As part of this voyage of discovery, American employers figured out that they didn’t have to care about their relationship with employees. Employees existed to perform tasks, and their connection to management was purely transactional.
Now, proponents of back-to-the-cubicle management are extolling the virtues of the relationships they can only have with employees through face-to-face encounters. It’s their employees who are pointing out, with no little justice, that they can perform their tasks at home just as well as they can in the office. Relationships? What does management think … that this is the 1950s?
What’s needed to succeed
There’s a big missing piece of this puzzle. It isn’t how to best encourage — “coerce” is a more accurate verb — employees to come back into the office, so as to restore the manager/employee relationship, which is how the dialog is usually crafted.
