You Can't Return to The Office Without Defeating These Four Major BattlesThink you're ready to return to a mostly or fully in-person workforce? Watch out and defeat these four major hurdles that will put your company's longevity to the ultimate test.
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As increasing numbers of companies are requiring employees toreturn to the officefor 3 to 5 days per week this fall, they're running into the buzzsaw of what one ofmy clientscalled the "Four Horsemen of the Required Return to Office" challenges: resistance, attrition, quiet quitting and diversity.
The Four Horsemen stem from the fact that workers who are capable of working remotely prefer to do so most or all of the time. For example, an August 2022 Gallupsurveyof remote-capable workers shows that 34% of respondents want to work full-time remotely, 60% want to work a flexible hybrid schedule and only 6% want to work in a traditional office-centric setting. A June 2022 McKinseysurveyof all workers, remote-capable and not, provides further context on preferences for hybrid work. It found that 32% of respondents want to work full-time remotely, 10% want to work remotely four days a week, 16% three days a week, 18% two days a week, 13% one day a week, and 13% prefer full-time in-office work. Thus over half of all respondents want to work less than half the time in the office. And a September 2022surveyfrom the School of Politics and Economics at King's College reported that 25% of respondents would quit if forced to return to the office full-time.
Related:Want Your Employees Back in the Office? Here's How to Make It a Place They Want to Be.
No wonder workers facing return-to-office mandates showresistance, the first of the Four Horsemen. For example, the leadership of Apple required its employees to come to the office three days a week. While Apple employees are not known for stirring trouble, in this case, 1,000 employeessigneda petition requesting more flexibility. GMannouncedin a message on Friday, September 23 that all salaried employees would have to return to the office three days a week. The message sparked intense employee backlash, leading to GMwalking backits requirements and delaying any required return to the office to next year.
In a September 2022survey, Gartner found that only 3% of companies would fire non-compliant employees, and only 30% would have HR talk to those who don't show up. No wonder large U.S. banks trying to force employees back to the office are meeting withhigh ratesof noncompliance of up to 50%. And many other employees areshowing upfor a part of the workday, from 10 to 2 pm. The Labor Day return-to-office mandates resulted in a rise in office occupancy in early September, reaching 47.5% during the week ending September 14 in 10 major cities tracked by Kastle Systems, a security access card provider. Yet the office occupancydeclinedto 47.3% by the end of the week ending September 21 and to 47.2% thefollowing week.
Given this resistance, some workers simply quit, joining theGreat Resignation, making attrition the second of the Four Horsemen. That includes top-level executives: Ian Goodfellow, who led machine learning at Apple,quitin protest over Apple's mandated return to office of three days a week. It also includes many rank-and-file staff, withpublicationsfeaturingthe stories of employees who quit rather than return to the office for 3 to 5 days per week. Or consider aNational Bureau of Economic Research paperabout a study at Trip.com, one of the largest travel agencies in the world. It randomly assigned some engineers, marketing workers, and finance workers to work some of their time remotely and others in the same roles to full-time in-office work. Those who worked on ahybrid schedulehad 35% better retention.
Even finance, the industryleading the chargefor returning to the office, suffered significant churn. European banks, which offermore flexiblehybrid work policies, are using these to hire talented staff from the less flexible U.S. banks. Smaller and more flexible financial planning firms areheadhunting理财规划师在com更大,也更灵活panies. Even bankers at the top banks, likeJP MorganandGoldman Sachs, are leaving due to the return to office requirements.
Perhaps even more dangerous than resistance and attrition is the third of the Four Horsemen,quiet quitting. That term refers to employees psychologically disengaging from their work and doing just enough to get by without getting in trouble. Quiet quitting can be worse than the much more obvious resistance or attrition since quiet quitting rots a company's culture from within.
Related:Quiet Quitting Is Dividing the Workforce. Here's How to Bring Everyone Back Together.
A September 2022surveyby Gallup found that such quiet quitters make up about half of the U.S. workforce. Forcing employees to come to the office under the threat of discipline leads to disengagement, fear, and distrust,accordingto Ben Wigert, director of research and strategy for workplace management at Gallup. Indeed, Gallupfoundthat if people are required to come to the office for more time than they prefer, "employees experience significantly lower engagement, significantly lower well-being, significantly higher intent to leave [and] significantly higher levels of burnout." By contrast, employees feel gratitude to companies that give them more flexibility and show trust: as one such employeesaid, "if my company is going to come in and give me this flexibility, then I'm going to be the first to give them 100%."
