We might be tempted to dismiss these as isolated cases. But a recent KPMG survey found that 83% of CEOs expected a full return to the office within three years. Such a finding raises serious questions, not so much about remote work but about whether CEOs deserve the power they currently hold and the pay they currently receive.
Many of the factors contributing to corporate success or failure, such as interest and exchange rates, booms and recessions, and changes in consumer tastes are outside the control of CEOs. And the success or failure of technical innovations is, to a large extent, a matter of chance.
By contrast, the organisation of work within the corporation is something over which CEOs have a lot of control. The case of remote work shows that the CEO class as a whole failed to pick up an innovation yielding massive benefits before it was forced on them by the pandemic, and have continued to resist and resent it ever since.
Even, a masterpiece of bad reasoning.
CEOs should have known about the benefits of WFH, didn’t, therefore they are bad CEOs and overturn the heirarchy. Further, because they’re against WFH and I, an academic economist, think this, therefore they are bad CEOs and overturn the heirarchy.
The real concern driving CEO resistance is the fact remote work involves a previously unthinkable change in the way productive activity is structured and organised. If workers can do without the physical presence of managers, perhaps they don’t need managers at all, at least in the way they currently operate. The eagerness of CEOs and other senior managers to wish these changes away suggests that, at some level, they realise this.
Except, nowhere is any proof given of that necessary proof – that productivity has risen. That is, the CEOs could in fact be right – there is no such rise, maybe even a fall. Which makes the CEOs correct and Professor Quiggin, well, somewhat jumping the horse.
The problem here is that having created the WFH bugaboo, they can’t easily put that back in it’s sealed container. Too many people with actual skills and value have come to realise that without the daily commute into the office, they are saving maybe 2 or more hours a day and not having to deal with office bullshit, especially interruptions.
Going back to the office full time means go back to the drudgery of both commute and office trivia / politics and some, perhaps a majority would rather quit and find a full time WFH job (even at lower pay) than return to old working practices.
This needs to be independently studied and not by the usual suspects who will take managements money and then find whatever solution managers want to find.
The reality is that some people ARE more productive in some jobs and others aren’t (is it the people, or the jobs?), finding out which and how means a far more detailed understanding of people and roles than just a return to 19th Century “Presenteeism” and micromanagement for the sake of the managers mortgage payments.
Wasn’t this tried in the ’80s when some Harvard academics decided that businesses didn’t need middle managers? IIRC it turned out they did need a layer to take senior management bullshit and make it work in reality and to translate what’s happening on the ground back in to management bullshit.
As for WFH, some people are more productive and others skive and there’s the problem. A good manager will be able to spot them but in our socialist world all should be treated equally, so rather than let the lazy bastards skive at home all shall work in the office, even though a few will be less productive.
without the daily commute into the office, they are saving maybe 2 or more hours a day and not having to deal with office bullshit, especially interruptions.
The “office bullshit” of meetings, conversations and interruptions is what makes a company more than the sum of its parts.
This academic seems to think that CEOs are demanding people return to the office as an ego-wank, when the reason they are demanding this is they can see WFH has damaged productivity. Mind you, anyone who can write the second paragraph Tim quotes above is a fucking moron of ocean-going proportions.
I am sure that flexible or hybrid working is now locked in, but the idea that great swathes of the workforce will be WFH most or all of the time is no longer valid (and frankly never was). Not only is it bad for companies, it is bad for people (especially younger people), making them more atomised, lonelier and fatter. The UK alone has literally millions of people idling on benefits or savings because they are too lazy or mental to make it into work for even a couple of days a week.
Also, jobs which can be done by autistic types beavering away at home will be those most vulnerable to AI and outsourcing.
Not only is there no proof, the evidence mostly shows the *opposite*, that productivity either remained the same or – especially in the public sector – *dropped*.
I am sure that flexible or hybrid working is now locked in
I’m too tired to make my point properly, but this is the real point – flexibility not blanket solutions. For instance, I have a work van to get to work. Today I’ve worked out I can get the tram to day’s call out, so instead of forcing myself to try and be awake enough to drive a vehicle I’m not comfortable controlling, forcing my way through the city centre to get from one side to the other side, I’ll have a cup of tea, walk down the hill to the tram, and snooze for 40 minutes, and be properly awake when I get to my destination. Checking tomorrow looks like I can do the same.
This above all.
Not for all workers. I know I’m far more productive when I don’t get interrupted by office bullshit, but then I’ve been working from home for most of the last 25 years.
Again, not necessarily. Maybe AI will eat the lunches of some creative types like advertising, or productivity-destroying roles such as HR; but even if megacorps decide to try outsourcing again for things like engineering or programming it will likely go just as badly as last time.
As AI improves some of the more enterprising WFH brigade will have an AI do their “work”. It doesn’t need to be good: just enough to give the impression that the worker still exists whilst they skive.
When the employer fires them and replaces their job with an AI there will be outrage.
Reading a piece in the Graun about businesses and the strategy and tactics required to make them successful is akin to asking a duck after its frontal lobotomy what the next steps should be to establish the significance of spin and colour in quarks.
Its response might well be “Quark, quark!” but this might not render useful light on the state of current atomic theory…
Grist – LOL.
Too many people with actual skills and value have come to realise that without the daily commute into the office, yadda yadda yadda
The vast majority of the UK workforce are not in clerical work. It might come as surprise but not everyone is an administrator. Of the office workers, it’s highly likely that most are less productive WFH. One only has to look at the severe degrading of business customer facing activities & communications during the enforced WFH period. The reality is that WFH actually is a benefit in a tiny amount of cases.
