The Munk Debates Podcast - Be it Resolved, it’s time to return to the office

Episode Date: May 31, 2022

While many people are now happily returning to restaurants and concert halls after two years of COVID isolation, most workers are not as eager to return to the office. Office occupancy rates in the US are only at 40%, with as many as 15% of people say they plan never to return. Some economists argue that workers must be at the office for at least part of the week to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and innovation. Specifically, young workers have a lot to learn from their senior colleagues, an invaluable knowledge transfer which is often the result of spontaneous workplace interactions or friendly relations which are hard to cultivate via Zoom. Likewise, older workers need to become invested in their colleagues' success, mentoring them, offering them assignments, and championing them to others. These are important relationships that are not only vital to individual progress, but also to the long-term success of the company. Others point to statistics that show working from home, avoiding long commutes, and having more time for leisure activities actually increases productivity and effectiveness. And polls show that a third of workers would rather resign than return to the office full time. Instead of returning to an old and outdated workplace culture, companies need to redesign how they function and use new technology to reinforce social bonds. Workplaces which let their employees work from home while embracing new digital work tools of the 21st century will increase productivity, strengthen relationships, retain better employees, and ultimately get better results. Arguing for the motion is Allison Schrager, columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute Arguing against the motion is Adrian Wooldridge, global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion QUOTES: ALLISON SCHRAGER  “If we completely get rid of the office, then at what point do you connect with your coworkers? In a quarterly or annual retreat? You're never going to really have the spark in chemistry if that's the only time you see them.” ADRIAN WOOLDRIDGE “People have discovered that they can be just as productive, just as creative, just as intelligent at home as in the formal office …. work is no longer tied to a place.”   Sources: Yahoo Finance, Bloomberg Markets, CNBC The host of the Munk Debates is Rudyard Griffiths - @rudyardg.   Tweet your comments about this episode to @munkdebate or comment on our Facebook page https://www.facebook.com/munkdebates/ To sign up for a weekly email reminder for this podcast, send an email to [e-mail].   To support civil and substantive debate on the big questions of the day, consider becoming a Munk Member at https://munkdebates.com/membership Members receive access to our 10+ year library of great debates in HD video, a free Munk Debates book, newsletter and ticketing privileges at our live events. This podcast is a project of the Munk Debates, a Canadian charitable organization dedicated to fostering civil and substantive public dialogue - https://munkdebates.com/   Senior Producer: Ricki Gurwitz Editor: Adam Karch Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

These statues have to come down. It's always been a pandemic of the unvaccinated. The problem now is it's a pandemic of the willfully unvaccinated. Falling birth rates are good. They're good for our planet. They're good for our societies. We're not responsible for the escalation with Russia. We're not the ones who invaded Ukraine.

I don't think it's fair to portray people of color as victims. It is a very dangerous time in American politics. Hello and welcome to the monk debates on every day. Every episode we provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issue of the day to arm you, the listener, with enough information to make up your own mind. Today's debate, be it resolved. It's time to return to the office. According to a recent Barclay's study, working from home is here to stay. That study says that the pandemic, in our view, has pushed through a desired increase in workforce and employer flexibility that was already slowly developing pre-COVID. Only a third of CFO's tech leaders and hiring managers say their employees will fully return to the office. Amazon announcing he'll be giving some of its workers more flexibility to work from home indefinitely.

Facebook leaning in aggressively to the notion of a remote workforce. CEO Mark Zuckerberg predicting that in the next five to ten years, half of the company's nearly 50,000 employees will work remotely. Hello, I'm your moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. While many people are now happily returning to restaurants and concert halls after two years of COVID disruption, most workers are not keening to get back to the office. Occupancy rates in the U.S. are only at 40-odd percent with as many as 15 percent of workers saying they never plan to go back to the office. Some economists argue that workers must be at the office for a substantial part of the week

