Why the Return to the Office Isn’t Working

A survey of more than 1,500 employees in the United States shows that companies’ insistence that staff return to the office after the pandemic has worsened labor relations, and in many cases led to more talented people leaving. Furthermore, a quarter of managers admit that they hoped the order to return to the office would create an opportunity to lay people off.

More than half of those surveyed (52%) say they prefer hybrid work models, while two out of five say they prefer working in the office. But the vast majority (88%) of those who work remotely, and 79% of those who work in the office, agree that the post-pandemic work culture has become highly performative, obliging people to “prove” they connected and working, which of course impacts negatively on productivity: 42% of those who were forced to return to the office say that they go there simply to be seen, with 32% saying that the return to the office simply reflects a culture of bosses wanting to monitor employees’ activity.

The so-called green status effect, showing the ‘available’ green ball on the icon of applications such as Microsoft Teams, or walking around the office looking busy, has become a commonplace tactic that simply infantilizes people. An archaic culture inherited from the presenteeism and factories of the Industrial Revolution, with backward-looking managers competing to retain the worst employees, those who do not feel able to flee to companies that offer them more autonomy. Another recent study shows that whenever labor market conditions allow employees to find other companies that allow distributed work, return-to-office policies can involve significant human capital costs in terms of production, productivity, innovation, and competitiveness for the companies that implement them.

Among Fortune 500 companies, 82% offer flexible working conditions, compared to 18% that insist on a full-time presence in the office. This situation, typical of a reasonably healthy labor market in which workers assume they can switch jobs relatively easily, contrasts with countries with dysfunctional labor markets such as Spain, where many companies take advantage of this to implement return-to-office policies. Do they make employees more productive? Not at all, but it doesn’t matter: the important thing is to have them under control.

This trends toward more flexibility and less monitoring or “workism” are clearly reflected in the last World Economic Forum report, “The Future of Jobs”, with some of its conclusions clearly stated on this video.

Economist and Stanford professor Nick Bloom claimed as early as last year that return-to-office policies were dead, with implementation rates flatlining, and that flexible, distributed work had won. The results published by companies on the impact of the return to the office on profits show that there is no correlation, and that the only thing that these policies have achieved is to worsen working conditions, and in addition increase emissions due to commuting and traffic jams at peak times. Basically, a disaster caused by the inability of too many companies to evolve.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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