Afterword: I feel like this post is a good litmus test for identifying which respondents are in the C suite lol.
The C level management sends out a company wide e-mail saying "the move will not be tolerated as an excuse for missing deadlines."
God I wish I had a copy of that e-mail.
At least in my mind the only time its the fault of the employee himself only when they slip their own agreed-upon schedules, without warning or reason
It's not everywhere, and maybe it's not even the norm, but surely other companies are supportive of their employees as well.
So some different realities for sure.
That seems a bit hyperbolic.
On the other hand, I got the best job I've ever had and I don't even know a single person who got covid. Restricted travel has only been a minor inconvenience because I live in such an incredibly beautiful and temperate place. In the most selfish perspective, this seems like a great year for me. There are probably many like me, and also in between.
All that is to say I don't think we can truly evaluate how difficult this has really been until we see the full consequence revealed in several years. Some people speculate that we will collectively bounce back in a roaring 20s kind of way, others suspect this has kneecapped our global economy and we haven't seen the worst yet.
I don't think elements of this experience were uncommon.
Them: We understand the concerns, but we have decided that the return to the office will be mandatory.
Me: So those who are not comfortable returning to the office will be let go?
Them: No! Yo mean fired? Good heavens, no! No one will be let go. But they will have to return to the office.
"If you park in my driveway again, I will have your car towed" - very clear threat.
"If you go around parking in people's driveways, you run the risk of having your car towed" - maybe a threat, maybe not, depending on how the person says it
"I understand that you parked in my driveway yesterday, because of an emergency. No problem. But if you continue doing it regularly, please be aware that I might need to have your car towed, if I urgently need to use the driveway myself" - I suppose this is a threat too, but probably justifiable.
Maybe others would consider this to be cynical, but I've always considered compensation and job stability to be directly correlated to the amount of value you provide as an employee. If an employer thinks that remote-working will reduce the amount of value I bring to the company, I would certainly expect that to have an impact on my career growth. If my manager tells me this directly, I would thank him for the upfront feedback. I would also consider working for a different company that has a different perspective on this topic... the exact same way I shop around for employers that offer the best work-life balance. But either way, there wouldn't be any hard feelings on my side, and I'm puzzled by the outrage around this article.
So maybe your reading is a bit too charitable, as it seems like all the employees heard the threat loud and clear.
Second, the CEO published this without talking to a single one of their employees about the issue. Why? "I am concerned about the unfortunately common office worker who wants to continue working at home and just go into the office on occasion." Can you imagine your colleague stating this publicly without ever speaking to you about it? It's incredibly disrespectful. Your neighbor is parked in your driveway out of necessity, and you're within earshot asking a friend "Can you believe these people who think they can park wherever they want? I hope they realize how easy it is to tow a car off your own property."
What this means is that a good manager will farm work out all over the place finding the right mix of quality / quantity / price.
People will not be paid salaries, they will be paid per unit of work.
Rather than interviewing people to join your family, businesses will be running a continual review of work producs and more carefully measure that mix of quality / quantity / price. Each cycle letting go the least desirable contractors and giving new contractors a try.
On-boarding new contractors will be streamlined, and how fast the contractor gets started will be the first quality control checkpoint.
To your point, I hope students today are learning how to learn/communicate/perform at home and building the skills required to do so in the field or these issues will be compounded after graduation. It's super easy to slip under the radar or just get by, in many cases it was like that before the pandemic. I think there will soon be lists of interview questions related to how one coped with the challenges of learning/working from home, what difficulties thy overcame, and how they did so as an individual/team/company. It's not like I'll be at a vendor conference to compare those notes with other people any time soon.
I don't know what generation you are, but for millenials, the 2008 crisis was a real doozy. Anecdotally, only maybe 20-30% of my cohort found stable, well paying full-time jobs in the 10-12 years since that recession.
Many of them put their life plans on hold due to not being able afford things that a family generally requires.
So the "future" is already here. And has been for about a decade.
As an aside, this unethical practice in the media irks me. It's really despicable for the Washington Post to write a headline from the perspective of the CEO, which the CEO never said themselves.
Does anyone know of any good non-partisan orgs that attempt to quantify and track these unethical practices across the media landscape?
Some groups like NYT have retired the term 'Op-Ed' name in favor of something like Guest Essays as it better conveys the intention of the submission: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/opinion/nyt-opinion-oped-...
It's also important to note that local papers may print what is provided vs editing for spelling/grammar or even fact checking a submission. Larger publishers who by simply printing it add weight to the original may exercise a higher degree of involvement. For a look at the NYT process when you submit a piece: https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/14/opinion/op-ed-and-you.htm...
Anecdotal, but every letter I remember I or my family wrote to the local paper was edited in some fashion, most often for length. Short articles were the least touched, if at all, as they had the least content to make fit on a page of newsprint. I think it's also near impossible to get a non-partisan source either simply because that term is applied to basic human decency these days like how it's apparently partisan to wear a mask.
Why are executives, regardless of industry, digging in and going to such great lengths to insist that physical presence in a purpose-built office building is the only possible way to work?
>The true issue at hand is not, ultimately, where we will work, but how we will work. Remote work forces you to change the how. It is not a cure for shitty management or a bad business model or a bad product. It is merely an organizing principle — it forces you to the hard work of listening to and trusting employees. It pushes executives to build a culture with intention and long-term vision. >If history is any guide, the business case for remote work HAS been made.
Management is increasingly becoming irrelevant. The fear of being irrelevant will drive all sort of drama as work forces returning to office.
I really can't tell, but the meat of the difference is that the warning would be about what other people will do, not himself. (So it makes sense to publish a warning on the media, but it makes much less rational sense to publish a threat. But there's no reason to be sure he is acting rationally.)
Anyway, it's a very narcissistic comment. CEOs will do what the competition for labor allows them to do, the ones that do anything more will fail. There's a huge and complex society deciding those factors, he (or the ones he is warning about) does not get to choose.
This article is just another typical example of the parasitic administrator class devaluing the people that do real work.
