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.”
“If the work you do is essentially a commodity, like writing computer code”
The only people who think writing code is a commodity are those who have never done it - or not done it well.
It’s not just the lawsuits IMHO it’s also causing aggravation to employees- for no recompense to the company.
Why? There are many jobs today for which there is absolutely zero objective reason to be on-site. My group has worked remotely for the past 14 months, and we are in total agreement that productivity and customer service have remained consistently equal to, or even better than they were when we were all in the office every day. Some private companies that experimented, prior to the pandemic, with eliminating any requirement to be in the office found that productivity actually increased, citing in one example a 25% productivity increase.
There are certainly many jobs that absolutely require physical presence on-site. For example, I really don’t want the pilots on my next airline flight to work from home. But for all the others, we have to get beyond the late-1800s, industrial revolution, factory floor mentality. Micromanager types are perpetually stuck in that outdated mindset. They are always hyper-focused on having butts in seats, but can never tell you exactly why it matters. It just satisfies their personal need to see everything at all times, whether that makes any difference to the work product or not.
I think more in terms of hiring someone to paint my house, as an analogy. So long as they deliver a painted house for the price we agreed upon and by the deadline set, and do so without doing anything illegal or unethical in the process, that’s all I should care about. If instead I follow them around the whole time, and try to tell them that they are eating the wrong thing for lunch, or that I saw one of them playing a game on their phone, or that I didn’t “feel” that they were on-site often enough, then I’m just a neurotic micromanager who is obsessed with the unimportant, rather than what actually matters, which is what is produced.
All of that said, you do make an important point about missing out on promotional opportunities if you are never physically present. Networking is essential to promotion, and networking is pretty much impossible in the virtual world. I will agree with you on that.
I was thinking about that as I wrote my statement. You’re exactly right, when it comes to how code SHOULD be written. Unfortunately, today an awful lot of programming is commoditized, which is why we get some really bloated, inefficient, buggy stuff from places like India. It’s bothered me for years that as processor speeds followed Moore’s law, it seems that programmers stopped trying to optimize code because they could just hack together bloated code and rely on the brute force of faster processors to make it run well enough to get by. That’s just wasting the leap in hardware speed.
There’s a vast difference between talented, creative, top-flight programmers and the drones working in code-writing farms, but unfortunately it seems most companies prefer the cheapness of the latter.
I think people have short memories about resiliency, the desire for human contact, and face time. And despite what people who've never set foot in Manhattan say, Manhattan is actually pretty awesome and will rebound (maybe not immediately, but it'll come back).
Yes...a meaningfully-large proportion of mask-monkeys will keep masked until The End. Many folks will never take an Uber or eat-out again. And some employers will realize that a longer-term remote work arrangement will help retain good workers. And some industries will thrive with remote workers. Finally, for people in global businesses you effectively are virtual workers anyway so nothing changed.
But if the boss comes back to the office and you don't, you will likely hit a career wall. Let's face it...while a lot can get done remotely, when you're face-to-face things are quite productive in a political and issue-clearing manner.
And if I have to attend another conference or seminar via Zoom I'm gonna scream.
I, for one, totally enjoy working in the back yard while hanging out with The Dog and drinking beer.
Is that wrong?
I understand why a lot of the comments on this thread are against going back to the office. I understand companies can save a fortune by not having to lease as much office space. I understand efficiency is even better by officing at home than in an office building.
But as I see it the greatest obstacle in working from home is the chance for advancement and promotion.
Out of sight. Out of mind.
Lot of good stuff there!
“...their employers don’t really care for them?”
That’s why it’s called A Job.
Otherwise the “employees” would pay a daily admission fee to go have fun.
“Manhattan is actually pretty awesome...”
Manhattan reminds me of Bangladesh.
“It’s bothered me for years that as processor speeds followed Moore’s law, it seems that programmers stopped trying to optimize code because they could just hack together bloated code and rely on the brute force of faster processors to make it run well enough to get by.”
Indeed, it’s always been trivial for code to overwhelm processor cycles.
More coders need to be forced to code for real time control systems.
“Your best chance of promotion today is a promotion to a different company”
Amen! That’s how I got my biggest promotions.
If you’re dog drinks beer with you in the backyard, it’s hard to beat that in the office.
I've been to Patterson, NJ, driven by Gary, Indiana, smelled the sanitation department near Philadelphia International Airport on I-95, and attended a conference in San Diego.
Manhattan is better.
San Diego >> Manhattan.
Less gas being consumed, less tires and brakes wearing, less tolls being paid on the highway, less people listening to FM radio ads and AM radio fear mongers, less fast food lunches.... Anything else to add?
Working from home often is fine for trained, experienced employees. But there are huge problems when it comes to hiring and integrating new employees.
Manhattan population density = 26,821.6/km2
Bangladesh pop density = 1,240
I also think younger employees miss out. Someone once told me that, in finance, the older workers (who've paid their dues) preferred a 7am to 7pm day and the work from home Friday while people under 30 absolutely love the rush of working on a deal or transaction all night and sleeping in a conference room....it gives them office cred and something they can use to "one-up" with their friends.
Is that silly and infantile and immature? Maybe...but it is the stuff that often leads to a lucrative career.
Workplace camaraderie is risk. A smart employee avoids anything other than work with their coworkers because if 2020 taught them anything, it's that coworkers can be spiteful toward conservatives.
Coworkers are not your friends, they're coworkers. It's bad that HR pushes the latest socialist diatribe but it does help identify which of your coworkers would stab you in the back for not drinking the Kool-aid. Many already despise you for your skin color and sexual orientation and you'll find out quickly what they think of you if you tell them you voted for President Trump, own firearms, and follow Free Republic.
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