Most bosses regret how they mandated workers return to the office. They blamed it on not having enough data
Jane Thier
5–6 minutes
Why aren’t workers particularly appreciating—much less adhering to—return-to-office mandates? Probably because adults don’t like being ordered around.
“People do want structure, and people like boundaries,” former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell last year. “But they don’t like to be told what to do, so I think the secret is to not make them feel like their autonomy is being denied or that their ideas aren’t important, while still giving some structure.”
If only managers had taken the hint. Four in five (80%) of bosses told workplace software firm Envoy that had they had a better grasp on their workplace data, they would have taken a starkly different approach to their return-to-office plans. The problem, they said: They didn’t have access to data that would help them make their decision. In a white paper report, Envoy surveyed 1,156 U.S.-based executives and workplace managers whose employees operate on some form of hybrid schedule.
Over half (54%) of managers told Envoy they’ve had to forgo making a critical decision about the workplace because they lacked the requisite data to support it. Without that data, nearly a quarter of them admit to making decisions based on “gut instinct,” which naturally leads to resentment and disappointment. Fifty-seven percent of bosses said if they had better access to data, they could better measure the success of their in-office policies.
One such example is Amazon, whose RTO plan was admittedly prompted by the feelings of senior leadership, not hard data. “It’s time to disagree and commit. We’re here, we’re back—it’s working,” Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, reportedly said of in-person work. “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”
It’s difficult to ascertain just how effective in-person days are compared to at-home days, especially when actual productivity could vary based on any number of factors not necessarily related to location. It’s even harder for companies who operate on an ad hoc basis, letting individual teams decide for themselves when to come in. Though experts speak highly of this kind of “organized hybrid,” it can be difficult to assess its effectiveness at a company level. “With so much variability, it’s difficult to know how to improve efficiency in order to save critical budget,” Brooks Gooding, a workplace experience program manager at a software firm called Braze, said in the report.
Braze operates on a hybrid plan with little consistency in attendance rates, which, as Envoy wrote, can make it “impossible for workplace managers to know how many people are on-site on any given day, and how to best allocate space and resources across the organization.”
The RTO mismatch
Envoy’s data lays bare a fundamental mismatch that’s endured since the earliest days of the pandemic: Most bosses would rather have their workers where they can see them. Most workers demand a bit more latitude than that.
Granted, there are solid arguments for both time spent in the office and time spent on the couch. On one hand, remote work is proven to be between 10% and 20% less productive and can weaken morale and bonding, especially among younger workers and new workforce entrants. But people still overwhelmingly prefer at least a few days per week at home, arguing that physical office presence is more trouble than it’s worth and is rarely necessary to complete a task.
Ideally, a mix of both options—at the workers’ discretion—should fix the problem. Workers are flocking to jobs with flexibility, which has quickly become a must-have for most white-collar industries rather than a nice-to-have.
But many bosses are getting impatient, and many are using the approaching Labor Day holiday as an occasion to officially put “work from anywhere” policies to bed, whether workers like it or not. Alongside the usual suspects (like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs), those even include formerly quite lenient companies, like Meta, Google, and Salesforce.
Despite the fact that remote workers make more money and have fewer expenses, lower stress levels, and more time for family and errands, the office isn’t likely to disappear. In fact, workers can even be excited by the prospect—if they think it’s their idea. Data from Unispace found that a third of workers felt “happy, motivated, and excited” about an office return, but felt none of those things when the return was mandated.
As Atlassian’s Annie Dean put it, productivity, innovation, and creativity are “how-to-work problems, not where-to-work problems,” which will be solved only by an overhaul of how we understand work.
“This is a watershed moment of innovation of how work gets done,” Dean told Fortune, “but we’re still talking about the f–king watercooler.”
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Lost all credibility when it implied working from home is working from the “couch”. This is not what working from home means in a professional context. Dedicated working spaces with a desk, monitors, and a proper chair is working from home in a modern organisation.
When the pandemic started, my sisters and I would work from the dinner table. Then gradually we all drifted into different rooms, buying desks to work on. Pretty soon we had our own offices in our house. These people don’t know or care to find out what normal people are like, they make decisions based on their own assumptions and that’s why their employees hate them.
Treat them like humans, take the time to ask them what they think. Have some goddamn empathy for fuck’s sake.
Completely agree! It’s a privileged place to be in to have the room to dedicate to an office but I think it’s necessary to have that setup to work from home properly without screwing your body, if nothing else.
My office is a 4 by 4m corner of my bedroom. I’m lucky in that I can devote that much space to it. But it’s all about having a place you can dedicate to being your workspace. If that’s on a couch, then let it be on the couch. At the end of the day, if you’re fulfilling the tasks outlined in your job description then there’s really nothing to complain about.
