A great paper on the effects of RTO mandates. In news that will surprise no one with half a brain:

- You disproportionately lose women.
- You disproportionately lose your best people.
- You find it hard to replace the good people that you lose.

For a long time, companies were excited about offshoring because it meant that they could take advantage of a global labour force to increase supply and drive down labour costs. Now they’re starting to see the flip side: with a lot of places offering remote work, the demand is also global and they are competing with companies worldwide. If you don’t offer a good work-life balance for your best people, someone else will and they may be anywhere in the world.

After running a successful research project at Microsoft with a team spanning several thousand miles between the furthest members, I was quite surprised to be told that we all needed to come back into the lab because research requires people to be face to face. Especially by people who had spent two years doing nothing to promote collaboration and who were pushing policies that would exclude my close collaborators in other countries.

At SCI, we’re remote first. My most recent hire is on a boat in the South Pacific. As long as people can communicate and have a decent Internet connection, I don’t care where they are (the accountants may, for tax purposes). You need to actively build teams when people are remote, just as when they’re local. Mostly of the people who felt RTO was important were the ones who weren’t doing this in either setting and were relying on similarity biases to create teams (I’d love to see a correlation between managers who advocate RTO and managers who have a higher turnover for folks who are not white cishet males: I suspect it would be strong).