Why Executives Like the Office (2021)

It&#x27;s about a whole list of things and many shades of gray between them: control, social needs, the need to be seen, crappy home life, unprepared for a home office, etc.<p>My managers at work (I&#x27;m a software engineer) tend to not have a dedicated office. They have kids running around being noisy and nosy. They STILL dress up wearing nice clothes. And I swear some of them talk about their gorgeous cars for the sake of talking about their cars, especially now nobody sees them drive or park those cars anymore.<p>They are also very verbose in any sort of meeting and dislike it when people turn off their cameras. I blame their extroverted social needs for this. They got to become a manager because of that social skill and need, and they are working with software engineers who are more toward the introverted side of the spectrum.<p>I don&#x27;t want to wake up early, drive my car in traffic jams, find a parking spot, see that someone stole my favourite (but still bad) office chair, sit in an open office full of noisy people, working on shared &amp; dirty keyboards, looking at small budget screens, on desks that can&#x27;t be adjusted.<p>At home I have a dedicated office with a sofa. Height-adjustable desk. Herman Miller Aeron chair all to myself. Mechanical keyboard (that doesn&#x27;t drive other people nuts with its sound) and expensive mouse. Two 27&quot; 1440p 144Hz screens on desk mounted arms. Both of my cats to keep me company. My own toilet all to myself. A fully stocked kitchen. A place to work out. A very nice 55&quot; OLED screen. My coffee machine is all mine (Gaggia Babila) with freshly roasted beans delivered every week. And my office has a view over a park and a large body of water.<p>Best of all: no office small talk. No interruptions at my desk. And if I realise, during a meeting, that I could just be a fly on the wall and continue working instead? Then I do exactly that, whereas in an office situation I couldn&#x27;t do that.

I don&#x27;t think I&#x27;d be where I am today if it wasn&#x27;t for sitting physically next to people and watching what they do, picking up on non-verbal cues etc. I love working from home, but I also have the mentality that we all need to &quot;pay it forward&quot; sometimes, so I tend to spend a couple of days a week in an office with (typically) more junior engineers who may not even have space for a desk in their flat share. The &quot;I&#x27;m alright, Jack&quot; WFH crew really get on my nerves - it&#x27;s a disappointingly selfish mentality.

The assessment that it is more difficult to &quot;have the managerial experiences and interpersonal experiences that you need to have to take your career forward in a work-remotely environment&quot; is fair. Because that&#x27;s office politics.<p>Also, it&#x27;s fair that it makes the company culture fragmented and nearly impossible to move together as a team for folks without that experience. Silos are real.<p>But, in my experience, the main reason is that senior leaders cannot let go of the &#x27;it&#x27;s work time you should be working&#x27; mindset, and understand that some people work best in the morning, some at night, and some in small bursts with breaks between.<p>I have learned that a VAST majority of companies simply suck at setting goals and measuring employee productivity.

This is also about job security. Technical people often have a record of what they have done. Think commits and PRs. Managers don&#x27;t have this. Their job doesn&#x27;t produce anything tangible, this is not to say that it is useless. There are good managers and bad managers, with the majority falling in the latter category.<p>Being seen in meeting rooms filled with people, talking to them, and pointing to things on a powerpoint presentation can give other more senior managers (who determine their position and compensation) the aura that they are hard at work and making things happen.<p>This of course is not very strong reasoning.

There seems to be a disconnect here:<p>&gt; 75% wanted to be in the office three days a week or more; only 34% of non-executives felt the same way.<p>They go on then to talk generally about people might need to be in the office. This is missing something really obvious though - Executives think <i>executives</i> need to be in the office. Not everyone. It makes sense that Executives - people whose role is primarily about co-ordinating the organisation obviously are better off being in the office because the office is good for all the things you need to do as an executive. It is great for high bandwidth communication. Meanwhile, individual contributors work is primarily solitary and so enjoy far more benefits from working at home in a more controlled, isolated environment.<p>Executives think they themselves should be in the office 3 days a week. That doesn&#x27;t necessarily mean that executives think everyone else should be in the office 3 days a week.

