Why your stupid Return to Office mandate is just the real “toxic masculinity”

Falling Down

Mar 27, 2025

The War at Home

Recently I got into a spat online with MAGA nation. One of my follows posted a woman who apparently worked for the government and got caught up in our new president’s command to return to office. She was beside herself with distress, but this posting, for this audience, was an attempt to make her an object of ridicule. I disagreed with the posters who chimed in to express how happy they were that this person was getting their perceived comeuppance. How dare she laze around and do nothing while they slaved away at an office!

The commentors all broke down into several types. The first type seemed to have never worked in an office. Some of them were business owners or construction labourers. Of course, their opinions can be discounted immediately because they chose careers that took them out of an office. What did it matter what they thought?

The second type assumed that no work was being done outside of the office. How they knew this to be true, I can only guess, but it’s probably not helping that the administration keeps offering up this lie. The words used are all “everyone knows” or “we know that” but do we? Are you sure about that, because I remember working from home and I remember working a whole lot. Anyway, let’s interrogate the truth of these statements a little later.

The next kind of commentor just seemed to think that office work required the constant supervision as if using a dangerous power tool. I was told that I had to get to work where I could be “seen”, although all one would do is watch me receive email and think about it. Maybe make some edits to a document that had a deadline. That deadline would have existed with or without them looking. Nor could they hear the person over the headset who had called me from upstairs. How they would have supervised such an activity is mysterious to me. Stop staring. You are creeping me out.

I guess they could have urged me to answer the phone, but surely, I could have done that at home as easily as in the office. In fact, not having to leave for a coffee break or another other type of casual travel away from my desk would have allowed me to be even more available, not less. I guess I could have never answered the phone, but I could have done that in the office with a much more plausible excuse. And anyway, how is anyone NOT answering the phone when cellphones are literally in our hands 24/7/365? That’s not real. In any case, being in the office doesn’t somehow prevent you from answering a phone if you (ugh) really want to call me and not text me like reasonable person.

Next, there seemed to be the ones that said, “well that’s the way we did it before.” I would make fun of those statements by using the cap/no cap font that one does when one is mocking someone who has said something completely retarded. Because obviously that person is retarded. We’ve done lots of things lots of ways before. All of life is an adaptation. If you can’t or won’t adapt for this, what makes anyone think you will adapt when something changes for the company and everyone has to adapt? That happens all the time or at least it should. That’s not a “work from home” problem, that is it’s “time for you to retire” problem.

Maybe I’ll program a macro for that font because actually having to press the shift key that many times is a bit of a pain. I guess I’ll have to do that in my spare time. hOwEvEr, EvEn TyPiNg ThIs OuT I’M pRoBaBlY bEiNg MoRe EfFiCiEnT tHaN tHaT PeRsOn. It’s 2025; it’s time to move on.

Lastly, there were the ones that did it out of spite. “I had to suffer so everyone else does too” types. Of all of them, those people are The Worst. Honestly, let’s just go back to the days where we had to drink a bottle of whiskey before we got that snakebitten leg cut off, shall we? Is that enough suffering for you, you masochistic Puritan? Why, sure, let’s make things as painful as humanly possible to satisfy your sadistic lust for “fairness” which is just an excuse to continue suffering ad infinitum. What is fair about enforcing mutual suffering no matter what the value add is for any given employee? If I can do my job better than you, why should I be subject to the same conditions because you don’t have any discipline at home? It seems what is fair is that I get rewarded for my effort and integrity and you have to slog it out until you become as good - if you ever do. Collective punishment is a war crime.

Never did it seem to occur to anyone that the cure for their class resentment was maybe to come to terms with their career choices, or learn how to work at home themselves, or realize that they just aren’t smart enough for a job that would allow it and accept their fate. It was much more fun to beat up on this poor Gen Zer. In their minds, that’s equitable, that makes us square.

Who can it be, now?

I guess if you are one of these people for whom your entire life revolves around work, being in office is not a big deal. If you are going crazy because you have to be alone with your own thoughts for thirty seconds, the whole idea of working from home is an anathema. Not getting up at some godawful hour in the morning and having somewhere to be, it’s unbearable for these people. And these early morning extraverts (gag) have controlled the pace and flow of office and administrative work since the post war period. They condescendingly say, “I got up at six this morning for a run” or some crap like that. No one cares, Liza. You ruined the last social by insisting on them serving gluten free food. The rest of us with normal circadian rhythms think you are a menace. But there’s no need for any of this anymore. We have electric light. “Early to bed, early to rise” is not about getting up in the morning at a particular time, it’s about seizing opportunities where they lay. It’s just in 1735 it got really dark at night.

See, in the before before time, you had to go work because phone banks, and typewriters, and then computers, copiers and fax machines, they were all REALLY big and expensive. You couldn’t afford to work from home even if it was technically possible and probably didn’t have the space either. An “at-home” office was only a thing very rich people with a lot of space had, like a car phone or a Bloomberg terminal. I have a circa 2010 laser printer and the damn thing is an annoying behemoth. But that problem ended decades ago. No one needs all those printed things. They are a waste of space, of trees, of time and energy. We just kept doing it because no one imagined we could do it any way else. The pandemic forced us out of that mind frame. Now we know what is technically possible, and we know what life is like if we use it. Are we really going to go back to the time where we would shove ourselves in trains and suits and heels and go to an office filled with bullies and idiots and bad incentives? There’s a reason “The Office” is funny. Why would we do this? Or at least, why would normal people do this? I gave the printer to my child as a toy.

