Time and Effort

Phoebe Philo | RTO is a Smokescreen | People-Centric Organizations? | Factoids | Elsewhere and Elsewhen

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Quote of the Moment

It takes time and effort to make most things that have meaning. One has to stand for something.

| Phoebe Philo

I am invoking the couturier Phoebe Philo to chastise the CEOs of many corporations who continue to pointlessly pressure workers to return to office. If they’d look at the research—some of it cited in the next section—they would stop. Stand for something. Don’t waste your time on meaningless gestures.

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RTO is a Smokescreen

I devoured a recent Sloan Management Review piece by Brian Elliott that lays out the case—fairly conclusively, thanks to a key research paper by Yuye Ding and Mark Ma—that corporate executives' ‘Return to Office’ push is a paper tiger designed to conceal poor performance, exacerbated by distrust of employees and a fear of Wall Street retribution for adopting the modern hybrid form of work.

Four years since the start of the pandemic, office utilization in the U.S. is now hovering at 50% of pre-pandemic norms. Still, Elliott points out big companies want to reverse that:

RTO pronouncements have come loud and clear from Amazon, Google, IBM, JPMorgan Chase, and more.

He relates the usual bushwa about why: Execs mouth the usual pieties about collaboration, face-to-face interaction, front-line worker solidarity, and so on. But mostly, he asserts, this word salad is meant to keep activist investors and Wall Street happy. They want 'the good old days' and maybe city downtowns filled with workers again.

The key research by Yuye Ding and Mark Ma on S&P 500 firms is compelling: RTO mandates don’t improve financial performance.

Results of our determinant analyses are consistent with managers using RTO mandates to reassert control over employees and blame employees as a scapegoat for bad firm performance [and lead to] significant declines in employees’ job satisfaction but no significant changes in financial performance or firm values.

That's the bombshell, the key takeaway. RTO is 100% bullshit.

What about the elusive ‘productivity’ execs are seeking to increase? An Atlassian survey found

Most executives don’t think the mandates they’ve already imposed have helped. Among executives who have instituted a return-to-office mandate, only 1 in 3 thinks it had “even a slight positive impact on productivity”.

The uncertainty among senior executives about RTO stems from the fact that they don't trust employees to work at home as much as they would under direct observation in the office. And the senior execs create a closed bubble of negativity where 'anecdotes seem like trends'.

Elliott cites other research findings, supposedly by Slack, suggesting that companies use time in the office as a direct proxy for time spent effectively working ('productivity') because there is no generally accepted method to measure the effectiveness of knowledge workers. Slack (I can't find this figure in the URL Elliott provided) found that, on average, 'employees spend 32 % of their time “on performative work that gives the appearance of productivity”.’

Elliott argues that this dynamic leads to a 'doom loop': the combination of enforced RTO, surveillance, and the need to project an appearance of productivity leads to high stress for workers and an awareness that they aren't trusted. Evidence shows trusted employees work harder.

Forcing people into this system leads to high levels of defection and, more importantly, defection by high-performing workers. Gartner found that high-performers were 1/ the group most likely to leave following a mandated RTO effort, and 2/ their 'intent to stay' numbers dropped 16%, where the average worker's only fell 8%.

Elliott makes the case that the most effective companies trust their employees to do their jobs and avoid the frameworks others build that demonstrate a lack of trust. They allow work flexibility; they don't associate time sitting in the office with effectiveness, and they have clear objectives in all parts of the organization across large and small groups as well as individuals. (This is what I call 'progressivity,' meaning outcomes-oriented measurement instead of performative 'productivity' theater.)

In a nutshell, companies would be better off adopting outcomes-based management than indulging in the shadow play demanded by the investment community.

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People-Centric Organizations?

Apropos of the story above, Colin Newlyn provides this checklist:

Little Lies

So when organisations say they have a ‘people-centric’ culture, you have to look at their actions.

