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CEOs are running companies from afar even as workers return to office

405 点作者 petethomas10 个月前

39 条评论

rtpg10 个月前
A recurring theme in so many startups I&#x27;ve seen inside is how the CEO in particular is extremely aloof with regards to presence. Sometimes that translates to aloofness for staff, but what more often happens is that when the CEO _does_ come in they expect other people to be there. So long as the alignment is good they don&#x27;t care, but when it&#x27;s not aligned, they just assume nobody is ever around and get real pissy about people showing up on time.<p>Fortunately the &quot;good&quot; ones are able to disassociate how much of that emotion is just them being lonely vs how much of it is actual synergy-seeking or whatever. The worst cases are people who get real tyranical, on top of just like... outright not showing up to do the actual day-to-day work that they are blockers on. A proper theory of the mind can often be quite absent.<p>My really glib take on this phenomenom is that a not-insignificant chunk of decision making for HR stuff is &quot;make the CEO fill the tip-top of their Maslovian pyramind&quot;. And to a lesser extent other executives who have decided that their job is their life.<p>Very annoying to listen to post-facto RTO arguments when you can feel the loneliness as the driving factor. Make a fun space, and make people&#x27;s work schedules be loose enough to where they can actually relax in the space, and some people will show up! Or at the very least, give the CEO a fun side project to work on or something.
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bearjaws10 个月前
Anyone surprised by this? I remember my first programming job it was FREQUENT that the execs would fly to other offices ~12+ weeks a year. Of course our office was in Orlando so every exec would also magically have their family flown in as well to go to Disney World.<p>5 jobs later, its been the same at any company that isn&#x27;t a startup. Execs have never been in the office, they have &quot;offsite&quot; meetings.
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karaterobot10 个月前
I think it&#x27;s more important for CEOs to be located in the same city as the company HQ than it is for any randomly selected employee to be. When VIPs visit the company, they expect the CEO to be present, not on Zoom. Plus, there used to be this thing where leadership had a more than tenuous connection to the legacy and culture of the businesses they ran, and even to the cities their companies were a part of. That&#x27;s harder to pass off if you can&#x27;t be bothered to go there. Imagine hearing a CEO say something like &quot;I care about Company X&quot; but they&#x27;re saying it from a thousand miles away, over a Zoom call, while all their employees are on site and hating being there. That says something about work today.
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andirk10 个月前
CEOs of medium&#x2F;large companies are the face of the company which means making a couple key decisions per week (a few work hours) and meeting with current&#x2F;prospective clients (leisure activities). Coupled with making far more $ than the rest of the employees, I suspect they&#x27;re both bored at the office and feel downgraded to a regular employee. Thus, out-of-office with nothing to show.<p>But if the company is _coincidentally_ doing great, then the CEO gets credit. If it&#x27;s tanking, the CEO leaves for another CEO position because the main prerequisite of being a CEO is having been a CEO, regardless of performance.
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adamtaylor_1310 个月前
Rules for thee, but not for me.<p>Alas, how could we?<p>We specialize in strategy.<p>Not possible in a seat.
sltkr10 个月前
<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;dwCFL" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;archive.is&#x2F;dwCFL</a>
seizethecheese10 个月前
This is engagement bait unless it has stats. What proportion of days are CEOs working remotely, what proportion are professional staff?<p>As someone who has done shift work before, it seems to me that the real dividing line is between professionals and non-progressional, not CEOs vs professionals.
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hintymad10 个月前
What I don&#x27;t understand is why tech companies don&#x27;t believe that they can enforce a high-performance culture without return-to-office. With or without remote work, the way we evaluate one&#x27;s performance has not changed, right? Then, why can&#x27;t we enforce the same expectation of engineers and teams? We break down a project into milestones, and we hold teams accountable to delivering the milestones on time and on budget. The process is orthogonal to return-to-office vs WFH. If a company can&#x27;t enforce the same standard just because its teams work remotely, would it say a lot about the incompetency of the company&#x27;s leadership?
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linotype10 个月前
Until people start leaving (and not joining) these companies en masse that have poor and hypocritical leadership, none of this will change.
