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  • Will They Ever Return?

  • General discussion of passenger rail systems not otherwise covered in the specific forums in this category, including high speed rail.
It is currently Tue Apr 23, 2024 12:35 pm

Will They Ever Return?

General discussion of passenger rail systems not otherwise covered in the specific forums in this category, including high speed rail.

Moderators: mtuandrew, gprimr1

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Re: Will They Ever Return?

 #1605996  by lensovet
 
With companies cutting back on hiring in light of, ahem, inflation…good luck to all those employees thumbing their noses at coming back to the office. Companies will be happy to let loose folks who are not motivated to be in the office a whole 3 days a week.

Lawsuits? lol over what exactly?

Re: Will They Ever Return?

 #1606101  by STrRedWolf
 
lensovet wrote: ↑Sun Sep 04, 2022 8:56 pm With companies cutting back on hiring in light of, ahem, inflation…good luck to all those employees thumbing their noses at coming back to the office. Companies will be happy to let loose folks who are not motivated to be in the office a whole 3 days a week.

Lawsuits? lol over what exactly?
And the cycle begins anew. :)

With the lawsuits... hey, someone sued McDonalds over hot coffee. All I know is some lawyers are going to get paid.

Re: Will They Ever Return?

 #1606110  by scratchyX1
 
STrRedWolf wrote: ↑Tue Sep 06, 2022 8:15 pm
lensovet wrote: ↑Sun Sep 04, 2022 8:56 pm With companies cutting back on hiring in light of, ahem, inflation…good luck to all those employees thumbing their noses at coming back to the office. Companies will be happy to let loose folks who are not motivated to be in the office a whole 3 days a week.

Lawsuits? lol over what exactly?
And the cycle begins anew. :)

With the lawsuits... hey, someone sued McDonalds over hot coffee. All I know is some lawyers are going to get paid.
Off topic, but there is more to that case than what's memed
https://www.caoc.org/?pg=facts

Re: Will They Ever Return?

 #1606112  by photobug56
 
Bosses like at JPM show such huge arrogance. The best people will look for firms where the bosses treat employees as human, not as 'resources'.

Re: Will They Ever Return?

 #1606212  by STrRedWolf
 
NPR reported today about how transit hasn't bounced back. (audio only until they publish a transcript)

From the report, American Public Transit Association says we're 60% of pre-pandemic levels, and predicting 75% in 2025. Bus systems however are recovering more, and weekend ridership is nearly back to normal. But work-from-home/remote-work is eating into the figure and most of the gains are from essential workers and those unable to drive.

Re: Will They Ever Return?

 #1606914  by STrRedWolf
 
So, as much as I wanted to go back... I have been informed that my office (not my job nor my company) is going to go away as they have moved the main departments over to the nearby datacenter and let the building my company was leasing from that this will be the last term of the lease. Thus, I join that 25-35% who will not be riding the rails anymore to the office. I'm now perma-WFH. I'll drive to the office one last time to empty out my cubicle, then remote into the desk PC and move out of that to a virtual PC.

Why do I mention this? Well, some segments of industry, especially involving the Internet, don't really need an office presence, or where a shrinking of floor space saves the company a ton of money. In my case, that's having to pay for snacks for staff that won't be there to eat it, drinks, and coffee.

No, it's the Green Mountain stuff, which is average at best. I'm not going to miss it.

This kinda changes my thinking to "It'll recover, eventually" to "There's going to be a whole lot of empty office space." It also makes me ask "How full is the World Trade Center now?"

Re: Will They Ever Return?

 #1606919  by photobug56
 
A large chunk of #1 WTC is empty space with no floors. It's tall but not so big.

Separately, the Cuomo Hochul real estate to build 10 new office buildings looks increasingly stupid. JPMorgan wants staff in the office because of the fortune they spent on new space that no longer makes sense.

Re: Will They Ever Return?

