John Quiggin makes two very good points about CEOs and their desire to force workers back to the office full-time, or nearly so. The first is something I’ve mentioned before–managers that aren’t in meetings feel superfluous to requirements (boldface mine):
The real concern driving CEO resistance is the fact remote work involves a previously unthinkable change in the way productive activity is structured and organised. If workers can do without the physical presence of managers, perhaps they don’t need managers at all, at least in the way they currently operate. The eagerness of CEOs and other senior managers to wish these changes away suggests that, at some level, they realise this.
As Gideon Haigh observed 20 years ago, the era of neoliberalism has been associated with the “cult of the CEO”. The office has been the shrine of that cult. In their plaintive call for a return there, CEOs are like declining deities who see their votaries deserting them.
But there’s a second point that I found interesting:
…a recent KPMG survey found that 83% of CEOs expected a full return to the office within three years. Such a finding raises serious questions, not so much about remote work but about whether CEOs deserve the power they currently hold and the pay they currently receive.
Many of the factors contributing to corporate success or failure, such as interest and exchange rates, booms and recessions, and changes in consumer tastes are outside the control of CEOs. And the success or failure of technical innovations is, to a large extent, a matter of chance.
By contrast, the organisation of work within the corporation is something over which CEOs have a lot of control. The case of remote work shows that the CEO class as a whole failed to pick up an innovation yielding massive benefits before it was forced on them by the pandemic, and have continued to resist and resent it ever since.
Again, the loss of control makes them nervous, because what if they (or at least a subset of them) are deemed irrelevant to most outcomes? That would be good for workers, but not for them personally.
mikethemadbiologist
Many workers would probably agree that there are too many middle managers, however, those same workers wouldn’t want those positions to be eliminated because those positions are often the only route for promotion and salary increase. So it’s a Catch-22.
The loss of control is a big driver. The record labels fought digital music and online delivery for decades before Steve Jobs convinced them that they’d be irrelevant if they didn’t move with the times.