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[35]Ideas

Why Managers Fear a Remote-Work Future

Like it or not, the way we work has already evolved.

By [36]Ed Zitron

An office worker at a cubicle. He looks bored.
Lars Tunbjörk / Agence VU / Redux
July 29, 2021
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About the author: [37]Ed Zitron is the writer of the tech and culture
newsletter [38]Where’s Your Ed At and the CEO of the technology public
relations firm [39]EZPR.

In 2019, Steven Spielberg [40]called for a ban on Oscar eligibility for
streaming films, [41]claiming that “movie theaters need to be around
forever” and that audiences had to be given “the motion picture
theatrical experience” for a movie to be a movie. Spielberg’s fury was
about not only the threat that streaming posed to the in-person viewing
experience but the ways in which the streaming giant Netflix reported
theatrical grosses and budgets, despite these not being the ways in
which one evaluates whether a movie is good or not. Netflix held firm,
[42]saying that it stood for “everyone, everywhere [enjoying] releases
at the same time,” and for “giving filmmakers more ways to share art.”
Ultimately, Spielberg balked, and last month his company even
[43]signed a deal with Netflix, likely because he now sees the writing
on the wall: Modern audiences enjoy watching movies at home.

In key ways, this fight resembles the current remote-work debate in
industries such as technology and finance. Since the onset of the
coronavirus pandemic, this has often been cast as a battle between the
old guard and its assumed necessities and a new guard that has found a
better way to get things done. But the narrative is not that tidy.
Netflix’s co-founder and CEO, Reed Hastings, one of the great
“disruptors” of our age, deemed remote work “[44]a pure negative” last
fall. The 60-year-old Hastings is at the forefront of an existential
crisis in the world of work, demanding that people return to the office
[45]despite not having an office himself. His criticism of remote work
is that “not being able to get together in person” is bad.

Every business leader should ask themselves a few questions before
demanding that their employees return to the office:
1. Prior to March 2020, how many days a week were you personally in
the office?
2. How many teams did you directly interface with? What teams did you
spend the most time with?
3. Do you have an office? If you don’t, why not?
4. What is office culture?
1. What is your specific office’s culture?
5. Has your business actually suffered because of remote work?
1. If so, how? Be specific.

Some of the people loudly calling for a return to the office are not
the same people who will actually be returning to the office regularly.
The old guard’s members feel heightened anxiety over the white-collar
empires they’ve built, including the square footage of real estate
they’ve leased and the number of people they’ve hired. Earlier this
year, Google’s parent company, Alphabet, rolled out an uneven
return-to-office plan for its more than 130,000 employees—the majority
of workers must soon come back to the office three days a week, while
others are permitted to keep working exclusively from home. One senior
executive at the company has even been allowed [46]to work remotely
[47]from New Zealand[48].

[49]Derek Thompson: Winners and losers of the work-from-home revolution

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.

I have run my own remote company that operates at the intersection of
technology, media, and public relations since 2013. I retained an
office for a year or so that I got rid of because it was really just a
place to meet before going off to have drinks. For seven years before
the pandemic, some of my peers showed concern that my business
“wouldn’t succeed without an in-person team.”

Some people really do need to show up in person. I live in Las Vegas, a
city of more than 600,000 people with more than 200,000 hospitality
workers, and thus I’m keenly aware of which tasks require someone to
physically be there to complete them. You can’t wash dishes over Zoom.
You can’t change bed sheets over Slack. Blue-collar workers are the
backbone of the city, as well as the Consumer Electronics Show that the
tech elite uses to champion code-based products. Local hospitality
workers suffered painfully during the pandemic as tourism in the city
dried up, because their jobs depend on thriving physical spaces.

But for the tens of millions of us who spend most of our days sitting
at a computer, the pandemic proved that remote work is just work. Every
company that didn’t require someone to physically do something in a
specific place was forced to become more efficient on cloud-based
production tools, and the office started to feel like just another room
with internet access. While many executives and managers spent the
early months of the pandemic telling their employees that “remote work
wouldn’t work for us in the long term,” they are now forced to argue
with the tangible proof of their still-standing business, making
spurious statements like “We’ll miss the office culture and
collaboration.”

[50]Read: There’s a perfect number of days to work from home, and it’s
2

Now, with the coronavirus’s Delta variant threatening to delay many
companies’ return-to-office plans, the value of in-person work faces an
even greater test. If you have unvaccinated kids or live with an
immunocompromised person, is risking your family’s safety worth
experiencing “serendipitous conversation” with your colleagues?

Should you ever go back to the office?

