💔 Grindr mandates RTO, loses half the company

Good Morning,

Congratulations to last week’s Dallas coffee shop contest winner, Katherine! 🥳 

This week, we’re running another one in Texas.

So if you’re in Houston and you’re on Instagram, we suggest you follow @TexasEatsFirst and keep an eye out for the next giveaway!

🇮🇹 Italian village Ollolai is enticing digital nomads with 3 months of free rent. The initiative brings in one digital nomad at a time to the village of 1,300 on the island of Sardinia. The only requirement they ask in return is for each visitor to leave behind a piece of work to serve as a “knowledge jolt” for the community. (CNBC)

💔 Dating app Grindr lost half its employees due to an RTO mandate, which only gave remote employees two weeks to choose whether they would relocate or leave with severance.

Employees had recently begun organizing a union, which was not recognized by company leadership. The RTO mandate appears to have been a retaliatory move in response to unionizing. If true, this is one of the worst cases of the recently-coined “gentlemen’s agreement,” where leaders disguise mass layoffs as a return-to-office “policy change” for better optics.

🧑‍💻 Leaders of the future want flexible work. Deloitte surveyed hundreds of mid-level executives - those most likely to move into the c-suite - about their remote work preferences. Most want hybrid arrangements, only 8% want fully remote work, and 13% want to work 5 days per week in an office. (Fast Company)

🏡 …related: Millennials are working remotely more often than Gen X or Gen Z, and there are two primary reasons. First, millennials are most likely to be young parents, and remote work allows greater caregiving ability. Second, they are more likely to have enough seniority now to dictate when and where they get their work done.

Combine this with Deloitte’s study above for a cohesive, data-driven thesis that most of America will be hybrid in the near future. (LinkedIn)

🇲🇹 Ideal destinations for senior digital nomads: given that each has “a more mature expat community,” Malta, Panama, and Malaysia are all worth considering for various reasons, all with friendly expat cohorts and a higher standard of living compared to other nomad hotspots. (Forbes)

🤝 Coworking spaces provide surprisingly big benefits. According to a 2022 study, coworking spaces were found to be more socially fulfilling than working from home or from the office. Given that loneliness can be a downside to remote work, these third-space offices designed to fuse work and community should be part of many remote personnel strategies. (SHRM)

🏢 …But the office has also been redefined for social activity. Most hybrid schedules allow for a few days at home to for focused work, and office days are reserved for more collaborative activity. In this new environment, “the office is not the best place to be for head-down work.“ (The Guardian)

📚 Turnover in higher ed has spiked due to lack of remote flexibility. Higher pay was cited as the top reason for turnover - no surprise. But lack of remote work options was the second biggest reason, with 44% citing it as a top-3 reason for switching roles. (Inside Higher Ed)

👎 RTO mandates will backfire (obvi) and here’s another reason: companies as big and prevalent as Amazon can’t actually provide data to employees that proves RTO is better. It’s a recipe for mistrust and attrition at all levels of an organization. (Axios)

Another real estate CEO made dumb comments recently - this time it was Tim Gurner in Australia, who said “We need to see pain in the economy. We need to remind people that they work for the employer, not the other way around.“

He continued, “Employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around. We’ve got to kill that attitude, and that has to come through hurting the economy.“ I’m sure he’s fun at parties 🤦

There have been major power shifts between employees and employers the past several years, and since the pandemic this power dynamic has been the primary driver behind remote work policies.

When it was more difficult to attract talent in the two years after covid, remote work flourished. But since early 2022, with a spike in interest rates, massive tech layoffs, and an abundance of talent available, employers have gained the upper hand - and used it to force employees back in the office.

It won’t last forever though. And the next time employees gain the upper hand - with more real estate leases expiring over time - remote work will gain some permanence, and we’ll be here to help you keep it 💪

Cheers Mate,
Grant