The Critical Hybrid Work Issue That Companies Should Tackle Now

Hybrid work isn’t going away — at least, not if employees have their say. 

New data from Glint reveals that 87% of employees would prefer to stay remote at least half of the time, even after it’s safe to return to their workplace. In other words, only 13% want to work primarily in person going forward.

Notably, most employees — 56% — would like a hybrid mix of in-person and remote. And even as more companies welcome employees back to in-person workplaces, remote work is still skyrocketing — despite a major potential downside. 

Read on for more insights from Glint and LinkedIn data on: 

• how employers are responding with more remote opportunities 
• how candidates’ expectations are evolving
• why a big challenge facing a work-from-home world will be, oddly, work-life balance 

Remote job postings continue to rise

You might expect remote work to diminish as pandemic restrictions are lifted and more employees can safely return to work. But surprisingly, the exact opposite is happening, according to the latest LinkedIn data. 

The share of remote job posts has continued to rise over recent months, despite loosening workplace restrictions. Remote job posts — job posts that are either labeled as “remote” or include keywords like “work from home” — grew by 2.4x from May 2020 to May 2021 on LinkedIn globally, ballooning from about 6% of all job posts to almost 14% in the latest data. 

Flexibility has become a top priority in recent months

Employers that offer more remote job opportunities are in a good position to attract talent — flexible work has become a top priority for candidates over the last few months. 

LinkedIn’s Talent Drivers survey asks members to select the most important factors when considering a new job; between January 2021 and May 2021, flexible working arrangements rose from the seventh-most important factor to the fourth-most important.

It’s not hard to see why employees and candidates are seeking more remote options — and why employers have been so receptive to those demands. 

It’s largely a win-win for both parties: Remote work encourages greater diversity; it hasn’t hurt productivity the way many expected it to; and as Glint’s recent Employee Well-Being Report revealed, employees at “remote-friendly” organizations are more likely to feel safe speaking their minds and to feel that their leaders value different perspectives. 

The surprising challenge of remote work: maintaining work-life balance

But despite all those positives, employers (and employees, for that matter) could be overlooking a significant downside to remote work. 

According to the same Glint data referenced above, employees at “remote-friendly” organizations — those with a large share of remote job posts on LinkedIn — are 32% more likely to say they struggle with work-life balance.

Maybe you’d expect working from home to improve work-life balance — after all, you have more time at home. There’s no commute, and you’re not stuck in the office for hours. You can easily transition between work tasks and home life — at least, in theory. 

In reality, the lack of clear boundaries between work and home life can feel like a muddled mess, as this data suggests. When work can fit into virtually any moment or any place, it’s easy for it to creep into every moment and every place. 

So, remote work can negatively impact work-life balance. 

That’s a big deal — bigger than you might realize. 

Not convinced? Scroll back up to the graphic on candidates’ top priorities when considering a new job. 

Month after month, the single most important factor is the same: good work-life balance. 

For many employers and employees, the benefits of remote work will still outweigh any negative impacts to work-life balance — but just because the pros outweigh the cons doesn’t mean the cons disappear. 

Burnout is on the rise, and companies hoping to attract and retain talent are working to find ways to address it — from more time off and open discussions about mental health to reevaluating your company culture to simple tactics like encouraging calendar blocking. Beyond that, LinkedIn recently gave all employees a paid week off, along with offering no-meetings days, mental health resources, and burnout training for managers. 

Final thoughts

While the past two years have underscored that nothing is certain, it sure looks like the newfound popularity of remote work is going to outlast the pandemic that sparked it.

If that’s the case, don’t be surprised if you see work-life balance become a bigger point of emphasis in recruiting, talent management, and employee engagement over the next few years.

Embracing remote work may be the right move for many. And while this post-pandemic shift is sure to bring new challenges — particularly for those trying to maintain work-life balance — employees and employers will have the opportunity to continuously adopt and adapt new solutions that make this new world of work work for them. 

Methodology

This analysis explored the workforce sentiment about a range of employee experience domains at companies that have posted higher versus lower rates of remote-friendly job postings on LinkedIn. Some 375 companies around the globe were grouped into three evenly sized buckets based on relative volume of remote job postings (percentage of job postings flagged as allowing remote work). Companies in the bottom and top groups were compared on a range of domains reported in this article to derive the sentiment insights of organizations investing more (vs. less) into remote work. Work setting preference insights were derived from Glint’s Ideal Work Setting item, administered to over 300,000 employees at over 60 organizations globally. A “remote job” is defined as a job post on LinkedIn where either the poster explicitly labeled it as “remote” or if the job contained keywords like “work from home” in the listing.

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