Employees with flexible work models surveyed by Future Forum, Slack’s consortium focused on the ... [+]
In the latest wave of orders for office mandates, Disney CEO Bob Iger demanded employees return at least four days a week come March. His reasons echo Apple CEO Tim Cook’s defense of the tech giant’s in-person work policy—which sparked workers to launch a petition—insisting in-office work is essential to innovation and collaboration.
But as leaders continue to call for the return to office, new data shows workers at companies with flexible work policies—where remote work is welcome and employees have the opportunity to go to an office—say the compromise is working. Employees with flexible work models surveyed by Future Forum, Slack’s consortium focused on the future of work, were 57% more likely to say their company culture has improved over the past two years compared to fully in-person workers—citing flexible work policies as the primary reason their culture is improving.
But flexible and hybrid work is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Companies that are experimenting rather than returning to pre-pandemic norms are the ones succeeding, says Sheela Subramanian, cofounder and VP of Slack’s Future Forum.
“The thing we’re forgetting is that this is not the end of this massive experiment. We’re still in the middle of it,” Subramanian says. “And those saying, ‘It’s over. We’re all going back to how things used to be,’ they’re getting a lot of pushback and resistance from their employee base.”
Future Forum has surveyed more than 10,000 global, full-time workers since its 2020 launch. This quarterly pulse surveyed 10,243 employees between November 16 and December 22, 2022.
Sixty-seven percent of respondents said they prefer a hybrid working arrangement with access to a physical workspace as an option. But when it comes to offering flexible work policies, executives are most concerned about employee engagement, company culture, productivity and innovation, says Kate Lister, president of Global Workplace Analytics.
Twenty-five percent of executives in Future Forum’s survey cited “culture is negatively impacted” as a top concern in offering more flexibility and flexible work policies.
However, compared to the 35% of workers who are fully in-office, flexible workers are equally or more likely to feel connected to their immediate teams, direct manager and employer’s values, the survey found.
“[Bosses] are realizing that if they want to keep their people, they’re going to have to compromise,” Lister says. “Even those that are very against it like Elon Musk are seeing, now that we’re facing recession and pressures for cost reduction, the potential for remote work to dramatically reduce their office space.”
At SymphonyAI, the enterprise AI company is finding ways to ensure that when workers are in the office, “it is productive for what it was intended to bring them into the office for,” chief people officer Jennifer Trzepacz says. How? They’re normalizing “in-office” notices instead of just out-of-office messages. “You know how you have an out-of-office message that says ‘I am out of office; I’m not available’? We want to have it [read] ‘I’m in the office; I’m not available,’” she says.
Three quarters of Future Forum respondents said they use the office for collaborating with co-workers and clients, facilitating in-person meetings and building camaraderie while 15% said they use it for having a quiet space to focus on work.
Lister says hybrid working arrangements have “always led to higher engagement than either fully remote or fully in the office.”
“I’ve seen this survey after survey,” Lister says. “[Employees] will tell you that the culture has gotten better during the pandemic because they felt they were listened to and felt more trusted. And that started to wear off after 2021.”
Now, companies are redefining culture, investing in new ways to create connections in a hybrid world, Subramanian says.
“The most successful executives are the ones who are setting the overall guardrails in terms of what they’d like to see,” Subramanian says. “And then they’re getting out of the way.”
