America needs to go back to work.
Elon Musk ordered Tesla employees back to the office full time last week. Tesla will “create and actually manufacture the most exciting and meaningful products of any company on Earth,” Musk said. “This will not happen by phoning it in.”
Bravo to Musk for rebuffing the fairy tale that employees working from home are just as productive. It’s true for some jobs but not for most. The nation is moving recklessly fast to make remote and hybrid working permanent without anticipating the harm to the world’s largest economy.
The advantages of remote work are obvious: no laborious commutes, especially with budget-busting gas prices, and more lifestyle freedom. But it also threatens to depress economic output, lower America’s standard of living, doom our cities, and deprive young people of on-the-job training.
It’s a myth to think employees — especially entry-level workers — can acquire new skills sitting in their pajamas at their home computer instead of interacting with more seasoned workers on the job.
Remote work penalizes strivers who want promotions and need their job performance to be on full display. Employees working remotely are half as likely to be promoted, according to Harvard economists Edward Glaeser and David Cutler.
Not to mention the adverse impact on cities. Alarmingly, 78% of New York City companies expect to make hybrid work (some days in the office and some at home) permanent after the pandemic, according to the Partnership for New York City. Business leaders should take a page from Tesla’s CEO and resist that trend.
Commercial real estate values here plummeted in 2022, resulting in less tax revenue to pay for city services like cops and firefighters.
Cities cannot bounce back from the pandemic until office workers return, spending money in restaurants, retailers, shoeshine stands, and after-hours bars. New York office workers used to spend $15,000 a year on average at businesses near their place of work. Now businesses are shuttered.
Workers demanding freedom from the office often sound self-centered and uninformed. Over 1,000 Apple employees signed an open letter declaring that “office-bound work is a technology from the last century,” and “commuting to the office, without an actual need to be there, is a huge waste of time.”
Sorry. Working together in an office fosters innovation, according to Glaeser and Cutler. Working remotely discourages collaboration and information sharing, according to a study of Microsoft employees.
Despite the negative impact on productivity, many employers are caving. Blame the current tight job market. An astounding 54% of employees working from home say they’d look for another job if forced to go into the office, according to Gallup. That will change when the economy slows.
But in the long term, the push to make work remote is one manifestation of the political attack on America’s strong work ethic.
Democratic California Rep. Mark Takano has introduced a bill, endorsed by the Congressional Progressive Caucus, to reduce the work week to 32 hours. Americans should not have to return to “the old normal” after the pandemic, he said.
Joe O’Connor, head of the nonprofit Four Day Work Week Global, argues, “there’s no correlation between working more hours and better productivity.” That’s laughable.
Europeans work fewer hours than Americans. No surprise, their GDP per capita is less, too. They’re producing fewer goods and services and having to settle for a lower material standard of living than Americans enjoy, including smaller homes and fewer appliances.
Zealots bashing America’s work culture and calling for an end to workplaces and 40-hour weeks aren’t telling you that these changes will likely require you to lower your standard of living. Societies that produce less have less.
Kudos to Musk and to New York’s Mayor Eric Adams, who’s insisting municipal workers get back to the office. More leaders need to do the same. The stakes are high for young people with ambition to succeed, for companies that want to grow, for cities, and for a nation whose work ethic has produced unrivaled prosperity.
Betsy McCaughey is a former lieutenant governor of New York and author of “The Next Pandemic,” available at Amazon.com. Follow her on Twitter @Betsy_McCaughey.
COPYRIGHT 2022 CREATORS.COM
This time I have to side with the Millennials and X gens. It’s about 30% of your paycheck if not more to commute along with car insurance. Today you have Zoom and Text. You have Docu- sign. That’s all you need. Businesses will layoff anyway…home or, in the office.
