It can be argued that COVID-19 has forever changed the way we work and the nature of the employer/employee relationship. Many managers stuck in the previous mindset are now struggling to justify their demands that workers return to the office. Many, or even most of the workers, are not convinced and the battle wages on.
Over at The Atlantic, Ed Zitron considers why managers fear remote work so much. It’s not pretty and if you’re a manager you probably won’t like it. This quote captures his argument nicely
“Remote work lays bare many brutal inefficiencies and problems that
executives don’t want to deal with because they reflect poorly on
leaders and those they’ve hired. Remote work empowers those who
produce and disempowers those who have succeeded by being excellent
diplomats and poor workers, along with those who have succeeded by
always finding someone to blame for their failures. It removes the
ability to seem productive (by sitting at your desk looking stressed
or always being on the phone), and also, crucially, may reveal how
many bosses and managers simply don’t contribute to the bottom line.”
Zitron is not a silly evangelist advocating for a glorious future in which no one has to leave home to go to work. Many workers, of course, need to show up. Construction workers, hospitality workers, sales clerks, and many others really do need to be there in person. The remote work movement has never been about these people. Rather it’s about those who, say, spend their days in front of a computer. There’s no reason, other than the made up “office culture” argument, that these people need to be in any particular place to do their work.
Zitron dismisses the idea of office culture as a way for non-produces to game the system at the expense of those who do produce. When everyone is working remotely, it’s much harder to game the system because it’s makes it obvious who is and is not doing actual work. He tells the story of Netflix’s co-founder and CEO, Reed Hastings, who dismisses remote work as a “pure negative” despite not having an office and, in fact, doing his work exactly like a remote worker would. That even includes working abroad for a year.
As I’ve said before, in the end all these arguments won’t matter because the best workers will refuse to take positions that require them to be in the office.