Elon Musk’s demand that Tesla Inc staff stop “phoning it in” and get back to the office has thrust the world’s richest person into the noisy debate over the future of work, and shows again that some CEOs remain tone-deaf to employees’ growing demands for flexibility.
“Everyone at Tesla is required to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week,” Musk wrote in a message addressed to employees at the electric-car maker. That “must be where your actual colleagues are located, not some remote pseudo office. If you don’t show up, we will assume you have resigned. The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence.”
But that mandate might not be acceptable to some at Tesla, and will certainly spook staffers at Twitter Inc, which Musk is seeking to acquire, who have enjoyed a work-from-anywhere policy throughout the pandemic. In today’s tight labor market, with salaries soaring and workers quitting at a record clip, Musk’s policy could also cost him some talent.
Photo: REUTERS
“Companies that demand that their employees come back to the office are likely to face a set of problems,” said Brian Kropp, head of human-resources research at Gartner Inc, a technology-consulting company. “They will either have access to a smaller talent pool or will have to pay a compensation premium to force employees to come back.”
More than two out of three so-called knowledge workers — data scientists, engineers, graphic designers — prefer hybrid work, according to an ongoing survey of more than 10,000 white-collar workers from Future Forum. The research consortium is backed by Slack Technologies, a unit of Salesforce Inc that offers a popular workplace communications service.
EMPTY OFFICES
Just 19 percent of executives are working from the office five days a week, compared with 35 percent of nonexecs, Future Forum found. Those who are in the office full time report higher levels of stress and anxiety, and more than half would prefer to work flexibly at least part of the time.
Tesla’s chief executive officer isn’t having that. In his return-to-office memo, Musk said Tesla would have “long ago gone bankrupt” if he hadn’t “lived in the factory so much — so that those on the line could see me working alongside them.”
He also ridiculed companies with more flexible workplace policies, saying “when was the last time they shipped a great product It’s been a while.”
Carmakers, along with retailers and other firms with a mix of white-collar and frontline workers, walk a fine line when they extend flexibility to some employees and not to others.
The pandemic laid bare how dependent society is on the physical presence of blue-collar workers in hospitals, meatpacking plants and grocery stores. The idea of white-collar employees logging in safely at home, while lower-paid employees risked their health to show up in person, has been an added source of resentment in an already stratified US economy.
GOING IT ALONE
Musk’s office mandate contrasts with some auto-industry rivals. Ford Motor Co in April adopted a “flexible hybrid” model where some salaried staffers mainly come in for collaborative work and otherwise work from home. General Motors Co has a “work appropriately” strategy that lets white-collar workers log in remotely, rather than coming in every day. Mitsubishi Motors North America Inc offers its corporate employees the option to work from home all the time.
Musk’s dismissal of remote work, which he dismissed as “pretend,” illustrates a commonly held perception among bosses that remote workers aren’t as productive, innovative or collaborative as those in the office.
Goldman Sachs Group Inc CEO David Solomon last year called remote work an “aberration,” while Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman expressed frustration that New Yorkers were visiting the city’s restaurants but avoiding their offices.
Research from Nicholas Bloom at Stanford University and other academics has shown that remote workers are just as productive, and typically more satisfied, than office workers.
TWITTER’S TAKE
Musk’s ultimatum also runs counter to current policy at Twitter, which is one of the most prominent tech companies to let most employees work from home permanently.
“If our employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen,” Twitter said last year.
Half of the world’s workers do so remotely or in a hybrid setup, up from 9 percent prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a global study of employers by Willis Towers Watson, a risk-management and human-resources firm.
“The widespread adoption of these work arrangements during the pandemic has challenged some of myths that have accompanied remote work over the years, namely that people cannot be productive working remotely, which has fed into greater openness and acceptance,” said Brad Bell, director of the Center for Advanced Human Resource Studies at Cornell University. At Tesla, though, “clearly that is not true.”
If one asks Taiwanese why house prices are so high or why the nation is so built up or why certain policies cannot be carried out, one common answer is that “Taiwan is too small.” This is actually true, though not in the way people think. The National Property Administration (NPA), responsible for tracking and managing the government’s real estate assets, maintains statistics on how much land the government owns. As of the end of last year, land for official use constituted 293,655 hectares, for public use 1,732,513 hectares, for non-public use 216,972 hectares and for state enterprises 34 hectares, yielding
The small platform at Duoliang Train Station in Taitung County’s Taimali Township (太麻里) served villagers from 1992 to 2006, but was eventually shut down due to lack of use. Just 10 years later, the abandoned train station had become widely known as the most beautiful station in Taiwan, and visitors were so frequent that the village had to start restricting traffic. Nowadays, Duoliang Village (多良) is known as a bit of a tourist trap, with a mandatory, albeit modest, admission fee of NT$10 giving access to a crowded lane of vendors with a mediocre view of the ocean and the trains
The March/April volume of Foreign Affairs, long a purveyor of pro-China pablum, offered up another irksome Beijing-speak on the issues and solutions for the problems vexing the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the US: “America and China at the Edge of Ruin: A Last Chance to Step Back From the Brink” rang the provocative title, by David M. Lampton and Wang Jisi (王緝思). If one ever wants to describe what went wrong with US-PRC relations, the career of Wang Jisi is a good place to start. Wang has extensive experience in the US and the West. He was a visiting
One of the challenges with the sheer availability of food in today’s world is that lots of us end up spending many of our waking hours eating. Whether it’s full meals, snacks or desserts, scientists have found that it’s not uncommon for us to be mindlessly grazing at some point during all of our 16 or so waking hours. The problem? As soon as this food hits the bloodstream in the form of glucose, it initiates the release of the hormone insulin. This in turn activates a switch present in every one of our cells, which is responsible for driving cell
RSS