To write about a much better topic, Peter Bergen writes about the
absurdity of return to office.
https://groups.google.com/g/Talk.Politics.Guns/c/7ObR5rPvu5I/m/1wfwsEhrBAAJ
Opinion: The absurdity of the return-to-office movement
Opinion by Peter Bergen
4 minute read
Updated 12:27 PM EST, Mon January 22, 2024
Pedestrians walk towards Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York, US, on
Thursday, July 6, 2023.
Pedestrians walk toward Goldman Sachs headquarters in New York, US, on
Thursday, July 6, 2023.
Michael Nagle/Bloomberg/Getty Images
Editor’s Note: Peter Bergen is CNN’s national security analyst, a vice
president at New America, a professor of practice at Arizona State
University, the host of the Audible podcast “In the Room” also on Apple
and Spotify and was the founding editor of the Coronavirus Daily Brief.
The opinions expressed in this commentary are his own. View more opinion
at CNN.
CNN
—
I host a podcast, “In the Room with Peter Bergen,” which focuses on
national security issues. Every day, I see the merits of being part of
an entirely remote workforce.
Peter Bergen
Peter Bergen
CNN
We have a production team, around half of whom live in Brooklyn and
Manhattan, and the others live in places like Chicago, Mexico City and
San Francisco. We have met in person only twice in the year that the
production has been up and running, and we have put out dozens of highly
produced episodes, often featuring multiple guests, which go through
many rounds of edits.
In my four decades of working in media, I have never worked somewhere
with a better esprit de corps, creative energy and a collective
willingness to help everyone else out.
And yet, some corporate titans are still pushing for their employees to
return to their offices. Banks like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase and
tech giants like Meta are demanding that their staff be back at the
office several days a week.
Those return-to-office demands are often couched in non-falsifiable
claims about the necessity of having chance encounters at the office
where folks bounce creative, productive ideas off of each other.
Typical of this view is JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, who claimed in 2021
that working from home “doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation.”
There is no empirical evidence for this claim, and the desire for
employers to see their employees working in their offices seems to be
more about the need for control and an attachment to the old ways of
doing things.
The return-to-office demands also make little sense from an overall
economic perspective at a time when a third of Americans who can do
their job remotely now only work from home, up from only 7% before
Covid, according to the Pew Research Center, yet the economy is very
strong in terms of low unemployment and GDP growth. If working from home
suppressed innovation, productivity and creativity, you would expect
quite different economic results.
Further, working from home saves Americans an average daily commute of
72 minutes a day, to say nothing about the reduced pollution and energy
consumption that comes from fewer commuters, according to a 2023
University of Chicago study.
The North Lawn of the White House in Washington, DC, on November 18,
2022. - Naomi Biden, 28, granddaughter of US President Joe Biden, will
marry Peter Neal, 25, on the South Lawn on November 19, 2022. (Photo by
Mandel NGAN / AFP) (Photo by MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)
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Working parents, in particular, benefit from not having to waste time,
money and flexibility commuting to an office. A 2023 Bankrate survey
found that 74% of working women with children are in favor of remote
work, while 64% of all working Americans support it.
I have some insight into this as a parent who now works mostly from
home. This arrangement gives me a lot more time to spend with my kids,
and if there is any kind of unforeseen emergency, I can be there for
them in a way that, during the era of the office, I couldn’t be.
The internet and cell phones obviate so much of what was once done at
the office, which is, after all, largely an artifact of the 20th century
thanks to the rise of mass transportation, the ability to build tall
office buildings and the previous immovability of the “work” telephone,
which was stuck to a desk. All this, thankfully, is going the way of the
dodo.
During the office era, so many workers spent so much time at their desks
that workplaces often tried to present themselves as some kind of
alternative family. You had your “work husbands” and mandatory “team
building” events. Of course, this all came at the expense of your loved
ones at home, as you had to spend time away from them while doing all
your office-based events and tasks.
I am writing this column in Washington, DC, but work with editors in New
York, London or Atlanta. In fact, I have written several hundred of
these columns over the past dozen years and I have never met most of the
editors I work with, and yet I still have a warm, productive
relationship with them.
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To be sure, a Starbucks cappuccino is not going to make itself, and
certain kinds of work environments — such as hospitals, restaurants,
film sets or government offices where classified material is handled in
a secure environment — require employees to be in person.
But for much of the economy where work doesn’t need to be in person, the
demand to “return to office” is not rooted in any concern for employees,
a large majority of whom want to work from home — not because they are
lazy or don’t want to be productive, but because it gives them more
freedom and control over their own lives.
So why do some bosses still feel it necessary to prolong the slow and
necessary death of The Office? Beats me.