to facilitate all the creativity, collaboration, and innovation that modern businesses need and demand to survive. In-person relationships are not only vital, again, to individual progress. They are themselves the wellsprings of success of companies at the company level and arguably have bigger economic impacts on the economy as a whole. Here's Citadel hedge fund founder Ken Griffin, a vocal critic of remote work. For us, so much of how we create value in one form or another involves creativity and innovation, and having everybody back together has been really powerful in driving forward our overall business. Others point to statistics that show that working from home, avoiding long commutes,

and having more time for leisure activities actually increases productivity and effectiveness. Here's Airbnb CEO, Brian Chesky, who made remote work permanent at his Fortune 500 company. I think the days of people going back to the office five days a week are over. I even think the model that people were talking about remote, a hybrid of three days a week is also, you know, I think that was a little overly ambitious. And I think that what everyone's realizing is more flexibility is where the world's going. Instead of returning to an old and outdated workplace culture of nine to five employment Monday to Friday, remote enthusiasts argue companies need to redesign how they function and use technology to build.

social bonds. Workplaces that embrace digital tools of the 21st century will be able to have it all. Increased productivity, strong collaborative working relationships, and bottom line, profit and growth. On this installment of the Monk Debates, we challenge the essence of these two competing arguments by debating the motion, be it resolved. It's time to return to the office. Arguing for the motion is Alison Schrager. A columnist for Bloomberg opinion in its senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Arguing against the motion is Adrian Waldridge, global business columnist for Bloomberg opinion. Alison, Adrian, welcome to the Monk debates. Hello. Hello. Such a timely debate today, our resolution be it resolved. It's time to go back to the office,

to return to the office. This is what everyone is talking about all the time. Obviously, The work has a huge impact on our waking life, sucking up precious hours, how we spend those hours in an office with our colleagues. Is that the return to work, the future of work? Or is there something new? Has this pandemic fundamentally disrupted work? And what's the role of technology in this? Productivity and mental wellness and teams and all that great stuff that. We're going to debate in the next 40 minutes or so with you both.

So again, just a real privilege and pleasure to have you on the program today. We're going to do short opening statements, two minutes each. Allison, I'm going to turn the program over to you. First, you're arguing in favor of the resolution, be it resolved. It's time to return to the office. Yes, it is. Because if not now, when? You know, I get it.

I'm a student of economic history. Work changes. the whole going to an office thing, it's easy to see it as something that was maybe even a relic of the industrial era. And now we're moving into a tech era. You know, before people worked at home, then they went to the factory, then they went to the office. But now technology is freeing us and moving back to the original way people worked.

But that is actually not what's happening. Because it's tempting to see your job as something you can do from home. If you're over 40 and you have a knowledge job, one of those 37% of jobs that are done in the office and can be done remotely, it seems like you're better off. You don't have to waste time putting on nice clothes in the morning. You don't have to spend time driving to the office. And it seems like you can do your work just fine from home. But I'm here to argue that in fact, you cannot. Because your full job is not just the tasks you have to do at the end of the day or looking after clients. A big part of your job is also imparting

skills to younger workers. And if you're in your 20s, working from home is not a good option. Not only because the early parts of your career, you tend to do a lot of tedious grunt work and the camaraderie you make with your coworkers, form lifelong friendships, long-term work contacts is what makes it bearable, but also think back in your career and what really moved you forward. Odds are it was a senior person who not only trained you, but championed and mentored you and spent political capital on you to get promotions maybe you weren't ready for or projects you didn't think you were ready for. And that's what really pushed you forward. And it's just impossible to understand how if we were all working from home, knew we would ever

feel that committed to a younger person in their office and would spend that sort of political capital on them. And we already seeing young people who missed out on being in person classes in college having depression, having problems being regulating, showing up. on time, all these sorts of things you also learn on your first job. So it'd be a real disaster. So I understand there's some statistics that show productivity increases from not having to waste time commuting. But longer term, if we never go back to the office, we're going to see declines in productivity from declines in this human capital accumulation that's very important from training. And also from even just if you're over 40, the innovation that happens, the little side conversations

after a meeting that you're just not going to get on Zoom. So we have to go back. The time is now. And I think I'll convince you that's true. Hey, thank you, Allison. You're listening to our debate today. Be it resolved. It's time to return to the office.