But let’s track back a bit before we get to that. Because we have a choice now and we should make the right one if we seriously want to stop the “baby apocalypse” or whatever they are calling society’s full scale rejection of motherhood today.

I’ve got a brand-new key

Having a family has gotten much more difficult. When I was a kid, you could let your nine-year-old walk to school and home and to the store and to the neighbors down the street and no one would bat an eye. Sure, some kids would go missing now and again, but hey, there was a ton of them of them, a lot of them probably the sole reason for getting married, so you know, acceptable loss for society to keep functioning.

But there were also a lot of grown-up people around back then - mostly stay at home moms. There were eyes on the street; the kids travelled in packs. You could reliably depend on the neighbor’s kid being semi-nice to you because your moms were friends and both of them would beat you stupid if you weren’t nice to each other. Everyone knew each other from back in the day.

No one was going to call the police if they saw a kid at the playground by themselves or walking home along a road. You weren’t banned from the mall. Irritated moms would tell their own kid, “Get out of my house and go talk to the new kid if you are so bored!” And now you had an instant best friend. If you were lucky, you had siblings and cousins and a whole bunch of family within striking distance you could rely on if you needed to. Your parents knew who you were with because they had to call you, and they picked up the phone and answered the door. It was a whole thing.

There are a lot of people who want to go back to that. Well, you can’t. Kids are safer now than they have ever been, despite some florid school shootings. A lot of that is because parents know where their children are, all the time, every minute of the day. We know where we ALL are now because we carry little trackers around in our pockets, on our keys, in our purses and wallets and attached to our bikes. And this is a reasonable compromise because no one wants to go back to the days of seeing kids’ faces on the back of a milk carton.

Honey, I shrunk the kids

I didn’t have a whole lot of that, but I did have enough to know that the life I grew up in and the life my kid is growing up in is very different now. Somewhere between then and now, all the stay-at-home moms went back to work. You moved miles away from your family because you needed a job, and the rents were too high. Good luck having a block party with the neighbors, half with Trump signs on their lawns and half with “In this house” signs in the foyer. You might as well just start with the screaming match. You can’t even find a teenager now much less ask them to watch the baby for a few hours while you run out to the doctor. Everyone is scheduled to the hilt. Or maybe you got divorced, or maybe you never married at all, or maybe you never married or had kids and now all you have is work. Can you blame anyone for just skipping out on all that?

Wanna know why you got sick with a cold in 2019? Because before the pandemic, desperate parents had to load their little bug vectors up on Advil and send them to school anyway. You couldn’t miss a day of work because your kid had the sniffles (and you were going to be as sick in about two minutes). Where was your commitment to this career? Sure, one bad quarter and you’ll get laid off right before Christmas but hey, we are a family here. (I mean, not me, I'd use any excuse to stay home with my kid, but I lost more jobs than I kept.) Working parents had it rough, and for single parents “working” was a complete nightmare. If you weren’t willing to or could afford to almost completely abandon your kids to daycare, good luck getting through life.

The truth is that for single parents, working is not made for them. Working is not made for parents to begin with. The workday long outlasts the school day. There’s no daycare at the workplace, and don’t even think about bringing your kids in. That’s simply weird, and only Elon Mush and Ben Shapiro can get away with it. Most people, especially if they were women, well, you obviously cannot work and let your kid play on their iPad for a couple hours. That’s, like, a whole two things at one time. AND YOU GAVE THEM A DEVICE??? WTF is wrong with you?

Interesting how people can multitask right up to the point where they have to occasionally stop to care for a smol human. We expect parents, especially mothers, to live and work and raise their kids as if it’s still the (imaginary) fifties, even if everyone else has moved on. We question the commitment of mothers who have to leave early and can’t work any overtime. Young, childless women look down their noses at us, as if we have betrayed the sisterhood by creating the person that’s going to fund their social security. Just you wait, missy, your day will come too. You will also get too old to get on your hands and knees and muck around in the back of the refrigerator or clean the oven. Time is cruel.

Parents are locked to the geography. Do you really think I’d take this paltry sum if I could just move out of the great school district and get paid more? If there’s a court order because both parents have to live close to each other to exchange the child, they are even more stuck. Did you know that, according to studies, parents are better workers? Yeah, studies have shown that mothers with children are simply more efficient workers, married or not. And the skills that you get with child raising are transferable: time management, conflict de-escalation and mediation, networking, budgeting, delegation, prioritization, and organization and logistics, those are all transferrable skills. Planning….so much planning. I’d put my money on the mother any day.

Enjoy the Silence

For one, very brief year, we got it all back. We were home, calm, in our lanes, making sourdough and not having panic attacks about what to do with our kids because they had a slight fever. Work from home is a godsend to everyone with children. No more hysterical screaming in the morning to put on shoes, no more almost heart attacks when your daycare closes for no reason. (Over the pandemic, this was a daily occurrence.) No more rushing from the office to the school to home to then rush through dinner and homework and bedtime and maybe, if you are lucky, you might get to watch one episode of the prestige show everyone else in the office is talking about. No more spending every weekend doing a mountain of laundry. You are so close why not take lunch on Friday morning to get the good sales at the supermarket? By Saturday they will all be gone. You can just work a little later that night. Overtime? 5-hour traffic jams? Blizzards? Cancelled flights? Sick? Menstrual cramps? GI issues? Insomnia? Hot flashes? No problem. For a lot of people working from home meant more time at work, not less.

