Adam Singer has a splendid rant about those who refuse to acknowledge that remote work has won out over the return-to-workers. The holdouts, he says, are bad managers and those with holdings in commercial real estate (CRE).
You can understand the concern of those holding CRE assets. Even in New York City, office space usage is at 46%. These people think it’s incumbent on workers to endure long commutes and degraded family life so that they can maintain their rental income. They’re not getting a lot of sympathy from those workers.
Then there are the managers. Like the CRE folks, one can understand why the middle managers are desperate for their works to return to the office. Without workers to micromanage and drag into endless meetings, there’s nothing for them to do, which makes them a prime target for the next layoff.
Harder to understand is the resistance from senior management. One explanation is that they have no skin in the game. There’s an old joke that the first thing a new CEO will do is move the company headquarters close to where he or she lives. Regardless of the truth of that joke, most senior executives are not going to spend hours on their commute. What commute they do have is eased by a limousine and driver that makes getting to work more like a coffee break.
All that aside, their stated reasons for wanting workers to return to the office are laughable. They mostly boil down to “that’s what other CEOs are doing” and “gut feelings” that worker presence is required for the company to grow and succeed. The fact that those gut feelings are contradicted by research (which shows the opposite) is ignored as an inconvenient fact.
To be sure, there are those who argue against Singer’s position—here’s a link to a particularly articulate demurral. In any event, Singer’s post is entertaining and thought provoking. I think that all-in-all he’s correct but time will tell.