Is remote work over? Two experts debate return to office mandates 

The fact that Jay is working from home during this interview is hilarious to me

It's an Ego thing and fear of losing control by the "old school" leadership.

Being a “team member” when you aren’t being compensated for inflation in your commuting and daycare cost, rent etc is BS!

"If your work can be done remotely, it can be done in another country" Well, pretending that your work can't be done remotely won't change the fact that it can be done remotely

How detached from reality is someone who thinks that people crave micro management to function?

Kevin is right I’m tired of these old grandpas 👴 telling us to go back to work remote work 🧑‍💻 is here to stay wtf 🤬

Employees aren't going back to commuting 14 hours per week so the corporations can feel good about synergy. Those days are over. Corporations aren't paying their employees a real living wage so those that allow a work life balance will get the best, most talented employees We have proven telecommuting works. The good old boy network is over

I agree with Kevin, remote will be the future option if not workers will leave and look for options.

If you can't create the 'synergy' with a remote team, that's a reflection on your poor management skills, not the workers.

If your boss tells you that you have to go back to the office, look immediately for remote work, and as soon as you get it email your boss and tell him that he can give your job to his mother.

Jay is a clown. I am so sick of the veiled threats about how companies will just hire someone overseas to replace you. I have seen companies do this just to end up dealing with communication issues, cultural issues, competence issues, experience issues, security issues, project delays, time zone issues, and contractual & regulatory issues - just to name a few. Many of these companies ended up reshoring these jobs because the headache and issues were too much. And for what? Because they wanted to spite their workers because they couldn't control them. So in the end they hurt their own business, lost highly skilled talent, wasted time, and wasted money. Nothing wrong with outsourcing if you do it right, but bad managers like Jay never do it right. Workers are adults. They are not children. Let them work from home, or they will find a company that will, because top talent always has opportunities.

Honestly remote will have less drama.

The answer is simple. Have companies offer remote/hybrid options and have companies that are fully 100% on site. The data will tell which way employees prefer. I bet those pushing for full back to office, won't dare to test this out.

Working Mothers need a voice on this!!!! Remote is making a huge life quality and productivity improvement without commute!!!!

Funny how the folks who don't actually do any work have the most to say about how actual workers work.

I love how they play the "work ethic" angle when this is all about the commercial real estate market.

I live in Chicago, started commuting about three months ago. I got held up by two guys on the train asking me for my belongings or I will get stabbed. Told HR. HR responded, "report to police and take another train." They would rather me risk my life to sit in an office than give me peace of mind working from home. We have the infrastructure for WFH, it's just their "lifestyle".

No one says the obvious... Hard for the "Boss" to sleep with the new intern when she's able to work remote. Remote Work is a win for work-place harassment!

Long before the pandemic, most firms have been using virtual teams for years. Part of the team in 2 or more spots in the US. And other parts on the team in India, some in Argentina. So these have been extremely successful. So it did not matter if all those were home or in the Office. School with small kids is different because their attention spans need a person to keep it there. Adults have already done this and succeeded. And not just in the last 2 - 3 years. My firm has been successful at virtual teams for 10 years. So not sure what the "Expert" is talking about 🙂

Insisting on "back to office" has two main reasons: 1. management being incapable to adjust to work remotely 2. managers being afraid that it'll become obvious how little they actually do

Mentorship is over-rated and it rarely happens in a work environment. You can mentor someone remotely as easily as in person…

Never going back to an office

You can always have your employees return to office for a price. The question is whether companies they are willing to pay it.

Kevin is absolutely correct and his comments reflect the opinion of the overwhelming majority of the work force. Remote work allows a company to attract and hire the best talent. That talent level directly impacts an organizations success. All companies will tell you that they are seeking the best talent and you can't find it if you limit your search to a 50 mile square box. A zoom call does not some how "magically" inhibit an employee's intelligence, ability to collaborate, or creativity. I have managed remote team for 3 years and can say with overwhelming confidence that we are more productive, more engaged and have less turnover. I previously managed teams and worked in an office setting for over 15 years, so this is not conjecture. The work force is evolving and soon the majority of it will be the millennial generation Corporations and their leadership who maintain an antiquated approach will see their talent simply vanish. Bright, innovative and forward thinking minds need to be compensated with the commodity of time and a sense of balance, not just dollars. Simply put the consensus of my generation is that time is more valuable than money.

