It’s actually quite incredible when you really think about it: over the past several months, we’ve gone through several phases of the COVID-19 pandemic:
- A Delta variant-led wave of cases and hospitalizations that rivaled last winter’s surge.
- A brief lull, in which the Thanksgiving holiday kicked off what should have been a time for families to kickstart holiday plans that looked much different than 2020.
- An Omicron variant-fueled surge that saw double and, at times, triple the amount of caseloads of the worst of the previous winter’s wave.
And now, we’re heading into the spring months (in the Northern Hemisphere) with yet another state of optimism that is actively guiding our personal and professional lives. The CDC has new facial covering recommendations based on risk levels predicated on county-level hospitalization rates and caseloads per 100,000 citizens.
If you watched the State of the Union address last week, you may have noticed that very few individuals in the room wore facial coverings during the event. As someone who routinely masks up in grocery stores and other indoor venues (even after three Moderna doses and while living in a heavily vaccinated state), this was something that I figured could bother some people…however, it’s clear that the greater direction of this pandemic is heading into a phase that promotes less restrictions and mandates.
And, speaking of the SOTU address: President Biden did at one point during his speech mention the much-vaunted “return-to-office” plans, stating, “It’s time for America to get back to work and fill our great downtowns again with people. People working from home can feel safe and begin to return to their offices. We’re doing that here in the federal government. The vast majority of federal workers will once again work in person.”
While the President was obviously ecstatic about the direction of the pandemic and wanted to capture this moment in front of a gigantic live audience, I fear that many business leaders will take this as a sign that it’s okay to rush workers back to offices without actually thinking of the flexibility and productivity gains that their talent has experienced over the past two years.
The conversations were due, especially from the moment that the first signs of the Omicron surge were beginning to slow just a few weeks ago. And now, business leaders face an existential question: how do they balance the need for in-person collaboration with the specter of talent retention risk hanging overhead? Is there a fine line between a return-to-office mandate and a softer approach, such as recommended office days? Will a too-quick, sudden “return to the days of old” alienate the workforce?
Future of Work Exchange research found that, on average, upwards of 43% of the typical enterprise’s total workforce operated in a remote or hybrid capacity heading into 2022. That number is probably much higher considering where we are today after the Omicron surge. Asking such a wide swath of the workforce to make such a critical call about their workstyle at this point in the game is, to be very, very blunt, asking too much.
While we don’t need to rehash the benefits, all of the signs are clear: workers enjoy flexibility, they enjoy the enhanced work-life integration, and they are fruitful in how productive they can be when they’re not wasting hours of each day on a commute. Business leaders cannot, and should not, expect total adherence and a willingness to leave what has been working so well over the past two years.
These articles, even though they are optimistic at heart, aren’t helping the situation. What we sometimes forget is that there’s a stark difference between feeling safer in a movie theater or restaurant now versus up and abandoning a workplace structure that has become the norm for the past 24 months. I wasn’t joking last week when I stated that, for real, we weren’t going back.
Being optimistic about the current state of the pandemic is one thing. Transforming that optimism into a reason to bring millions upon millions of workers back into the office when the remote and hybrid infrastructure has revolutionized how work is done? That is something much, much different. The move to remote and hybrid work was a reactive measure when it was first needed in March 2020. Two years later, it’s become a permanent fabric of the Future of Work.
