Baffled by the U-turn some influential business leaders have made, I go in search of some answers as to why

What the hell has changed… I have read thousands of lines of blogs, news articles, white papers and comments about this whole demand for people to come back in the office to understand: “Why?”.

No one has a clear idea, as far as I can tell.

What I can deduce is a number very prominent CEOs all wanting the same thing, some form or return, from a few days to full-time in some well publicised cases, to the way it was. And these CEOs have a lot of sheeple following them. That’s the worry.

One CEO, Sam Altman CEO (again) of OpenAI, stating that the whole WFH period was a “failed experiment”. And some of these CEOs are prepared to make it rather enticing or very difficult to get their way – from quadrupling salaries to automatic resignations at the extremes. Perhaps the most ironic is Zoom wanting their employees to return. I wonder if CEO Eric Yuan used Zoom to tell everyone?

I have read that collaboration, communication, productivity, culture, and oversight are the reasons for wanting people back… right. So, all of these things in the pandemic collapsed and the business world exploded into a fiery ball of confusion and failure that we are only just recovering from as a result of being forced back into the office.

Err, no. I think we’d have seen this happen far, far sooner. So here are some thoughts.

Let’s look at Leaders

Are our CEOs, MDs, Founders and leadership teams working in isolation? Probably not. They will have a team of directors or a board/consultants to advise them, plus their lieutenants in the field and the Talent/People/HR people as well. And let’s not forget all forms of pillow, dinner table and golf club talk. So… how are all these people coming to the conclusions?

Also, many of these prominent leaders seemed to be the poster kids of remote working in the pandemic, citing how important it was for their cultures, individual health and wellbeing and business had never been so good. Fast forward three years and these same leaders have back-peddled faster than an MP at election time.

Most CEOs will make decisions based on data – I can’t imagine they’ll flip open TikTok and use the balance of probability from a bunch of creators and Gen Zees. So what data are they looking at?

The big P (productivity) floats to the top of many lists, but that just made me wonder just how does a company, large or small, judge and define productivity, a notoriously capricious measure to pin down?

KPIs across departments? Sales figures. Website hits. Clickthrough rates. ROI. COA. EBITDA, which the late, great Charlie Munger said, “Every time you hear EBITDA, just substitute it with 'bullsh*t'.” So perhaps not that then. Profitability over time. People ticking off their to-do list? Length of time to complete tasks. Staff feedback. Hours worked to complete tasks. Output divided by inputs. Generally, these are strategic measures, based on grouped data - lead or lag.

But people are not machines and do not perform at a consistent rate day-in, day-out.

What else did I find?

One of the questions that popped up was what the hell is so great about the office, anyway? Good point! How many of these resonate:

office politics; long commutes; cost of commuting; people disliking each other/relationships; noise; interruptions; discrimination; sexual harassment; long hours; poor diet; illness (sharing of bugs); childcare challenges; pet care challenges; cost of food; cost of cultural expectations such as birthday/leavers; individual try to deal with unseen illnesses and mental health; where people sit; faith inclusion; can mums breastfeed; cramped spaces; poor tech; general cleanliness; parking; office tracking/observation; physical distances - spread across floors; go into the office to sit in hours of video calls… I am sure you can think of more.

Do CEOs just want window dressing?

Bums on seats, to hear fingers hitting keys and see activity going on. Which, to me, is more about control than anything else – or more a fear of a lack of control. It’s an old fashion paradigm about presenteeism or even imposter syndrome, seeing a full office justifies the purpose. And there is more than a little ego in there as well. It is also likely more than one paradigm is contributing. Like us all, leaders will want to work with likeminded people, their own energy and productivity could well be tied into why they like to be in amongst the throng. Musk said in one interview that if he’d not been at the Tesla factory he'd have failed years ago.

CEOS return to work policy — Do COEs just like seeing bums on seats as it makes them feel good and the impression that their businesses are being productive?

Is it just laziness?

More the inability to accept and embrace change than laziness, I feel. Maybe even flawed thinking around performance expectations not being those of when the pandemic first hit so what’s known will work. Get people back in; we have 500-years of data and insight to ‘prove’ this works.

Is it fear due to the financial climate?

