Staff at the country’s most successful bank, the CBA, are screaming mad at their boss, CEO Matt Comyn, who has ordered his staff back to work, in the office! The Daily Tele have headlined the reaction of his team with “Bank Staffers Livid At Office Return” but let’s examine why.

The exact order is that staff need to come into the office, wait for it, 50% of the time, starting from July. This resulted in a town hall meeting, presumably online, where one observer labelled it as a “bloodbath!”

The Tele says there was a pretty supported view that one day in the office was deemed the preferred option by many of those who allegedly were “livid”.

This follows NAB's chief executive Ross McEwan telling his senior staff that they are required back in the office five days a week, which 9news.com describes “…as part of a global revolt against remote work”.

This isn’t just an Aussie boss demand, with JPMorgan in the US also ordering executives back to work, while the likes of Salesforce and Amazon have pushed their executives to give up on working-from-home as if there’s still a pandemic.

Amazon workers filed a petition against the company’s decision, businessinsider.com reported. The same reaction happened when Apple’s Tim Cook told his team he wanted “in person collaboration” in the workplace.

Disney’s new and former boss Bob Igers has introduced a four-day in the office week and Goldman Sachs has made workers resume the five-day working week but a month ago only 65% had played ball.

So why are bosses against the work-from-home model and why do employees largely love it?

There’s one big reason for bosses — they think or know productivity is falling, costs are rising and profit isn’t increasing. How do we know that’s the case? Well, a boss would be dumb if they saw their company benefitting from their staff working from home and then tried to kill it.

They’re getting complaints from customers, who think the company’s new and unimproved service is probably linked to that bank employee trying to fix up their problem with a dear little bubs crawling around or crying in the background.

On the flipside, many staff members either love or persist with working from home for a variety reasons, such as:

• It helps in raising their family.
• It gives the parents the change to keep their career advancing while parenting more from home.
• It saves on childcare costs, which can be huge.
• It saves money via less travel and takeaway food costs that come from being at work.
• Life-work balance improves, which is good for mental health and getting golf handicaps down!

These cost-savings when interest rates are rising is a powerful reason for CBA staff and others who prefer working from home, to be livid about their employers’ demands to get back to the office.

It’s understandable, but company CEOs, who are accountable to shareholders, can only justify the work-from-home staff model if it can be proved that it’s great for bottom lines of businesses.

There’s a lot in that typical US big business take of Apple’s Tim Cook, who said he wants “in person collaboration”, which is something he probably got from an article in Harvard Business Review. That said, anyone who runs or owns a business knows that staff working from home for too many days a week makes their task of succeeding in business just a little bit tougher.

The pandemic has created bosses who are more flexible — Matt Comyn only wants to see his staff half the time — but the work-from-home brigade look like they’re a lot less flexible.

Compromise has to come, as I expect a notable economic slowdown is coming — 11 interest rate rises and the mortgage cliff could push us close to a mild recession — and that means job losses are coming.

Those who fight hard against going back to the office and who are not indispensable, could make it very easy for bosses, who soon might need to cut costs to cope with the loss of business that comes with a serious slowdown.