The appeal - and perils - of working from home

The sad tale of Brittany Pietsch, who filmed herself being fired from her role as an account executive for a US tech company, should be a warning about the need for better management, training and performance assessment of junior staff. Maybe it's also a warning about the perils of trying to lead, manage and train in a world where face-to-face contact  is diminished. My daughter told me about the viral TikTok video that resulted, and while I talked about the importance of being fair, clear and honest when taking away someone's livelihood, she suggested that some managers simply don't like telling their staff that performance isn't good enough and so don't help them improve. So someone at the start of their working career can be left with no clue how to do their job better. It's even harder for managers to mentor, train, help or evaluate junior staff in a hybrid working environment. If, as as is often the case, the managers have home offices (and would like to come into the office one or two days a week at most) while juniors are in flat-shares which encourage going in, say, three or four days a week,  the chances of managers being effective are further reduced. 

Some time before Covid, someone asked me how long I was planning to go on working and I replied, glibly, that I had no intention of stopping but I didn't know how long I wanted to go in for the 7 am morning meeting. My employer's relocation from the City to Canary Wharf and the explosion of low traffic neighbourhoods means that what used to be a 20-minute commute, is now an hour by public transport,  45 minutes by bike (downhill) or 45 minutes by car (on a Sunday morning or before 6:30 am in midweek). The result is that it is now over a year since I last went in for the morning meeting. I go in later instead. 

The shift away from standalone Reuters, Telerate, Quotron or Bloomberg terminals (which were all tiny by comparison to anything you see on a trading desk today) and their replacement with huge banks of screens giving access to multiple applications, reduced human contact on trading floors years ago. The shift away from voice trading and the growth of email and chat, along with regulatory limits to who should have access to what information, has significantly changed the purpose of the cavernous trading floors of the 1980s and 1990s. There's still a strong case for a lot of trading/sales staff to be present on the floor, in order to reduce the risk of (expensive) mistakes, but those old clips of Masters of the Universe lording it over the floor and screaming abuse at everyone, have nothing to do with a modern trading business. 

There is then, little point in my going into work first thing in the morning, and little benefit to being in the office to listen and watch the markets. It has become clear that the only reason to go in at all, is to talk, eat and occasionally drink with other people. Juniors need mentoring and managing, colleagues need to shoot the breeze, bosses need to be helped to say what they really think without hiding behind a Teams connection and clients need ideas. All of these can be done over breakfast, coffee, lunch, tea, drinks or dinner. And the nice thing is that while I like the view of the Wharf from home in the morning, the view from the Wharf is wonderful in the evening...