 #1606923  by RandallW
 
Serendipitous exchanges between employees benefit companies, and work from home effectively squashes that (in much the same way that online learning effectively squashes that). Pre-pandemic, it seemed to me that companies that didn't encourage people to come into the office were treating employment much more transactionally than those that did.

But JP Morgan has another problem -- their trading operations depend on fast networks and short paths to NYSE interconnects I work with specialized (and expensive) NICs for a niche purpose, but the NICs we use are specially designed to meet the needs to institutional stock traders, and they are not cheap, but definitely will not work with consumer networking equ, and, if connected to appropriate equipment in a home, are rendered useless by the fastest line Comcast or Verizon will draw to a home.

Re: Will They Ever Return?

 #1606926  by STrRedWolf
 
Trading platforms would be crowded around the exchanges, spending that money to get stupid-fast connections to make transactions before anyone else -- time in transit is money. JP Morgan et al of course would want folks back in office. They fall outside my "segments of the industry that can get away with WFH."

The question of the thread here is "Will they ever return?" To answer that, you involve topics outside of trains and transit... essentially analyzing how business is done. I feel that when boiled down, the answer becomes "eventually, but it won't all be the same people."

Re: Will They Ever Return?

 #1606930  by Gilbert B Norman
 
Almost 48%:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/u-s-return ... _permalink

Fair Use:
.Workers are returning to U.S. offices at the highest rate since the pandemic forced most workplaces to temporarily close in 2020, as infection rates continue to fall and more companies intensify efforts to bring employees back.

Office use on average was 47.5% of early 2020 levels for workers in the office over the five business days from Sept. 8 to Sept. 14 in the 10 major metro areas monitored by Kastle Systems. The company, which tracks security swipes into buildings, said that was the highest percentage since late-March 2020.

Midweek days were especially strong, with office use for Tuesday and Wednesday last week at about 55% of the prepandemic workforce, also a high during the pandemic for those days, Kastle said. The data through last Wednesday were the most recent weekly figures available.
The article goes on to note that New York is lagging behind this national average. Elsewhere, I have learned that RTO is stronger in areas, such as the Southwest, where public transportation use is less a factor. Further, I note Mr. Wolf, probably the strongest voice around here for "wanting to get back", is now being forced into WFH.

Much as they publicly preach about the need to "bring them in" - no doubt in great part to appease their often politically connected landlords - tenant companies are learning of the economies resulting from WFH, and with the computer "playing Big Brother", the employees had best be as productive as they were in the office.

Re: Will They Ever Return?

 #1606942  by eolesen
 
I think as we head into the recession, you're going to see a lot of property managers rethinking whether or not to extend leases with owners. Consolidating to owned or leased properties that have excess space and a lower cost per square foot is going to be the trend.

We did something similar with our data center and moved a bunch of engineering and networking folks who had been working in a more expensive building into empty space that had become unnecessary over time.

Turns out they don't need to have conference rooms with glass walls, or fancy video wall conferencing for a bunch of communities space with couches, tables, and the right feng shui.... Using a 55 in TV with a laptop camera in a boring conference room seems to suffice.

In a recession, you lower the costs you completely control... real estate is an obvious target.

Sent from my SM-G981U using Tapatalk

Re: Will They Ever Return?

 #1606996  by photobug56
 
Also, figure out where your workers live - odds are property's a lot cheaper there, and with a few sites away from the center area, you can have spaces that are both daily use and disaster recovery sites.

Re: Will They Ever Return?

 #1607080  by STrRedWolf
 
photobug56 wrote: ↑Tue Sep 20, 2022 10:06 pm Also, figure out where your workers live - odds are property's a lot cheaper there, and with a few sites away from the center area, you can have spaces that are both daily use and disaster recovery sites.
The Register just published an article on the "cost-of-working" crisis where a worldwide survey of workers was done. A few tidbits are that out of the 1200 UK employees surveyed, 38% were anxious about returning to the office -- over a third of that group cited the commute, and from what I could tell, over a quarter of that 38% would welcome a commuting reimbursement.

Funny, we have that here in the USA. Lots of dynamics here.
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