We do have a lot of uncertainty right now, but even the WTO are being cautious about calling it a recession. Some commentators are saying, in this case some dude from JP Morgan, “It will happen at some point,”. Headwinds are recession so in preparation this could be a version of battening down the hatches. Of course, layoffs mean the employment market goes from buyer to seller. Whereas for the last three years, employees have had a disproportionate power ratio in the talent acquisition stakes. Perhaps now with this current ‘ghost recession’ looming (possibly, maybe) that balance has shifted. Though evidence is out there showing that next to salary, hybrid and flexible working is second on the riders and people are determined to maintain the hybrid working status quo.

Anything more sinister?

Well, yes. If there is going to be a global recession (people are being let go in big numbers, more in the US than the UK) – staffing is your heaviest financial burden. But what better way for a CEO/MD or leadership team to organically thin the herd than enforcing something they know will be unpopular with around 50% of their people, certainly consolidating a percentage of people to collect their things and move on – and with no redundancy pay out. Smart… or cruel? Oh the life of a CEO.

**Global downturn?** Is this the opportunity leaders have been looking for… and perhaps a sign for you to do something new?

**Employee efficiency – is that not a race to AI?**

Without wanting to become too philosophical, what is the endgame here for CEOs, and wider for us all? We hear efficiency, effectiveness, productivity, and many more of these terms and measures, but are these the things that get you up in the morning? Do wake up and the first words are “I wanna be damn effective today!” or “I will increase my productivity today by 7%”.

Are we not judging ourselves by incredibly flawed, even harsh metrics. Will we, and business leaders, only ever be happy when we can actually measure human performance on a daily basis with a ‘work effectiveness App’, perhaps with data from one of Musk’s brain chips wirelessly sending analytics to it, feeding data to an amalgamation centre where ChatGPT AI gives each individual an hour-by-hour performance rating and our compensation becomes an aggregate of this data? Actually, the tech part of that idea does sound quite thrilling, if rather disconcerting at the same time!

Should the CEO/MD/Founder have the right to dictate the culture to everyone else?

Unless a small company, I don’t think they can. But yes, they should, and then employ from within that culture envelope. For larger businesses, leaders can create a framework they ask people to follow, even lever a cult of personality, but every business of a certain size has microcultures created by ‘leaders’ at all levels. That will never change.

But there must be some genuine reasons why CEOs/leaders want us back in the office, right?

Teaching through doing. Learning through observing. Some skills, and activities, can only be taught this way – and some people’s preferred learning is also this way. In person. By wrote. Show me. And yes, some people and teams genuinely do become electric when they collaborate in the right way. In addition, some people just wanna be around others, for multiple reasons. Even escape. However, if it’s just more of the same pre-pandemic, my fear is staff purposefulness and motivation will rapidly dissipate and we could end up in another Great Resignation cycle.

The keys are: purpose, balance and choice. Not force.

This whole work from home thing started as a no choice option, with huge amounts of fear about productivity, success, technology, only to end up revolutionising the mindsets of people around their relationship with their companies and work generally. Well, for many it has, and still is.

I feel we should be starting with a different view, totally changing the paradigm.

What would help enable people become more consistent, more purposeful?

Numerous research has proven it’s not more money. More time for work? No. What with the success of just about every 4-day-week study I can think of, less actually seems to be more!

So perhaps measures around purpose, the problems the business is solving, how the business is supporting a community and environment, how close it is sticking to its mission, vision and values.

And this comes back to telling stories about those key indicators. Taking people on journeys and following them and supporting them on those journeys. The OUTCOMES emanate from the journeys, the purpose, the mission, the culture. Yes, this is very altruistic, I get it. Richard Branson said, and I am paraphrasing (I am sure Mr B won’t mind, he seems pretty chill – he did interview for a very senior exec role from his bed in his jammies once – oh and he is a squillionaire):

The customer does not come first, your team comes first. Look after your team, really care for them, nurture them and they will happily, joyfully (not every day, this isn’t bloody Hollywood) look after your customers.

Okay, I may have embellished the sentiment, but you get it.

I wonder if people have been consulted on changing their business culture of the last three years, suddenly reverting back? I wonder if it’s likely that this reversal will attract a certain type and only go one way! My advice to CEOs, for what it’s worth, is: listen to the people that work for you – like next level listen. Make people feel they are part of the solution, not the problem. Empower them to control their own destiny by extending trust and hold them accountable to their agreed commitments.