Elon to X remote work, RTOs as retaliation, and what employees really value

In this episode, we dive into Elon Musk's and Vivek Ramaswamy's controversial task force, cheekily named the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Their mission? To slash federal workforce numbers by targeting remote and hybrid work—impacting up to a million federal employees. We unpack the implications, including potential productivity myths and disproportionate impacts on marginalized groups.

Then, we pivot to Grindr's clash with the NLRB. Accused of retaliating against unionizing employees by enforcing an in-person return-to-office mandate, Grindr’s case is a litmus test for RTO policies and their role in modern labor relations. Are we seeing the start of a broader worker movement?

Finally, we explore the “human factor” in workplace design. How can organizations create an employee experience that values flexibility, connection, and well-being in a hybrid world? From balancing tradition with innovation to rethinking digital workspaces, we’ll share insights on fostering environments where employees truly thrive.

Tune in for a conversation that bridges the political, legal, and cultural landscapes of today’s workplace!

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Articles:
Elon Musk’s first order of business in Trump administration: Kill remote work

NLRB: Grindr retaliated against unionizing workers by forcing a return to office

The human factor: 5 ways to prioritize what employees really value

Chapters

• 1:37 Elon to X remote work
• 9:10 RTO retaliation
• 16:58 What employees really value

Transcript

Stacey Nordwall (00:00):
Welcome to Toot or Boot, where each week we talk about news related to HR and the world of work. We toot the news we like and boot the news we don't like. I'm your host, Stacey Nordwall, a serial joiner of early stage tech companies as their first in or only HR person. And joining us today we have Kate Sargent. Hi Kate. Tell us about yourself.

Kate Sargent (00:21):
Hi, Stacey. Wow, that's a tough question, but I have a background and career in purpose-driven retail, having worked on the field side recruiting side, managing global talent acquisition, and as a head of people for a couple of different purpose-driven B Corps and sustainability focused companies. And that's sort of my sweet spot right now. I am a fractional head of people for a couple of different organizations. I run my own consulting company and executive coaching. I've got a couple of other projects, but the big one is called the plus one collective, and it's all about purpose-driven consultants who are able to have a give back model as part of their business. So there's a theme here, but I'm all about figuring out ways for us to do more than the bare minimum in business.

Stacey Nordwall (01:11):
Yes, I love that. I love that. I am excited because you told me that you have worked remotely for quite some time.

Kate Sargent (01:20):
Long time, yeah, many, many years and off and on both hybrid and remote. So yeah.

Stacey Nordwall (01:26):
Fabulous. So we are going to dive into some things all about, have a lot to do with remote work and RTOs and all of that. So we're going to start, there was an article recently about Elon Musk and the title is Elon Musk's First Order of Business in Trump Administration Kill Remote Work. In the article, they say that Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy are to lead a task force. They are calling the Department of Government Efficiency AKA DOGE for those who know the meme and is Musk's favorite cryptocurrency. Which to be clear, this is not an official government department. It is a task force. The goal of Doge will be to eliminate regulations and dramatically reduce the government's workforce. They plan to start this reduction by cracking down on remote and hybrid work for government employees and slashing discretionary funding to things like the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Plannned Parenthood. So what did you think about this desire to kill remote work?

Kate Sargent (02:35):
Yeah, I mean I think it is just missing the point of what needs to happen right now. I think I love the idea of reducing spending. I love the idea of the article also mentioned that they were going to be removing some of the defense spend that was just out of control and missing all of their audits. But I think cutting remote work feels like we're headed for the wrong thing. Remote work isn't the reason that things are going wrong right here. Overspend is what's wrong. And frankly, remote work is something that makes people happy. It limits greenhouse gases, it limits commute. You actually get more out of people a lot of times. But it takes a little bit more effort to manage a remote workforce. It takes a little bit more planning, it takes a little bit more training, and I think it's the wrong target. I think that's not where it needs to be. The idea that we would be cutting public broadcasting and that we would be cutting Planned Parenthood to me is absurd. Personally, that's just my take as those are sort of necessary services for all of us, but I like the idea of them taking down government spend. So I just think they're just pulling it from the wrong places.

