The Back-to-the-Office Movement

I imagine that what the business world really needs now is a back-to-the-office movement. Malcolm Gladwell despaired over the fact that corporate managers had not been very successful in explaining why workers should be back in the office, but perhaps the younger generation is not susceptible to rational argument. When they made their way through the American academic maelstrom, one thing they did not learn was-- how to think.

Perhaps these Gen Zers can only function when they feel like they are part of a movement, even a mob. Thus, to get them back into the office, what we need is a BTTO movement. 

Now that we have solved that problem, we turn to Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google, an important figure in the technoverse.

Schmidt made a valiant effort, on CNBC, to explain why presence in the office was an important thing. He emphasized casual encounters during the workday and efforts to teach young employees the importance of a work ethic-- something that the school system has wrung out of most of them:

"We spent decades having these conversations about people being close together ... the discussion at the coffee table and going to coffee," Schmidt says. "Remember all of that? Was that all wrong?"

Schmidt says it's not just a matter of nostalgia: There are practicalities to working together in person. For example, he says that conversations about professionalism — which might be particularly necessary at companies full of young employees — are much harder to have virtually.

So, Schmidt goes back to 2001, the better to show that there is nothing new under the sun. Immature young workers were the order of the day back then:

When Schmidt started at Google, for example, the company had "an awful lot of college students who were behaving as though the workplace was like college," he says. "And I used to say to them, 'This is not college. This is a professional thing, you can't do that. And, or, it might be illegal. So please stop, now.'"

One would have been happier to know what these overgrown children were doing that might be illegal, but alas.

The more important point is that it is more difficult to manage a younger worker or to teach the younger worker how to manage if he is on remote, How much management involved subtle forms of communication, a wink and a nod, a quick smile or a frown. Surely, these are far better than giving a speech or chewing someone out:

Younger employees, particularly those between the ages of 25 and 35, can also use in-office settings to more effectively develop their management styles, Schmidt says. For him, that includes learning about meeting etiquette, presentation skills, workplace politics and dealing with competitors, both internally and externally.

"In terms of their age, that's when they learn," he says. "If you miss out [on that] because you are sitting at home on the sofa while you're working, I don't know how you build great management. I honestly don't."

Management involves human relationships. If you are on a Zoom call or are crunching data through a spreadsheet, you are not learning how to manage human beings. And if you do not learn it then, you are not going to learn it.

The important thing is that human beings are social beings. About that Schmidt is entirely correct. If you do not socialize with other human beings, you will not feel like you belong. You will not feel like you are part of a larger enterprise. And you will not gain the satisfaction of relating to other people, learning how to be managed and learning how to manage:

Still, Schmidt says, a largescale movement to permanently work remotely would deny at least 30 to 40 years of workplace experience.

"I think there is a lot of evidence that humans are social," he says. "And that the current virtual tools are not the same as the informal networks that occur within a corporation."

Building relationships, creating networks, using the most economical modes of communicatin-- you cannot do it virtually.