Do you agree with this famous hedge fund’s super unique take on remote work?
A famous hedge fund has come up with a unique way of getting workers back to the office 5 days per week while still attempting to appease remote work advocates.
The approach is one I’ve never heard of before.
I’ll walk you through the new idea and then I would love to hear your take in the comments.
Would you support this approach in your own workplace, or do you think it’s just a dirty trick or token gesture for those who want to work from home?
The office life
Now if you watch all the make money online content I put out on my YouTube channel, you probably have no interest in being in an office at all.
Neither do I.
But the reality is until you start your own business and it can support your lifestyle, you’re probably going to be stuck commuting somewhere at least part of the time.
In fact, there’s a big push underway by many big companies to force people back to their cubicles across all industries despite strong resistance from workers.
So is there a happy medium?
Here’s what the famous hedge fund Pershing Square did to get people back in the office 5 days per week while also purporting to support remote work.
A new approach
Rather than have people come in, say 3 days a week every week with two work-from-home days, CEO Bill Ackman instituted a rule that people must work in the office 5 days a week.
For 10 months a year.
In the summertime, they can work from wherever they want — within reason.
Here’s what Ackman told the New York Post:
“What we’ve done at Pershing Square is bring people back five days a week 10 months a year.
“Of course, if there’s something you need to do like a doctor’s appointment or working from home one day, use your best judgment.
“And then we give people July and August to work from anywhere with the caveat that if there’s something where we need to bring everyone together, you show up.”
I actually think this is kind of ingenious.
If it were up to me, I’d work from home every day, but this gives people something to look forward to when they’re trudging to an office from Monday to Friday all winter.
Stock market volume typically slows down a lot in the summertime, so having people around is a lot less critical to a trading company’s business operations.
The perfect time
I think this could be adjusted based on location, too.
For example, I live in Canada and I like to minimize the amount of time I spend in the car.
That’s why I actually don’t mind working in the summer.
There are fewer people on the roads because school is out and people are on vacation, which makes my commute easy-peasy. I hate wasting my life unecessarily driving to and from an office.
When it’s deep winter here — the cold, the snow, the slush, the sleet — commute times can double and triple depending on road chaos.
I think it would be way more efficient to take January and February at home when we’d all rather be hibernating.
Said Ackman: “We’ve experimented with that for two years and that’s worked well. People like the balance, and it works for our business.”
So what do you think of that approach? Let me know in the comments!
