Working it out

Staying for a moment on yesterday’s Labor Day theme, I’m seeing some post-pandemic shifts in white-collar employment trends. The big panic in 2020, of course, was “how are we going to hit our numbers this quarter if employees aren’t working in the office???” Turns out employees saved their corporate bacon by working from home, collaborating by video calls and chats, and generally stepping up to the challenges of managing professional and personal responsibilities. It wasn’t without strain, but it’s generally agreed that productivity met or bettered in-office metrics.

Go figure.

But starting last year, companies have begun flapping their hands about having staff return to offices, because reasons. Some of it is probably tied to angst about all the rent they’re paying for office space, which is empty or only sparsely occupied. I’m frankly unclear about the soundness of this rationale—it’s emotional rather that practical. They want to feel like they’re getting something for the tens of thousands they’re paying commercial real estate landlords, I guess.

Then they claim that, well, productivity may be right up there, but creativity is suffering, and people need to be in the office together for that to happen. Yeah, that’s the ticket. People need to be milling around in the open-plan office, bumping into one another and thereby sparking…big ideas! Innovation! 10x!

They never give you any examples of the “watercooler serendipity” moments that are supposedly no longer taking place. (And, to tell you the truth, while they yap a lot about innovation and 10x, any real suggestions of anything but incremental change make their bowels wobble.) What were all these acts of creativity that presumably provided all the sparkle magic that working remotely has removed? Dunno.

But corporations are telling us they’re serious now about RTO: workers better come back or else. They’ve moved from enticements (“Remember the free snacks/meals?”) to mandates to threats. Google has decreed that employees must adhere to the hybrid (three days per week) in the office. Anyone not complying will have that in their personnel file. Amazon is telling people who moved out of commuting distance to an office that they need to move back. Even Zoom, the company whose fortune was made by pandemic-induced working from home, is telling staff to get back in the office.

In my own search, I’m seeing more job listings that specify on-site and hybrid requirements than remote ones. seems like this change has taken place over the past few weeks.

Last week I had an interview with a recruiter for a cybersecurity firm in Columbia, Md. It was a terrific opportunity, one in which I’d really add value. The interview ended when the recruiter (who is situated in North Carolina and apparently hasn’t been in the corporate HQ because he said he had no notion of the geography) said that the person doing this job (completely research and analysis, so requiring nothing more from the company than a computer setup and connectivity) “has to be in the office on Tuesdays and Wednesdays.” He was very vague about why this was so.

For me that would be a 50 mile commute, from suburban Virginia across the District They Call Columbia to exurban Baltimore. It would be insane whether I did it by car or public transportation.

(Although that ended the interview, I emailed him with a copy of my résumé, including a matrix of my skills and experience mapped to the job requirements. He didn’t bother to reply.)

There are indeed some jobs that require the workers to be on site. Surgeon (although robotics and video are chipping away at that). Firefighter. Manicurist. Prison guard; probably. There are many more jobs that corporations have signaled they don’t think are worth staffing, eliminating them in favor of computerized self-service. Retail and airline operations now want you to perform all the tasks formerly attended to by humans.

But for whole swathes of the workforce, jobs can be performed wherever there are computers and connectivity, without any loss of productivity. The pandemic demonstrated that, and all this corporate assholery is just precisely that: management (who, let me point out, are not in the mandated return-to-office cohort) demanding that workers jump through hoops as a reminder of who holds the power in this equation.

It's nothing they’ve not tried before; it’s just dressed a little differently. But I’m wondering how it’s going to play in the GenZ era?