The consensus is clear: Workers don’t want to go back to the office full-time.
According to a recent Prudential survey of 2,000 adults who’ve been able to work from home during the pandemic, an overwhelming 87% want the ability to continue doing so after the risks of the virus subside. One in three employees doesn’t want to work for an employer that requires them to be onsite full-time, and nearly half say if their company doesn’t extend their current remote-work policy, they’ll quit to work for another one that does.
With that said, workers do have concerns about how continued remote work could stall their career progress. Roughly two in three think being physically apart from leaders could result in fewer opportunities to advance within the organization.
And on an interpersonal level, though workers from the Prudential survey have grown accustomed to communicating with colleagues, learning on the job and sharing best practices while working remotely, they say socializing with colleagues remains one of the biggest challenges to the adjustment.
Still, Prudential Financial vice chair Rob Falzon cautions against companies bringing everyone back to the office full-time. Instead, he tells CNBC Make It that leaders should be thinking about how to reimagine company culture and connection for remote workers. For example, workers could spend half of their time working on individual tasks remotely, and gather in an office for collaboration and meeting times.
Simply put, “if you’re an employer and you’re not being accommodating, you’ll lose talent,” Falzon says.
What will save company culture?
Managers and senior leaders, whom employees say are responsible for connecting individuals to the company culture, should take a worker-centered approach to charting their path forward, says Derek Avery, a researcher and University of Houston professor in industrial/organizational psychology.
Employers should consider not only how workers’ lives have changed since before the pandemic, but also how their needs or circumstances have changed throughout it.
Prior to 2020, “leaders assumed everyone really enjoyed coming into an office and extensive human interaction,” Avery says. “We’ve learned through the pandemic that, yes, there’s some truth to that. But it’s possible people don’t want as much of that as they had before.”
Generally, the workers from the Prudential survey have initial ideas of how they think employers can strengthen culture among remote workers, including by offering remote-work resources, updating policies to reflect the way work has changed (such as instituting no-meetings days) and increasing communications from leaders.
Still, best practices won’t be the same for every workplace, Avery adds: “There’s lots of nuance, and the best employers will be the ones that generalize the things they can, but also take the time and invest energy and efforts into finding out what specifically is different for their employees.”
