Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

I posted yesterday about 5-day-a-week RTO mandates such as the one Amazon announced a few weeks ago. When a big change is being made it's appropriate to ask "Why?" Why is this change being made? And more specifically, what is the value the businesses are looking to achieve? People all over industry, from CEOs to business/HR consultants to ordinary workers, have ideas about this. Here are Five Things:

• Sunk Cost Fallacy. "We're paying for all this office real estate," this argument imagines a CEO fuming, "We should have people occupying it." This is an example of sunk cost because the office space is something the company has already purchased or entered into a long term contract to pay for. And it's arguably a sunk cost fallacy because occupying the office space doesn't necessarily save the company any money or create any new value. "But wouldn't business CEOs, through their education and wisdom, being able to avoid trivial fallacies like the sunk cost fallacy?" Haha, no. One thing I've learned about business leaders is that their reasoning is often like anyone else's. They make decisions emotionally and then rationalize by selecting whichever data fits.


• Weak Managers. "How do you ensure remote workers are actually working?" has been a challenge of managing remote work for years. A lot of leaders still have a factory-work mindset that workers need to be at their stations visibly performing their tasks otherwise they're goofing off. That's still true for a variety of professions from air traffic controllers to welders to fast food workers, but it's less and less true within the burgeoning world of desk jobs. Yet that remains the go-to for weak managers who've failed to understand and embrace the myriad other ways to monitor worker engagement and worker productivity in an increasingly computerized work world.


• Productivity. Ah, now this is one explicitly cited by business leaders for their RTO mandates. Workers are more productive in the office. Yet that claim rings hollow for so many of us workers who worked through the safer-at-home phase of the pandemic, when those same leaders crowed about how efficient their businesses were with widespread remote work.


• Culture and Professional Development. This is another one that leaders themselves have explicitly cited as a driver for RTO policies. It's valuable for new hires and early-career employees, especially, they've said, to work in the office alongside more senior colleagues to develop critical skills. There are two challenges with that. One, there are elements of both carrot and stick. The carrot is development and advancement. The stick is when leaders turn that around and tell employees, "If you want to work remotely, forget about being promoted." Which they have told employees at some companies. The second challenge is that the notion of professional development for lower level employees depends on the higher level employees/leaders being in the office, too. And companies have spent years already hiring talent wherever they can find it, especially when & where they can find it for vastly less money. It's transparent nonsense to tell employees they have to report to offices in, say, San Francisco and Seattle, for professional development when their Sr. Dir. is in Texas, VP is in Ohio, and half their colleagues are in India.


• Stealth Layoff. It's widely suspected among workers in industry, and not a few industry watchers, that tough RTO policies spurring some number of employees to quit is a feature, not a bug, of the plan. Tech companies have been downsizing for over a year now. Attrition is cheaper than layoffs. If companies can get employees to quit on their own, there's no bad PR from having to file WARN Act notices, there's no risk of legal action from laid off employees alleging discrimination on the basis of age, gender, family status, etc., and there's no cost of severance packages. The challenge to companies in downsizing attrition is that it's often the best employees who leave, as their desirable education, skills, and accomplishments make it easiest for them to find new jobs quickly.

Hurricane Milton has made landfall along the Gulf Coast of Central Florida, bringing strong winds and rain expected to cause potentially record-setting damage. Many people fled the area ahead of the storm... but far from everyone. Was that wise? If you listen to some of the dire warnings offered earlier this week you might think it's ridiculous to stay.

Here's the Tampa Bay mayor Jane Castor offering a warning two nights ago that quickly went viral:



"I can say without any dramatization, if you choose to stay in one of the evacuation areas, you're going to die."

So there you have it. You stay = you die!!

Except while that's what some people heard, it's not what the mayor said. Or meant.

"Evacuation area" is not the whole city of Tampa Bay, pop. 400,000. And it's not the whole metro area, pop. 3,000,000. Evacuation zones are actually very carefully delineated by local governments in Florida. Here's a map I found for Hillsborough County, FL, which includes Tampa and many of the suburbs:



The evacuation order current covers hurricane evacuation zones A and B, only. Those are the red and orange areas on the map. Zones C, D, and E are not under evacuation order. And as you can see from the map, significant parts of the region are not even zoned— meaning they're not at enough risk of hurricane damage even to consider for mandatory evacuation.

BTW, I made this chart from the page Find Evacuation Information | Hillsborough County, FL. A similar page for Pinellas County, FL is Know Your Zone.

So yes, a lot of people in and around Tampa are choosing to "ride it out", to "shelter in place". If they're in zone A or B, they're legitimately risking their lives. But if they're anywhere else— zones C-D-E or un-zoned areas— their choice is reasonable.

Besides, evacuating is hard.

Imagine you scramble to load up your car with everything that's important. Family, clothes, medicines, electronics, spare batteries,  pets. You load up the car and hit the road and... it's a parking lot. So many people are trying to leave that there's a traffic jam. You're parked on the highway, moving maybe 10 miles in an hour.

And there's no gas. You're burning fuel idling on the highway not going anywhere, and the gas stations are already sold out. Or closed. Or both. You were frankly safer in your house than sitting in a car parked on a highway when the storm comes.

There's also no food. The stores are all sold out and closed. How much food did you pack in your car along with everything else? Almost certainly you had more food in your pantry at home. Water, too.

How far will you have to drive to find a place to stay? In a hotel? Ha! The hotels are all sold out for 200 miles. You might be driving for 20 hours just to make it that far, anyway.

And when you do find a hotel with vacancy, if you haven't run out of gas by then, how much is it going to cost? Not just for 1 night but for however many nights you need until you think it's safe— or even possible— to go back home? You could be stuck hundreds of miles from home for a week or more. You could easily be spending thousands.

You've got to weigh the cost of all that against the risk of staying. Yeah, you might lose power, for a few hours or a few days. You might have to boil water. Your home may take some damage, and roads around you may flood limiting transportation.

So if you're in an area where evacuation isn't mandatory, it's a legit decision whether leaving home is a good idea. So don't automatically scoff at the people choosing to ride this one out.