Cathy Merrill is the publisher of Washingtonian magazine, and she is in big trouble over an op-ed she wrote on Thursday for the Washington Post. Here is a typical response from a staff member:
As members of the Washingtonian editorial staff, we want our CEO to understand the risks of not valuing our labor. We are dismayed by Cathy Merrill’s public threat to our livelihoods. We will not be publishing today.
— Jane Recker (@janerecker) May 7, 2021
So what was the problem with Merrill's op-ed? Answer: it urged people to think twice before insisting on working from home after the pandemic has lifted. The first few paragraphs are basically some throat clearing about the difficulty of building a corporate culture if older workers are at home and not available to mentor and manage new hires. Then the fun started:
While some employees might like to continue to work from home and pop in only when necessary, that presents executives with a tempting economic option the employees might not like. I estimate that about 20 percent of every office job is outside one’s core responsibilities — “extra.” It involves helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone’s birthday — things that drive office culture. If the employee is rarely around to participate in those extras, management has a strong incentive to change their status to “contractor.” Instead of receiving a set salary, contractors are paid only for the work they do, either hourly or by appropriate output metrics. That would also mean not having to pay for health care, a 401(k) match and our share of FICA and Medicare taxes — benefits that in my company’s case add up roughly to an extra 15 percent of compensation. Not to mention the potential savings of reduced office space and extras such as bonuses and parking fees.
....People considering just dropping into their office should also think about FOMO, fear of missing out. Those who work from home probably won’t have FOMO, they will just have MO. The casual meetings that take place during the workday. The “Do you have three minutes to discuss X?” These encounters will happen. Information will be shared. Decisions will be made. Maybe if you are at home you’ll be Zoomed in, but probably not. As one CEO put it, “There is no such thing as a three-minute Zoom.” Being out of that informal loop is likely to make you a less valuable employee.
There are two ways of thinking about this. The first is that Merrill is an unbelievable idiot and intended to threaten her own employees in the pages of the Washington Post.
The second is that she was genuinely trying to offer some career advice that she's afraid a lot of workers might not consider. In this case, I suppose, her sin lies in being a little too blunt, contrary to modern standards that require lots of tip-toeing and invocations of "this would be wrong, of course, but..." It so happens that I've become a sworn foe of this style of writing, but that's just me.
In any case, I vote for #2 unless someone provides evidence that Merrill is not just stupid, but a sociopathic Trumplike monster.
UPDATE: The inevitable apology tour has begun:
Merrill issued a statement to this blog: “Washingtonian embraces a culture in which employees are able to express themselves openly. I value each member of our team not only on a professional level but on a personal one as well. I could not be more proud of their work and achievements under the incredibly difficult circumstances of the past year. I have assured our team that there will be no changes to benefits or employee status. I am sorry if the op-ed made it appear like anything else.”
She gave a more piercing self-evaluation via phone: “Everyone needs an editor," she told us. "I wish I had run my piece by mine.”
I assume that Merrill's op-ed was, in fact, seen by an editor at the Washington Post before it ran. And presumably that editor didn't see anything especially wrong with it. Still, Merrill's update is welcome. As I mentioned, I'm not a fan of nuancing pieces to death, but sometimes a little bit of diplomacy goes a long way.
I'm convinced some people get out of bed in the morning and immediately try to find things they can get offended about. It seems the 'Washington Post' might have more than its share on staff.
The Po-Ed she wrote was in the Washington Post, but it was about Washingtonian Magazine, of which she is the publisher, and which is unrelated to the WaPo.
In a larger sense, though, your observation is almost universally correct: A lot of people wake up in the morning looking for something negative to focus on, when what they ought to be thinking about is how incredibly lucky they are.
“A lot of people wake up in the morning looking for something negative to focus on, when what they ought to be thinking about is how incredibly lucky they are.”
The first part is a valid problem: too many people go out of their way to search for something to be upset about.
