OPINION:
American businesses are ordering, cajoling and even bribing workers to return to their offices, but fear, pleading and free food don’t stack up against some cold realities.
According to Kastle — the folks who provide electronic keys to access so many buildings — office occupancy has only partially recovered to about 45% and is less than half of pre-pandemic levels.
Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon ordered his bankers to their desks full-time, but on day one of his edict, just 50% of his headquarter employees showed up.
Mr. Solomon and much of the Wall Street aristocracy are the product of a system that effectively hazes its young employees with extremely long days and senseless overnight and weekend work. And a mentality that says, “if I had to do it, it must be good for them.”
Google has softened the stick a bit by treating employees to rock concerts, but it’s cutting pay for those who wish to permanently work remotely or transfer to offices at less costly locations.
The message is clear: Work away to dead-end your career.
Most businesses can’t afford the best, brightest and most obsessed with huge starting salaries and the prospect of making partner and being paid as well as a middle infielder for the New York Yankees. And the professional employee matchmaker, Ladders, reports over the last year the share of jobs that can be done remotely has risen from 18% to 25%.
Those options will expand further, and we may be dealing with a generational problem among corporate decision-makers. The likes of Goldman Sachs and Google may need new CEOs more than bread and circuses to attract and keep young talent.
Young people have been interacting remotely most of their lives. Video games as social spaces, texting and, before the pandemic, blended learning at universities that combined classroom and remote instruction was coming into play.
The shutdowns of 2020 and 2021 may have pushed distance learning to unproductive extremes, but the positive trend for relying more on instruction online as opposed to in classrooms has shifted upward.
Getting ahead and to the top in most industries has required an outsized work ethic and good advertising. With a crisp new Ph.D. in hand and working for a business-oriented think tank, I learned having my Datsun B-210 first in the lot, next to the door where my boss, his boss and their secretaries passed counted for a lot.
Before you know it was “Peter’s here all the time,” and I became the youngest vice president in the firm’s storied history.
Fortunately, I got smart, wanted a life and became a professor at the University of Maine. After two years of cultivating campus contacts, I mostly worked from home and often from my digs in Alexandria, Virginia.
Not all places are universities — thankfully or the Chinese would surely own the country by now. But faculty are terribly productive — we are rewarded to publish and make trouble, and we do a lot of both.
We never bought into bonding at water coolers. Our most important colleagues are counterparts in the same subdisciplines at other universities and consulting clients, and we communicated quite effectively before email and zoom with telephones and conference calls.
And we are not managed by Luddites — ask any dean, faculty are influenced but never managed.
The facts are becoming plainer — the optimal setup for working in the office is two or three days.
Studies at Harvard and Stanford parsed workers into groups according to how much time they spent at the company desk. They found that one or two days a week at the office yielded the highest productivity but those kinds of studies are inherently short-run.
The pandemic was characterized by sprints where employers could rely on employee relationships established during years of in-office interactions prior to shutdowns.
Bosses tend to have egos, and too many like to see their workers under their dutiful control. But good ones also like to brainstorm with their juniors and encourage free-form collaboration. Those who elect to stay at home and out of sight are inherently disadvantaged for plum assignments and promotion.
Employers should pick two or three days when everyone must come to the office — otherwise the employees will all fight over who gets to work away Mondays and Fridays — and shut the offices the rest of the time.
Instead of requiring a good reason to work from home, employers should require a good reason to take up space at the office on days designated for work-from-home days. And those obsessive young professionals who want to park their cars first in the lot will have to get ahead simply by being more productive and creative.
• Peter Morici is an economist, emeritus business professor at the University of Maryland, and national columnist.
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