Adrian, you're arguing against the motion. Let's have your opening statement. Well, Allison has perfectly well made most of my case for me. I think that we have realized over the last few years that work and the office do not necessarily go together. Most of what we regard as being work, we can do at home because we live in a world of smart machines

and instant communications that mean that we can complete our tasks just as easily on our work computer as on our home computer. We can collaborate with each other at distance. And in doing so, we gain an enormous amount. We don't have to sit on that train next to grunting, smelly people.

We don't have to risk our sanity getting up at a ridiculous hour in the morning. We don't have to discombobulate ourselves by moving around. We can gain an enormous amount of time for ourselves that we didn't know that we had in the past. And people are reacting in a rational way. They're not going back to work. However much they're bullied or bribed by their companies, A few are going back to work, but we seem to have hit a peak. And what we have certainly done is to hit an enormous amount of resistance.

So people have discovered that they can do their jobs at home. They can be just as productive, just as creative, just as intelligent at home as in the formal office. Or they can work anywhere. They can work at home, or they could work on the beach, or they could work in their chalet or retreat or in the local cafe. work is no longer tied to a place. Now, Alison made two very important arguments on her side, conceding, I think, that work isn't necessarily something that we do in a particular place, but emphasising the importance of two things.

One of training the next generation of workers and the second of innovation. I just don't think these arguments actually work, because I think both the training of the next generation of workers and innovative, can be done outside the office. It is absolutely vital that young workers are acculturated. It's absolutely vital that the culture of companies is transmitted and the company's culture is not just something that can be easily sort of turned into a sort of university, corporate university formula and transmitted.

It does have to be done with people mixing together, but I don't think that is ideally done, in a particular office by enduring the commute of five days a week and sitting at your desk for those five days a week and occasionally talking to a younger person. I think it has to be done in a much more structured way, perhaps by creating retreats, perhaps by creating intense immersion scenarios in which all the workers are brought together across the generations, in which the primary purpose of what you're doing is training. So rather than training, being an incidental product of everybody sitting in the same space.

It should be something that is deliberately structured. Secondly, with innovation, I don't think the workplace is a particularly good place for innovation, particularly now that we've gone for this notion of the open plan office. When I go into offices, I see lots of people sitting around with headphones on or earplugs in because offices now are noisy. There's all sorts of things going on that actually act as a distraction and stop people from this sort of deep concentration or even the really committed process of collaboration that you need. You can collaborate over the internet or again you can collaborate in particular sort of places

which are retreats which are devoted to the process of innovation. So I think this notion that these very precious things, collaboration and innovation, can be just the byproduct of physically being present and feeding your words into into all your numbers into machines is a very, very backward-looking way of dealing with very vital things. So the commute, a waste of time, innovation, collaboration, absolutely vital, but not necessarily something that must go on in the office. Thank you, Adrian. Opportunity now for rebuttals. So Allison, react to what you've just heard from Adrian. Yeah, and you know, as I said, I largely agree. No one really wants to spend time commuting. I will be the first one to say,

we should end open office plans. But that doesn't mean we have to throw away the office altogether. We can just put up walls again. And, you know, I think we both agree that spending time together with your coworkers, culture is very important. But I think what Adrian describes, to me, sounds a lot like mating in captivity. You know, this is your time, you know, on a work retreat, doing trust falls, spending time together where you're all going to connect.

And, you know, human beings aren't like that. You need to spend a lot of time together. even when he don't really even want to be together. And I've just said like I, you know, I've had a couple conversations with the economist Nick Bloom who studies innovation and has sort of become a big work from home expert. And he's the one who's done a lot of these studies that find, in fact, these huge gains from productivity gains from not going in. But even he thinks there can be too much of a good thing.

