Here’s a new-ish article from Business Insider saying what most logical people have been expecting for 39 months now: companies are shifting away from conventional full-time employment and into more part-time and contractor deals. This actually makes sense, seeing as how as far back as 2010, former U.S. Generals were writing books arguing for a “team of teams” model whereby some people come together for six weeks, drill a few targets, and then disperse.
It makes more sense for the company too: pension plans and health benefits and various are expensive. Company executives no likey the expensive stuff. They’d rather that go into their fourth bedroom that their wife has been nagging ’em about for a year. And in that article, you have that attitude reflected in this quote:
“If somebody’s coming into your site five days a week, week in, week out, it feels like they’re your employee,” says Bloom. “You want to give them healthcare, a pension, train them up, have them as a long-term part of the firm. But as soon as they’re not on site, managers are thinking it’s not so obvious they want to pay all those additional costs. Employees aren’t mixing, they aren’t talking over lunch about kids. They may be less loyal to the company. I do hear this from companies — the more remote someone is, the more transactional it feels.”
More remote, more transactional.
This might be the only argument executives like that’s against RTO. See, executives do want people on-site so they can see what they’re doing (or pretend to do that), and they do want to be deified and be able to change a person’s whole day at a snap of their fingers, because that’s fun.
Those arguments are pro-RTO. But if you allow remote and can move someone from “FTE” to “contractor” — which, oddly, often have the same protections in America because of how much we’ve eroded the rights of workers — that’s an argument in favor of WFH.
Save money? Hmmm, me likey.
If you want some “data” on how much this is happening:
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