Stop me if you’ve heard this idea before: a grizzled executive decides that remote work was just a fad and it’s time for all workers to return to the office. He or she believes that the pandemic was an anomaly and any changes associated with corporate operations because the crisis was meant to stay within the confines of this short, confusing, and challenging era.
These are the CEOs and executive leaders that made news throughout 2021 and 2022 by saying, collectively, “It’s time to go back (to the office).” These are the leaders, many of whom control very large and household brands, that still believe that most, if not all, necessary collaboration between workers must happen within the physical presence of an office.
It seems that James Gorman, CEO of financial giant Morgan Stanley, fits squarely into this bucket. “They don’t get to choose their compensation, they don’t get to choose their promotion, they don’t get to choose to stay home five days a week,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg while in Davos. “I want them with other employees at least three or four days.”
More from the Fortune article:
The investment bank CEO has been vocal about wanting his employees back in the office since the summer of 2021, when he said at a conference that it was time bank employees in New York made it back to the office. He also said he would be “very disappointed” if employees didn’t return in person by September of that year.
Then came the Omicron variant, throwing many companies’ well-laid plans out of balance. It forced many banks to adopt a softer stance on when they wanted employees to come back to working in person, especially in their New York offices, including Morgan Stanley. “I thought we would be out of it by Labor Day, past Labor Day. We’re not,” Gorman told CNBC in an interview in December 2021.
Gorman has continued to push this year for employees to start returning back to the office. During an event in March 2022, he noted that many people had adopted a mindset of “Jobland” where employees just showed up to work to do the job, versus “Careerland,” in which employees learned and developed skills from in-person interactions.
Enbridge’s Eric Osterhout, the company’s Senior Specialist, Category Management – Contingent Labor, put it perfectly on LinkedIn recently, saying, “Workers can decide to work remotely and can certainly choose their compensation. They can leave you and go to other organizations that do not have archaic thinking such as you demonstrate with your statement. Like it or not, the world has been forever changed and workers will leave go to companies that embrace flexibility and recognize that being a destination of choice for workers translates to competitive advantage in the war for top talent.”
It’s not fair, however, to peg Gorman as just an old-fashioned leader who wishes remote work would fade away (Gorman even admitted that we’ll never go back to five days in the office). There is much truth in the notion that more and more workers will be heading back to the office in 2023, especially as the emergency phase of the COVID-19 pandemic is in the rear view. There is nothing inherently wrong or unmoral, as an executive, to want the workforce to spend more time at the office. It’s the attitude that Gorman portrays that signals the same old problem that existed before the pandemic: a lack of trust and faith in the concept of flexibility and its link to the ultimate respect for workers.
Ardent Partners and Future of Work Exchange research finds that 82% of businesses leveraged more remote and hybrid work models in 2022 than in 2021, a powerful stat that also takes into account that the past year brought less pandemic-fueled disruptions (as well as powerful antiviral and an updated vaccine). This proves that flexibility is now an inherent attribute of the modern enterprise.
More and more workers will return to the office in 2023, regardless of the “normalcy” that we’ve recaptured. However, this does not mean that workers should trudge back to hours-long commutes, wasted time in meetings, and missing out on crucial family time as a result.
The question of productivity over the past three years has been answered. Both business leaders and workers alike understand that remote and distributed teams can drive value no matter where the work is taking place. And, to boot, the added sheen of flexibility means that workers are also happier with malleable arrangements, something that Gorman seems to be missing. It doesn’t matter if a leader allows its workforce to work two days a week from home or four; if the appreciation, empathy, or trust isn’t there, talent retainment won’t be, either.
Remote work is linked to flexibility, which is inherently linked to the trust in the workforce. It’s a lesson that we’ve learned time and time again over the past few years. Talent is what separates one organization from another; without access to top-tier skills and expertise, businesses cannot thrive in these dynamic times. If the modern enterprise wants to retain talent and become a destination of choice, aspects like remote work, flexibility, and, critically, trust, be embraced.
