Billionaire CEOs were quick to sing the praises of working from home at the start of the pandemic, calling it the way of the future — but over the last three years, they’ve slowly changed their tune.
Late last year, Forbes reported that 90% of companies will return to the office in 2024, with 28% threatening to fire workers who don’t comply.
But it turns out that the motivations for calling workers back to the office may have less to do with employee productivity or profit margins and everything to do with catering to the egos of controlling managers who want their workers back, according to a recent study published by researchers at the University of Pittsburgh.
Mark Ma, an associate professor of business administration from Pitt’s Katz Graduate School of Business, who led the study, told BI he started the research hoping to understand why some S&P 500 firms want employees to return to the office while other firms avoid calling them back.
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“One of the most common arguments management suggests is that they want to return to office because employee productivity is low at home, and they believe returns to office would help firms improve performance and ultimately improve the firm’s value,” Ma told BI. “That’s the reason they give — but our results actually do not support these arguments.”
It’s fine to prefer that. But forcing your employees to work in the office is an ego trip and makes you a bad boss. Especially considering it’s been proven most people are more productive in a work from home environment.
But based on that anecdote, unless I am missing something (possible), it just sounds like the boss is stating they miss seeing people in the office. OP said their boss frequently says they don’t mind employees working from home. What it sounds like is two things are true: (1) the boss doesn’t care if employees work from the office or home and (2) the boss misses seeing people at work because it’s nice for them to have in-person social interactions.
Also, to be blunt, using productivity as the marker of an effective workforce is how you end up with hellholes like Tesla or Facebook. Morale matters for quality of output. Anyway, effective managers know that their teams will have both people who prefer to be in office and people who prefer to WFH, so will create schedules that work great for everyone.