Elon Musk’s Memo Didn’t Just Demand A Return To Offices. It Promoted Overwork.

Lost in the kerfuffle over Elon Musk’s memos about Tesla executives’ return to work—knocking “some remote pseudo office” and tweeting that those who prefer remote work should “pretend to work” elsewhere—was that the missives weren’t just about where work should take place. They also mandated how much time work should consume for Tesla executives.

Reminiscent of a clock-punching supervisor of another era, Musk—who, according to a report by Reuters Friday, wants to cut jobs and pause hiring—started one memo by saying “anyone who wishes to do remote work must be in the office for a minimum (and I mean *minimum*) of 40 hours per week or leave Tesla.” He discussed “why I lived in the factory so much” and appeared to suggest working remote would be “phoning it in.”

The issue, say workplace experts: Employees today don’t just want flexibility about where they work. They want flexibility around when, and the trust of their managers to be assessed on the output of the job they do, even if it takes less time.

An April report from Future Forum, a research consortium on the future of work launched by Slack and other partners, found that while 79% of respondents said they wanted location flexibility, 94% said they wanted to choose the hours they work.

“People want flexibility in place and time,” says Cali Williams Yost, founder of Flex+Strategy Group, which works with companies on workplace policies. “There is a call now to say how can we work better and smarter.” As burnout and mental health issues increase, memos that imply working more than 40 hours a week is expected could “seem tone deaf to the current reality,” she says.

The issue of long working hours is hardly new territory for Musk, the world’s richest man, who has also, if you haven’t heard, been trying to buy Twitter, where workers have been told they can work from home “forever.”

“This is very consistent with who he is,” says Gianpiero Petriglieri, a professor at INSEAD’s business school who studies leadership and learning in the workplace. “He is the poster boy of the culture of overwork. He wants people to be completely committed.”

Musk recently praised workers in China who, amid Covid-19 related lockdowns, were “burning the 3am oil. … whereas in America people are trying to avoid going to work at all.”

During another uproar over his 2018 tweets that he would take Tesla private, Musk gave a tearful interview to the New York Times, saying he’d been working up to 120 hours a week, hadn’t taken more than a week off since 2001 and that such intense work hours have “really come at the expense of seeing my kids. And seeing friends.”

In 2015, during an appearance at a Vanity Fair New Establishment Summit, he was asked about being CEO of two companies and said he “wouldn't recommend” it. (The same might go for adding a third.)

Musk’s most recent memos were targeted at Tesla’s executives, who, like many senior managers, likely already work far more than 40 hours a week. He also seemed to be trying to put executives’ privileges in perspective with Tesla’s factory workers, saying the 40-hour minimum is “less than we require of factory workers” and reminding executives that “the more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence.”

But while that may be taking the “high moral ground,” says Petriglieri, it can also damage the inclusiveness of a workplace and suggests “anyone who’s not like me doesn’t belong here,” he says. “He’s trading inspiration for inclusion.”

That’s a common issue with visionary leaders, Petriglieri says, who expect that everyone else has the same commitment they do. For such founders, “their achilles heel is inclusion. They’re constantly saying this is the culture I want. … One of the reasons our cultures have trouble being inclusive is that we worship visionary leaders”

Petriglieri, who says he’s a fan of the office himself, suggests that while much of the debate over the return to work has been about where work happens, it’s also about the amount of it.

“Underneath all the discourse of remote versus office work is actually discourse of overwork, how much work and the quantity of work,” he says. Even if the last two years have shown people can be productive working remotely, “the assumption is if people are in the office they will work more. It’s the old thing of senior executives wanting control,” he says. “As always with [Musk], he’s kind of saying the quiet part out loud.”