When I started Working from home in the late 1980s as a freelance technical writer, I was clearly an outlier. At that time, even contractors mainly came to the office. However, over time, that slowly changed, and the pandemic, along with the generational shift in views on work-life balance, accelerated workers' sentiment toward not going to a formal office every day. , even if some CEOs wish it weren't that way.
Today, 14% of American workers work from home full time (including me), and that number is expected to rise. increase to 20% next year, according to data published by USA Today. In total, 58% of white-collar employees want flexibility in their work schedules to work from home a few days a week, according to the same data from USA Today. However, we continually receive mixed messages post-pandemic about returning to the office.
Some companies like IBM and amazon have been pushing hard to get people back to the office; amazon CEO Andy Jassy reportedly told employees that if they wanted to stay remote, they probably amazon-ceo-andy-jassy-return-to-office-mandate-or-face-consequences/”>it wouldn't work well for them. Wayfair, the Boston-based online furniture company, focused on remote workers about people in office in a layoff earlier this year, according to a WSJ report.
Big tech CEOs like Jassy and Elon Musk have been strongly pushing back against remote work; musk he called it “morally wrong” that some people worked from home while service workers had to report. Meanwhile Michael Bloomberg suggested The remote workers weren't actually working, but rather playing golf (which, honestly, seems like projection to me). Even Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, whose company pushed the notion of a digital headquarters during the pandemic, began preaching about returning to the office, blaming working from home for a lack of productivity, especially among new employees.
This is a lot of executive energy directed against working from home and toward working in the office. Some have suggested that it is because these companies have invested heavily in office buildings and need people to occupy them. Maybe it's simply a need to get employees in front of managers for control purposes, or they truly believe workers are more productive in the office. Whatever the reason, they seem pretty determined to get back to the office.
Do they have a point? Will workers be more productive under the watchful eye of their managers sitting in cubicles rather than in the comfort of their homes? Perhaps most important for results-oriented CEOs is: Will their companies make more money? Research from the University of Pittsburgh Katz School of Business published earlier this year suggests not necessarily.
“Our findings are consistent with employee concerns that managers use RTOs (return to office mandates) to monopolize power and blame employees for poor performance. “We provide evidence that RTO mandates harm employee satisfaction but do not improve company performance,” the report found.
Karen Mangia, president and chief strategy officer of Engineered Innovation Group, who has studied and written extensively about remote work, says she was surprised to find that workers tended to value flexibility over location; It wasn't so much about where you needed to be, but rather your ability to control when you worked and maintain a proper work-life balance.
“All the research I've been looking at shows the same thing: that employees who have some degree of flexibility about where and when they work report higher levels of engagement. That is the group of people that is proving to be more engaged and more productive,” he said.
What's more, Mangia has found that those companies that force employees to return to the office, unsurprisingly, have to deal with greater employee burnout. “The argument many times behind this return to the office mandate is that employees will be more productive because we will be able to collaborate in person and get things done. Well, being exhausted and maintaining a level of exhaustion is the opposite of being more productive,” he said.
There are also good reasons to encourage hiring more remote employees, including access to a much broader and more diverse employee base than could be obtained from one geographic location.
“A large consumer packaged goods company in the Midwest told me, 'we're finding all kinds of talent.' Whereas before we insisted that all employees had to be local or in the city, we have now opened it up more widely and have much better candidates. We don't ever want to go back and we're going to open it permanently,'” said Dion Hinchcliffe, an analyst at Constellation Research, who has been watching this trend for a long time.
The next debate is how much time, if any, employees should be required to spend in the office and for what reasons. There are many technology companies that let their employees decide where they want to work, and it seems to work quite well.
Gitlab is a great example of a company that has been completely remote since the day it was founded a decade ago. Other tech companies with a flexible approach include Dropbox, Atlassian and Okta, none of which require a specific number of days in the office.
As for startups, anecdotally the vast majority of founders I talk to are remote-first. Hinchcliffe says this is part of a shift towards a decentralized workplace where startups, in particular, avoid the usual overheads of having an office. Instead, they often rent space in the WeWork model to meet with clients, press and analysts, or each other, as needed.
Mangia says the only demographic of workers that tends to struggle in fully virtual environments is new employees coming out of college, who benefit from being in an office. “When you have newly hired employees, especially early in their career, they progress faster and report a better experience with a lower degree of burnout when they can get to a place where there are other people to help them,” she said. , giving some credibility to what Benioff was saying.
Even the most ardent advocates of working from home understand that there will be times when it will be valuable to come together to build teams, meet with clients, or collaborate and exchange ideas in person, but despite the cries of big CEOs, employees have tried this flexibility, and it's going to be difficult to put the genie back in the bottle. For now, it remains a debate between labor and management over where and how work is done.
