When McDonald’s chief executive Chris Kempczinski demanded the fast-food chain’s corporate workers return to the office three days a week in the summer of 2021, he spoke up for the benefits of direct personal contact. “We ultimately are an in-person business,” he told Bloomberg Television. “You lose something from culture, you lose something from a connectiveness by being so remote.”
But, apparently, that doesn’t apply when it comes to firing people. McDonald’s ordered all its corporate employees to work remotely last week so that it could lay off hundreds of them — via Zoom, other computer meeting options or telephone.
McDonald’s action is the sort that inspires no small amount of cynicism about companies demanding workers return to the office. What kind of culture claims to desire “connectiveness” only to jettison it at the moment it most serves their employees?
“It’s almost like, ‘This is what you want. You want more remote opportunities. Well, we can also use remote work also when it’s convenient for us,” says Mark Bolino, a professor at Price College of Business at the University of Oklahoma. “There’s something about it that feels a little bit adversarial.”
Remote work has emerged as a flash point of the worker empowerment movement we’ve come to call the “Great Resignation.” Three years after covid hit the United States, office occupancy is hovering around 50 percent of pre-pandemic norms, according to security firm Kastle Systems.
Employers, for the most part, would like to see more of their employees, claiming remote work hinders everything from employee spontaneity to hours workers put in. But many employees beg to disagree. They point to surveys showing that minus their pesky commutes, they are putting in more time on the job.
Still, more than a few members of Team CEO have taken to the media to predict we’ll see less remote work as employment slows — and they do it in tones that often sound punitive. “It’s not going to be so easy to give up your job,” warned Kathryn Wylde, the head of the Partnership for New York City, late last year. “As you go into a recession and people fear they might not have a job, that will bring people back to the office,” said real estate developer Stephen Ross. “The employees will recognize... that you have to do what it takes to keep your job and earn a living.”
At the same time, employers might like to think they are doing best by their employees, and the hamburger giant is no exception. “McDonald’s decided to close our offices out of respect,” a source familiar with the layoffs told me. “We’ve all been through restructures before and our goal here was to provide confidentiality and respect to our colleagues.”
But respect is not what comes across. Remote layoffs — especially by an organization that’s previously extolled the virtues of in-person work — allow the company physical and emotional distance, while leaving the now former employee completely alone. Those who rarely work in person, or live far away from the office, might think that’s just as well, but for someone who commutes several days a week, it’s likely a different matter. “It is yet another layer of dehumanization,” Barbara Larson, a professor at D’Amore-McKim School of Business at Northeastern University, told me.
Of course, remote work is hardly the only area where employers can mistake their own self-interest for that of those laboring for them. Witness the recent spectacle of Starbucks chief executive Howard Schultz testifying before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. With Starbucks paying $15 an hour and offering part-time employees access to health insurance and online college courses, Schultz seemed astonished that they would want to unionize — or, in other words, to demand an actual say in their working conditions.
Numerous companies and leaders have caught negative attention for how they’ve handled layoffs in this remote-work age. There was Vishal Garg, the chief executive of mortgage lender Better.com, who downsized 900 employees on a mass Zoom call, informing them they were “unlucky.” A remote downsizing by Google reached one woman shortly after she gave birth. Then there is Elon Musk’s Twitter, where some employees discovered they’d been separated from their jobs when they were locked out of their accounts, and others were, apparently, fired by mistake.
No one wants their last communique from their employer to be a Zoom call that suddenly fades to black. If companies want employees in the office on a regular basis, they should do them the courtesy of letting them go in person as well. There is no good way to lay someone off, but, as remote firings reveal, there are ways that are worse than others.
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