Ellen Weinstein for The Washington Post
Going back to the office full-time?
According to most workers, the answer is simple: I would prefer not to. Not yet. Not every day, anyway — and maybe not ever.
The obvious answer is a new model that allows for in-office, hybrid or fully remote work. But it’s an open question how many workplaces agree.
A poll by the Best Practice Institute found that some 83 percent of CEOs want employees back full-time, while only 10 percent of workers want back in.
“There is a belief in our culture that we’ve proven that most jobs can be done virtually,” Melissa Swift of consulting firm Korn Ferry told Newsweek. “But that’s not the belief within the leadership of organizations, so we’re headed for a real clash.”
Certainly some people are thrilled to rejoin the office. But for many, it is a nightmare. People across industries and pay grades express the same fears, including legal administrators, analysts, people who book athletic travel for colleges, corporate office workers, software engineers and those in administrative health care..
The pandemic’s dramatic expansion of remote work, with its attendant humanization (Your toddler interrupts a meeting? A colleague joins the Zoom from their car? Just another day at the “office”!), suggested there was a different culture on the horizon — one that accepted the realities of family, health, disability and more, and that, critically, treated workers as adults capable of managing their lives and their deadlines.
But many higher-ups seem eager to maintain the status quo and are directing all employees to return to the office by a specific date, no exceptions. Others have expressed “concern” about the “erosion” of company culture; in The Post this month, Washingtonian Media chief executive Cathy Merrill wrote that employees who don’t want to return risk being demoted to the status of hourly contractor — if they keep their jobs at all.
WeWork chief executive Sandeep Mathrani told the Wall Street Journal that the least engaged workers are easy to identify — they’re the ones who prefer remote work.
Smarter companies are already preparing for a limited return or for fully remote work. They know that the “office” is never going to be the same, and that a rigid refusal to change their culture will cost them their best people, who will flee to more flexible rivals.
Opinion by Tracy Moore
From The Washington Post
