18th May 2021. Offices | Tesla
The extras of office work;
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One of the live post-lockdown questions at the moment is how fast, and how much, we might return to working in offices. A predictable queue of fairly sociopathic finance organisations—from Goldman Sachs to JP Morgan—have lined up to say how important it is to be in the office, although their younger talent might not agree.
It was perhaps a surprise to see Cathy Merrill, the CEO and owner of the Washingtonian magazine join in, in an op-ed in the Washington Post. It’s paywalled, but she was concerned about the usual things: culture, learning. But the discussion about culture came with something of an implicit threat:
I estimate that about 20 percent of every office job is outside one’s core responsibilities — “extra.” It involves helping a colleague, mentoring more junior people, celebrating someone’s birthday — things that drive office culture. If the employee is rarely around to participate in those extras, management has a strong incentive to change their status to “contractor.”
(Leaving do cakes. Made by Alice. Image: Phil Gyford, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
So perhaps it was not so much of a surprise that the response of her staff was to stop publishing for a day:
An article about all of this at Nieman Lab by Laura Hazard Owen (headlined, ‘It’s not your job to buy cake’) cut through some of the cultural and social issues—read: gender issues—involved in these office “extras”, in a way that goes way beyond a small argument in an upmarket magazine:
There’s another term for the “extras” Merrill mentions. Researchers call them “non-promotable tasks.”.
“Across field and laboratory studies, we found that women volunteer for these ‘non-promotable’ tasks more than men,” Linda Babcock, Maria P. Recalde, Lise Vesterlund, and Laurie Weingart wrote in Harvard Business Review wrote a couple years back, “that women are more frequently asked to take such tasks on; and that when asked, they are more likely to say yes.”
Nor do these tasks help in getting promoted, as University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill researchers discovered:
We found that women were more likely than men to have “helpful” or community-oriented behaviors mentioned in their performance evaluations. Yet, being perceived as highly helpful was not associated with receiving the highest performance rating (for men or women). We suggest that women are “viewed” as having more communal or community-oriented qualities, but these qualities are not valued highly for top performance outcomes.
Owen also observes that mentoring isn’t some nice-to-have—it’s a fundamental part of staff development. Since it matters, it should be recognised as useful and valuable work. But the deeper point is this: not being in the office for a year has made completely explicit the power relationships that underpin office life:
Working remotely for the last year has revealed just how much of office culture is accidental, arbitrary, and sexist. Much of what’s lumped in with unpaid “culture” should be identified and divided equitably. (Do what we do at the Nieman Foundation: The managers buy the cakes.) And if it turns out people keep pointing to the same things as positive elements of their in-office experience, well, try to find the person who’s making those happy things happen — and recognize them with money and career advancement.
Scott Galloway has had the temerity to suggest that Tesla might be less than the sum of its parts in his newsletter.
In particular, he had a look at the latest financials—which show a decent $438 million dollar profit—and stripped out the receipts the company has for emissions credits and the profit it made on trading bitcoin (this specific bit came to $101m). There are losses on the energy and services divisions ($158m and $101m respectively) while the auto division made a razor thin profit margin ($140m on $8.4bln).
(Source: Scott Galloway)
The emissions credits are a bit of a regulatory boondoggle that works like this, according to Auto Week:
The automaker (Tesla) accumulates regulatory credits because it produces only EVs and sells them for a profit to other automakers that are short of these credits.
While I’m probably OK with seeing the emissions credits as part of the business model of an electric vehicles business, the net effect is that Tesla is profiting from other car companies’ carbon emissions. The bitcoin part is more problematic, especially since Musk has enough Twitter followers to apparently shift the price of bitcoin.
I’m not going to go a long way into Galloway’s longish piece here, but he sees a couple of problems in all of this.
The first is that while the rest of the car industry may not have access to capital in the way that Tesla does, but they’ve not been kicking their heels on electric vehicles. There is now significant choice in the market place:
Or that was the auto industry. Because the Germansarecoming. And the Swedes. And the Japanese. On May 2, we got a glimpse into a post-Tesla future when the New York Times ran an article titled: “Mercedes EQS Electric Sedan: The S Stands for Stunning.” The innovation gap is closing. And it’s not just car companies coming for Tesla’s fat margins. The industry’s shape-shift from a $100 billion low-margin manufacturing business to an $800 billion high(er)-margin software business has attracted some enormous sharks.
With Apple due to join them sometime next year.
The second is that bitcoin does have an emissions problem, and part of Tesla’s narrative is about being an environmentally friendly innovator.
But Galloway’s larger point is that we value markets because—or so the theory goes—they help allocate resources to the places where there are better returns. In a market that is led by a combination of asset bubbles and celebrity leverage, the markets don’t work properly:
In a healthy market, resources flow where they’ll generate the best return: Workers move to cities with strong job markets, capital flows to companies with robust growth prospects... Our elevation of Musk as a capitalist idol has distorted the flow of capital and talent. Healthy markets don’t take cues from the tweets of one man.
My son also pointed out that some of the comments are wild. Almost as if Musk’s many fans can’t deal with the blow to their self-image that comes from a bit of sector analysis.
(H/t John Naughton)
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