Yeah, some marriages didn’t make it, domestic violence went up, but if you could, you did enter the warmth of the family burrow and didn’t leave. Government transfers drove child poverty to record lows. And at first, it wasn’t all that productive because people suddenly had to get over the shock of the whole world just…stopping. But then, people got more bandwidth and better broadband, they bought a second monitor and a greenscreen, they set up the corner in the house as an office. Some of them moved to the country, where it was clean and safe, and they could actually afford a house or even just a second bedroom. Introverts introverted. Being old wasn’t so much of a problem. Everyone got enough sleep.

Now a bunch of rich douchebags want you to go back to accidentally sitting in pee on your way to a downtown office where everything is twice the price, and you can hear your coworker scream into the phone? Why? Do you really want to pack lunches? Put on makeup? Scrape ice off your car. WHY? And then you have the kids where now you have to take everything you just did for yourself and double or triple it. This is insane. NO.

Mad Men

Obviously, this might be a bit of gendered issue. A lot of men probably don’t even know these problems exist, much less have them. Despite almost a century of feminism, men still don’t do most of the childcare, the emotional labour, the meal planning, complex personal beauty arrangements, and caretaking of adults the same way women do. Nor do they overwhelming staff support roles in offices that don’t pay enough to take an Uber or drive a Cybertruck every day to work. They also don’t fret relentlessly about relationships at work or who is doing what or who is in competition with who and whether it makes them “unlikable.”

They aren’t in a constant running gun battle with their own confidence because any statement they make is going to be interrogated for the truth of it. And often this by other women, not men. How do you think I learned to cover my ass? I have acquired enough PTSD from that phenomena that I take meticulous notes. I bring the receipts (see above) …and it just makes people (women mostly) even more mad. Men do not ruminate about being excluded from this social group because they are too pretty, too smart, too ambitious, too talkative, too quiet, too weird, or whatever it is that is going to make them seem like the office “problem.” Men just don’t see it. Where are the female leaders going “Yeah we need to get back to the office or we’ll be ineffective?” Is there one? Where’s that “lean in” chick in all this?

And that is why Elon Musk and Donald Trump and Jamie Dimon, and Peter Thiel can all get up and say, “We are going to force everyone back to the office to do “real work” instead of whatever it is they are doing right now. Which we assume is not working because that’s what “we” would do. I mean, it’s not like "we" have to plan meals for the next week in our downtime. “We” need to collaborate you, see? “We” need to be in each other spaces or “we” have no ideas - or just fuck off all day. It’s not like “we” spend our entire lives doing work that no one asked us to or even realizes we are doing until we stop doing it. Hey, um, guys, that bathroom did not magically clean itself. Speak for yourselves, brah.

I guess you could just fire all the women, (you mean like they did at *cough..Twitt..) or as it seems to be happening, make it so they never want to come back. But let’s assume for a minute that *some* of them might be pretty talented. *Some* of them might talk you out of taking stupid risks that ruin your business. *Some* of them are willing to do the trash work you don’t want to do like answer the phone, process your payroll, sift through useless resumes, or format your document. Do you really want to fire them all? We can’t all be programmers in goblin mode, or rainmakers at a hedge fund. Somebody has to do all that other stuff. And all that other stuff can be done from home.

And it’s not just women and kids, but people with disabilities or just getting old. I know everyone hates the whole DEI thing - until you realize that it *could* apply to people who are just getting old. Getting old sucks, it’s the worst. Everything hurts all the time. And it happens to everyone. One way or another, your body betrays you. And, according to a study out of the UK, over 20% of menopausal women could resign or do resign because their symptoms are too severe. Are we going to lower the age for Social Security? No? Then how about we make it a little easier for those people to work? The older you get the less patience you have for dressing up, the people on transit, the fucking stairs…. Just because they say they can, I assure you no bra or mascara actually is still great after 16 hours.

Oh yeah, and what about your parents, now aging boomers in place, living in a neighbourhood you can’t afford? When do you get to drive over there and make sure they don’t get too lonely or fall down the stairs or that the delivery person doesn’t rob them? Can’t you just answer all those emails from their study? I mean, they can afford the extra room, might as well use it for something. I guess if we can’t be there, we can always throw them in a home and just pray no one *checks notes* twerks over them so they can become instafamous for being a total psychopath. I’m sure it will be fine.

The modern office is terrible. I hope whoever invented the open concept office is burning in the lowest circle of hell right now. You know what would make this job really great? Being able to see, hear and smell every single thing my co-workers are doing. That’s not going to be distracting at all. And it’s so much easier for them to start getting insecure because they realize Suzie knows how to do their job better than them so they sabotage her, hoping the boss will think she’s the problem..or as we like to call it, “collaboration.” Maybe they’ll swing by and dump a whole lot of tasks on her desk that technically isn’t her job too. No “I” in team.

At least at home we have some privacy. Too cold? Too bright? Too *waves hands*? Not a problem. That lady that talks too loud on her phone or the busybody that’s always trying to be your manager. Who cares. Now she can’t see what you are doing, or she can REALLY see what you are doing because there are logs for everything. Remember that time you told your boss something and she swore up and down that you didn’t? Oh, look, here is the email. And were you sure you printed this? Did you send it? Did they even look at it to sign it? DocuSign to the rescue. YOU HAVE YOUR OWN BATHROOM.

