Bob Goldman
(Warning: This column is for CEOs only.)
If you’re a CEO, you’re probably in a bad mood right now. And rightly so.
Your stockholders complain every time the price of your stock drops a measly 50 percent or 60 percent or 70 percent. Your employees complain simply because you’re paid 400 times the salary of the average worker. Most annoying of all, no one will come back to the office.
It’s intolerable!
Provide an efficient workspace in a charming high-rise or a bucolic office park, and still your ungrateful employees insist on working from the miserable hovels they call home.
It’s not like you’re unwilling to compromise.
When your employees wouldn’t come to the office five days a week, you offered the olive branch that is hybrid work. Come in for four days, you said. Or three. Or the third Monday of every month when Mercury is retrograde.
In other words, drop in whenever the mood strikes you.
And still they stay home.
Oh, they will jump on Zoom for a meeting now and then, but what fun is it to run a meeting when there’s no one sitting at a conference table, shaking in their boots? Why, with no one in the office, you can’t even fire your employees. How is it possible to send someone home when they’re home already?
No wonder CEOs are fed up and not going to take it anymore.
Like Amazon CEO Andy Jassy, who told employees who refused to return on his schedule, “It’s probably not going to work out for you at Amazon.” Or JP Morgan Chase & Co. CEO Jamie Dimon, who announced that “managers may consider attendance in performance reviews and take ‘corrective action’ if requirements are not met.”
Whatever hardcore CEOs like Jassy and Dimon are doing, it isn’t working. According to “The Five-Day Office Week Is Dead,” a recent article in The New York Times by Stanford professor Nicholas Bloom, today’s office occupancy rates “were at 50 percent of February 2020 levels.”
“That is shocking,” concluded the professor. “Only half as many days are spent in the office compared with prepandemic times.”
Is there a solution to this dilemma? Yes, there is.
Instead of putting all your effort into pulling employees into your office, where they can be supervised by your managers, turn it around and begin pushing your managers into your employees’ home offices.
Starting with you.
Imagine the joy in your employee’s face when they answer the doorbell at 6 a.m. to find you standing there. In you stride, stopping briefly to wipe the noses of your employee’s children as they leave for their jobs at the poultry processing plant.
Since your employee will likely be working from the kitchen or dining room, you take the bedroom. What a wonderful surprise when your employee’s partner wakes up to find you in the closet, making an inventory of your employee’s wardrobe blunders for inclusion in their quarterly review.
As a CEO, you spend your morning making phone calls, arranging golf games and discussing CEO matters, like company-wide layoffs and moving headquarters to fourth-world countries where “people appreciate a steady paycheck.” If your employee hears you, no problem. It will increase their understanding of the pressure on you.
Generously, you take time in your busy morning to drop in on your employee and review their work in progress. After you have eviscerated their projects, turn your attention to other aspects of your employee’s life, like how they could brighten their dreary home by upgrading the window treatments, and the how a regression analysis of their laundry basket indicates beyond statistical doubt their partner is cheating on them. Given your CEO-level communications skills, you will have no problem convincing your employee they need couples counseling, which the company health plan will not pay for.
With your employee’s life and home decor issues resolved, set up a light lunch of lobster and chardonnay at Chez Garage. Bring cottage cheese for your employee, who definitely needs to lose weight and will certainly appreciate your diet advice.
It will then be time to start discussing the afternoon schedule, but before you bring out the whiteboards, your employee will have changed out of their sweats, ready, willing and desperate to return to the office.
As your other executives start working in employees’ homes, word will spread, and you will no longer have trouble convincing everyone to return to the office. At which point, you can start working from home.
It’s quite delightful, and you deserve it.
Bob Goldman was an advertising executive at a Fortune 500 company. He offers a virtual shoulder to cry on at bob@bgplanning.com.
COPYRIGHT 2023 CREATORS.COM