Indeed,researchby Stanford University even before the pandemic found that workers who spent 4 days a week working remotely were 9% more engaged than in-office staff. Gallupfindsthat "the optimal engagement boost occurs when employees spend 60% to 80% of their time — or three to four days in a five-day workweek — working off-site." A June 2022 Citrixsurveyfinds that 56% of fully-remote workers feel engaged, but only 51% of in-office employees do so. The evidence is backed up by a CNBCsurvey从2022年6月,发现52%的完全雷莫te workers say they are very satisfied with their jobs, compared with 47% of workers working full-time in the office. No wonder, then, that mandatesforcing employeesto come to the office results in quiet quitting.
The final of the Four Horsemen relates to the serious loss of diversity associated with the mandated office return.A Future Forum survey发现,21%的白人知识工作者想要的ed a return to full-time in-office work, but only 3% of all Black knowledge workers wanted the same. That's a huge difference. Another Future Forumsurveyfound that 38% of Black men wanted a fully flexible schedule, but only 26% of white men felt the same. The Society for Human Resource Managementfound thathalf of all Black office workers wanted to work from home permanently, while only 39% of white workers did so.
Why do we see this difference? It's because Black professionals still suffer fromdiscrimination and microaggressionsin the office, and are less vulnerable to harassment in remote work. Similar findings apply to otherunderrepresented groups.
Evidence shows thatunderrepresented groupsare leaving employers who mandate a return to the office and are fleeing to more flexible companies. For example, Meta Platforms offers permanent fully-remote work options. By doing so,Meta found, according to Sandra Altiné, Meta's VP of Workforce Diversity and Inclusion, that "embracing remote work and being distributed-first has allowed Meta to become a more diverse company." For example, in 2019, Meta committed to a five-year goal of doubling the number of Black and Hispanic workers in the US and the number of women in its global workforce. Thanks to remote work, Meta's 2022Diversity Reportshows that it attained and even outperformed its 2019 five-year goals for diversity two years ahead of its original plans.
While Meta's diversity goals are benefitting from remote work, other companies that offer less flexibility have DEI staffringing alarm bellsabout how the desire for remote work among underrepresented groupsthreatens diversity goals. After all, the workers who are going to Meta are coming from somewhere, right? Underrepresented groups are joining the Great Resignation in greater numbers in the context of the mandated office returns.
In working withmy clientswho wish to bring their employees back to the office to slay the Four Horsemen, I find a combination of strategies to be crucial. Before launching an office return, we consider compensation policies. A June 2022surveyby the Society for Human Resources reports that 48% of survey respondents will "definitely" look for a full-time work-from-home job in their next search. To get them to stay at a full-time job with a 30-minute commute, they would need a 20% pay raise. For a hybrid job with the same commute, they would need a pay raise of 10%. A September 2022surveyby Goodhire found that 73% of workers believe companies should pay in-office workers more than remote workers. Indeed,researchby Owl Labs suggests that it costs an average of $863 per month for the average office worker to commute to work versus staying at home, which is about $432 per month for utilities, office supplies and so on.
That data helped my clients develop a fair compensation plan that paid staff a higher salary if they spent more time in the office. Doing so helped address the first two Horsemen, resistance and attrition. Some of my clients even used that policy as a simple yet effective incentive to nudge most of their staff to return to the office in a way that minimized resistance and attrition, while saving significantly on the payroll for the small minority who chose to work remotely.
Addressing quiet quitting required a range of techniques. One involved working on improving culture and belonging, such as retreats with fun team-building exercises. Another is centered on helping staff address burnout, such as by providing mental health benefits. Finally, it helps if employees feel you care about their professional development: upskilling pays off.
有助于防止多样性损失,以及facilitate underrepresented groups getting promoted, it's valuable to create a formal mentoring program with a special focus on underprivileged staff. That means providing minority staff with two mentors, one from the same minority group and one representing the majority population. Doing so offers the minority mentee a diverse network of connections and experiences to draw on among both minority and majority staff. It provides mentees with the implicit knowledge and relationships they will need to advance, while the fact that each mentee has two mentors lightens the load on each mentor and makes the workload manageable.
So if you are committed to returning to a mostly or fully in-person workforce, remember that you need to watch out for — and defeat — the Four Horsemen. Make a plan in advance, and determine how you will overcome these problems before they threaten the success of yourreturn-to-office plan.
