The Resurgence of Return-to-Office Mandates: A Closer Look

Understanding the Shift Back to Office Culture

In recent years, the workplace landscape has undergone a significant transformation due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Many companies embraced remote and hybrid working as the new norm, enabling employees to work from home, allowing more employees (such as caregivers and employees with disabilities or who were neurodiverse) to access roles they might not previously have been able to. However, as the world gradually recovers from the pandemic, a growing number of organisations are reintroducing return-to-office mandates. So why are so many companies pushing for a return to traditional office environments, is remote working going to go away, and how is this going to affect employees?

Why are Companies pushing for a return?

In-Person Collaboration

The argument I have heard most companies use for implementing return-to-office policies is the perceived benefits of in-person collaboration.

It is true that face-to-face interactions can foster stronger and quicker relationships among team members, allowing impromptu chats in the kitchen or over the water cooler, which are informal. Employees are less likely to call each other over Teams just for a chat, meaning that relationships sometimes don't get any further than that of superficial work-colleagues. This in turn can lead employees who remote work to feel isolated and less of a team member. Employees can use breakouts and in-person meetings to work through problems and brainstorm ideas, in a way that simply isn't the same virtually.

It's also true that email conversations can sometimes lead to conflict in a way that in-person dialogue doesn't; being able to read faces and hear tone of voice makes a huge difference to how we perceive intent. Conflict is a natural part of life, we will not always agree with everyone, and being able to work through conflict at work can sometimes create ideas and innovation.

Employee Engagement and Company Culture

Another argument used is the desire to maintain employee engagement and strengthen company culture. Remote work can dilute a company's culture, making it difficult for employees, especially new hires, to fully immerse themselves in the organisation's values and beliefs. This seems to be especially true for more established and corporate companies who work on a very traditional culture model.

However, lots of companies have embraced remote and hybrid working and still feel that they have a fantastic culture which is embraced through the company. Companies like Automattic and Zapier prioritise quality hiring processes to get the right people and an employee-centric culture to keep them. The difference - it's more effort than the traditional model of enforcing a culture and requires modelling from the top down.

Productivity Concerns

Organisations also cite the fact that there is less visibility over employee's work output and that remote working has an effect on productivity. In reality, when I have pushed back on this organisations have struggled to show evidence to support this. It might be easier to see whether an employee is working or under-performing in the office, but the fact is that good employees will work hard whether they are at home or in the office. Employees who are trusted and given flexibility tend to work harder, as they are proud of the work they produce. Employees who slack off at home, sadly, will also slack off in the office. These are not employees you want in your business full stop. Two options; improve your hiring practices so you don't employ them in the first place and if you do make an error make sure you have robust performance management processes in place to manage them. This should be the same whether your workforce are office-based or remote.

I also find that people that don't trust their employees to get work done remotely are the ones that might not be great at self-motivating and working from home themselves...

A massive step back?

Research indicates a significant portion of the workforce prefers the option to work remotely, citing reasons such as improved work-life balance and reduced commuting stress. Many employees were recruited on a remote or hybrid basis, and whilst their contracts may state that their work location is the office and that home-working was only temporary, after four years is it fair to expect them to completely change their mode of working? What if they accepted a job with a long commute, because they were of the understanding that they were home-based? There's also the possibility that depending on their contract wording, employees could argue that remote or hybrid working is an implied term of their contract due to custom and practice.

Abandoning remote and hybrid working and flexible working policies has a considerably more negative impact on women. Women with children are 50% more likely than men to be the primary caregiver, and women are more likely to provide unpaid care than men in every age group up to 75 years. This in turn has an impact on their absence rates which are higher than mens and higher than non-caregivers. Removing remote working and reducing the prevalence of flexible working as a company wide policy, means that a section of the workforce are going to struggle to juggle their responsibilities with their work.

Employees with disabilities and who are neurodiverse are also more negatively impacted; for many of these employees, the ability to work from home was the only thing that made accessing a regular job in the workforce accessible. And while these employees can request flexible working as their statutory right, it's not hard to wonder what effect the return to office will have on diversity and inclusion recruitment practices.

Choosing with your feet

I feel passionately that remote working is the future and that organisations who are moving back to a full-time office model are short-sighted and reneging on their diversity policies.

It also doesn't match up with what we know about work in the future; tech and AI will play an ever bigger role, and more things will be automated. Gen Z are already showing that their work motivations are different to previous generations; they prioritise work-life balance, mental health, diversity and inclusion and corporate social responsibility. Gen Alpha are likely to take this even further. Companies really need to start thinking long-term if they want to attract the best new talent, as younger workers simply won't accept the same sub-standard employee care that older workers have put up with.