Elon Musk is right to bring workers back to the office, wrong to suggest remote work is lazy
Elon Musk is like that favorite high school teacher: Half taskmaster, half curiously fun. You never know which version you’ll get on a given day.
The witty Tesla founder and potential Twitter owner just announced an ultimatum to his Tesla staff Tuesday: Return to the office to work or you’ve quit. According to emails, Musk requires car-company executives to work a minimum of 40 hours per week in office and exceptions would be made only for exceptional contributors on a case-by-case basis.
Musk rationalized this demand as an example of company rapport, suggesting that it is important for factory workers building cars, who have been required to come into work throughout the pandemic, to see senior executives working in tandem.
If anything good came out of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was the realization that far more jobs can be done remotely than we realized. Whole industries. Entire companies. Even better, employees report being more productive than ever while working remotely: A Stanford study of 16,000 workers over 9 months found that working from home increased productivity by 13 percent.
According to a February 2022 Pew Research survey, nearly 60 percent of Americans with jobs that can be done remotely are still doing so, down from about 71 percent in October 2020. Before the pandemic, only 23 percent of people frequently worked remotely.
Here’s the real kicker: 60 percent of workers with jobs that can be done from home said if they have the choice, they’d like to work from home all or most of the time.
Statistics show happier employees are more productive, so this too is a boon. For employers, the choice about remote work seems like a no-brainer. Yet some employers, like Musk, seeing that the pandemic is waning, are demanding employees back to the physical workplace.
If you own your company, you should do what you think is best for it and your employees. And it’s clear many industries cannot employ people who work mostly from home. From healthcare or construction to law enforcement and production work, like factories, many jobs that simply cannot be done from home and often it makes no sense to have the people who are in support or executive roles out of sight either, if everyone else is physically at the workplace.
Some people believe working from home can diminish work ethic and disconnect workers from one another. Musk is renowned for his work ethic, sleeping on Tesla factory’s floor and working more than 120 hours a week in the company’s early days. He’s said he considers working 80 to 90-hour work weeks to be scaling back.
In May, Musk told The Financial Times that Americans “are trying to avoid going to work at all” and lauded Chinese workers who don’t leave their factories. Thanks, but I don’t think I’ll take my cues on work or life happiness from a country that censors everything, including Twitter, through a dictatorial government.
I highly doubt China is a shining example of boundaries or happiness.
That said, I could see where remote work might look lazy to a billionaire who produces rockets and cars. Especially when, during the beginning of the pandemic, fluffy, feel-good articles about baking bread and creating your best work-from-home-space abounded.
Still, only 4.3 million Americans, or 3.2 percent of the workforce, actually works remotely. If they’re thriving at work, they’re not exactly wiggling out of it, and the number is so small, it doesn’t affect the American workforce at large.
Like everything, there are trade offs. The only downside for remote workers is a real disconnect from co-workers that even innumerable Zoom calls can’t fix. I could see where remote work might also be really difficult for twenty-somethings just starting their careers. Mentoring by way of casual lunches or even walking down the hall to meetings is invaluable at the beginning.
On the other hand, many remote employees have found they can balance their work and personal life better now. They juggled more things that were important to them. Parents made more time with their kids.
Working from home isn’t for every industry, employer or worker, but Musk is wrong to say that it signals a decline in work ethic or laziness. For a small percentage of the American workforce, it provides a great balance of life and work.
That’s one of the best realizations to came out of the COVID pandemic.
This story was originally published June 2, 2022 at 2:32 PM with the headline "Elon Musk is right to bring workers back to the office, wrong to suggest remote work is lazy."
