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.
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.
How are the MBAs going to pull all their power poses if we work at home?
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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.
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!
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.
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.
Don’t forget the hoarding of cash offshore too. A lot of themcan pay, they just don’t want to use their own money.
“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.
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!
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.
A lot of that control is about perceived obedience and perceived productivity.
In many areas you’ll find that ACTUAL productivity matters far less than perceived productivity.
And it’s easier to perceived productivity when you can walk a floor and see people work as you walk by.
For a lot of positions. Remote work is not just the past and the present. It is also the future.
And by “look like” we mean “totally are”
Additionally, people have been saying this since day 1. How is this news?
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).
Sure would be a shame if a lot of those office buildings burned down for no reason…
Is FTFY
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