I spent the first year of covid working from the couch, and it was more than fine, at least from a work perspective. I was more productive there, I think, than I am in my home office! But it robbed me of my den. I was only able to be productive in that space by it no longer being a relaxation and entertainment space. So, I had to reclaim it.
But still, the idea of working from a comfortable space is something employers see as unprofessional, and a sign you’re not actually working. They’re wrong, but perception always wins out. And in their minds, that’s what we’re doing when working from home - being comfortable, relaxing, and not doing any work.
Employers have publicly accused employees of “time theft” over and over again since lockdowns started, and have brought it up in almost every discussion about RTO. They see people working from their living room as this “time theft”, even as the amount of work that they get done has remained consistent with, or even higher than, what they got done at the office. Simply by being at home, were theives in their minds. Because they can’t be creepy little shits and stand to greet us when we get back from lunch 2 minutes late, or time how long we’re in the bathroom.
If you enjoy doing something, that’s leisure, and you should be paying for it.
If someone is paying you to do something, then it clearly isn’t something you’d pay for doing yourself, so you can’t enjoy doing it.
Work is suffering, or it isn’t “real” work.
If you aren’t suffering while claiming to be at work, then you’re clearly stealing your employer’s time.
Unfortunately, there do exist people willing to get paid for doing nothing, pretty much every employer ends up meeting some sooner or later, so even those who claim to look for people who “like and are passionate about their work”, in reality end up trying to catch the lazy grifters to cut them out.
Most professional jobs can’t be done from a couch without screwing your body or compromising your work space, etc. A laptop on your knees isn’t a professional work environment for most people.
I spent a while during lockdown taking video calls from my bed. It doesn’t matter where you are. The whole point of a laptop is to be able to work anywhere.
Sometimes I attend to meetings from my couch. As did I in the office. But I have two great monitors, a height adjustable table, a great office chair, a fan, the light is perfect for my desk…
Sure, joining a call from the couch, bed, or toilet is a thing but it’s not something that is the entire day. I agree about having a better desk set up at home - I spent a lot of my own money making my home environment better.
Article:
fortune.com
Most bosses regret how they mandated workers return to the office. They blamed it on not having enough data
Jane Thier 5–6 minutes
Why aren’t workers particularly appreciating—much less adhering to—return-to-office mandates? Probably because adults don’t like being ordered around.
“People do want structure, and people like boundaries,” former Slack CEO Stewart Butterfield told Fortune editor-in-chief Alyson Shontell last year. “But they don’t like to be told what to do, so I think the secret is to not make them feel like their autonomy is being denied or that their ideas aren’t important, while still giving some structure.”
If only managers had taken the hint. Four in five (80%) of bosses told workplace software firm Envoy that had they had a better grasp on their workplace data, they would have taken a starkly different approach to their return-to-office plans. The problem, they said: They didn’t have access to data that would help them make their decision. In a white paper report, Envoy surveyed 1,156 U.S.-based executives and workplace managers whose employees operate on some form of hybrid schedule.
Over half (54%) of managers told Envoy they’ve had to forgo making a critical decision about the workplace because they lacked the requisite data to support it. Without that data, nearly a quarter of them admit to making decisions based on “gut instinct,” which naturally leads to resentment and disappointment. Fifty-seven percent of bosses said if they had better access to data, they could better measure the success of their in-office policies.
One such example is Amazon, whose RTO plan was admittedly prompted by the feelings of senior leadership, not hard data. “It’s time to disagree and commit. We’re here, we’re back—it’s working,” Mike Hopkins, senior vice president of Prime Video and Amazon Studios, reportedly said of in-person work. “I don’t have data to back it up, but I know it’s better.”
It’s difficult to ascertain just how effective in-person days are compared to at-home days, especially when actual productivity could vary based on any number of factors not necessarily related to location. It’s even harder for companies who operate on an ad hoc basis, letting individual teams decide for themselves when to come in. Though experts speak highly of this kind of “organized hybrid,” it can be difficult to assess its effectiveness at a company level. “With so much variability, it’s difficult to know how to improve efficiency in order to save critical budget,” Brooks Gooding, a workplace experience program manager at a software firm called Braze, said in the report.
Braze operates on a hybrid plan with little consistency in attendance rates, which, as Envoy wrote, can make it “impossible for workplace managers to know how many people are on-site on any given day, and how to best allocate space and resources across the organization.” The RTO mismatch
Envoy’s data lays bare a fundamental mismatch that’s endured since the earliest days of the pandemic: Most bosses would rather have their workers where they can see them. Most workers demand a bit more latitude than that.
Granted, there are solid arguments for both time spent in the office and time spent on the couch. On one hand, remote work is proven to be between 10% and 20% less productive and can weaken morale and bonding, especially among younger workers and new workforce entrants. But people still overwhelmingly prefer at least a few days per week at home, arguing that physical office presence is more trouble than it’s worth and is rarely necessary to complete a task.
