Ever since COVID began to recede, America’s CEOs have been waging a determined campaign to haul their employees back into the office. Big banks led the charge, ordering everyone back to their cubicles and threatening to fire those who refused to comply. In recent months, even holdouts like Disney and Salesforce, which just two years ago declared that the “9-to-5 workday is dead,” began pushing many employees to report to the office four days a week. And after a yearlong fight to get workers on-site full time, Goldman Sachs now boasts attendance rates that are pretty much back to where they were before the pandemic.
Ask these executives why they’re pushing the office so hard and you’ll get some HR-concocted jumble of “productivity” and “creativity” and “culture.” But their less-filtered peers will tell you what they really think. Jamie Dimon declared that working from home “doesn’t work for those who want to hustle.” Elon Musk demanded that employees commit to an “extremely hardcore” schedule consisting of “long hours at high intensity.” And in a recent op-ed article in The New York Times, the finance executive and professional blowhard Steven Rattner railed against working from home as evidence that America has “gone soft.”
Recent Comments