Payne made the discovery in 1967 during a research trip to Bermuda in which a Navy engineer provided him with a recording of curious underwater sounds documented while listening for Russian submarines. Payne identified the haunting tones as songs whales sing to one another.

He saw the discovery of whale song as a chance to spur interest in saving the giant animals, who were disappearing from the planet. Payne would produce the album Songs of the Humpback Whale in 1970. A surprise hit, the record galvanized a global movement to end the practice of commercial whale hunting and save the whales from extinction.

Payne was cognizant from the start that whale song represented a chance to get the public interested in protecting an animal previously considered little more than a resource, curiosity or nuisance. He told Nautilus Quarterly in a 2021 interview that he first heard the recording in the loud engine room of a research vessel and knew almost instantly that the sounds were indeed whales.

In spite of the racket, what I heard blew my mind. It seemed obvious that here, finally, was a chance to get the world interested in preventing the extinction of whales, he told the magazine.

Payne died Saturday of pelvic cancer. He lived in South Woodstock, Vermont, with his wife, the actress Lisa Harrow. Funeral arrangements have not yet been made, Harrow said.

Payne had four children from a previous marriage to zoologist Katy Payne, with whom he collaborated. The two used primitive equipment in the late 1960s to record the sounds of humpback whales, which sometimes sing their eerie, complex songs for longer than a half-hour at a stretch.

The impact of the whale song discovery on the nascent environmental movement was immense. Many anti-war protesters of the day took on saving animals and the environment as a new cause, and the words save the whales became ubiquitous on tote bags and bumper stickers.

Whale songs would enter the popular imagination via everything from a 1971 episode of The Partridge Family to a 1979 issue of National Geographic that included a flexi disc with excerpts from Songs of the Humpback Whale. It remains the best-selling environmental album in history.

Payne founded Ocean Alliance in 1971 to advocate for the protection of whales and dolphins. The organization operates to this day in Gloucester, Massachusetts. It has played a role in watershed moments in the history of whale protection, such as the 1972 passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act by the U.S. Congress and the 1982 commercial whaling moratorium passed by the International Whaling Commission.

The world has lost a giant of environmental conservation with Paynes death, said Iain Kerr, the chief executive officer of Ocean Alliance and a longtime collaborator with Payne. Payne retired two years ago.

He had a presence and a way of connecting to people that led them to dedicating their lives to protecting whales and our planet Earth, Kerr said.

Payne was born in New York City and educated at Harvard University and Cornell University, where he received his doctorate. Early in his career as a biologist, he studied bats and birds.

He met Harrow, his widow, in 1991 at a rally for whale protection at Trafalgar Square in London. They married within 10 weeks of meeting.

The way his mind worked was a constant joy, Harrow said. He was constantly seeking answers, to seemingly constant questions.

Companies that put up with [remote work] for a long time are finally getting sick and tired of [it], Drum wrote on Sunday. The reason for that is fairly straightforward: Working from outside the office simply isnt as productive as office work, no matter what remote workers say. Too much evidence has piled up to credibly deny this any longer.

He pointed to return-to-office pushes at tech companies where most jobs could be remote, particularly Salesforce, Google and Meta. Then he highlighted four key pieces of evidence, although asterisks abounded. Still, Drum is worth listening to on this matter: Along with figures like Brad DeLong and Ta-Nehisi Coates, he thrived in the Wild West days of blogging, and at Mother Jones and independently he displayed an aptitude for paying attention to what the data says about major economic subjects and cutting out the noise.

For his part, Drum expects most of the private sector to go back to work in the physical sense. There was remote work before the pandemic and there will be a little more after the pandemic, he wrote. But its going to be measured in a small handful of percentage points, not as a revolution in work. Drum, who since leaving Mother Jones in 2021 has been blogging semi-daily from his home in Orange County, Calif., did not respond to Fortunes request for comment.

Most remote workers insist they wont be going back to their sad desk lunches, and many companies are still promising they wont take attendance ever again, but maybe they should listen to Drums warning. Heres why the tide is turning against remote work (rightly or wrongly).

#1: Remote work is bad for new hires and junior employees

This one is not nearly as controversial as it sounds. Especially when youre new on the job, being physically present can be an enormous leg up; even the supposedly anti-office Gen Z workers acknowledge the overwhelming truth of this. 

