Just 6 out of 158 U.S. CEOs said they’ll prioritize bringing workers back to the office full-time in 2024, according to a new survey released by the Conference Board.
Why it matters: Executives are increasingly resigned to a world where employees don’t come in every day, as hybrid work arrangements — mixing work from home and in-office — become the norm for knowledge workers.
Zoom in: “Maintain hybrid work,” was cited as a priority by 27% of the U.S. CEOs who responded to the survey, conducted in October and November.
- A separate survey of chief financial officers by Deloitte, conducted in November, found that 65% of CFOs expect their company to offer a hybrid arrangement this year.
State of play: “Remote work appears likely to be the most persistent economic legacy of the pandemic,” write Goldman Sachs economists in a recent note.
- About 20%-25% of workers in the U.S. work from home at least part of the week, according to data Goldman cites.
- That’s below a peak of 47% during the pandemic but well above its prior average of around 3%.
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Good luck. People would rather quit and find another job than come back to the office.
I quit my job nearly a year ago, but RTO was the symptom of a larger micromanaging-asshat problem that appeared after a short coup in management.
Still, moved to a new job with familiar peers from an old job where the toxic asshattery self-corrected during the pandemic: micromanaging dicks couldn’t cope with mandated WFH and got themselves new jobs, so the only ones left were actually good managers. WFH was just the symptom of good management, and the canary in the coal mine.
This shop kept 1% desks as ‘hotel’ spots, and a rotating stuckee to receive packages, but the rest of the space was given back; and it’s now hiring from across the country to get the best talent.
I remember reading about a Seattle based company that had like tripled the size of their staff during the pandemic by poaching engineers from other companies simply by offering them remote/hybrid options. The CEO said that it was the easiest time they ever had filling positions and expanding their business.
I haven’t been to my desk in over two years. I heard they turned it into a shrine to my spiritual presence.
I’m not kidding.
Can we have photographs of said shrine? Always wanted me a nice shrine.
Don’t have one to share. I’ve been remote so long that we’ve actually moved to a new unit since I was last in the door. I don’t even know where my desk fucking is lmaoo
lol why do you still even have a desk?
For the shrine. Duh!
As it should be. Om Shri u/Gradually_Adjusting
I grant protection against commutes.
Please sir, bless my job search that I may find remote work.
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I worked for a company over two years and never set foot in the door. And they contracted me out to other companies that I also never set foot in. Then I got laid off and now work… for a company I’ve never been to, subcontracted to another company I’ve never been to for a government agency I’ve never set foot in.
I haven’t seen a coworkers face in person since 2020. I almost did once when I was working from a rental in Orlando while my family had a month long vacation at the same time my boss was there for his kid’s baseball tournament, but we didn’t wind up meeting up.
I haven’t even had a desk in ten years, and I haven’t met 90% of the people I work with.
I just got a job that’s with a company based in another province. I have no desk, I have not met anyone from the company in-person, and I may well never meet anyone from it in-person.
My company just finished a multi-million dollar office buildout and we all worked from home for 6 months while it happened. Now we’re back in the office the only people really into it are the managers… Who have private offices. With doors. The rest of us get “hotelling” without cubicle walls.
But they did it for us, they say. Because, ya know, we were all begging for a louder, more distracting work environment and a fancy kitchen with 140" ultra wide displays and not enough cabinets for personal storage
Open plan is the worst. I don’t need all my co-workers to see me scratching myself.
The half-walls we have are lower than the webcams on the monitors. Which means they pick up EVERYTHING so people have to mute until they have something to say. I had a meeting that included someone like 10 desks away and I just muted and talked through their mic
Half our computers didn’t have webcams, so people would do the meeting on their phones instead, and many of them didn’t have headphones, so the meeting would be a bunch of echoes around the room. Fucking ridiculous. And the stupidest part was that it was an office in a manufacturing facility and we all worked hybrid schedules. Even when we were there, all of our communication was on Slack and all of our meetings were on Zoom. None of us had to ever be there for any good reason. And if we weren’t there, they could have gotten rid of the office added more production lines. I’m glad I’m not there anymore. The only good part of that job was I got to work from home half the time.
Brutal. One of the worst parts for me is that the majority (I’m talking 90%+) of my work communication is with people in another state…so what do we gain by having me in the office 3 days a week? The only real benefit I see is that it will impress clients…but we only have clients visit a few times a year.
The worst part is that the open office plan has been shown time and time again to actually decrease work output yet somehow people are still pushing for it.
Yep, it’s total shit but hey, the pictures of it look nice!
I’ve been asking everyone at work to find me a single study that says open offices are good for productivity
I guarantee that there were some in the mid 1990s when it was a new concept and few people had implemented it. Now we have a generation of people who never looked back since.