That it's really critical to at least go in a couple days a week. Just because when you do do innovation, I've worked in corporate jobs where we were coming up with new financial products. And, you know, the gains that we often had, you know, were very spontaneous, never during a meeting, but usually after the meeting, when we're sort of getting coffee afterward, is there a kibitzing about what went on and who said this and who said that? And that's when the idea happens. It's very organic. You know, human beings, I said, we can't manage our, have our relationships managed like this. It's said, we need a lot of hours together to really connect. And I think one reason why we're not seeing huge declines in productivity or culture yet, although I do think we're seeing some signs. of it. It's because we went into the pandemic having already had relationships with most of our coworkers. If we completely get rid of the office, then at what point do you connect at what in a quarterly annual retreat? Again, it's like mating and captivity. You're never going to really have the spark and the chemistry with your coworkers if that's the only time you see that.

Adrian's similar opportunity for you. I want to just hold you to the two minutes to be fair to the times in this debate. So quickly react to Allison and then I'll join with some questions that must be top of mind with our audience listening to you both. I think it's very interesting how much consensus has been forged in this particular debate. First of all, the consensus is that going back to the office five days a week is not a rational thing to do, and that people are not willing to do that, because a lot of what they were doing with their daily commutes and their daily, you know, sentence to sitting in the office was not something they liked, not something that they found particularly productive. The second sort of consensus is that there are important things that people

learn from being together, either to innovate or to collaborate or to transmit collective learning, train each other or for their older people to train the younger people. But the real question then is, what is the best way of doing that? And I think the idea that we need to go into a physical office, let's say for two days a week, and that it will somehow come organically, rather than as a result of sort of planned interaction, is rather like throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing how much of it sticks. It's a very haphazard approach to something that's incredibly important. I think a lot of people go to the office and don't interact very much with their colleagues. And, you know, the idea that we can somehow have this water cooler moment or this coffee moment when people start to interact.

I think it's, again, too haphazard. What we need is structured relationships when people are altogether engaged in innovation or engaged in culture building or engaged in training. And yes, certainly interacting, but not as a byproduct of just being in the office as something that is absolutely the central mission of that particular activity. Thank you, Adrian. Let me now join the conversation and try to kind of channel some thoughts that are going through our audience's minds listening to you both. And Allison, let me come to you first and just be interesting to hear from you. Here in Canada, we're a little bit, I think, behind the United States in terms of the return to work.

We've got a kind of health care constrained society that had to, in a sense, partially shut down again in response to the latest surge of the the virus. So I'd be curious to know what you are hearing, Allison, from employers. What are they telling you that the number one issue is with regards to return to work? Is it productivity? Is it, as you've mentioned, team building? I want to try to understand a little bit better from your perspective at Bloomberg. What's at stake here for employers? What's at risk, most importantly. I mean, I think there's a lot of concern about culture. I mean, they've built cultures around people being together. Also retention. I mean, a big reason people stay in a job sometimes is they really enjoy their coworkers and they become like family and they're used to seeing them every

day. So, I mean, quit rates are up. You have less control over culture. You have more people becoming much more sort of politically fragmented. I mean, I think another benefit of the workplace is it's becoming one of the few areas, certainly in American society, where people of different political beliefs come together and actually have to cooperate and work together. And you see that that person who votes differently than you is actually an okay person. So I think certainly when I talk to senior management, they're very concerned about culture and feel like it's broken down and they're getting sort of more incidents at work just because, you know, working with other people, admit it, is sort of annoying.

But, you know, you have a project. You want to do it. your boss is like, no, you can't, and you know that it should be done and they don't. Or someone talks too long in a Zoom meeting. They're also irritating. But when you actually work with people in person, you actually also get to see them as fully formed people who actually are nice people and have children and have pets and have all these things that you really care about.

So it forces you to like your colleagues a little bit more or not forces you. It just becomes more natural. And I think when you just see people over Zoom or maybe just very intermittently, it's a lot a lot easier to dislike them. So, Adrian, let's have you take up that point, because I think it's one that we're all struggling with, that we're social animals. We need to feed off each other. We've always done that.

