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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