Maybe there is at Tesla or Bear Sterns, but there's no creativity in the accounting department. But go ahead, go into your office on Monday and tell everyone the great idea that would save the company money but the whole department will have to slightly change how they do things. Or tell them that the thing they worked so hard on doesn’t actually work and there’s a simple solution that doesn’t cause a whole bunch of problems. Or inform them that they have a major issue that is slowly eating away at the heart of their business and will eventually bankrupt them, but to solve it they have to spend a fraction of their budget on new tech. Or that they are wasting a whole bunch of money because the hoomans don't work like that. Get back to me on how that’s received. Especially by the lady that is going to lose her job because of it. (Paging "James Damore")

People in power don’t really want to have their underlings to tell them what to do, ostensibly the reason they hired those people in the first place. No, these executives want to show you that THEY know what they are doing. Where they can walk into a room and say “Look how powerful and smart I am” even if they don’t realize their company is being hollowed out by a toxic environment. (Which according to Robby Starbuck is actually happening in JP Morgan.) They aren't interested in facts. That's just gets in the way of great ideas like gold plated airplanes. The laws of physics don't apply to them.

Having records of who is actually doing what will expose people for the lazy incompetents they are. Forcing people to learn how to use technology to its maximum effect might mean that some people will have to learn new things whether they want to or not. Having to have meetings on Teams or Zoom, where you CAN’T talk over someone is going to complete ruin the ability to marginalize the people you have been stealing all your ideas from. Maybe someone will be able to complete a sentence before they are cut off. We can’t have that.

I get that Elon Musk and Donald Trump, and some other hands-on executives get down in the trenches with their front-line people and really listen to what they have to say. Good for them, every boss should do that, but the idea that we are all sitting there “collaborating” or being creative is nonsense. Most companies, especially big ones, have become bureaucratic zombies hurtling through legacy database systems, riding it out until retirement and never learning how Word paragraph spacing actually works. I blame the baby boomers who refuse to retire. Listen, I know it’s scary having to go out there and believe me, there but the grace of God go I, but that’s just the way it is and we all need to learn to adapt. When I started my career in publishing there was whole world of print and books and folded maps and local papers and now all of that is gone. What is left is a shell of itself. Sell the damn six-bedroom house; you don’t need it. Give the money to your kids and then you have a place to go on Christmas.

But just because a handful of very successful executives find meaning in their work, doesn’t mean that’s true for us all. You see, most companies need cogs. They need people processing things, they need people correcting human errors. Maybe a lot of those things are bullshit jobs, too, but the ones that aren’t, you still need them until you have tools that renders them obsolete. Then the whole company will refuse to learn how to use those tools anyway. And that’s just private companies. When Elon figured out that the government was still working on paper in a literal mine, I was like, “Yup, that checks out. That’s the government I know.” Giving people incentives like not having to pack lunches - have you ever done that EVERYDAY??? The. Worst. - maybe it will encourage people to go, “there’s a better way to do things that doesn’t require me to do *this*.”

For my enemies, The Law

This is technically a law blog, so I feel like I have to stop here and point out that the employment law in Canada and the law in the USA is a little different when it comes to employment. The main change is that “constructive dismissal,” as it’s known, is not allowed in Canada. They can’t just torture you until you leave, and if an employer wants to significantly change the parameters of a job, they need to get the employee to agree. So, this whole “RTO to avoid layoffs” thing doesn’t work here. Otherwise, the employee can just quit and collect unemployment as if they were laid off for no reason. Since Canadians aren’t “employed at will” they are entitled to what is known as “reasonable notice” which depending on the length of time they are with the company, and other factors can be anywhere from one week to two years.

The company can also just pay the employee money, in lieu of notice, and that can satisfy the legal requirements to let the employee go. Age, health and other factors play a role in this, and if the employee thinks they have been treated poorly, or the severance isn’t adequate, they have recourse in both an employment tribunal, which is free to them, and regular trial court where if they win the employer pays the costs; there is no “American rule” here. Things like firing someone in an abusive manner, or for a made-up reason, can also attract damages, some of them significant. In 2012, Meredith Boucher was awarded $1.45 million for wrongful dismissal from her Walmart job, alleging constructive dismissal, intentional infliction of mental suffering and abuse by her manager.

And in both countries, firing someone because they are old or disabled or female..all of this is illegal. At the very least it’s a liability even when done above board because the line is lower in civil court. Basically, where there is an awful lot of smoke, that means a fire. WFH represents a “reasonable accommodation” for a lot of things. At some point, there *will* be a lawsuit about this and it will be an expensive lesson learned for everyone. It would probably be cheaper to just get everyone to know how to use SharePoint.

But in the meantime, talent can go where it’s most loved and if that means that it wants to work from home, it can do that. The fact that most people who could work from home can’t work from home because of the fragile ego of a few, dare I say, spoiled and powerful men, well what is that really worth to your average company that may be teetering on the edge? Wouldn’t it just be cheaper to hire people without the ego problem and save yourself the drama? Believe me, increasing contact with egotistical, disagreeable and insecure people is not going to be pleasant for anyone. Giving your workers space might keep them from fighting with each other, which they will do because let’s face it: not every job is a cooperative job. Sometimes it’s better for the company if they flat out compete. And why make your entire firm poachable if a competitor has the money?