But the second part is just not how most (any?) humans operate. I don’t know that anybody - not even royalty or billionaires - routinely wake up each day and think “wow I’m incredibly lucky to be where I am today.” It just isn’t human nature to be thankful on a daily basis for one’s station in life and/or for not being personally affected by a whole host of potential problems that could’ve affected oneself. Clergy and closed religious groups (eg the Amish) might come the closest to this idealized behavior, but I bet even they have to constantly work at being thankful on a daily basis for their current life situation and ignore all that could be improved around them.
We are all Witnesses.
Employee: "Pretty unhappy that the CEO of my company published an implied threat to my job in a national outlet during a time of declining employment in my industry."
Kenalovell: "Snowflake!"
This
My other thought is that Merrill may have a poor understanding of what motivates her employees. If the number of journalists fleeing major firms for Substack is any indication, becoming independent contractors might be just what they want. No more pointless meetings or having to chip in to buy Laura from Accounts Receivable a wedding gift!
The deals that the Matt Yglesias's of the world can get aren't available to more than a tiny percentage of journalists.
Yup.
& people like Andy Sullivan can't write about race science at legacy publications, while there is a limited market for Glemm Greemwald's Democrat Party = Mussolini + NAMBLA* content. (Still surprised Glemm hasn't tried to latch on at the Federalist, American Conservative, or even the still around American Spectator.)
*But NOT NAMBLA in the good way.
Sounds like a company that needs a union!
My bet would be it mostly isn't the older people who are preferring to work at home.
Corporate culture is highly wingnut-centric, which a lot of people, especially younger people, find alienating and offensive, as well as de-motivating.
So, working from home is that much less anxiety.
edit: conservative-centric.
Whatever that means. Working from home was never a real thing. It was a environmental forced change. Stop whining.
environmental forced change
Like the dust bowl.
Or when Mt St Helen's blew up and everybody left, except that one guy, the social conservative.
More than one guy. The geosciences guy in his office observing the mountain was also killed. As were several campers who were invited into the restricted zone by conservative governor Dixie Lee Ray, who felt excluding people from getting close to the mountain was infringing on their freedumb.
I feel that I once knew that and it left me for another life somewhere.
Working from has been a real thing for up to 20 years. I've been WFH for 12 years, indeed nearly my entire industry is WFH.
Wingnut???? Again, what are you talking about??? Most employees here aren't even workers. Nothing more than paid talking heads like Tucker Gayrlson. Media needs abolished.
For what it's worth, I think it's entirely possible to do informal knowledge sharing over electronic channels, but not everyone is good at it.
I made a career change of sorts at the start of the pandemic. My new company (despite being in the technology industry) has a very office-based culture, and came back to the office as much and as soon as it was safe and legal (I'm in Australia, so there has basically been no local transmission of Covid here since October 2020).
I started in one team of mainly younger workers with a relatively young and outgoing boss, and there was a constant stream of banter, knowledge-sharing and the like on the team Slack.
I joined another team a few months ago and while there's plenty of that kind of thing in person, the team-wide Slack is tumbleweed central on the day where we're not in the office.
My conclusion is that while it is undoubtedly easier to do informal knowledge sharing in person, it can be done online, but it's a skillset and set of practices that doesn't come naturally to everyone and has to be deliberately fostered if your company is going to go exclusively or mostly virtual. Frankly, it may also change the communication skills you look for in an employee as well.
A friend of mine is an attorney with a small publicly-traded company. His staff is located all over the country. He took the job after Covid, and his job has been totally online since the beginning.
He told me, as you did, that it is possible to foster a collaborative environment online, but you have to work at it and use the proper tools. Otherwise there’s a risk of everyone going off and doing their own thing.
Twenty years ago, kids in high school would spend their time texting....and now it's full on TiKToK. Granted, not everyone is comfortable online, but there is a pretty good baseline. Of course, in corporate space, there is no such thing as a private conversation.
With the shots and microchip conspiracies, I really want to reference Dr. Strangelove. but the young kids don't know who Peter Sellers is...and explaining Dr. Strangelove is...not really safe for work.
