Jassy outlined the reasoning for this in the memo with this thought, “When we look back over the last five years, we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.”

Work-From-Home vs Return-To-Office

For many future years we will read reports and say, “The pandemic caused that” and at top of the list is the work-from-home (WFH) phenomena that today has led to an increased level of tension between employees who have embraced it and employers, like Amazon, who are over it and are mandating return-to-office (RTO).

From the employee side, WFH represents options…for when and how to work, for easier child and elder care, and even for which state to live in. For employers, the combination of WFH + RTO has led to higher turnover, more positions to fill and tougher recruiting, and lower productivity.

Reporting tells us this:

• 42% of companies that have mandated RTO saw a higher level of employee turnover than they had anticipated.
• Almost one-third of companies found recruiting got worse.
• And 76% of employees said they would leave if their company forced them to RTO.
• As a final kick, nearly half of candidates said they would reject roles if there is no flexibility.[ii]

From the start, forced WFH looked like trouble for employers who had zero choice but to permit it during those pandemic months. One of few expected upsides was that money would be saved via reduced office space, assuming workers would remain at home. And while true for some companies, those non-renewed leases are having a massive negative economic impact on our cities which has yet to fully hit home.

—–

Further Reading: What 60 MINUTES Got Wrong About WFH Commercial Real Estate Crisis

——

WFH Hasn’t Improved Employee Engagement

Turnover is up and Gallup tells us employee engagement is down for the first time in a decade, saying this specifically about WFH:

The largest decline in employee engagement was among those in remote-ready jobs who are currently working fully on-site — this group saw a decline of five points in engagement and an increase of seven points in active disengagement. It’s worth noting that exclusively remote employees saw an increase of four points in “quiet quitting” (aka not engaged in their work and workplace).[iii]

Prediction is CEOs Will End WFH

Amazon may be on the forefront of this mandate, but media reports have been clear that we should expect more of this to come. Fortune published a recent report predicting CEOs are running out of patience with WFH, citing the following reasons[iv]:

#1: Remote work is bad for new hires and junior employees.

#2: Workers admit that remote work (sometimes) causes more problems than in-person work.

#3: Remote workers put in 3.5 hours less per week compared to in-person workers.

#4: Productivity plummets on days when everyone is working remotely.

I remember two Wall Street Journal articles that nailed the problem. In one a CEO said he could not imagine a recent college grad developing adequately via zoom meetings versus walking the halls with her in-office, more-experienced colleagues. And the other article profiled four employees who had been hired and then quit within six months because zooming alone didn’t help them build relationships with their managers nor their peers.

Do Employees Have Power Regarding WFH or RTO Decisions?

The major obstacle is workers now have the upper hand. That the sheer number of workers across the U.S. cannot meet the demand for filling open jobs, permitting employees to make decisions that severely impact organizations rather than the traditional other-way-around. And the Census Bureau tells us this won’t change anytime soon because our baby boomers are retiring and there just aren’t enough younger workers to take their places.[v]

The Census Bureau also tells us in the same report that 51% of all new workforce entrants will be immigrants beginning in 2030, and that percentage will increase throughout the foreseeable future. This comes at a time when Americans’ favorable opinion of immigrants continues to go down[vi], likely influenced by the continuous streaming of Mexican border stories across TV news as though these are the only immigration examples.

——

Further Reading: How Much Are Worker Shortages Impacting Customer Service Today?

——

Regardless of WFH or RTO, Employee Retention Must be Addressed

CEOs are ultimately deciding their organization’s WFH/RTO strategies, choosing from (1) total WFO, (2) total RTO, or (3) various forms of hybrid scheduling. But among the hundreds of online reports about companies’ decisions, little is said about how those organizations should engage employees in order to retain them. Generic recommendations call for managers to build stronger, more personal relationships with their individual team members, yet those same generic recommendations come up short on how to do this.

