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 10hr Sat/Sun. Elon Musk is not doing those hours period, 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?
They could and should do a podcast of that married couple who gamed and won the Michigan State lottery… I mean that was a lot of hardwork lol.
Jerry and Marge Selbee if anyone wants to look them up.
Even if Elon Musk is putting in 100-hour weeks, he’s the CEO of five companies, which means being CEO of one company is a half-time gig at most.
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.
They don’t care. They need to lead/rule over/command people. Second rate or not.
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.
How are the MBAs going to pull all their power poses if we work at home?
Through Teams, Webex, Zoom, etc like they already do … all the newer nimble companies don’t care where you are.
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.
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.
When I got my newest job the boss was bragging about I can work as much overtime as I want at 1.5x. like bitch I want undertime, let me work less!
As a manager, I empower my team to work remotely as much as possible 🤷
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.
OK OK, I’m not saying all managers are like that. But I’ve certainly met a lot of them in my time.
It’s also to make sure the commercial real estate market doesn’t crash
no it isn’t. the only people concerned about commercial real estate collapse is commercial real estate owners. CEOs care about their interests and power only.
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.
He’s right about that though.
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.
cook and sous chef
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!
Seems like the commercial real estate collapse has a lot to do with it too.
How so?
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.
And those owners can almost always find a compassionate ear from their loyal rich CEOs who don’t want to upset a however many years relationship of “I’ll scratch your back if you scratch mine” kinda thing.
Highly plausible deduction.
I see a lot of people say this but I haven’t seen real data that this is actually a trend. Though I live in Australia, maybe it’s different elsewhere.
If I’m understanding correctly, you’re saying you don’t see the trend of office real estate losing value? This might be a problem mostly for the US, but Manhattan real estate is definitely struggling. There’s also the company WeWork, which is basically AirBnB for office spaces, which is now on the brink of collapse.. WeWork had bought up so much office space for renting out that US banks are legit concerned over what happens if the business fails.
Thanks for the sources, yes looks like the US commercial real estate market is in trouble. Here in Australia it’s not that bad, though there are predictions that there may be issues due to economic reasons, with WFH playing a small part.
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.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
“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.
The original article contains 512 words, the summary contains 215 words. Saved 58%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
These dingles are gonna flex like this just before another Covid surge, I guess?
And by “look like” we mean “totally are”
Additionally, people have been saying this since day 1. How is this news?
Is FTFY
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.
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A new study by human resources and payroll services platform Gusto Inc. shows smaller companies that have embraced remote work cite higher performance, better employee retention and strong corporate culture built on a foundation of flexibility. As small companies compete with deep-pocketed giants for talent, those gains could provide an edge.
“SMBs are increasingly looking to extend the flexibility that their workforce enjoys,” said Gusto Economist Liz Wilke. “Not only to attract them, but to keep them less stressed, more able to manage their lives, and to build a culture and a team that works for them.”
Companies that started in the past three years are 31% remote and 46% hybrid for their workforces, far higher percentages than more-established companies. Only 22% of younger companies are fully in the office, according to Gusto. Overall, companies that were 100% on-site before the pandemic are split between hybrid work and being fully in the office, with 8% fully remote.
from: https://www.bizjournals.com/bizjournals/news/2023/06/13/remote-work-small-business-success-tips.html (paywalled, unfortunately)
Nobody is forcing anybody – freedom is in the freedom to abstain, and all of us can abstain from working for an employer that demands RTO. There are plenty of remote jobs remote roles are possible, and the smaller the company, the better the job because you (as the individual among fewer) are valued. Big companies don’t care and don’t have to care.
It’s probably another fact missing from this article, but while larger companies are doing RTO, smaller companies are not. Larger companies are making a mistake here, most likely. They’ve got problems and are blaming remote work rather than innovating. Smaller companies are nimble.
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