- If they get rid of people to boost short-term profits;

- If they re-organise without any consultation;

- If they have lots of procedures in place to police behaviour;

- If they impose cultural norms;

- If they recruit to for ‘culture fit’;

- If they don’t support flexible working;

- If they unilaterally impose changes in terms and conditions;

- If they cut the training budget to save costs;

- If they tolerate high-performing arseholes;

- If there are topics that are ‘out of bounds’;

- If they continually ask for more to be done with less;

- If they focus on profits;

- If they make you fit the process;

- If they allow workloads and stress to increase;

then they are not people-centric.

Because if they were, they wouldn’t do those things.

By their fruits shall you know them.

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I am finding interactions with others in the Substack community a welcome change from social media, like X.com. Give it a try.

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Factoids

The average American household contains 300,000 items; the U.S. has only 3.1% of the world’s children but 40% of the world’s toys; and Americans spend $1.2 trillion annually on non-essential items — ie, items they don’t need.

| Rishad Tobaccowallah

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The 2022 US Agricultural Census showed a decline in farm operations of every size category from the smallest to the largest. The number of US farms fell below 2 million for the first time, down to 1.9 million farms, showing a loss nearly 142,000 farms and 20.1 million agricultural acres from 2017 to 2022.

| via Dense Discovery

Most of these farmlands aren’t dissappering: they are being consolidated into larger farms owned by corporations (and rich people) as families leave agriculture behind. But 20.1M acres of lost agricultural land is a lot. Nebraska holds 19.7 million acres of cropland, for example.

I wonder how much of the loss is due to climate change, and formerly arable land drying up?

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The world economy — the combined size of all of the annual gross domestic products of every country on the planet — amounted to $100.88 trillion in 2022.

| World Bank (hat tip to Jeff Somer).

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For the first time since the first World Happiness Report was published in 2012, the United States fell out of the Top 20 and dropped to 23rd, pushed down by cratering attitudes of Americans under 30.

| Sopan Deb see report

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Elsewhere and Elsewhen

Just for today, I am leaving the Elsewhere and Elsewhen section open to all, as an indication of what a paid subscription opens up, along with the 700+ paywalled issues. Note that I plan to keep the majority of posts open, and I will open everything when I reach the lofty goal of 1000 paid subscribers.

Elsewhere

Peter Thiel, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg are leading a parade of corporate insiders who have sold hundreds of millions of dollars of their companies’ shares this quarter, in a signal that recent stock market exuberance could be peaking. As markets hit record highs, the ratio of corporate insider selling to insider buying is at the highest level since the first quarter of 2021, according to Verity LLC, which tracks insider trading disclosures. Stock sales at the beginning of a calendar year are normal, with pent up demand in early 2024 being exacerbated by shareholders avoiding sales last year because of depressed company valuations. But analysts still said this season’s spree has been surprising and an indicator that a recent tech bull run, fuelled by excitement over the rise of generative artificial intelligence, is about to wane. “If they think that we’re at the top and so they’re getting out, that’s a rather stark signal to everyone else,” said Charles Elson, a legal veteran and chair of corporate governance at the University of Delaware.

| FT

Or maybe they are just cashing in on the spike in prices partially caused by Wall Street’s happiness about layoffs and RTO mandates. Are they gaming the system?

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Inbox Fuckit

I have achieved Inbox: Fuckit.

See, Inbox Zero is just another job to do. It’s using up a bunch of decision cycles that can be more usefully put to actual creative work. We treat it as informational hygiene or a thing to actually achieve so we can pat ourselves on the back for not having ignored the cat turd on the kitchen floor. I’ve come to treat it as a false achievement. My inbox is currently 95 notes to self, newsletters and notifications, work stuff I need to keep handy, and emails I want to reply to only when I have the time and mindspace to write a proper letter in return. Important stuff and receipts get handled first thing and across the day during breaks. Everything that isn’t red-hot? That can wait a bit. Fuckit.

Inbox Zero is fake productivity. Inbox Fuckit is getting shit done in the real world. Relax. Embrace Fuckit. Give it a try and see if anyone notices.

| Warren Ellis

Elsewhen

I saw that a number of folks had clicked on and commented about a piece from 2022, one of the most popular here on Work Futures: