Dominion Offshore Wind Success, RTO Mandates

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. Fill out our
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www.weatherguardwind.comIntelstor - https://www.intelstor.com 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
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revolution. Visit BuildTurbines. com today. Now here's your hosts,
Allen Hall, Joel Saxum, Phil Totaro, and Rosemary Barnes. Allen
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windaustralia.com. 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,