It’s pretty obvious, at this point in time, that employees would prefer to remain working at home or remotely anywhere they so choose. Meanwhile, management and C-suite executives are eager to have workers get back to their desks at headquarters.

Since the unexpected two-year trial run of remote work was so highly successful, bosses don’t have the evidence to order people to start commuting once again into the city and sit in a cubicle for over eight hours a day, five days a week.

To be fair, it’s challenging for business leadership and middle management to oversee a distributed workforce. They need to continually adjust policies and deploy technologies to keep workers connected with the home office and everyone else. Team leaders have to continually keep track of where their workers are.

It’s easier for supervisors to herd everyone together under one roof or in hub setups. Managers can patrol the aisles, making sure no one is slacking off and scrolling through social media or purchasing items on Amazon.

It drives them crazy that they can’t constantly watch over people when they’re working from home. Their fallback and less attractive alternative is to offer a hybrid work model. This entails inviting people into the office two or three days a week. For both workers and management, it’s an imperfect scenario. Workers complain that they must commute three hours round trip to risk their physical safety in cities, only to sit in a cubicle farm sending out emails and getting on back-to-back Zoom calls that could easily have been done at home.

Adding insult to injury, the people that they need to collaborate with aren’t in the office at the same time, so there really wasn’t any reason to make the schlep back and forth. Then, there’s also the cost factor. Commuting is expensive and so is grabbing or ordering breakfast and lunch every day. Since you’re in the office, after gaining some pandemic pounds, a new wardrobe is in order. If you need to drive, the cost of gasoline and tolls take a toll on your wallet.

During the virus outbreak, while saying people could work from home, companies including Amazon, Microsoft and Facebook—now Meta—purchased, built or leased lots of office space. The executives at these top-tier global organizations are exceedingly smart people. They weren’t haphazardly buying office space. It’s now clear that they knew, despite extolling the virtues of remote work, that people would one day be brought back.

It’s highly probable that, as time goes by, managers will get frustrated with keeping track of who is in the office on any given day, forget to tell people to hop on an important client video call and blame issues on the fact that not everyone is in the office together. These and other real-world challenges may ultimately lead to animosity.

Those who are at home may feel left out and forgotten. There will be people who decide to go into the office five days a week, in pursuit of consistent face time with bosses and upper-echelon executives. Their goal is to get noticed, so that they’ll be selected for better assignments and career advancements, which will lead to higher salaries and bonuses.

People who aren’t playing this game, as they have young children to tend to, are caregivers or desire a non-commuting better quality of life, will start to grow resentful of the employees who are benefiting from a proximity bias.

People will be divided into different factions and the corporate culture will become toxic. Tensions will flare. Since it’s a hot job market with around 11 million jobs currently available, it’s relatively easy for people to opt out and quit. It’s hard to replace them, as it’s a tight job market. With inflation raging, the cost of acquiring a new employee will be higher than what the former employee earned.

Eventually, something will give. Due to pressure from overburdened middle managers, complaints of being overlooked by people who spend more time remotely and everyone getting fed up with the in-fighting and juggling schedules, the C-suite executives will call for everyone to return five days a week.

You could see a divide happening. There will be businesses, such as the big New York City investment banks, that will hold firm and continue to tell their brokers, traders and money managers to come in five days a week. Some companies, in a competitive maneuver, may pivot to a remote-first setup to steal talent from the companies that demand everyone to return to the office. It’s likely for tech-savvy companies that have the best software, platforms, apps and well-trained managers to navigate a hybrid model.

If you are looking for a new job, you need to find out about the company’s work style—remote, hybrid, flexible, digital nomads or in-office full time. You wouldn’t want to get caught up in an untenable situation and feel the need to leave only after a few months.

Source: Forbes