It’s not just Tesla founder Elon Musk who thinks employees (or, more specifically, remote workers) are “lazy” — Frontier Airlines CEO Barry Biffle recently weighed in on the debate.
“We got lazy in COVID,” the budget airline boss complained at an investor conference hosted by Morgan Stanley on Wednesday. “I’m serious, people are still allowed to work from home. All this stupid stuff, right? It’s all out the window.”
Like many businesses, Biffle said Frontier is responding to falling demand during the economic slowdown by doubling down on cost cuts and boosting productivity, but insisted his business’s woes reflect a “society-wide” phenomenon.
“We’re not alone. You hear every company talking about productivity challenges,” he added.
Biffler, who has more than 20 years of experience in the aviation industry, did not specify what actions the company might take, but he outlined the problems the company currently faces: falling demand for domestic flights, rising fuel costs and rising wages after the epidemic. .
“When we compared overhead expenses adjusted for capacity in 2019, we saw a significant increase in expenses,” Biffle said. “Why are there more passengers per aircraft in the air than in 2019? It’s because they are not as productive. .”
Frontier Airlines did not respond of wealth Request for comment.
Not the first CEO to complain about post-pandemic productivity
Biffre is one of a growing number of executives voicing disdain for remote work and pushing for a return to more traditional ways of working — five days a week in the office — as the pandemic has receded.
Elon Musk tweeted last year (now
The billionaire’s first priority after taking office was to end Twitter’s “work from anywhere” policy. He’s taken the same approach at SpaceX and Tesla, where he expects employees to be in the office at least 40 hours a week and praises employees who pull all-nighters “working hard until 3 a.m.”
Just last week, an Australian CEO similarly complained that workers’ insistence that they had earned the right to work from home after about three years of doing so during the pandemic was hurting the economy.
“Employees feel that their employer is very lucky to have them, rather than the other way around,” Tim Gurner, chief executive of the Australian luxury real estate Gurner Group, told the Australian Financial Review conference.
“We have to get rid of this attitude, and that has to be done by damaging the economy,” he continued.
Even the staunchest proponents of remote work seem to have changed their tune. Salesforce co-founder and CEO Marc Benioff and Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg both ditched super-flexible working policies this year due to RTO directives.
Why? Because employees who work in person “Get more done“, Zuckerberg said. At the same time, Benioff also said that the new employees “will do better if they are in the office.”
Will employees be less productive working from home?
Employers around the world are sounding the clarion call to get back to work in the name of productivity.In the UK, train ticket seller Trainline sees Sales increased by 23% this year As more and more people go to work. At the same time, about 1 million office workers have been ordered to return to U.S. offices.
Yet studies consistently show that employees are as productive or more productive when working from home than when sitting at a desk, surrounded by noisy coworkers. McKinsey analyzed 2,000 tasks and 800 work types and found that about one-third of jobs can be done remotely without losing productivity.
Still, there are differences in the effectiveness of remote work, depending on who you ask: Employees generally believe working from home is more productive, but managers often disagree.This may be because, according to reports wealthemployees factor commuting time into their calculations of productivity, while managers do not.
For now, employers and employees seem to have found a compromise: 90% of companies With plans to implement return-to-work policies at the end of 2024, the proportion of companies requiring full-time offices is declining.
Svlook
