17 Comments

Wow, this one was dead on. I absolutely despise:

- companies that recruit by saying they are a family: no, thanks, I have a real family.

- the wellness charade of nagging me about doing supposedly healthy things: get lost, you nosy intermeddlers

- faux-voluntary socializing after work: I saw these people all day, which is just enough

If they want to make work better, make the working part of work better.

- do something systematic to free up time from low-value meetings and the kind of stuff listed above

- embrace a diversity in how people work: from home, from office, or a mix

- identify real skill gaps on an individual basis and address them: training that the whole company takes doesn’t count

- think hard about variable compensation: you can afford it when the company does well

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Thanks Ed for subscribing to the Times so I don't have to.

Here's a nice bad-faith pro-remote spin: If you support commutes you're supporting Russia and their war on Ukraine.

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Everything here is true!!! I work for a well known university in their Development office and all of the above is in full force. First, they expect us to be thankful they hired us as we're all "replaceable". They then tried to make us feel better about being forced back into the office with free lunches for 4 days one week. Did they ask those of us in the office what our dietary restrictions were? Nope. They ordered 80% beef, 15% chicken, 3% fish, and one vegetarian meal and one GF/Vegan meal. It was pandemonium as most people in the office went hungry and had to BUY their own lunch. And it repeated the entire week. In response to burnout they have also told us to use our PTO or take advantage of their recorded 5 minute yoga videos, on our OWN time. They do not care about our well-being, or the fact that we worked through a pandemic, political upheaval, social turmoil, and are all dealing with massive amounts of anxiety and grief. As a worker I fall squarely in the 100% remote work and 4 day workweek category. Suck on that NYTs.

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As a born and bred New Yorker, it's always been obvious who the NY Times writes for after one glance at the real estate section.

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Hi Ed -- saw this on Twitter and immediately went to my inbox to see if you'd written about it yet:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2022/05/08/new-graduates-office-vs-remote-work/

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For sure. 100% all of this. My own company had us return to work in August of last year. We are doing a hybrid model - 2 days in, 3 days WFH. If it was up to me, I'd never go back. It feels like such a pointless, PERFORMATIVE way of being. Our office culture sucks because it's basically non-existent. There's no camaraderie or team bonding or 'spontaneous conversations in the hallway' that has made being at the office nothing more than a waste of time to many people at my organization. Of course, we don't make the rules. So we continue to go in.

Our first week back, they lured us in with a field trip basically. Then there were donuts, maybe? We got dangled a reward of a pizza party if everyone filled out their Employee Satisfaction Survey. Not enough people filled it out because everyone is so depressed. No pizza for us.

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"At least for now, he added, companies are opting for the carrot over the stick: rewarding workers for coming into the office rather than punishing them for staying home."

This is a misrepresentation: These rewards are not enticements to come to the office. If they were "carrots," people could simply say, "No, thanks," and stay home. There isn't a stick either. People aren't staying home and then, say, being docked in their paychecks.

No, what's happening is a just a threat backed up by employers' ability to use power with impunity: "Do what we say or you don't eat."

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"... Qualcomm held a happy hour with its chief executive, Cristiano Amon, at its San Diego offices for several thousand employees with free food, drink... " I wonder what their COVID rate was a few days after that event.

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This is a bit much-ado-about-nothing though. I get the sense that you've probably had a lot more horror show executive leaders than I have ever experienced in my multi-decade career. Perhaps I should be more thankful that I've managed to avoid working for places that haven't evolved beyond pit bosses at the salt mines. But I find it odd you paint all businesses with the same broad strokes of motivation ... lumping the likes of Apple and Google in with Exxon and Reuters.

Of course companies are trying to lure workers back to the office with perks. Because the current economy and job market has them over a barrel. Hence they want to appeal to carrot rather than the stick. But mark my words -- the moment recession sways and the layoffs come you better believe the stick is coming back. In many cases, that will make some businesses require going to the office as a condition of employment.

And productivity measures are mythically short-term. You can easily productivity yourself into obsolecence. Efficiency isn't the name of the game anymore in a complex, uncertain world. Doing the same thing as yesterday is a recipe for faster company death on the S&P 500 index. If I may quote a piece on why Blockbuster no longer exists relative to Netflix from Greg Satell in Forbes: "The irony is that Blockbuster failed because its leadership had built a well-oiled operational machine. It was a very tight network that could execute with extreme efficiency, but poorly suited to let in new information.”

As long as we're doing the human work of business, we need to learn how to best work with other humans. That not only means bandwidth through a wire, but non-verbal communication and a facilitation of the spontaneous. The letting in of new information.

Some of these can be done digitally, but some cannot and many aren't nearly as good. Especially in the messy work of reinventing the business every year or two, as the market seems to require these days. Working in digitally siloed human data farms on TPS reports isn't going to cut it for a lot of industries and businesses over the long term, because they won't exist anymore. Some of what you're interpreting as Neanderthal management is sometimes an acknowledgement that lather, rinse, repeat as fast as possible is a death sentence for a business's long term future.

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