This week, Barry Biffle, the CEO of Frontier Airlines in the US, gave a speech at a private event in which he said “we got lazy in COVID” and called post-COVID working from home “silliness”. Biffle is certainly not the only CEO to speak out against employees working from home, but his characterizing workers as “lazy” drew a considerable amount of criticism.

It’s an interesting time in a lot of workplaces. Full-time working from home was an emergency response to an emergency situation (although we should remember that between 60% and 70% of jobs cannot be done remotely), and as such, the pandemic experience of fully remote work shouldn’t be considered an example of how remote work can be optimally structured and operated. However, even in that emergency situation, some at-home workers discovered that they liked features of remote work such as some flexibility in scheduling, not having to commute, and not having to dress up every day. (Full disclosure: I work from home for part of each week.)

So it’s not at all surprising that when in-person workplaces started to open up again, workers that liked remote work wanted to continue that arrangement. Biffle may have been a bit more forthright in his public comments than other business leaders, but it’s not unreasonable to think that what he said so bluntly is not unlike what other CEOs might be thinking about workers that now want to work differently than they did before the pandemic.

Interestingly, around the same time that workers started returning to offices, the business press began carrying stories about something called “quiet quitting”. Quiet quitting was characterized as workers continuing to work for their employer, but “lacking in enthusiasm”, “not taking work too seriously”, and “doing the minimum in one’s job”.

But even in these discussions that focused almost completely on workers (allegedly) not pulling their weight, and paid very little attention to the behaviour of their employers, it seemed that what quiet quitters were actually doing were things like refusing to take on unpaid tasks or to work extra hours. It says a lot when employees doing the work they are paid to do, and refusing to be exploited without additional compensation, is suddenly identified as a form of “quitting”.

Biffle calling remote employees “lazy” and the alleged phenomenon of “quiet quitting” both reflect similar attitudes toward work and workers. Workers are valuable parts of the organization, the key reason for the company’s success, partners in everything the business does  – I don’t have to go through all the clichés, you know them well. But those supportive attitudes seem to disappear when how workers want to work isn’t how their employer wants them to work, or isn’t how their employer thinks they should work.

In pretty much any situation, characterizing workers as slothful or unmotivated is not helpful. This type of criticism certainly won’t do much to motivate workers if they are genuinely unmotivated. It also doesn’t build the positive and supportive workplaces that employers love to claim they have. The COVID shutdowns and their impact on workplaces have made many workers think differently about their work, and that attitudinal change is going to affect work and organizations for a very long time to come – no matter how hard employers and the media push back.