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hnarn10 个月前
Many large corporations are just structured on modern feudalism with minor changes. They have a privileged nobility, an internal belief system (with attached clergy to match), and by definition a large majority &quot;working the land&quot;.<p>If you&#x27;re talking about a small company, to some extent this makes sense. I mean, if Alice or Bob starts a company, they&#x27;re risking more than you are; of course they get to decide. When you&#x27;re talking about a multi-national corporation with an employee count similar to that of a medium sized city in Europe, I&#x27;d argue that logic breaks down, because most people in positions of power are just men-at-arms brought in by the bureaucracy.<p>The CEOs are no longer the &quot;founders&quot;, they&#x27;re just exotic strangers from far-off lands that happen to know other CEOs and marry other CEOs. They dress differently, they talk differently, they act differently, and finally, just like the nobility, they often have personal agendas that may or may not align with the interest of the &quot;company&quot; (I&#x27;m referring here to the employees, not the shareholders).<p>There&#x27;s a quote I really like said by a frenchman (can&#x27;t remember the name, so sources are welcome) that goes something like: &quot;You cannot manifest the republic in society as long as monarchy reigns in the factory&quot;. And sure, I realize for many readers this is just commie gobbledygook, but I&#x27;d encourage everyone to at least think about the area inbetween extremes, and alternate ways we could structure &quot;work&quot;, because the older I get the more absurd this culture becomes, which is weird because I was kind of expecting my political skepticism to start wearing off with age.
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confidantlake10 个月前
RTO has always been about social hierarchy, not economics.
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23B110 个月前
Here&#x27;s a pro tip to CEOs and wannabe CEOs; get a fucking executive coach and work on not being a bubble-dwelling turd.<p>I swear to god American business has its head up its own ass, from the VPs to the ELT, and it&#x27;s the easiest thing in the world to have some goddamn self awareness and empathy.
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disqard10 个月前
I misread the title as &quot;CEOs are <i>ruining</i> companies from afar...&quot;, and found myself agreeing.<p>I sense that, CEOs are often ignorant of day-to-day (and even month-to-month) realities of what&#x27;s going on in their own company (probably unavoidable at large corps).<p>Basically, they have an &quot;astronaut&#x27;s eye view&quot;, so their decisions&#x2F;strategy are essentially just them operating while untethered to Reality, just going off of intuition. Sometimes, that guides them well, and they do a good job of &quot;running things&quot;. Other times, they&#x27;re just &quot;ruining things&quot;<p>When they do the former, the public valorizes them, and when they fail... well, they get to try again ¯\_(ツ)_&#x2F;¯
cratermoon10 个月前
Gotta wonder how much of the compensation and investment portfolios of those CEOs is in commercial real estate.
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29athrowaway10 个月前
Being in an office is a exclusive lock that prevents you from having multiple remote jobs. Other than that is serves no useful purpose.<p>And what the &quot;face to face conversations&quot; narrative really means is: 1) I don&#x27;t want to put things in writing, 2) I want to tell if you are lying.<p>RTO sucks
djbusby10 个月前
Where is my AI CEO?
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pradmatic10 个月前
When I worked at Veeva Systems (VEEV) my team sat right between Peter Gassner’s office and the SVP for our product org. PG was on-site at least 75% of the time from what I could tell. It was great to see, especially as a fresh grad.
physicsguy10 个月前
My previous companies CEO was barely in but decided to link bonuses to office attendance 3 days a week, and made his secretary secretly take a register of when people were in the office or not.
ewoodrich10 个月前
What bothers me personally when I read quotes from CEOs describing how often they work in the office or how productive they are is the lack of perspective that their &quot;day in the office&quot; is vastly different for them compared to the rank and file.<p>A CEO has much more autonomy to set their daily schedule as they see fit, which one day might be showing up at 6am if they&#x27;re in that grind mindset, and the next day might be showing up at 11am after a tee time and casual breakfast with colleagues or friends. They may have a schedule full of internal meetings but can choose to skip whichever they feel like isn&#x27;t a good use of time at their own discretion. They don&#x27;t ask permission from their supervisor or get passive aggressive texts asking if they&#x27;re planning to come in if they don&#x27;t show up by 9:30AM.<p>Psychologically speaking having that much freedom to direct one&#x27;s own schedule fundamentally changes one&#x27;s relationship with work. Obviously they have their own non-negotiable obligations so it isn&#x27;t completely in their control but the typical office worker at most companies is rarely entrusted to manage their own schedule to that degree even if they&#x27;re keeping up with their tasks and a high performer.<p>It doesn&#x27;t bother me that the nature of the CEO job is much different than a lowly software dev but instead it&#x27;s the lack of awareness or deliberate dishonesty that I find grating in the RTO debate.
