Different Approaches to Return to the Office
One of my colleagues gave me an article,’ Meet the People Who Refused to Go Back to the Office and Lost Their Jobs’. It references Amazon, UPS, Morgan Chase and Boeing mandating that their employees return to the office five days a week. The article quotes workers who were mandated to return, who didn’t and were then laid off and had difficulties finding similar remote work. ”Though a lot of workers seemingly have little choice but to comply with RTO mandates, Dan Kaplan, a senior client partner at Korn Ferry, predicts many will refuse anyway and foresees a “bloodbath” in 2025 with neither employer nor employees backing down. In this same article “Just 8% of jobs posted on LinkedIn were remote, the company says, down from 18% in early 2022. Dan Bladen CEO and Co-Founder of Kadence referenced Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy wanting all Federal employees to return to the office. Musk claimed that remote workers are ‘just pretending to work’. However, ‘Studies have consistently shown that forced RTO policies often yield poor results. A 2023 Gallup Survey found that fully remote and hybrid employees reported higher engagement and lower burnout compared to those working exclusively in the officer. According to research from Stanford, employees are, on average, 13% more productive then their in-office counterparts.’ As another view of this, on December 16, 2024, Stitch Fix, the personal styling service, announced it was subleasing 70% of is San Francisco space and moving towards a leaner workforce and the adoption of a hybrid work model. This is just one example of what many, many companies have decided to do. So we will the ‘come back or your fired’ companies, the hybrid model companies, and also the ‘we have exceptions of employees we don’t want to lose to the competition’ model companies. I’ve been predicting for several years that our 50%-return to office will increase to 60%-return to office, but it may be years if ever before we return to the office, and by then AI will have replaced all of us…
