Former legendary Utah Jazz coach Frank Layden once joked that he confronted a lackadaisical player and asked, “Son, what is it, indifference or apathy?”
He said that the player responded by saying, “Coach, I don’t know, and I don’t care.”
Frontier Airlines CEO Barry Biffle thinks he has the answer for some lackadaisical employees.
They got lazy.
“We got lazy in COVID,” Biffle said last week. “I mean seriously, people are still allowing people to work from home. All this silliness, right? All that’s out the window.”
He said he is not the only CEO to complain about this and called it a “society-wide” phenomenon. Even Elon Musk, the CEO of X, formerly Twitter, said there was a problem.
“We’re not alone in this. You hear every company out there talking about productivity challenges,” Biffle said.
Frontier, like many airlines, is trying to increase productivity in the wake of staff shortages, rising fuel costs and increased demand.
“When we look at overhead versus 2019 adjusted for capacity, it’s up dramatically,” Biffle said. “Why do I have more people per plane in overhead than I had in 2019? It’s because they’re not as productive.”
Biffle said it is time to return to a more normal workplace environment.
So did Musk
“All the COVID stay-at-home stuff has tricked people into thinking that you don’t actually need to work hard,” Musk wrote on X. He has since revised the work-from-anywhere policy at X, Tesla and SpaceX, his three most prominent and visible companies.
According to Fortune magazine, the number of companies requiring full-time attendance in the office is beginning to decline.
“Employees feel the employer is extremely lucky to have them, as opposed to the other way around,” Australian luxury real estate Gurner Group’s chief executive Tim Gurner, said at an Australian Financial Review conference. “We’ve got to kill that attitude, and that has to come through hurting the economy.”
An independent analysis found that about a third of all work could be done remotely without the loss of productivity.
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