Posted on 05/22/2021 5:29:23 PM PDT by DoodleBob
As vaccinations and relaxed health guidelines make returning to the office a reality for more companies, there seems to be a disconnect between managers and their workers over remote work.
A good example of this is a recent op-ed written by the CEO of a Washington, D.C., magazine that suggested workers could lose benefits like health care if they insist on continuing to work remotely as the COVID-19 pandemic recedes. The staff reacted by refusing to publish for a day.
While the CEO later apologized, she isn’t alone in appearing to bungle the transition back to the office after over a year in which tens of millions of employees were forced to work from home. A recent survey of full-time corporate or government employees found that two-thirds say their employers either have not communicated a post-pandemic office strategy or have only vaguely done so.
As workforce scholars, we are interested in teasing out how workers are dealing with this situation. Our recent research found that this failure to communicate clearly is hurting morale, culture and retention.
We first began investigating workers’ pandemic experiences in July 2020 as shelter-in-place orders shuttered offices and remote work was widespread. At the time, we wanted to know how workers were using their newfound freedom to potentially work virtually from anywhere.
We analyzed a dataset that a business and technology newsletter attained from surveying its 585,000 active readers. It asked them whether they planned to relocate during the next six months and to share their story about why and where from and to.
After a review, we had just under 3,000 responses, including 1,361 people who were planning to relocate or had recently done so. We systematically coded these responses to understand their motives and, based on distances moved, the degree of ongoing remote-work policy they would likely need.
We found that a segment of these employees would require a full remote-work arrangement based on the distance moved from their office, and another portion would face a longer commute. Woven throughout this was the explicit or implicit expectation of some degree of ongoing remote work among many of the workers who moved during the pandemic.
In other words, many of these workers were moving on the assumption – or promise – that they’d be able to keep working remotely at least some of the time after the pandemic ended. Or they seemed willing to quit if their employer didn’t oblige.
We wanted to see how these expectations were being met as the pandemic started to wind down in March 2021. So we searched online communities in Reddit to see what workers were saying. One forum proved particularly useful. A member asked, “Has your employer made remote work permanent yet or is it still in the air?” and went on to share his own experience. This post generated 101 responses with a good amount of detail on what their respective individual companies were doing.
While this qualitative data is only a small sample that is not necessarily representative of the U.S. population at large, these posts allowed us to delve into a richer understanding of how workers feel, which a simple stat can’t provide.
We found a disconnect between workers and management that starts with but goes beyond the issue of the remote-work policy itself. Broadly speaking, we found three recurring themes in these anonymous posts.
Others have also found that people are taking advantage of pandemic-related remote work to relocate to a city at a distance large enough that it would require partial or full-time remote work after people return to the office.
A recent survey by consulting firm PwC found that almost a quarter of workers were considering or planning to move more than 50 miles from one of their employer’s main offices. The survey also found 12% have already made such a move during the pandemic without getting a new job.
Our early findings suggested some workers would quit their current job rather than give up their new location if required by their employer, and we saw this actually start to occur in March.
One worker planned a move from Phoenix to Tulsa with her fiancé to get a bigger place with cheaper rent after her company went remote. She later had to leave her job for the move, even though “they told me they would allow me to work from home, then said never mind about it.”
Another worker indicated the promise to work remotely was only implicit, but he still had his hopes up when leaders “gassed us up for months saying we’d likely be able to keep working from home and come in occasionally” and then changed their minds and demanded employees return to the office once vaccinated.
Another constant refrain we read in the worker comments was disappointment in their company’s remote-work policy – or lack thereof.
Whether workers said they were staying remote for now, returning to the office or still unsure, we found that nearly a quarter of the people in our sample said their leaders were not giving them meaningful explanations of what was driving the policy. Even worse, the explanations sometimes felt confusing or insulting.
One worker complained that the manager “wanted butts in seats because we couldn’t be trusted to [work from home] even though we’d been doing it since last March,” adding: “I’m giving my notice on Monday.”
Another, whose company issued a two-week timeline for all to return to the office, griped: “Our leadership felt people weren’t as productive at home. While as a company we’ve hit most of our goals for the year. … Makes no sense.”
