RTO Motivations Warranted?

The U.S. Career Institute reports that by 2025, up to 36.2 million Americans will be working remotely. Currently, 54% of workers want to work fully remotely, with 41% preferring a hybrid schedule, followed by 5% who would choose to work in the office full time. Despite the statistics, enterprises instituting RTO policies (e.g., a return to office in some capacity, three times per week, or permanently) argue their necessity to improve productivity, strengthen collaboration efforts, and drive deeper innovation.

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What enterprises can’t lose sight of is the Future of Work progress over the previous three years. Much has been gleaned from an enterprise and employee perspective about what drives productivity, wellness, and retention. Unfortunately, some enterprises are reverting to full or near-full in-person guidelines. Disney CEO Bob Iger is the latest high-profile executive to require workers to return to the office four days per week, citing more effective collaboration and creative output.

However, some organizations are shifting their stance for other reasons.

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In our second installment this week, we’ll be diving into the “first-mover advantage” and what that means for innovation and resiliency.

Adoption of Future of Work Accelerants

The number two must-know about the Future of Work is that the first-mover advantage (in this case, early adopters of Future of Work-era strategies and solutions) translates into urgency for innovation. During the scary early days of the pandemic, businesses were either struggling for survival…or were thriving. When we think about where we are today, let’s look at the organizations that adopted some of these Future of Work accelerants: they tapped into remote work, became more diverse and inclusive with their workforce and in their workplace, while also improving their workplace culture and overall work optimization strategies.

Businesses also embraced aspects like artificial intelligence and used their technology more expansively. For example, a Vendor Management System (VMS) wasn’t used just for requisitions, but also to build scenarios and leverage predictive analytics to scale the workforce and understand what could happen tomorrow based on today’s numbers. Doing so could lead to smarter and more educated and intelligent-led talent decisions. Thus, there is an urgency for innovation.

This is not simply about thriving, but surviving as well. Those businesses that have adopted some of these accelerants, whether they’re strategic or technology-led, are much more likely to thrive in the months ahead. The first-mover advantage sets these organizations up very nicely for the future.

Thrive Through Understanding and Embracement

The Future of Work Exchange’s architect, Christopher J. Dwyer, highlighted a discussion he had with a director of talent acquisition, who said it was easy for her company to transition to a remote workforce because it was already a hybrid workplace. The company took what it learned in pre-pandemic times over so many years that it was fairly simple to transition to remote work. It already leveraged both HR and contingent workforce technology and had those systems integrated, so it knew where its workers were across the globe — a company with approximately 300 global locations. She said the company had the capability to know who was working on what projects, where they were located, when their assignments ended, and what locations were being hit hard by a COVID-19 surge, which allowed them to react in real time. Speaking with her months later, said Dwyer, the company was thriving because of the lessons learned and its embrace of Future of Work accelerants during the early days of the pandemic.

This is not to say that a business struggling in 2020 couldn’t be thriving today. The first-mover advantage means that enterprises shouldn’t sit back and watch others pass them by in terms of what they’re adopting and embracing from Future of Work, innovation, and progression perspectives. What else is happening out there? What are their peers and competitors adopting from a technology perspective? How are their business leaders managing the workforce? How are they treating their workforce? Why are they losing talent to other organizations? Why are they getting hit harder by The Great Resignation than others?

The next economic recession will be unique because of existing inflation; however, many industries are doing well and thriving because of lessons learned and the collective trauma experienced over the last three years from the pandemic. During the next downturn, companies are likely to weather the storm much better because of the technology they’ve adopted and the new strategies they’ve embraced. The innovative thinking that comes from those decisions makes companies better suited to handle the challenges of today.

Flexibility Cannot be Underestimated

What does this mean for the workplace? In many respects, hybrid is the ideal workplace model because of the flexibility that workers crave. Obviously, many workers are unable to work remotely because of their job description. And, some businesses look at remote and hybrid work models with concerns about productivity and workforce control. However, time and time again, workers have proved that avoiding a 90-minute commute to and from work allows them to be more productive each day.

It also speaks to the flexibility of taking care of life events. The ability to go to the dentist or pick up a sick child from daycare or school can mean a great deal to workers. Workers are humans, not just numbers on a spreadsheet. It doesn’t matter if you’re a contractor that worked 4.5 hours or an employee who has been with the company for 40 years. These are not faceless workers. We are humans and humans crave flexibility. We want the ability to feel connected to the organization.

