The CEO of Morgan Stanley says employees can’t simply choose to work remotely | Hacker News Reader

The CEO of Morgan Stanley says employees can’t simply choose to work remotely

fortune.com

27 pointsindus16 comments

“They (workers) don’t get to choose their compensation, they don’t get to choose their promotion, they don’t get to choose to stay home five days a week,” said James Gorman, CEO of Morgan Stanley…”

Absolutely they do.

They get to make that choice by choosing a company that values their talent to the degree they are paid what they feel their time is worth; they make that choice by choosing to work for a a company that values their talent enough to give them the opportunity for promotion; they make that choice by choosing to work for a company that values results over butts-in-chair.

For almost 2 years, many, many workers proved they could be as productive, if not MORE productive than pre-pandemic times. They got creative on how to be collaborative; it worked.

If Gorman doesn’t see and embrace that, may he find himself setting the “open to work” flag on his LinkedIn.

Obviously his claim assumes one choose to work for Morgan Stanley, and for that he is correct for a fact. And don’t worry for him, he can get fired and still fine.

In fact I don't think anyone eventually can decide except the market. Pandemic is not enough to show work remotely universally works, since it is a period that economy heavily influenced by government.

MS workers could also attempt to unionize to secure remote work as a right. The attempts to do so would be protected by federal law. Annoying for these workers to be held hostage by elderly leadership teams (see Disney as well, Bob Igor is 71 and "put his foot down" requiring 4 days/week on site) and their emotional driven whims and value systems. For them, it’s not about productivity data, but about power (and the loss of it through increases in worker power, primarily due to labor shortages caused by demographic compression).

> For almost 2 years, many, many workers proved they could be as productive, if not MORE productive than pre-pandemic times. They got creative on how to be collaborative; it worked.

Mandatory office work is not about productivity. It is about social aspect of it. The high level manager feels lonely and does not feel in control. Mandatory in office work fixes both.

It is same with long hours - they are not effective, but they feel good. They feel like effort and they feel like being in control. In home long hours don't feel the same to management.

> If Gorman doesn’t see and embrace that, may he find himself setting the “open to work” flag on his LinkedIn.

It'll become evident if remote unfriendly companies struggle to hire. A lot of folks are loudly proclaiming this as fact already with very little data. Let's wait to see what happens.

I'm reminded that there have always been fully remote companies before the pandemic. I've worked at some of them. They've never had an overly competitive edge in retention or hiring.

Alphabet, Microsoft, Salesforce, Shopify, Goldman Sacks, Kracken, Coinbase, Crypto.com, Amazon, Cisco, Twitter and Meta... double digit headcount layoffs in the last quarter.

Tech companies wont struggle to hire for a good while.

They will, because those highly compensated employees are hitting the market and finding out that salary and comp isn't the same outside the bubble.

So they're sitting on million dollar mortgages in Seattle or SF on houses they bought at 2% interest during the good times and now the offer they're looking at won't make ends meet.

Now what? Who blinks first? Do the other tech companies need to slide salaries upward to fill their roles? Why would they? We were told there's a glut of engineers.

Workers post Covid just aren’t as productive, to account for the malaise that presented itself, companies over hired. Layoffs across industry seems to tell us otherwise.

That’s a great theory, but do you have any evidence to support it? Otherwise it’s just conjecture…

Morgan Stanley is an investment bank, with significant exposure to commercial property holdings (1).

It's easy to see why their CEO was disappointed when everyone left the office and these assets became redundant.

Usually, when a big well known business magazine prints an article like this, the Leader or CEO quoted is someone with significant exposure to commercial property assets. Conflict of interest, anyone?

If you're a business leader, I'd be taking James's words here with a grain of salt. He wants you as a customer to pay exorbitant amounts of money for commercial property that his company will benefit from.

(1) https://www.afr.com/street-talk/morgan-stanley-knight-frank-...

Interesting take from Mr Gorman. I wonder if he knows that when I worked at Morgan Stanley 10 years ago, I absolutely did choose to work remotely whenever I liked. My team was spread all over the world, I was in London and my boss was in New York. Nothing to do with the pandemic obviously… and my productivity was good enough to get promoted 18 months after joining.

LOL. someone over invested office real estate...

https://archive.ph/0TmOb

Morgan Stanley employees aren't unionized? If not, are there examples of similar companies where they are?

This seems like something that's negotiated at a contract level, company-wide.

FYI: Morgan Stanley owns E*TRADE as of Oct 2020.

Individual workers have no power, and collectivizing is impossible when their attention spans and ability to think and reason are shot. The moment they leave, 100 replacements are ready to take their role.

Good luck.

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