👨🏻 Most bosses regret returning to the office

Good Morning,

I just saw author Malcolm Gladwell’s terrible take on remote work from last year, but it’s worth a share now:

Holy cow. This Inc article does a great job of pointing out some of the hypocrisy; namely, that Gladwell has stated he prefers not to go into an office, and that he says right up there (!) it’s a hassle for employees.

The full podcast episode is here on YouTube. I didn’t bother to watch it, but the comments, adequately ripping Gladwell, are worth the click and will restore your faith in humanity.

Visit the Remote Source Job Board

The biggest free remote & hybrid job board in the US

🪑 Product Spotlight: ADHD Chairs. A new trend in chairs aims to benefit those more prone to movement due to ADHD. Some examples are ball chairs, kneeling chairs, and wobble chairs. For three examples, the Remote Source Chairs page features a Gaiam ball chair, a Varier Variable balans chair, and a Humanscale Ballo chair. (remotesource.com/chairs)

🤡 80% of in-office bosses regret their RTO plans. Not surprising - and we can expect more of this sentiment in the future.

Even with high sunk real estate costs, companies have learned the hard way that strict RTO will lead to more employee turnover and worse morale. (CNBC)

💸 Which counties saw the biggest income change due to WFH? When remote work became prevalent, people moved where they really wanted to live - often where their dollars went further. This interactive graphic shows the change in income by every county across the United States 🤯 Florida, Idaho, Arizona, and Central Texas all came out well ahead. (Axios)

💰 Bloomberg launched an “Are You Rich?” calculator, which reports how much more/less “rich” a household would feel in a different city, based on population, housing, and cost of living data.

In the example below, a household with income of $150,000 in Washington, DC, would feel “$18,466 richer” if they moved to Atlanta, GA. (Bloomberg)

🤝 Remote work can be a reprieve for people of color. Previous studies have shown diverse employees are less likely to want to return to the office. Microaggressions, office politics, and code-switching all took away from productivity and added to their stress. Now, diverse employees are more likely to seek fully remote jobs. (Los Angeles Times)

🥞 Office occupancy trends are “flat as a pancake.” On a webinar hosted by software company Scoop, Nick Bloom said office attendance has stayed within 45-50% of pre-covid norms for all non-holiday weeks in 2023. (Fortune)

☕️ WF[anywhere]: where exactly do remote workers work? According to a WFH Research survey, a little over half of remote workers work from home, with public spaces / coffee shops coming in second at 20%. Full results below. (WFH Research)

🫡 Atlassian and Airbnb are among several major tech companies staunchly sticking with remote work. Others include Autodesk, Twilio, Okta, Dropbox, and Gitlab.

Atlassian’s VP of Team Remote, Annie Dean, said the real culprits of workforce productivity are “back-to-back meetings, having minimal clarity about what goals you’re trying to move forward, overflowing inboxes, vague processes.“ Executives need to focus on fixing those issues, rather than whether people are working from the office. (Bloomberg)

A quick note on the content in these emails:

I take a lot of direction from which links are clicked most when planning what to include in the future.

BUT direct feedback is appreciated and my inbox will always be open.

So if you want to see more or less of anything, you can always just reply here 🤝

Cheers,
Grant