Last fall, 94 percent of [51]employees[52] surveyed in a Mercer study
reported that remote work was either business as usual or better than
working in the office, likely because it lacks the distractions,
annoyances, and soft abuses that come with co-workers and middle
managers. Workers are happier because they don’t have to commute and
can be evaluated mostly on their actual work rather than on the
optics-driven albatross of “office culture,” which is largely based on
either the HR handbook or the pieces of the HR handbook your boss
chooses to ignore.

The reason working from home is so nightmarish for many managers and
executives is that a great deal of modern business has been built on
the substrate of in-person work. As a society, we tend to consider
management a title rather than a skill, something to promote people to,
as well as a way in which you can abstract yourself from the work
product. When you remove the physical office space—the place where
people are yelled at in private offices or singled out in meetings—it
becomes a lot harder to spook people as a type of management. In fact,
your position at a company becomes more difficult to justify if all you
do is delegate and nag people.

When we are all in the same physical space, we are oftentimes evaluated
not on our execution of our role but on our diplomacy—by which I mean
our ability to kiss up to the right people rather than actually being a
decent person. I have known so many people within my industry (and in
others) who have built careers on “playing nice” rather than on
producing something. I have seen examples within companies I’ve worked
with of people who have clearly stuck around because they’re well liked
versus productive, and many, many people have responded to my
[53]newsletters on [54]the topic of remote work with similar stories.
I've also known truly terrible managers who have built empires, gaining
VP and C-level positions, by stealing other people’s work and
presenting it as their own, [55]something that, according to research,
is the number-one way to destroy employee trust.

[56]Arthur C. Brooks: The hidden toll of remote work

These petty fiefdoms are far harder to maintain when everyone is
remote. Although you may be able to get away with multiple
passive-aggressive comments to colleagues in private meetings or calls,
it’s much harder to be a jerk over Slack, email, and text when someone
can screenshot it and send it to HR ([57]or to a journalist).
Similarly, if your entire work product is boxing up other people’s
production and sending it to the CEO, that becomes significantly harder
to prove as your own in a fully digital environment—the producer in
question can simply send it along themselves. Remote work makes who
does and doesn’t actually do work way more obvious.

Even if we’re discussing some sort of theoretical, utopian office in
which everybody is contributing and everyone gets along, each day
during which a business doesn’t fail because of going remote proves
that the return-to-office movement is unnecessary. Those in power who
claim that remote work is unworkable are delaying an inevitable remote
future by using logic that mostly comes down to “I like seeing the
people I pay for in one place.” I have yet to read one compelling
argument for a company that has gone remote to fully return to the
office, mostly because the reasoning is rooted in control and ego.

We have lionized the founders, CEOs, and disruptors who nevertheless
have intra-office reputations as abrasive geniuses who treat their
workers as eminently replaceable. Because most private companies don’t
share revenue, we frequently tie headcount and real estate to success.
Removing the physical office forces modern businesses to start
justifying themselves through annoying things such as “profit and loss”
and “paying customers.”

When you hire someone, you’re (supposedly) hiring them to do a job in
exchange for money. But the anti-remote crowd seems to believe that the
responsibility of a 9-to-5 employee isn’t simply the work but the
appearance, optics, and ceremony of the work. Abusive work cultures
grow from this process too. Making people work late is much harder when
you can’t trap them in one place with free food, a Ping-Pong table, a
kegerator, or laundry services—benefits that you champion instead of
monetary compensation. When you are a full-time employee, you might
believe that you are owned by a company and should be grateful to its
leaders for generously making you show up in their office every day.

[58]Read: Work from home is here to stay

Which brings us back to Hollywood.

Forty-six summers ago, it wasn’t enough to see Spielberg’s first
masterpiece, Jaws, and be scared; the whole point was to experience it
with a bunch of other people in a shared space and feel something
intangible. But our world has changed. Two years after trying to keep
streaming movies out of the Oscars, Spielberg’s company, Amblin
Partners—the studio behind such made-for-the-big-screen blockbusters as
Saving Private Ryan, Jurassic Park, and Back to the Future—[59]signed a
deal with Netflix that, if nothing else, will mean more people will
soon watch more movies at home.

Across multiple genres and decades, Spielberg has known his audience.
The 74-year-old cinematic guru had to understand that whatever
reservations he’d had about how and where people watched movies didn’t
matter as much as making movies that people would see. Perhaps he
realized that the world was evolving faster than he was, or that his
judgments of streaming were antiquated and, on some level,
anti-creative.

And perhaps we’ll see the business world follow suit.

References

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