The epidemic forced the vast majority of office workers into working from home. This is true for anyone who isn''t working in the service industry, construction, manufacturing, and a number of other industries.
Many workers were quarantined and shut down due to the only good part of the covid community. While their lives were limited to their houses with brief, sternuous outside trips, at least they did not have to leave their offices.
That event sparked an age-old debate about working from home. Many workers claimed that they actually worked harder without having to go into office, while a handful of CEOs sat down.
Get Netflix Inc. ReportCo-Chief Executive Reed Hastings has been outspoken on the topic and has made very clear that he sees working from home as a major negative.
The streaming major is, of course, a business in which a large percentage of its employees do creative jobs. Hastings may feel differently if he led an accounting firm or a business in which collaboration was less important.
In his remarks on the subject, he described "debatating ideas" as something that was significantly difficult in an isolated environment.
Getty Images supports Theo Wargo/WireImage.
Musk Approves With Hastings (Maybe for Different Reasons)
Elon Musk, Musk, has taken to Twitter (TWTR) and has received a report from Bloomberg, a platform he is currently buying.
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The CEO told the company''s leadership that "working from home is no longer acceptble (sic)" that the work commitment must be made in a "main Tesla office, not a remote branch office unrelated to the job duties, for example being responsible for Fremont factory human relations, but having your office be in another state.
Because that was previously expected of Musk''s factory workers, he wants office workers and management working in the office.
"It''s why I lived in the factory so much that those on the line could see me working alongside them," said the billionaire. "If I had not done that, Tesla would have gone bankrupt."
Interestingly, that''s not a popular opinion among many Tesla employees, but the assumption that employees may be more productive might be backed by new research from Eagle Hill Consulting.
Work From Home Might Not Work
While a survey of 1,001 adults in the United States aged 18 to older who are employed full-time or part-time can''t definitively answer the question of whether remote workers are as productive as in-office workers, the figures suggest that Musk and Hastings have a point.
The performance of 45% of remote workers, both fully remote and hybrid, was improved in the past two years. That''s more than the 34% of in-person workers interviewed on the same question, but neither outcome gives a huge obligation to modify the notion that most workers should go into an office on most days.
While the results are inconclusive, they suggest that a hybrid approach not Musk''s goal, but closer to the Netflix model of four days in the office, one day at home per week might be the solution.
Nearly all workers say their manager is adamant that they will get their work done, and this is fairly consistent for remote (96%), hybrid (90%) and in-person employees (96 percent). However, since the epidemic began, most employees have felt more pressure to perform properly (66%). That sentiment is substantially higher for hybrid workers (74%), followed by in-person employees (67%) and remote workers (56%).
The opinions of professionals working in offices were probably related to the fact that they likely had to follow covid-related protocols while at work. That factor likely influenced how they felt about their performance.