I been in sales and lost potential sales because a business lead is on the east coast and gone by noon. I’m busy in aggressive stop and go traffic trying to get over a bridge that cost 12.00. Great tax base. I need to keep a sandwich shop open with crappy food, or still have to blow half my lunch break at a drive in window. Especially with a half hour lunch. What tax base? Walk by more tents? What are we getting out of this? Dirty sketchy transit buses and trains? I have jobs that I can do the same exact performance at home as well as in the office.
Matter of fact….why aren’t you at the office writing and publishing this article Mr. Ms Outside Contributor.
Your opinions are outdated, embarrassing, and fit for nothing other than being printed out to line a birdcage. Way to show you’re woefully out of touch and so indoctrinated into our toxic work culture that you are willing to advocate against the health and happiness of your fellow humans in favor of kowtowing to corporations. You should be ashamed of yourself.
This is such a boomer article. It has so many outdated assumptions that are backed up by cherry picked stats that dont show the whole picture.
Here’s the truth: WFH means happier employees. Happier employees live better lives. Your entire article is making the argument that people’s happiness and health aren’t as important as “the economy.” In the long run most people benefit from WFH.
One issue is that companies are dragging their feet on adapting to WFH and then declaring WFH at fault.
People are tired of this mindset. You can’t reason with old boomers though because their minds exist in a world that no longer exists. This article is an embarrassingly bad take on a situation the author clearly does not understand.
Such b.s. I know in my IT role as a software developer, WFH has made my quality of life immeasurably better without sacrificing an iota of productivity. And it’s not that I work in isolation – everything I do is highly collaborative with my fellow team members, and our collaboration is much easier and more effective, certainly much more efficient time and technology-wise, over Microsoft Teams calls and meetings than it ever was in conference room meetings at the office. The ability to “share screens” in order to look at problems or code or data together – or to quickly share information we need via copy-paste into ongoing chats – there are no equivalent in-person methods to achieve these tasks as easily; we’d only have to do the exact same thing between our cubicles if we resumed our miserable commutes into the office. In between coding, testing, emailing, documenting, we are laughing and talking together all day from the comfort of our home offices where the audio setups, computer monitor sizes, comfort level of the whole environment, is far superior to those in-office; no camaraderie is lost, although the need for constant awkward time-wasting small talk interactions with other employees we don’t actually work with or know is eliminated. Plus we save tons of money, not only on the commute but on lunches. In these inflationary times, how can you say it’s better for companies to reimpose these extra costs of thousands per year on employees? Thanks for showing how much you care. (And I feel bad for restaurant owners who are challenged by this, but I gotta say it’s not legitimately my problem, my job is not to have to drive for hours each day just to support them because then I have no other choice.) More sleep – better for my physical health, guess that doesn’t factor in to your thinking. And the time spent on say your lunch break is so much more comfortable, refreshing, enjoyable at home than it ever was in any office building, where you have to suffer through some institutional-food in-building cafeteria or deal with traffic and parking to hunker down in a crowded overpriced deli or fast food atrocity – this way you’re genuinely refreshed after the break or can use it for a truly productive activity that helps your life, maybe some laundry or grocery shopping, that otherwise you’d have to eat into your personal time at night to get done.
In my job anyway, after more than two years, I see no disadvantages to myself or to my employer from my doing my work remotely, and only advantages for both of us. Since my company hasn’t made any moves to require me to come back, it’s obvious they see it this way too. So please shut up.
Pathetic mouthpiece propaganda for stunted management skills from the 50s. Part of an ongoing effort by a few major business interests to create a counter narrative where none existed. I am sure “Outside Contributor” is a well know and utterly unbiased source. All vitriol like this does is galvanize people against RTO.
Idiotic garbage. Go be a dictator elsewhere.
OK, boomer. YOU’RE LAUGHABLE.
What a askewed point of view.
My company is growing too large, too fast, for me to come back to the office. My desk was given away at the beginning of covid right after we finished rebounding a new office space (which was too small for our current staff at the time), and since work from home is so successful, my company is hiring more and asking more of the veteran workers to go remote because they don’t need to be babysat or micro managed. And there is no need to buy more real estate immediately in order to maintain company growth. Get your head out away from the blinders and the idea that remote is bad for everyone.