Ideally, a mix of both options—at the workers’ discretion—should fix the problem. Workers are flocking to jobs with flexibility, which has quickly become a must-have for most white-collar industries rather than a nice-to-have.
But many bosses are getting impatient, and many are using the approaching Labor Day holiday as an occasion to officially put “work from anywhere” policies to bed, whether workers like it or not. Alongside the usual suspects (like JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs), those even include formerly quite lenient companies, like Meta, Google, and Salesforce.
Despite the fact that remote workers make more money and have fewer expenses, lower stress levels, and more time for family and errands, the office isn’t likely to disappear. In fact, workers can even be excited by the prospect—if they think it’s their idea. Data from Unispace found that a third of workers felt “happy, motivated, and excited” about an office return, but felt none of those things when the return was mandated.
As Atlassian’s Annie Dean put it, productivity, innovation, and creativity are “how-to-work problems, not where-to-work problems,” which will be solved only by an overhaul of how we understand work.
“This is a watershed moment of innovation of how work gets done,” Dean told Fortune, “but we’re still talking about the f–king watercooler.”
Subscribe to Well Adjusted, our newsletter full of simple strategies to work smarter and live better, from the Fortune Well team. Sign up today.
Lost all credibility when it implied working from home is working from the “couch”. This is not what working from home means in a professional context. Dedicated working spaces with a desk, monitors, and a proper chair is working from home in a modern organisation.
When the pandemic started, my sisters and I would work from the dinner table. Then gradually we all drifted into different rooms, buying desks to work on. Pretty soon we had our own offices in our house. These people don’t know or care to find out what normal people are like, they make decisions based on their own assumptions and that’s why their employees hate them.
Treat them like humans, take the time to ask them what they think. Have some goddamn empathy for fuck’s sake.
Completely agree! It’s a privileged place to be in to have the room to dedicate to an office but I think it’s necessary to have that setup to work from home properly without screwing your body, if nothing else.
My office is a 4 by 4m corner of my bedroom. I’m lucky in that I can devote that much space to it. But it’s all about having a place you can dedicate to being your workspace. If that’s on a couch, then let it be on the couch. At the end of the day, if you’re fulfilling the tasks outlined in your job description then there’s really nothing to complain about.
Also why would working from the couch even be bad? Surely being comfortable while working is objectively better?
I spent the first year of covid working from the couch, and it was more than fine, at least from a work perspective. I was more productive there, I think, than I am in my home office! But it robbed me of my den. I was only able to be productive in that space by it no longer being a relaxation and entertainment space. So, I had to reclaim it.
But still, the idea of working from a comfortable space is something employers see as unprofessional, and a sign you’re not actually working. They’re wrong, but perception always wins out. And in their minds, that’s what we’re doing when working from home - being comfortable, relaxing, and not doing any work.
Employers have publicly accused employees of “time theft” over and over again since lockdowns started, and have brought it up in almost every discussion about RTO. They see people working from their living room as this “time theft”, even as the amount of work that they get done has remained consistent with, or even higher than, what they got done at the office. Simply by being at home, were theives in their minds. Because they can’t be creepy little shits and stand to greet us when we get back from lunch 2 minutes late, or time how long we’re in the bathroom.
The logic goes like:
Unfortunately, there do exist people willing to get paid for doing nothing, pretty much every employer ends up meeting some sooner or later, so even those who claim to look for people who “like and are passionate about their work”, in reality end up trying to catch the lazy grifters to cut them out.
US supermarkets forcing cashiers to stand comes to mind. Always has been mind-boggling to me and btw is blatantly illegal over here.
Most professional jobs can’t be done from a couch without screwing your body or compromising your work space, etc. A laptop on your knees isn’t a professional work environment for most people.
https://www.google.com/search?q=couch+laptop+table&tbm=isch
https://www.google.com/search?q=physiotherapist+near+me
Sure, consult with your therapist before picking one of the hundreds of different options.
I spent a while during lockdown taking video calls from my bed. It doesn’t matter where you are. The whole point of a laptop is to be able to work anywhere.
Sometimes I attend to meetings from my couch. As did I in the office. But I have two great monitors, a height adjustable table, a great office chair, a fan, the light is perfect for my desk…
That’s way more than I had at the office.
Sure, joining a call from the couch, bed, or toilet is a thing but it’s not something that is the entire day. I agree about having a better desk set up at home - I spent a lot of my own money making my home environment better.
That’s what I meant. No matter what that dude thinks about WFH, I didn’t spend all that money to wreck my back on the couch.
Sorry if it sounded like I don’t agree with you - I do!
Ah, missed that. Sorry ❤️🩹