From my experience it&#x27;s all about control. If you&#x27;re at home they&#x27;re not sure if you&#x27;re working even if the results are there, but if they see you on your desk they think you&#x27;re working.<p>Jokes on them I used to procrastinate a lot more in the office

Though I do think there&#x27;s a lot of bad managers around, one thing to consider is that executive type roles tend to be people jobs, and people jobs are hard to do without face to face conversations. Office politics requires you to weigh what people want to do, and that&#x27;s often hard without seeing exactly what expression someone is making. It also thrives on knowing who is talking to who, and that&#x27;s also a lot easier to figure out in real life than via slack.

As someone fortunate enough to have worked remotely over the past two years, I&#x27;ve found the change enormously refreshing.<p>But, as with most things, there&#x27;s tradeoffs, and the author correctly points out a few of them:<p>&gt; These concerns have substance. Virtual work risks entrenching silos: people are more likely to spend time with colleagues they already know. Corporate culture can be easier to absorb in three dimensions. Deep relationships are harder to form with a laggy internet connection.<p>Another issue I&#x27;d add to this list is that promotions partially hinge on &quot;chummyness&quot; with decision makers. Remote work makes this challenging, and consequently, it might explain why folks are eager to get lucrative pay-rises and promotions by jumping ship to different companies. (Maybe this has always been the case, but it seems to have been exacerbated).

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220412074929&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.economist.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;2021&#x2F;11&#x2F;06&#x2F;why-executives-like-the-office" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20220412074929&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.econo...</a>

Am I the only engineer who does miss a hybrid office schedule? My productivity has cratered over the pandemic with WFH becoming constant. My motivation is nonexistent. In the past, having one or two WFH days per week allowed me to get solid focus time to crush tasks that required deep thinking. But that effect only lasts a few days tops. Going on three years of this, even the simplest tasks feel like pulling teeth. I’m burnt out and I really feel like being in a room with other engineers is the only solution.<p>It’s to the point that I’m thinking of leaving my fully remote company to find an in person office. Something I never thought I’d say.

You really don&#x27;t need an entire article to understand this - just ask your boss or your boss&#x27;s boss why they like being in the office. It is because it is harder to manage people (or they think it is harder to) remotely.

In my experience, it&#x27;s less about surveillance and more about Executives having absolutely no technical skills.<p>The only way to cover this deficit is to have bums on seats who will come and help at a moments notice.<p>Your experience may differ.

It all boils down to them being worried WFH exposes how useless most management actually is.

all cynicisms aside, if my presence makes an impact then you bet I&#x27;d like to be there too and it just so happens execs make calls that matter at the end of the day so they&#x27;re more likely to want to be present. salaried workers are labourers, having no say in company affairs, and it&#x27;s little wonder that they feel like they&#x27;re needed there. to do the work sure, but actual engagement? hard ask as they are decoupled (rightly or wrongly) from decision making therefore cut from the profit.<p>ps. having stock&#x2F;options doesn&#x27;t help either, it&#x27;s about control and agency and less so about ownership and profit

I work on-site and from home. There are pros and cons to each. Some people prefer one or the other. A hybrid solution is probably best, but I can do either or both. Each side has valid arguments (empty office space, office rent cost, lack of in-person chemistry) versus (no commute, more time to focus, just as productive).<p>Some people do take advantage of WFH and work less. Some people who cannot WFH feel it is unfair. It&#x27;s a complex issue and both sides should work together to come to a fair solution for everyone. Bickering about it and not compromising is unproductive.

I think it&#x27;s reasonable to believe that the kind of work executives do is done better in person. I&#x27;ve never been an executive, but I&#x27;d believe it. I do know that, for many individual contributors, the kind of work they do is better done remotely. Certainly their lives are better. That&#x27;s the real tension, in my opinion: whose experience is more important, and if it comes down a zero sum contest, who can make the other side blink first?<p>Ideally it should not come down to a zero sum contest, but that&#x27;s often how these things happen.

Life happens outside. Most of us only work for the sole purpose of actually doing things in that outside world.<p>You sit at home and work at Uber for X but everyone&#x27;s at home all day so there&#x27;s no need for Uber because no-one moves.<p>It&#x27;s like people here have fully internalized &quot;there must be work&quot; but not really thought about what the point of even doing it is.<p>Post-2020 life has been a neverending comedy show of these sort of quotes from people who &quot;like&quot; sitting in front of a screen so that tomorrow they can continue sitting in front of a screen.