We've done that in our culture for the better part of the 20th century. We've done that in a work setting. Some people would argue pre-pandemic for millennials' work was, as Allison mentioned, one of the key focus points, maybe the focus point of their social life, their dating life. a second family. Adrian Shirley, in 24 months, all that cannot have just gone out the window.

I think unfortunately, if you work in close proximity with other people, you may well not end up liking them, and you may well end up teaching them as part of your extended family. You may well end up intensely disliking them and finding them intensely annoying. And I think the trend,

which has probably been driven by a desire to save money, but it's justified in terms of the disaster to encourage collaboration, which is to knock down walls and to create open offices, creates an enormous amount of tension and dislike in the workforce. People are sitting there feeling intensely annoyed. And so when they've been given the choice, do you want to go into this office to sit elbow to elbow with other people? Or do you want to choose to work at home or in the local cafe or in your garden or wherever, they have willingly chosen to do the opposite to not to go to work. And indeed, you know, about a third of people are saying they will not go to work back to the office under any circumstances. They're saying that it's such a horrendous thought, not just because of the

commuting, but because of the enforced proximity to other people, that they'd rather quit their job and go somewhere else. So I think, you know, people are making a rational choice there. However, you know, as I say, we do need some form of collaboration. We do need some form of collective activity, collective innovation. You know, we work together because we can do certain things together, which we can't do at home. But I think not as a byproduct of sitting in the office, but as a structured approach to management.

I should also say, you know, you asked Alison about Canada versus America in terms of people going back to work. When I was recently in America, I noticed a lot of reluctance. to go back to work. People have gone back at least to the centre of London much more willingly and I think they've gone back to downtown New York partly because of security worries. You've had a number of quite severe sort of shooting incidents

or incidents of people being pushed under trains. And I think there's a general sense that American cities now are not that safe. And that's another reason why people are not wanting to venture into the heart of these cities. Hi, Rudyard Griffiths here, your host and moderator. I have a favor to ask you, please consider becoming a monk member.

Membership is free and you get access to a series of great benefits, including a 10-plus-year library of some of our best debates, dialogues, and podcasts. You also get a free monthly newsletter featuring the debates that we're watching around the world. And you get a specially curated Friday weekly monk members-only podcast that focuses on the big international events, and trends shaping our world. All of that, again, free at www.w.com. I hope you'll consider joining and becoming part of our community. Now, back to our program.

So, Allison, to build on some of Adrian's points here, isn't there an argument that the reluctance to return to work shows, as Adrian says, this deeper dissatisfaction that existed before the pandemic. And really what this transition is, the return or not to return to work is a debate, as it always is between these situations, between labor and capital. And, you know, capital, the owners, they want people back. They like the idea of having a more pliant, monitored, controlled workforce. But that workforce is now rebelling and using, let's call it an excuse,

using COVID as an excuse to say we were deeply unhappy before. We're not going back. And in a hot job market, we are reasserting the power of labor over capital. Well, I mean, I think in some ways, that's true. Although it's, to me it seems strange to put as labor versus capital, because we really are talking about the most elite band of workers. Only 37% of jobs can be done online. Most jobs, most of the working class jobs are still going to always be done in person. So the people staying home, I guess, are not, say, labor in the sort of traditional sense, and that, you know, factory workers, service workers are still largely going to have to go back in and do their work.

This is mainly a fairly elite population we're talking about. I think it's sad. When I hear that one third of people never want to work around people again, I think that says more about our collective anxiety and our, as becoming more and more disconnected from each other. I mean, we people, I said, before the Industrial Revolution, people largely worked from home, but we had much stronger social structures then. We had apprenticeships. We had, you know, people went to church. They connected in all these different ways. If we move to sort of completely virtual work, we're just going to become progressively more antisocial. And that's just that for

society. Although, honestly, I don't even, I'm not even arguing that's enough to make my argument. I think really that work still requires an in-person component, and that is largely, again, the innovation component and the training component. I mean, I just don't see how you can be just out of college. Your first job is completely remote. You barely ever meet your coworkers. You never really meet that person who's going to train you, who's going to invest in you. I mean, all these things still we don't have structures to deal with. Great comments from you both. You're listening to our debate on the return to work, our motion be it resolved, it's time to get back to the office. Adrian, let me come to you and pick up on a couple points that Allison just made there.

