Elon Musk is wrong about remote work!
🛎️🛎️🛎️
The results are out… Elon Musk is wrong about remote work and we now have the research to back it up!
"I'm a big believer that people are more productive when they're in person," Elon Musk bluntly told CNBC. "People should get off their goddamn moral high horse with their work-from-home b*******."
And he is far from the only one who thinks so. Netflix's CEO, Reed Hastings, has called remote work a "pure negative." JPMorgan Chase boss Jamie Dimon opined about remote work, "It doesn't work for those who want to hustle." (What does hustle even mean here?)
These companies and CEOs have used Return To Office (RTO) mandates to reassert control over employees, blaming remote work for poor performance while believing RTO boosts firm values and financial outcomes.
Remote work advocates lacked evidence to counter these claims, UNTIL NOW!
A new paper by two University of Pittsburgh researchers looked at the financial performance and employee satisfaction of S&P 500 firms before and after they issued RTO mandates.
Their findings showed that RTO mandates often followed a dip in a company's financial performance, but didn't reveal any uptick in profitability or stock performance associated with having more bodies back in office chairs.
However, what did increase post-mandates was, to no one's surprise, the number of employees expressing dissatisfaction with their work on Glassdoor!!
The researchers are blunt in expressing: "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. Also, our findings do not support the argument that managers impose mandates because they believe RTO increases firm values."
To be fair to Elon Musk, we acknowledge that certain roles cannot be done remotely—we’re not unrealistic in thinking we can all build spaceships from home 😜
Also worth pointing out is that some data supporting in-person work is recommended for early-stage companies and also suggests that younger workers, those just starting in a role, or those engaged in creative brainstorming do better-working face-to-face.
However, the latest research from the University of Pittsburgh paints a strong picture that many higher-up commands to return to the office are more about ego, control, and fear than any actual benefit to the company.
So what's your take on this argument? Return-to-office or…
REMOTE WORK FOR ME!
Stay rebellious,
Michelle
*This weekly article is credited to Inc.
*Photo credit Tayfun Coskun/Anadolu via Getty Images