thewileyone10 个月前
Most CEOs that I&#x27;ve worked under do most of their work outside of the office. That&#x27;s why they have COOs to run the day-to-day stuff.
pimpampum10 个月前
What does a CEO do anyway?
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neverartful10 个月前
Do as I say, not as I do!
tropicalfruit10 个月前
laying off 10,000 people is hard work<p>you definitely dont want to be in the same building as the people you&#x27;re laying off
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Animats10 个月前
So the new Starbucks CEO gets $150 million up front. That&#x27;s about $4,000 per retail outlet, which is probably not too bad.<p>If anybody sees him in a Starbucks retail location, post that to social media. Let&#x27;s see if he gets out much to check on things.
neilv10 个月前
Non-paywall: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seattletimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;ceos-are-running-companies-from-afar-even-as-workers-return-to-office&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.seattletimes.com&#x2F;business&#x2F;ceos-are-running-compa...</a>
chmod77510 个月前
Sure, especially in leadership you will often find sociopaths, but there&#x27;s plenty of people leading by example as well. The company I&#x27;m working at comes to mind, where every level of the hierarchy, including leadership, is on a an employment contract that pays a regular salary, allows WFH&#x2F;remote, and has just regular paid vacation days. Despite everyone having the option of being fully remote, it is the leadership who is generally in the office, while I&#x27;m typing this from another country. They <i>have</i> to be in our home country - where we make most of our sales - while I&#x27;m free to travel the other side of the globe. I haven&#x27;t heard a peep of complaint.<p>Almost all of my previous employers have been some variation of the above for the past 10 years. If instead I chased the highest paying jobs without thinking about quality of life, becoming a small cog in some behemoth of a company that doesn&#x27;t care if I wear down, then that&#x27;d be on me.<p>If you&#x27;re in tech, nobody forces you to work for a company that may pay you 200k&#x2F;year, but asks you to work and commute 60 hours a week. There&#x27;s plenty of other choices once you realize that beyond a certain point, salary matters much less than everything else for your quality of life.
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singular_atomic10 个月前
Rules for thee but not for me
xyst10 个月前
Rules for thee. None for me.
bitwize10 个月前
Expecting CEOs to live by the same rules and expectations as the line workers is like expecting generals to live by the same rules and expectations as privates. It&#x27;s just stupid. It will lose you the war in the military; what do you think it will do to a business?
nunez10 个月前
Makes sense to me if the execs who do this are in the air all of the time.
davidmurphy10 个月前
Workers should not return to the office.<p>WFH or remote work should be permanent for all -- CEOs and low level staffers.
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sltkr10 个月前
Quod licet Iovi non licet bovi.
game_the0ry10 个月前
Stunning how out of touch CEOs are with their own employees.<p>If there is one thing that would significantly improve the quality of living of all employees, it would be remote work. The fact that leadership wont give that (which costs nothing) I believe demonstrates some personality characteristic that is arguably sociopathic, and I do not throw that word around lightly.<p>If employees had a say in who gets to be leadership - which is how most of nature works - then CEOs would be be acting drastically different.
486sx3310 个月前
I mean, I do go to the Orlando office 4 days out of the 14 that my family and I stay at a 5 star resort .. ok maybe 3 and a half days with the 3rd afternoon spend at twin peaks
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broknbottle10 个月前
Rules for thee but not for me!
bamboozled10 个月前
Nothing new here at all.
drx10 个月前
Another advantage startups have over big companies.
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nubinetwork10 个月前
Rules for thee but not for me... Now if you&#x27;ll excuse me, you interrupted my golf game. &#x2F;s
high_pathetic10 个月前
So what? CEOs also get paid more. Where is this crying coming from? Create a company, become a CEO, do whatever you want.
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