CEOs are paid very well. To be fair, some of them have to do uncomfortable things to promote their company and earn their lush pay packages. The heads of cigarette companies need to convince people to smoke, casino executives rely on gamblers and beer and wine makers have to keep people drinking.
Sandeep Mathrani, a thoughtful, serious and sober real estate executive, recently took over the reins of the co-working real estate company WeWork from the flamboyant over-the-top Adam Neumann. He’s tasked with a tough job. Mathrani must convince people to leave their now-comfortable routine of working at home and start schlepping from the suburbs into a big building in New York City.
You have to respect that the guy has a job to do. Unfortunately, Mathrani’s attempt to rally a return-to-the-office campaign came across as tone-deaf. The chief executive intimated that the best, brightest and most motivated people will go back to the office. Losers, however, will stay at home.
Mathrani said, “Those who are uberly engaged with the company want to go to the office two-thirds of the time, at least.” He added, “Those who are least engaged are very comfortable working from home.” Mathrani continued, “People are happier when they come to work. The bigger issue is do you come to work five days a week or do you come to work three days a week? That’s the bigger issue. There’s no issue of not coming to a common place.”
We all get that he has to say this type of thing to hype returning to an office, since it’s his livelihood. It’s the same way McDonalds saturates the media with advertisements glamorizing Big Macs, large sugary sodas and fries. Executives need to get an understanding of the current zeitgeist.
For the last year, nearly all white-collar professionals worked from home. Most of them realized that they could be just as effective at home as being in the office. They also experienced a better balance of work and life—lots of quality time with family and no more long commutes. We are still in a pandemic and people are concerned over health-safety issues. Mathrani wasn’t wrong, he just didn’t read the room right.
Last week, Cathy Merrill, the CEO of the Washingtonian, a magazine covering the D.C. metro area, made a similar faux pas. She wrote a threatening-sounding op-ed for the Washington Post. In the opinion piece, Merrill said, “While some employees might like to continue to work from home and pop in only when necessary, that presents executives with a tempting economic option the employees might not like.” She ominously stated that if an employee is rarely around the office, then there is a “strong incentive to change their status to ‘contractor.’”
The consensus of large corporations shows that we’ll likely see, at first, a flexible hybrid work model, in which workers come into the office two or three days a week and then operate remotely the rest of the week. Google has built and repurposed offices to make them look and feel amazing. With amenities, cool technologies, lots of snacks and a fun environment, the search giant hopes to attract and retain the best emerging Gen-Z talent.
Other CEOs, such as the heads of Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Netflix, have called for an immediate return to the office. David Solomon, the CEO of investment bank Goldman Sachs, said the remote-work trend was an “aberration” and not conducive to Goldman’s way of working. JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon isn’t a fan of remote work, pointing out there is an absence of “spontaneous learning and creativity because you don’t run into people at the coffee machine, talk with clients in unplanned scenarios or travel to meet with customers and employees for feedback on your products and services.”
There is a large group of people who are adamant about staying at home and say they’d quit if asked to return to an office setting. It’s not that they’re being difficult. For instance, families with dual-working parents and young children experienced a tough time balancing child care and job responsibilities, especially if public schools remain closed.
Mathrani previously offered a more reasoned and nuanced response to the return to work, stating, “We’ve seen mental health reasons for people who want to come back to work (in the office). I’m a firm believer that the office is an important part of everyday living.”
WeWork started out as a celebrated unicorn company. The co-working company planned an initial public offering (IPO). Neumann, former CEO and cofounder, was heralded as a wunderkind and was a multimillionaire on paper. The company was valued at a staggeringly high $47 billion and employed 12,500 people in its offices throughout the United States and internationally.
He took the boring and stale shared-office-space concept (that had been around for years), added a lo-fi, hip-hop music background soundtrack, free-flowing kombucha and the air of being part of a young, cool club and people clamored to set up their offices at WeWork.
The company rapidly expanded all across the U.S. and abroad. Along with the growth, cracks started to show in the facade. WeWork was accused of financial self-dealings (on the part of the former CEO), quirky behavior by cofounder Rebekah Paltrow Neumann (Gwenyth Paltrow’s cousin and wife to Adam Neumann), questionable trophy acquisitions (such as a wave pool operator) and a disturbingly high burn rate of cash.
Neumann told reporters that he’d like to become the leader of the world, live forever and amass more than $1 trillion in wealth. He allegedly engaged in over-the-top behavior, such as reportedly leaving a cereal box filled with pot on a private jet. Crew members found it and contacted the plane’s owner, fearing that this was part of an international drug-trafficking ring. The plane’s owner demanded it returned, which left Neumann stranded abroad.
A Wall Street Journal profile of Neumann detailed his nontraditional firing of about 7% of the company’s employees in 2016. At an all-hands meeting at WeWork’s home office, Neumann was “telling attendees the move was tough, but necessary to cut costs and the company would be better because of it” and then things took a strange twist. Tequila shot glasses were served to the employees. In a surreal moment, Darryl McDaniels of the old-school rap group, Run-D.M.C, started to perform the 1980s hit, “It’s Tricky.”
When asked by the Wall Street Journal if Mathrani would bring back beer on tap and tequila shots, he said he forecasts a WeWork known more for providing flexibility than fun. Marthrani added, “Fun is not defined by those aspects. I’m 59 years old. I’m uber serious, and so maybe having an adult in the room will change that.”
