Show notes
Allen, Joel, and Phil discuss the growing popularity of return-to-office mandates. New York state has signed a climate change superfund act, making companies pay for pollution retroactively. And Dominion Energy's Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind Project should be successfully finished in 2026.
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Allen Hall: Newark launches a landmark challenge to Big Energy. Dominion Energy proves offshore wind can work in America and the great return to office debate hits the wind industry. All this, plus much more. You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast. You're listening to the Uptime Wind Energy Podcast brought to you by buildturbines.com.
Learn, train, and be a part of the clean energy revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now here's your hosts, Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes.
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Allen Hall: All right. 2025 is going to be an exciting year for the return to office. Now, a lot of companies are mandating the return to office, but the attendance hasn't been so great. The. Office attendance reached about 62 percent at pre pandemic levels, according to Betty. And it's planned to increase to almost 70%.
So there's 30 percent of society that hasn't really returned to office. Now, as we have seen on X and on With Amazon and a number of other tech companies, they are really pushing for it to get back in the office, and they've seen about an 11 percent rise in office attendance, and it is becoming mandated.
So Amazon is requiring three days and plans to reach five days during 2025. Apple requires Tuesdays and Thursdays, plus one team day in the office. And Disney's mandated four days. Minimum on site, but in the wind industry, we're haven't really seen that yet. There's a lot of offices, Joel, you and I have been to it over the last six months or so.
Which are still pretty empty.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, absolutely. I think it's the nature of the work too, right? Wind is distributed, right? It's all over the place. So when you're saying, Hey, I'd love to go talk to, this team of engineers. In general, that team of engineers is spread all over the country anyways.
You may have one in Chicago and one in Houston and one in. wherever South Carolina or whatnot. So you don't it's an odd thing, but I think in the grand scheme of things, the wind industry does remote work pretty well. Just because we've always had to do it, right? You're always if you're a back office engineer, or if you're an asset manager, if you're in procurement, you've always been dealing with remote sites since wind has been a thing, so it's not something that's crazy new for us to do well.
The other side of it is, I think that this is a personal thing from business wise. I'm not 100 percent opposed to the back in office thing. I don't like the idea of mandate four or five days a week, but I think there is value that you get out of sitting face to face with team members that you just can't get over teams.
And I think that extends to a lot of things in business. Right now I talk with salespeople all the time, sales and revenue generation and client facing and it's almost like in some respects. People have forgot how to do that part of business in person. If that, does that, does that make sense?
Phil, have you seen that in your BD activities?
Phil Totaro: Yeah. The reality of it is that people would still rather shake hands than, as a way to, to close a business deal than, do it remotely. It's pretty rare to do a big deal having never met face to face including from my own company but even from my experience.
Before the pandemic, we had an office in Houston, and it was, it wasn't necessarily mandatory to come into the office all the time, but it was a good idea to get people to, to come together. Since the pandemic, I've allowed everyone to work remotely, because frankly, I work remotely too, for the last 14 or 15 years since I started the company, because prior to the pandemic, I was traveling all the time as well.
Business development reasons. And my own philosophy on it is look, you're even though all my employees are contract employees, the reality of it is they're also, on salary, they are not chained to a desk nine to five. The idea is you get your job done and you get your compensation for doing the, helping us achieve the goals and objectives as the company.
And the reality of that is that if you can work from the beach, I don't care, but if you don't get your job done, you're out. And that's, that sounds harsh, but that's just the reality of how we've done things. It's a new version of leadership.
Allen Hall: It is a new version of leadership.
And the thing about the wind industry is there's so much of the technician side, which has to be on site and has to be there every day and has to put in that 40 plus hours a week. And then when you get to the sort of the front office people, they seem to have dispersed a little bit. I don't know how that culture works internally.
I'm actually a little concerned for some of the companies because the technician side has to be a little bit upset with this. It's Hey, when I need. That engineer, I really need that person to be here. If they're not in the office, that can be a little bit difficult. I would see those conflicts really arising this year in particular.
Phil Totaro: It's possible because, but what's also interesting about it is that there's a lot of companies and you mentioned active training team in the intro, Alan, that a lot of companies are trying to leverage. More technology to enable onsite technicians to do their job more efficiently, including you could have somebody leveraging, remote inspection technology that then goes back to an office for an engineer to review it, then that, the end result of that analysis goes back out in the field to tell the technician what to do.
And so there's a whole chain that, that has to be doing their job. But again my point, is, and I take what Joel's saying here, but my point is that it doesn't really matter where they are when they perform their job function as long as they're doing it to make sure that they're not the weak link in that chain for, making sure assets perform to a, to an operationally sound level.
Allen Hall: Joel, do you think you'll see people leave? Companies this year because they're forced back in the office.
Joel Saxum: Yeah, I think the really important thing to consider here is exactly what you're saying Alan is this is a this will be Whether it's to what's supposed to be temporary or will be permanent or whatever.
This is a cultural change within a company this is a change management thing that needs to be handled very well. And if it's not handled properly some companies are using it as a tool to flush people. They're like we've got 2000 people. We're going to mandate it back to office.
And you got part of them just saying we're not coming. Okay, cool. Then you're released. All right. Now we're down to, 1800 employees that we have to pay. So it's a tactic that's being used to force people out. But I just think that if you're. So take this note, if you're a person that's in charge of this mandate or in charge of making sure this mandate goes well, whether you're in HR or whatever,