So...."does your dog bite?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXn2QVipK2o
My last few years before I retired, I leveraged my experience with my boss (I pulled the company's chestnuts out of the fire a few times) to take Fridays off. I avoided the terrible Friday Seattle commutes, but the thing that amazed me more was that sitting at home at my computer answering emails and texts I soon realized people didn't even realize I wasn't in the office. I support the concept of core hours where the whole team is present and available to interact directly, but it doesn't have to be 40 hours a week.
Correction: I worked from home on Fridays, I didn't take Fridays off.
Freudian???
😉
Even as someone who is completely on the opposite side of this asshole of a boss, I also completely agree that there are big benefits from times when teams are all in the office together.
Depending on the nature of the work, it doesn't even need to be all that often. Anywhere from one day every two weeks to just a couple of days a week would be sufficient for almost any office occupation I can think of.
The employer makes some good points. However, she needs to re-evaluate the culture and what can be accomplished without everyone sitting in the same building.
If I worked there, I'd be looking for a new job ASAP. Even if the exec left or was booted, what she wrote belies a toxicity towards the labor that provides the product that is indicative of a broader cultural issue.
Also, one of my responses to her (and others of her ilk) would be: are you not already evaluating the performance of your employees? This kind of talk is the last refuge of the shitty boss.
So those who are working from home and not good at schmoozing remotely will miss out on those informal meetings and birthdays (lolol come on, what a sorry excuse for "company culture"). Who cares? If it's to their detriment, that's on them. Sure, letting somebody know that there are valid reasons to come in to the office can be good career advice. But she said it like a mobster - in the "nice job you've got here, shame if something happened to it" kind of way. "I need to supervise your work in person because I'm insecure as a boss, so if you don't agree to come in we'll just have to make your job shitty." It's coercion.
I also suspect she is dead wrong about converting employees who telework into contractors being legal, at least for certain employees who are central to the operation of the business (the IRS and NLRB have rules on who can be classified as a contractor, as well as full time status). Especially since she came out and said it like this.
Finally, lowering the value proposition of working for your publication is a great way to kill your talent pool. Another tick in the "shitty boss" column.
Addendum: I'm astonished that private sector executives have not thought about the cost savings to them of having more people teleworking. Essentially, it allows them to stealthily shift employment costs onto the employee. The business essentially wouldn't pay taxes on the expenses anyway, while the employee would not be able to deduct the costs of working from home as an employee (but would be able to do so as a contractor!) unless they are itemizing their deductions already. So the company can lower their expenses while maintaining the same revenue as they would otherwise have (this assumes the product stays the same regardless of telework status).
My wife's company is not renewing their office space lease this year. Currently it is around $3M a year. Once people can go back to the office they will only return once a week in some sort of staggered schedule or for team meetings.
That was my first thought. An employer can't just blithely announce that an employee is suddenly a subcontractor not an actual employee. There are rules about employment relationships.
Yep, the whole "Do it my way or you will lose your insurance and pension" is Mob Boss 101. I'm sure that is what fueled the employee rebellion, not the helpful hints about company culture and the sharing of information.
"An employer can't just blithely announce that an employee is suddenly a subcontractor not an actual employee."
In right-to-work states employers can absolutely mandate that you re-apply for your own job with a new employment status/configuration.
" I'm astonished that private sector executives have not thought about the cost savings to them of having more people teleworking."
Why should they? Private sector executives have been ignoring the"cost savings" of supporting a national health plan for many decades now. A total elimination of the annual "look for employee plan(s) and give the drones their choice, then administer it all year round". No more huge premiums, which increase hugely every year. Sure, you pay the government -- but the feds don't need to show a profit or grossly over-reward the "executives", much less the shareholders. So it'll cost less.
It can't be the money. As others have noted, these decisions are part of the ideology.
GM: "A health care provider with a car company attached"
Health care is the major legacy cost for older companies. Retirement was too--but most have gone to 401K's. Doesn't seem to be an efficient system.
In choosing between long-term cost savings vs having a threat to hold over the heads of their employees, executives seem to prefer the threat option. Every. Single. Time.