After a long period of office shutterings, it stands to reason workers would need time to readjust to office life, a point expressed in recent survey results. Employers that quickly flip the switch in calling workers back and do so with poor clarifying rationale risk appearing tone-deaf.
It suggests a lack of trust in productivity at a time when many workers report putting in more effort than ever and being strained by the increased digital intensity of their job – that is, the growing number of online meetings and chats.
And even when companies said they wouldn’t require a return to the office, workers still faulted them for their motives, which many employees described as financially motivated.
“We are going hybrid,” one worker wrote. “I personally don’t think the company is doing it for us. … I think they realized how efficient and how much money they are saving.”
Only a small minority of workers in our sample said their company asked for input on what employees actually want from a future remote work policy. Given that leaders are rightly concerned about company culture, we believe they are missing a key opportunity to engage with workers on the issue and show their policy rationales aren’t only about dollars and cents.
Management gurus such as Peter Drucker and other scholars have found that corporate culture is very important to binding together workers in an organization, especially in times of stress.
A company’s culture is essentially its values and beliefs shared among its members. That’s harder to foster when everyone is working remotely.
That’s likely why corporate human resource executives rank maintaining organizational culture as their top workforce priority for 2021.
But many of the forum posts we reviewed suggested that employer efforts to do that during the pandemic by orchestrating team outings and other get-togethers were actually pushing workers away, and that this type of “culture building” was not welcome.
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One worker’s company “had everyone come into the office for an outdoor luncheon a week ago,” according to a post, adding: “Idiots.”
Surveys have found that what workers want most from management, on the issue of corporate culture, are more remote-work resources, updated policies on flexibility and more communication from leadership.
As another worker put it, “I can tell you, most people really don’t give 2 flips about ‘company culture’ and think it’s BS.”
A few of them were very thankful - "I haven't thought about it that way."
Once I returned to the store, and one of the cashiers recognized me and yelled across the store "HEY - HERE's THE GUY WHO SAID WE ARE MORE ESSENTIAL THAN HOLLYWOOD!"
Most of the companies I deal with that are working from home, have delayed response times because they no longer are by their phones and computers.
Then they are delayed when their people are delayed.
So a part that would be ordered in minutes now will take a day.
That may be true, but to my point while Wesleyan will require all students to receive the COVID-19 vaccine prior to returning to campus, at the same time The University highly encourages faculty and staff to be vaccinated as soon as they are able.
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That’s ONE school…
Here is the full list of vaxx-requiring colleges and while some require everyone be shot (like Yale and Columbia) not all do.
Which can be spoofed at home.
Now, if they are responsive and doing the work, it isn’t a big deal. But I talk to 40 some companies in a week, and know which ones are working from home.
They are not working. Delayed responses up and down the chain, delayed orders, no answers.
So for some of these, I moved to places where the have better response times that don’t include a barking dog in the back ground.
“Amazon, Microsoft, Google and others are relocating most of their staff to India anyways.”
They can’t keep that up for long. Management expects immediate answers and that just doesn’t happen from overseas. Any attempts to get answers is met with stonewalling and requests for more money.
Minorities are 1.5 times less likely to be vaxxed. Colleges are creating Jim Crow 2.0 with vaxxing requirements
AKA corporate Stasi. In company I worked at 15 years, HR Commissar started out as owners Admin Asst. Dropped her Police Officer husband to be concubine/advisor. Acted as a Legal advisor with paralegal training
Her latest contribution was to be hard line against UFCW in request for raise which a number of competitors agreed to. Well, guess what, workers leveraged COVID policy stating they were exposed and could not show up. Resulted in missing many order. A former boss at competitor contacted me about process this company utilizes for manufacture ( outside NDA disclosure envelope-not personal its business) Getting a consulting gig at expense of former company-Their potential loss of millions due to woke corporate Stasi HR b**CH advice
Exactly. And poor managers need to see people in the office and they immediately assume they are working. Having managed remote employees for years and being remote because I constantly traveled, the shift to home during the pandemic was no big deal. For others who insist employees weren’t working if they weren’t in the office, the pandemic shift was really difficult. And then you find out how they manage. Most said they didn’t talk to their teams more then once per month. That’s crazy.