Stacey Nordwall (03:52):
Yeah, I think for me it was this article is a boot. It's an absolute boot because I think there's nothing that I've seen that indicates if their goal is reducing spend, that reducing or limiting remote or hybrid work is going to do that. Other than that, that seems to be them trying to bring in the ways that they like to work their personal preferences, the way they want to run things at their companies and bring that into the federal government. And I'm thinking, if you think federal government or employees are going to work for the wages that they make and are going to pull Tesla hours, you're out of your mind. It is not going to happen that way. And people aren't. I don't think it's going to get the efficiency that they want. And they've even said, Elon Musk has said in other places, this is really forcing, that is really just a tool to get people to quit. That's ultimately where the savings would come from, is forcing people into a working situation that they don't like in order to get them to quit.

Kate Sargent (05:06):
Well, I mean a hundred percent, but I mean the article goes on to mention too that they're trying to RIF a bunch of government employees in different states where it feels like there's overspend and those type of things too. So it's like there is a self-select part of remote work where it's a great way to get people to self-select out because they don't want to do it anymore. But I mean, these are people who have given their lives to the government, their pensions, they have investment in whatever this thing is. So it's almost in some ways a more vulnerable group. They aren't normally paid as much as a lot of other folks, but they get these really tremendous benefits and that's why people work in the government, teaching government services, all of those spaces. And to require them to come back from something that they were already doing is not only gutting their current salary and their current job prospects, but they have long-term reasons to stick around for this as well. So it's a matter of potentially uprooting families, people losing more money than just a couple of years of salary too.

Stacey Nordwall (06:09):
Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I hadn't even really fully played that out, but that's totally correct. There's a reason that there is that longevity within the government and it's because of the things that those other kinds of benefits that they're accruing during that time as well.

Kate Sargent (06:26):
But I think the danger of a task force too is a lack of oversight and it's also just a slash and burn kind of mentality. And my fear is what are we just putting a couple of highly egocentric men in that are saying, we really need to have people in here to worship whoever the top brass people are in the organizations. And I don't think they have the best interests of the people in mind here, which is ultimately what this should be about. And I just think we have so much budgetary spend and time that could be spent in other directions that this feels just targeted and personal.

Stacey Nordwall (07:06):
Oh yeah, a hundred percent. And as you're talking, it's reminding me too of the idea whenever I feel like there's always this thing when people come from outside of an organization, be it a company or the government, a government organization, and come in and just immediately try to, they don't try to understand the culture of all. They don't try to understand how people work or why things are set up, that they're just eliminate this, eliminate that, and it never works. And I feel like that's what this is going to be.

Kate Sargent (07:40):
Yeah, I mean it feels like a slash and burn mentality where it's like we're going to fix it right away, might, and the truth is, those are government employees that are potentially living on relatively small salaries, but they really appreciate the fact that they're getting to work remotely. They appreciate that they work a true nine to five. I know a bunch of government, my family's filled with teachers too, who are supplemented by state systems and supplemented by retirement plans that are really everything to them. This just feels icky. I also feel like, where's the woman in this group too? These two dudes are just going to make decisions for everyone. This feels like it needs a group of people with some real concrete data behind it, not just Elon Musk hates remote work.

Stacey Nordwall (08:37):
And that is the vibe that I get from it, which is why it is a boot for me because it doesn't where anything, where is anything behind this other than power play, I don't like this. I'm going to destroy it.

Kate Sargent (08:53):
It feels like there's a lot of that going on right now. Yeah.

Stacey Nordwall (08:59):
Alright, on that note, I want to move to our next article. This one is titled NLRB. Grindr Retaliated Against Unionizing Workers by Forcing a Return to Office. The recap here is that the National Labor Relations Board filed a complaint in November against Grindr alleging that Grindr implemented an RTO plan, a return to office plan in retaliation over workers' planning to unionize. Grindr implemented their RTO plan in August, 2023 and terminated almost half of their employees for failing to relocate to work in person two days a week. The NLRB said that Grindr had not made a good faith bargaining effort with the union. What did you think about this?

Kate Sargent (09:42):
Well, I think this is a boot just in general because if you look at the timelines too, if you're trying to say that this wasn't related, then don't do it immediately following something like that. If you're trying to try and wrap it up, be a little bit more clever about this if you're going to do it that way, not that they should do it at all, but I mean, I think it's really interesting. I mean, don't really, in terms of unionizing and why they're unionizing and all of those reasons, if you look back, it looks like there's a reason that they're doing this. It looks like some of their labor practices are not good. It looks like there's some real concrete where there's smoke, there's fire kind of thing. And I feel like the fact that the Labor Board is also saying, yeah, this isn't right, it feels targeted. I mean, that one to me is just an easy, it's so obvious what you're trying to do.