I estimate that about 20 percent of every office job is outside one’s core responsibilities
----------------------------------
To borrow a line from Goodlfellas: F*ck you, pay me....
The 20% are part of your paid time. Shut up and think!
Corporate stooge. Or general brown noser?
I have a job where I can do some WFH. It’s nice to be able to leave early or come in late. The observation about informal meetings and mentoring is quite valid in this environment. I do think every job will be a bit different. Pure desk / computer based work is obviously easy to do from home.
It would behoove Ms. Merrill to understand that independent contractors also get significantly higher hourly rates than what employees earn, specifically because of the things the employer no longer directly pays for in benefits, often 2x-3x higher.
Merril is obviously right. Which is probably why so many commenters here are reacting with hate or with arrogance.
On the other hand: To threaten people with contractor status is bit mean spirited, not to mention counterproductive.
Which means I am about in the middle between Kevin's two options.
One point: Info sharing per se is usually easier remotely in writing (i.e. remotely) than in person. The recipient has a record and can go back to check any time they need to. But the 3 minute meetings mentioned in Merril's piece are more likely to be spontaneous "mini-brainstormings" rather than info sharing. And nobody can convince me that those are easily possible in remote fashion.
I'm at about the same place. I still think it's within normal bounds for an employer to prefer and generally require that workers come to a common workplace. Not that I didn't appreciate the option of working from home before the pandemic; I was usually in the office for less than half the day, but I thought it was worth being there some of the time.
I've found this in my own workplace as well since we all started working remotely. There are times when we'd just walk down the hall to pick each other's brains about something or other. That was valuable, simple, and it took little effort. Now, it involves setting up a time to Zoom, checking calendars, etc. There are many personal advantages to working from home, but some things take much more time to accomplish than before.
I walk down the hall and find the colleague whose brain I want to pick is in a meeting with a client. It's just as easy to pick up the phone and find out the person I'm calling is busy. A three minute brainstorming session usually doesn't need video.
"... but some things take much more time to accomplish than before."
I'd encourage your company to set up a group IM - Trillian or some other client that doesn't even need a Slack setup can take a few minutes. A conference is as quick as typing in "there?" to someone.
Sending a quick chat: "do you have time to talk?" doesn't require checking calendars. Once the chat is started: "should we switch to video?" is quick and easy too.
Just because you only know one way to do things doesn't mean there is only one way to do things.
"And nobody can convince me that those are easily possible in remote fashion."
Even the thousands of employees who are doing it currently?
Do they?
FOAD, troll. Could your deliberate chain-yanking be any more obvious?
At college, a computer programmer had an assembly listing of the program they were trying to debug. Frustrated, they wrote in the margin "FOAD!". A few minutes later their manager walked by and asked "What's 'FOAD'?" ... "Oh, uh, Floating Octal Add".
I know. Because if you can't smell the pheromones of the person you are talking to, you can't really understand what they are saying.
Whatever Merril's faux pas in this I'd just like to point out that POTUS (_P_resident _O_f _T_he _U_nited _S_tates) works from home. I'll bet he misses out on a lot of the office gossip, critically transformational as it may be, too. Republican presidents (including the ones that call themselves Democrats), as well, spend a lot of time golfing and hanging out on their ranches and golf courses all day. Merril fails to include this example in her piece; that's the shortcoming. The fish stinks from the head.
Miltown AM Crank Radio Listener with the Gotcha.
Thanks, Mark Belling's Biggest Fan!
I think you've got that backward. POTUS doesn't work from home, he lives at the office. The White House is mainly an office building.
In no particular order:
- this has all the hallmarks of an analysis written by someone who has no idea how Slack/collaborative tools work. ie. "no such thing as a 3 minute Zoom". Probably true. That's what they invented IM for. Also, maybe quote employees and team leaders, not CEOs.
- We've been WFH since 2013 and there were adjustments, but we...adjusted.
- No question that there are fewer of those random "you're working on x, *I'm* working on X! Lets talk" moments. In my particular industry, these don't particularly create a lot of value, and while I don't know the lifestyle magazine industry very well, I'm having a hard time seeing how it would.
