The cognitive dissonance of corporate life

I was struck by a recent New York Times op-ed by Elizabeth Spiers, former editor of the New York Observer and founding editor of Gawker, skewering employers’ efforts to drag people back into the office by offering them “perks” from free snacks to company swag. One particularly eager (and rich) organisation offered workers who were willing to trek back in the chance to win a Tesla.

But Spiers, like me, isn’t biting. “I’ve come to think of these corporate toys and rewards as the work equivalent of the cheap prizes you win at a carnival after emptying your wallet to play the games,” she writes. “The difference is that the point of the carnival is to have fun and the prizes are incidental. In the workplace, this is just a laughably terrible trade-off. Who wants to give up the two hours a day they gain by not commuting for a free coffee mug?”

Indeed. As we’ve discussed at various points in Swamp Notes, there are pros and cons to the new hybrid and work-from-home arrangements, but the bottom line is that they look to be permanent. Even the big banks can’t get people back into the office full-time, not only because sentient human beings value autonomy more than money (one survey found that two-thirds of workers would give up $30,000 before they’d go back into an office full-time) but because we are more productive with less distraction.

I actually love my colleagues and would like to see more of them. But the structure of our office, in which nobody has a door that shuts and we all work elbow-to-elbow in a trading floor-style arrangement, is antithetical to getting any deep thinking done. Sure, I could buy noise blocking headphones and try to ignore all the distractions in my peripheral vision. But why, when I can get much more done, more quickly, in my home office?

Of course, the very fact that so many companies have ditched a traditional office architecture for open plan pods is down not only to cost savings, but to trying to emulate the Silicon Valley way of working, in which systems of social control, masked as pleasure (free in-office massage! All you can eat gourmet food! Dry cleaning done on-site!), keep people working 24-7. We all bought into it, by choice or by force, before the coronavirus pandemic. But plagues change things, and one of the things this pandemic has changed most profoundly is how we relate to work, how we show up (or not) to work, how we dress for it, and how we think about corporate structures.

Some of the shifts are small, but telling. A Columbia University study recently looked at whether more casual attire had turned us all into slackers. Nope; quite the opposite. Wearing comfortable clothes, the sort of outfits most of us have been padding around in for the past couple of years, actually “increased authenticity and engagement”. Not only did traditional office suiting not do anything for our power or productivity, the whole hybrid “Zoom mullet” look of sweatpants on the bottom and jacket on top “did not produce any psychological or work-related benefits”. This is one thing the Silicon Valley crowd seems to have done right — we should all ditch the false pretence of suits and sheath dresses and buy more hoodies.

A more serious and potentially impactful study was done recently by a group of scholars, including MIT’s wonderful Daron Acemoglu, looking at what value different types of managers bring into organisations. (The study was done looking at the US and Denmark). It turns out that hiring professional managers is actually a terrible idea for business — people with MBAs actually reduce employees’ wages, while failing to increase business output or investment in the process. This certainly dovetails with what I’ve thought for years — I had a chapter in my first book entitled “What an MBA Won’t Teach You”, outlining all the ways in which the people running businesses often run them into the ground. I’ve been in the world of work for three decades now — both as a sole operator, but also a high-level manager — and my experience is that in general, you need one strong person at the top with a vision, a handful of brilliant people working in a tight team, and that’s it. Anything more and you are just growing bureaucracy and process for its own sake.

What’s interesting to me is that all these things that many of us have felt for years are now being documented. The veils on corporate life are lifting. People aren’t going back to the status quo. Business won’t be able to either. Karl Marx would be happy, I suspect. Ed, I’ll end this piece with a question to you on what areas of cognitive dissonance you feel have been most exposed by the pandemic — in the work world, our personal lives, politics, or elsewhere?

Don’t miss Rana Foroohar, Edward Luce and other FT journalists on May 7 at the inaugural US edition of the FTWeekend Festival, featuring Henry Kissinger, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, William J Burns, Tina Brown, Jennifer Egan and more. Claim 50 per cent off your pass using our exclusive newsletter discount code FTNewslettersxFTWF22.

Recommended reading

• I just finished reading and reviewing Gary Gerstle’s important economic history, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order, which is a must-read. He puts the past 100 years of US economic history in a brilliant new light, and shows us how both conservatives and liberals drank the same ideological Kool-Aid.

• This Vanity Fair piece by James Pogue on the “New Right”, which is neither MAGA nor Mitt Romney, is a useful read.

• I loved reading about the wife of Otis Redding, my all-time favourite soul singer, and the new museum she has helped create in Macon, Georgia, in his honour. I will for sure be visiting it on a road trip at some point. For those who don’t know him, download his album Otis Blue, and in particular his version of “A Change Is Gonna Come”. It will make you weep.

Edward Luce responds

Rana, my pandemic began in 2012 when I became a columnist and stopped regularly going into the office. Between 2012 and 2020 I did a lot of travelling and was out and about most of the time. Only now are my pre-pandemic travel habits beginning to reassert themselves. Working from home works for me because of the nature of my job, which is inherently individual, like yours. There is a reason the FT banned double bylines on our op-ed pieces: columns by teamwork are invariably unreadable. The more bigwigs on the byline (say, the finance ministers of the leading western powers, or even heads of state — especially heads of state), the more turgid the prose and lifeless the arguments. 

But our jobs are not typical. As you know, we live in an increasingly lonely society. Having spent 20 years as a reporter, I had made lots of friends at the FT and could thus sustain them while no longer working from the office. For a young reporter — or young data analyst, or a young take your pick depending on the industry — I think working from home is a poor bargain. There might be a short-term boost to productivity from the saved commuting time and flexibility to juggle your priorities. But it will come at the expense of integration into the workplace, which is bad for productivity in the medium and long term. I have heard a lot of anecdotes about newer recruits feeling isolated, confused and left out. Most real communication takes place face to face. That quality is simply not possible to replicate from a distance. 

Right now employers are resorting to insulting gimmicks, as you point out, to lure their employees back in. That is because we are in a seller’s market: people can move very easily to another job. When that changes I expect employers to become more demanding about requiring their presence at least for three days a week. To be frank, I wouldn’t blame them. Indeed, I think it would be for the good of younger employees. The present hybrid situation is biased towards those who had already established relationships face to face, which as time goes on will become unsustainable. 

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And now a word from our Swampians . . . 

In response to ‘Putin’s other war on behalf of “men”’:
“We have, to a large degree . . . taken leave of our senses and ceased to treat people as individuals full of nuance and complexity. Instead, they are pressed into service as vehicles for the promotion of social tropes. Witness the spat between Ron DeSantis and Disney, the latter caving in to some of its outraged employees, the former to his supposed base. Florida taxpayers may reap some unforeseen consequences. Pusillanimous corporate governance meets retributionist politics.” — Neil Winward, New York, New York