Media War Against Work From Home Is Ridiculous Boss-Centric Propaganda – Business Insider

• News outlets have been waging a war against remote work through reporting and commentary.
• The arguments focus on what’s lost from remote work, rather than the positives.
• Most people speaking against remote work are higher-ups that barely interact with the office.
• Ed Zitron is the CEO of EZPR and a contributing opinion writer for Insider.
• This is an opinion column. The thoughts expressed are those of the author.

The New York Times recently published an op-ed from a partner at a law firm saying that “We’re Kidding Ourselves That Workers Perform Well From Home.” On the same day, they published a piece called “Return to Office Hits a Snag: Young Resisters,” a piece focused on how young people are holding up the return to the office, missing out on non-specific benefits such as “culture” and “collaboration.”

Less than a month later, they published another piece titled “My Years on Wall Street Showed Me Why You Can’t Make a Deal on Zoom” from a former Wall Street trader who extolled the “alpha male mind games” of in-person Wall Street dealing. Soon after, the Times published yet another piece about workers who are frustrated about not going back to the office.

The author of this last piece called these workers a “silent majority,” based on a study of 950 workers —  questionably including retail workers that could not work remotely even if they wanted to — that found that while 45% of workers wanted to be in an office full-time, 55% of workers actually wanted to work remotely in some capacity — ether all the time (31% of those surveyed) or in a split between the office and home (24%). The next week, the Times published “The Winners of Remote Work” a piece that suggests that remote work will create inequality, as if the office doesn’t do so already.

It’s hard to view these as anything other than a propaganda campaign against remote work — a continual flow of spuriously-argued think-pieces that don’t pose any true criticism of remote work beyond the loss of a vague sense of “office culture,” which, like the vague term “professionalism,” is something that’s often used to exclude diverse voices and promote bias. These pieces almost always argue that “office culture is important,” and that face collaboration is better without any proof, usually argued by somebody in a senior role that doesn’t participate in the day-to-day of the company. 

One must also wonder why the New York Times is hiring a “back to work” newsletter writer to cover subjects such as “value of face-to-face communication with coworkers, balanced against the burdens of commuting and living in high-cost areas.” 

The remote work debate has potentially become an issue of both-sidesism, with major publications feeling the need to counter the “obvious” benefits of work from home in an attempt to present counterarguments that seem “surprising” but instead disregards the positives of remote work. As a result, the conversation is almost exclusively around what is lost from working remotely — a vague sense of “collegiality,” the “spontaneity of collaboration” — and uncritically publishes quote after quote from executives baselessly arguing that remote work is bad and that we “must return to the office.”  

Despite research showing that remote work either maintains or improves the productivity of a company that can institute it, managers and executives are working overtime for the first time in their lives to fight against it. They’re claiming that remote workers are “forgettable” and easily replaceable, likely because a large chunk of them are unprepared to lead remote teams — which, of course, they blame on the workers -—and, of course, the majority of managers prefer to have their workers in person. In any case, the majority of workers would rather quit than return to the office.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal followed an op-ed called “Employers Must Resist Remote Work’s Allure”  with an exhaustive piece called “The Boss Wants You Back in the Office. Like, Now.” The latter piece is about how a regional bank and mortgage company (that happens to have Glassdoor reviews that claim it’s a “cult” with a “toxic underwriting environment“) forced people back into the office.

A follow-up piece on remote work potentially lasting for two years reads like a message board for executives scared of remote work, complaining of people not feeling as connected to their organizations when working remotely — meaning they’re more likely to leave their job — which may indeed betray why so many of these pieces exist.

In the same month-or-so long period, the Times and Journal published a slew of anti-remote pieces, mostly centralized around anecdotal quotes, flawed research, or the vague musings of executives and managers (who rarely understand actual work).

These op-eds and articles are almost universally boss-centric propaganda, propping up the in-person office with loosely-sourced arguments that by-and-large do not actually relate to whether the company is doing well or not. In fact, it’s rare for these pieces to question their sources about company performance, milestones, or any other evaluations as to the company’s success. 

It’s likely because management wants people back in the office because they like having them there, and it’s nothing to do with the company’s ability to make money or get things done. Having workers back in the office allows management to keep an eye on them, as well as extract more hours out of them through the guilt of colleagues’ judgment — and the surveillance of middle managers. The same CEOs that will talk about “tough decisions” when laying off employees are failing to make the “tough decision” of shuttering or reducing their office space, and are acting as if remote work is a fleeting event rather than the future of how desk jobs will work. 

And instead of critically examining a post-office future or reevalute the need to return to some warped sense of “normalcy,” large media entities are propping up pro-office opinions in the flimsiest, least-critical way possible, helping to build and reinforce a narrative that remote work is inferior and that we must return to the office. One small problem, though — many workers would rather quit their jobs entirely than go back to their desk full time.

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