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(It may be hard to shed a tear for a banker, but the problem of overwork is rampant.)Īnd as much as employers talk about interaction, the modern office is often a place where one goes to be alone among others.
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Last year, a group of analysts at Goldman sent their bosses a list of grievances that included having to work 105 hours in the previous week. Add that on top of an eight (or nine, or ten) hour work day and you’re losing virtually all of your awake time to work. In New York City, the average commute time is nearly 40 minutes one way. “It’s more that the requirement being unilateral and being handed down from the top without our input and frankly treating us like children - that’s the problem.” People often cite commuting as their main complaint of returning to work, which makes sense when you consider how much time a person spends just getting to and from work. “It’s not that we don’t ever want to step foot in any of our locations ever again,” one Hearst staffer told me. In other words, it was a symptom of the culture that inspired workers to organize there in the first place. At the root of Hearst Union’s NLRB complaint was that management was making a “ unilateral change” without bargaining with employees and listening to their needs. When you look beyond employees protesting return-to-office policies, there are almost always other signs of greater discontent. The office isn’t the problem - it’s work. The fantasy many employers have of what the office was - the story of why we must come back - is currently running up against reality. The reality of the office is often a miserable one: people stuck on long commutes only to arrive at mostly quiet offices and sit in pointless meetings junior staffers quitting because they don’t see a career path and don’t have mentors.
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In-person work is often fine, it’s just that cultivating the kind of environment described by bosses in their odes to the office - natural collaboration, mentorship, spontaneous creativity - is a different project than simply dragging people back to midtown as we cycle through COVID waves. People like seeing colleagues face to face, like collaborating, and - significantly - like separating their work life from their home life. “It’s bumping into each other over the course of the day and advancing an idea that you just had.” Leadership at Hearst told Insider a similar story: Pushing people to come back to the office despite protests from their union “reaffirms our connectivity, builds our community, and helps foster an environment of creativity and overall collaboration.” Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, who has called remote work an “aberration” and inspired the tiniest of uprisings among his firm’s junior bankers, told Fortune in February that the “secret sauce” for the company is when younger hires “come together and collaborate” with more senior employees.
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“Innovation isn’t always a planned activity,” he said. Apple’s Tim Cook told People last March that he couldn’t wait to go back and experience a little of that magic again. It’s a space where the walls practically vibrate with possibility. To hear it from bosses, the office is sacred.
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