closet), my daughter (in the living room), my husband (in the updated basement), and my son-in-law in an office with an open floorplan, but he used headphones. My son lived here too and he was the only one that had to go into work.
We don't have dogs. We have one cat. When my daughter and son-in-law go into work it is an hour and a half each way. My husband chooses to go to work now, and his commute is 40 minutes.
I get a lot more done now, but it is the nature of my job. Before Covid, it was impossible to work with all the tech stuff with my coworkers because of conference rooms, small screens, etc. Now I can just call them up on Teams and I can show them things or they can show me things and it is SO much easier!
CRE investing...maybe. Interest rates increase is another major change from the past almost 2 decades that is going to screw up even performing assets. Hybrid schedules make some sense, so companies either still shrink their floor plans or reduce utilization.
Jeff,
A lot of good points as usual. I retired in June 2019, and am so glad I did not work during COVID. I think WFH will continue to decline and likely end up with some sort of hybrid model for many.
My son has a friend who has had two full-time, WFH finance jobs at once since he graduated from college in 2020. If he is requested to come into the office or one job becomes too demanding, he just finds another one.
At some point we will have a recession at which time leverage will swing back to the employer. This will force more workers back to the office.
Good thoughts. I agree no question that WFH is definitely lower productivity than office. However I don’t think the office market will see much rebound on a wide scale. The shakeout has only just begun. The trend was clear before COVID, which just accelerated it. And it will continue.
Companies are finding out that work from home may be somewhat less productive, but there's a lot to be said for using half the space in a suburban location instead of top dollar in the center of the city. WFH requires no commute, but driving to a suburban location with parking is a lot easier. This was already happening before the wfh trend. And the perception true or not that many downtown areas are dead commercially after rioting and looting and remain high crime doesn't help. Being downtown even at high rents had some compensations when there were lots of shopping and rec opportunities. The offices will fillup, but not at the same rents and not with the kind of employees most cities really need.
I’m quite afraid that AI is going to consolidate many white collar office tasks performed by large groups of workers into significantly smaller groups of workers that do little more than check to make sure the AI is performing correctly. We are only beginning to scratch the surface of the economic disruption this will cause. And that does not portend well for any kind of future office demand.
I think it depends on the company, the kind of work, and the specific job. One huge advantage of WFH (for the company) is that the area from which you can draw workers is vastly expanded.
There are jobs for which 'work from the office' leads to the question 'which office?' At lot of companies are international in scope, and many have grown by acquisition. I'm thinking of someone in particular, who works at a fairly high level, whose job involves interacting with customers and distribution partners all over the world and executive management in several US and international locations. He spends about 40% of his time traveling. What would be the point of requiring him to come into an office (which office?) for the remaining 60%?
First of all great risk of divorce if you work from home
Also people I know that work from home don’t have there head in the game
Something is lost with home workers
Less interaction with your comrades
And the big boss is always wondering wtf is going on!
I worked at NextSpace as a CFO during the turnaround. It was a decent business with a very well funded, irrational competitor. Sorry you lost your investment.
I think most companies are now looking at hybrid work - not 100% work from home.
Also, any number of economists and demographers are predicting a structural labor shortage going forward due to a confluence of factors such as: retiring boomers, low birth rates, declining immigration (southern border fiasco of irregular migration excluded - but those are mostly not office workers), smaller gen z cohorts. This changes the game in terms of what employers can demand.
One thing I am sensing is that Gen Z puts an extremely high premium on flexible work schedules. My wife did some consulting work where high paying ($90K/yr) manufacturing jobs were going unfilled because workers would rather drive for Uber or something else that gives them schedule flexibility. All those viral videos of Gen Z people talking about how they hate their "9-5" jobs" are in a similar vein. You and I might think this is crazy, but as you know, the market doesn't care what we think.
Structural labor shortages and Gen prefs could be a game changer. Maybe not - but I do think things have fundamentally changed. When I moved from NYC to Indianapolis I thought my network would atrophy. Turns out my network got better thanks to Covid facilitated work style changes. The world is just different today.