It would be a real shame if productivity were to fall off a cliff due to all the distractions. A real shame.
Right before the pandemic my company moved to a new office. It was an hour-long commute from my house (the previous office was a 15 minute walk), located downtown next to a homeless shelter and an abandoned casino, with an open-office concept (the previous office had many enclosed rooms, though we did share them), and the kitchen had a commissary where we could buy snacks. The executive was very proud of the new digs and spent a fortune on the decor.
I considered it a huge downgrade. The millions of deaths and long-Covid cases aside, Covid-19 was pretty awesome.
I’m pretty convinced that RTO was another way to do layoffs without severance or “bad” press. What I would like to see now are more job roles finding freedom in working times. I think many jobs have strict scheduling for a reason, but I suspect more jobs don’t require you to be physically present all the time to get it done.
I don’t know about that. I work a office job and often deal with people from all over the world. Getting everyone online at the same time for a meeting or phone call is really difficult.
Yes I can send emails but sending an email and not getting a response till next morning really eats into timelines.
We can have video meetings and phone calls and share screens so I fully understand WFH and support it. That said having no requirements for work time I think would be really bad.
I didn’t mean to intend not to set up good working times with your teams. Scheduling will always be a challenge but that’s something that leadership should give teams the freedom to decide what works best for them. Especially on global teams, some people would like to rotate, some would rather work on evenings for them, etc… That’s for the members to figure out. What I mean is for roles like say Social workers who do need to make in person visits, get more freedom in their working hours and not having to spend their time at a desk where there’s no real value.
To put this another way.
If your employee is capable of working from home, and an employee has to be home, would you rather them work or take the day off?
Saying full time in office sounds nice. But employers are going to choose to have a working associate over a non-working associate.
It’s a funny situation when it comes to government work, because technically the job doesn’t actually produce anything. There are no shareholders and no profits. If an asshat micromanager wants to see a bunch of people keeping their office seats warm, they don’t give a shit about productivity.
My office would genuinely rather I take the day off, and that mindset is never going to change. Luckily, I get a decent amount of remote time, but there is literally no reason that it couldn’t just be 100% remote.
I worked for a government contractor for about 4 years. About half the year there was nothing to do, but retraining and retaining talent was so difficult, that it was just more cost effective to have people sit around and do nothing. And since the boss was really the government paying the bills, nobody really cared most of the time.
I hear they went remote 100% after I left.
Where I work, everything can be done remotely. We use cloud based software for everything and teams for company meetings. We’re still required to come into the office. If you can’t make it in for that day, you need to use PTO. We cannot choose to take the day unpaid either. I do not have the option to work while home.
I would think once we get past the commercial property owners bitching about losing their shirts that the actual business owners would realize that the savings from renting much less office space would drive work from home. It is massively expensive to maintain office space for people.
The commercial property owners and the business owners are the same people.
Somehow they manage to bitch about RTO while saving a fortune downsizing on office space.
I’m sure there were sneaky C suite jerks who tried to use return to office to filter out some headcount, but I’m not sure it would actually be wise from a practical standpoint.
If office workers can get their work done at home, there almost certainly also doing extra work, 15 more minutes here, 30 more minutes there, because they’re already at home. Spending a few more minutes isn’t going to get them stuck in worse traffic. It’s not going to mean their 7 year old is home alone. They won’t be late for dinner.
The only people who lose in a remote work paradigm are the people who spent their time wandering around “working” by dropping in on their direct reports. Surprise, it turns out we don’t actually need that!
laughs in factory worker
Stilll helps factory workers have better commutes. Everyone who wants to work from home should be able to, because it helps the people who want to go in or have to.
I hope, as commuting becomes mostly a thing only for people who can’t work from home, the people who do work from home start moving out of the housing near those jobs so people who have to be on the floor can move in.
Just imagine, small town America might be saved!
cries in public service worker
sobs in retail worker
Yeah I like to bring up when talking about WFH, there should be a pay bump for required on-site workers. If that means physical laboring jobs get a yearly % increase or whatever that I don’t get, no skin off my back, and then it’s harder to pit worker against worker
It is inherently unfair, but not all work can be done remotely.
Just take the work home. Lazy people I swear. /s
Unless I can take my blood samples home with me, it appears I’ll be left behind in that trend
Can they not fax you the blood?
I know right, but apparently it’s “too unsanitary” and “nobody wants blood all over their documents”. Honestly, what has this world come to
I’d rather be homeless than work in an office. I’m remote all the way!
I’d rather just not work if I had to go back in.
We were doomed, by the nature of our business, to return to F2F, but it doesn’t help when upper management is compromised of rabid traditionalists.
At least we carved out one day a week to WFH.
Ended, the return to office wars have…
lol nice
