Who wants to go back to work and who wants to work-from-home ?
In a recent poll, we asked
"...What is the preference between work-from-home,/Hybrid/Return to workplace..."
Within a day we had hundreds of replies and over 16,000 impressions of people who had reviewed the results. The quick snapshot is 4% wanted to return 100% to the office. WFH preference was 56%, hybrid was 40%.
We work closely with a range of clients in our consulting and recruiting activities. A few have recently sold off the majority of their bricks and mortar and gone almost 100% remote. At the other end of the spectrum, others have told their workforce to get ready to return to the office. This 2nd option has created a wave of talented professionals looking for another option.
We've been contacted by many senior leaders that don't want to return back to work. Many have already made a change and the coming year will see many more pack up and make a significant change. The past few years of work-from-home has increased the quality of their lives or relationships and in many cases they feel their team is as productive or more productive than they were when they were all in the office together. Some have relocated their families away from more expensive urban centers, enrolled the kids in new schools and returning physically to the old location isn't an option now. It's an interesting time for employers and employees. Flexibility and adaptability for many employers needs to be the pathway forward to attract and retain top talent.
领英推荐
We talk to hundreds of candidates every week and the majority are telling us if they can't work from home they're not interested in talking about the career opportunity. This is unprecedented prior to 2019. We used to get questions about location and flexibility. The game changer now is the empowerment of many potential job-seekers spelling out their expectations to us. It's definitely not an employer driven market right now.
What are your success stories recently? What is your company doing right now with regards to a return-to-work policy and how is that sitting with you and your colleagues? Are employees telling you the truth or secretly on the hunt for something new? How many colleagues have moved away and the commute now is unrealistic? And what will the cost be to companies when some of their top talent leave for a more attractive flexible work arrangement?
We're curious to continue talking with company leaders more in the coming weeks about their recent experience around turnover/churn, talent attraction and retention strategies. It's definitely a brave new world for many employers and employees.
Nuke Compositor
2 年great article! One of the many skills that makes my current employer so adept at managing a Work From Home workforce is clear, concise email writing. If there is ever any question about what needs to be done, a few words typed back and forth in an email cced to our small team are enough to get the job done efficiently and reference later. If anything, we are even more efficient now than we were when we worked on projects before the pandemic. Sure, working from home took some getting used to, but when you think about it, what's the big difference between sending an email to someone in the next room or hundreds of miles away?