How Was Working From Home?

When looking for final answers, the closer you can drill down into something the more you can fully appreciate all that’s involved in that conclusion. A CEO with a worth of $32 billion, however, isn’t going to be able to get that deep into many topics. Maybe then we shouldn’t in turn to give too deep a look into Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman saying that people who worked from home during the pandemic didn’t work as hard as they did in the office.

Upon first seeing this headline, I thought that it was a rather broad statement to make, for there was no way there wasn’t a sizable chunk of people (granted, it may be less than 50%) who were more productive at home. The article itself went on to highlight what a lot of people had to juggle (such as guiding children through schoolwork) at the same time, so they were still working hard even if not all their time was fully invested in their job.

So now that this has all been able to shake itself out a bit – aren’t there certainly people who agree with Schwarzman and are glad to be back to the office? Aren’t there people who had a very difficult time with doing too much during the pandemic and glad that schooling and child care are back up and running? Aren’t there some people who were more productive by being able to have more control over their time, when they work, and when they didn’t?

Then again, when running a large operation, it is easy to understand how Schwarzman must make some type of blanket statement to get the best possible outcome for his business. I don’t know how many employees he has, but I can appreciate there are enough of them that he can’t go through and give every one of them an individual opportunity to choose just how, where, and when they want to work. There are, of course, many tasks where those things will have to line up with the time of others to be the most productive and not have things lagging due to waiting on one person to finish a task. So what he is saying may truly be best for his company.

At the same time, though, championing it as some grand final answer denies the truth of some people he is referring to. So in the end, there is some truth on both sides of this, like there is in most everything. Remembering that is something we can all do well to keep in mind more often (even if I am saying this as my own blanket statement).

Warmly,

Josh Bousquet
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