The Great Return Is Not Going So Great
By Kevin W. Grossman on ERE.net, published on August 24, 2023
Employers and candidates are increasingly at odds about work arrangements.
Growing numbers of employers are instituting return-to-the-office mandates, which aren’t exactly a hit with employees or job candidates. According to a 2023 Greenhouse report, 76% of employees say they’ll actively search for or be open to a new job if their company rolls back flexible work policies, and nearly half of all candidates won’t even apply to a job that doesn’t offer a hybrid or fully remote schedule.
To make matters worse, 42% of companies with return-to-office mandates are experiencing higher levels of employee attrition than they expected, and nearly one-third that enforce these mandates are struggling with recruitment, according to a Unispace report.
As with so many talent-related issues, there are no simple solutions here. Of course, there are many more in-person jobs than remote ones, whether that be in the store, the plant, the office, wherever. And some companies need their employees to be in the office every day or most days. But there’s no escaping the fact that both employees and candidates have a strong preference for flexible work arrangements.
If companies want to fill their open jobs, keep their talent pipelines flowing, maintain high retention levels, and strengthen their employer brands, many may need to recalibrate their thinking regarding flexible work.
While there are benefits to having team members together in the same location, or at least periodically together — benefits related to teamwork, morale, productivity, innovation, company culture, and more — our small team has been remote for years and we’ve done OK.
Meanwhile, I also believe that employers haven’t carefully tracked and measured these metrics and whether flexible work options actually reduce (or improve) them. That seems like a logical and worthwhile undertaking.
However, according to a recent study from economists at MIT and UCLA, productivity dropped 18% when people worked from home. The study included observing data-entry workers in Chennai, India, across two groups — those working from the office and those working from home — over test periods of eight weeks. No matter the validity of this study, there are so many factors that impact productivity, including overall wellbeing and the commute to and from the office versus working remotely.
Although solutions to the flexible-work conundrum will vary from company to company, all employers share one thing in common: the need to recognize that change and compromise are inevitable and a two-way street in the new world of work.
The Impact to Talent Attraction and Recruiting
Make no mistake, this whole situation isn’t merely a difference of opinion between employers and workers over a perk or a people policy. Return-to-the-office mandates go right to the heart of a company’s culture and values — two of the top characteristics job seekers care about when considering prospective employers, as revealed by Talent Board’s most recent candidate experience benchmark research…