Kevin is right, I've been WFH 2 years 5 months and it's not changing back. Teamwork works great from home, it's all about communication. And mentoring and transparency and client communication have ALL improved with WFH, as long as we have the imagination to be proactive and follow through with it, and not be stuck in the same old same-room dependencies.

Kevin O leary nailed 👏 👌. Exact on point..... No one is isolated...people will report to office as needed 1 or 2 days a week ot or few days a month..most jobs that gets done in downtown high rise offices can be done from home. Industry like Life science, Manufacturing need back to office plans...that's how it works....

The company I work for has lots of remote workers and they fly us in a couple times a year for meetings and teambuilding events like going to a baseball game. The team works fine I don't understand why they want everyone commuting again.

I recently had a job offer that I had to turn down due to it being an hour from home. They too understood due to the time it would have taken to get there & cost of gas too. On top of that, I just broke my ankle a few weeks ago & that would make it much harder on me than working at home. Luckily, I got offered a job to work remotely & offered more money too.

No reason to enter an office. Don't threaten me with outsourcing. If you want to outsource to India me being willing to commute won't be stopping you from doing that.

I judge companies by their opinion on remote work. If a company does not allow remote work, then they probably have old-school attitudes and they probably do not have the best people in my field and I will pass them up.

I strongly disagree with the idea that everyone is super easily replaceable. I've worked at companies that had teams overseas, and had to have a 6PM PST meeting with them. The results really weren't that of 20% of the quality of our home company. With Zoom/Skype today it's so easy to to get a call with 3 team members, and share everything clearly on your computer. No need to play lets see who booked which conference room for the next 30 minutes, while running around the building getting kicked out of here or there. Need computer help? IT can easily remote into your computer and fix any problem.

working remotely really comes down to the specific job. If you work in a call centre then no need to work from an office. If your a cashier then you have to go to work..lol

Also; company leaders that push for return to work for “team building” while making record profits are just looking for a way to stay relevant in their position. If they can’t adapt to digital culture, the way all of those employees did; they will eventually be the herd being thinned out by the board when revenues fall due to high turnover of tenured employees not being compensated to return to said office

Times have changed people, remote work is the future. Bosses are just made they will have a hard time bossing people, and they will have to get their own coffee 😅

I've been working remotely since the whole thing began and haven't been back to the office since or seen my coworkers except via phone call meetings. I love it. We do our work well as a team and I get the benefit of being home with my gf and my dog. I'm able to cook my own meals, workout during my lunch break and actually live a healthier life. I'm getting ready to change jobs and will be taking a hybrid role as they are increasing my salary significantly, but these past two years have been amazing. I wasn't tempted to go out and buy lunch or coffee with others. I was able to max out my retirement accounts and still invest almost 30k throughout this time with a low salary. It really does help when you work from home. I'm more interested now in working to live rather than living to work and want to enjoy my money that I worked hard to save and invest.

remote working is better than working with people in the office. like seriously we don't want to be in the office with people.

Either you let me work from home or I take my degrees and 15+ years of managerial experience and going to work for your competitor who happily will. The reason WFH isn't going away is because this is a free market where any firm that requires in-office time will lose top talent to those who don't. Easy.

If theyd embrace work from home wed have the solution to high oil prices. But, nah thats too easy..

Funny how Kevin points out 9 valid points of concerns of employees, yet Jay totally brushed them aside with disregard and goes back to the trite response of, “but what about the collaboration, what about teamwork, what about your career, your growth.” Just shows you how much this guy doesn’t care about your needs, but wants to go back to the old system that supports his own growth.

This video commentary is filled with scam threads. Sad to see. It's happening on all finance related you tube video's unfortunately.

