KEY POINTS
- Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, whom President-elect Donald Trump appointed to lead a new government efficiency team, said they intend to call federal employees back to the office five days a week.
- Companies such as Amazon and The Washington Post are adopting a similar policy in 2025.
- But many companies will keep remote or hybrid work arrangements, largely because they boost profits, economists said.
- Some view return-to-office mandates as a stealthy way to reduce employee head count.
Me too. Musk can’t actually manage people, but he can pretend more convincingly if he can see them in person and yell at them. There are a lot of managers like that and there are far more executives.
My company looked at the actual business results from the period of COVID remote work. Productivity went up, so they decided to keep things that way. It also allowed them to get rid of all their office space, except for a sparsely populated headquarters building, which is saving them a lot of money.
Most studies have shown that workers were more efficient when working remotely. Why would any executive want to reduce efficiency and increase infrastructure costs? The Return-To-Office push is not rational. It represents an inability to adapt to changing conditions. If boards were doing their jobs, they would be quietly showing those executives the door and looking for better people to run their companies.
It’s not irrational it just has more to do with corporate real estate and control than productivity or employee satisfaction. Large companies don’t do anything solely for the benefit of their employees.
Especially with land prices trending upwards. You don’t want to be the exec who has to explain that yes, productivity is up 15%, but you’re sitting on a skyscraper that nobody wants to buy because it’s worth $60mil or whatever.
If no one wants to buy it at $60mil then it is not worth that much.
Line goes up, not down.
I think it is irrational, in the sense that executives’ sole legal responsibility, at least in the US, is to make as much money as possible for their shareholders. Favoring control over productivity is a violation of that. They are gratifying their egos instead of doing their jobs.
Of course, in a sane world, how they treat their employees would be an issue, not just profitability.
Like most stupid things in our world, it’s about emotions.
This topic is funny to me because I worked for a place that was all about data. Data driven decisions. They had tshirts made that said like “Data > Feelings”.
And yet when people brought up to the CEO stuff like studies showing WFH or 4-day-workweeks were effective, he just said “Nah, we’re not doing that.”. No discussion. No looking at the data. Just no.
To his credit, that CEO did run a profitable startup with barely any funding, so he wasn’t a total fool. But on that kind of stuff he was a total gutfeel asshole.
People who run startups, even the successful ones, tend to be awful to their employees. I should say, especially the successful ones.
Commercial real estate. That’s why.
The owner of a previous company is a lot like that. He is way more comfortable walking around and seeing people toiling away. I told him I’m perfectly capable of sitting in the office and looking busy for 8 hours.
He treats the place like a convenience store and assumes everyone is stealing from the till.