Cozy in Zoomtown? You’re All Eventually Going Back to the Office.

Here’s 10 Reasons Why…..

As it approached midnight on December 31st, 1999, like many other Y2K management consultants and IT managers all over the world that night, I was at work. My job was to represent my Big 5 blue-chip consulting firm and physically follow around no less than four different company CEO’s who were clients of ours and all attending the same black-tie New Year’s celebration event at a downtown hotel. On the surface, these CEO’s were all calm, greeting people and being very social, as the demands of their office require. Unseen however, were all the special briefcases with satellite phones and computer gear under their dinner tables ready for Armageddon. Underneath their tuxedos and in their pockets, they were wired up like astronauts with all sorts of comm gadgets and electronics needed to run their empires from afar if the dreaded Y2K meltdown happened. Everyone was nervous, but trying to be social and look calm.

Finally, the stroke of midnight hit and………

Absolutely, nothing happened. Not a thing. Nothing melted down, all their companies kept running just fine. As additional minutes ticked on, I breathed a sigh of relief that our firm’s contribution to this great win had come through and I was growing more happy, upbeat and relieved by the minute. I looked at the CEO’s expecting to see the same. Something was wrong though. They didn’t look happy. I noticed the four CEO’s started exchanging whispers, and then after a while, they all got up and excused themselves and went into a side room together. Since I was one of their main designated contractor liaisons and shadow for the night, I followed them in. I announced to them the continuing good news, now pouring in from all over the globe, that Y2K interruptions everywhere had been basically nonexistent and that their four companies had a great success on their hands. Time to relax and celebrate. Right?

Well, no……

They. Were. Furious.

Instead of being happy, relieved and thankful, these CEO’s felt they had wasted tens of millions of dollars and two years of hair-on-fire preparation in chasing a phantom boogeyman that they now believed had been hugely overblown. I could not convince them otherwise. In the rush to Y2K, they had all hired on increasingly bloated IT staffs who all demanded and were paid the highest salaries to review their dated code to thwart the expected end of the world. Instead of being relieved however, they now wanted revenge. One CEO turned to me and said “Names must be taken. Asses must be kicked.” And lo and behold they did. In the days that followed, it did indeed appear that the Y2K threat had been significantly overblown, and our firm heard through the grapevine that similar CEO meetings were taking place in similar side rooms and golf courses all around the world. The mad as hell CEO’s of the world, almost as one, went to war with their own IT departments. People have forgotten, but after Y2K and from 2000 to 2004 many IT professionals were downsized and put out of work and scrambling for jobs. IT budgets were cut. Then cut again. IT salaries and perks plummeted. IT contracts did not get renewed.

This was my first real indoctrination in how CEOs truly think.

They do not think like you or me.

That was over 20 years ago you say. That was the old-school dinosaur type CEO’s you say. Our CEO’s are all humble servant leaders now who want to make their employees happy. Right?

Don’t kid yourself for one second. We’re entering a recession. CEOs are mostly all still cut from the same type of cloth. There is the public face and speech of the CEO, and then there is the real CEO only seen in small, trusted circles. CEOs are almost all Type A’s. If they aren’t, they generally don’t get to become a CEO. They didn’t spend their whole lives going to their schools, paying their career dues, navigating corporate politics, and missing their kid’s soccer games just so you could bring your dog to work. It’s not about you.

Never forget their job is to make the trains run on time and a profit, and I’m sorry to say, you’re all eventually going to have to get back on the train. Here’s 10 reasons why……

· First and always foremost, the Organization’s goals are more important than yours. It’s time for a reality check and to put your big boy pants back on. Every Work From Home (WFH) let’s-keep-this-good-thing-going essay out there is all about what WFH can do for you and your own perceived personal happiness, with a splash of efficiency and let’s save the planet thrown in for altruism. Odds are however, you don’t work for an organization whose primary stated mission is to save the planet and that’s not what you are paid to do. The WFH arguments generally heavily reek of me-me-me, not what’s best for the company. To the Type A corporate elite, this makes you look like the weakest slacker generation that ever existed. You can call it a revolution if you want, but what comes through to them is slacker.

