The Return To Office Hypocrisy: A Short History

If you’re alive and working in a white-collar job in 2024, there’s a very good chance that the conditions of your workday have recently undergone some profound changes. By the mid-2010s, there had already been mounting pressure on most companies to offer their employees more favorable conditions, including home office, flexible hours, and shorter work weeks.

While older workers cling to the mid-century values of a 9-5, 5-day grind, younger workers reject what they consider to be a tired and tiring orthodoxy that leads to burnout, depression, and, not least, lower overall productivity. Since the global pandemic began almost five years ago, Gen Z workers in particular have become outspoken critics of the broken office culture that now beckons them to return to the office full-time.

As we discussed in a recent post, at least part of the problem for younger workers is that the modern office environment is alienating, highly automated, and fails to offer the sense of collaboration and spontaneity that management often imagines it to have. Workers in offices across the UK and North America do much the same routines in offices that they would do from the comfort of their own homes, as meetings continue to happen on Zoom, and work happens on productivity tools like Slack. 

Meanwhile, housing prices, especially in the business corridors between major urban centers, are unsustainably high, pushing younger workers to look farther afield, and depend on remote work to live somewhere they can better afford. Meanwhile, congestion charges, public transit ticket prices, and tolls are climbing higher than ever in major cities like London and New York, while daycare for young children is often ridiculously unaffordable. 

Overall, it’s an expensive time to be a young worker in developed countries. 

Weird RTO Mandates

Yet a long list of companies are tapping their entire workforces for a forced Return to Office (RTO) sometime in 2024 or 2025. Apple, AT&T, Dell, GM, IBM, Uber, Amazon, and bizarrely even remote-work giant Zoom are all demanding that employees commute to their offices at least several times a week

The irony is that some major employers pushing for RTO are the very same companies that have been working for years to make home office work feasible. AT&T is a leading internet service provider. Apple supplies home computers, phones and tablets, Amazon provides the data and computing infrastructure home offices rely on to get work done, and Amazon and Uber bring fresh food to the doors of millions of people a day. 

As if that hypocrisy was surely not enough to rub younger workers raw, today’s management class are among those who enthusiastically take advantage of home and hybrid working arrangements. Seattle-based coffee giant Starbucks recently made a deal with its incoming CEO, Brian Niccol, that will allow him to commute by corporate jet from Newport Beach, California – a round trip flight of about 2000 miles, at least twice a week. This while the company warns of a new “accountability process” for its remote workers that will require them to return to the office at least three times a week.

The hypocrisy couldn’t be much more pointed than that, but it’s not at all unusual. Far from being merely embarrassing, this lack of management accountability to company policies has been linked to numerous scandals and corporate failures. This includes the safety and quality struggles of Boeing, which allowed its former CEO David Calhoun to commute by private jet throughout his tenure, creating a lack of effective oversight that some blame for the company’s problems.

Values Disconnect

What seems clear, whether one blames these specific executives, is that there is a growing disconnect between the values of younger generations and those who are now inheriting political and corporate power. 

There seems to be more going on than the simple belief that more time spent at the office means more productivity or better results. If that were the case, surely, shareholders would widely take the position that longer vacations, more flexible schedules, and super-commuting should be off-limits to executives, who should be spending much more time “in the trenches,” inspiring their teams to collaborate and get things done. 

Of course, that’s not the case. Company boards understand that to attract top management talent, they have to offer attractive pay, comfortable work conditions, and other perks. Yet when it comes to executives managing their salaried workers, this logic seems to be forgotten in favor of romantic notions of teamwork, personal commitment, and self-sacrifice, that will magically push the company to new heights. 

That disconnect is not even as bad as it could be. Today’s Western work culture, particularly in the technology and manufacturing industries in America, draws much inspiration from the example of Japan, which won many converts to its work culture during the “economic miracle” it enjoyed in the 1970s, 80s, early 1990s. 

It’s known colloquially in Japan as ganbaru, a bushido-inspired workplace culture that stresses extreme excellence, personal dedication, and self-sacrifice for the sake of the company. Many breathless accounts of this admittedly impressive cultural value set ignore the roots of the ganbaru system in Japan’s long history of feudalism and slavery, in which the duty of every individual is to serve the good of their liege lord, and by extension, the country. 

Living to Work: A Possible Future

Japan dazzled the business world in the 1990s with their dedication to innovation and high quality. Yet there are tangible downsides to this extreme commitment and self-sacrifice, or what my generation might term “grindset.” Japan may be unusual in its commitment to work, but its experiences should be demonstrative.