You would think Canada would be the WFH mothership. The weather is crap. The country is very large with very few people so it’s difficult to hire. Housing in the major cities is astronomically expensive. Commutes are long and traffic is horrible. It’s expensive to fire the tenured. Canadians in-person social skills are abysmal (admittedly, I might be biased here considering the time we are in.) But like all things new, Canadians seem more resistant than Americans. Even though they lag in productivity compared to almost every industrial country, they seem to want to do nothing to change it. It’s fine to hemorrhage money to the rest of the world, there’s gold in dem hills, haven’t you heard?

Phacts

Okay, you say, but science….PRODUCTIVITY!!! No one wants to work….

You could say the science on this is mixed at best and as time has progressed and people have adapted unequivocally coming down on the WFH side. Mostly they find that as people developed home offices, productivity improved. I myself have learned that if you really want to go fully paperless you need at least two monitors, maybe four if you include email monitoring. The general feeling though I get from all these studies (references in the endnotes) is that people who do good work will continue to do it, wherever they are, because it’s not just about the job. Everyone else, well you have results. Look at them and stop saying “we all know…” Clearly, we do not.

I would like to pause here and say that I’m still suspicious about all this “productivity” nonsense to begin with. It’s really easy to monitor productivity if you are in say, investment banking or software development. At the end, you have a product or a pile of money. It is very easy to keep score that way and for a lot of people in those industries, the ONLY way to keep score. Even Trump doesn't dabble to much in the details, or at least that's how it seemed on "The Apprentice." But there are other jobs that many, many people do where productivity matters and no one is really keeping score. Jobs like in accounting or as administrative assistants, or middle managers. Most of the time, the company doesn’t even think about the metrics that they would need to really measure if something is working or not. Or it’s worked great for thirty years, why change now? And if it does change, we’ll just burn through fifteen employees in three years because who cares why this job seems impossible? Nevermind that we've been quietly blacklisted on Glassdoor. No news is good news, even if the lack of adaptation is eating away at the company within. And if it wasn’t working and people had to change? You better be a pretty high pay grade to start telling people that if you want to be able to keep your job.

Stuff that is “intangible” like loyalty, lateral skills, or institutional knowledge, things that solve long forgotten problems before they become noticeable (only so many people can retire a month because that’s how fast the elevator works) aren’t accounted for at all. Have you ever worked in a company where the most productive member of a team has been laid off while the useless dick who skates by on face time and social skills remains? Sure, you have. Or have you ever been laid off because all of sudden the whole company seemed to default all at once?

In almost every case I know of, things were going bad for a very long time, but no one wanted to point it out. To do so would change things, and no one likes that. No one has ever asked me to show them what I have been working on. Not once. So, these zombie corporations continue on until they can’t, or they get sold or something else gives the company an excuse to get rid of people they don’t think they need. Inevitably it’s a fire sale on careers. Despite the habits of Elon, I’ve never seen a company ruthless go through and find out what everyone is actually doing. They certainly never asked me. And honestly, if I had told them would they have even listened? No one here but us chickens.

The idea that we were so laser focussed on productivity to begin with is a questionable proposition at best. How do we even know it’s better or worse now, anyway? Maybe something catastrophic is about to happen but until it does, everyone thinks that things are going along just fine. The company has been bureaucratized, and merit doesn’t matter until, just like government, the city of LA burns down or a whole bunch of people need to retire or the government needs to bail out the entire industry.

But fine, lets talk about those productivity studies for a minute.

In a joint study (2023) between the University of Hong Kong and Pittsburgh of RTO mandates on over 3 million tech and finance workers, the researchers found that:

“These firms experience abnormally high employee turnover following RTO mandates. The increase in turnover rates is more pronounced for female employees, more senior employees, and more skilled employees. Further, it takes significantly longer time for these firms to fill their job vacancies after the mandates. Their hire rates also significantly decrease. These results are consistent with firms losing their best talent and female employees and facing greater difficulties with talent attraction after RTO mandates. Our study highlights brain drain as a significant cost of RTO mandates even for the largest firms in the world.”

Okay, but how about that 2021 study of Indian workers that found a drop of 18% in productivity?

In an article in LinkedIn, called “Lower work-from-home productivity does not mean that return-to-office is a sound business strategy” Paulo Gaudiano, Chief Scientist at Aleria and ARC, Adjunct at NYU, writes about a study where productivity of the WFH staff was found to be lowered by 18%. He writes,

“The study does not mention how much it cost to rent the office. However, for most companies the cost of providing additional office space (plus utilities, maintenance and other associated costs) may well exceed the savings of greater productivity.”

But that’s just one example of added cost. I can think of others: cleaning, events, food, heating, special equipment, unnecessary printing and paper and “stuff” that gets shoved into desk drawers, interpersonal conflict, or health problems, all of which is part and parcel of dealing with humans in the flesh. They have needs, and often the business has to carry that instead of just saying, “Sure, stay home, and work with what and however is comfortable for you.” But we can’t name the “new thing” so we revile it. We don’t see the “automobile” yet, so we are still referring to it as a “horseless carriage.” If it doesn’t have a combustion engine and it can drive itself, can we even call the Cybertruck a “car?” I bet Jeremy Clarkson doesn’t think so.

In any case, that result was early on, in 2021, in the beginning of the pandemic when everyone first had to adjust to the new normal. Another later study, published in Nature by Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford economist, finds employees are as productive at home as they are in work – if it’s a hybrid arrangement. The trend line is pretty clear: at time goes on, workers have and will become more and more efficient working from home. If I’m going from personal experience, sure, there are some moments where you want to be face-to-face with the people you work with. But are we really asking if that is cost effective and practical, or are we just assuming it because the idea of such a dramatic shift is unsettling? Are companies even asking that question? I think not usually.