I did WFH for 2 years and received 3 raises and a promotion. I have no idea where you got your information but it is WRONG. I returned to the office and was placed in a tiny cubicle and have been told there is no budget for any more raises or promotions in the near future.
“New York office workers used to spend $15,000 a year on average at businesses near their place of work.” Just think, now they can save that mindless spending for things that matter. College funds, retirement, family vacations, etc.
OK boomer is the only valid response to this opinion piece devoid of any facts or sound logical reasoning
GIT OFF MY LAWN!!
I thought this was a parody article.
I bet you some baby boomer wrote this article. America is finished, and we’re not going back to 2019. Baby boomers are out of touch with reality and in the way.
Who wrote this, a lobbyist for the commercial real estate industry? All of my employees work remotely. All anyone should ever care about is whether or not the work is getting done, and if their employees are happy. Otherwise you just may be a weirdo control freak.
There are those of studies going back as far as the early 90s that refute the assertions in this article and none that support…hmmmmm
This individual who wrote this article can suck my Wang. I’ve proven over the past two years to my employer that my stats are just as good, or better then being in the office. I save 30-40hrs a month both in drive time, and lunch hour.
Amazingly bitter and out of touch article you have here. Resist all you want but WFH is here to stay. Sorry we all don’t want to go back to miserable commutes, middle managers with no real purpose, constant interruptions that slow down production and a terrible work life balance.
Tell me you’re a Boomer mid level manager that needs to justify your job without telling me that you’re a Boomer mid level manager that needs to justify your job.
Here I’ll fix your title for you: Get back to the office so I can lord over you even though you are adults and don’t need your hands held.
Remote work allows for more flexible work hours whether that be starting early, working late or working on weekends which is huge! You are saving time on commute, prepping for work, and dressing up. You do not need a specific time for lunch. You may not even need to take off when sick or for childcare. For me that is much more useful when I have a project due if I can depend on my staff and coworkers to carry through. Plus there’s less wasted time mingling. Training is a valid concern for new people but there will be advances in that area. The pros greatly outweigh the cons. Never mind the fact that I worked from home about one day out of the week every week prior to COVID-19 anyways.
Completely disagree. There are some big tech companies that are 100% remote and have been since inception. I currently work as a senior software engineer 100% remote. Almost all the employees are fully remote and have been since the start. There is an office and about 30 total people work there. Once or twice a year I fly in for a week to hang out.
The company has a very open policy in that everyone’s calendar including CEO are fully viewable by everyone. Everyone in the company is very active on slack and we use zoom for meetings. Works incredibly well if the procedures and culture are established.
When I was a graduate student in Boston in the mid 1980s, I had a professor who claimed that the invention of the personal computer– just then starting to enter homes– would result in a seismic shift in work, where many people could work from home, lessening the impact of vehicle emissions on the environment, increasing productivity bc there wouldn’t be a lot of useless chatter etc. As one who had to contend with commuting (by mass transit and later by individual vehicle), I thought whatever saved me from the horrifics of rush hour traffic would be an improvement. So I waited for this “revolution.” And waited. And waited. Forty years later, remote work became a necessity for many during COVID. I thought, hurrah! My husband started working 2 days a week from home in 2017, so the switch wasn’t that drastic– and it has worked so well for his whole company that they didn’t renew the lease on one of their buildings. So I disagree with the author: remote working DOES work quite well for some!
This is 100 percent false. The only jobs that need “on the job” training are those that could never function remotely (such as factory positions). Also, why does AMAC, which is geared toward conservative seniors, care about who’s working from home? If less cars are on the road, those rich old seniors will have less traffic to compete with when they go out on their boating excursions.
As a recent graduate working my first full time job from home, the only valid part of this argument is that working from home lacks on the job training. The idea that working from home means a lower standard of living is problematic. We will grow and learn to live with less of the useless material junk we are bombarded with now.
