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.”
That said, if a company promised someone they could move to Coeur d'Alene from Manhattan and are now backtracking, shame on the company.
My nephew works for a big name company in California. He and his family’s home burned in the big fire. He now works from home in another state. Not sure if they will go back now.
So regular people are coming to the realization that their employers don’t really care for them?
3,000 responses out of 585,000? That’s not a very good response.
This is the classic Dilbert work experience. The pointy haired boss needs the people around him to claim credit for their work.
Corporate Culture in the age of Woke means a captive audience at a minimum of 8 hours a day 5 days a week where the Woke Corp. can subject its employees to a constant flow of Brainwashing. So very much harder to accomplish without a captive workforce.
Very much so.
People who refuse to come to work, fire them. End of discussion.
As corporate cultures become more woke, fewer workers are going to buy in to any part of it. Many that appear to do will only be providing lip service.
Working from home is better for the environment, especially with the price of gas. It’s also better for workers because they don’t have to spend an hour every day commuting and fighting traffic. Most cubicle jobs can be done remotely anyway.
No one is gonna go back if they are treated like second class citizens and lepers for not taking the risky experimental treatment.
That is exactly what it is.
The work from home gravy train is coming to an end as things get back to normal. People will have to go back to working in an office. That’s what I did for 40 years. People should be happy to do that and finally go back to interacting with coworkers. Your opportunities for promotion will be greater if you work in an office vs work from home.
The other thing going on is that businesses will look for opportunities to cut benefits and costs. They know Biden will increase their taxes. So rough sledding ahead. Workers will be lucky to have a job.
Don’t like the Boss? Work for yourself. I started age 26, retired at 60.
Let’s see if you really want to work.
The people I spoke to who were working remotely were hoping it would continue after the pandemic.
No more commute, no more Winter commute, commute costs etc.
They found themselves to be more productive at home than at the office as it is co-workers, office politics that get in the way of productivity.
One guy mentioned the people who did the least at the office and got away with it had a much harder time working remotely.
I would think companies would be more interested in saving huge amounts of money that would otherwise be spent on commercial real estate.
I read an article in the WSJ that many companies were slowly moving into the remote work situation before the pandemic and the pandemic just accelerated the process. Looks like some of those companies are scaling back.
It is cheaper to work remotely from India.
And it is very hard to keep track of hours spent working when at home.
1. The employees in many of these industries have tremendous leverage. One of my former clients just changed jobs within the last two weeks because the new employer is letting her work from home most of the time.
2. Most companies in this situation (i.e., they've been able to function adequately with employees working from home since the COVID fiasco began) have no reason to bring the staff back. Almost all of those that are insisting their employees return to the office are only doing this because they are paying a lot of money to lease the office space and simply don't want to waste it.
3. See the last sentence in Item #2. Every one of these companies is going to send most of these employees back to work from home when their current leases expire.
That was my normal work commute for 30 years!
If bosses discover most of the work can be done via the internet, they’ll farm all their jobs overseas.
Great strategy.
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