I Agree with Peggy Noonan…The Lonely Office Is Bad for America

Wall Street Journal Opinion Columnist, Peggy Noonan, recently penned a piece I found particularly relatable (link below is behind pay wall…need WSJ subscription to access). When Raymond James shut our office in March of 2020, I worked from home like most in America who could fulfill their employment responsibilities remotely. I had all the technological tools to do my job effectively and my family made a space for me where I was not disturbed…but I didn’t love it. I had a hard time separating work from home…often I went into my home office around 6:00 AM and would not shut down until 6:00 PM. I got my first Covid vaccination in January of 2021 and returned to the office shortly after that.

I have been coming into our now remarkably quiet and desolate office nearly every day since and things are not what they used to be. For those clients who have met with our team here, you know that the office feels utterly empty and often eerily noiseless. There is little camaraderie and outside of our own Weiss Wealth Strategies team, very little mentorship or idea sharing occurring.

I began my career 30 years ago this month and the things that I learned from just being around other advisors (of all experience levels) were unbelievably valuable to my professional development. Gordon Schubert was one of the older advisors in the office and the largest producer business-wise. I made it a point to have lunch in Gordon’s office with him every few weeks. I picked his brain and absorbed everything he told me like a sponge. I can still hear his voice saying, “Buy Merck and Microsoft…the M & M’s!”* I remember my first large down day when the DJIA dropped 100 points (back when the DJIA was at 3,000 or 10% of what it is today, 100 points was A LOT). Simultaneously, both Gordon and my dad were busy writing buy tickets all day. I said something to the effect of “Are those all BUY tickets?” and they both said, “You don’t sell on days like today!” I remember the feeling of healthy competition among my “rookie” peers…I did not feel good if someone was clearly outworking me (staying later, making more calls, etc.). I believe my work ethic elevated as a result of being in this environment.

Our business has obviously gone through a lot of change over my career, but in my humble opinion, having a healthy office where there is a bit of hustle and bustle still remains something worthwhile. I am a believer that real relationships are built through face-to-face interactions. A company’s culture (including ours at RJ) is critical to its success, and culture is taught and perpetuated as junior employees interact on a regular basis with a firm’s leaders. Fledgling staffers often make friends and sometimes even find their mates in the office. There will no doubt be more flexibility in the future, but the benefits of being together, for both the employee personally and for his/her company as a whole, generally outweigh the inconveniences.

As Peggy Noonan states,

“The primary location of daily integration in America—the coming together of all ages, religions, ethnicities and political tendencies, all colors, classes and conditions—has been, during the past century, the office. It is where you learn to negotiate relationships with people very different from you, where you discover what people with different experiences of life really think. You discern all this in the joke, the aside, the shared confidence, the rolled eyes. And with all this variety you manage to come together in a shared, formal mission” Get that account, sell that property, get the story, process those claims.

The end of the office will contribute to polarization. Receding from office life will become another way of self-segregating. People will be exposed to less and, in their downtime, will burrow down into their sites, their groups, their online angers. Their group-driven information and facts.”

She sums up my feelings very eloquently.

WSJ - The Lonely Office Is Bad for America

-Gary Weiss, September 2022

*The above is not a recommendation to buy or sell the stocks of the companies mentioned.