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Fake Guru

 The author of this highly pointless article calls himself "the office whisperer". What he calls the trend of the future was available quite ubiquitously even twenty years ago. The right to work from home (telecommute) part-time or even full-time as reward for strong performance was common in mundane organizations like banks and health insurance companies. Even as a consultant, I got to enjoy those privileges, the full-time employees had a much better deal and rightly so. The closing of this writing so clueless that I have to wonder if the wisdom that author is spewing out sprung from the trusty ChatGPT

By anchoring flexibility as a merit-based privilege, you invite a culture of self-motivation and responsibility–one that values results over routine, innovation over presence, and autonomy over micromanagement. It’s a cultural shift that can redefine what it means to be productive in the modern world.

People had reasonable expectation of quality and originality if stuff was published in Fortune magazine. That was before people started to call themselves whisperers of various sorts. Such a tragedy that this stuff gets written and promoted all around as some kind of genius revelation. I wish I had the contact information of N so I could send this this piece of nonsense to her. She could opine based on her direct experience. 

This woman made dozens of telecommute decisions for her staff every year at performance review time. She was tough but fair, close to retirement age and this was already a couple of decades ago. It had been the norm in this health insurance company for a while - a system that worked well and people liked. Underperformers felt like they were being named and shamed because they had to badge in everyday, supervised more heavily than the stars. But it gave them a tangible goal to work towards for the whole year and develop the work ethic that automatically qualified them for remote work.

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