Kevin nailed it in many ways. A few other things he didn't mention: 1. When you are looking for people of certain skill sets you open yourself up to a much wider pool of candidates by advertising "Remote" instead of "certain location". This is by far the biggest benefit of "Remote" hiring. You can focus RIGHT NOW on hiring the very best fitted candidates worldwide for your position, not just the less than 0.1% of people (or even much less if not in the very largest metro areas) with the other 99.9%+ excluded up front. 2. You can very often save a lot of money by offshoring jobs to overseas providers. Personally, I'm an American living in Vietnam and I have 22 people working for me where we do this. Our labor costs are much lower than competitors. 3. Geo-redundancy is built-in with having "Remote" workers. If your office location is having some geographical disaster (like hurricanes, earthquakes, traffic snarls, etc) you have built-in backup to keep operations going. 4. There are tremendous cost savings in not having office space; and just keeping it as hoteling space for when they do come into the office. In reality it would be better to just schedule team building activities away from the office anyway at some local restaurant about once every 2 weeks. 5. If you ever need to do layoffs quickly, having a huge "Remote" workforce & then making "mandatory" that they go into the Office will be a quick way to get attrition & greatly reduce the need for severances. In the long run for so many job positions its going to become "added cost" to have "onsite" positions that operations/finance managers will have built into their cost centers & profit centers accounting/budget plans.

Some companies want people to work back into the office because management is terrible. I worked where management does not support/train/communicate/etc which cause for the lower staff members to take on heat which makes everything look bad. Instead of realizing that, they think bringing back people into the office will change the outcome. Silly people if you ask me

The issue with working from home is only that you have a lot of sycophants in the corporate world who view going back to the office as an ass-kissing competitive advantage over their cohorts. Those are the folks who will ultimately end up ruining it for everyone else.

Jay sounds like the little old ladies in the office that printed and saved every single piece of paper and refused to save documents electronically, out of fear of losing them. The world turns and as it turns, we must improve and move forward. What I'm waiting to hear someone say is that 40 hours a week is too many hours to be in the office. I think we need to either spend 5 hours a day in the office 5 days a week or only 3 day work weeks or allow business to operate on weekends or allow business to work past 5 PM (I'm talking about cooperate jobs, because most of them are M-F/9to5).

Are these 3 in the same room ? Same office ?

I’m fine with hybrid but going to the office full time i won’t do. Rather go to another company

This isn't about WFH or commuting, no, most of the people who are advocating going back to the office are more worried about their commercial real estate losing value that'a what' this is about.

Hail to Kevin! The other dude's response was mumble jumble about team work. We have already proved that team work can be done remotely based on the last 2 years. Working remotely far outweighs than being in the office.

Outsourcing it's ok, but remote work is not? lol

I think the fact the both of them did the interview from their homes/office should settle the argument. both of them realized that in order to be efficient and productive they should not drive all the way to the studio. That's what remote work gives you! the ability to be productive and to utilize your day in a more efficient way. I think the real reason businesses want ppl to work from the office is they are afraid to lose their employees to a better company. lets face it, when you work from home it is easier for you to shop around, interview and assess you real worth.

If the unstated fear from management is that employees are all sitting around at home sleeping or drinking all day, they should consider browser tracking or other surveillance options, such as webcams on all day for record keeping. While employees may balk, they would still get their remote work, be able to take a lunch and power down, etc. Any employees who have been obviously milking this will likely quit under those requirements…problem solved? I’m sure there is a good chunk of the American remote working population that honestly work from home better than they would in the office, and without all of commuting time wasted, drama, and in-office time drains. By the way, I wonder how many companies that went remote also saw precipitous declines in sexual harassment or other office-centric “hijinks” during the remote work era? Less toxic cliques, less temptation to participate in groupthink leading to happy hours, and other similar things that often have bad bleed over back into the following workday. People just don’t want to deal with that, and I’ve got to think that some of the folks who are chomping at the bit to be back to in-person work are really craving the opportunity to return to drama and chaos that they thrive on?