Not only does Japan consistently struggle with extremely low worker productivity, owing to its overly long work hours and its culture of social deference to managers, as well as to excessive drinking and lack of sleep. The country as a whole has now experienced a near generation-long economic recession, with persistent price deflation, which has left workers with even fewer options for better working conditions, and with little hope of improvement. These trends contribute to alarming rates of death by overwork, as well as workplace suicides. 

Since the 1990s, Japan’s persistent inflation has accompanied a decline in productivity, which is either a result, or possibly the ultimate cause of its economic problems. As Japan’s working-age population has declined, and work hours have increased, productivity has only gotten worse, feeding yet more declines in consumption, lower prices, and yet poorer productivity.

Some economists suspect that the risk-averse Japanese banking culture, which led to over-investment in the country’s few mega-conglomerates, now combines with this deeply held cultural emphasis on “working harder, not working better” and the desire for workers to be employed at major firms, to continually depress Japan’s economy, smothering small and medium-sized businesses with a lack of investment capital, a lack of workers, and a lack of customers with money to spend. 

One thing above all seems clear: at the extreme, overwork and an unfailing belief in quantity over quality can lead to a persistent economic decline that impacts workers’ ability to live healthy and productive lives. It would not surprise us at all if the future of the American and British economies look a lot more like Japan, unless we reform how we work, along with why. 

Why We Should Work 

There is another looming problem that Japan helps us to see by example. 

As the corporate world in the west continues to consolidate power into fewer hands, and as monopolies of the previous century re-form, the how of how we work is changing whether we like it or not. It’s obvious from what we’ve said so far that we think the maniacal focus on in-person productivity is outmoded and even dangerous to public health and to the economy. 

But another problem that Japan illustrates is the question of why we work at all. How does a society like Japan sustain itself when overall productivity and individual productivity are continually falling across the board? When workers can expect that their pay and their conditions will not only not improve in the near term, but in the long term are sure to only get worse, why do people get up and go to work at all?

Managers pushing for RTO will argue that the camaraderie of the modern office is what will motivate workers to continue to be productive. But as we’ve discussed in detail before, the modern office has become so digitized, that office workers often experience more alienation and loneliness in their offices than they would in their own homes. When the workplace is a hot-desk in a mostly empty office building, many execs think coffee and lemon water are going to motivate workers to show up and interact with each other, producing value fo the company.

This attitude, stuck in an era when rapid personal advancement was attainable at the office, is at odds with the behavior of executives themselves, who are frequently absent. So why should younger workers put themselves out for employers who don’t seem to understand their working conditions? 

The Withdrawn

The answer of course is that many in the younger generation have stopped trying. The term for them in Japan is Hikikomori: “the withdrawn.” 

These are people, often young men, but increasingly men and women across a larger span of ages, who become completely withdrawn from society following some personal, financial, career, or romantic failure. Beginning in the 1990s, and timed pretty closely with the overall setbacks to the Japanese economy, many middle-class children in their teen years began to withdraw completely from society, becoming utterly dependent on parents and other caregivers to sustain them. Today, Japan recognizes this as a real public health emergency. 

Perhaps as many as one million people in Japan qualify has Hikikomori, about one in every 147 people, and their average age, once thought to be about 21, is now 32 years old.

It won’t surprise many to hear that this phenomenon is no longer exclusive to Japan. The ready availability of video games and streaming services, and the relative anonymity of social media like Reddit and Twitter help enable a generation of American digital hermits.

It’s convenient to blame digitalization, the internet, video games, or anime culture for normalizing this phenomenon, but we think that rather ignores a more glaring cause: hopelessness and loneliness are fed by what Marx once called “self-estrangement,” the process of a worker or a member of society becoming alienated from the work he or she does for that society. 

If that work lacks meaning, or if the meaning of that work seems inherently suspect or questionable in value, a person may become detached from the face they wear in public, and the persona they adopt to do that work. 

Anti-Heroes

Think of a teacher who feels that their job doesn’t involve teaching children, but instead solving computer issues, or administering standardized tests. Think of the office worker who spends half of their days in meetings and half of the remaining time checking their emails. A person who does not spend a substantial portion of their productive time actually being productive is ripe for alienation.

This tension in workplace culture is very apparent when one looks at popular entertainment over the past 20 years. Shows like Breaking Bad, The Office, Succession, Mad Men, or the recent hits Andor, and Silo, all heavily feature workplace alienation and rebellion from societal norms by anti-hero characters.

