A survey of 158 U.S. managers revealed that the overwhelming majority have policies in place to return to the office from the back burner, with only 6 considering them important.
About 27% of managers considered maintaining hybrid work a priority. In another survey conducted by Deloitte, 65% of financial executives stated they expect to offer hybrid work arrangements starting this year.
Contrary to what many believe, remote work is growing in the U.S. 20% to 25% of people are working from home at least part of the week, a decrease from 47% during lockdowns, but an increase from 3% before the pandemic.
For increasing numbers of managers, placing teams in a remote environment where they do not enter the office daily has now become the norm, and it never accompanies a decline in productivity. It retains talent, especially among younger individuals.
After the pandemic, nostalgic managers who insisted on forcing people back to the office cited unproven productivity losses, which in reality existed only in their heads, making the normalization of remote work completely reasonable in today’s technological environment.
Providing the freedom to choose through a hybrid model that empowers people rather than constraining their choice of working from home or coming to the office is becoming an increasingly rational option for companies that understand the changing environment. With the progressive availability of bandwidth and technology, it has become easier than ever to adjust work, which was accomplished during the pandemic. Faced with this, the old-school generation of managers who cannot abandon micromanagement have lied when they insisted on returning to pre-pandemic conditions, claiming they recognized the productivity losses from the new situation.
These back-to-office mandates have met a very interesting reality. In the functional labor market, many people have simply decided to leave companies that tried to push them back to the office along with the loss of talent. In other cases…