ATT made headlines last December when the company told employees they needed to return to the office and give up hybrid (telework) schedules. Now last Friday, August 1, CEO John Stankey told employees: get with the program or get another job.
Analyzing results of an employee poll, Stankey seemed satisfied that 79% of respondents seemed to accept the return to office policy and the new direction upper management was taking. Stankey insisted that, for ATT to remain competitive, it needed to move from a paternalistic company based on employee satisfaction to one based on competition for customer satisfaction and market share. And if that’s not your cup of tea, you might want to find another company more “aligned” to your vision.
The American workplace seems prone to wild oscillations. Not too long ago, I was regularly critiquing the phenomenon of “greedy work,” the idea that somehow “professionalism” made the principle of a limited day obsolete. There is a reason why one of the noteworthy achievements of the American labor movement was the eight-hour day. Nor should we think of that limit as exclusively for physical laborers (though one-third of one’s day is demanding). One-third of one’s day is fair labor for people who should not have to live for work.
But COVID swung the pendulum to the other extreme. While our most “essential” workers -- the people who stocked shelves and drove trucks -- never left the job, those who “think” about the workplace took a long time to get back to the office. Their absence, of course, was supported by those who went back to their jobs much earlier, delivering food, groceries, and all sorts of care items to our “thinking” and “management” classes. The fact that in 2025 people are still grousing about going back to the workplace is very much a class issue.
And while I very much want to strike a balance between “greedy work” and “pajama-clad work,” I see one big reason for the return to the office. It’s the Biblical injunction: “it is not good for the man to be alone.”
Most work requires collaboration. Teamwork. Collaboration does not occur only (or even primarily) through scheduled connections on Zoom. It happens in a thousand and one little ways by which employees in the office connect and learn a company culture, from the meeting in the conference room to the gossip around the water cooler. This context acculturates employees, forms bonds that are the social glue reinforcing work teams, and performs the valuable psycho-social function of putting people in contact with other people regularly.
It also reinforces a valuable red line that greedy work blurred: the distinction between home and workplace. The growth of home as alternate workplace is not a positive phenomenon. The fact that returning ATT employees complained that they were compelled to come back to offices for which there was no space for them shows how the workplace also benefitted from spinning off its infrastructure requirements on to the home.
But I think the most important benefit of return to work is a correction to the culture of at least two generations raised by helicopter parents: life is not primarily about you. In marriage and family life, it is often about the other. In business and work, it is about the employer and what it takes for your employer to be successful. Your job is not first and foremost about your personal fulfillment (which is why people need to be more serious about vocational discernment). It is about giving your employer a fair day’s labor. Work is not a locus for participation trophies.
Stankey seemed to infer that the idea of corporate loyalty towards employees might also be on the line in the new management paradigm. That would be unfortunate: a company that has no loyalty to its people, who sees them simply as a “cost factor,” have no right in justice to expect 110% loyalty commitment from them. “The measure by which you measure will be measured out to you…” is more than just a nice Biblical saying.
Still, there’s a valuable lesson in America’s most successful businesses laying down markers that productive work, normally in-person, is the mark by which one’s employment success will be measured. It’s good for business and good for the worker, because “it is not good that man should be alone.”
Image: AT&T