Is the Five-Day In-the-Office-Week Over?

by Peter A. Arthur-Smith

“Remote work is not going anywhere. Return to the office has stalled out” New York Times Opinion article by Nicholas Bloom, ‘The Five-Day Office Week Is Over” October 2023. 

“I can prove it with data – lots and lots of data showing that returning to the office is DOA (Dead On Arrival),” continues Professor Bloom. It’s likely that all day-to-day activities and intuitive signs around us confirm his view. However, don’t quite write-off a number of powerful, heavily invested lobby groups. These include office realtors, town-city-state tax gatherers, and a tremendous number of die-hard managers. They’re not going to roll over and play for dead by any means.

Watch and wait for crafty, bogus PR campaigns by commercial office realtors with stories and data, as well as fancy gimmicks, as they do their darndest to convince executives and their staffs how they’ll enjoy being back in offices. Many have already tried sexy office make-overs to lure people back two to three days per week. Unfortunately, realtors know relatively little about what it takes to shift people’s views, because they are invariably numbers-people. They talk numbers everyday and mostly lure tenants into their offices by enticing them with “efficiency” numbers. People’s social norms are usually much more than just numbers!

Regarding the town-city-state tax gatherers; they of course want their cake and eat it too. It won’t be long before they contrive formulas for people to pay extra taxes while they work in their own homes. They will also join forces with realtors to generate propaganda to lure office workers back during week days to town and city centers – they desperately want those taxes generated from stores and restaurants at lunchtimes and cocktail hours. They also want taxes generated by commuter buses, trains, taxis and subways, too. Meanwhile they turn a blind eye to the inconveniences, inefficiencies, and inadequate comfort associated with such services, due to less than stellar management/leadership and lack of investment in them.

The other office-vested-interest groups are our conventional managers (CMs) and executives. They are another powerful group that avidly desires their people to be back in the office “under their noses.”  Apart from that daily feeling of power, they traditionally don’t trust their people any further than they can see them. We’re exposed to daily and weekly stories about how their people feel cut-off without someone looking over their shoulder every day! Behaviorists are likely to be regularly hired to report how miserable their people are without daily supervision – that may be true in a minority of cases.

Economists will be drafted to prove that people work less hours when they’re at home rather than in the office, even though its already been shown that it’s quite the contrary. At-home workers make up any shortfalls in their own time, after picking up their kids from school or watching their offspring’s afternoon soccer games. Of course any reports don’t mention eye-boggling daily commutes, as people try to balance cost-of-living issues and out-of-pocket commuting costs by living large distances away. Beyond that, CMs and executives duck the questions: “Are you a joy to work for?” or “How do you manage to take care of your toxic work environments?” or “Do your people enjoy working in basements or windowless offices?”

As this article has already implied, the chances are very high that remote and hybrid working are here to stay. Quite apart from the fact that we are now blessed with many tools to facilitate this, like computers, cell phones and other portable office gizmos; as well as we have an acute shortage of convenient and desirable commuter possibilities. Governments have too often neglected commuter conveniences as they’ve allowed people to rely on their cars. Also, what about the health and stress circumstances created by clogged highways? Did you ever take an aerial view of the Long Island Expressway, our route 66 out of Washington, DC, or California Freeways?  One wonders how commuters tolerate this day-in, day-out torture. No wonder we have productivity issues; many people are exhausted by the time they reach their office desks.

Enter enlightened leaders (ELs) who know how to inspire people, whether they work from an office, remotely or in hybrid situations. ELs inherently stimulate team members to give of their best from wherever they work. The attributes of such leaders are finally about to become more commonplace rather than be historically denigrated by their CM counterparts. People-leadership will be viewed as more important than just monitoring and counting the numbers. ELs appreciate that it’s their people that generate the numbers, rather than utilize numbers to railroad productivity every day. Numbers can be useful indicators of progress, but well led people know the fundamentals behind any numbers and how to orchestrate sotuations into abundance.

Have you witnessed how people step-up when they’re mentored into discerning an effective success strategy, have the right knowhow, have reasonable resources to meet their situation, and can collaborate with others equally motivated? Even in remote or hybrid situations, camaraderie and teamplay can be orchestrated by ELs through regular virtual and in-person interactions. People know the difference between genuine mentoring and someone breathing down their necks. They also enjoy work environments where they are valued for their team contributions rather than being pitted one against another.

So the age of enlightened leaders (ELs) is finally here. Many of them will emerge from the closet, where they’ve been hidden or banished for so long. Utilizing their people-skills rather than being devoted to numbers will become more respectable once more. Steadily and surely productivity will rise to levels not witnessed here-to-fore, especially as people’s contributions will be inspired by their talents and attitudes rather than talking-up numbers every day!  

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Author, Peter A. Arthur-Smith, Founding Principal with Leadership Solutions, Inc., is based in New York, and author of Smart Decisions: Goodbye Problems, Hello Options. He has drafted a potential new publication about enlightened leadership that offers a slew of fresh leadership concepts and practical models. Feel free to follow author at: Linkedin.com/in/peter-arthur-smith-2115722/  

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