And I guess the first one is that, you know, I don't know, I'm Gen X. I sense, Adrian, you might be in the boomer category. Allison, maybe you're a fellow Gen X. Or, I mean, is this generational, Adrian? Is it effectively your generation, if I'm right, that you're a boomer just saying, yeah, we're ready to retire and we're going to do it like the boomers have done it every single step of their evolution as a generation they do it on their own terms they love to set the rules and these are the new rules that the boomers want might not be the right rules for millennials it might not be

the right rules for generation z but this is really just about one cohort one generational group turning their back on work when conveniently they're sloughing their way off to a retirement Well, look, I agree with you entirely that the boomer generation is an utterly selfish generation that's done everything for its own benefits and doesn't think about other people at all. And I'm definitely one of those people. And for me, remote work is, you know, something that's extremely convenient because I have a house. I have a support network. I have a family. And I think I know roughly what to do with my job, although sometimes I find some of the mechanics of the Bloomberg terminal a little bit. bit difficult to follow. But nevertheless, I think there are other generations of people who are also seizing this opportunity. I think younger workers, if I go into a local cafe, it's full of younger workers who are working in this third place, who are enjoying a certain sort of coffee house social life, who are collaborating on their phones or on, you know, over their headphones, but are not going to work clearly unless they're staying at home. And also, a number of younger people, you know,

do not want to have to live in, you know, the very crowded, cramped conditions of big cities, you know, trying to afford to, struggling to afford a flat. They'd like to take advantage of remote work just in order to be able to get somewhere bigger, space here and perhaps more rural in order to live. So I think lots of different generations of people can benefit. from this. And also, you know, again, to talk to myself, about myself, I moved from the economists where I worked for many, many years to Bloomberg last January. So I had to learn a lot of things. I had to learn how to collaborate with new colleagues and I had to learn how to operate the expenses systems and things like that. And I did find it is quite possible to do that remotely.

And you do always have telephones, so you can phone people up and ask them how things, you know, how things are done, what the best button to press or code to put into the machine is. And I think you can build up a certain rapport with people over Zoom, actually. I feel, you know, as though I know some of my colleagues I've never met, but I've talked to every day on Zoom and probably followed up on the telephone. So I think, you know, we have to, you know, understand that as these smart machines, which are atomizing society are also bringing us closer together in some ways

because we can communicate in a way over Zoom that we could never communicate before, we can read their facial gestures, we can get some sort of sense of what they are as people, which we couldn't do over the mere telephone in the past. So, Alison, that brings me to my next last question for you before we go to closing statements, which is technology.

I mean, if this pandemic had happened as, let's say the Hong Kong flu did in the late 1970s, we wouldn't even be considering this debate. We would be back in our glass towers, you know, lined up in our cubicle farms, you know, toiling away. But something happened. The Internet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, you know, we all know the brands may be too well. this, in fact, is a technological revolution that has now captured work. It's captured whole other parts of our economy. It was inevitable that work was going to be disrupted in this way.

The pandemic has simply accelerated processes that was destined to happen. Yeah, I think that's definitely, I mean, this is how work does change. If you look at the history, you said work has always been evolving. It said people working from home, you can even argue it's a more natural, way to work. It's how most people did. Of course, they said they have much different social structures in a way of training people that we don't have now. So I think it's tempting to see this as, you know, this was a long time coming. And all the pandemic done was accelerate an existing trend, which is we had this technology that really is the potential to fundamentally change work. But I don't think

