Return to Office Mandates

It seems that everywhere we turn, there are new return-to-office (RTO) mandates making headlines. Amazon’s CEO, Andy Jassy, recently mandated employees return to the office three days a week beginning in the spring. The same day of the mandate, over 14,000 employees joined a newly-created Slack channel to voice their displeasure with the ruling.

Disney’s executives followed a similar path, only much earlier in January, and, with four mandated days-in-office rather than the three dictated by Amazon. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff mandated three days in office in the midst of the company sunsetting its Future Forum consortium, which, SOMETHING enough, found that flexible working environment were incredibly conducive to productivity and employee engagement.

And, yeah, we all know Elon Musk’s feelings on remote work during his tumultuous time thus far at Twitter. There’s also this nugget from a recent Fortune article:

“But the latest data suggests that partially empty office towers — a feature of city-centers with the rise of remote work — may remain that way. Data from security firm Kastle Systems show that office occupancy in major US cities is only about half of the pre-Covid level.”

Ardent Partners and Future of Work Exchange research has discovered that 82% of businesses relied more on remote and hybrid workplace models in 2022 than they did in 2021, a statistic that proves flexibility is a continued pandemic-era accelerant that has become a permanent fixture of the world of work.

So, in the face of more intrusive RTO mandates, where does this leave the most critical component of the modern enterprise, it workforce?

Well, it’s a complicated quandary, for sure. As the tail end of 2022 swayed more and more towards a likely economic downturn, workers became more focused on keeping their jobs in lieu of the continual quest for flexibility and other benefits. However, that specific focus has seemed to settled a bit; while layoffs are regular news across most industries, the backlash to household CEOs’ RTO mandates proves one major thing: remote work and employee engagement are inherently linked, and more importantly, shouldn’t be separated.

The modicum of control here, the very level of pervasive oversight…it’s all archaic. While it is easily understood that every executive leader desires some semblance of authority over their workforce (which leader wouldn’t?), there is a major difference between control-for-the-sake-of-control and a balance between control and trust. If anything at all, the past three years have proved that remote and hybrid work models are effective in maintaining (and boosting!) productivity,

There is an ongoing war for talent and there will always be a war for talent, no matter the economic, social, or political background of any business era. Simply put: a company’s talent is what propels it into innovation and success. So, then, doesn’t it make sense that every business leader do all that they can to actively engage their workers and ensure a positive, consistent workforce experience?

“When it comes to our talent acquisition strategy, we’re not completely opening the doors for every request from every candidate,” one SVP of Talent Acquisition told me last week. She added, “However, our executive team realizes that we’re not going to compete without the right talent across our many global locations, so, we do what we can to prioritize the candidate experience and ensure that flexibility is embedded into as many roles as possible. We value interoffice collaboration and understand that it’s vital to who we are as an organization…it’s just that we know how much the world has changed and how critical attributes like remote work are for the engagement of our workforce.”

Many leaders and professionals alike typically equate “employee engagement” with growth opportunities and enhanced communication; while these are indeed cornerstones of the overall worker experience, in a talent-driven world as such we live in today, businesses have traverse beyond these aspects to attract and maintain high-quality talent. Workers crave autonomy and flexibility, two pillars of the remote or hybrid workplace model. Professionals want to be trusted in their environments to be productive and to have the flexibility required for better work-life integration. These two attributes together? They are, in essence, the foundation of worker happiness.

And, as we know, happy workers are the ones that are satisfied with their roles and careers and feel much more engaged with their leaders, peers, colleagues, and organization. The link between remote/hybrid work and employee engagement is one that cannot, and will not, be broken.