White-collar workers temporarily enjoyed unprecedented power during the pandemic to decide where and how they worked.
Return-to-office orders look like a way for rich, work-obsessed CEOs to grab power back from employees::White-collar workers temporarily enjoyed unprecedented power during the pandemic to decide where and how they worked.
"These elite CEOs probably work 100-plus hours a week and they're much more work-focused."
No they don’t. Full stop. Let’s stop fabricating this bullshit. That’s 16hrs a day M-F with 10hrs Sat/Sun. Elon Musk is not doing those hours period, let alone while also finding time to play Elden Ring.
Yeah people need to stop acting like they're the most hardworking people out there. They definitely are not. Especially when you can be CEO of multiple companies and no one bats an eye.
Well, let's do some quick math. Let's count billable hours in a day with a minimum billable hour being 1 hour. If you work a 6 hour work day, and can complete the average task in 15 minutes, that works out to 24 possible billable hours in one day accounting for a total of 90 minutes of actual work.
So yeah, on paper it's actually really easy to "work" 100 hours per week
I totally agree. I always think it's weird when they have interviews or podcasts about talking to CEOs and they all say something like "you just have to work hard enough". Yeah. Okay.
Where are the podcasts where they ask lottery winners for some vapid aphorism about hard work paying off?
Its important to note what they consider work too. I'm sorry but spending half of your day getting to meetings and the other half in them is not the same as fixing a layer 3 issue on a critical app, or laboring all day in the sun at 60 hours a week. I don't subscribe to the idea that work is work. If that were true nobody would mind being a traffic controller over an office administrator.
Talking about work during a business dinner does not equal hours. Thinking about work ideas after hours does not equal hours. Fostering a business connection does not equal work hours.
And if they do, then I get to count stressing in the shower, arguments in my head while I go for a walk, ranting to my partner about work problems, and keeping in touch with former coworkers.
My main take on the pandemic is that employers involuntarily gave their employees a huge benefit set by having to go remote. They had to give this benefit set not just to their buddies or a select few, but to people they consider undeserving or do not trust.
All of their moves since have reflected that they want to put the cat back in the bag.
It's not about productivity at all and never has been. The studies even called the bluff by comparing productivity and determined that productivity is higher with WFH. The reaction to that has been to ignore the data and lean back into gut feel, because high level management isn't really about productivity.
You can tell this simply by the fact that their natural environment is the office and very few things in an office environment are actually about productivity. The reason they want return to office is the same reason they wanted open offices: control. It's easier for them to hover behind you in an open office plan. It's easier for them to order you around when they don't have to call you first.
It's all about control, and likely always has been.
As a manager, I can confirm that productivity drops in the office (even my own). I've got team members that choose to go to the office (moreso than me). I encourage them to work however they prefer, and want. You can work anywhere around the world however you wish, including at some nice beach, as long as it doesn't affect the project.
Good, they'll be left with second rate wage slaves while other companies who trust their employees will be more productive and competitive as a result.
So many don’t understand just how wildly inefficient bureaucratic hierarchies are; what happens isn’t the most profitable thing, it’s the whim of whoever managed to claw their way highest up.
Basically, the decisions are the manifestation of the artificial stupidity of brute force.
That's why I'm sticking with my company. They even sold about 90% of their buildings and we are never going back to office. They have saved billions, why would they send us back? They make sure to tell us that we will never be sent back to office, unless someone chooses to. There is one office left for those who want to work there.
Trust. You’re right, it completely comes down to trust. If you can’t trust the people you hire to work without someone looming over them or watching everything they do, then you shouldn’t have hired that person.
Plus, if you hire someone and have work for them - either the work gets done (and ideally it's high quality work of course) or it doesn't. There are actual meaningful metrics. Asses in seats just isn't one of them.
Managers are managers because they're good at playing power games, not because they're good at their jobs. These games are harder to play if people aren't there. That's why they're so scared.
Some managers are actually really good at resolving conflicts without bias and keeping the team functioning smoothly. In tech at least, people who make things aren't always that great at interacting with other people.
Of course, the kind of manager I'm talking about doesn't care how/when/where the work gets done, and they don't micro-manage.
Super simplified version: the office buildings are losing value due to low occupation. Owners of those buildings lose money if the value goes down. Those owners do not want that.
My understanding is as follows: A lot of corporate debt is backed by the real estate. For example, McDonald's food operations are far less valuable than its real estate portfolio. If that property is now worthless because no one wants it and it's unoccupied, banks now have assets worth less than what's owed on them. That in turn means when the loan term ends, banks can't just re-finance the debt, because the collateral that secured the loan in the first place isn't worth what the debt is. That means big problems for companies who now need those loans as a source of cash to pay off the old loans. They now have to scrape up actual cash to pay, leading to more austerity. Because corps can't pay the banks, the banks lose out on revenue, which means they have to tighten their belts, and so on and so on in a self-reinforcing spiral. If the corps default, the banks can seize the assets, but again, they're worthless, so it's a one-two punch.