it really changed work as much as we think, because we're still social people who need to be together. We still have to train each other. We still have to form a community. And we're work in our society is quickly becoming our only means to do that. So I think work from home is a very valuable thing. I just don't think it should be every day. I mean, it will be a real gift now that if you're a mother and your child is sick, you can now say work from home and still look after your child. That's an amazing gift. That is the appropriate role for it. Not every day. Let's completely ditch the office. Thank you. You're listening to our debate. Be it resolved. It's time to return to the office. Adrian, last question for you. Is this all the end of the day

about class? You know, is this basically a white-collar affluent urban workers trying to get away with whatever they can get away with? They have no solidarity with the rest of the workforce that is not contemplating a future of lovely remote work with their dog at their feet and their favorite, you know, herbal tea at their elbow and a walk out their front door, you know, to their local park at the noon hour. Like, where is our sense of social solidarity here? Why isn't the return to work part of, you know, what a society does, all the members of a society do together, you know, work is what produces the wealth that allows our societies to function and why should the so-called knowledge workers, the white-collar workers, get this special

velvet glove treatment? Well, I think what you're presenting there is an argument for collective misery. Just because some people have to go and commute or go into work every day, you're arguing that as a gesture of solidarity, everybody should have to do that, even if it's not necessary for them to go into the office in the way that it's necessary for some workers to be physically present in what they're doing. So I don't think collective misery is really a solution to problems. I don't think also it's just knowledge workers that have gone on this sort of retreat from work. When I was, again, I was in the United States a few weeks ago and traveled around. And I saw right across the board big labor shortages. A lot of cafes, restaurants could not get

the workers that they needed because people had decided not to come in or because people had decided to retire early. because they decided the benefits of working didn't outweigh the benefits of not working. So I think there's a big sort of class reconciliation, a class debate going on here, that knowledge workers and manual workers, service workers, have decided that they weren't getting as much out of the contract that they'd made with their employees as they wanted. And I think right across the board, there's a renegotiation of what that contract is. In the case of knowledge workers, I think they've decided what it's not worth us going in physically

because we can do what we need to do remotely. I think in the case of manual and service workers, they're giving up because they're not paid enough and they don't have good enough conditions. And I think if the employers want them back in their hotels or restaurants, they're going to have to renegotiate the contract by paying people a bit more and giving them better conditions for working. So there is, you know, collective misery isn't the solution to it, but a whole thing. series of renegotiations of the bargain between labor and capital needs to go on, not just between knowledge workers and their employers.

Okay, so before we go to closing statements, Allison, let's have you react to that last point of Adrian. So this is about, again, a moment of empowerment. We should not capitulate and return to work. We should use this moment to change the nature of work, not just for white-collar knowledge workers, but for the betterment of everyone. Well, I mean, a lot of ways, it's never been better time to be a worker. I just, you know, I mean, I don't understand the argument that everyone was so upset before the pandemic.

I mean, when is work? Works always been sort of had its pluses and minuses. It's always been had it, you know, your coworkers have always been like your family, sort of annoying sometimes, but ultimately important people in your life. So I think in some ways, the pandemic just, you know, gave people's sort of a view of something different that felt better for a while, but I think over the long term, they're going to realize really isn't that much better. And really, you know, they are missing something. Great.

Let's go to closing statements. You've been listening to our debate today. Be it resolved. It's time to return to the office. As per debate convention, Adrian, you're speaking against the motion. You're going to go first and then we'll give Allison the last word. Yeah, work is always something that has changed historically in response to changing material conditions of life. So in the 18th century, in the pre-industrial age, most work was done at home.

Then along come the factory and people are crowded into these factories in order to produce things with their hands. Then along comes the office and these huge skyscrapers in the middle of cities and people go into these skyscrapers in order to do, in order to file paper and to do office work and both the factory and the office, the big urban office, were driven by material demands. You know, you could produce things better in factories, you could produce things better in offices by crowding people together. Now the material conditions of life have changed fundamentally because of the arrival of smart machines, which can connect us all together, which can allow us to feed material into the machines, which can allow us to talk to each other, which can allow us to

