Remote Work and the Executive Anxiety of Time

Since the first sign of improvement among pandemic statistics, executives and industry leaders and politicians began celebrating an imminent return to the beloved workday office. And they almost immediately encountered resistance from the actual workforce that the idea of office work for its own sake was either particularly productive or meaningful.

Even the most hardcase return-to-office CEOs find themselves caving to hybrid work arrangements, while putting forth the usual gnomic philosophical explanations as to why the glorious Office should still be a central fixture of working life. Other leaders are quite comfortable simply insisting that it be so, claiming the mantle of heroic Business Maverick by enforcing a lifestyle founded in the 19th century (in this country).

I recently quit a very nice job that had gone fully remote along with the pandemic but, at the behest of a new corporate parent, was adapting to a three-day hybrid work week. Even that much was a concession for the corporate parent, who had begun their return-to-office plans with a full five-day work week, but had to back down after a wave of agitation from current and prospective employees.

My reasons for quitting were personal and typical—not wanting to look for childcare, not wanting to commute, etc.—but also because I’d come to really, vastly prefer remote work versus office work just because it’s so much easier to control my time in a productive way. It’s an individual preference for sure, as I know people who feel like working from home turns their home into an office, and dissolves work-life balance. But for me, not going into an office made it seem like the office didn’t exist, while the work itself became a manageable and engaging domestic task.

That recent job of mine also benefited from extremely sensible managers (my own and others) who were focused on evaluating your assigned work product, not investigating the concrete metrics of your hourly existence in the Workspace Dimension. And this got me thinking about how one of the most corrosive executive neuroses is what are my employees doing with their time?

I once had a manager, who was also the CEO and owner of the company, who despite not being 1,000 years old nevertheless considered his employees to be his chattels. In particular he was absolutely enraged at the idea of any employee picking up outside freelance work, no matter how unrelated or noncompetitive or non-impactful for their expected work at his company. This had nothing to do with a New York Times style freelance ban in the sense of somehow impugning the high moral position of the brand. And it certainly wasn’t because people in the company were adequately compensated.

Instead, what maddened him was the idea that anyone he paid a full-time salary had the right to spend time generating any work product that he did not somehow control or benefit from—even outside work hours, even outside the office. Bizarrely this draconian mindset led him to offer employees the “compromise” to accept freelance work if they paid his company 20% of what they earned (one employee pointed out this was basically a gangster insisting on a vig). I really enjoyed explaining that policy to staff by the way, and to my knowledge nobody every took him up on it. I told everyone to just freelance on the sly without bylines or with pseudonyms, and I would disavow all knowledge.

Almost every senior executive I’ve ever worked with was very anxious about what everyone was doing with their time, and/or what they were not doing with their time. They needed constant reassurance because being a senior executive means you have little to no direct visibility into the work product anymore. Your big executive brain is focused on strategy and vision and coddling investors and shareholders and such.

This executive time anxiety gets serviced, relieved, or exacerbated in a number of ways. Reporting and data can help soothe the nervous executive, demonstrating that whatever human time is being paid for, it’s resulting in x-y-z outputs, which ideally make sense in a cost-benefit sense.

But despite all their personal mythology, executives are simple, basic creatures of mere flesh. They believe most in what they can see with their own eyeballs (or by proxy, their minions’ eyeballs). And nothing calms the troubled brow of a feverish executive more than an office full of humming worker bees. Look at all those people toiling away, butts in seats! They’re definitely producing stuff. They’re spending time doing work.

Years ago I had a job at a magazine company that had its own mail-sorting facility. Myself and other new hires went on a tour of the place, where rows of workers sat at desk-like sorting machines, with mail zooming through a slot and automatically slit open. The human sorters snatched up the moving envelopes and deftly deposited the contents in various cubby holes ranked in front of them. The manager giving the tour proudly explained that the machines sensed the pace of the envelopes being sorted and decreased or increased their speed based on the speed of the worker.

The woman at the station in front of our tour group moved her hands in a blur sorting envelopes, otherwise motionless and unspeaking. I glanced down and saw there was a “Jesus Loves Me” sticker on the sorting cubbies in front of her, right at her eye level. This depressed me for days afterward. But she certainly was spending time, in an office, doing work, visibly and trackably.

Contrary data about returning to the office can be finessed or ignored, of course. Companies have become accustomed to paying outrageous rents for office space in major cities—that’s baked into the model by now. You might debate size and location of your office, but never “is it worth it to pay this much for any office?” And of course companies don’t pay for the portions of employee lives wasted on commutes, so that’s not much of a factor in decision-making. Other questions of work-life balance, morale, recruitment and retention? When enforcing a return to the office, these are concerns, surely, but they are the airy abstract concerns of HR.

However, when whole industries shifting to remote work didn’t annihilate their businesses, office partisans were very quick to embrace a whole host of their own airy non-monetary abstractions. Much of this falls under the infinitely elastic concept of company culture (an updated look at that in another story). Mentorship, collaboration, team-building, esprit de corps, brainstorming together with whiteboards, just droppin’ by your pal’s cubicle for a quick chat? So much of that in-person immediacy of work life is lost in the remote lifestyle!

But all those things—or those versions of those things—are artifacts of the prior age. There’s nothing wrong with preferring one over the other. But neither approach is necessary, as the pandemic demonstrated. Executives prefer the old-school office environment because they find it most familiar, comforting, and reassuring as a mechanized environment for monitoring and controlling time. In their precious little hearts, every executive in the world would love to somehow implement a tracking system like Amazon’s to monitor employee time by the minute—from Jeff Bezos, truly the master of executive time control.

The tragedy of executives like Elon Musk insisting on hard time for office presence lies not only in the arbitrary nature of I’m-the-boss mandates. It’s the assumption that office employees have not found many, many ways to elude standard office time control over the decades and centuries. I myself have spent uncountable company hours over my career figuring out ways to conceal time-wasting office behavior! I promise you that on a daily basis Elon Musk looks directly at an employee who is wasting time without his knowledge, while they nevertheless appear to his eyes very efficiently busy.

Not all executives, etc. etc.—there are several counter-examples of leaders out there who have a very chill vibe about time control, and are quite content to focus on the work instead. Good for them. Having a flexible office policy means a much simpler policy, tailored to individuals and teams, and without the need for an enforcement process and a whole bureaucracy of consequences.

As an executive, ask yourself this question: If my employees are otherwise doing everything required of them, does it bother me more if they have free time or are wasting time? Is a pointless task better than no task? Are you paying for work, or are you paying for time? If the latter, you should probably be paying more.