Steve Schwarzman of the Blackstone group said staff want to work from home so they can save money
The boss of the world’s biggest commercial landlord has accused remote workers of staying away from the office because it means they “don’t work as hard” and can save money.
Steve Schwarzman, the chief executive of investment firm the Blackstone group, made the claims about hybrid staff while speaking on a panel at the Future Investment Initiative summit in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
In remarks first reported by Bloomberg, he said employees had kept working from home because “they didn’t work as hard, regardless of what they tell you” and also due to the savings they make on their daily commute, lunches and work attire.
Get this asshole a submarine too
There are no metics to support any drop in productivity. There are lots of metrics to support making people go back to the office is bad for the environment. The traffic were I live is pretty much back to what it was before. It’s gross just watching the haze of fumes knowing it is there so these dickheads can maintain their property portfolio.
I work a job where our metrics are extremely easy to analyse, since switching to 100% remote work instead of 60% max at will remote work our productivity has increased by 15%… How much are companies willing to spend too increase productivity by 15%? Imagine being able to get that boost by saving money instead!
The company I work for experienced significant growth during COVID and has more employees at the corporate office than they have desks. They’re literally saving craploads of money on building a new office by maintaining a hybrid and remote workforce
The irony of the hedge fund boss that owns the world’s largest corpo land lord complaining about WFH employees not doing real work
The boss of the world’s biggest commercial landlord
In other words, they make their money via passive income.
has accused remote workers of staying away from the office because it means they “don’t work as hard”
The world is so full of hypocrisy that…maybe he thought no one would notice (?)
Dumb ass says dumb ass thing. News at 11.
I mean, at work I’m probably just going to play Pokemon on my phone until an actual assignment shows up, then do it and back to Pokemon.
If I worked from home I can’t imagine I would do my job any differently, except it would probably be playing Pokémon Violet on the switch instead of Pokemon Masters on my phone
The evidence says otherwise. He can go fuck himself. I personally prefer going in but I understand people wanting to work from home or at the very least do hybrid work. Childcare is fucking expensive and if you can work while watching kids, that can really help combat the massive rise in housing costs.
He’s essentially saying that companies need employees to come work at the office because the real estate investors depend on it.
Question what do the models say will happen if commercial real estate values crash because everyone is wfm? Can it really cause an macro economic issue?
The short version is yea, they (and we) are pretty fucked if they can’t fill their commercial leases.
The long of it: apparently in 2020 a whole lot of property owners took out new loans/cash-out refinanced when interest rates hit record lows before COVID hit. A lot of those (maybe most of them) were balloon loans, meaning they were short term (about 5 years usually) with small payments for the duration, and a larger balloon payment at the end.
We are coming up on the end of 5 years, and commercial real estate prices have still not recovered. They could be in a situation where they owe the bank more than what the property is worth, and if enough properties default because of that, we could be in a similar situation as in 2008.
Frankly though: they can fuck off. They gambled (again) with our economy, they don’t deserve to be catered to our bailed out for their reckless decisions. I say nationalize the defaulted properties and convert them to housing, much like we should have done in 2008 instead of bailing out the banks who caused the crisis.
I will happily watch them squirm from my comfortable home office
Someone is confusing hard work with productivity. Fucking dinosaur.
Remote workers can live in locations with cheaper rent. Blackstone has invested far too much money buying up overpriced housing in densely populated areas to allow that. A spread out population is bad for their bottom line.
Steve-O here should just see how unproductive I can be in the office!
I can ruin the productivity of at least one other person in the process.
Hash tag Colin Robinson did nothing wrong
While on a particularly stupid project that I knew was destined for failure, I actually requested to come into the office on a constant basis because I knew that it was going to fail horribly and I didn’t want my non-presence to become the scapegoat for the manager’s pitifully bad choice.
I mean, I was there all the time, right? How can I have been the cause of this otherwise perfect project failing so miserably?
“It’s very important to me that you head into a large an expensive to rent office. Don’t ask me why.”
Probably doesn’t like WFH because people can clock off when their task is done and he can’t ask them to work unpaid overtime.
Probably part of it, but being a commercial landlord is probably bigger. WFH is reducing the need for offices and thus hurting his property values.
did this dipshit ever hear the term “work smarter not harder”
I think he sounds like a loser
Business saves money: “the goal of a business is to make money”
Employee saves money: “you just don’t want to pay all the robber barons all the way in and out of work you lazy piece of shit”
Business saves money: “the goal of a business is to make money”
I loathe this definition that has become the norm. The goal of a business used to be to provide a good or service, with profit as the reward for success. The profit being the purpose is what leads to the constant, unnecessary enshitification.