We know empirically that [new Salesforce employees] do better if theyre in the office, meeting people, being onboarded, being trained, CEO Marc Benioff said in March. If they are at home and not going through that process, we dont think theyre as successful.

That could also hurt companies; a recent Paychex survey found that 80% of new hires will quit a job if they had a poor onboarding experiencewhich is much more likely to be the case if theyre welcomed aboard from a distance. 

Nearly one-third of employees told Paychex they found their onboarding experience confusing. That figure jumped to 36% for remote workers, who were most likely to feel undertrained, disoriented, and devalued after onboarding, compared to their in-person counterparts. 

As a one-time entry-level product manager, Drum wrote, I cant even imagine what it would have been like trying to learn what I needed to know if everyone I had to work with was available only via Zoom or phone or Slack. Its one thing for existing teams to continue working well from home; its quite another to get a new member of a team up and running.

Its a shame, because proximity bias poses an enduring threat to career advancement. But attempting to get around by staying home as an entry-level worker means youll be swimming against the current. 

#2: Workers admit that remote work (sometimes) causes more problems than in-person work

When executed incorrectly, hybrid work plans can create discordant, unproductive teamwork. Thats especially true when teams dont make an effort to align their in-office days.  

Also, remote work has its fair share of downsides. Drum linked back to McKinsey research he had highlighted in his midterm report on remote work from December, which found that remote workers are much more likely to report mental and physical health issues and hostile work environments. Thats not the worst of it: 60% of bosses recently admitted that if they had to make job cuts, theyd come for their remote workers first.

Usually, Stanford economics professor and remote work expert Nick Bloom has told Fortune, companies mess up these kinds of plans because they fundamentally misunderstand why people want to work in-person or remotely in the first place. The disaster scenario, which too many companies end up in, is when everyone must come in two days per week or so, with no further clarity. 

Then they come in and realize their team is all at home, which defeats the purpose, Bloom said. They didnt come in to use the PingPong table, and theres no point in coming in just to shout at Zoom all day. Plus, Bloom, who advocates for organized hybrid arrangements, agrees with pro-office zealot Benioff that newer workers need the office most. 

#3: Remote workers put in 3.5 hours less per week compared to in-person workers

Sure, its true that remote workers squeeze in errands, exercise and laundry between 9 and 5, but just how much? A working paper submitted to the National Bureau of Economic Research in January found that remote workers worldwide save 72 minutes a day on average just from avoiding their commute, and that on average, of that time saved, 40% goes to extra work.

Drum is unconvinced about the effects in Americaand so is the federal governments own dataset.

For his part, Drum sees a 3.5-hour decline in hours worked, and he got the figure from an October 2022 report by Liberty Street Economics, an arm of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Researchers David Dam, Davide Melcangi, Laura Pilossoph, and Aidan Toner-Rodgers made calculations based off the American Time Use Survey, a nationally representative survey by the Bureau of Labor Statistics that measures both the amount of time people spend on various activities and where the activities occur. In a damning chart, they found that remote workers decreased time spent working and instead increased their time spent on leisure and sleeping. The chart clearly showed an increase roughly between three and hours in time spent on things that are, well, not work.

Maybe in the rest of the world, workers are taking time not spent commuting and plowing it back into work, but the governments own data in the U.S. tells a different story. A 3.5 hours less story.

#4: Productivity plummets on days when everyone is working remotely (anecdotally)

In March, Drum wrote a post highlighting what the CEO of an HR tech firm told the Wall Street Journal: On days his team is working remotely, new subscriber counts plummet 30%. But thats just one anecdote; even Drum himself says the stat is amazingif [the CEO] isnt exaggerating.

A piece of hard data in Drums favor here is the shocking decline in productivity across five straight quarters, unprecedented in the postwar era. EY-Parthenons chief economist Gregory Daco told Fortune that hes heard similar stories from clients across sectors of reduced productivity because of the new work environment. Daco added that remote work is only one piece of the puzzle here. The difficulty is that there is no magic productivity wand.

Other experts are more skeptical. What I suspect is if you took out all the time at work talking about the Super Bowl, politics, your weekend, etc., working from home would involve more actual working minutes [than working in an office], Bloom, the remote work evangelist, told Fortunes Tristan Bove.

Workers themselves certainly beg to differ on this point. According to a recent Pew Research survey, pro-remote workers (especially parents and caregivers) have a better work-life balance and are more productive and focused. According to an October 2022 survey of white-collar workers from Slacks think tank, Future Forum, those with full schedule flexibility showed 29% higher productivity scores than employees with no flexibility at all, and remote and hybrid workers reported 4% higher productivity than their fully in-office counterparts.

