2024 Work Trends: Return to Office, Sneaky Layoffs and are MBAs Worth it?

0:00Tuesday on NBC, Jimmy Fallon and Bozma St John host the highly anticipated new competition show. I hired 10 creatives from all walks of life. They will be battling it out to see who can impress the world's biggest brands. This is a huge opportunity. This is the battle for the next big idea. This is not Play Play. We're spending millions of dollars. I'm so excited to embark on this adventure with all of you. Make the best I do win! On Brand with Jimmy Fallon. Series premiere Tuesday on NBC. Good Morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, we are joined by Morning Brew's Workplace Whisperers and host of the Per My Last Email podcast, Kyle Haggy and Kayla Lopez.

0:42Kyle and Kayla join us to break down the biggest workplace stories of this year and the next. It's Monday, December 23rd. Let's ride.

0:55Kyle and Kayla, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us. Just real quick before we dive in, can you give our listeners a quick explanation of who might enjoy or who might find useful your show per my last email? Well, obviously everyone would love the show, but early to mid-career professionals looking to level up in their career. They want help navigating some of the thorniest work-life scenarios per my last email of the show for them. Sweet. So let's dive into some of those issues and begin with what's expected to be the number one workplace battle of 2025, return to office.

1:31Yes, it feels like we've been talking about the end of remote work for years now, but the push to bring workers back to the office ramped up in a big way in September when one of the nation's largest companies, Amazon, said it would require employees to work from the office five days a week. Meanwhile, Starbucks said starting next year, it'll begin actually enforcing its hybrid work policy that requires employees to commute three days a week. Many see ulterior motives by these companies here, namely something called backdoor layoffs. The theory goes Amazon, Starbucks and other companies cracking down on remote work think they have too many employees.

2:07But instead of going through the grueling process of laying people off themselves, they're mandating return to office to accomplish the same thing because they know angry employees who love their work from home setup will just voluntarily quit. Kyle and Kayla, do you think there's any validity to this backdoor layoff concept? And more broadly, how do you see the remote work battle lines being drawn in 2025? I mean, first, if I work at Starbucks and they're making me come in and Brian Nichols is like taking his private jet from California to Seattle. This is the new CEO you're talking about, who they're allowing to live in Southern California and commute up to Seattle.

2:39Exactly. I would be pretty pissed. I mean, I think this is all about voluntary layoffs. Even in Andy Jassy, the CEO of Amazon's Note, he said, we're doing this as well to increase the ratio of individual contributors to managers. So I think this is a way to right size without actually having to assess talent. It's just an easier way to get people to quit if they don't want to work there or they like their work-from-home setup. And I'm actually pretty disappointed. This feels like a big step backwards, particularly from Amazon, who's always been super innovative. They were like, people don't need to go into a physical bookstore.

3:10We can actually sell books online and embrace these new technologies. And now it seems like, but people still need to work in an office. It feels backwards, and I'm a little disappointed in Amazon. Yeah, I think my hottest take here is that this is just laziness. It's laziness from the management team that basically is pining for these like older, the olden days when they could tell how hard people were working by standing behind their desk. And I think that instead of doing the actual work of determining who are high performers, who maybe should be downsized or right sized or whatever the hell they want to talk about.

3:43They're just saying, if you work from home and you want to stay there, just leave. And I think that that's a very lazy practice and it's not going to turn into improved performance. it's maybe going to cut costs for a little bit, but I don't think it's going to do that much in the long run. I do also want to talk about the Department of Government Efficiency, aka Doge here. It's the non-governmental agency led by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramashwamy. Their goal is to cut costs across the government, cut bloat as well. And one of the ideas they floated is ending remote work for federal employees. But they've explicitly come out and said, we want to downsize the federal workforce and we think this is the mechanism we can use for doing it.

4:22So I guess my question is, would you rather have Amazon or Starbucks just come out and say like, hey, we are doing this to cut employees or do you think that it is better to do it in this like backdoor layoffs method a little bit more under the radar? If I'm an employee, I'd rather them just be honest. I think from Amazon's perspective, they have so many employees that it's probably hard to go and assess each individual's talent and like make layoffs that way. So this is like just a more effective way for them to do that. But I'd rather them just be honest. Well, Amazon Web Services CEO, Matt Garman, did actually say this explicitly.

4:59He said, if there are people who just don't work well in that environment and don't want to, that's OK. There are companies, there are other companies around. So he was basically giving Amazon employees license to go apply, didn't want to come back to the office license to go apply elsewhere. My question is also around recruitment, right? So Amazon may be downsizing now and they're like, it's okay. We have too many employees and people who don't want to come into the office are going to leave. This is kind of all shaking out the way we want and the high performers are going to continue to come in.

