Hold Up -- I Am Supposed To Be Connected To My Company's Mission? Come Again?

I guess if you’re going to discuss The Wall Street Journal (cc: The Wall Street Journal ), you need to begin by saying that it’s conservative-minded legacy business media with a long interest in propping up the managerial class and the ownership class, so since the beginning of COVID, it’s been a very staunch advocate for “the way we were,” i.e. everyone needs to be in neat little rows in the office.

As such, when they write articles summarizing new research from Gallup , as they do here —

— they tend to make it a story about how remote work is failing us all. To wit:

In a new Gallup survey, the share of remote workers who said they felt a connection to the purpose of their organizations fell to 28% from 32% in 2022 — the lowest level since before the pandemic. The findings are from a survey this spring and summer of nearly 9,000 U.S. workers whose jobs can be done remotely.

That’s not a bad sample size. But see, in the next paragraph, you have this:

By contrast, a third of full-time office workers reported a similar sense of connection, nearly the same as last year. Hybrid workers clocked in highest, with 35% saying their companies’ mission made them feel their jobs were important.

These numbers are still terrible. Basically 3.5 in 10 hybrid workers are saying “Yea, I mean I guess I understand the mission?” If you got a 35 on a test in high school, your dad might get out the belt, depending on what generation he comes from. These are not scores to write home about.

This discourse about the efficacy of WFH vs. hybrid vs. on-site is essentially never-ending, and I’m not really sure why we keep discussing it.

If you have certain types of jobs, i.e. working a drive-through, you cannot even work remotely. So right there, 50% of people could care less about the discussion and have to go somewhere.

For the privileged class that can discuss WFH, the basic tea is that if your company “gets” it and realizes people can be productive from anywhere and seat time isn’t a marker for productivity, then you will have flexibility. If your senior leadership doesn’t understand this concept, you won’t. It’s that simple.

Now, as for the “mission” component of all this, especially in times of rampant costs and inflation, the “mission” of most companies to a standard employee is: “Stay stable and keep paying me.” Very few people care about whatever the stated mission of saving the world through SaaS and widgets is. They want to keep getting paid because without income, they will feel broke and more stressed.

The whole “mission” thing sprung up in the aftermath of the 2008 recession, when executives realized the economy was a wet blanket and tech could only pretend to save us for so long. They knew they would have to keep costs down, so they invented “purpose” and “mission” and “engagement” in order to justify lower base salaries and benefits packages. It worked for about 6–8 years, then people started to get it. In COVID, especially those first two waves of mass layoffs, people really started to understand that (a) work isn’t everything and doesn’t love you back, and (b) you’re a number to most of these guys, and they don’t really care if you’re “engaged.” As a result, some people left jobs and made custom chess boards on Etsy and we called that “The Great Resignation,” whereas in reality people who were flush with a bit of COVID savings from the government and from not eating out as much job-hopped from one corporate hellhole to a slightly-different one.

As this was all happening, very few people were deeply concerned about the “purpose” or “mission” of their organizations . They wanted the cheddar.

So yea, I mean would a remote worker be less engaged? Very possible. Maybe even very likely. I totally could see that. But if they’re getting done the tasks you told them to get done, who cares if they buy into the mission? If they do tasks and that helps you, you keep paying them. If they stop doing tasks or aren’t reachable to your liking, you terminate them. It all cuts both ways, Mr. Manager. And in a world where you can’t even define “productivity,” who cares so long as the right boxes are being checked and the executives can prove growth?

All these terms around “engagement” and “purpose” and “mission” are fluffy. The private equity guys who own most companies these days don’t really care about whether someone is remote or in-office (unless, of course, they also hold a lot of downtown commercial real estate). They care about whether the graphs are up and to the right, and how quickly they can sell some of these places off to another bidder. The remote vs. on-site discussion is primarily a distraction. Work is about getting tasks done and, in return, getting your basic economic needs met. “Mission?” Who really cares?

What’s your take?