The Pew survey respondents acknowledged that not being in the office could be hurting their opportunities for advancement, mentoring and making connections, but they believe theyre more productive.

But the tide is turning for many reasons, and whether workers believe theyre more productive remotely or actually are, they may not have much of a choice in the matter.

Quiet quitting has a cost and its big. The global economy is losing almost $9 trillion, according to analytics firm Gallup, equivalent to as much as 9% of the worlds GDP. While that may look like a hefty price tag, its good news in a way, the polling firm argues. Quiet quitters are often your greatest opportunity for growth and change, Gallup wrote in its report on the phenomenon published Wednesday. 

In other words, quiet quitting is rampant among employees, but managers could make something meaningful out of it.

Although they are minimally productive, they are more likely to be stressed and burnt out than engaged workers because they feel lost and disconnected from their workplace, Gallup wrote of quiet quitters, who now account for 59% of the workers globally, in its report. 

There may be many factors driving quiet quitting. With layoffs roiling the jobs market, one industry at a time, morale and engagement among employees have taken a hit even among employees who kept their jobs as they grapple with higher stress levels at work. Economic woes may be compounding the quiet quitting crisis with high inflation and recessionary fears at the top of peoples minds. Or maybe the quiet quitters are just responding to the changing workplace dynamics, suggests Rubab Jafry OConnor, service professor of management at Carnegie Mellon Universitys Tepper School of Business.

Perhaps our work-from-anywhere, accessible at all times technological world puts us in a stressful space where the boundaries have blurred so much as to be indistinguishable,  OConnor told Fortune. Perhaps quiet quitting in organizations is a response to that stress. Could that be an effort to reestablish those boundaries?

Theres even more to the subject beyond the nearly $9 trillion figure. Did you know that there are three kinds of employees in your workplace? Gallups findings may surprise you.

Dont be a loud quitter

The Gallup survey categorizes employees in three ways based on their level of engagement: the ones thriving at work are most engaged, the quiet quitters are not engaged, and the loud quitters are actively disengaged which involves taking steps to hurt the organization they work for. The issue of low engagement comes with cost, but its also mostly fixable if managers try hard enough, especially in the case of quiet quitters, according to Gallup. 

They are waiting for a leader or a manager to have a conversation with them, encourage them, inspire them. A few changes to how they are managed could turn them into productive team members, Gallup wrote. Quiet quitting employees are your organizations low-hanging fruit for productivity gains.

The survey found that most employees want better culture at their companies to improve the quiet quitting problem, whether thats by being able to approach managers more easily or by being given more challenging work. And Gallup finds that the solution to these roadblocks lies in the hands of managers and leaders. 

Seventy percent of team engagement is attributable to the manager. But many or most of your managers are quiet quitting too, Gallup wrote. They are waiting for the tools to build great teams.

Top leaders have highlighted how quiet quitting is an issue for managers to solve. A panel of human resource experts at the World Economic Forum earlier this year discussed how top-down leaders must communicate and build connections with their employees to help them feel more motivated.

If the leaders and organizations are listening to their employees and addressing the underlying concerns of their employees, then this should have a positive impact, OConnor said, adding that in contrast, if organizations saw employees as acting antagonistically, it could hurt morale.

Experts have also observed changes in how employees are in their workplace. Economics professor Tyler Cowen argued in an op-ed last week that there is a serious crisis of morale in the new post-pandemic office setting, and that perhaps workers are doing less as a result. He also added that remote work could be having a negative impact on the workplace and likely requires more research before we can conclude its effects on employee productivity.   

Several studies in the past have shown that remote work helps employee productivity more generally, but among American workers, productivity has been on the decline. Employees, especially among the younger generations, are increasingly valuing work-life balance and treating it as an important factor in their jobs.  

With the labor force reevaluating their priorities while braving the twin storms of layoffs and an economic downturn, suffice to say that quiet quitting may linger around longer than people thought. 

Quiet quitting is a reaction and a move away, intentionally, from the hustle culture of the past and towards a culture thats more around setting boundaries around work/life balance, Lexi Clarke, compensation software Payscales vice president of people, told Fortune in February. I dont think quiet quitting is going away in 2023, especially if were in a recessionary environment that causes more layoffs.