- There were fewer forced exercises of corporate morale building like obligatory birthday parties. Note that this raised overall morale because we didn't have to do performative morale exercises. (I was once part of a company which made their employees gather in the parking lot and sing "Happy Birthday" to the corporate logo on the side of the building.)
- If you don't build an organization driven by a digital product that can't mentor over Zoom/Slack/IM, you will not be part of the economy soon enough.
- She's completely correct that companies will use WFH as an excuse to underpay/under-benefit employees. However, that's not about WFH - that's about the scorpion nature of companies.
- WFH is a huge draw when we recruit. If your HR people can't spin the extra time/no commute/etc to attract people who can mentor/collaborate/etc in a WFH environment, they're not doing their jobs.
- Lets not underestimate the effect of having certain kinds of harassment/hostile behavior be impossible with WFH.
- Lastly, " in my company’s case add up roughly to an extra 15 percent of compensation.". A quick google search confirmed that our company's ratio for this isn't out of line - 30ish% is average. She's already screwing her workers. This hooks into the last point. This is only an obstacle if you're trying to pay the absolute minimum.
I've been working from home since 1997. If you took all of my face-to-face work-related interactions during that time, they would probably add up to be between three and six months.
It works for me, because I'm most efficient when I can get fully into "the zone" and not be interrupted. I occasionally find myself out of the loop on something, but it's rarely a big deal. I can fully understand how other people -- probably most other people -- don't work well that way.
Again, if your employers finds that your job can be done without your physical presence (or maybe your face on Zoom) they may be tempted to have it done by someone in a foreign country where wages/salaries are much lower. It would also increase pressure to automate your job in some way or other.
I think most employers have been doing the math on this for 30+ years. What the Covid year has done is make them re-consider their real estate costs.
My job can be done without my physical presence, and my employer does hire people from foreign countries. Turns out they can't hire as many people as they would like to, foreign country or not, and they have to keep me around. And we literally spend all day every day figuring out ways to automate our jobs.
Same. My own team is in 4 locations across 3 time zones. Our main communication challenge is maximizing the use of the window when everyone is online. The means of remote communication are so easy & efficient that the main problem, during those windows, is one of information overload.
True, the pandemic has forced us to do without some of the in-person planning sessions that we otherwise would have had. That's probably a real loss: lengthy planning sessions are probably a bit easier / more efficient in person, and there's probably some extra measure of bonding that happens only in person.
But those are exceptional (not day-to-day) events, and never require the entire team's presence, only various subsets of it. If the price to renew them were dragging everyone into a 5-day / week commute with full & fully overlapping days in the office, it's not clear the trade-off would be worth it (and in any case would only "work" for local subsets of the team).
Even before the pandemic, the expectation of full time in-office work seemed like a relic of a by-gone age, with little serious justification apart from old-fashioned management surveillance. Now, even moreso.
Let's not forget that the first headline for the op-ed included "as a CEO, I want my employees to be aware ..." Fred Hiatt had it changed after she called.
As to sociopathic Trumpite monsters, there are a lot of them, and many are indeed stupid. If you're really interested, I would suggest looking into her history. Did she get the job by working up to it, or is she a child of privilege? If the latter, many -- think Don Jr. and Eric -- are both sociopathic and stupid.
And as to her points, some are fair enough, but see LostPorch's comments above. Having managed a mix of professionals with a mix of in-office and varying amounts of WAH, and worked at home myself a day or two a week for a while, I can say there are differences, and complications, but also advantages -- like any management situation. That's what managers are paid to manage.
And that brings up a last point. I wonder how good a manager she really is. Maybe she's just not up to the challenge. She sure seems to have bobbled this one pretty badly. If I were on her board, I'd be watching closely.
She spoke heresy! Dox her!
Ms Merrill inherited her job from her parents who founded the magazine. So yes she is Donald Trump Jr. She previously wrote anti-shutdown/COVID isn't so bad screed's for the Washington Post Op-Ed section last spring.
