Why don’t workers particularly appreciate (let alone abide by) the return-to-office rules? Probably because adults don’t like being directed.
“People do want structure and they like boundaries,” said former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield. wealth Editor-in-Chief Alyson Shontell last year. “But they don’t like being told what to do, so I think the secret is to not make them feel like their autonomy is being taken away, or that their ideas don’t matter, while still providing some structure.”
If only managers understood this. Four in five (80%) bosses told workplace software company Envoy they would take a radically different approach to their return-to-office plans if they had a better understanding of employees’ actual preferences. Here’s the problem, they say: They don’t have access to workplace data to help them make decisions.in the white paper ReportEnvoy surveyed 1,156 U.S. executives and workplace managers whose employees work some form of hybrid schedule.
More than half (54%) of managers tell Envoy that they have had to give up making critical decisions about the workplace because they lack the necessary data to back them up. Without this data, nearly a quarter admit to making decisions based on “gut feeling”, which naturally leads to resentment and disappointment. 57% of bosses say they could better measure the success of office policies if they had better access to data.
Amazon is one such example, and its RTO plan is undeniably driven by the feelings of senior leadership rather than hard data. “It’s time to disagree and make a commitment. We’re here, we’re back, and everything is working,” Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, reportedly said of working in-person. ” “I don’t have the data to back it up, but I know it’s better this way.” “
Envoy respondents acknowledged that it can be difficult to determine how efficient working in-person versus home is, especially when actual productivity can vary due to many factors not necessarily related to work location.
Companies that let individual teams decide for themselves when to step in are more difficult for companies that operate on an ad hoc basis. While experts speak highly of this “organized mix,” assessing its effectiveness at the firm level can be difficult. “With so much change, it’s hard to know how to increase efficiency to save critical budgets,” Brooks Gooding, workplace experience program manager at Braze Software, said in the report.
Braze employs a hybrid schedule with little consistency in attendance, which, as Envoy writes, can leave “workplace managers unable to understand how many people are on site on any given day and how to best allocate space and resources.” organize. “
RTO mismatch
Envoy’s data exposes a fundamental mismatch that has persisted since the early days of the pandemic: Most bosses would rather keep employees where they can see them. Most employees demand more degrees of freedom than this.
Admittedly, there are good arguments for both time spent in the office and time spent on the couch. On the one hand, remote work has been shown to reduce productivity by 10% to 20% and sap morale and cohesion, especially for younger workers and new workforce entrants. But the vast majority still prefer to stay at home at least a few days a week, find being in the office more trouble than it’s worth, and seldom necessary to get a task done.
Ideally, combining the two options (at the worker’s discretion) should do the trick. Workers have flocked to jobs with flexibility, which is quickly becoming a requirement rather than a bonus in most white-collar industries.
But many bosses have grown impatient, and many are using the upcoming Labor Day holiday as an opportunity to formalize work-anywhere policies, whether workers like it or not. In addition to the usual suspects (like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs), these companies even include previously fairly loose firms like Meta, Google, and Salesforce.
While telecommuters make more money, spend less, are less stressed, and have more time for family and errands, the office is unlikely to disappear. In fact, employees might even get excited about the prospect if they think it’s their idea. Data from Unispace found that a third of workers felt “happy, positive and excited” about returning to the office, but felt nothing when the return was enforced.
As Atlassian’s Annie Dean puts it, productivity, innovation, and creativity are “how to work, not where” problems that can only be solved by fundamentally changing our understanding of work.
“This is a watershed moment for innovation in the way work is done,” Dean said. wealth, “But we’re still talking about that damn water cooler.”
Svlook
