The Journey Back to the Office
This article is part of the "Hybrid Work For Dummies" ebook , promoted by OfficeRnD.
Employers are desperate to get employees to return to the workplace, but in many cases neither enticements nor mandates prove successful. As tensions rise, employers are at a loss as to how to resume control of the business. Both sides need to be satisfied so an equitable relationship and competitive work environment can exist. From this upheaval a transitional work model called hybrid work accelerated significantly to satisfy the need for both structure and flexibility. Many employers are discovering that hybrid work software analytics can help them optimize office space and productivity that yield significant cost savings.
Understanding the Path to Permanent Change in Work
The mass migration of workers from workplaces to home offices in March 2020 was assumed to be a temporary fix to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. Employers everywhere rushed to keep employees safe and their businesses operating.
Because the situation was largely assumed to be a necessary but temporary blip on the business resiliency plan, few paused to consider that it may have a lasting impact. Many employers were caught off guard to find that the distributed workforce model now appears to be the new normal.
Realizing worker and workplace tensions
As the virus classification moves from pandemic to endemic status, companies are eager to resume business as usual. Unfortunately, there’s nothing usual about employee expectations and motivations.
The driving motivation behind worker pushback against returning to the office full time is a desire for better work/life balance. A majority of workers prefer to work or continue to work from home most or all of the time. Employers, on the other hand, are looking to reduce uncertainties after a period of unprecedented ambiguity. The pandemic created chaos in everything from unexpected expenses in equipping home workers to looser controls over employee behaviors, productivity, team spirit, and job loyalty.
For example, collaboration can freefall in remote work environments. Both formal business groups and informal communities became more siloed and less interconnected, thereby hindering team dynamics, idea exploration, and innovation efforts. It’s widely believed by leadership that bringing employees back under the company roof will unite the workforce, intensify the focus on company goals, spur collaboration and innovation, and generally improve productivity.
However, evidence suggests that not all of that is true. A PwC survey found that a little over a third (34%) of employees say they’re more productive working from home. Executives agree. Over half (52%) report employee productivity improved in work-from-home models. Even so, most leaders believe it’s easier to manage well if managers can see who and what they’re managing.
Given that these two trajectories of employee versus employer drivers have precious few intersecting points, rising tensions and opposing goals will persist. The quest now is to find a compromise that appeases the underlying needs of both camps.
Evolving work models
Initially, employers thought reassembling the distributed workforce in centralized work areas was a matter of issuing a company decree once an all-clear call was made by public health agencies and government officials. After all, that was the traditional course after emergency events. But this time that action didn’t go as planned.
The reason resistance has been largely successful is that workers have more leverage now. For example, unemployment is at a 52 year low in the U.S., thereby giving workers the upper hand in negotiations. The unemployment rate in the EU was 6.0% in June 2022, down from 7.2% a year ago. Unemployment decreased by 2.311 million in the EU and by 1.957 million in the euro area. Unemployment rates are trending similarly in many countries around the world.
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Employers are having to offer a lot more in terms of pay, benefits, and flexibility in workplaces. So far, the results have been unexpected as the majority of workers declined to return to the workplace. Employers then turned more of their attention to innovation, specifically to rethinking and overhauling the nature of work and the structure of the workforce.
Exploring the Benefits of Hybrid Working
Given that efforts to return the workforce to the workplace have proven to be mostly futile, the search for new work models has commenced in earnest. To date, the most promising is the hybrid work model (not to be confused with a flexible work model).
Advantages for employers include more control, mainly via the ability to schedule and manage work done on-premises. This in turn provides greater opportunities for in-person instruction and mentoring, team building, interdepartmental collaboration, silo busting, inspired creativity, real-time oversight, and other benefits. Reduced real estate and employee expenses are also a benefit.
Advantages for employees include more flexibility in work arrangements to accommodate better work/life balance, while still having opportunities to collaborate, network, and socialize on the job. Being in the office also provides younger workers more opportunity to shadow and interact with mentors.
DISCOVERING THE DIFFERENCE: FLEXIBLE WORKING VS HYBRID WORKING
Flexible work pertains specifically to flexibility in the hours an employee works and encompasses a spectrum of options for employers to deploy. The goal is to enable the employee to achieve better work/life balance by allowing them to choose when they work. Employees must still meet productivity goals and total hours for the work period.
Hybrid work pertains specifically to a hybrid mix of environments in which the employee works. This model combines work done in the office with work done at home and can inherently include some attributes of flexible work.
But a hybrid work model has challenges for employees and employers alike. These include:
There are also logistical, cohort, and geographic challenges to manage. But the biggest challenge may be the disconnect between employees and executives. Traditionalist leaders will need to move towards a more progressive style, so their company can remain competitive in the job markets.
With so many differences in attitudes, opinions, needs, and desires, previous work management software won’t be able to accommodate, let alone manage, everything involved. Hybrid work software is designed to manage the many unique aspects of this model to scale over the long term and adapt to new models.
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