Stacey Nordwall (10:37):
Yeah, I think maybe it took the flip side of this because I was like, oh, this is a toot for me. I was so excited. I think I was excited about the idea because I couldn't really, and I need to investigate this more, I wasn't really sure why or how Grindr was unionizing under the communication Workers of America, which is a union my mom was in when she worked for the phone company, which she worked for most of her career. So that kind of got me thinking. I was like, wait, could other tech companies unionize in a similar way under something like CWA or something like it? That was really fascinating to me. I think in general, because I have that background, I am always pro unions. So whenever the unions are doing something that are on the behalf of employees, that always makes me happy.

(11:28):
And it was interesting. I think it also made me happy to really kind of see, laid out that RT return to offices initiatives can really be this retaliatory thing. And I know that that's kind of been the hush hush thing when different organizations are pushing RTO. It's like, oh, no, no, it's just because we need to collaborate. It's just because we're better in the office. And I'm, I see this on LinkedIn a lot too. People are saying, is it though, is that really what this RTO is about? And I think most people don't think it is. And it was good to kind of see this statement of, yeah, this was clearly a measure done in a way to lay people off and force them. Totally.

Kate Sargent (12:29):
No, totally. Sorry, I didn't mean I, I'm just agreeing with you. Yeah, no, I'm anti grinder being awful in this scenario. From a boot perspective, positive on the unionization piece of it. I also think from a bargaining perspective too, RTO is a new bargaining. My master is actually a negotiation conflict resolution and peace building. And I did a whole segment on union negotiation and bargain collective bargaining and all of that. And to me, I'm like, RTO is a new thing. It's a new thing as part of these bargaining agreements too that I hadn't really thought about. Because when you think about negotiating salaries and when you think about negotiating benefits and you think about negotiating all of the things that unions are here to really protect and help you with RTO is new, right? This is a new bargaining chip on the table. So I think it's an exciting thing to think about.

(13:24):
Where does that kind of play into salary numbers, benefit numbers, RTO, where does it weigh in the measurement of decision making and what people are willing to give up first take? I think it's a whole wild new world, but to your point of RTO, you can say whatever you want. It's all bullshit. They really want you to just either come back into the office so that they can monitor you, which I think is a general reason that people want people back in the office is being able to monitor their work. Everyone's afraid people have six jobs out here and are doing their job. I mean, to me, it's about results. It's about training managers to be able to communicate properly. It's about trusting people and creating autonomy. And those are things that people suck at in upper management. They are bad at it. And I think what RTO has done is reflect how bad we are at actual leadership management communication skills of leadership that we've kind of given up on.

(14:26):
And RTO is just like a bright light shining on that. So if your employees aren't successful in RTO one, they might not be built for it, which you should be evaluating through the interview process or two, your leadership sucks, and they're not able to manage people properly in an RTO scenario. So to me, you're retaliating against the wrong people. It's the managers and the people who are doing a poor job of managing RTO, not the people who are actually working from home. Sorry, super passionate about this one. I feel like I'm yelling, but I'm very excited about it.

Stacey Nordwall (15:00):
No, I think that's great. I mean, that's something I thought as well is what this is really. I think what it has highlighted is generally that, yeah, we aren't good at working asynchronously. We aren't good at working, or generally there are things that have to be intentional. People haven't really figured out how to manage or measure knowledge, workers' performance or productivity. So it's highlighted a lot of those things. And I think instead of seeing it as an opportunity to say, let's actually think about those, let's work through those, let's think of different ways to do them. It's like just get everybody back in the office.

Kate Sargent (15:41):
Yeah, I mean, it feels, it's a false sense of control. It's like if I can see you, you're real, what is it? The Schrodinger's cat or whatever,

(15:52):
But it's like if I can see you and I can physically know that you're here, I can feel more safe and secure in myself that you are working. But that has nothing. And I mean nothing to do with productivity. I'm one of the most productive people that I know. I work all the time. I am constantly getting 17 things done at once, and I did not ever need an office to prove that. I mean, there's some things where you have to be in an office. You can't fix a broken bone from virtually ai, figure that out. But I mean, there's some things that you have to physically be in person, but I worked in recruiting and HR and most of the stuff we did was private anyway. And for you to tell me that I need to work in an office to be able to have these private phone calls that I would have to lock myself in an office to be able to do, it's just ludicrous. But I hear people say that all the time. You can't be productive from home, and that's just absurd.

