‘Desk bookings have grown by 46% since last Autumn… job switching slowed, power shifted back to employers’. The CEOs drawing a hardline on return-to-office policies’, BBC News, September 7th 2023
‘Amazon CEO tells staff ‘It’s probably not going to work out’ unless they visit office three days a week’. The Guardian, August 29th, 2023
‘Minions… I mean colleagues, partners. Come back to the office. Now!’
‘I am lonely in here, there’s just no way for you all to recognise my important status as your CEO from home; and there’s no one to go out and get my latte.’
‘After all, I am paying a fortune to rent this office in the City, so we need to fill it’ (San Francisco-based tech company Dropbox posted a loss of more than $175 million in 2022 due to unused office space they had planned to sublease).
‘Goodness, it might even affect our share price and then my executive incentive payments could go down by a few million next year’. (Executive pay levels for FTSE 100 CEOs grew by an average 16%/£530,000 in the past year, compared to the annual growth in average earnings of 7.8%).
‘And everyone else, even Zoom itself, is enforcing office returns now. For we always copy what everyone else is doing in HR’. ( That’s despite the importance of strategic and employer brand/EVP differentiation in a continuing tight UK labour market, where more than half of employers are still reporting skill shortages according to CIPD)
‘Ok, I accept we did all work at home during Covid and you got used to that. It drove my wife up the wall having me there all the time’.
‘And your productivity and performance held up remarkable well and the economic ‘bounce-back’ was stronger and higher than everyone anticipated’. (Revised ONS figures published earlier this month suggest the UK economy shrunk less in 2020 and recovered significantly faster in 2021/2 than it had initially reported). (And at the individual employer level, the latest working paper from Professor Nick Bloom’s team at Stanford University reports a 40% increase in remote working since 2019, with a hybrid model looking to be the most attractive for the benefits in terms of productivity and reduced recruitment/retention costs – letting people work flexibly they calculate is equivalent to offering them an 8% increase in their pay).
‘I just don’t understand why the 56% of you who aren’t able to work from home at all (shown in the latest ONS data) report lower job satisfaction (according to PWC’s UK worker survey); nor why 90% of you looking for new jobs say you want a flexible balance of working from home and in the office’ (as reported in Timewise’s latest flexible jobs index).
‘But as Mr Jassy at Amazon says, now we need to get back to normal. Yes, I know that you waste productive time on your commute and there’s growing evidence that home and more varied and flexible working schedules can be more productive’. (For example, over 90% of the employers in a major UK six-month trial covering more than 500,000 workers of moving to a four-day week reported that productivity improved or was the same as five-day working and so have retained the arrangements).
‘And those clever folk at IES and Timewise I know have even worked out how you can enable greater flexibility and work-life balance for those in necessarily site-based roles, for example in retail and health and social care, with their Fair Flex for All project.
‘Those annoying, disruptive climate change protesters argue that commuting also pollutes the environment, even more than my executive BMW’ (The US National Academy of Science this month reported a study that found that remote workers produce less than half the emissions of their office-bound colleagues).
‘And the wokeists say that it puts up additional barriers to disadvantaged groups like our female and disabled colleagues’ (Recent IES research with Restart providers shows that many of the millions currently economically inactive and long-term sick would never in future be able to access, return to or stay in a job without working-from-home flexibility).
‘But I need you to satisfy the status needs of us male executives!’
According to the Future Forum’s executive leader Brian Elliott:
‘Many executives simply aren’t experiencing the same lives as their employees and are falling back on an antiquated view of work to make inferences about what’s important for a company to flourish…Executives have a better setup at work, probably an office with a door. They probably don’t have the same child-care issues as many employees’.
‘The risk that we run as a society’, according to Elliot, is ‘executives don’t listen to employees looking for flexibility and a real proximity bias sets in among people who are at the office and those that aren’t.’ According to a 2023 BCG survey of 1500 office workers in the US and Europe, employees were happiest when they were involved in developing their own working arrangements and least satisfied when their work pattern was imposed ‘from the top’. Yet in two-thirds of cases that’s just what they reported, with no say or involvement in their company’s policy.
A range of studies suggest that HR departments have achieved growing levels of corporate influence and business contribution during the Covid and cost-of-living crises. Now is the time that HR needs to be courageous in the boardroom, to reflect this ‘Covid dividend’ as Perry Timms calls it, and stand up for the importance of more evidence-based, employee-engaging, flexible, productive and caring working arrangements.
As my IES colleague Astrid Allen explains, convince your executives to trial and consult, team and involve, trial, and then invest to transform in flexible working. The evidence seems increasingly clear that it pays off: for employees, their executives and employers.
Dr Duncan Brown is principal associate at the Institute for Employment Studies (IES) and visiting professor at the University of Greenwich