5:29But what about when they have to compete against Google, Microsoft, other big tech companies for workers going forward? They're not going to be able to say we have these remote, flexible work environments like our competitors and that may put them at a disadvantage in the future? I think it depends on the general environment. Like I think if every single company starts to enact mandatory return to office policies, then employees may not have a choice. But I think if companies like Allstate, which we talked about in a previous episode, decide to make co-working and flexible working and hybrid working more of an option, they're going to have the leg up and you will see in the long run better talent going and driving to those companies.

6:10Yeah, ultimately, like it is a war for talent. I think the genie is out of the bottle on hybrid work. And so if you're a very talented employee and you want to work in a hybrid setup, I think there is going to be a company that will pay you the same to do that. And you're ultimately going to end up there. And so I think Amazon is going to be stuck in this like messy middle where if you want to work for a large company, you probably also want to work hybrid. If you want to work in person and like tackle really, really thorny challenges, you might want to go for a startup. And that's not what Amazon is.

6:36I wonder if we should revisit this segment. if Amazon has just a killer year, if Starbucks just has a killer year. Maybe it does work, yeah. I mean, we're all poo-pooing it right now because workers have shown this desire for flexibility, but maybe good old-fashioned in-person office working arrangements are gonna be best for the company in the long run. It is very fascinating to see how much workers value flexible environments. They value it more than even money. I mean, 76 % of Gen Z workers said they'd give up a salary bump for more flexible work environments. So that is a pretty fascinating and stark statistic right there.

7:11Okay, so this next topic I want to ask you guys about also deals with this concept of layoffs. But this time it's a term called sneaky layoffs. You all actually spoke about it on your show and defined it as these tiny technicalities that big companies are using to justify firing someone instead of maybe just laying them off. So what are these tiny technicalities? Earlier this year, Meta laid off about 30 employees in their LA office for misusing their$25 meal credits. The employees were found to be spending them on things like nail polish, toothpaste, non-food items. Another instance of this happened at EY, the big accounting firm, which fired employees for watching multiple online training sessions at the same time.

7:51You can't pay me to be one. How are you doing multiple? Sometimes gasp they were using multiple monitors. Fidelity fired some workers. You guys spoke about this on your show. For joining a fantasy football league at work, which violated company gambling policies. So to the average person, letting go of someone over these seemingly minor offenses seems pretty crazy. But what is the broader context here? Are these companies using selective enforcement to justify these reductions in headcount? Yes. And also, I would like to say that those last two I actually think might have been a little bit justified.

8:24And we went back and forth. Kayla hates fantasy football. It's not necessarily that. But there are rules for a reason. And I'm not saying that Meta should have fired these people for misusing these perks or that EY should have fired these people for whatever they're doing. I think it's more like it's a slippery slope. If they're fudging the rules on these small things, that'd be an indication of a larger issue with those employees. So that being said, I do think it's very silly to fire somebody for being part of Fantasy Football League. But I kind of understand where they're coming from. They are rules that they've set.

8:57they're allowed to like enforce those rules. Yeah. I mean, I think we already talked about voluntary layoffs. Now we're talking about sneaky layoffs. We're going to talk about AI. The under like the word that's pinning all these together is efficiency. And even Zuck said, like, this is the year of efficiency. I think we're seeing companies with new tools and with hiring too much during COVID wanting to right size and finding any way to do that. And so if they can find someone that's like broken a company policy, they can fire them. It looks better for from a PR perspective, you're not having to do mass layoffs.

9:30And I think that's what this is all about. I think what gets tricky is if you're a fan, if the person running the fantasy football league was like the top performer at that company, they wouldn't have fired them. And so I think you're going to get into this place where like some people break the rules and they're given more leeway. Some people break the rules and they're not performing well and they're given no leeway. And we'll see how that affects overall employee morale. Right. So when a company's in hiring mode, for instance, they're happy to overlook those small things, but if they're In austerity mode or the year of efficiency mode, they might nitpick.

9:58I believe they remember the employee manual and all the things that you can't allegedly do. Well, let's go down that. I'm sure a lot of people now hearing that, listening to this, are saying, what can I do to make sure I don't run afoul of these things? Do you guys have any perspective on what you can do to make sure you're not part of these sneaky layoffs? Yeah, I mean, I think going back to what I said, the problem is most people think they're above average. So, like, everyone's probably like, oh, I'm doing a great job at work. It would never happen to me. I think be realistic. So like don't do something that the company says not to do.

10:28We probably all do a little bit of that, but don't do something egregious. But then the second thing is I think you just have to decide, do I want to work at a place that legitimately would fire me for doing fancy football? For me, I'd be like, F that. Like I don't even want to work here. Like that is super, super lame. So I think you also just have to come to terms with like, do you want to be micromanaged to that degree? I personally wouldn't. So I think also one of the things that we actually don't know about these sneaky layoffs is how abrupt they were. Were people warned about this and then they were fired?