And what if employees are lonely? Well, get a dog, or a wife or have some kids or join a bowling league or the Mormon church. There’s no reason why your co-workers have to be your best friends or even your friends at all. And maybe they shouldn’t be if they stop talking to you the minute you are laid off, which happens. Having friends that live near you, who are more like you in many ways, that might be a better way of creating the enduring community that you so crave. It’s not like you are going to find yourself going head-to-head for a promotion with your “best friend” that way. It’s fine if the battles stay on the poker table.

Take this job and shove it.

Going to work costs a lot. It cost in time and in money, so much easier to just skip the commute, make a nice cup of coffee and chillax over those spreadsheets. Now no one will see the face you make when you read that email. And there are other costs like clothes, meals, transportation, childcare, medication for added stress, and whatever else you need to leave the house and look decent for 8 to 10 hours outside the home. Not to mention leaving your family, which I hope most people dearly love.

See, the problem is that working outside the home causes a lot of stress for people. More than one study concluded that commuting not only detracts from satisfaction with the job, but satisfaction with life OVERALL. It was the most significant thing among all the other things like pay, bosses, coworkers, and working conditions. And it affected women more than men well, because see above. Because women do all this *extra* work, the aptly named “second shift,” the commute was particularly hard on them.

Companies seem to be trying to offer anything that they can (short of a huge raise in pay) to get people back into the office. Cakes, events, demands, promotions, threats, booze and none of it, NONE of it, seems to be working. People, especially women, would rather be fired and find a new job than accept the “old normal.” It is estimated that a full 50% of the workforce would start looking for a new job if they had to be in the office full time. And in my experience, you can bet if you have more than two days in the office, every employee you have is looking at the door. Loyalty is so 2019. (Well actually it’s more like 1995, but let’s not quibble.) Even the spectre of losing precious WFH days is enough to cause people to head for the exits. A friend of mine works in a business where they cut down from three work from home days to two; turnover shot up to double digits.

For most of our existence, people worked at home. I think up until the fifties and even beyond, most people lived on farms. Growing food was serious business and if you didn’t do it, you might starve. You might starve anyway, so a lot of people did it all over the world. Living on a farm, however, demands a certain structure and most of the time, women were at the farmhouse doing farmhouse things (making sourdough, jam…maybe weaving, whatever) and they didn’t have to get dressed in an uncomfortable bra and heels and go answer emails with “regards.”

They probably went days without seeing another person outside their immediate family. Each household was a “productive household”. I’m sure there were times, mostly Sunday, when you had to go to church, deal with the other people and especially women. Maybe they were gossips or scolds, but at least you could go back to the farmhouse with your parents or your husband and spend the rest of your week ignoring people who had no real control over your life. You can’t help but romanticize such a pastoral existence. It seems so peaceful. We even have a meme about it.

Even if productivity is lower, and I’ve seen no evidence it is, it isn’t the only thing you should evaluate when you are looking at the total contributions of an employee. Retention matters, and employee satisfaction matters, all of which can cost the company a ton of money if they get it wrong. If the pandemic taught us anything, it’s that life is short, it could end at any time. All of sudden a microscopic, barely-alive monster can rise up and suffocate you to death before you even know what happened. You can die alone and afraid. Knowing that, why should you spend the bulk of your day unhappy, stuffed in a cubicle so you can process invoices as PDFs?

Taming of the Shrew

Maybe I’m over-romanticizing the past, maybe it was different or not all that great. Maybe I would have been bored out of my mind on some farm, resenting every minute of it, and cursing the ground for not easily giving up carrots or pulses. But now every day feels like church day, with the pecking judgmental hens, gossiping about this or that. This just feels so much harder except now as parents it feels like we are doing it dancing backwards. Is it any wonder that there’s a whole “trad wife/soft girl” discourse? How do I become a SAHG (stay-at-home-girlfriend)? Just pay this cable bill, please. The rent is outrageous.

And single parents do it alone. There’s no one to back you up if your tired, or sick, or sad, or just running a bit late. You are on your own if your paycheck doesn’t cash or doesn’t come. It may have not been your choice to find yourself alone at midlife, wondering what you’ll do for retirement, now your meal ticket just flew to Cabo with the new, younger wife. People may say, “if you marry for money, you earn every penny,” but all marriages are marriages for money. They certainly aren’t “I will drag you into poverty for the rest of your natural life, but you still love me, right?” Why did you think it was a good idea to share expenses in the first place? It takes two people to make a marriage, but it only takes one person to break it.

Not every woman wants to ‘lean in’ but some how we have to make a living doing it. We told ourselves “Babies are awful, don’t have one,” and convinced ourselves that cats are better, all because our grandmothers didn’t have reliable birth control and hated the husbands they had to marry when they got knocked up. They taught us that men were unreliable, that we were taking a massive risk just to associate with them. And we listened to them. And now we have, um, this.

Let me make a case for the single parents here. For one thing, single parent households now comprise 40% of all households in the USA. In Canada it’s a little over 20%. In both cases that number is growing and for a variety of reasons (See “A Dirty Shame” by me at the site that must not be named.) It’s not going to shrink. Marriage, in its current form, is permanently broken institution, IMO and according to all the girls on “Are We Dating the Same Guy” Facebook pages. But do you really think that all those single moms have so little contribute that you can afford to be openly hostile to them in policy and sometimes personal animus? Are you really going to go out of your way to make their lives as miserable as possible and who are, whatever you may think of them, ACTUALLY having the kids? Why abuse the people who are sacrificing so much to raise the generation that supposedly is going to pay for your social security? Who do you think is going to pay that? Power couples in Brooklyn? Immigrants? The Mormons?

