After two years, giddy executives appear on the brink of welcoming their workforces back to the office, whether their employees are ready or not.
“I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to being together again,” Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook told his employees in a memo last week, outlining his company’s April 11 hybrid back-to-work plan.
“I hope everyone is feeling as energized as I am, and that you are looking forward to seeing your colleagues in person again in the weeks ahead,” Comcast’s NBCUniversal CEO Jeff Shell wrote in a Feb. 22 memo to staff. “This is an exciting time. Our offices are ready for your return across all NBCUniversal locations.”
Even President Joe Biden wrote a letter to federal workers this month telling them to show Americans the time is right to go back to work as Covid cases decline following a dramatic surge fueled by the omicron variant. He broadened his message to all Americans in his March 1 State of the Union address.
“It’s time for Americans to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again,” Biden said. “People working from home can feel safe to begin to return to the office. We’re doing that here in the federal government. The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.”
Yet studies show employees aren’t nearly as gung-ho about returning to work.
The Future Forum, developed by workplace-messaging platform Slack, surveyed more than 10,000 workers globally in the summer of 2021 and found an “executive-employee disconnect” with regard to returning to work. Three-quarters of all executives reported they want to work from the office three to five days a week, compared with about one-third of employees. Among executives who have primarily worked completely remotely through the pandemic, 44% said they wanted to come back to the office every day. Just 17% of employees said the same.
Other research suggests employees have been pleasantly surprised by their work-from-home experience and don’t want it to end.
There are several causes for the disconnect, said Brian Elliott, the Future Forum’s executive leader and Slack senior vice president. Many executives simply aren’t experiencing the same lives of their employees and are falling back on an antiquated view of work to make inferences about what’s important for a company to flourish, he said.
“Executives have a better setup at work,” said Elliott. “They probably have an office with a door. They probably don’t have the same child care issues as many employees. The risk that we run, as a society, even in a hybrid-work setting, is executives don’t listen to employees looking for flexibility and a real proximity bias sets in among people who are at the office and those that aren’t.”
While JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon said last year remote work “doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation” and erodes culture, Elliott said the data shows hybrid settings allow for better work-life balance while also increasing workers’ sense of belonging among the colleagues. Modern technology connects co-workers — including those who may have worked remotely before the pandemic — that levels the playing field among employees. That sense of fairness, not based on face time or who happens to have a chance meeting in an executive-suite elevator, boosts overall work satisfaction, Elliott said.
“The data runs counter to the idea that always being in the office is the best way to foster culture,” Elliott said. “Using digital tools is really important to building a culture for people who aren’t the average white male executive. Companies that invest in modern tools and in rethinking how they bring people together will do better than those insisting in full-time office work.”
Elliott noted that while Slack benefits from work-from-home policies, all Future Forum research was completed independent of the technology company.
Cultural mythology
It’s possible the executive-employee disconnect represents a division between what’s best for the organization and what’s best for the individual, argued Art Markman, a professor of psychology and marketing at the University of Texas at Austin. In an essay for Harvard Business Review, Markman wrote that observing work by others can lead to a phenomenon called goal contagion.
“When you observe the actions of other people, you often adopt their same goals,” Markman wrote. “Being around a group of people who are working toward a common mission reinforces that goal in everyone in the workplace.”
But several of Markman’s assertations — including “the physical workplace enables moments of serendipity that can move projects along” and “it’s harder for institutional knowledge to make its way around in a remote environment” — are more fairy tale than reality, Elliott said.
“I’ve heard so many times from executives about the importance of whiteboarding, but that sentiment is always coming from the person who is controlling the pen in that whiteboard session,” Elliott said. “The truth is whiteboarding leads to group think. If you allow people to submit ideas on their own, not in a room with others, studies show you’ll get more creativity.”
Source: CNBC