It's a giant shell game, and from what I've read economists are afraid a 2008-style crash may be in the works due to the cycle of debt above.
To add what other folks have said... Banks have a conflict of interest in regards to employees coming back into the office: They hold the mortgages on all that office space. If the work-from-home trend doesn't let up they stand to lose trillions of dollars.
The bigger the bank the more they stand to lose. This is why banks like Goldman Sachs are extremely vocal about bringing people back into the office and grasp at every little thing that can find to back their claims that, "it's better". Even if the arguments they're making are based on 100% bullshit.
Example: You'll often hear big bank executives say things like, "teams that work near each other work better" knowing full well that their global workforce doesn't actually "sit near each other". On any given internal team employees will live all over the damned world so even if every one of them came back into the office they still wouldn't be anywhere near each other.
We know this is 100% bullshit anyway because if they actually stood behind these words they'd issue mandates that huge amounts of employees be relocated to the same physical locations and that hiring could only happen locally. They're not going to do that though because they know what they're saying is bullshit.
Eh, that may play a role for the big firms, but most of the small to mid sized businesses just lease their real estate. They'd realistically come out ahead by downsizing their offices.
I think what we are seeing is management really struggling to adapt and find reliable metrics for performance management as well as to promote employee retention and engagement without the social bonds of an office culture.
Small companies are often under long leases. Our landlord was quite flexible and let us break the lease if we did the work to find a new tenant, but most wouldn't be.
And yes we are coming out ahead, by quite a lot.. offices aren't cheap even the tiny one we tried to use temporarily.. have now ditched that and gone totally remote.
These elite CEOs probably work 100-plus hours a week and they're much more work-focused.
Oh ffs. I have nothing against Nick Bloom but this statement is so BS. Even if "elite CEOs" could work 24 hours per day, 7 days per week their salaries could not be justified by any means. There are just not enough hours in a day to actually do it.
The mandates symbolize the sharp disconnect right now between the way CEOs and employees think about work.
When I was an intern at a large company, the CIO talked to our small group of interns. He said he worked around that much, and I don't think he was lying. He told us about his typical day.
The company was located in a big city and he lived in the suburbs with a long commute by taxi and train. He would get up at 5AM to start the commute. He worked on the train and taxi. Then he would leave the office at 5PM, work on the commute home, have dinner and family time for 2 hours, then work until bed at around midnight. He said he was lucky he only needed 4 hours of sleep and how much he treasured the 2 hours he spent with his family every day. It was the only time he refused to take calls.
I think part of the problem why executives mistreate their workers so much is that they themselves are overworked and exhausted. Despite having a ton of money, they don't get to enjoy it, so it becomes meaningless.
And there's people out there who work just as much but will never make the same amount of money. When you have the privilege to never worry about cleaning, laundry, taking care of your kids, grocery shopping, cooking, and all the numerous bullshit things that just add up to consume your time that you can wave away when you were born rich allow you to do that. They don't consume your day and energy.
Not that everyone if suddenly given that kind of time would do what he does, but I don't think they should. I think he's the type of person who looking back on his deathbed will regret only spending 2 hours a day with his family. That's really sad.
Some small number of people love being married to their work. And some of these people think since they enjoy it that others must feel the same, and when they see their employees quitting it's surprised Pikachu face and denial.
I've worked as cook and sous chef for about 13 years now. Most I ever made was 55k a year and at that time I was working ~75 hours a week. If we extrapolate to 100 hours... Carry the one.... Yup! Still a far cry from the paycheck of a CEO.
Mad respect from me. I can't think of a more difficult job, you have to keep up, you have to juggle orders were some things are easy and some things are hard, you have to deal with the temperature and the standing and the moving. This is a tough, tough job!
"Because the labor market is looser and there's more talent to be hired, I think the employers think they'll be able to get their way," Dr Grace Lordan, associate professor in behavioral science at the London School of Economics told Insider.
A certain kind of CEO — noticeably skewing male and older, she said — is drawing from this "command and control" playbook as a way to rebuild an employee base that fits their idea of being productive and diligent.
"This belief of a certain cohort of people, and they are represented across all sectors, that presentee-ism is productivity, for them it's perfectly rational that if somebody doesn't want to come into the office then that basically means they're not somebody who wants to add value to the firm," Lordan added.
Elon Musk is consistently adamant about workers at his companies from X to Tesla being present in office, going as far as calling remote work "morally wrong."
A number of firms that benefited from a pandemic bump in business, particularly in tech, went on a hiring spree — triggering the "Great Resignation" as workers quit for ever-higher salaries and perks.
That attitude means certain types of employees will lose out — and return-to-office mandates will likely hurt diversity too if they are strictly enforced.
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Oh my god, so much this! The only apparent reason I see for many of the “return to office” cases I know about is for middle managers to be able to hold court and lord over their subordinates. As for the actual work that needs to be done, I see little advantage (in fact, constant interruptions for management and colleagues make it quite worse).
This is terrible reporting, emotional, practically yellow. Two academics are quoted. The article and headline tell you how you should feel about this. This should have never gotten past the editor's desk.