Mark Cuban got it right last week when he said that the way companies treat their employees over the next few months will define their brand for the next several decades. Companies insisting on this level of control are simply adding cost now and making employee retention difficult for when we end up coming out of this. If your company can't handle ground-level employees having some autonomy in their work, then your business model isn't likely to survive.
Besides, given the extraordinary circumstances I don't think it's fair to expect everyone to be equally productive to being in the office. In addition to the fact that some people just don't perform as well without the structure of an office (I'm personally one of them), we've got kids to take care of, extra chores to do, and the general anxiety coming from the media. People are not going to be 100% right now, so the need to build a work culture that can support that reality is more important now than ever.
> If your company can't handle ground-level employees having some autonomy in their work, then your business model isn't likely to survive.
> Besides, given the extraordinary circumstances I don't think it's fair to expect everyone to be equally productive to being in the office.
It's worth noting that you're describing a very specific subset of the world of employment, namely people who work with some degree of autonomy in an office setting.
I would be shocked if even half of the American workforce primarily works in an "at a desk" or equivalent type position.
I'm only describing the kind of jobs that can be done from home since that's the topic of the article. I'm not expecting an auto mechanic to fix a vehicle over video chat :)
I would be shocked if even half of the American workforce primarily works in an "at a desk" or equivalent type position.
I'm curious about this but don't have time to look up numbers. It's hard to make a reasonable guess because while cities (and the offices within them) have the highest density, there could be a very long tail of factory, strip mall, grocery store, etc. jobs that would be higher per capita outside of cities and invisible to someone living inside a city.
Even in a city you're completely surrounded by people who don't have desk jobs. All the people who deliver stuff to your office, the maintenance staff, all retail and restaurant employees, law enforcement and fire/EMS, taxi and car service drivers, and on and on and on.
And that's just what's in an office district. Drive down the NJ Turnpike or something and count how many massive employment centers you see that are primarily not office jobs. Everything from the shopping mall to the refinery to the airport to the distribution center.
I am going to add anecdote from my little corner. Last week all of our team ( 10+ people total ). Not terrible and it happened before so we were good. All of a sudden, vendor suffered a breach. We went into disaster mode and survived the day. That day was Friday. In its infinite wisdom senior management tried to bring one volunteer on a Sunday to the office so that they can manually do the things we did remote on Friday. No one volunteered, because it was a retarded idea. It was clear they wanted a live body to yell at. Friday was that kind of day. They eventually backed off.
But senior management here is old and unwilling to let go of control they thought they had so far.
Out of completeness, my pc is riddled with control crap running in background often slowing me down. Some of it makes sense ( why are you moving all this data ? ; why are looking up marijuana dispensary address ). Most of it does not fall under reasonable category..
So what people do? They adapt. They know their work pcs are riddled with crap so they spend ridiculous amount of time on their pocket computers instead..
Besides, given the extraordinary circumstances I don't think it's fair to expect everyone to be equally productive to being in the office. In addition to the fact that some people just don't perform as well without the structure of an office (I'm personally one of them), we've got kids to take care of, extra chores to do, and the general anxiety coming from the media. People are not going to be 100% right now, so the need to build a work culture that can support that reality is more important now than ever.