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Calls for Back-to-the-Office Are Running Amok

Posted on Thursday, July 29, 2021 at 8:58 PM

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to the post-pandemic workplace. Decision makers who believe otherwise risk losing existing talent and prospective hires.

By William Dunkerley

Return to the office? Not so fast, boomer! That's how some in newer generations are perceiving demands to come back. They won't do it, many are warning. They see this as a generational divide. But is it?

This isn't a phenomenon limited to editorial offices; it's widespread.

According to a Bloomberg Wealth headline, "Employees Are Quitting Instead of Giving Up Working from Home." The story explains: "The drive to get people back into offices is clashing with workers who've embraced remote work as the new normal."

For some, returning to a physical office is a step back in time, almost like a throwback to the days of moveable type.


Whether workers' reactions are largely generational is elusive. Office search company Hubble.com claims, "Gen Z and millennials are much more pro-office than Gen X and baby boomers." But are they right?

What Employees Want, Generation by Generation

A research report from Citrix groups together the millennials and Gen Zers and calls them Born Digitals. Citrix found that "90 percent of Born Digital employees do not want to return to full-time office work post-pandemic, preferring a hybrid model instead." Citrix says that "these young employees are different from previous generations in that they have only ever known a tech-driven world of work."

Citrix reports a fundamental disconnect between an organization's leaders and the employees. It disclosed that "when it comes to understanding what engages and motivates younger workers, leaders are out of touch.... Leaders overestimate office appeal." The research found:

--Over half (51 percent) want to remain working from home most or all of the time.
--18 percent would like hybrid working with more time in the office.
--21 percent would like hybrid working with time evenly split between home and the office.
--Only 10 percent would like to be in the office full time.

"But 58 percent of leaders believe that young workers will want to spend most or all of their time working in the office," Citrix added.

A Conference Board study found that 55 percent of millennials question the wisdom of returning. That's higher than other groups. Only 36 percent of the boomers do. They're more amenable to going back. Gen Xers are in the middle at 45 percent.

That seems to show a close correlation between willingness to return and age. Older: more willing. Younger: less willing.

Company Role Factors into Preference

That correlation breaks down when you factor in an individual's role. There are more significant differences related to a person's level in an organization. The Conference Board reports, "The lower the employee level, the more they question the need to return to the workplace." Only 18 percent of CEOs are questioning it. For others it's 56 percent.

How do you explain that? One obvious factor is that the CEOs have to consider what's best for the organization. Others are thinking of their personal preferences. The presence of this disparity can be quite problematic for management.

The New York Times cited a case example:

"David Gross, an executive at a New York–based advertising agency, convened the troops over Zoom this month to deliver a message he and his fellow partners were eager to share: It was time to think about coming back to the office.

"Mr. Gross, 40, wasn’t sure how employees, many in their 20s and early 30s, would take it. The initial response—dead silence—wasn’t encouraging. Then one young man signaled he had a question. 'Is the policy mandatory?' he wanted to know.

"Yes, it is mandatory, for three days a week, he was told."

The Times commented, "The decision to return pits older managers who view working in the office as the natural order of things against younger employees who’ve come to see operating remotely as completely normal in the 16 months since the pandemic hit. Some new hires have never gone into their employers' workplace at all."

Meanwhile, a July 2021 Harvard Business Review article extols the benefits of office-based work. It places them in three categories:

"Culture. It’s hard to start a brand-new job remotely. We learn how to navigate a workplace’s culture by watching other people and how they interact."

"Collaboration. It’s harder for institutional knowledge to make its way around in a remote environment. A lot of information sharing happens through short, informal conversations between people over the course of a normal workday."

"Purpose. Another benefit of spending time with colleagues in the office is that it reinforces the sense that you share a common mission. The phenomenon of goal contagion is a reflection that when you observe the actions of other people, you often adopt their same goals."

The Reality: Things Have Changed, Some Irreversibly

The above are very valid issues. But in a longer perspective, the HBR article commits a kind of "because it was, it will be" fallacy. In other words, it does not take into account what seems to be a technology-driven cultural change in how we communicate and gather together. It may not be good for the organization to buck that trend. Is work from home our evolutionary destiny?

If you think of ways of getting to offices historically, things began with people residing in cities and walking on foot. As cities grew, that became somewhat impractical for all workers. As a result, public transport by horse carts emerged. They were later replaced by motorized trolleys. People could live farther from the central city. The transportation systems focused on that hub. Later the technical innovation of private automobiles made outlying destinations practical. People could live and work outside the hub cities.

Now it is possible for us to go to work electronically instead of physically. It’s a new concept, a paradigm shift. Talcott Mountain Science Center founding director Dr. Donald P. La Salle decades ago was an early advocate that "it makes more sense to move electrons than to move people whenever possible." That's exactly what we've been doing lately, going to work by moving electrons.

So where does all this leave editorial managers? Data USA reports that the median age of editors is 43. That places them at the younger end of the Gen X group, approaching millennialship. They're not likely to be as docile toward returning as boomers.

How to Proceed at Your Publication

So how to handle things at your publication?

I suggest starting with a no-nonsense assessment of how necessary returning to the office really is. Some managers may be grappling with a sense of lack of control from when Covid sent staffers home. Don't require people to come back just because of that. Find some other way to deal with the anxiety.

That said, if in your particular situation having an office contingent is really important, try to be flexible in dealing with that.

You may find that while some of your staff want to remain at home, others will feel more comfortable and at home when working in the office. Be accommodating of both groups. For still others some kind of hybrid arrangement would be best. Be accommodating of that, too. Insisting on a one-size-fits-all solution may be counterproductive.

Before the Covid experience, working part-time from home was reserved as a perk for senior staffers. That's changed. It's no longer just a perk. It's a viable option for all, and not only for part-of-the-time schedules.

A new survey just in from Breeze, a disability and critical illness insurer, targeted workers that have or are seeking jobs that can be performed completely at home. Below are some interesting key findings. They may or may not be applicable to editorial positions.

Workers are willing to make compromises if an employer offered the option of working remotely full-time:
--15 percent would take a 25 percent pay cut
--65 percent would take a 5 percent pay cut
--39 percent would give up health insurance benefits
--46 percent would give up 25 percent of their paid time off
--15 percent would give up 100 percent of their PTO
--53 percent would work an extra 10 hours per week

That means that a work-from-home option could be a hiring and retention benefit for the employer.

The Bottom Line: Maintaining Workflow

A very important consideration in all this for editorial offices is workflow. Producing and publishing an article involves the sequential participation of several people. That requires a certain amount of compatibility in the hours each person works.

Problems can crop up if there are unnecessary delays. I saw this some years ago with a publisher that put his staff on a four-day work week. (He wanted to spend long weekends on his yacht.) Each employee could choose working Monday through Thursday or Tuesday through Friday.

This was not a well thought-out plan. It meant that, for instance, a Monday-Thursday person could finish his work on an article on Thursday. Next, a Tuesday-Friday person wouldn't get to do her work on it until Tuesday. That put a four-day delay into the schedule.

In closing, keep in mind: The Covid environment has proved itself to be in a continual state of flux. Plans need to consider that. Thoughts of a predictable end to the pandemic may be more hopeful than realistic.

William Dunkerley is principal of William Dunkerley Publishing Consultants, www.publishinghelp.com.

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