· You took a temporary privilege granted during a global medical emergency and think this is something you’re now entitled to for life. Nothing could possibly anger the average CEO, COO or CFO more. This elevates you now to opportunistic slacker. They’ve spent untold millions on training, infrastructure, corporate culture, campuses, teambuilding, and all those ping pong tables and K-cup contracts you said you had to have, only to see meetings reduced to listless Zoomtown thumbnails of people sneak-texting trash to other meeting participants and dressed in sweatpants from the waist down. You would never try that in a real conference room, and they know it. They want you back in that conference room. But hey, we all get it, right? Parkinson’s Law says a luxury, once sampled, becomes a necessity that must be accounted for in all future planning. But you all know you’re climbing down off the horse, and the C-levels know it too.

· You took advantage of a temporary glut of job openings to rebel against your existing employer and/or demand crazy salaries. Nothing could possibly anger the average CEO, COO or CFO more. If you have them by the short hairs through position or skillset, you will win. For a while. But there is now a target on your back. If your job doesn’t directly move the needle, and consistently, eventually, there will be a wave of downsizing (this has already started, by the way). They will then reset all the salary levels back to their lower comfort zones with the next wave of new-hires who replace you. This is in the same exact manner as was done post-Y2K. The glut of open jobs will be gone and is in fact drying up already as we head into a recession. In the near future, you’re probably going to find you’re not quite so fussy anymore.

· C-levels are always looking for high potential contributors and deputies who think like them and that they can groom to succeed them. Everyone likes to get a promotion. Much of what is derisively called “politics” by snarky mediocre employees is nothing more than talented hard-working executives looking out for their replacements who are talented and hard-working just like them. When they find them, they will take them under their wing and give them more responsibility to test them. Succession planning is a large part of any senior executive’s job. In a WFH world though, who are they going to pick? Well, who would you pick to turn over the keys to if it was your company? You are going to pick the folks who consistently show up at the crucible of the office and do the heavy lifting, because they know more and have done more and that is their rightful reward. No matter what the current stated policy is at your company, some folks are going to go into the office almost every day just to get things done and be seen. If you’re on a hybrid model, on your WFH days you will eventually suffer from hybrid guilt and anxiety, as you see some of your co-workers opting to go in every day. Those folks will get promoted, and not so much the folks at home. Over time this will create a tremendous peer pressure gap as you see your paycheck and career stalling, and one by one people will creep back to the office so they can get back in the sandbox and still be seen as contenders.

· WFH puts a target on your back as instantly replaceable, especially by more inexpensive workers. You already know this one by heart. If the only thing that connects you to your employer is an Internet connection, you can be replaced by anyone at any time from anywhere. I once hit a tenure milestone at one of my employers where I was now newly eligible for 8 full weeks of vacation. Shortly thereafter in a meeting with a C-level who was loading me up with an enormous pile of work, I jokingly told him “Hey, be nice to me. I can take 8 weeks of vacation off now if I want.” Without batting an eye, his immediate response was “If you take 8 weeks off from work, you will have proven that we can do without you.” That’s how a C-level thinks. WFH is no different.

· Young workers and new hires need to learn company history, values and pride. A company is a giant conveyor belt. Every day some people fall off the belt, and on the other end new employees hop on. The WFH onboarding process right now consists of emailed forms and a laptop and screen mailed to your door. This process does not imbue new-hires with any sense of company mission or belonging, and the C-levels know that. If left unchecked, the entire belt will eventually fill up with remote drones, none of whom any longer have knowledge of the founders story, institutional memory, knowledge of company glory days, and the full campus onboarding experience. Most C-levels in most companies aren’t going to wait for that moment to happen.

