More than three years out from the pandemic’s onset, when America’s office workers suddenly had to do their jobs from their homes, a substantial majority of those employees have no desire to turn the clock back to 2019.
It’s clear in survey after survey. Bosses intent on herding their workforce back into the office have met consistently with resistance, both overt and covert. White-collar workers like the flexibility the work-from-home routine provides. They appreciate not sitting in traffic or on trains for substantial portions of their day. They’re happy not having to hire dog walkers and being available for their kids if the need arises.
America’s workers also are unhappy generally. Strikingly so.
A recent Wall Street Journal story highlighting the trend pointed to a survey of 2,000 workers by the Lincolnshire-based human resources firm Alight in which more than a third said they “dreaded” starting work each morning. That was 11 percentage points higher than last year. Friction with bosses over returning to the office wasn’t the only reason for the discontent, but it was a key part.
It’s one thing to be less than enthused about your job. It’s quite another to dread doing it.
It seems abundantly clear that the heyday of “the office” — that totemic feature of American life, celebrated in TV shows of yore like the “Mary Tyler Moore Show” and later satirized in shows like, yes, “The Office” — is over. The question now is, what will replace it?
It’s easy to say that the new business model is likely to be a “hybrid.” The majority of office workers will spend a fair chunk of time working from home, but also will need to be “at work” for some portion of the week.
That’s an overly simplistic way of looking at the issue, though. Within that broad category, managers have many choices to make. How many days per week will workers need to be in the office? Which days? Will they be able to choose which ones, or will bosses want all their workers together at the same time?
The issues aren’t exclusively about what workers desire, of course. Companies hire people to do jobs. They pay them and provide critical benefits such as health care insurance. They have every right to set expectations and hold their staffs accountable for a full day’s work.
So, how do managers do those things effectively in a remote working environment? To what degree should an employee working from home with flexible expectations be expected to be “on call” in return? When are after-hours requests acceptable? How much should bosses and colleagues communicate electronically, via Slack or similar systems, and when and how often is direct, verbal communication necessary? The situation is especially tricky when managing both hourly and exempt employees, job categories subject to very different regulations.
And there’s the issue even the most ardent work-from-home advocates acknowledge is a problem: How do people just entering the workforce get the training and mentoring they need and — just as critically — understand the culture of their workplaces if there are little to no face-to-face dealings with their new colleagues?
The protestations of Elon Musk, Jamie Dimon and other staunch critics of WFH notwithstanding, five full days a week in the office is not the future of most American workplaces. But as we write three years after the greatest upheaval in American work life in generations, it’s also unclear what the settled upon model of white-collar work will be.
The growing discontent of labor demonstrates that workers don’t think their companies are acknowledging the reality of a permanent hybrid model or are trying hard enough to fashion a new routine that works for everyone.
Corporate bosses like to talk about how their employees are their companies’ most valuable assets. They fret about morale. They survey their workers each year on their views of managers, benefits, pay — everything associated with their work lives.
We don’t doubt most of these managers truly worry and care about worker morale.
Happy, or at least contented, workers are a critical component of long-term business success. We think few bosses would disagree with that assertion. The corporate winners of the future will be those owned and/or run by forward-looking people who give thought and attention to all these questions, solicit input from their workers on their ideas, and then act transparently and with conviction on forging this new model in collaboration with their workers.
We don’t pretend to know exactly what the new American office job will look like. We understand, too, that one size won’t fit all. But we do exhort today’s employers to get busier on the task of forging the new reality.
— Chicago Tribune