I think managers being extroverted (or, if you read this thread, useless narcissistic status-seekers with bad home lives!) is part of the answer, but not all.<p>Another simple explanation:<p>For an individual dev, your job might be to, say, take a new feature and then work for hours or days on coding, debugging, documenting, etc. that feature. How that maps to WFH is pretty obvious (just code at home instead of work!) Getting up to talk to another employee is maybe a few times a day thing that just becomes a quick ping on Slack. Likewise, if you have a meeting that day, do it on Zoom.<p>Because you see how you can do your job, you are comfortable with WFH.<p>For a manager, your job is to get the people and teams you manage to work together to accomplish something, and perhaps make a few key decisions now and then. My contention is that, while I have no doubt that there <i>are</i> methods of succeeding at as a manager in a WFH system, it&#x27;s simply a much bigger change from how managers are used to working.<p>For example, walking around the office to see if anyone catches your eye and &#x27;grabs you for a quick question&#x27; is not straight forward (pinging dozens of people to say &#x27;hey, anything up&#x27; throughout the day is just bothersome.) Likewise, the simple act of observing team dynamics becomes hard because lots of communication is happening in un-observable private communication channels.<p>It maybe that the WFH model really is better for everyone, but I think managers are simply in for a bigger change to how they work and it&#x27;s therefore simple to understand why they are more hesitant.

Reading the title, I thought it was meant &quot;The Office&quot; as TV Series :(

Interesting that nobody talks about creativity in this thread or in the article. I imagine a lot of jobs just rely on execution, so those &quot;water cooler&quot; interactions that yield innovations down the line aren&#x27;t valued as highly.<p>Of course, as a scientist my social landscape and work environment are really different from most Economist readers.

Fundamentally, the question of why executives prefer in-person office over remote is -- extroverted people vs introverted people.<p>Extroverts tend to get promoted to management. They feed off the presence and interaction of others. But, more importantly, they want to show up and show off. They want to wear nice clothes in the office, not pajamas at home. They want their accomplishments broadcasted around the office, and that&#x27;s how they get noticed &#x2F; promoted. There is a lot of research that shows people who are extroverted get paid more.<p>So of course, extroverted managers are going to push for return-to-office, while their introverted subordinates prefer to work from home and at peace, especially when social interaction can induce anxiety (it does for me).<p>If you&#x27;re a manager, figure out how to make both personality types happy, not what makes <i>you</i> happy.

Time for another reminder of a study I saw long before the COVID-19 days - study done referring to software enabling distributed knowledge work.<p>Remote work improves the results of good managers, and makes bad managers&#x27; results worse.<p>Apparently because good managers manage for results, and bad managers manage only for indicia of sork, such as butts in seats, screen time, ability to walk around and interrupt to micromanage...<p>If a company at this point, with solid results for as-good-as or better results far lower costs (e.g., reduced office costs), and becoming more competitive (e.g., ability to hire workforce from entire continents and not just 50km from your offices), fails to be moving to substantial if not complete remote work, this is a negative sign, and you can safely avoid them if at all possible.<p>This goes for applying for jobs as well as investment.

Am executive. Hate office.<p>Other execs I work with do too. Can only think of 2 in the past 10 years I&#x27;ve worked with that had all of the tropes that these articles tend to parade.

Note that the people wanting to go back to the office have one. Often a very nice one, with a gatekeeper. The horde, on the other hand, doesn’t always have a desk to call their own let alone an office, gatekeeper, …<p>Power trips and lack of empathy sum up (senior) management far too often. The head shed exists to run the company. Other managers exist as conduits or team facilitators. If the grunts don’t grunt contentedly, there’s no company.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;b18QW" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.ph&#x2F;b18QW</a>

They love it because most of them are execu-morons.<p>Especially when talking about data and Excel.

&gt; Virtual work risks entrenching silos: people are more likely to spend time with colleagues they already know.<p>This is incredibly true for in-person work too.

TLDR; narcissists need an audience