In-person collaboration has been linked to high performance and job satisfaction, but these benefits don’t increase with more days spent in the office.
An oft-cited reason for in-person work mandates is that they help drive connection among a team. As more employers push for four and five days in the office, rhetoric has focused on the importance of collaboration and a sense of belonging that some leaders believe can only be fostered in a shared physical environment.
Yet some data shows the number of days people attend the office doesn’t directly correlate to that sense of connection. In fact, there’s only a 1% difference in the number of employees who say they feel connected to their organisation working four or five days a week as compared to those working two or three days on site. That slim leading edge went to the latter group, at 60%, according to a global survey of 1,115 employees by London-based workplace insights firm Leesman, seen by the BBC.
“There just doesn’t seem to be huge gains from the number of days people are in the office,” says Allison English, deputy CEO of Leesman. “It’s about the quality, not quantity, of time that matters. In fact, we see that the greater the number of in-person days, the less the worker is generally satisfied with work-life balance, impacting engagement and their connection to the organisation.”
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My last job was a hybrid schedule- 16 hours WFH, 24 hours WFO. Not only did that not make any sense, but absolutely nothing any of us did had to be done at the office and all meetings were either done by Discord or Zoom because the hybrid schedule was flexible.
It wasn’t even a ‘we have to use this real estate’ situation because it was the office part of a manufacturing facility and they could have put in at least two more lines if they got rid of all of our stations and just kept the executive offices. They could have made more money by not having us there.
So fucking stupid.
Managers are willing to spend company money - and your goodwill - chasing that feeling of “being in charge”, which is apparently a more pure high in-person:-P.
Yeah, don’t dilute the product with this TEAMS filler, SMDH
My manager doesn’t really care about that, and hence, I’m currently only in office for our monthly company meeting, and thats mostly to help out the new CEO have a room of people instead of just a zoom call. I do enjoy when I go in, but once a month is enough for me. If I were closer, once a week would be fine too, but I really benefit in a ton of ways working from home, and in office I’m usually just helping others out and twidling my thumbs(helping people out is a major part of my job, but I can still do that remote as well).
A good manager is worth their weight in
golddiamondsplatinum. :-D
The bullshit is that managers don’t understand why RTO is valuable.
The best thing to do is to let the groups that need face time to choose the days they come in and focus only on facilitating that time. If the group isn’t there at one time, RTO is worthless.
My team has one day per week where we have our regular team meetings and the expectation is we are usually in the office on that day. Outside of that, we all set our own schedules based on our needs. Some people just like being in the office or have job duties that necessitate it. Others like me have little reason to be in the office other than specific meetings so I WFH 4 days most weeks, coming in on those if needed.
It’s the best work setup I’ve had so far, and a lot of that is because our manager is actually great at her job.
Exactly right. We came back to the office 1 day a week and moved every zoom/TeAmS meeting put of that day so we could focus on “in person” work…
My wife’s team on the other hand, were told to come back 2 days a week, they chose whichever building from a few available and whatever day. The result is that she goes to an office to sit around strangers and do, uncomfortably, the same tasks she would do from home.
We have the same schedule. I go in 3 days to run Teams meetings as all the participants are Suppliers and some are in a different country. Sometimes I have spent an entire day in a small conference room in meetings without “collaborating” with anyone at work.
It’s so stupid, but the extra stupid in the case of that job was that not having everyone WFH was actually costing them money.
I love how media is slowly moving away from “RTO is bullshit” to “It has some benefits but they’re taking it too far”. Next week it will be “What were we thinking? RTO is here to stay!”
As so many people have said, there’s plenty of jobs where this isn’t necessary at all. The conversation needs to stay focused on the flawed conceptions of corporate suits in an echo-chamber.
So they’ve failed at pushing full return to office and now they’re commissioning unscientific studies to try to make hybrid seem necessary?
These results really can’t be applied to all jobs. Some jobs obviously require in-person but many white collar jobs can be done entirely remotely saving workers time, money and freeing up infrastructure for those that need/want to go in. Not to mention other benefits to mental health and reduction of emissions involved in commuting.
I feel like full remote only works if you don’t need to train or have meaningful coordination with staff.
However, at that point, it becomes really easy to view the work as a cost center and make attempts to reduce costs.