We don’t believe this trend is a coincidence. When TV isn’t consumed with fantasy or sci-fi, and when it depicts anything close to our modern work culture, the story is generally the same: lonely people working within inhumane systems that they don’t understand and come to resent. It’s a dangerous cultural moment when society feels that its only heros must be superhuman comic book characters or fantasy creatures, and that its normal, average human heroes must be outlaws, rising up against the oppressiveness of modern life. 

If Japan serves as a glimpse of the future of office culture, the current trend doesn’t have a happy ending. Depressed people, given enough time, depress whole economies. Alienated people don’t work well together, and that lack of cohesion at work leads to a lack of direction as an organization, with a leadership class that is completely disconnected from the everyday lives of both workers and customers.

New Approaches to Employment

There can be hope in this situation. But only if we acknowledge the reality of the world we are creating together. 

The Amazons and the Zooms and the Apples of the world must understand that the technology they have introduced has drastically changed how people work and communicate. In that realization, they should completely let go of the 20th-century ideal of a 9-5, Monday to Friday workweek. Throw it out. Forget it. It serves no remaining purpose for many workers.

Look at what executives are doing with their own time, and consider why they’re not spending that time at the office themselves. If you aren’t a teacher at a school, or a receptionist at an office building or a doctor seeing patients, if you’re not working on a manufacturing line or laying bricks on a job site, being at work 40-50 hours a week is an anachronistic chore. Even “full-time employment” should seem out of place today.

Embracing hybrid work modes doesn’t just mean allowing workers to come to the office a few days a week, while keeping everything else the same. At doFlo, we’ve leaned into the idea that our team members should be able to work part-time, on a flexible schedule, allowing them to raise families, pursue hobbies, and even take on work at other companies. 

This not only allows us to retain people who appreciate our flexibility, but it also allows our team members to decide for themselves what level of engagement they are comfortable with. By meeting workers where they are, and allowing them to do what they think is best to meet the goals of the team, we place far more trust in the individuals we work with, and we avoid the hypocrisy of a management style that emphasizes “just showing up.”

Hybrid Workforce

Let’s call this our “hybrid workfoce.” Rather than focus on how much time our team members spend working, we can emphasize the outputs and contributions each individual makes and naturally focus the attention of each worker on the tasks and projects that most motivate them to succeed. Then it can be management’s role to decide what the overall goals will be, and whether we have the resources to meet them.

Simply put, if your team members feel that they’re just showing up most of the time to get paid, then you’re paying a lot of people to waste a lot of time – including your own. In today’s digital world, country barriers, and individual family circumstances should not have to dictate how workers contribute to our common goals. Whether a team member has kids, volunteers at a soup kitchen, or plays golf every day, they should be able to find ways to contribute and get paid decently for it. 

So far this approach has resulted in a 100% retention rate at doFlo, in the three years we’ve been operating (mostly in stealth mode). It’s also allowed us to tap a greater range of talent because we can rely on experienced contractors who prefer not to commit to 9-5 full-time schedules but instead work with us on a part-time basis, or even hourly. That approach is cheaper for us, more attractive to the kinds of people we like working with, and far less stressful from a management perspective.

Hybrid Management

If you approach your team from the position of getting the best work from them, sometimes that has to mean less overall work. Maybe team members and contractors need to have a relationship with employers that ebbs and flows according to their interests, and the demands of the business.

Of course, it helps that doFlo’s mission is to allow workers to automate critical aspects of their jobs that shouldn’t need constant supervision and repetitive work. That has allowed us to attract people who generally agree that the modern work environment should focus on creativity and cooperation between real people, rather than tedious routine tasks.

Yet in truth, most companies have room for a more “hybrid” style of management. One in which managers should expect that employees and contractors guard their liberties and freedoms as jealously as the managers do. Don’t feel like coming to work today? If the result for the company is the same, then that work can probably be done tomorrow. Feel like working more today than you planned to? Once again: we can adapt to that. 

This takes managers who are willing to view their team members as equals, equally deserving of those freedoms, and equally capable of taking responsibility for their own work. We don’t say that managers should never have to make hard decisions or to replace people who can’t get their work done. But that should not be the goal. Constant grind and ever-increasing expectations lead to burnout, and burnout leads to lower productivity. That’s not a direction we can afford to go in in today’s economy.

What say you? Are you willing to give Hybrid Management a try at your organization?