Virtual Reality

The great controversy of the early 21st Century is not Yankees vs. Red Sox, nor Barbie vs. Oppenheimer, nor even the potential cage match between Elon and Zuck (although I have $20 on the newly buff Zuck).

No, the controversy about which everyone seems to have an opinion is remote work vs. return to the office.

This issue does not effect a huge proportion of the working population who must show up in person, such as doctors, teachers, delivery people, and paid assassins.

But thanks to COVID, many in the office economy discovered that something they already had called a telephone and “the Cloud” and something they never had before called “the Zoom”, allowed them to get it all done at home in their pajamas with time to spare to walk the kids and help the dog with his homework.

There has been a fivefold increase in working from home since COVID, stabilizing this year into something of a hybrid model involving working from home some of the time and going to the office whenever the kids are being really annoying or if there is a new lunch spot to try out near the office.

Some research claims that hybrid working three days a week in the office has a net neutral effect on employee productivity while saving on recruitment and retention costs since apparently employees value the ability to work from home two or three days per week as equal in value to an 8% pay increase.

Many old school bosses still think working from home makes workers lazy and less productive and a survey of CEOs found, under the category of “this time we really, really mean it”, that nearly 2/3rds of such CEOs expect a full 5-day in the office work week by 2026.

I see a value to the alchemy of camaraderie, accessibility, idea creation and salacious office gossip that is created when office workers are under the same roof, and there is certainly a training value for newbies to their chosen profession.

But there is also a ton of wasted time and no reason that much of that time cannot be wasted remotely allowing for a much saner work/life balance, notwithstanding the sad loss of those special commuting hours.

I see with my own twenty and thirty something kids that they would rather have root canal than go to the office five days a week and, depending on the economy and their particular skill set, many in their generation may force a permanent change to the hybrid model.

But what has really been disheartening was a recent Wall Street Journal article indicating how the calls to return to the office have been a disaster for working moms.

Economists thought that women’s workforce participation would be crushed by the pandemic and instead participation reached record levels. The WSJ article refers to a Penn Wharton Budget Model study positing that increased female education and more college-educated moms joining the workforce was behind this surge in women’s workforce participation, with no mention of the effect of pandemic induced workplace flexibility.

It is hard to argue with anything coming out of the University of Pennsylvania in light of all of its top notch publicity lately but, as the WSJ article points out, this workforce participation surge was no surprise to actual working moms and from the moms’ point of view the clear reason was available remote and hybrid flexible work arrangements.

There are many things which I just do not understand. Breakfast in bed. The NBA salary cap. Vivek Ramaswamy.

But I truly have never understood the inability of businesses to fully tap into the working mom segment of the population.

It made me think of Jacinda Ardern.

Who?

She is the former rock star Prime Minister of New Zealand, first elected in 2017 at age 37 and the world’s second elected head of government to give birth in office (the first being Jimmy Carter).

She steered the country through mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, a deadly volcanic eruption and then COVID, plus she helped those cute little Hobbits save Middle Earth from those nasty Orcs in Mordor, resulting in her landslide re-election.

Then, in January, 2023, she shocked everyone by indicating that she would step down.

“I know what this job takes, and I know that I no longer have enough in the tank to do it justice.”

She said “To (her daughter) Neve: Mum (that’s “Mom” in the New Zealand native language) is looking forward to being there when you start school this year.”

What? A politician stepping down while on top when most other politicians stubbornly hold on to their elected (or even unelected) offices like Gollum to “the Precious” notwithstanding their tanks running on nothing but fumes?

Granted, her re-election was not a lock, but she said she thought she could win.

Being Prime Minister is very much 24/7 and certainly not susceptible to remote or hybrid work, but even with all the perks, benefits, support staff and let’s not forget power available to the head of a country, she felt that her gas gauge was near empty and it was time to move on.

Maybe the Kiwi first dude did his part around the house, but studies have found that even in “egalitarian marriages,” women spend more than double the amount of time on housework than their husbands and even when couples earn about the same, women spend two hours per week more on caregiving.

Adding face time in the office to the mix does not help.

If we are really concerned about productivity, then we need to figure out how to more efficiently use this huge and talented Jacinda portion of our population, and after COVID and the remote/hybrid work experiment, it is clear that there is a way to do it (other than waiting for all the old school bosses to retire).

I know, because on a small scale, I already kinda did it.

I had a commercial real estate law practice that was reasonably successful for the most part because I worked with attorneys all of whom were smarter than me and most of whom were working moms.

Yes, I realize that saying my colleagues were smarter than me is a little like Ringo saying he succeeded by surrounding himself with talented musicians, or Mugsy Bogues, the 5 foot 3 inch NBA star, saying he succeeded by surrounding himself with taller teammates.

One of my early hires from a large respected law firm started me down this path by requesting hourly pay with a guaranteed minimum number of hours and an understanding that time off was time off (and she figured, if more time was sometimes absolutely required, she would at least get paid for it).

Her large firm had allowed her to work on a “mommy track” where she got paid 4/5ths of a standard salary for a theoretical 4-day per week schedule, but she was regularly asked to work seven days per week anyway.

Using this new approach across my entire practice, I ended up working in my small firm scenario with super talented attorney moms of a caliber that are usually found only in the largest law firms or in really cheesy television shows, some who came in a few times a week, some who came in infrequently and one who never came in at all and I am not even sure who she was.

After spending a few hours with screaming toddlers, opposing counsel were not going to be intimidating, and these attorney moms had no trouble making the more difficult ones clean their room.

My management system was kind of a “Reverse Charlie’s Angels” model.

For those of you too young to remember that there was once a thing called network television, Charlie’s Angels was a popular TV show in the 1970’s about a wealthy guy (Charlie) who ran a detective agency by speakerphone with Kate Jackson, Farrah Fawcett and Jaclyn Smith (and eventually Cheryl Ladd) as his detectives.

Nobody complained that Charlie was being lazy and inefficient working from home or that the show had truly inane plot lines because most people tuned in just to watch Kate, Farrah, Jaclyn and Cheryl strut about. Plus, without Zoom we never even got to see Charlie to know whether he was working or just hanging out.

In addition to Charlie, plenty of men have worked quite effectively with out-of-office flexibility, so why not the true denizens of the Marvel Universe … working moms.

Bond only went to the office when he needed some cool gadgets from Q or M was annoyed with him.

Batman was spoiled by Alfred as he worked from the Bat Cave home office.

Clark Kent might go to the office, but Superman? Pleeeze.

In the Reverse Charlie’s Angels model, I was Charlie and pre-COVID came to the office regularly, but my lawyer detectives had total flexibility as long as they got their work done.

This model required that I back up my working mom crew, sometimes on weekends or if they had other commitments, but that was not much of a problem since they were constantly backing me up by fooling our clients into thinking that I actually knew how to practice law and by making our practice as capable as at any larger law firm.

There is no reason this cannot be done at law firms of all sizes (and in plenty of other “white collar” professions) even more easily today now that we know from the pandemic about all the available technological tools.

All that is required is some basic management ingenuity and effort and whoever figures out how to make this work on a large scale will clean up the competition. Hands down.

Frankly, there are a lot of talented men that would also welcome similar flexibility.

As we all know, there is nothing more ferocious and determined than a mama bear providing for her cubs.

And make no mistake, my former mama bear colleagues would crush Elon and/or Zuck in a cage match.

Bring it on.