WeWork CEO says ‘least engaged’ employees prefer to work from home – New York Post

A desire to work remotely is a sign of poor job engagement, says the head of shared workspace company WeWork. 

But other executives are slamming him for that appraisal.

Sandeep Mathrani, CEO of the commercial real estate venture, said this week that employee engagement directly correlates with a preference for working in-person or not. 

“No one is saying they don’t want to go to work. They are saying ‘I wanna go to work two or three days a week’ and ‘I’d like to work from home a day a week,’ ” Mathrani, 59, said at the Wall Street Journal’s Future of Everything festival Wednesday, Insider reported.

“It’s also pretty obvious that those who are overly engaged with the company want to go to the office two-thirds of the time at least,” he continued. “Those who are least engaged are very comfortable working from home.”

Mathrani — who took over as CEO in 2020 following the ouster of company founder Adam Neumann — went on to cite the collaboration, innovation and company culture that happens when colleagues work together in person as his reasoning. Combating “Zoom fatigue,” he continued, was a significant reason many businesses have had employees begin returning to the office and establishing “hybrid” working schedules.

In response to the blunt assessment, other CEOs have taken to Twitter to generally taunt him and specifically point out that Mathrani has a significant conflict of interest in determining such a thing, as WeWork benefits from workers returning to an office setting. The office-leasing empire was seriously impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, though in January Mathrani said the company could reach profitability by year’s end.

A shared workspace at a WeWork location in London last month.

AFP via Getty Images

“The most engaged employees always store their files in Box,” tweeted the cloud content company CEO, Aaron Levie, in a mockery of Mathrani’s vested interest against remote work. 

“The most engaged employees always take @Uber to work and order @UberEats so they can skip those pesky long lunches,” responded Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi. 

WeWork declined The Post’s request for comment. 

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