Jun. 19, 2023 "Working from home is becoming a once-a-week treat for more office goers": Today I found this article by Jo Constantz on the Financial Post:
A small but growing list of big-name companies like BlackRock Inc., Walt Disney Co. and Chipotle Mexican Grill Inc. are taking their return-to-office mandates up a notch, calling employees back to their desks four days a week.
It’s a form of RTO creep, as companies test what has emerged as the post-pandemic norm of two to three days in the office and fan the debate over remote work. It’s also a sign of employers gaining more power in the labour market as layoffs mount and a potential recession looms.
As the Great Resignation took hold, quit rates soared and staffing shortages hamstrung businesses, companies were forced to embrace flexibility to keep workers.
Now a cooling labour market has emboldened executives determined to get back to a semblance of pre-pandemic normalcy. But these moves could backfire among employees who’ve grown fiercely protective of the work-life balance that remote work affords.
Among the firms instituting more aggressive RTO policies,
Chipotle ratcheted up its on-site requirement to four days a week last month from three since March.
Disney made its four-day move, up from two or three previously, shortly after the return of chief executive Bob Iger.
BlackRock has said employees must be in the office four days a week starting in September, following nearly two years mandating three days on-site.
Snap Inc. and top law firms such as Davis Polk and Skadden also have broken ranks to require four days.
JPMorgan Chase & Co., meanwhile, has ordered managing directors back to the office five days a week.
Other companies may be watching to see how these policies play out as they consider their own.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if some organizations take their peers’ lead if they wanted to increase the frequency of on-site work,” said Caitlin Duffy, research director in the human resources practice at consulting firm Gartner Inc. “They may have not wanted to be an outlier.”
At the same time, many workers have made major life changes around their hybrid work policies, rearranging everything from child care to where they live.
“Going back on something that influential to day-to-day life for employees — and not just in work life, but also their life more holistically — this causes so much disruption,” Duffy said.
Employees have voiced fierce opposition through public protests at companies such as Amazon.com Inc., Starbucks Corp. and Disney.
At Disney, over 2,300 employees signed a petition urging reconsideration of the policy, saying the mandate will result in “forced resignations among some of our most hard-to-replace talent and vulnerable communities” while “dramatically reducing productivity, output, and efficiency.”
Two or three days a week is the sweet spot for employee engagement and well-being, according to a Gallup survey of over 16,000 full-time U.S. employees conducted last year.
Its data also show that remote-capable employees who don’t work in their preferred location are more prone to burnout and a desire to quit.
This emerging norm is also reflected in data from WFH Research, a group of experts from Stanford University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the University of Chicago and other institutions, that show workers’ desire and employers’ plans for the average number of days worked remotely has stabilized at somewhere between two and three days per week.
Though companies who increase their in-office requirements might not see an immediate exodus — switching jobs takes time — it might be the line at which employees start looking, Duffy said.
Roughly one in two people who work in finance would change jobs — or already have — if their managers required them to spend more time in the office, according to a Bloomberg Markets Live Pulse survey in early June.
While four-day-a-week mandates have made headlines and may provide some cover for other companies who want to do the same, they’re still rare, according to Scoop Technologies Inc.’s Flex Index, which tracks the remote work policies of over 4,500 companies.
Of hybrid companies that require a minimum number of days in the office,
only about five per cent mandated four days as of early June, according to Scoop.
Two or three days remains the norm, accounting for roughly 90 per cent of hybrid setups.
The call for more in-office time comes as other firms make clear that their existing mandates are compulsory and have started enforcing them — or at least indicating working from home isn’t the best way to get ahead.
Alphabet Inc.’s Google announced last week it will include in-office attendance in performance reviews
while International Business Machines Corp.’s Arvind Krishna has said that not showing up will hurt employees’ chances of promotion.
The rationale for returning to in-person work includes what many company leaders see as greater opportunities for
learning,
career development
and mentorship.
“The key driver behind our in-office attendance philosophy is a desire to provide all members of our community with best-in-class professional development opportunities,” wrote Davis Polk managing partner Neil Barr in an internal email seen by Bloomberg.
Recent research from economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the University of Iowa and Harvard University provides some backing for this view:
The paper, titled The Power of Proximity, argues that working in the same building “has an outsized effect on workers’ on-the-job training,” especially for younger workers.
Data from WFH Research shows that those in the office spend 25 per cent more time on career-development activities than remote counterparts.
For Disney, face time is seen as necessary for creativity: “In a creative business like ours, nothing can replace the ability to
connect,
observe,
and create
with peers that comes from being physically together,” Iger said in an internal memo seen by Bloomberg.
Others, like Chipotle, cite ambitious business objectives as a driving factor: The company’s moving to a Monday through Thursday schedule “to preserve our unique, collaborative culture and achieve our aggressive growth plans,” Laurie Schalow, Chipotle’s chief corporate affairs officer, wrote in a statement to Bloomberg.
