The Bullog - June 2022

Take Sugar with a pinch of salt

Do you consider yourself a lazy git???

If you’ve ever taken the odd Friday afternoon off then you’re at risk of being branded one by Lord Sugar.??The star of the UK version of The Apprentice is not renowned for his tact and used the term as a collective description for PwC employees who were told they could take Friday afternoons off over the summer.

"The lazy gits make me sick," he wrote, referring to PwC's new policy. "Call me old fashioned but all this work from home BS is a total joke."

(N.B. A “git” for those of you who are not native English speakers is not a particularly flattering term as you can read from the Urban dictionary definition)

Yes, you are indeed old-fashioned Lord Sugar, as is your TV show in my opinion. Not surprisingly PwC’s Leadership hit back and accused Lord Sugar of being out of touch.?

It was in the May Bullog only last month that I was talking about the culture war that is emerging around remote working and this red threat is unapologetically continuing through this month’s Bullog too.

It would have been easy to write off Lord Sugar’s view as that of a business dinosaur and argue that there was a strong consensus amongst modern, progressive companies that productivity is not correlated to the amount of time you spend sitting at your desk in an office.?Indeed, I’d suggest that if there is a correlation then it’s probably an inverse relationship – meaning that I suspect people are becoming less productive the more time they spend in the office.??

Then, much to my disdain, Elon Musk appears to have kicked off the same debate on the other side of the Atlantic.?Whatever your views on Mr Musk, I doubt you would describe him as a dinosaur and he is arguably one of the most successful and creative entrepreneurs of our time.??A leaked memo informed Telsa employees that they should get used to being back in the office or “pretend to work elsewhere”.

Musk's work ethic is infamous and he is known to regularly pull 100+ hour work weeks and on occasion sleep on the Tesla factory floor.?His views are in sharp contrast with the leadership of Twitter, when only back in March, Jack Dorsey told his staff they could work from home indefinitely.?If Musk’s takeover is successful, there is likely to be a rude awakening in store.?Here’s my prediction: Musk will invoke a backlash amongst employee activists who will effectively go on strike or collectively prevent such a policy from being implemented.

Predications are of course unreliable, but I think that Julia Hobsbawm, author of book The Nowhere Office, hits the nail on the head when it comes to the debate in the UK.

"I would say that Alan Sugar and indeed Jacob Rees-Mogg, given his recent comments, are the least likely to solve that problem, which is: how do you get people working productively post-pandemic, in very new ways." She explains.

Spot on Julia. Productively and, I would add, creatively.?Which is nice segue to my next topic.

This article is an extract from the?June edition of my Bullog,?my monthly?blog. To read the full blog or to sign up to receive The Bullog directly each month?visit………www.gibbulloch.com/bullog.