Yeah it’s always better when we are togetherso let’s croon jack johnson in every retail store and ceo in the usa national collection of empty offices. The latest to join the Greek chorus is IBM CEO Arvind Krishna, who recently claimed in a Bloomberg interview on Monday that working from home was not the best for everyone’s career. And until the AI takes over filling an office, Krishna seeks to bring in his employees on a hybrid basis. Not “under those old ‘everyone is in my sight’ rules,” he said, but at least sometimes.
“In the short term, you can probably be just as productive, but your career suffers,” Krishna said of working remotely only, stressing that working from home is best for roles that focus on individual contributions. “Moving from there to another role is probably less likely because no one is watching them in another context,” he adds, “it will be more difficult. Not impossible, but probably much more difficult. thinks working from home is bad for your career trajectory, the tech giant’s boss isn’t forcing anyone back into headquarters, as Bloomberg points out that 80% of IBM employees work at least partially remotely.
Krishna is far from the only CEO to recently come to the defense of in-person or hybrid plans. Coming out weaker than some ardent back-to-power advocates like JP Morgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon or Twitter’s Elon Musk, Krishna landed in the camp of those like Salesforce’s Marc Benioff, not forcing employees back full-time but warning them of the potential consequences of remaining only at a distance. Currently, IBM is simply encouraging workers to come Three days per week.
But they might be a little surprised about their new co-workers when they get back to the office. On the other hot topic of discussion about the future of work, Krishna dwells less on what has worked and more on new innovations. Embracing the potential impact of AI, he recently said he intends to freeze hiring for roles that can be filled by robots instead. Looking specifically at back-office roles, he told Bloomberg that “I could easily see 30% of that being replaced by AI and automation over a five-year period,” which would lead to the loss of approximately 7,800 jobs.
IBM said in a statement Fortune that there is no general hiring pause at the company, and instead they are “deliberate and considered in our hiring with an emphasis on revenue-generating roles” and “very selective” about hiring for jobs that are not customer- or technology-focused. The company is currently “actively hiring” for thousands of positions, they added.
Before managing software systems or finding themselves out of a job, managers may struggle to work remotely. It’s harder to be a boss when he’s not in person, Krishna says, and while that doesn’t mean managers always have to have their team under their watchful eye, it can be helpful to see them at the less occasionally. “It seems to me that we work best when we’re together in person,” he said, adding that “it doesn’t have to be every minute. You don’t have to operate by those old “everyone is in my sight” rules, but at least sometimes. »
His comments follow a new debate about the difference between a job and a career, echoing that of Jefferies CEO Rich Handler, who noted in a @WallStreetConfessions Instagram post last year that the difference between having a job and a career might depend on where you do your job.
“If you want a job, stay at a distance all the time and be effective in a very limited way,” Handler writes. “If you want a career, engage with the rest of us in the office and only use wfh when you’re smart, flexibility is key, sanity calls and life balance needs help.” He added in a comment to Fortune that office workers are drawn into “many interesting situations in ‘real time’.”
Hearing such advice from their bosses, young employees began to become more interested in mentorship, greater productivity, and career opportunities. But it’s hard to have any of those things if nobody really steps in. Until then, executives will issue mandates, try to coax workers, or hope robots will take over and do the work instead (fingers crossed, no revolution there).