10:58If that's the case, then you have, you know, you're probably fine. If you get warned about misuse of the$30 credits, maybe just don't misuse them again and now you'll be okay. But I think for the most part, maybe revisit that employee handbook if you're a little nervous and try to reduce your rule breaking. If I'm a company and I found someone doing two training videos at once, I'd promote the person. Like that's like, that's efficiency. Come on. The year of efficiency. I will need to see both of your fantasy football records to see where your head's at. I'm eight and five. Oh, sure you are. Sure you are.

11:31All right. Another topic that you've mentioned and that we've talked about on Morning Brew Daily a lot is how many people that are using AI at work. Google released this survey where they talked to over a thousand young knowledge workers and 93 % of Gen Z respondents said that they were using two or more AI tools a week. 93%. Some of the use cases they mentioned for AI at work were revising emails, taking notes, or generating ideas. Nearly 90 % actually said that they use AI to start a task that felt overwhelming. Now, our take on this was consider the source. Google ran the survey and they obviously have a vested interest in showing that AI products are catching on in the workplace.

12:10But from where you guys sit, give us a broad overview of where you see AI in the workplace. Is it really a game changer or is it still a ways off from affecting people's daily work lives? Yeah, I mean, my take is it is a game changer personally, I think. And I think people forget like the world is an open notes test. And so like you should be using every tool available to you. And I think there are so many really incredible tools out there now, chat, GBT, perplexity being a few. And Toby, you mentioned this, like people are using this when they're stuck. And I think that is a common thing you find in knowledge work.

12:42Like you're overwhelmed at a task, Even having something to prompt to get you started, I think is very effective. The thing I think people are hesitant about is they feel like they need to understand how the tool works. They need to learn deep LLM technology to use these tools, which you don't. You just have to be open to experimenting and trying them. So if I was a worker, I would definitely be experimenting with AI tools. You're retired. If you were a worker, are you using AI tools? You are a worker. Yes. Just to remind you. I am also a worker and I am not. I really don't care about AI. So it's tough for me to have a big opinion on this.

13:19I think when you're using AI tools to get unstuck, to help brainstorm, to reduce task fatigue, to be more productive, great. Where I run into issues is when it's used to communicate to other people and then it's very obvious that AI has been used. To me and I think to other maybe potentially hiring managers, that's a signal that you're not thinking very deeply to at least try to mask the fact that you used AI in the first place. So that's one of the things I think we might see a backlash of in 2025. There does seem to be somewhat of a stigma, as you mentioned, around communicating using AI. And you had an email and you're like, this was so obviously ChachiBT written.

14:00Do you think that will go away? I mean, as these tools become more popular, you know, one of the other findings in the survey that stood out to me was that more than 50 percent of the people, of the Gen Z people that they surveyed said that they freely talk about their AI use at work. and they're not shy about it like maybe some older workers are. So they're talking about it. They're blatantly using AI and they're proud of it. I think human in the loop is still very important. I mean, even thinking about like the Morning Brew newsletter, for example, like an AI could write that, an AI could curate the news, but what makes Morning Brew newsletter so special is the tone.

14:35It's witty, it's smart, it's irreverent, it's funny. And right now I don't think AI can emulate that. And I think people still love communicating with other people. So I think when you're doing some sort of communication that goes to an external person, they want to feel like you actually care. It is a sign of respect to like, I put effort into this email and that's going to get their attention. I think to Kayla's point, when it's obviously AI, people feel like, okay, I'm just getting a hundred spam emails a day now. They're all AI. I don't really care. So external facing communication, I think a human should still be in the loop.

15:07Internal efficiency, I think AI should be used all the time. Well, so, you know, Kayla doesn't use AI, but I'm just listening. I'm hearing this survey as a regular person who's working in our in our current workforce. And I'm seeing that 93 percent of Gen Z leaders, right? They surveyed leaders and future leaders, aspiring leaders. These people who are very motivated to get ahead. And I'm seeing that 93 percent are using AI. What would you say to people who aren't using AI? Should I just light a fire under my butt or am I OK kind of living in an AI-less world? Yeah. Sometimes I kind of feel like somebody before the internet being like, why would I use the internet when I have books?

15:48So I could be wrong. And let's revisit this in December of 2025. The one thing I will say is a lot of AI, you are using AI. It's just built into the existing tools you're already using. So I think also asking people, are you using AI? It depends on if they recognize that like Google already has AI built into their suite of products. Autocomplete, all that stuff. Autocomplete, stuff like that. So I think everyone is using AI, just not everyone knows they're using AI. I will give you a little feather in your cap, Kayla, because you've been getting ganged up on in this segment. Slack ran this larger survey.

