Here’s a rare sight: a CEO of a large company has spoken out in support of remote work for employees, slamming those firms that drag staff back into the office against their will. Dropbox boss Drew Houston compared RTO mandates to trying to force people back into malls and movie theaters.
Speaking on an episode of Fortune’s “Leadership Next” podcast, Houston said what most people have long thought: that returning to the office is a waste of time and money when employees can do exactly the same tasks at home.
“We can be a lot less dumb than forcing people back into a car three days a week or whatever, to literally be back on the same Zoom meeting they would have been at home,” he said. “There’s a better way to do this.”
I agree with most of this except for the manager piece. Most of my managing is over Teams or the phone. Doesn’t matter where I am.
But of course, I’m just a worthless manager taking up resources so take what I say with a grain of salt.
I think people tend to overly generalize to “managers” when they really mean the middle 3-4 of 6-9 layers of management or something.
E.g. the reporting chain from our company’s CEO all the way down to me (an “individual contributor”) has 7 people between us. The most change, and with the least noticeable effect on the work I actually do, happens around layers 4 to 6 above me
There’s typically 2 reasons for this: