This post was originally published on Remote Rebellion. Michelle is a force of nature when it comes to connecting remote job searchers with genuine remote companies. These are her musings on forcing people back to the office - with my own musings in between (in italics).
Blackrock and JPMorgan are the latest large corporations to enforce a return to the office policy JPMorgan is going full on-site, specifying 5 days a week for its MDs and Blackrock is mandating it to all its employees, ‘graciously’ allowing them a whole day every week to work remotely.
These two are getting added to the ‘Remote Work Vilains’ list that we posted about earlier this year. Thankfully there are many more companies being added to the ‘Heroes’ list every week!
Technically, remote means “anywhere that’s not the office” - only that during the pandemic “not the office” effectively meant “at home”, and within commuting distance of the original office. This has, in practice, changed the meaning of the word remote for many companies - they seem not to understand that remote can be quite far removed from their headquarters
According to a study conducted in April/ May 2023:
“Desire to work outside the office is high among remote-capable workers, with about 7 in 10 saying they’d choose to work from home “all of the time” (37%) or “most of the time” (35%).
Just 6% would opt to work remotely “rarely or never” and the remaining 23% would choose to work from home “some of the time”.
So why do these companies insist on forcing people into the office, when research shows that very few actually want to go into the office so often?
These are multi-billion-dollar companies that must have done the research.
My opinion on this? Fear and overwhelm.
Rarely do executives ask for open-ended research. More often than not they request data that supports their own worldview. And as an executive, going back to the office does not mean “going back to the office”. A lot of executive work is social in nature, so the office is not a disruption. And it’s difficult to step out of one’s own bubble and understand that maybe working in an office isn’t exactly helpful if you are trying to concentrate on code or have a conversation while seated in an open office.
Fear. Most people do not enjoy change. That includes those that tell you the opposite. Distributed teams by default require a lot of change, change that feels far away and unmanageable. And who wants to admit they need support?
Overwhelm. Leading distributed teams requires a different set of skills. Leading a company used to feel effortless, easy even. Now, without the immediate feedback about what works and what doesn’t it feels - uncomfortable. What if I am a “bad” leader (whatever that means)? What if my boss finds out that I can’t do this?
It’s easier to push for getting back to the before-times. Especially if you don’t have any support as a people manager or executive.
I’m curious to see how this affects things and want to use Blackrock as an example to see how the company is faring now and we can compare in 6- 12 months' time.
The 4 things we’re going to look at are:
Company profits
Employee attrition
Employee satisfaction
Diversity and equity
Company profits
Admittedly I know very little about the ins and outs of huge corporations' financials, so rather than trying to understand all of the data points- let’s just use one-EPS
EPS, for those who don’t know, stand for ‘earnings per share’. This is the monetary value of earnings per outstanding share of common stock for a company. It is a key measure of corporate profitability and is commonly used to price stocks.
As of March 2023, this was 7.93
Employee Attrition
Attrition is the departure of employees from the organisation for any reason.
As of 28 May 2023, LinkedIn reported 25,619 employees, up 1% from the previous month, with the Median employee tenure- 4 years.
Employee Satisfaction
Now this one is a difficult one to measure and not only does poor employee satisfaction have a short-term effect on productivity and lead to higher attrition rates, but long term it can have a real negative impact on the whole company culture which again affects profits in the end.
All I have access to gauge this is the Glassdoor ratings which as of 28 May 2023, looks ‘OK’…
Diversity and equity
It’s a no-brainer that remote work positively impacts diversity and equity. Remote first companies hire people regardless of where they’re from, and where they live. It also opens up a multitude of doors to working parents, carers and those with mental and physical impairments.
Now of course I know 1 data point (company) is not enough to use as evidence and even if I had the time to analyse 100 companies, it would be difficult to pin the results down to the ‘return to the office’ policy- good old correlation vs causation.
However, it will be interesting to see all the same, don’t you think?
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