In October, Nicholas Bloom – a professor of economics at Stanford University – wrote an op-ed column in The New York Times that began:
Working from home is here to stay. I can prove it with data — lots and lots of data showing that returning to the office (R.T.O.) is D.O.A.
Yes and no. As proud as Dr. Bloom may be of his data, here are some more: The same newspaper would report three months later that UPS was planning to cut 12,000 jobs this year. That is no doubt shocking news to those affected, but in some ways this line from the fourth paragraph was more surprising:
“Employees will also be expected to work from the office five days a week…”
It’s been a year since we last checked in with Kasie Whitener, who teaches entrepreneurship and strategic management at the Darla Moore School of Business, to talk about this subject.
Kasie takes the UPS announcement with a large grain of salt. It’s hardly surprising that a company in the delivery industry would cut back in the month after Christmas. But bringing it up in connection with demanding that office workers go back to 20th-century schedules sends a confusing signal: “It looks more like they’re using work from home as an excuse to lay people off.”
It’s true that, as Bloom suggested, most companies aren’t doing what UPS is doing. The Boston Globe reported in late January, from a recent survey by The Conference Board, “only 4 percent of CEOs said bringing workers back full time is a priority.”
But 4 percent of CEOs still employ a lot of people, and some have been more insistent lately about employees showing up and toeing the line. That same story from the Globe told of the reaction of employees at a Boston business, using the word, “riot.”
It continued, “Last year, 88 percent of employers nationwide said they expected workers to be in a certain number of days a week, up from 69 percent in 2022, according to a customer survey by Robin, the Boston workplace management software company.”
But these employers aren’t necessarily going the full five-days-a-week route taken by UPS. They’re just edging in that direction. Fortune recently reported that “International Business Machines Corp. delivered a companywide ultimatum to managers who are still working remotely: move near an office or leave the company.”
Kasie Whitener suggests that these moves to tighten up attendance policies, and the layoffs, reflect nervousness over the economy. The economy grew 3.4 percent in the fourth quarter. Still, bean counters across the country are worrying about what will happen in this election year. So they’re thinking out to the second, third and fourth quarters of this year.
And it’s not just about who wins the election, she says. In the tech sector, it’s also about pending legislation. Some of the nation’s tech giants are feeling a lot of heat. For instance, much of the country watched in recent days as Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg was accused of having “blood on his hands” in a Senate hearing on internet child safety.
With that kind of uncertainty swirling around, she says, there’s a tendency on the parts of some to move toward more “managerial control” – even if things have been going well up to now.
Amid the uncertainty, some employers seek the seeming certainty of seeing their workers around them. “It’s done with the best intentions – to simplify things,” said Kasie. There’s also a strain of old-fashioned notions of fairness in saying that if some people have to come to the office, everyone does. “Everybody works these hours, everybody gets these days off,” some bosses say. “But it’s not a great way to do things. If the standard doesn’t work for everybody, it doesn’t work for anybody,” says Kasie.
“It’s a failure of management creativity,” she says. “It’s like a sickness to believe you have to treat everybody the same.”
The younger workers who will build our future economy expect to be treated as individuals. Not because they’re spoiled, says Kasie, but because that’s what their online experience has taught them to expect. And to them, when the last four years constitute most or all of their careers, some bosses are unfairly changing the rules.
Comments are closed.