A famous CEO of the world’s largest search engine said that “the Future of Work is flexibility.” We’ve been saying this for a long time on FOWX and it’s true: the Future of Work is built on flexibility.

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• Now that the FDA has given full approval to the Pfizer vaccine (with Moderna’s vaccine expected to follow suit shortly), it gives more businesses the necessary leverage to mandate vaccines for its staff and workforce. With cases and hospitalizations soaring across the country, many businesses will err on the side of health and safety and begin to mandate that their employees (and contingent workers) be inoculated for in-person work. I fully expect an incredible amount of conversation about this topic in the months ahead as those that choose not to be vaccinated have to grapple with their beliefs versus their jobs.
• There’s a question here that we’re missing, though, that may arise beginning in September: will boosters be mandated for those workers that are eight months past the date of their second Pfizer or Moderna jab (or their one-dose J&J vaccine)? A casual scroll through a personal Facebook feed tells us that there are some individuals that were open to being vaccinated months ago but will draw a hard line at a booster dose. Something to watch, indeed.
• Worker wellness, well-being, and burnout are all very real and very counterproductive issues that are plaguing the business world today. The time has come for business leaders to truly prioritize worker wellness and mental health if they are also prioritizing productivity and better business outcomes, since the two sides cannot converge. With a return to school for working parents, it remains to be seen what types of disruption the Delta variant will unleash. This could add another stressful load to the remote workforce if there’s any type of return to the models that schools had to employ for the 2020-2021 year. Mental health is more important than ever, and businesses must be conscious of their wellness plans well into the latter months of the year (with empathy continuing to be at the forefront of core management approaches).
• One thing that many businesses miss regarding the remote and hybrid work models is how they play into talent acquisition and talent engagement strategies. Remote work isn’t just a Future of Work transformation for the existing workforce, but also a valuable tool in how companies attract new, future talent. The days of early pandemic levels of unemployment are long gone (knock on wood) and “The Great Resignation” that has been ongoing since the spring is resulting into the re-emergence of the long-vaunted “war for talent.” Businesses that are beginning to think about return-to-office plans must keep in mind that, in a world where there if fierce competition for talent, they must offer more than compensatory perks if they are going to attract top-tier workers. Remote options are alluring to today’s highly-skilled workforce, and, many talent acquisition execs will quickly realize that the remote/hybrid models also enable access to new candidates that may not have been historically considered for roles based on their location.
• Proposition 22 was the most expensive ballot measure in California’s history ($220 million, by some estimates) and was recently ruled unconstitutional by Alameda County Superior Court Judge Frank Roesch. Gig tech apps like Uber, Lyft, and others bankrolled the ballot measure, but the rebuke was a decision based on the fact that Prop 22 does not allow “gig workers” to collectively bargain or unionize (hence the “unconstitutional” ruling). Although nearly 60% of voters passed Prop 22 back in November during the general election (which is essentially an exemption to AB5, which was passed in 2019 as a measure to determine a worker’s status as an independent contractor or an employee), the ruling thrusts the measure back through the California court system, where it could take up to a year to reach the state’s Supreme Court. Within its ruling, the court stated that Prop 22 was more about the proponents’ economic interests as well as having a “divided, un-unionized workforce.” Uber, Lyft, and DoorDash are fuming and vowing to appeal, which will provide more fodder for discussion as Prop 22’s now-unconstitutional status slithers through the California court system well into 2022.
• The upcoming Future of Work Exchange Report for 2021 (an Ardent Partners and FOWX research study) finds that the top Future of Work accelerant due to the pandemic was the increase in remote/hybrid work and distributed teams (noted by 72% of businesses), which is not surprising given the environment in which we now live and work. What was interesting and of note is that 70% of organizations that participated in our study also noted that greater digital transformation efforts were accelerated over the past year. Businesses learned very quickly that a flexible technological architecture was a necessity during evolving times, and even greater so as the global market faced incredible challenges. Whether it’s the automation of manual- and paper-based tasks (which became harder to execute in a remote environment), a deeper data-driven approach to core business functions, or a future-ready organization that is equipped to be more agile and dynamic in how it responds to the challenges of tomorrow, becoming a “digital enterprise” should be a top priority for today’s organizational leaders.

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