· Childless single employees need and want to meet people. People need human contact. Especially if they are not attached. It’s about love and sex. Who does anyone partner up with in life? Data shows you most often tend to partner with someone you meet in your normal orbit of activities, after getting to know them for a while. Since work takes up 40 hours of your week, your chances of meeting your future mate are very high in one of the social venues associated with the physical office. Eliminating the physical office has caused a bit of an unintended crisis among the 20-somethings. The resolute WFH ranks are already starting to crack from internal dissent. The younger unattached folks in your workforce who want to go to the office are starting to deeply resent the workers with kids, who they feel do not really speak for them. They feel the parent workers are crippling their own professional social lives and hands-on facetime and learning experiences needed for their budding careers. The feeling among the youngsters is that WFH parents are maintaining the rebellion through their own self-interest. CEO’s are watching this and listening.

· Working from home makes it easier to quit your job — and companies know this. They want you in the office. It’s a lot harder to walk away when you must face the boss to serve notice in person. Plus the boss, if they want to keep you, wants a fair shot at trying to get you to change your mind behind a closed door, and not in a text or email.

· Some jobs are indeed more geared to WFH, but some of you have poisoned the well and now require additional monitoring. WFH provides endless clever opportunities for fraud and abuse, and a few of you clever devils have been outsourcing your own jobs on the down low. Almost every tech company recruiter out there has a story of exposing one or more of their employees working 40 hrs. a week for 2 or more companies and collecting multiple paychecks. WFH is what makes this much easier to do. Dishonesty issues and possible NDA’s aside, among other things this probably means proprietary company data has been flowing to places it was never intended to go and the security risks are sky high. Expect nothing less than a medieval response to this from companies who want you now back inside the tent where your work processes and technology connections can be much more thoroughly monitored.

· Clothes make the person — and sometimes, the career. We’re becoming a nation of slobs with no manners or etiquette, and it’s being noticed. This has been generally said of us Americans all along by the international community, but it’s really going off the crazy train now with WFH. With people coming back to the office the CEO’s are revisiting dress codes again. Believe it or not, you still are how you dress and it’s important to your career. When I entered the workforce, men at my consulting firm were required to wear 3-piece suits with vests, and you were fired if a Partner or HR caught you ever wearing athletic shoes on a business airline flight. Thank God those days are gone. But it’s gone too far the other way now. You folks know who you are. Just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should do something. Also, there are rules of etiquette about dining out with even the hippest clients. Things like silverware use at formal dinners, how to break (not saw) bread, who orders first, who finishes last, what not to order on the menu….alcohol use. All the things you need to truly succeed in an increasingly international world of business in almost any keyboard job. We have at least a good two years-worth of new-hires who don’t know any of this stuff now, and they aren’t ever going to learn it wearing sweats and eating cups of yogurt out of their fridge.

This office-first Revenge-of-the-CEO’s process has already started. Companies from Broadcom and Tesla to Bank of America and Goldman Sachs are already leading the charge. I don’t feel all is lost, however. Some progress will remain. In my personal opinion, I believe keyboard-workers nationally will probably all settle out somewhere along a sort of hard-hybrid 4-and-1 model where basically everyone will mostly work at home on Fridays, which is about where we were headed anyway, prior to COVID. Some folks want to take this up a notch and are advocating that we just stop pretending people are doing real work on WFH Fridays and that we just formalize working four 10-hour days so we all have a 3-day weekend every weekend.

Hmmmm. We will see….

The takeaway here though is always remember CEO’s don’t think like you or me and recognize we are entering a new repeat post-Y2K period. The pendulum is swinging back. So, standby for the revenge of the C-levels. The holy three, the CEO, COO and the CFO are always working big picture issues trying to make and move big numbers. Sure, they want their employees to be happy, but their overall people mentality is that of a General in combat doing the grim quarterly algebra of casualties and replacements. It’s not about you.