But you’re playing with dynamite here. How do you think the majority who can’t get the opportunity WFH are going to feel about the pampered minority who can? Especially knowing so many doing so are taking the opportunity to swing the lead. There was Torygraph from a writer shared a Med villa with a WFHer who was unashamably WFH floating on a lilo in the pool. Needless to say a public sector employee.
If you’re self employed or on a contract pays by measurable volume of productive output, it’s your business what you do. Otherwise feck off & get back to your desk. Before an AI takes your job away altogether.
Whether a worker is as productive when WFH is not the point.
What is the impact on other members of the team? If he/she isn’t there, do they need his advice and expertise? Then their productivity is hit, not his.
Teams exist for a reason.
So these CEOs who are greedy bastards above all else refuse to get rid of unnecessary managers and require people to return to the office for no good reason? Even though some very valuable & profitable employees may leave their company and go work for a competitor? And WFH saves their company a lot of money on office space, etc.
Next week we’ll be reading about a CEO who closed down a factory in a small town just to squeeze out a few more dollars of profit.
It occurs that this situation would never have come about, but for social media. People would come the the Covid restrictions period – if that had even happened- & just gone back to work normally. Like they did in 70s with the power cut lay-offs. No it’s the endless wittering, mostly by desk jockeys because they have the time & opportunity to witter on social media.
A stochastic parrot, which doesn’t even know if or when it’s lying is no use to man, nor beast.
Despite claims of increasing complexity, I’ve seen nothing to demonstrate any AI has moved out of Parrot territory and into even low level intelligence.
Happy to be proven wrong and time will make the difference.
@JG
But for most desk jocky jobs a stochasitic Parrot is what’s required. All they are is distributed rules based data processing. Where most of the “work” is communication between the processing nodes to coordinate the processing activity.
I reckon we’re going to see a lot more of the public sector and government at all levels trying to get the private sector, and by that I mean those who aren’t reliant on government in any way, to implement WFH.
If the likes of Bezos and Musk say it doesn’t make their businesses, more productive and loses them money its going to be hard for the public sector to claim WFH make the more productive. See also 4 day week on 5 days pay.
I had my first AI nuisance phone call to the landline yesterday.
There are so many junk calls that unless I recognise the number of the incoming call I press the handsfree button with the finger poised to press it again and end the call after a couple of seconds.
There was the tell-tale even drone of a recorded message so i said “bother!” or some such and the message stopped and asked “are you there?” like a person. I said yes and it started up again so I interrupted again and it gave up on me and said that it was AI generated information message and wished me a nice day.
Progress, eh?
I’d be more impressed by this argument if someone could convincingly argue that productivity is actually successfully measured in a service economy
For example, I recently had an issue with Octopus Energy which took weeks to resolve and umpteen emails until Ocotpus finally did what they said they had done, instead of just insisting that they had when I told them they hadn’t and answering the wrong question
So productivity measured how – customer services issue successfully handled or it took weeks to do something that should have been sorted in 5 minutes?
As AI improves some of the more enterprising WFH brigade will have an AI do their “work”. It doesn’t need to be good: just enough to give the impression that the worker still exists whilst they skive.
Wasn’t there a case of an individual software developer ‘outsourcing’ their work to India, presenting it as their own, and living off the difference? Or is that just an urban myth?
Executive decisions: from a letter in this morning’s Telegraph.
Saf Ismail, a Post Office director and former sub-postmaster appointed to champion victims of the Horizon IT scandal, has stepped back from the Post Office’s board after concluding that executives closed the Post Office Belfast data centres “at any cost to the public” – in this case £35 million – solely to release their pay bonuses
Incentives, incentives.
“I’d be more impressed by this argument if someone could convincingly argue that productivity is actually successfully measured in a service economy.”
Definitely this is a serious problem.
There’s the joke about two economists out for a walk. One sees that a dog has left its business and says to the other “I’ll give you $100 to eat that.”
The other thinks about it, then eats it. The first hands him the money.
They continue to walk and the second one spots another dog’s business.
He says to the first “Same back at you.”
The first thinks about it, then eats it. The second hands him his money.
They continue walking for a bit, then the first says “Did we actually accomplish anything?”
The second says “We raised the GNP by $200. I’d say that’s a good thing.”
This is a problem with services. If you measure production of widgets, then at the end of the day you have widgets you didn’t have before.
But things like filling out tax forms? Does that count in any positive way?
Admittedly even with widgets there’s the chance that they’re not useful. There’s the story of one country behind the Iron Curtain (forget which one) where a shoe factory manager directed the workers to produce only left shoes, as they could produce more of them and thereby meet their quota of shoes for the year…
@M
Did they actually accomplish anything?
They poisoned themselves with dogshit and cleared it up at the same time. I’d say that was an accomplishment. If only the entire metropolitan elite could be persuaded to do exactly the same thing rather than leaving their doggy bags on trees.
It seems we need HS2 after all.
@M
The shiteater gag isn’t a bad analogy for commerce in the economy. We are both producers & consumers. All value produced is consumed. What is valued is the decision of the consumer. So, in a sense, it is a zero sum game.
So the gag describes it better than the GDP or GDN figures.
Before I retired I worked in software development (IBM Z/OS Assembler for the software people out there) and many of the developers liked to work from home. Company was all for it as it saved on office space costs. They did check on productivity occasionally just to make sure that it was still up to par. Some, like me, preferred to go to the office for work. People to talk to, company cafeteria, quiet, but not too quiet, and more. Probably about a 50/50 split. I liked it.
On the other hand my previous company had a similar policy for developers with one difference, they never checked productivity. One of the people in another development group worked in the office mornings and from home afternoons. A friend of mine in that group said the person wrote better than average code but only seemed to get about half as much work done as the rest of the group.
Gee, I wonder how that could possibly happen.