As we approach the fourth year since the COVID-19 virus forced us to restrict ourselves to our homes, it’s unbelievable that the debate over remote work and return-to-office mandates is still going on. Around a month ago, Walmart announced that it was requesting most of its remote workforce to move to its main office in Arkansas and to its other locations in San Francisco and the New York metro area. Giants like Google, Amazon, and Apple have also implemented a three-day-per-week in-office policy.
Many of the worries about making people return to the office seem to be about younger workers. The big bosses think Gen Z employees don’t want to come to the office regularly, aren’t working hard if they’re not at their desks, and are missing out on important skills by not being around their teammates.
Although those beliefs might be true, leaders should focus on their managers. In a survey by Gartner, 33% of high-ranking employees said they would leave their jobs if required to work in the office, compared to only 19% of lower-level workers. Additionally, a study analysing resumes from three big tech companies showed that employee stay duration decreased after the companies started requiring staff to work from the office.
A recent survey by software company Checkr, which included 3,000 American workers and managers, reveals that many leaders are keen on maintaining the work-from-home model. In fact, 68% of bosses, including middle managers, executives, and business owners, prefer to keep working remotely into 2024. This contrasts with less than half of the employees (48%) who share this sentiment. Despite these findings, it remains challenging to draw any concrete conclusions about the remote work preferences of both employees and managers.
Even though some big company CEOs, like Amazon’s Andy Jassy and JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, are telling people to return to work in the office, other studies show that many leaders really like working from home and don’t want to lose that. As per Future Forum’s February 2023 survey, over 80% of bosses and other workers want to choose where they work. Even those who are already working in the office all the time, about 56% of them, want this choice. A McKinsey report reveals that people who make a lot of money, like those who earn more than $150,000, also want to keep working from home. In fact, one out of every three would rather quit than go back to the office every day.
People who work for these companies can’t agree on whether to return to the office. Most people like a mix of working from home and going to the office, but there are still many who just want to work from home. There’s a difference between what managers want and what they’re being told to do because of money. The people who own the company shares, or the big bosses, are putting pressure on them to make everyone return to the office.
A research study has found evidence for what some people guessed: forcing employees to come back to the office is a sneaky way of firing people, and the work environment after COVID-19 makes people unhappy. The company BambooHR, which makes HR software, asked over 1,500 workers what they thought, and many of them work in HR. What they found was that making people come back to the office hasn’t worked out well. One standout result was that about 25% of bosses and 20% of HR workers were actually hoping that by making people come back to the office, some would choose to quit their jobs.
This finding kind of says what everyone was thinking but not saying. Indeed, when companies force people to come back to the office, some employees quit, especially at big companies. However, not as many quit as these companies had hoped, according to the report. The study also found that more than one-third of the leaders thought their companies had to lay off workers in the past year because not enough people quit over the office return rules. Almost the same number of leaders thought the real reason they wanted people back in the office was to keep a closer eye on them. Ultimately, this has led to a workplace culture that’s more about showing off, distrust, and division than before the pandemic.