Stay Interviews are Key to Employee Retention

As our company has proven for a decade-plus, Stay Interviews provide managers with a structured method to learn their employees’ greatest day-to-day needs and then meet those needs. This specific WFH retention solution is to combine the five Stay Interview questions with skill-building for asking those questions, listening to each employee’s responses, probing to learn more, taking a full page or two of notes, and then building individualized stay plans to retain that employee longer.

The Stay Interview goal is to identify and address work-driven issues versus virtual happy hours and other social activities which fail due to their simplicity, their superficial quality. While helping employees meet their peers virtually is a worthy objective, the absolute most important relationship is the one they develop with their manager…and that manager must have training and tools to lead that relationship.

Improving retention and engagement among WFH employees is a very, very tall task. Training managers to facilitate Stay Interviews on a regular schedule provides the absolute best opportunity to retain and engage them.

Need help establishing retention goals for WFH, RTO, or Hybrid?  
Schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and we’ll discuss the numbers and needs you should have to evaluate your retention goals. We work with companies in every type of industry to cut turnover by 20% and more by building trust and accountabilities.

[i] https://techcrunch.com/2024/09/16/amazon-mandates-full-five-day-return-to-office/

[ii] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/we-re-now-finding-out-the-damaging-results-of-the-mandated-return-to-the-office-and-it-s-worse-than-we-thought/ar-AA1eDefg?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=1c82f1dc40644b398135a3d0e5745381&ei=16

[iii] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/468233/employee-engagement-needs-rebound-2023.aspx?thank-you-subscription-form=1

[iv] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/bosses-are-fed-up-with-remote-work-for-4-main-reasons-some-of-them-are-undeniable/ar-AA1cyh0l?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=6ab063aa84fa4eb5abcae434f66ef879&ei=18

[v] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p25-1144.html

[vi] https://news.gallup.com/poll/508520/americans-value-immigration-concerns.aspx

The post Is Amazon’s Return-to-Office Bellwether for WFH’s Future? appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

Work From Home vs Return-to-Office Long-Term Impacts

How serious is this issue for our long-term economy?  From McKinsey’s report titled Empty spaces and hybrid places: The pandemic’s lasting impact on real estate^[ii]:

• Office attendance has stabilized at 30% below its pre-pandemic norms.
• Untethered from their offices, residents have left urban cores and shifted their shopping elsewhere. Foot traffic near stores in metropolitan areas remains 10 to 20 percent below pre-pandemic levels.
• In a moderate scenario that we modeled, demand for office space is 13 percent lower in 2030 than it was in 2019 for the median city in our study. In a severe scenario, demand falls by 38 percent in the most heavily affected city.

In addition, Morgan Stanley says commercial real estate will crash harder than during the Great Financial Crisis, and that no sector will be immune to the fallout. Capital Economics says office values are unlikely to recover by 2040. Goldman Sachs saw commercial real estate’s future this way:

“The potential for disruptions to U.S. commercial real estate activity from a pullback in small bank credit availability is substantial, unaided by the fact that the segments most dependent on bank financing—offices and retail properties—are also facing the strongest risk of functional obsolescence.^[iii]”

—–

Further Reading: The Truth About Who Will Work From Home

—–

What 60 MINUTES Got Wrong in Its Report

The wrong part of Sunday night’s report was 60 MINUTES indicated the root cause of this current-and-to-become worse economic catastrophe was the pandemic which drove many workers into makeshift home offices on the fly. While that latter part is true, the real cause is that CEOs cannot demand that workers return to the office because our current workforce shortage gives employees unprecedented power to say “no”.

Had the pandemic occurred ten years earlier, CEOs would say “return” and employees would readily comply. Not so during our 30-year shortfall of workers on every level.

—–

Further Reading: Confirmed: Mandated Return-to-Office = Higher Turnover

—–

Workforce Facts as We Know Them Now

For starters, about 40% of the US workforce could actually perform their jobs from home.^[iv] This means that those workers are not tied to equipment or people such that they can perform their jobs from anywhere. The remaining 60% must work in a specific location and therefore cannot work from home like those who work in factories, schools, or for many in healthcare.  This brings to mind the popular holiday season joke, that Rudolph told Santa the reindeer wanted to work from home.