For employees who value flexibility and have proven they can get their work done outside the office, the shift to four days can feel like a rollback of autonomy and trust.
The policy removes a key element of choice, since most organizations that mandate four days expect attendance Monday through Thursday.
“It’s frustrating for employees because they’ve already been working really hard and performing really well, and so it almost feels like a negative — they’re saying, ‘Well, that’s not good enough,’ or that we don’t trust you to continue in this way,” Gartner’s Duffy said.
Duffy advises executives to carefully consider what they’re trying to achieve with in-office requirements and to be intentional about that, beyond just mandating a set number of days.
“‘What do you really want from your hybrid model?’ is a question I always ask every leader who’s grappling with this kind of decision.
What outcomes are you trying to drive?” she said.
“If the outcome is just, ‘make your leaders happy because they want employees on-site,’ that might not be necessarily the best rationale.”
—With assistance from Matthew Boyle.
https://financialpost.com/fp-work/working-from-home-once-a-week-treat-more-office-goers
You could run your own business from home same time you got your steady eddy paycheck coming in .How would they ever know .
Regardless of the type of business I am very opposed to having any of my information transmitted through a computer in the personal residence of an employee.
There are enough security breaches through corporations who maintain IT departments without entrusting my private data to someone whose main job has nothing to do with computer security or the protection of my data.
Im curios how many companies will see onsite work as important as they do now when lease renewals start coming down. There is so much dead wood at many companies, the idea of paying to house them 3-5 days a week doesn't make sense. Keep senior management there for all the important stuff (if they insist) and just let the competent doers just work on their computer from whatever buidling they like, coming in for important meetings and social stuff occasionally. Set hours onsite is for shift workers.
People just want flexibility, and it's understandable. With the cost of childcare being what it is, having the option to work from home is immensely helpful. Also, our urban transportation infrastructure is inadequate, to say the least. Forcing people to commute in this slog is obviously upsetting.
So if your job can never be WFH should those that work away from home get a raise? When you say do child care, how can you do that when you should be working from home?
I'm just pointing out the problems faced by desk job workers that are being alleviated by a flexible work policy.
As for pay, I don't think hybrid and fully on-site should pay differently in most scenarios.
Performance metrics should dictate compensation, not time spent in the office.
I like being on site, don't have to work as hard.
United Kingdom employees are working from home more than workers in other European countries, a new survey found.
Britons work remotely for an average of 1.5 days a week, almost half a day more than the international average. Globally, only Canadians spend more time logging in from home.
Employees in most European countries spent around half as many hours working remotely.
Germans spend one day at home, the most in Europe after the U.K.,
while that number is
0.7 in Italy
and 0.6 in France.
More than 42,000 full-time employees in 34 countries were surveyed between April and May by the IFO Center for Macroeconomics and Surveys, a German think tank.
The study comes amid warnings that remote work may wipe US$800 billion from the value of office buildings in major cities, while attendance remains below pre-COVID levels.
“Even in the aftermath of the pandemic,
the majority of workers highly value the opportunity to work from home for a portion of their workweek,”
the study’s authors said.
Working from home tends to be more common in English-speaking countries.
U.S. workers are at home 1.4 days a week,
while in Canada it’s 1.7 days, the most in the world.
In Asia, the number of remote working days ranges from
0.9 in Singapore to
0.4 in South Korea.
British employees want to spend even less time in the office. U.K. workers said they would like to be at home for more than two days a week. Only Brazilians, Argentinians, Mexicans, Turks and Americans wanted to spend more time working remotely, according to the study.
—With assistance from Zoe Schneeweiss.
This finding in itself is neither a positive or negative. the first poster here notes that North Americans typically have larger houses (especially those who would be commuting) that accommodate dedicated office space.
On the other hand we lack the transport infrastructure needed to justify commuting to jobs that were effectively performed during the pandemic. With the tools that became common over the past 3 years, there has to be a valid reason to demand in-person work when getting to work is such a waste of time and fuel.
( And I agree that regular face-to-face meetings for teams are worthwhile). Let's also not forget that the system of childcare has not kept up with needs. This impacts many workers, who, if they are in a home office, can work without interruption while children are at school even if they have to be home when school ends. There are many system-wide discontinuities that can be managed through permitting work form home. ( speaking for myself - I used to commute to Toronto daily, but the early VIA train has been cancelled so without the opportunity to work from home and attend only 2 meetings a week, I would have had to quit my job).
That makes sense to me.
Houses are larger in Canada and the US than in most other countries. As a result we have more room to create a home office, or office area.
Secondly public transportation is much better in the rest of the first world countries, so commuting can be more efficient and less costly.
The distances between home and work might also be a factor, although congestion on the roads might be higher in some of those smaller, but heavily populated countries.
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