Elon Musk may be vocal, but he’s hardly the only chief executive who wants work from home to stop, like yesterday. In 2022, he followed up on a mandate that employees at Tesla and SpaceX return to the office by threatening layoffs. More recently, he went so far as to call working from home immoral, as front-line workers don’t have that option.

Other high-profile CEOs – including Bob Iger of Disney and Tim Cook of Apple – have also jumped on the return-to-office bandwagon. The leaders of thousands of smaller businesses have followed suit. These executives all believe remote work hurts innovation, harms relationships, eats into employee motivation, and a host of other bad things.

But according to author and collaboration expert Phil Simon, they’re letting legacy attitudes (cough, cough show their age) and their unfounded biases get the best of them. There is no turning back the clock to 2019, and executives that try to do so will fail, says Simon in his new book The Nine: The Tectonic Forces Reshaping the Workplace.

He argues that the work environment of 2023 already differs enormously from its pre-pandemic version — in many cases; it is downright unrecognizable. This gap will only intensify in the coming years, due in major part to powerful economic, societal, geopolitical, and technological trends covered in the book.

Simon examines how nine separate, but related forces will continue to expand, morph, and collide with each other in unforeseen ways (see “Phil Simon’s Nine Forces”).

Phil Simon, author of The Nine: The Tectonic Forces Reshaping the Workplace.

Is this potentially good news for senior leaders? Chilling as it may be to say it, many of Simon’s nine trends could lead employers to hire fewer full-time employees. That means managers may have more resources to focus on keeping the high-octane remaining staff happy. And he’s convinced that remote or hybrid work will be part of that equation.

SAP Insights: Many vocal CEOs view in-office work as the gold standard. Why do you think that is? Is it just a feeling? Or do they have data that indicates work from home was a failure?

Phil Simon: The Future Forum did some fantastic research even before the pandemic about worker productivity away from the office being higher than in-office. So, when leaders asked people to work remotely because of the lockdown in March and April of 2020, they did. And because of tools like Slack, Microsoft Teams, and Zoom, they were, able to be as much, if not more productive.

The Elon Musks and Jamie Dimons and Bob Igers of the world grew up in an era in which work took place in an office. To them, that's just natural. And even though workers are pining for flexibility, and had been extremely productive under those remote circumstances, this just rubs them the wrong way.

It’s a matter of trusting employees, a matter of culture. But I think it’s absurd to demand that people forget the last three years happened. Even though some executives might see some short-term success by mandating a full-time return to the office, it’s only a matter of time before talented folks start poking around to find something else.

It’s also absurd for employees to say I’m never coming into the office, because there are certain things that are very difficult, if not impossible, to replicate in a purely virtual way. We don’t get to know our colleagues as well remotely, and Zoom fatigue is real. It’s exhausting going back and forth when sometimes a five-minute discussion obviates 30 messages back and forth. For brainstorming and training – truly collaborative activities – employees will need to get to the office, particularly if they’re younger and haven’t built up their social capital.

Q: Many of your nine trends focus on automation which will likely have the downstream effect of reducing the need for full-time employees. Doesn’t that counteract senior leaders’ incentive to cater to employee demands for remote work and flexible hours?

A: Yes, to a point. I don't see a scenario anytime soon, though, in which companies get rid of 90% of their workforces because they can automate or use generative AI to do everything. My point is, it's a mistake for organizations to dismiss the power of these new tools outright.

I don’t want to say that it’s permanent, but I also don’t see a docile workforce returning in the near future. According to a Gallup poll, 71% of Americans now approve of unions, which is the highest measure in nearly 60 years. So, there are some massive trends that aren’t going to go away just because there are rumblings of a recession, especially when you think about the number of companies that have embraced remote or hybrid work.

A study by LinkedIn in 2022 found that less than 20% of its job postings were purely remote, yet those posts garnered over 50% of all applicants. This massive shift isn’t reversing itself anytime soon.

For managers who want a return to work, it’s not only about trust but also job security, though they would never admit it. A large part of their job is supervising and watching people work. And if they’re not watching anyone work, because fewer people are there, then what are they actually doing?

Meanwhile, cities are suffering from hybrid and remote work as corporate tax breaks were predicated on bringing employees in to work to stimulate local business. So, there’s a lot of self-interest at play here. It’s the Miles Law: Where you stand depend upon depends upon where you sit.

Q: What about wage stagnation? We have seen some long-overdue increases in the minimum wage recently. But the fact remains that real wage growth has stalled over the last few decades, even as gross domestic product (GDP) has grown. Can employees be empowered if their wages never increase?

A: That’s one of the big hairy questions: Would employees feel as empowered and restless if their wages had been keeping pace with inflation? You could absolutely make the argument they would not.

I think a large part of what employees think about is ‘My wages haven't increased, should I take a side hustle? Should I reevaluate what I'm doing?’ Whether you're white-collar or blue, do you want to schlep an hour and a half every day, five days a week, and not see your kid? Do you want to risk your life as a frontline worker?

Q: So, if wages have not kept pace, not even close to keeping pace, with inflation, is that really being empowered?

A: A single employer doesn't control all of that, but they can respond. So yes, you could increase employee wages by taking funds based on not needing as much square footage for real estate and allocating that to employee salaries or towards new technologies.

Maybe we see employees’ true empowerment in their willingness to up and leave. We’ve seen that people are more likely to enjoy their side gig because they choose to do it. So maybe that's the choice if employers don’t increase wages.

Q: In one chapter, you talk about “unhealthy” analytics: employers tracking and monitoring employees. Where does this impulse come from? Why aren’t you a fan?

A: It’s part of this notion that we can quantify everything and get this “objective” view of performance. That is ridiculous.

Remote and hybrid work complicates things because there's this emphasis on facetime. You want to prove that you're working. People feel it’s necessary to show they responded at 9:14 p.m. if someone asked for something at 9:12 p.m., even though most of the time it can wait.

I think it was Bob Iger of Disney who said we've got the swipe data; we know which employees are coming into the office. But going into the office doesn't necessarily mean you're productive. One company found that when people went back to the office, they were less productive. I conclude from this that they were so ticked off about having to get on the train or fight traffic for an hour each way, just to show they were there that they were rebelling by doing less.

Once you tell people, this is how we're evaluating you, that measure becomes less meaningful, if not totally meaningless. In the book, I have an example of how some companies calculate a developer's worth by the number of lines of code that he or she submitted. So, they submit bad code, fix it, and then they get credit for fixing the code. They should have just submitted the correct code first, but that's not their incentive.

Q: What is your call to action for senior leaders who want to get ahead of the forces you highlight?

A: The workforce is not reverting to its pre-COVID form. The forces affecting the workplace will only intensify. I recommend leaning into them and trying to figure out what’s best for your organization by running experiments.

You're talking about possibly getting rid of a full-time office or some full-time employees. In some cases, you're talking about automating what was formerly a manual process or trusting AI to do something a person has always done. People hate change. These are big changes, and they won’t resonate with everyone. But pretending they don’t exist is not going to help in the long run.