Stacey Nordwall (16:47):
Yeah. I think this is actually a really good segue into the next article, which is, it's titled Human Factor Five Ways to Prioritize What Employees Really Value. For me, the main message of this article is that when you're thinking about the employee experience that you're creating within an org, it's important to also consider specifically the digital employee experience. So this is things like how are we using technology in the org? Are we proactively thinking about where the challenges come up and are we thinking about the overall remote experience? And for me, this is kind of this exact segue that we've been talking about, is I think that the challenge from, and as a background, I worked at a company prior to the pandemic that we had a distributed workforce had. I was in San Francisco, there were folks in New York, London and Melbourne in Australia.

(17:41):
So we were around the globe, and I was used to that distributed working across different already. And I think when a lot of folks went remote, went hybrid and didn't have that experience, what they did was they just tried to take the office experience and make it remote, and they didn't think about, does this work, is this suited to work? In that way? It was just like, well, we do a town hall, so now let's just put the town hall on Zoom. But it wasn't, let's look at the town hall. Looks like everybody hates it. Nobody's paying attention. Maybe rethink the town hall. And so the people that did that best, I feel like were the ones who actually were very successful within remote work because they looked at it as an opportunity to say, Hey, what has been working about how we work together and what hasn't? So yeah, I think that's really, for me, this whole larger conversation also about remote work is it was an opportunity to think about how you can work well with someone. Yeah. Anyways,

Kate Sargent (19:01):
What did you No, no, no, no. I mean, I get it. And I think the systems are broken, and I think that's what I've been saying this whole time too, is the systems are broken for leadership, they're broken for remote work, they're broken for a lot of things. And I think we don't invest in capabilities, leadership, soft skills in the way that we used to. Rotational programs, training programs, those kinds of things. There's this older group of leaders that had that training and this younger group of leaders who have not had that training. And I think when they talk about the disconnect of what employees want and how remote work works and what people actually need, I think we tend to gloss over it. Like, oh, gen Z just doesn't, they need to be in person to have these interactions, et cetera. And it's like, no, we need to facilitate a workplace that works for everyone.

(19:48):
It's accessibility, it's everyone, and every circumstance is different. Every person in a workplace is different and has different needs. But instead of evolving our people and involving evolving our mindset about it, we just physically changed location. And I think the pandemic was a forcing mechanism for that. So we had to physically change the way we did things, but then it was like we were all scrambling so much to figure out health policies. This is my personal take on the HR side. I remember being at Allbirds and all of us just sitting in these task force to speak about task force and being like, okay, what do we do now? People physically aren't here. We were not prepared for this, and we had to kind of figure it out. And I had come from retail. So retail, I worked in the field. I always worked from home or in a store, this store that store coffee shop.

(20:44):
At one point I was working from climbing gyms when I was doing interviewing for the North Face, which are very stinky, don't plan your interviews there. No offense climbing community, don't at me. But I worked from anywhere. People were always like, but Kate, don't you need three monitors? I'm like, no, I can deal with an iPad, maybe a laptop. And I was successful doing that because that business was built around that type of workforce. And it's funny, you don't think of retail as being the most innovative and ahead of the times kind of space, but retail people have been working remotely, forever. District managers, regional managers, teams across the country. And we had a model that was built around that. So you understood how to make those connections. So I mean, I think what people want at work, one is snacks. Just to be clear. If we're going in this direction, having worked in HR and having to work in that space, people just always want snacks and food. Food makes people happy, but it's not what keeps you in an organization. What keeps you in an organization is connection is the feeling that you have meaning in your job. It's the feeling that you are able to grow and build. And location has nothing to do with any of those things. You know what I mean? It's all about the people that you work with and how they're facilitating your growth.

Stacey Nordwall (22:07):
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, I feel like I

Kate Sargent (22:09):
Went on a tangent there, sorry, but so fun. I love this.

