Why threatening layoffs to enforce a return to the office mandate is not a good talent strategy

I believe there is a place for the physical office in the future of work. I am not against the office. Furthermore, hybrid work policies should not be a compromise between employees and their organizations about how much time employees should spend in the office. That's what we have today in many organizations. Executives have split the baby to appease employees. If they had their druthers, many executives would want all employees in the office five days a week. They'd like to go back to the way things were before the pandemic. Employees dutifully engaged in their daily commutes.?

Recently, the Wall Street Journal reported that Vanguard Group, Paycom, and other employers are using the threat of layoffs to force employees to comply with return to the office mandates. This is the best evidence for the compromise I just described because of these employers. Now, that the executives at these firms feel they have an advantage in the marketplace, they're taking advantage of employees. They know that employees are afraid of layoffs. So, they're using that fear to get what they wanted all along - everyone back in the office. ?

That's not a winning talent strategy long-term. Here's why.

The Covid-19 pandemic changed everything by accelerating trends in the global economy and waking up employees. ?

When we look back at the evolution of work, we will see the postwar period from 1946 until 2007 as the golden age of the physical office. During this period, the daily commute made perfect sense. Working together required physical proximity. We needed a technological infrastructure sufficient to enable us to perform differently. However, the office's importance began its decline, as imperceptible as it was, with the rise of cloud computing and social media technologies. These digital technologies changed our world fundamentally. Executives are only now beginning to catch up.

The pandemic was a global wake-up call. How long would we have continued like zombies commuting to work without it? How long would we have droned on neglecting our well-being without it? Didn't the pandemic demonstrate how fragile life is? Didn't it illuminate for all of us that time squandered is time lost? Ultimately, that's why return-to-office mandates will only work for a while. We've lost too much to go back to the way things were. Like going back to an old love, it isn't necessary. We broke up for a good reason.

This brings me to what is the heart of the matter. In the pre-pandemic world, employees bore the entire cost of commuting. Employers require employees to be in the office from 9 to 5. It was on the employee to get up and commute to work on time. Whether an employee lived 15 mins or 2 hours from the office, the cost was born entirely by the employee. But let's consider whether employers would require employees to commute to work if employers paid the commute cost. Imagine if the employer shouldered the cost of the time and transportation. That would eat into profit margins, no doubt. Would employers be as quick to mandate the daily commute if employers bore that cost?

The Federal Reserve Bank of New York calculated that Americans who were working from home reclaimed 60 million hours that they used to spend commuting to an office each day. Would the world's employers be willing to compensate the world's employees for returning to the office five days a week? I think not. If employers were required to pay employees for commuting time and transportation costs, wouldn't they be more intentional about requiring people to be in the office? Post-pandemic employees are more aware of the costs and want employers to be more empathetic about them. The worst of all worlds is employees commuting to the office to participate in Zoom calls. It's the starkest reminder that there's a better, more productive way to get work done.

Several weeks ago, Elon Musk learned precisely what might happen when you give employees a clear choice about working gruelingly long hours in the office. After laying off nearly half of Twitter's workforce, 1/3 of the remaining employees accepted Musk's offer for three months' severance instead of remaining with Musk for "hardcore" Twitter. The response caused Musk to close Twitter's office and rethink his strategy.

Younger workers have different values from older generations. Companies need to be cognizant that some younger workers are less willing to put in long hours or give up their nights and weekends for a career," says Bhushan Sethi, Peter Brown, and?Yalin Zhao, all from PwCs people and organization practice. What may have been confined to a generational cohort pre-pandemic is now much more widespread across the economy. It's a mistake to see the current economic environment as management's opportunity to roll the clock back. The shortage of workers is a decades-long trend, and shortsighted employers will make a big mistake in treating employees as objects. Greater empathy, flexibility, and intentionality are investments in the employee experience. They will help employers sustainably attract and retain.

Younger workers want employers to invest in them through training and development. They want greater flexibility and autonomy in where, when, and how they work. They also want greater transparency and consistency between stated values and corporate action. Executives tend to see employees as a cost rather than an investment. That's antiquated thinking.

Digital technologies have caused a paradigm shift from hierarchies to networks. Younger generations have grown up on social media. They'll use it when it suits them to expose organizational hypocrisy. And that is a crucial reason why return-to-office mandates have yet to work and won't work going forward. In Cascades, transformation and change expert, international keynote speaker, and bestselling author, Greg Satell writes

"Today, digital technology helps connections to form with blazing speed, upending traditional forces that drove power in the twentieth century. We no longer need bureaucracies to carry a message, or even, strictly speaking, to organize work. In fact, traditional institutions are finding that conventional hierarchies are often too slow and cumbersome to function in the world today."

The office is the physical embodiment of what's ailing workers and the organizations they serve. The pandemic demonstrated that organizations needed new digital capabilities to increase resilience. The post-pandemic era is revealing that modern workers need new skills and capabilities to create innovative organizations. The old ways of work are burning everyone out. Communication and priority overload are symptoms. The sickness is the hierarchies and ways of working that are no longer fit for purpose. Mandating that employees commute to work five days a week may be the quintessential example.

When the return to the office debate was at its peak, technology executives were among the loudest to mandate a return to the office. They said that innovation required the office to create serendipitous encounters where an idea or innovative spark would occur. Apple's Tim Cook was among the loudest voices on this issue. But it wasn't the office creating the spark. It was the conversations. If I go to a communal space and don't speak with anyone, there's not likely to be an innovative spark. The spark is in the chance encounter that turns into a conversation. ???