Just about everyone agrees the future is hybrid. But with no playbook to guide businesses, strap in for the trial-and-error phase
For the last year or so, hybrid work seems to have settled into some sort of agreeable state, with workers back in the office for two, maybe three, days each week. Sure, the rhetoric on both sides of return-to-office remains fierce, but the paths are remarkably parallel. Hybrid work it is.
Recently, however, there’s been a bit of a stronger push on the part of bigger organizations to get their workers back in the office a little bit more frequently.
Earlier this year, RBC CEO Dave McKay said the bank was “on a journey to make sure that we’re in half or more than half the time in the office.” The City of Toronto also updated its flexible working policies to be a bit more prescriptive. And in the U.S., major employers like Chipotle, Disney and Snapchat have all slowly ratcheted up the expected number of in-office days, leading Bloomberg to wonder whether working from home was becoming a “once-a-week perk.”
Not surprisingly, others see something else: desperation on the part of businesses to make their RTO plans stick. “It’s been three years of scattershot plans for returning to in-person work,” writes Emma Goldberg in The New York Times. “Summoning people in, not really meaning it, everybody pretty much working wherever they pleased. Now, for the umpteenth time, businesses are ready to get serious.”
She details how some companies are toying with carrots (like Salesforce making a $10 charitable donation for each in-office day worked) as well as sticks (like Google saying it will take in-office days into consideration in performance reviews).
This dynamic will be one to watch over the next year or so, as the durability of the first iteration of hybrid work is tested. If the push to up the amount of time spent in-office is going to work, though, it will need to come with clear communication and rationale. More than anything, what has rankled employees has been RTO mandates that have seemed arbitrary.
“It is okay to create an expectation on them [employees],” Gallup’s Ed O’Boyle told WorkLife. “But with that expectation should come a reason why. And I think leaders are stopping short on providing real reasons around it versus platitudes about it.”
Content written by Kieran Delamont for Worklife, a partnership between Ahria Consulting and London Inc. To view this content in newsletter form, click here.