Maybe Starlink or JP Morgan have enough people desperate to work for them, but some mid market auto parts maker in a flyover state better be a little more flexible. And a corporation is not a democracy, you can give people perks who prove they can be productive without oversight like the freedom to work from home. (If you actually bother to measure it properly.) You will not go to jail because Stacy the intern doesn’t think it’s fair. Do not leave talent on the table because you think people who get up after 8:00AM have some sort of moral failing. Someone else will most definitely take that talent and turn it into something wonderful.

Do we really need to keep doing this because a handful of extraverts can’t stand to be alone with their own thoughts? Should we really have to lord over people we pay to do something to get them to do the thing? If someone said to me, “If I was home all day, I would just do [THIS] instead of working” I would just shitcan their ass. What are they doing at work when I’m not watching? I’m your fucking manager, not a babysitter. How about we just say to them, “Hey, do the thing or you’re fired?” And then, if they don’t do the thing, we fire them? That seems a much easier plan than synergizing our core competencies to leverage a paradigm shift in our value-added, scalable, mission-critical solutions for a win-win vertical integration. I find that not getting paid is highly motivating for myself. Are we really going to get dressed and get on a fucking bus to go to an office where we can be bullied by Francis in accounts receivable? How about, um, no.

The truth is, the jobs I did have that required me to be in the office never really required me to BE in the office. People called me from down the hall, they sent emails and messages from the upper floors or Palm Springs. I can count on one hand the number of times in the last two years someone came personally to my office for help. The rest contacted me on Teams, on my phone, wherever I was. No matter what people claim, when push comes to shove, they are going to take the path of least resistance, and that path is the digital highway once they realize it’s there for the taking. No one is going to shove themselves in uncomfortable clothes to ride transit with the reeking homeless so they can listen to you prattle on about collaboration and reject every idea they have ever had. RTO is like Michael Scott declaring bankruptcy; none of this works like that.

In 2012, Ann Marie Slaughter wrote an article called “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All” quoting Mary Matalin she states,

“Having control over your schedule is the only way that women who want to have a career and a family can make it work.”

She goes on to describe how damn difficult it was to have her career and take care of her kids. And everyone nodded in agreement. Here we are, five years in, where women finally had some say as to when they worked and when they didn’t – and now a bunch of obnoxious suits want to destroy it all. If they didn’t get any “real” work done in that time, and don’t have healthy, well adjusted children to show for it, I guess maybe the Jamie Dimons and the Peter Thiels of the world have a point. But if Elon and the rest are serious about how the country is not having enough kids and MAHA ones at that, maybe they need to spend a little more time and some introspection into why. In the meantime, they seem to think that we need to pay the rent on government offices to do what? Fire up the mimeograph machines? I just want my tax return. I don’t give a flying fuck where the IRS processes it. And if people want to go bicycle around a mine for a living, I guess they can, but I don’t understand how this is better.

We have an opportunity here to make the changes that we’ve spent years trying to implement. You want a fairer society, a society based on merit? Well, how about you think about what that word actually means and get back to me. In the meantime, I think working two or three days at home is more than fair. And if you are lonely, and don’t have anywhere to go at the butt crack of dawn in the morning, how about instead of fucking over half of American families (and 20% of Canadian ones) just get a damn dog.

Shine on, you crazy diamond

Two things happened last week, before I could push this out that seemed illustrate perfectly the issue at hand. One was a leaked audio from Jamie Dimon complaining about how people shouldn’t be working from home, while in the meantime JP Morgan announced layoffs. The second was an announcement by Ashley St. Clair that she had had Elon Musk’s baby.

In Dimon’s call he goes,

“It simply doesn't work. And it doesn't work for creativity. It slows down decision-making. And don't give me this (EXPLETIVE DELETED) that work-from-home Friday works. I call a lot of people on Fridays, and there's not a (EXPLETIVE DELETED) person you can get ahold of.”

Ugh, okay, calling. Phone calls are The Worst. The telephone got invented and bosses have been insufferable ever since. Get with the program, Jamie, send a text message on teams like everyone under forty does.

But seriously, again, being at home doesn’t make you incapable of answering the phone. That’s just people aren’t answering your calls. (Probably because unlike you, they have lives outside of work and you’re calling them at 7:30 on a Friday night.) And if you got their voice mail at work because they were in a meeting or on a coffee break or just didn’t get to the phone in time that would have made a difference? Maybe the problem isn’t working from home, maybe the problem is you and your desire to boss people around and inability to be alone. Do you like dogs?

He continues,

“And, you know, I come in -- I've been working seven days a (EXPLETIVE DELETED) week since COVID. And I come in and -- where's everybody else? They're here, they're there and the Zoom.”

