Elon Musk believes remote work is a 'COVID-era privilege'

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Elon Musk said what a lot of CEOs think: RTO mandates are meant to make you quit

By Pavithra Mohan

Writing in the Wall Street Journal this week, Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy —who were recently tapped to lead the newly minted Department of Government Efficiency—touched on a topic that continues to be a source of friction in workplaces across corporate America.

In their op-ed, Musk and Ramaswamy offered insight into how the new initiative, known as DOGE, might cut costs and reduce the size of the federal government. They hinted at their plans to trim head count across the civil service—in part by mandating that federal workers return to the office full-time. “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome: If federal employees don’t want to show up, American taxpayers shouldn’t pay them for the COVID-era privilege of staying home,” they wrote.

A report released by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) earlier this year revealed that federal employees eligible for telework were already spending more than 60% of their time working from the office. Still, the change in policy that Musk and Ramaswamy are advocating for could impact more than a million employees—about half the overall federal workforce, in fact—who are currently able to work from home at least some of the time.

These plans for DOGE are fairly consistent with Musk’s approach to governing his own companies. When Musk bought the company formerly known as Twitter, he barred remote work and instituted sweeping layoffs, cutting something like 80% of the workforce. In 2022, he told employees at Tesla and SpaceX they needed to spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week. Musk has even described remote work as “morally wrong” because some employees don’t have the option of working from home. (“People should get off the goddamn moral high horse with the work-from-home bullshit,” he told CNBC last year.)

In describing hybrid work as a “COVID-era privilege,” Musk and Ramaswamy echoed what many leaders have suggested as they impose strict return-to-office requirements. Even as they saw high rates of productivity during the pandemic—and in the years since —many companies have insisted that five days a week in the office is essential to fostering collaboration, despite pushback from employees who grew accustomed to hybrid schedules or were hired as remote workers. When Amazon CEO Andy Jassy ordered employees back to the office full time, he noted that “before the pandemic, it was not a given that folks could work remotely two days a week, and that will also be true moving forward.”

Some return-to-office policies were seemingly engineered to increase attrition and encourage voluntary resignations —and C-suite executives have admitted that they expected turnover after issuing those mandates. In response to employee complaints about Amazon’s new policy, Amazon Web Services CEO Matt Garman implied that people who were unhappy should leave the company, according to a Reuters report . “If there are people who just don’t work well in that environment and don’t want to, that’s okay, there are other companies around,” he said. But few leaders have been as explicit as Musk and Ramaswamy about the intent of their return-to-work mandates—and their hopes that a new policy will actually help reduce head count.

In fact, the idea that more stringent in-office requirements will lead some federal workers to quit—much like their counterparts in the private sector—appears to be a core part of their proposals for downsizing the federal government. If corporate mandates are any measure of how people feel about remote work, it’s likely this strategy will prove effective.

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