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.”
Bingo!
I told my boss that with only 4 years left until retirement, and my two only goals are to take great care of the client and minimize how much bullshit company admin crap I do.
I've been going in there once or twice every week for the past year and it's more than a little odd walking through that space with only a handful of others. Close to half of the employees have never even seen the office. Yet they have somehow acquired photos of it to use as their background on ZOOM meetings.
I get a kick out of calling them out when I'm actually in the office. I'll grab my laptop and walk into their office live and wave at them as they show the phony-baloney backgrounds of the office they are pretending to be in.
“But a good manager would also think up that if I get this amount of production for 4 hours work at “X” cost, how much more production can I get for the same labor cost?”
A good manager knows that output is not necessarily proportional to hours spent warming a chair - and that by mindlessly pushing for more of the latter you may get less of the former.
No it’s not hard to keep track of hrs worked working from home, still have same clocking in and out procedures
“I know someone whose bosses were worried about lower productivity when workers worked at home but it increased. Now they are now trying to figure out how to retain the increased productivity while requiring the workers to come in the office.”
LOL! The pointy-haired boss is not fictional.
LOL. And I’m my own boss — and I did two things once the COVID fiasco began that have paid great dividends: (1) I relocated my home to another state (that had nothing to do with COVID; I was going to do it anyway); and (2) I am relocating my business into my home and keeping a virtual office in my original state.
I have been at my office the whole time, as have most of the bosses and staff. My company is small and never closed. We all have traditional offices or are sufficiently distanced from each other so whatever social distancing mandates went into place were observed without changing a thing. A few people worked remotely for a few months and then trickled back in last year. Some of that was caused by child care issues that had to get worked out.
P.S. — Anyone who has one of those fake backgrounds in Zoom comes across as a moron to me. LOL. One of my close friends who is self-employee and works out of his home has the most impressive setup I’ve seen. He doesn’t need a fake background because his home office looks like something I’d see in a modern suburban office building.
HR doesn’t do any productive work, for the most part.
Not real sure what they do besides insurance and compliance issues. No workplace, less need for most of them.
I read somewhere on FR (the actual words escape me so I'm putting this in my own language) that posters often mistake their job as being that of a orchestra conductor when it's actually that of a jazz musician. The best threads are the ones where the jazz cat starts the tune but backs off and watches things take off, while the conductors kill the spontaneity and thus the dialogue.
Ironically, many "conservatives" want to micromanage "their" thread like a central planner....or, like a manager demanding that remote workers log hours.
People should be happy to do that and finally go back to interacting with coworkers. No, interacting with coworkers is a large risk. You can be accused of anything and have no recourse. How the hell do you figure out someone's pronoun?
Your opportunities for promotion will be greater if you work in an office vs work from home. Things have changed since you started your office work 40 years ago. Your best chance of promotion today is a promotion to a different company, especially if you have something "in your file" from a mentally ill coworker with a grudge. (see risks comment above)
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. ...and those who can work remotely from a lower cost of living area, who don't require an office, and can never cost the company legal fees from a workplace "human resources" lawsuit will have a HUGE advantage over someone currently in the office.
Any job the bosses could have sent overseas, they already have years ago. The jobs that are still here are the ones that require people who actually know what they're doing.
Great replies here.
” The best threads are the ones where the jazz cat starts the tune but backs off and watches things take off, “
Well, yeah, OK,
But it’s a great thread.
Or threatened with termination.
That’s not the deciding factor in whether or not your job gets outsourced, it’s the nature of the work itself that matters. If the work you do is essentially a commodity, like writing computer code, then you should be worried no matter where your physical work location is. If, on the other hand, you do professional work that relies upon your unique expertise, knowledge, and judgment, then you’re far less likely to face outsourcing, again no matter where you work physically.
I respectfully disagree...and no I'm not in HR.
Over many years I've seen HR's "behind the scene" activities and have come to have great respect for them. You know that high-performing sales guy who's been looking down secretary's shirts for a while? They found a way to can his butt without severance AND without a lawsuit AND without the secretary quitting or suing the firm. They are the ones who successfully ease out despicable employees. They perform due diligence on prospects and find out (somehow) that the guy you want to hire is actually a narcissist with a wake of carnage behind him.
Don't f with HR. They're not all bad and they're kind of more frightening than the legal dept.
And that is the reason why we are all going back to the office. Your company is a lot like my company. Recently invested hundreds of millions of dollars into office space for employees. My company actually built a campus with a food court, a gym, Starbucks and etc.
What are they going to do with this multi million dollar investment?
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.
I really haven’t worked for pay from home for over a decade. I still have an office at home with a desk and computers, two phones, 2 routers/modems and a printer w/a lap top computer to drive that printer. I do our genealogy and stuff for our church and family.
A couple of weeks ago, I got phone calls from my latest internet/phone provider. I don’t need anything else from them. However, discussions with their reps were interesting.
None of their corporate contact people/reps are working from their corporate offices. They are working from homes all over America like us, their customers. Their corporation is saving huge money even with some empty office spaces where they are still paying rent, re minimal upkeep, janitorial and security now versus a year of so ago.
As a manager, I’ve come to appreciate the HR department. I’m sure they’ve kept me out of court a number of times over the years!
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