look at each other on videos. So these machines have fundamentally changed the nature of the productive process, and they will, as a result of that, fundamentally change the way that we interact. So I see a world in which cities will become less concentrated, in which more and more people will move out to the countryside, and in which, above all, work will not be associated with particular physical places, but more with a set of tasks that can be completed over, you know, computers which connect us altogether. I do concede that there are certain things which require a certain amount of face-to-face interaction, principally training younger workers and some forms of creativity. But I think instead of relying on the serendipity of office life, those famous

water cooler moments. We should have structured meetings of people for the point of either innovation or the transmission of knowledge. It seems incredibly silly to have people commuting two hours a day, dragging themselves into offices just on their off chance that they'll have five minutes of creative conversation or five minutes of useful mentoring. Let's take mentoring seriously. Let's take innovation seriously, but do it in a structured way, not as just the offshoot of the agonies of office life. Thank you, Adrian. You are listening to our debate today, be it resolved. It's time to return to the office. Allison, we're going to give you the last word, wrap this debate up for us. So I should make a confession. I actually, there's only been a nine-month period in my entire

career where I went to an office every day and was expected to do so. So in some ways, I might not be the best messenger from the we all need to go back because I never have and I never will. But I also know the downside of this, which is one, my career, I could have never learned what I need to learn. I could have never progressed the way I needed to progress if everyone else was not still going to the office, whether it was harassing my advisor in grad school to give me attention. I found him in his office. He probably would have ignored me otherwise to various finance jobs I had where I actually did work remotely and was always at a huge disdemeanor. disadvantage. Certainly in terms of adapting to the culture, in terms of getting more resources,

and also being left out of a lot of very important conversations. And I mean, yes, I guess if everyone was remote, it would have been different. But I still don't think really, because they were all, they said it had a culture that was very well formed in advance. So I don't think it really would have made a huge difference. I think really when we look back, it's to romanticize the work from home before industrialization, we had a very different social structure then. And we also had really sort of well-defined apprenticeships. And we don't have that now. I mean, as I said, just having people come together under very superized condition, that's for social creatures, that serendipity is important. That's how we connect.

And that's honestly, even those five minutes actually are worth the commute because they can be so valuable. They can move you forward in so much, right? Even if you have those five minutes a month, it could be worth it. So it is time to go back to the office and the time is now. Thank you, Allison, for that closing statement. And Adrian, your participation in this debate too. Guys, we've covered the whole waterfront of issues that I wanted to dive into it. I just really appreciate your time and interest in having this conversation with us. Again, it's gripping all of us in our day-to-day lives as we struggle. Do we return to work or not? What does that look like? I don't know yet what I'm going to do. Am I going back to the office?

not, but you've certainly given me a lot to think about. So on behalf of the Monk Debates community, thank you both so much for coming on the program today. While that wraps up today's debate, I want to thank our participants, Allison and Adrian, for giving us a lot to think about as we all think about, going back to work in the office or not. I'm sure you've got some feedback and reflections on what you've just heard. Please share them with us right now via our email podcast at monk debates.com. That's MUNK Debates with an S.com. Here's an email from Sylvia about our members-only podcast that comes out every Friday. Dear Rudyard and Janice, congratulations to you both for a simply spectacular pair of broadcasts. They're very educational and have generated

much talk and even more thinking among your listeners. Hey, thanks, Sylvia. And just a reminder to all of you that you can listen to our weekly monk members. podcast by becoming a monk member. It's free as part of our complimentary monk membership. Anytime grab yours at monkdebates.com forward slash membership and then we'll send you a link on Friday to listen to our monk members only pod. And of course you can listen to more debates on everything from the war in Ukraine to the rise of labor unions to the future of climate change all on our website, triple w monkdebates.com. Thank you for helping bring back the art of public debate one conversation at a time.

I'm your host and moderator, Rudyard Griffiths. The Monk Debates are a project of the Auree and Peter and Melanie Monk Charitable Foundations. Rudyard Griffiths and Ricky Gurwitz are the producers. The Monk Debates podcast is mixed by Adam Karsh. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thank you again for last. listening.