Think twice before ordering work-from-home employees to return to the office

(This column originally appeared in The Guardian)

Over the past few months , major corporations such as Disney, Apple, Starbucks and Amazon announced new policies mandating their employees to cut back on working from home and return to their offices for as much as five days a week. The moves were met with backlashes from employees who signed petitions, sent public letters to their CEOs, complained to the press and on social media, and even went on strike.

You would think that I, a business owner, would agree with the executives at those companies. I don’t. Those employees are right and their bosses are making a big mistake. The reality today is that you can’t mandate people to come into the office. Here’s why.

Working from home is an employee benefit.

Ask any HR expert and they’ll tell you that once a benefit is given, it’s extremely difficult to claw it back. Any benefit – including the ability to work from home – is a form of compensation. Employees may have chosen to work at a company because of its remote working benefits. Others may have elected to stay at the company for the same reason. Taking away these benefits is like cutting an employee’s pay. It’s not good policy.

Too many companies are offering this benefit.

Working from home is flexibility and flexibility has become one of the top benefits requested by employees. As such, many companies – as much as 71%, according to one study – have recognized this and offer a work-from-home benefit. People love it. Taking this benefit away means you’re no longer offering something that most of your competitors are offering, which puts you at a significant disadvantage.

It’s easy to quantify the upsides, hard to quantify the downsides.

Working from home has very tangible advantages. Among them: more flexibility, more time around loved ones, better control over one’s hours, improved mental health, lower commute costs, less of a carbon footprint. And – what we found during the pandemic – is that even when employees are working from home, their jobs get done. Of course working in the office has its upsides: It improves culture, fosters innovation and provides mentorship. But – same as working from home - the job also gets done. The problem is that no one can specifically quantify which arrangement works better. Because proving this difference is difficult, making the case for mandating employees to commute to the office is a harder sell.

Working from home is appreciated across all generations.

Working from home isn’t just a younger person’s demand. Turns out it’s extremely popular among older people too. A friend of mine who manages a large accounting firm said that the biggest pushback he gets from requiring people to come into the office comes from his older partners, not his staff. “They’ve been slogging it for 25 years and now they want a better balance,” he said to me. “They were the ones who resisted the most before Covid; now they’re the biggest opponents of returning to the office.” When the older, more experienced workers are the ones who are pushing for more home time, it’s tough to push back.

Most of my clients – small and mid-sized companies – have hybrid plans that allow their employees to work from their homes one or two days a week. They get it. But for those that are still sticking to the be-in-the-office-every-day-or-else policy, here’s my advice: adapting to this new reality isn’t as hard as you think. There’s no need to have a company-wide policy on this issue. You don’t have to get into public fights with your employees. Be smart: push the issue down to your management.

If your managers are comfortable with team members working from home and they’re still meeting their quotas, deliverables and promises, then who are you to argue? If a manager feels that they can run their team better in a face-to-face environment, then that’s their prerogative. As a CEO or owner, you want results. You don’t care how or where the work is getting done, just as long as it’s getting done.

It surprises me that these large companies are mandating a return-to-office policy. They’ve invested heavily in processes, structure and strong management teams to run their teams. If I were the CEO of any of these organizations, I’d punt the work-from-home issue to the people who know their own people the best and let them decide on the issue. Don’t they have more important things to worry about?

On the other hand, watching these big companies fumble the ball is enjoyable. As a small business owner who competes for talent with them, I say: go ahead, take that benefit away. Make your employees angry enough to look for other, better places to work. By doing so you’re helping me.