Manufacturing Consent For The Office:
In any case, the problem with young people’s careers isn’t remote work - it’s the people they work for. If you are a manager that is giving an assignment to the person you last saw in the hallway rather than the person who can do it the best, you are a scumbag. The person in question that’s also ignoring someone who’s remote is likely ignoring someone because of the color of their skin, or their gender, or something else they don’t like - they are biased, lazy, and cretinous.
Hey Anti-Remote Managers! Shut up.:
If you are willing to cut someone’s pay as a manager because they won’t return to the office, you deserve to have your entire pay cut and your job removed. You should be barred from managing other people until you’re able to pass a simple empathy test, or perhaps just never allowed to manage people again, a sort of corporate version of having a felony conviction for being too big a piece of shit.
That’s it, I’ve snapped. I warn you this is not the regular kind of newsletter I write where I am deeply thoughtful and reflective about the qualities of leadership and the future of work.
A study of 3500 American managers by employment background check company GoodHire found that 77% of managers would fire or cut someone’s pay for not coming back to the office.
I have a very simple message for them: Shut the fuck up.
I am sorry, I know, it’s cursing, it’s rude, and I should be nicer to people, but god damn, shut up. I am so sick of managers and executives complaining about how hard they have it and how they want workers to return to their nasty little work prisons so that they can do the same work they’d do at home but in the office.
“Clearly, managers are struggling,” said Max Wesman, GoodHire’s chief operating officer. “Organizations that find a work arrangement that satisfies the majority of their workforce will benefit in the areas of recruitment, productivity, employee satisfaction, and retention.”
I know I am meant to be writing a newsletter with the rigorous research and thought process that you’d expect from a journalist or otherwise intelligent writer. Still, I cannot find nuance in how I feel about this study and anyone who agrees with it. If you are willing to cut someone’s pay as a manager because they won’t return to the office, you deserve to have your entire pay cut and your job removed. You should be barred from managing other people until you’re able to pass a simple empathy test, or perhaps just never allowed to manage people again, a sort of corporate version of having a felony conviction for being too big a piece of shit.
I really want to be reasonable, and calm, and fair, but I cannot. I am sick and tired of these worthless, brainless cretins that seek to push their inefficient corporate policies on workers because they’re too insecure about the fact that they’ve done nothing of worth with their lives.
These people are losers, and you are a loser if you agree with them. You hate the people that work for you and see them as objects, and you are stunned that your lack of humanity and intelligence has led to people not wanting to share physical space with you. You are a net negative to society, consuming resources without providing anything of worth or merit, and you exist as a vacuum for productivity and young people’s happiness.
I hate you with my entire being. Have a terrible weekend.
Capitalism Only Does This When It’s VERY Distressed :
Let me be perfectly clear: if your business cannot function without paying people below a liveable wage in your state, you are running a bad business, and you should shut it down. If your existence is predicated on direct exploitation, you are a worthless goblin. We are told our entire lives that we should live within our means, that we should be careful with our money, and yet we rarely hear anyone telling businesses to do the same thing.
Remote work didn’t kill company culture - it just proved that it never mattered, or even really existed beyond the tolerances and intolerances of those in power. Company culture exists to manipulate workers into believing that they owe something to the company other than their labor, and that leaving said company would be “letting someone down.”
This is why executives are pushing people back to the office - because, without physical presence, there really is no company culture. And when there’s no company culture, the only differentiator between you and another company is how much you pay and treat workers, which is more expensive, time-consuming and less satisfying than trying to con your workers into believing that their boss is their dad and their workmates are their brothers and sisters.
Company culture is used as a means of trapping workers at a job through guilt and peer pressure by adding societal responsibility to the transaction of labor for money. It’s also a way in which executives and managers can wield power by emotionally manipulating workers, making them feel guilty for not “being a team player” because they didn’t stay late or that they don’t drink with the rest of the team.
Office and Company Culture Are Bullshit:
The entire idea of Office Culture is entirely predicated on trapping people there. It is an inefficient yet satisfying way in which executives and managers find way to extra more labor out of people, with creative measures like “nap rooms” and free food to give them more reasons to stay and work unpaid overtime.
Company culture is if anything an extension of the same tools - it is a mechanism through which the company wields command over the intentions and actions of the worker to squeeze more out of them, and make them feel bad when they disagree with the company. Much like the definitions of why we need to be in the office, it’s an unwieldy blob that is dropped onto workers to tell them that they’re being bad - that they’re missing out because they’re not “in the office,” or “fitting in with our culture,” which usually ends with a manager or executive asking whether someone is “loyal to the company.”
Everybody is terrified that the magical things that happen in an office might not happen if we’re remote, as if being in each others’ personal space is a magical force of unity.
The entire idea of Office Culture is entirely predicated on trapping people there.
Company culture is if anything an extension of the same tools - it is a mechanism through which the company wields command over the intentions and actions of the worker to squeeze more out of them, and make them feel bad when they disagree with the company.
Let’s just be brutally honest - company culture is often management contorting itself into a pretzel in an attempt to not compensate a worker, and to remove themselves from being an exchange of work for money.
“.. management has created a structure that benefits management and captures the time and soul of the worker, who they believe they have some ownership over. Labor is not enough for many managers - they want to feel like they have power, which requires controlling and influencing the lives of others.“
Company culture is industrial guilt - it’s “just what we do here” - and without an office, it becomes significantly harder to wield, because there isn’t an easy way to wield power over a distributed group of people
It isn’t about work getting done - it’s about work getting done for you.
. Let me tell you what’s actually happening here: big companies are being driven by executives that are barely in the office to have people back in the office because they want to justify their stupid, wasteful real estate and feel good about having people that they own running around the office. These executives have escaped the realm of monetary concern, and thus can only get their kicks by manipulating the time and space of those that work for them.
The Work-From-Home Future Is Destroying Bosses’ Brains
At its purest, it is hiring people for vanity’s sake - you’re not hiring because you want to make more money, you’re hiring because you want to do less and own people.
Bosses love the idea that they capture your time and part of your soul with work - you are theirs, “full-time.” Their intention was not just to hire you for a task within an organization - it was to trap you and your production in the office, and on some level divorce you from your labor while extracting it, in exchange for the “protection” of full-time work that rarely if ever defends you from layoffs or firings, especially in at-will employment states. That’s why Shayne’s statement is so powerful - it is not about work, it is about ownership.
You can’t monopolize someone’s time when you can’t trap them and act as a hall monitor over their every action, and so they want you back in the office. They deep down know you’re not working all 8 hours of the day at your work station, but they know that you know that they could walk behind you at any time and see that you’re doing something else. They don’t want to make the office a place where things actually get done, because that’s not the point to them - the point is that they own you.