What a garbage article. No concept of the modern workplace. Just a bitter old boomer – ah, yeah, Ok Boomer
I love the comments about working in an office. How would these people feel if they called a plumber who said, “Sorry. I only work from home. I’ll send you a nice u-tube article on how to fix your broken toilet.” How would they feel when they call a doctor for help with a medical emergency and were told, “Sorry. I only work from home because I get sick less often when I have to deal with contagious people. I recommend you take an OTC product and try to get well on your own.” How would they feel if they called for a fire emergency or a police emergency and were told, “Sorry. Our emergency personnel only work from home. We’ll call them and see if any of them are willing to replace their pajamas with a uniform and help you.” How would these people feel if they called to find out where their paycheck was and were told, “Sorry. The Human Resource Department is having trouble with computer connections. Your paychecks are delayed until a tech person can be found who is willing to come out of their house to fix the problem.” I could continue, but I hope the people who only want to work from home get the idea.
Sounds like these people who don’t want to leave their homes to come to work have a problem socializing except, of course, on their sacred computers. Maybe they aren’t that necessary to the real world.
Uless, of course, these people are only writing sarcasm.
Btw Betsy – you’re 73 years old. I’m sure you mean we’ll and are a nice person. But honestly you should be retired and enjoying what little time you have left and not trying to play politics or write the next piece. And I’m guessing you’re either fairly broke and can’t afford to stop working (which means your life choices were terrible making this piece invalid & worthless) or your heart is darkening in your later years, you’ve grown cynical, arrived at overly opinionated, likely highly emotional about your own opinion because nobody listens to you anymore or brushes you aside, you’re exceptionally bored and lonely, and are simply losing touch with the reality we’re all in facing. Go get some fresh air and go walk. Take a 3 month trip through the Bahamas on a sailboat and see the islands. Go relax for a while. You need it. You need to take a look around and get some fresh perspective and not drum up some old cream from the bottom of the barrel just to find there is no more cream there to be had so you find yourself licking the spoon or egg beaters for a taste of the good old days.
This was hilarious. This op-ed wouldn’t even cut it in a high school freshman English class. This is a boomer who’s upset because they invested in commercial real estate because “it’s a steady investment and the commercial real estate market is ever expanding” and, similar to 08, they’re acting shooketh now.
Top 20 – I’m Never Go Back
1.) I’m happy working from home & not working in an office.
2.) It’s made my life infinitely better & I will never go back to an office.
3.) I don’t want to be around colleagues 8-12 hours a day.
4.) I don’t like being micromanaged & having people breath down my back.
5.) I get sick less now from everything like colds & flus.
6.) I don’t like big cities & being packed-in close to others.
7.) People need space to live & others need to give people space.
8.) This has tremendously helped smaller rural towns grow & sustain & we need that because those places are our farm lands which make our food.
9.) I don’t care if you need my tax money from gas sales & and inflated city prices to help a hurting economy you wrecked in the first place.
10.) I don’t like real estate people so I don’t care if their buildings are empty & aren’t leased.
11.) Speaking of which, companies have made record profits since Covid-19 & going back to the office would lower moral, lower production, & increase operational expenditures resulting in reduced profit margins.
12.) I don’t care if you need attention & need people to see you as the big boss man in the office.
13.) I don’t care that you can’t make friends IRL & need people in an office kissing your a$$ pretending to be your “friend”.
14.) I hate waking up early & being forced to perform my morning ablutions.
15.) I don’t like commuting & not being thanked for my efforts to get in my car and go somewhere when I’m putting wear-and-tear on my vehicle, which is already a depreciating liability I might add.
16.) I don’t like being forced to do dry cleaning of my work clothes & still being made to feel like I don’t have enough variety or style of the day to keep up with my peers.
17.) I don’t like having my ideas stolen by my boss & Co-workers who can’t think for themselves.