Presenting these data in percentages disguises their importance. Our Bureau of Labor Statistics tells us that about 168 million are working today, meaning the aforementioned economic impact of those who could potentially work from home exceeds 67 million people. Pre-2020, the great majority of these folks were working in urban centers while also dining and shopping there. Not so much now which leaves a lot of downtown diners looking for noon-time customers.

Early on during the pandemic, the Wall Street Journal surveyed a group of CEOs about their work-from-home and return-to-work preferences. Let’s use the acronyms WFH and RTO going forward. I’ll paraphrase from memory the one quote that jumped out the most:

“You can’t tell me that a kid graduating from college will learn as much from his dining room in his first three years as he would by walking up and down the halls of our office.”

—–

Further Reading: Two Things I Can Predict About Working From Home

—–

Supporting this quote, here are three widely-reported numbers that clarify CEOs’ positions regarding RTO^[v]:

• 90% of companies plan to implement RTO policies by the end of 2024.
• Nearly 30% report they will threaten to fire employees who don’t comply.
• Just 2% say they will never require employees to return to work in person.

That push appears to be working as fewer than 26% of US households still have someone working remotely at least one day a week, a sharp decline from the early-2021 peak of 37%, according to the two latest Census Bureau Household Pulse Surveys.^[vi] The key phrase though is “at least one day a week”.

But before moving on, let’s step into a 2020 time machine and recall the number of journalists who reported that chief financial officers would be quite happy for workers to continue working from home so they could cut back on those hefty commercial real estate bills. Those days and those predictions are long behind us.

Here is a summary of the most recent research findings:

• Employees who can WFH strongly prefer to do so.
• These preferences vary though by age and income as older and higher-paid workers would rather avoid the office altogether, while younger workers want at least occasional social connection.
• While hybrid scheduling is trending strong, there is no magical days-in/days-out winning formula.
• WFH vs RTO productivity and innovation data mostly favors RTO, though some detailed data has uncovered that overall productivity has been slipping for years prior to COVID-19.
•  CEOs’ bias that employees RTO vs WFH might be exceeded by the biases of their own managers, many of whom don’t trust that employees are actually working from home.
• Employees like WFH because of schedule flexibility, increased work/life balance potential, and WFH saves money on commuting, clothing, and more.
• But employees also face disadvantages that are not so obvious such reduced opportunities for their own professional development as well as women facing more subtle discrimination based on assumed childcare distractions.
• RTO mandates have negatively impacted turnover and recruiting, especially among those companies that have changed policies from “WFH is good” to “WFH is no longer permitted”.
• CEOs are varying between carrots and sticks to drive RTO, potentially including that those employees who appear onsite more frequently will be rewarded with more pay and promotions.
• While most CEOs will push for more RTO, newly-developed technologies will make WFH easier and more productive.

And not to be overlooked, Unilever which owns Dove, Axe and other products reported a 15% surge in deodorant sales that coincided with the RTO push^[vii]. That’s good news for all of us.

So the punchline here is that our current and projected-future workforce challenge is the real cause of the commercial real estate crisis…as it will also be for the additional struggles colleges and universities will face as companies continue to down-grade job requirements by eliminating the mandate for college degrees.

—–

There has never been a better time to implement fresh solutions to retain your best workers. Write me: DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com or connect with me to have a one-on-one conversation on ways you can get started today on your journey to improve your employee retention and engagement.

