30 Minutes on Zoom
- Ryan Aimers
- Apr 8, 2022
- 1 min read
Updated: Apr 12, 2022
Companies should immediately enforce employees back to the office full-time
Work From Home (“WFH”) was implemented during COVID-19 to reduce transmission of a deadly disease. In March 2020 the percentage of white-collar employees working from home, rose from 6% to over 70%. Fast forward two years and many companies are still operating in a hybrid-WFH environment. What began as a medical objective, has turned into a social experiment, and companies are suffering.
A recent Bloomberg study reported that 97% of white-collar employees view the ability to work from home as a new employment benefit. While typical employee benefits (medical, 401k) are an economic exchange of compensation for work effort (“win-win event”), I argue that WFH is a zero-sum benefit. That is – employees are winning and companies are losing. For example, a New York Times survey listed the top reasons employees prefer WFH as: COVID safety, sunlight, sweatpants, quality time with kids, and more hours to read and run. The shortlist doesn’t exactly instill confidence in employee productivity and company performance.
To gain perspective from the frontlines, I caught up with Augusto Titarelli, CEO of Imperial Capital’s National Pool Partners, on his experience with WFH. He noted that “Zoom enabled transactional corporate tasks to be same-or-better, but transformational strategic planning has been nearly impossible.”
The global economic forecast is marred with uncertainty. Executives and investors are contemplating the impact of rising rates, historic inflation, labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, COVID relapse, and geopolitical warfare. Businesses will have to adapt, adjust and transform. Let this be a warning to executives across North America: with hard decisions ahead, do you really want to book 30 minutes on Zoom?
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