The pandemic has forced the vast majority of office workers — in fact, anyone not working in the service sector, construction, manufacturing and a handful of other professions — to work from home.
For many workers this may have been the only good part of the covid quarantine and shutdown. Although their lives were limited to their homes with short, scary trips out, at least they didn’t have to commute to their offices.
This sparked an age-old debate over the concept of working from home. Many workers argued that they actually worked longer without having to go to an office, while a handful of CEOs took a stand on the matter.
Netflix (NFLX) – Get the report from Netflix Inc. Co-CEO Reed Hastings has been blunt about the matter and has made it very clear that he sees working from home as a major downside.
Big streaming is, of course, a company where many of their employees do creative work. Hastings might feel different if he ran an accounting firm or a type of business where collaboration was less important.
In his comments on the matter, he cited “debating ideas” as much more difficult in a remote environment.
Musk agrees with Hastings (perhaps for different reasons)
Your opinion is similar to Tesla’s (TSLA) – Get the report from Tesla Inc. and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, perhaps for different reasons. Musk took to Twitter (TWTR) – Get report from Twitter Inc.a platform he is currently involved in buying,
On May 31, Musk claimed on the microblogging platform that he had told Tesla’s executive team to work at least 40 hours a week at the company’s offices or “they should pretend to work elsewhere,” reported TheStreet’s Martin Baccardax.
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The CEO told the company’s leadership that “working from home is no longer acceptable (sic)”, that the work commitment should be done in a “Tesla main office, not a remote branch not related to work functions, for For example, being responsible for Human Relations at the Fremont plant, but having their office in another state.”
In Musk’s case, he wants office workers and managers working in the office because that was expected of the company’s factory workers.
The CEO cited his own time sleeping on the factory floor during one of the electric vehicle company’s drives to meet its production targets, which TheStreet’s Luc Olinga covered on June 4.
“The more senior you are, the more visible your presence should be,” the billionaire said. “That’s why I lived in the factory so much – so those on the line could see me working alongside them. If I hadn’t done that, Tesla would have been bankrupt a long time ago.”
That’s probably not a popular opinion among many Tesla workers, but the idea that workers can be more productive may be supported by new research from Eagle Hill Consulting.
Working from home may not work
While a survey of 1,001 U.S. adults age 18 and older who work full-time or part-time cannot definitively answer the question of whether remote workers are as productive as office workers, the numbers suggest that Musk and Hastings are a Score.
About 45% of remote workers — both remote and hybrid workers — surveyed said their teams’ performance had improved over the past two years. That’s better than the 34% of face-to-face workers surveyed on the same question — but none of the results give an overwhelming mandate to change the idea that most workers should go to the office on most days.
And while the data is inconclusive, they suggest that a hybrid approach — not what Musk wants, but closer to the Netflix model of four days at the office, one day at home a week — could be the solution.
Nearly all workers say their manager trusts them to get their work done, and this is pretty consistent for remote (96%), hybrid (90%) and face-to-face (96%) employees. But since the start of the pandemic, most employees report feeling more pressure to perform well (66%). This sentiment is substantially higher for hybrid workers (74%), followed by face-to-face employees (67%) and remote workers (56%).
The opinions of people working in offices were likely also affected by the fact that they likely had to observe Covid-related protocols while on the job. This likely influenced how they felt about their teams’ performance.