For a glimpse of turmoil these days, look no further than the nearest office. “It’s an incipient war zone,” says a McKinsey study.
That’s despite the fact that offices are mostly empty — both federal and corporate. The MAGA-era U.S. government pretends to function despite the absence of its workforce due to layoffs and the prolonged shutdown. Even flights take off with minimal air-traffic controllers.
Meanwhile, down the block, millions in the private workplace are refusing corporate demands that they return to their offices. Having survived cutbacks and Covid, employees prefer taking Zoom calls at home in their sweat pants rather than coping with traffic or office politics. They also don’t want to read ominous forecasts about incursions from AI.
Confession: I used to like going to the office; others apparently did, too. A benign show called The Office was once a TV hit in the UK and U.S., its characters sharing gossip over the water cooler. Offices brought busy people together for a common purpose. Some even hooked up.
Yet employees today are rebuffing powerhouses like Amazon, J.P. Morgan and studios like NBCUniversal even as they offer compromises to lure them back.
Discovering myself in the minority on the office issue troubled me, so I decided to find a way out: I asked ChatGPT to write an unbiased column in my “voice” to learn where Peter Bart really stands, or has stood. That’s what’s known today as research.
Within a minute or two I was reading that offices presently are a relic — at least according to my digital avatar’s viewpoint. “Creativity doesn’t need proximity,” I wrote — apparently.
My chatbot even cited a Harvard study declaring: “Gen Z executives who were schooled on Zoom and hence addicted to their phones and screens are not coping well with office interaction.” Further, the new “open plan landscape” of offices leaves workers feeling “both distracted and defenseless.”
Was all this correct? Thinking back on my own scattered past, I actually enjoyed these “distractions.” I relished the high-decibel exchanges when I was a young member of the news staff of the New York Times. Also the fierce debates voiced by the motion picture production staffs at Paramount or, later, MGM.
To be sure, I was occasionally pummeled as a newcomer in one job and second-guessed as the company president in another. Office life can be noisy.
Hence, were I to occupy an office today I think would agree, not with the AI Peter Bart’s “voice” but with Bartleby, the superbly informed columnist of The Economist. He wrote last week that he “welcomed the constant background hum of generative AI, even though meetings now routinely end with phrases like ‘I guess I still have a job.’”
Still, the overall AI lexicon troubles him: “People have no clue what they are talking about with words like ‘agentic’ or ‘non-determinism,’” he writes. Bartleby, to be sure, often works at home as do most newsmen.
So what’s the bottom line? Last week the Wall Street Journal reported that, as more companies try to herd workers back to the office, average office attendance “has barely budged.” And managers are reluctant to crack down too intensively.
“There are more pressing things for companies to worry about right now,” the Journal quotes one CEO as admitting. Hence Microsoft now demands three days a week in the office starting next February, while NBCUniversal asks for four.
Ironically, Amazon’s more rigid rules have actually caused that company briefly to run short of desks. One executive admitted, ”It’s still a cheap way to reduce head count but you don’t get to choose who stays or who leaves.”
What’s the solution? I asked my chatbot, who replied, “Maybe it’s not about mandates but about making the office truly matter again, not with pizza parties but with a mission.”
I agree this time with my chatbot, but I hope I don’t have to settle with an AI company for the right to misquote myself.
The post Peter Bart: Companies Are Pitching MOGA (Make Offices Great Again), But AI-Wary Workers Are Barely Budging appeared first on Deadline.
