Can we compare these two activities? Let’s check it out with Luis!
Apparently, Morgan Stanley’s CEO, James Gorman, said working in an office is the same thing as going to a restaurant. He recently reported that if you can eat at a restaurant in New York City, you can definitely go back to the office.
What do you think? Is he right?
Watch the video to find out more!
Luis:
Is working in an office the same thing as going to a restaurant? Let’s talk about, over some coffee. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen. This is Virtual Coffee Chat with Luis, I am your host Luis, and this is my espresso. Let’s talk about going to work at an office versus going to eat at the restaurant, because those two things apparently are the same for Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman. He says that if you can eat at a restaurant in New York City, you can definitely go back to the office. So, hmm, I wonder, are these two things the same?
Let’s see, you go to a restaurant something like two to three hours a day. You go to the office something like seven to 10 plus hours a day, in case of some particularly unhealthily workers. So, this the same thing? Doesn’t look like it. So, not wanting to go into medical details here because this is, after all, is a show about remote work, but the amount of this position to other people, and also the air volume in the room, seems to matter when it comes to COVID. So if you just want to make a purely public health-related argument, one would say that going to a restaurant where it’s usually the air is usual circulating and the people are coming and going, and people only circulate inside with masks and all of that, seems to be a lot safer than just being boxed in for eight hours with constantly the same people breathing the same air over and over again.
But I don’t even think you need to make this call. The reason that this comparison is foolish is because Morgan Stanley should just own it. They should just say, “Look, we have systems and processes that are not compatible with remote work. We’ve evaluated what has resulted from remote work over the last year, we don’t particularly like it. So here’s company policy.” You shouldn’t need to do fully weird comparisons with this or this or that, and you shouldn’t need to do anything else but justify… I mean, you didn’t even need to justify. Your company doesn’t need to justify why they want to go back to the office. Your company can just say, “This is the policy now, this was the policy that was in place when you started working here, so this is the policy that you’re supposed to follow.”
Now, that changes somewhat if you’ve been hired always remotely. I don’t know what the details were for everyone there, certainly not for everyone at Morgan Stanley. If they hired someone who has been purely working remotely, then maybe there’s an argument to make there saying that, “Oh, I accepted these working conditions, you shouldn’t change the rules on me.” But I do think that, as much as it saddens me because I’m pro-remote work, it does seem to me that it’s perfectly fair for companies to want to go back to business as usual, post-pandemic. That was the initial agreement. There was a change that was forced due to circumstances, and now we go back to what we’ve always done. And for you people who’ve had a taste of freedom and don’t want to let go, well, I hate to break it to you, but some companies won’t accept that. That’s the sad reality, and you’re probably better taking your talent off somewhere else.
Look, it might sound unfair. It sucks, certainly, but it is way it is. I think that it’s perfectly legitimate for a company such as Morgan Stanley to want you to abide by whatever rules were in place before the whole pandemic thing started. There’s no reason to be flippant about it, though. The comparison with restaurants is quite ridiculous. Anyway, those are just my two cents. What are your two cents? Please tell me in the comments, preferably while having some coffee, and also press like, subscribe and share. See you tomorrow, everybody.