I figure it will be the Left’s favorite “You are not black if you are not vaxxed”
That’s a good point. I honestly don’t know why an employer would insist on having employees back in the office AND insist that they wear masks. As an employer, you are giving the staff a huge pile of evidence to support lawsuits or disability claims over an unsafe workplace, adverse health effects from stressful job conditions, etc.
My wife says it is. She gets quite mad at me if I crack open one at 1400.
Exactly. And poor managers need to see people in the office and they immediately assume they are working. Having managed remote employees for years and being remote because I constantly traveled, the shift to home during the pandemic was no big deal. For others who insist employees weren’t working if they weren’t in the office, the pandemic shift was really difficult. And then you find out how they manage. Most said they didn’t talk to their teams more then once per month. That’s crazy.
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That’s common in most menial labor jobs like in fast-food and grocery stores. “If you ain’t moving, you ain’t working and you find something else to do/ work on, like clean, take out the trash, restock or face product”
Shouldn’t be in white-collar work (those that don’t trust their workforce use crap like Time Doctor to take camera and screenshots at random a few times an hour)
There is also great value in seeing the world. Sometimes reading the headlines on conservative media, you’d think we are a tiny minority on the verge of being rounded up by a phalanx of Bidet followers. Then you go to the office and see zillions of people getting coffee, having lunch, holding meetings, and realize that yes there is a collection of statists but most people simply want to love their job, make money, and not have their home torched or workplace looted.
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Yeah seeing taillights on a 45 minute to 2 hour commute each way stuck in traffic is certainly a great way for seeing the world. An 8 hour job (sometimes 9) becomes 13 hours away from home.
I built a recording/ development room far better than anything I can get while teaching with an underpowered school-issued laptop or iMac (academia love iMacs as it makes their marketing videos look better) face-to-face
That’s a good point. I honestly don’t know why an employer would insist on having employees back in the office AND insist that they wear masks. As an employer, you are giving the staff a huge pile of evidence to support lawsuits or disability claims over an unsafe workplace, adverse health effects from stressful job conditions, etc.
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Karen Maskholes, for starters.
They can’t keep that up for long. Management expects immediate answers and that just doesn’t happen from overseas. Any attempts to get answers is met with stonewalling and requests for more money.
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Microsoft and Google are already de-facto Indian companies.
Amazon, Facebook, Oracle, Uber, Apple, Salesforce and others have huge development centers in India. They will reduce US staff before Indian staff.
“Shouldn’t be in white-collar work (those that don’t trust their workforce use crap like Time Doctor to take camera and screenshots at random a few times an hour)”
If an employer doesn’t trust his white-collar employees, WTH did he hire them?
Most larger companies have separate departments for that (i.e. Risk Management).
HR actually plays a much larger role in a corporation than the typical employee gives them credit for. If you are in management or in particular an upper level manager, you will realize just how important they are to have around.
Think about it, if they weren't essential, cost-cutting corporations would have done away with them or outsourced them a long time ago (like they did with payroll, travel & expense, company cars, benefits, pensions, etc.)
As I discussed with some on Freep Mail, the most important function of the HR department is to keep the company (and its managers) out of the courtroom. A good HR operation can save a large corporation millions of dollars in litigation and lawsuits - not to mention the bad publicity that can result from these actions.
So while the typical employee may see the HR department as non-contributing employees who are all about the "touchy-feely" with their endless politically correct memos on diversity and what not, it actually serves a larger purpose. Managers tend to see HR as their business partners and recognize their value. Speaking for myself, this past year has even increased my respect for them as they were constantly dealing with helping the company navigate through all the COVID nonsense. Every COVID case had to be reported to them and they were often working into the night dealing with these cases and coming up with the best solutions that protected the company and the employees. They worked their tails off this past year dealing with all this nonsense and keeping the company out of the courtrooms and out of the headlines.
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