The "Mission" Of A Company Is To Make Money. The Rest Is Bullshit.
But we keep falling for this lie.
I guess if you’re going to discuss The Wall Street Journal, you need to begin by saying that it’s conservative-minded legacy business media with a long interest in propping up the managerial class and the ownership class, so since the beginning of COVID, it’s been a very staunch advocate for “the way we were,” i.e. everyone needs to be in neat little rows in the office.
As such, when they write articles summarizing new research from Gallup, as they do here, hey tend to make it a story about how remote work is failing us all. To wit:
In a new Gallup survey, the share of remote workers who said they felt a connection to the purpose of their organizations fell to 28% from 32% in 2022 — the lowest level since before the pandemic. The findings are from a survey this spring and summer of nearly 9,000 U.S. workers whose jobs can be done remotely.
That’s not a bad sample size. But see, in the next paragraph, you have this:
By contrast, a third of full-time office workers reported a similar sense of connection, nearly the same as last year. Hybrid workers clocked in highest, with 35% saying their companies’ mission made them feel their jobs were important.
These numbers are still terrible. Basically 3.5 in 10 hybrid workers are saying “Yea, I mean I guess I understand the mission?” If you got a 35 on a test in high school, your dad might get out the belt, depending on what generation he comes from. These are not scores to write home about.
This discourse about the efficacy of WFH vs. hybrid vs. on-site is essentially never-ending, and I’m not really sure why we keep discussing it.
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