Google and JPMorgan have each told staff that office attendance will be factored into performance evaluations. The US law firm Davis Polk informed employees that fewer days in the office would result in lower bonuses. And Meta and Amazon both told employees they're now monitoring badge swipes, with potential consequences for workers who don't comply with attendance policies – including job loss. Increasingly, workers across many jobs and sectors appear to be barrelling towards the same fate.
In some ways, it's unsurprising bosses are turning back to attendance as a standard. After all, we've long been conditioned to believe showing up is vital to success, from some of our earliest days. In school, perfect attendance is often still seen a badge of honour. The obsession with attendance has also been a mainstay of workplace culture for decades; pre-pandemic, remote work was largely unheard of, and employees were expected to be physically present at their desks throughout the workday.
Yet after the success of flexible arrangements during the pandemic, attendance is still entrenched as a core metric. What's the point?
It's a game that has nothing to do with workers, but real estate instead. If workers don't go to the office, there will be no need for the company to rent an office the size it does, making it "lose" money. If they cut on their offices, real estate starts losing value (as we can see in some articles that start popping up), and that's something that bothers a lot of big players.
There was a time when I would have jumped at the chance to work for one of these companies.
Hell, I even interviewed with Google 17 years ago (for a position that I was thoroughly overqualified for).
But, these days I don't think they could offer me enough money to convince me it would be worth it... Unless there was a HUGE upfront signing bonus that wouldn't need to be repaid no matter what happens.
They're shooting themselves in the foot by drastically reducing the talent pool available to them.
It's a bold strategy, Cotton. Let's see how it works out for them.
It doesn't have to be unprofitable. They just don't need to "maximize their return". They want tax credits and subsidies for low income housing so they can make the same profit as a bidding war for a luxury condo. It's greed.
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