18.) I love having the extra non-commute hours to be at home or out to spend time with my family & friends which are infinitely more important when you’re on your death bed because nobody on that death bed ever said, I wish I spent more time at the office.
19.) You can thank your governments for dabbling in a deadly science call biowarfare & releasing (intentionally or unintentionally) a virus that changed your old perfect world.
20.) You need to change with the times & realize that working in an office is the old world
…And to that end, my friend, that ship has sailed! Peace out biotches…you ain’t getting me back in no office!
Bring back office rape, got it. Do we need to call the cops on this writer for being a predator
Haha old people are so mad at anything that brings anybody joy
Spoken like a true late-stage capitalist overlord rooting for the continuation of corporate slavery. I’m getting Confederate era vibes from this piece. You’re delusional if you think people will relinquish their newfound freedom. There’s more to life than being a cog in the system.
Somebody come get their grandma, out here basically pining for slavery to come back. How out of touch and backwards can someone be?
If we’re going to turn back the clock we might as well go all in and return to the early days of the industrial revolution when men, women and children were physically tied to weaving machines to keep them from taking too many breaks that would reduce factory output. There is absolutely nothing more important than productivity right? The worst possible thing would be to reduce a CEO’s standard of living.
The writer is living in 20th century.
40 hour workweek is ok with me! Out of bed at 5:50 am, working by 6 am, off at 2:30 pm giving me a lovely long afternoon and evening. No commute, finding it easier to interact with people at work since I’m more relaxed in my work environment. This article is bs
Oh wait, this isn’t a satire site? Could have fooled me ????????♀️
Remote work is here to stay superfluous. unproductive offices are what must go. Godspeed!
I’m on the east coast and my team is on the west. Nobody I work with on a daily basis would even be in the same office. Maybe you can talk my manager into letting me fly out on a daily basis.
Nah, GTFO with this BS.
Nah, GFY. Sincerely, someone who fires dunces like you.
It’s an opinion piece and I don’t agree. At least “Outside Contributor” concedes it depends on the job. I worked remotely in high tech for years, much more productively than fighting traffic to get to and from the office, at which point I’d have people dropping into my cubicle all day, and the office gossip was just depressing. I know people who do prefer to socialize with others in an office every day, but I’m willing to go toe to toe with them in a comparison of productivity and innovation.
The companies I worked for were also distributed, usually globally, so there was no advantage to being together in one branch office. I still participate in really creative projects with great minds from around the globe and we do it by team video and Slack. How refreshing that the talent pool doesn’t have to be limited to one physical locality and there’s nothing to stop me from having the same quality of collaboration with remote team members.
Finally, innovation? There aren’t many jobs where innovation is encouraged or even tolerated. See the book A More Beautiful Question for examples of companies that do and don’t encourage innovation in the ranks. amazon.com/More-Beautiful-Question-Inquiry-Breakthrough/dp/B0913HP573/ )
Obviously there are jobs where you have to go to work. You can’t work from home as a garbage collector. But if you’re hiring for work that can be done at home and you’re only willing to hire people who are able to come to your work location every day, you’re going to miss out on talent. Especially as folks continue to move away from large urban areas.
OK Boomer – signed Gen X
This is a horrible article. My office has been working from home since the start of the pandemic and our productivity and attendance has skyrocketed. The author of this article needs to stop being a dictator and realize WFH is better and cheaper overall.
Fake news. Probably funded by an interest party. Work from home has proven to be good for business, workers, and the environment as well. I had made my research as well.
This post was inaccurate and false on almost every count
They should work and they should like it! And let’s get rid of lunch breaks, vacation time, insurance benefits, and 401(k) contributions while we’re at it. So inefficient for American business!
The truth is that working from home might actually be MORE efficient than working in the office (check out the latest research—not just the pronouncements of self-important CEO’s) and is incomparably better for the environment.
Musk is trying to perfect autonomous vehicles but he can’t allow his workers to be remote. Something seems off with that.
How much you want to bet that the author wrote this garbage at home?
This article is total garbage just like Elon.