RTO or taking away any employee benefits is a great way to lose your best performing employees
Don’t care; costs are lower.
Those guys were extra expensive, too!
I work in the office 2 days each week and three at home. The two days are spent with the in person stuff and the other three is doing all the solo work based on that interaction with a sprinkling of remote communication on teams or zoom as needed and no other office distractions.
Good to see the obvious backed up by data.
That was my experience early on, but since committing to full remote first, I find even the “in person” tasks like onboarding, and brainstorming, easier to do remotely.
You just need a good remote culture of frequent and open sync/async communication, with protected do-not-disturb/focus time.
For me, the occasional office visit is basically for socialization only. Meeting up with coworkers, have lunch, hang out for a bit in the office, then back home to work.
Yeah, that’s how I treated it when I was doing hybrid instead of fully remote, but now I don’t even have an office to go into even if I wanted.
I will still meet old co-workers cum friends for lunches, though. Can’t do without that!
I work with some non-technical people that just need in person communication because that is how the rest of their job works. They are the knowledge experts about the things we are creating web systems to support.
If I worked only with technical people I would expect remote to work for everything.
I could find half a dozen studies right now that contradict this one. It’s only as obvious as you want it to be.
You’re getting downvoted here, but your anecdotal evidence matches my own. This is how I set my own schedule by choice. I get my “real” work done when I work from home, while the 2 in-office days are mostly spent in meetings, training other staff, and stuff that’s easier to do in person (hardware troubleshooting).
I get that this isn’t the case for everyone though, and many people would be more productive predominantly working from home.
I work from home entirely.
The issue with this topic is that most people can’t see past their own roles and experiences with it to see how office time can sometimes be beneficial (as you outline above) or completely pointless (my case).
It’s good to have a place to meet clients, or have important meetings, so I go when only when I need to do that. For some people that’s all they do. Other people can do their jobs away from the office. Neither side should be slammed for their view; the only people we should slam are our corporate overlords. Now get in the Hilux
Yep. My role works heavily with outside vendors and contractors in multiple states and countries. It’s incredibly rare for any given meeting to consist solely of workers living within 50 miles of each other. So ‘in person’ typically means two guys in a shitty conference room, with shitty audio calling in to an online meeting with the other 4 people. That is not productive and has no value. Actually negative value as I’ve always found mixed in person and on call meetings to be less effective than if everyone just called in.
I get a lot of people can actually see their coworkers, but that’s not my role and never will be. RTO is an extremely poor fit for me.
Yes, they’re getting downvoted because of what you said in your second paragraph. It doesn’t work for everyone.
The only way my current boss can contact me is by going through his secretary. I think that’s dumb, mostly because the secretary is not very good, and is slow to relay information. But whatever, that’s the way they want it.
Leave me alone and I am much more productive, if you watch me like a hawk you can expect quality and quantity to go down, and I’m gonna quit.
I really don’t like being watched, but more than that I will focus on someone watching me rather than the work at hand.
I didn’t say it worked for everyone.
I know you didn’t. I didn’t downvote you, the way you work is as valid as the way I do.
My last job had so much hardware troubleshooting involved that when we had that talk about RTO after COVID, I told that boss flat-out I wouldn’t do hybrid. All Hybrid would mean is that I would have two labs, and inevitably whatever I needed would be in the other place. I told him to either keep me home full time, or I come into the office full time.
For unrelated reasons, I left for a full time remote role. Very little hardware troubleshooting required. I could not have done my last job like this, but for this job it’s perfect.
Everyone’s situation is different. Anyone who says that there’s only one way to do it is ignorant.
Yeah, having to split your gear up between two workplaces gets exhausting. For a long time I was a self-employed contractor primarily working for one company and I’d never have the right tool or part where I needed it. I now work full-time for that company and most of the gear stays in one place and is a lot more manageable. Plus, I set up a co-management agreement with an IT company that is literally our upstairs neighbor so if there’s a hardware problem that needs to be fixed in a hurry on a day I’m working from home I can just escalate the ticket to them instead of driving into the office.
But yeah, there’s absolutely no one size fits all approach to every workplace or specific job. I’ve been pushing for more flexibility there at my office for other roles because of that.