Stacey Nordwall (22:14):
We love a good tangent. I think this article for me was just on the toot side, and it was because I think the things that they were talking about in terms of what employees really value, they're not specific to a remote work at all. Feedback, flexibility and autonomy, connection, wellbeing, personalization. Everybody wants this in whatever work environment they're in. I think that's pretty standard. What I appreciated about it though, really was this sense of, look at the overall experience that you're creating. Don't just try to slap technology on something as a fix. Think about whether or not the experience is broken and how technology might better enable that. Or if it's something that, I mean, it is exactly like Zoom fatigue and all of these things where everyone did every started doing everything on Zoom and Slack became overwhelming. And all of this, if you have not figured out your ways of working, if you haven't figured out how to support people and you think it's all just going to, you enable Zoom, you enable Slack, and that's going to fix it. It's not, not going to help. So

Kate Sargent (23:32):
I think, I mean that comes along with, oh, sorry, go ahead.

Stacey Nordwall (23:35):
No, no, go ahead.

Kate Sargent (23:36):
No, I was going to say that comes along with communication too. Communication is all of it. Communication is probably one of the most pieces of any policy, any project, anything that you do. And I think if you don't have a successful communication strategy, which again stems from actually knowing why you're doing something in the first place, if you don't have that, you can't really communicate anything out. So I think there's a peeling back that we need to do before we make all of these decisions for people. There's tons of data out there too, and I feel like all of the data is supporting these things. This is what people want. This is what people want. People want flexibility. People want connection. People want authentic experiences. People want feel like they have meaning, and we just keep answering these questions with the most basic dumb stuff that doesn't give people any of those things.

(24:31):
We're like, okay, great. You want connection physically be here, right? Okay, you want authentic leadership? Go take a course on Coursera. I mean, you know what I mean? Where you come up with all of these simplistic answers and then we're like, oh, man, why didn't that work? Well, obviously because it wasn't thought out. We didn't communicate it properly. No one understand why. They understood why they were doing it, which builds meaning. And so all of these things people have just told you, you're like, oh, here's a bandaid, here's an effin bandaid, and we can't understand why you're still gushing blood. Weird analogy, but seriously, everything feels like a bandaid that no one really thought about. And people were like, what's the cheapest way for us to fix this? Oh, technology. Great, let's do that.

Stacey Nordwall (25:18):
Yeah, same thing. Technology or back in the office. Let's just go back to what we know, what we did and not really think about the intention behind it, why we're doing it in the first place. Any of those things, or even think about it as an opportunity to experiment, do something different, really make a change. It's just come back to what we did and what seemed comfortable.

Kate Sargent (25:46):
But I mean, here's another thing. The connection that I was just thinking of too is what is the connector between technology, using technology to pass somebody off and bringing people back to work? It is removing the impetus from you to fix something and finding another way to fix it through. Now you go back to office and fix this technology, you solve this problem. What that does is it takes it off of whoever the leadership is or whoever the person is trying to solve the problem and says, here's things to do. Now you're outside of my line of sight. Go fix it. Instead of us saying, we're broken, we need to fix this. It's like, okay, you go over here and show up here. That'll fix that. You go use this technology that'll fix that. I have no responsibility anymore.

Stacey Nordwall (26:35):
Right? Yes. Yeah.

Kate Sargent (26:39):
It's a shirking of responsibility.

Stacey Nordwall (26:41):
Well, there's a lot of that there in this world.

Kate Sargent (26:45):
No kidding. We need three hours for that conversation though. For real.

Stacey Nordwall (26:51):
Yeah. Okay. Well, we're going to pull it back before we end up going. Yeah. The entire rest of the day on that. Kate, I want to thank you so much for joining me. If people want to connect with you or how can they do that? Or if there's something that you want to promote, I want to give you space to do that as well.

Kate Sargent (27:10):
Oh, well, I appreciate that. I love a good, so you can find me on LinkedIn constantly giving unsolicited advice, and I'm a pretty prolific poster attempting video and trying to get comfortable with it right now. And I have my own little version of this, which are going to come on, which is called Career Hacks and Snacks. Two things that I'm highly passionate about, where we're going to talk about people in their careers and some of the things that have made them successful or unsuccessful, and also judge people for the snacks that they eat. So it's going to be really fun. And then if you're looking for services, you can find me at kjs Consulting, and that's my consulting company for any fractional work or executive coaching. And I do run a 20 minute free session for anybody that's looking for it. They fill up really quick, but I'm always happy to help somebody as quickly as I can and be friends forever, basically. So you can find me all over LinkedIn though. That's the best place to find me.

Stacey Nordwall (28:10):
All right, fabulous. Thank you so much. And thank you everyone for joining.