16:20They talked to 17 ,000 workers across multiple countries. And they found that overall, across all ages, AI use in the workforce was actually stalling out a little bit. So perhaps it was a more international survey, talked to just a wider range of people, not just these young, hungry knowledge workers. So you could be right that maybe it isn't vibing with a lot of people's workflows. Maybe they've had bad experiences with that. So I'm just giving you a little bit of backup here. Thank you. I appreciate it. You're not alone out there. Yeah. OK, I want to talk. I want us to talk about the hottest three letters in higher education, MBA.

16:54Many people listening to this might be at the point in their careers where they're considering whether to go to business school or not. And more and more young workers are saying, I'm in. After two years of declines, applications for business schools spiked 11 percent between 2023 and 2024. That's according to a recent survey by the Graduate Management Admissions Council. The tippy top B schools saw an even bigger surge in applications. Columbia up 27 percent. Northwestern's Kellogg up 23 percent. University of Chicago Booth up 22 percent. Harvard Business School up 21 percent. It's huge double-digit increases across the board, driven by Americans rather than international students.

17:34And people are searching for the full immersive MBA experience rather than evening part-time classes. Applications for full-time in-person MBAs jumped 32 % to their highest level in a decade. So Kyle and Kayla, I'd love to hear your take on why we're seeing such a rise in MBA applications and what you think it says about the current state of the job market. Yeah, I think it's all connected, right? So we've been talking about sneaky layoffs, backdoor layoffs. If these knowledge workers, tech workers are getting laid off and don't necessarily see any prospects in the job market, it makes sense that they're looking for ways to strengthen their resume.

18:08And typically, I guess I don't have exactly the data on this, but typically the idea is when you see expected declines in the economy, these graduate degrees or additional degrees, additional credentialing will increase. So I'm not surprised that you're seeing that at the same time. Um, what I'm surprised by is the fact that I'm also seeing anecdotally, uh, an increase in distaste for hiring people with MBAs. And just a few months ago, we did an episode on if you should get an MBA. And one of the stats that we saw was actually that, uh, people who graduated from the Harvard business school, which is one of those tippy top business schools that you mentioned, um, we're having a vast increase in unemployment six months after graduating.

18:49I believe it was, It went from like 7 % unemployment to like 23 % unemployment, something like that. So I'm curious what's going to happen when this next batch of increased students graduate. Yeah, it's interesting too. It's also a bit of supply and demand. So I think in a vacuum, I would say like most people see an MBA, they're like, oh, that's good. But if more people are getting an MBA and you're now fielding more candidates with MBAs, you still have to find a differentiating way to stand out to a hiring manager. So it'll be interesting to see after this batch goes through the process if they're actually lucky enough to get a job.

19:22I think really what underpins this is people don't like to go home on the holidays or whatever and see their aunt and be like, I'm not working. It's so much easier to be like, well, I'm getting an MBA, Aunt Pam. And so I think there's a bit of this like you feel stuck. You're not sure where to go. And an MBA is a convenient off ramp to like feel like you're doing something and to figure out what you want to do next in your career. I think also we're in a period of pretty rapid technological change. We talked about AI. There's a lot of other things happening from clean energy to machine learning that's part of AI.

19:55Data analytics is becoming – there's new fields popping up every single year. And so something that might be going into applicants' minds is I would love to level up my game in these various fields and be a leader in this space. But I don't really have the skills or the knowledge set to do it right now. why don't I go to get an MBA and become an AI data science person? And I'm just looking at the trend line here and I'm seeing, wow, they're probably going to be hiring a lot of employees, a lot of leaders in this space going forward. So it might be an opportunity to learn more about the changes that are happening pretty rapidly in our labor force.

20:29It's really interesting, Neil, though, because as you said, as new fields get developed more and more rapidly, I feel like a two-year program should actually become less relevant and you'd want to focus on really quick bits of learning that are hyper relevant to the scenario you find yourself in right now because you start an MBA program in two years there's like 100 new fields that didn't even exist when you started so that's an interesting like counter trend and we'll have to see how it plays out well hiring for roles that require a bachelor's degree drop below 2019 levels in recent months so I think that stat has a lot to do with what we're seeing I think some Silicon Valley people and some founders just cringed at the fact that Neil said best way to get ahead in these emerging fields is to go get an MBA in it no the best way is probably to go and like actually work in the field to go do research in it and stuff like that so I definitely do think if you can get a job if you can or just the whole reason you can't get a job you have to go establish your credentials you can't just say hey I'd love to get an I'd love to be your AI CEO and they'll be like you don't know nothing about that go to school and they're like okay yeah Neil I would the way I got the job is by literally saying hey give me the job not not credentialing it that way But you're not working in data science.

21:39That's true. Personally, I would love to be an AI CEO. So if anyone's hiring, just let me know. Where did I come up with that? There you go. All right. Let's take a quick break.

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