Okay sure, you’ve worked at this company with every ounce of dedication you could muster. I guess that’s fair for America’s premier investment bank. But I looked you up on the internet and you had the support of a wife, who is apparently, a force in her own right. You haven’t seemed to have been visited by the four horsemen of the apocalypse of life: divorce, abuse, addiction, or death. (Well except for your obvious workaholicism.) And maybe you are right to expect that from your workforce. To use your own words, “You don’t have to work at JP Morgan.” But the problem is you convince other, less prestigious companies that they can do that too and they can’t and they shouldn’t. Unless they are going to fire every parent, especially the single ones, they are going to have to be a little more forgiving. And are you telling me that JP Morgan doesn't need women, or older women or single parents or anyone that's not willing to work seven days a week? Are you saying not a single one of them are talented enough, or they can't make you good enough deals that they have ceased to be valuable? Don't you all work on commission anyway? What are you suggesting exactly?

See, the thing about money, and investment banks, is that they are only valuable if they are rare. (You of all people should know that.) And if everyone worked seven days a week at an investment bank, why, there would be no time for anything else. Certainly not for babies. This woman I was talking about in the beginning of the essay, do you think she’s some sort of captain of industry pulling in million of dollars a year? Obviously not. Is it any wonder that women are looking at this and going, “um, I don’t think this is possible” when choosing between career and kids? And then, after devoting hours to commuting you get shown the door, because you’ve become “redundant?” And now we have a baby problem, or lack thereof. To be honest, I’m not even sure we need investment banks anymore. It seems we spend a whole lot of money bailing them out when they are about to collapse the economy, money that they then use to become even bigger banks. *Long Term Capital Management enters the chat*

The second thing is the baby. Now, unlike my ex-peers in investment banking, who love the pain, I am loath to criticize a man who seems to have single handedly saved America because he was annoyed by Jack Dorsey. Especially on his own platform, which I may need if I going to be able to continue to work from home. And perhaps a critique is unwarranted, I claim no special knowledge of the internal workings of this relationship or whatever it is. But history suggest, and even Ashley herself, that this is not going to turn into an enduring marriage. See, it’s not enough to just sire a child, or to pay the pittance that is usually the schedule child support, you have to raise the child as well – and like it or not, with the mother, that’s usually a package deal.

I’m sure whatever agreement Elon and Ashley come to will be fine. But the tendency of today’s men to flit about, by way of social media, to any available piece of ass is hardly reassuring to women. It is women who are weighing the chances they will be shouldering the bulk of care for their children, sometimes in abject poverty. Elon seems an active parent, maybe even too active for Grimes’s taste, but the baby buck always stops with moms and women know this. Why roll the dice with someone who *isn’t* a billionaire? Seems sus, as the kids might say. And there are only so many billionaires, and even they seem to move on if Bezos and Gates are any indication.

You can work all you want, build fantastic businesses, you can sire as many children as you can afford with as many beautiful women as you want, you can streamline the government and the world with breathtaking technology. It all won’t mean a thing if by doing so you inadvertently drive humanity into extinction by scaring the economic shit out of women. The empty office buildings and fax machines left behind will not thank you for it.

Free Fallin'

A while back, a friend of mine got laid off. She was stunned. She had taken the job only a few years before and by all accounts, it was going great. Her boss lauded her work. She was left to manage herself basically, and she took that as a mandate to make sure that every minute she was adding value to the company. As her job was providing an internal service, she treated her coworkers like clients. No request went unheeded, no problem unsolved. She was “always on” when she was on. If there was something she did not know or understand, she went above and beyond to make sure she understood it. She was by all accounts, the most skilled and best employee in her position. Despite being so good, she was paid at such a low wage, she was thinking of taking on a second job. She loved that job, and up until that moment, she thought it loved her. Now she was gone, and no one seemed to know why.

There had been signs that the company was trying to get people back into the office for months - meetings and events, a slow rollback from three days to two. Exhortations from the uppity ups telling the staff they were going to put “people first” and move forward into the future. But she could feel the pull from a certain segment of the company that this was not going to be easy. They didn’t like it, didn’t know how to manage it, and they didn’t trust their workers to do their jobs right if they did. So, everyone knew it was coming to an end eventually. And the response? They left. The offices were deserted on a regular basis. The turnover hovered in the double digits. No one was staying. They knew they couldn’t trust the company. At least the workers at JP Morgan sent Dimon a warning by way of petition.

She had been very clear about the fact she needed to work from home some of the time and that’s how she was hired and now probably why she was let go. “It’s good I work from home,” she told me, “Now [my co-workers] are motivated to learn how to use the technology. I never could get some of them to even open the programs much less use them. And once they do use them, they have no problem calling me from upstairs even if we both are there.” I asked my friend, “Would you go back to full time if you had to?” “Only if it was the last option on the table. I don’t know. Maybe I would just change careers.”

“To something else?”

“To anything else.”

And here are the links….

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20240408-menopause-women-job-quits, www.bbc.com

https://www.cbpp.org/research/poverty-and-inequality/governments-pandemic-response-turned-a-would-be-poverty-surge-into

https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/teens-are-getting-banned-from-malls-107347372697.html, www.yahoo.com

https://nypost.com/2025/01/29/us-news/sick-nurse-arrested-for-twerking-on-heads-of-disabled-patients-in-viral-videos-smirks-in-mug-shot/

https://bandofoutsiders.com/jamie-dimon-wife-judith-kent-and-children/

https://www.indiatoday.in/trending-news/story/jpmorgan-ceo-slams-employees-wfh-petition-leaked-audio-goes-viral-2681257-2025-02-17

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5031481, papers.ssrn.com

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024075002, www.nature.com

https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2022/02/04/3-new-studies-end-debate-over-effectiveness-of-hybrid-and-remote-work/, www.forbes.com