My employer decided to close their office and have everyone work remotely. Last time I heard the old office is empty. So it really depends on your line of work and your industry.

Only people wanting the office return are, company people, the lonely, and those escaping the home...Everyone else is happy to work from home and hop on calls in dress shirts and underwear!

I wouldn't agree that America responded best to the pandemic

These companies sure don't mind remote work when it's fattening the bottom with overseas slave labor.

I'm in NYC and there are no new leases for office space. As a result, hardly anyone is leasing retail space for the most part. Rent is still going up , though most of the apartments remain empty. It's a scam. A city begins with employment, then residential ( housing the workers) and finally retail. Companies with time on their lease are waiting it out. The only people to come to the offices to work are really young people because they need a social life. Like he said, you can get just as much productivity from remote work and you save on leasing. As time goes on there will be more and more vacant office space. The only hope cities have is rezoning for entertainment to attract tourism. On the weekends NYC is packed with young people commuting from the tri state area. Unfortunately, there's not much left to do, due to the lockdowns. Even before the pandemic the city was in decline due to the high cost of living, and most of the night life was rezoned for luxury condos ( most of which remains vacant).

As a young person I've gotten nothing but overwhelming complements by my older peers at my job. Now have 5 interns that report to me, headcharging an AI effort that could potentially save our company a whole bunch of money. Guess what? I started work in 2020, full remote. I didnt need to walk into an office to get where I'm at. I just needed to produce and show them I could do the job. And I did. I'll never not wfh.

War zones? Lol....i think ppl just dont want to cost of living in those cities...but otherwise 100% Kevin. Jay is living in the 90s ..... i work well with my clients - and all we have done are remote conference calls ( prior to covid). These ppl just want ppl back in commercial real estate for personal profit...

The push to bring people back into the office isn’t about team building or any of that crap. People are trying to get people back in the office for economic reasons. Cities, and business districts thrive off of the costs you spend on commuting and working on site. Bus & Rail commuter companies, and downtown commercial business interest groups are lobbying hard for telework to be demolished because they want your money from transportation, food, coffee, parking garages, parking (and speeding) tickets,and other in-office related costs. It’s all about evening out the economy, by draining your pockets

The old "That could have been an email" joke about mandatory office meetings never rang so true.

Just landed my second remote position today with ADT. I have no complaints. God is good.

Mr. Wonderful is spot on! This other guy is out of touch as he participates in this interview remotely!

I noticed that those who refused to come back to work in the workplace are mostly included in the current layoffs. Corporate America is no longer begging employees to come back to the workplace, but instead, just layoff them. What do you think?

Miserable commute to be in the miserable office. No matter how many "perks" an office may offer it doesnt beat working at home. I will never work in an office again.

Did he lead this interview with comparing American workers to school children?

Team work, accountability etc.. by going to office is non sense.

I don’t need a driver. I need good pay, fun work, security, and understanding from my employer. In return I’ll give it more than my all when I’m on their time and then some.

Sounds like ppl who are terrible at their jobs want to go back to the office to annoy people

This is a prime example of why so many people don't want to work for big companies and would rather be content producers on social media.

being a "team member" lol. They will axe you the moment you are not needed or times get tough.

I've watched employees endure so much hardship in their personal lives- like marriages and home life when one partner or both have to commute 45 min to 2 hrs each way just to "be in the office". Those same employees are also a hell of a lot more productive for 2 hrs a day doing work than being in a car. And as for the perils of blue cities- like high housing costs, bad schools or expensive private schools, massive crime and vagrancy, and a general poor quality of life- Kevin is right. A happy employee is a productive employee

Chicago isn't as bad as long as you know where the bad areas are located.

I think remote work will end up being a reward for high achievers.

Isn't it funny that it is Baby Boomers that are being asked this question when Gen Xers and Millenials are the ones that are actually dealing with this and are being even more productive remotely. My wife's company is in no rush to mandate workers back to the offices and they have seen productivity and employee wellness sky-rocketed through the stratosphere. Jay Clayton is the old school that will never get it because he has been a CEO-level worker before the technology revolution where Microsoft Teams and WebEx are common place.