She's a Fast Swimmer--inherited the mag from Dad.
The place where Merrill messes up is she assumes everyone is like her.
I work in a global workplace. My co-workers are in Bangalore, Zurich, and Pittsburgh. Even when all of us go to the office during a given 24 hour period, we don't necessarily overlap, and we certainly don't coincidentally run into each other at the water cooler.
We develop the tools to provide remote mentoring and three minute "zoom" calls.
I began working as a WFH contractor 7 years ago. But I was quickly moved to being an employee, because the government looked like it was going to crack down on companies using contract workers in place of long-term employees. It probably saved my company money. I am part time, so my only benefits are vacation time and a 401k match. They were probably spending far more than that on the temp agency they hired me through.
As long as the government continues to be serious about stopping companies from abusing contract workers, there is little to worry about on that front.
But the second point is very, very valid in my experience. It is just a lot harder to get answers to questions and quick feedback in the virtual environment.
In an actual office you can tell when a coworker isnt focused on work, and can easily ask them for something when they have some actual capacity to do it. In a virtual world, your email or text often lands on their desk when they are very busy, and is totally forgotten. It also becomes much harder to learn who is who in the larger organization. I am doing from home a job that I used to do as a mixed WFH and in-office job. Those three days in the office were extremely helpful for learning the organization and getting coworker feedback on my work.
There is really no sustitute for informal information sharing. The giant zoom meetings and company newsletters are a terrible way to communicate, because people dont learn that way. They only remember when they are interested and receptive. Conversations are perfect for that. I remember how much of a struggle we had working with another department that was located in a different place. It wasnt until we had members traveling to the same location and eating dinner together that we actually started working together well.
A lot of people are coasting on the knowledge and relationships they built over years of being in the office. Those will start to wane as employees turn over. It may take three years, but there will be a point where they are staring at their computer totally unsure whom to ask a simple question, and wondering why none of their close colleagues have answered their request for help. Requests for significant help--like editing a document--that were common and done quickly when we were all in an office together, now take weeks to get back, if they happen at all.
WFH is just fine when you do a rote job that requires no input from others. But any job where organizational knowledge and coworker feedback is important is MUCH harder when totally WFH.
So when you read stories (some of which are in these comments) about people in organizations that solve all of those problems with changes in tech/work process/management technique and so on, do you think they're all lying or delusional?
Where I work if you don't act upon an e-mail with a "you're in my queue but your person # in line" sort of e-mail within an hour or two of it being sent (provided you are online that day), you get called, if you don't answer your team lead's contact, then your person cell is called and your colleagues are asked about your whereabouts. We are required to e-mail our boss and team when we get online in the morning and when we log out in the afternoon - we also inform folks when we go offline for an appointment etc or text the boss if say the power goes out and were offline.
If someone develops a pattern of non-productivity or not being reachable if contractor, they are eased out. If that someone is a civilian employee the usual improvement plan steps are taken.
Folks who used to be addicted to in person drop by now need to foster their skyping skills. If you're not good at typing fast, a phone call is perfectly fine and video is good when dealing with the hearing impaired I work with.
The 21st century office is still evolving but we won't be going back to the old ways for many jobs. Anything that does not involve material things, yeah remote can be done.
"I assume that Merrill's op-ed was, in fact, seen by an editor at the Washington Post before it ran. And presumably that editor didn't see anything especially wrong with it."
Or he correctly saw it for the shit-stirring clickbait that it was. Just like Kathleen Parker's complaint about all these lazy people who choose to collect unemployment rather than get back to menial service jobs and expose themselves to COVID. Written from home, of course.
Maybe workplace culture needs to change.
I'm glad I'm retired
Know some people who tele-work for Verizon. The employees don't like it. The Supervisor's HATE it. They take a perverse joy in making sure the employees know who's thumb they are under. Weird company, for sure
I wonder how the employees are getting high speed data? Spectrum offers a much lower speed for at home use but the work computers need high speed access. And with area networks security is always an issue (Ask the Colonial Pipeline operators.
We shall see what happens to the commercial real estate market