Both will prevail. As we head to recession, employees will lose the leverage over employers, making employers to force the process on work from office compulsory. However more of hybrid and some part of WFH wont stop as people have tasted the freedom

Jay; what century are you living in?

It's easier for management to look like they serve any useful purpose in an office setting. Studies have proven productivity is increased working from home. The vast majority of offices in corporate America are toxic and depressing.

These tired old farts just can't get with the program that good, productive talent will work even in a remote setting as long as the pay and benefits are good

I think this whole debate misses the point and is pointless to begin with. It is trying to paint all people with single brush! Reality is, For some people(probably very social ones) coming to office would be a good thing, and many of those might actually (wrongly)think and opine to the contrary. For some, it is neutral - doesn't matter much. While for others, working remotely(mostly, NOT all of the time) would be productive and better - these are probably the introverted and unsocial types. I agree that we all need atleast some social exposure from time to time, but that varies from people to people.

I have a friend who work in a hybrid job. Most of the week he is at home but the days they need people in the office, the job buy food for them.

My company wants us back in and they are a telecom company. Which touts connectivity no matter where you are. Plus my boss works in another state! It makes no sense

people have expense going into the office because the associated services economy is the only economy left in US. 1000% markup on the food you eat for lunch provides the support for the value of the Dollar. So get your butt back into the office so prices can continue to rise.

Talk to some one in a large city like Atlanta and ask them their travel time, looking for a parking space, eating grub food downtown, dry cleaning, etc.

Remote work is here to stay.

We are all for green energy- think of all the carbon that doesn’t get released from the lack of driving.

Only the “valuable” employees can stay at home! All other marginal workers back in the office doing 9-5, 5 days a week! Travel, pay for fast food lunches, being boss around for 8 hours and office politics!😀👏 The more technologically savvy the company is, the more the company demand that their workers be in their offices 5 days a week! Thus, technology is for everyone else, not tech companies’s workers!

Safety is another reason why continue to work from home especially in places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Oakland etc due to spikes in crime after defunding and demoralizing the police. So chances of being mugged or attacked as one walks from the car or bus stop to the workplace are higher than before covid (3/2020).

Working remotely is not a one size fits all. For my situation I come in to the office to do the same thing I do when I'm working remotely. I still have deadlines and performance expectations and my work ethic hasn't changed because my boss isn't breathing down my neck. I am exempt meaning I can work "off the clock" legally in an individual contributor management role and I do that often to make sure I'm on track to meet targets. Technology connects us better together than being in the office does. In fact even when I'm in the office I'm meeting with peers digitally and not in person. My work is done on the computer 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. That can be done anywhere.

Do not isolate but trust the people you hire. Don't threaten people with benefits. Remember these are the same people that got you through the pandemic

What makes them experts?

I’m in Alabama, my team members are in various locations in SC, and GA. Even I went to my assisted office, no one I work with would be there. It would be pointless!

'Responded the best to the pandemic' not sure where he got that one from 😂

i don't like how you don't know how secure your personal info is with remote workers. You don't know who they live with, if they have you on speaker phone, etc. Very insecure.

Everyone hates working from offices as they have to spend min 2 hours in commuting, we have to breath poor air quality and we have to miss our family, why?? No reason!

I think that you are going to have a super hard time getting talent if you force people back in the office after the world was forced to stay home for so long.

Why is the argument being pitched in a.. . "one way or the other" format? 👈🧐 These platforms should coexist for so many reasons.

I have seen the good and bad sides of working remotely. It’s great for most employees who make sure to put in full days of work no matter where they are. There are also bad apples who put in far less time than they should and are much less productive than average employees but this could also be issues with managers not making sure people behave.

I love Kevin! Just makes sense out of everything and speaks clearly and simple terms.

Old people counting their days talking about work from home

I wouldn’t listen to a word of what Levin O says.