[i] The report was broadcasted on CBS on 1.14.24

[ii] https://www.mckinsey.com/mgi/our-research/empty-spaces-and-hybrid-places

[iii] The quotes from Morgan Stanley, Capital Economics, and Goldman Sachs appeared in https://finance.yahoo.com/news/morgan-stanley-says-commercial-real-202952701.html

[iv] https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2023/03/30/about-a-third-of-us-workers-who-can-work-from-home-do-so-all-the-time/

[v] https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/11/90percent-of-companies-say-theyll-return-to-the-office-by-the-end-of-2024.html

[vi] https://fortune.com/2023/10/16/remote-work-hybrid-return-to-office-rto/

[vii] https://fortune.com/europe/2023/10/27/unilever-deodorant-personal-care-hygiene-wfh-return-to-work/

The post What 60 MINUTES Got Wrong About WFH Commercial Real Estate Crisis appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

The forced work-from-home in 2020 and 2021 has led to dreamy work situations for white-collar employees but total drudgery for employers…to the point that we now have two additional immediately-recognizable acronyms: WFH for work-from-home and RTO for return-to-office.

From the employee side, WFH represents options…for when and how to work, for easier child and elder care, and even for which state to live in. For employers, the combination of WFH + RTO = higher turnover, worse recruiting, and for-certain-resulting lower productivity. New reporting tells us this:

• 42% of companies that have mandated RTO saw a higher level of employee turnover than they had anticipated.
• Almost one-third of companies found recruiting got worse.
• And 76% of employees said they would leave if their company forced them to RTO.
• As a final kick, nearly half of candidates said they would reject roles if there is no flexibility.[i]

From the start, forced WFH looked like trouble for employers who had zero choice but to permit it during those pandemic months. One of few expected upsides was that money would be saved via reduced office space, assuming workers would remain at home. And while true for some companies, those non-renewed leases are having a massive negative economic impact on our cities which has yet to fully hit home. And city-based hotels and restaurants are feeling the same whack.

But if there was another employer win from WFH, I can’t see one. Turnover is up and Gallup tells us employee engagement is down for the first time in a decade, saying this specifically about WFH:

The largest decline in employee engagement was among those in remote-ready jobs who are currently working fully on-site — this group saw a decline of five points in engagement and an increase of seven points in active disengagement. It’s worth noting that exclusively remote employees saw an increase of four points in “quiet quitting” (aka not engaged in their work and workplace).[ii]

Some Predict CEOs Will End WFH

Fortune published a recent report predicting CEOs are running out of patience with WFH, citing the following reasons[iii]:

#1: Remote work is bad for new hires and junior employees.

#2: Workers admit that remote work (sometimes) causes more problems than in-person work.

#3: Remote workers put in 3.5 hours less per week compared to in-person workers.

#4: Productivity plummets on days when everyone is working remotely.

I remember two 2021-ish Wall Street Journal articles that nailed the problem. In one a CEO said he could not imagine a recent college grad developing adequately via zoom meetings versus walking the halls with her in-office, more-experienced colleagues. And the other article profiled four employees who had been hired and then quit within six months because zooming alone didn’t help them build relationships with their managers nor their peers.

Yet Employees Have More Power…and Will Continue to Have It Regarding WFH or RTO Decisions

The major obstacle is workers now have the upper hand. That the sheer number of workers across the U.S. cannot meet the demand for filling open jobs, permitting employees to make decisions that severely impact organizations rather than the traditional other-way-around. And the Census Bureau tells us this won’t change anytime soon because our baby boomers are retiring and there just aren’t enough younger workers to take their places.[iv]

The Census Bureau also tells us in the same report that 51% of all new workforce entrants will be immigrants beginning in 2030, and that percentage will increase throughout the foreseeable future. This comes at a time when Americans’ favorable opinion of immigrants continues to go down[v], likely influenced by the continuous streaming of Mexican border stories across TV news as though these are the only immigration examples.

What To Do? Regardless of WFH or RTO or Hybrid, Retention Should be Addressed

CEOs are ultimately deciding their organization’s WFH/RTO strategies, choosing from (1) total WFO, (2) total RTO, or (3) various forms of hybrid scheduling. But among the hundreds of online reports about companies’ decisions, little is said about how those organizations should engage any resulting zoomers in order to retain them…and this is a topic that fits right into our sweetspot. Generic recommendations call for managers to build stronger, more personal relationships with their individual team members, yet those same generic recommendations come up short on how to do this.

As our company has proven for a decade-plus, Stay Interviews provide managers with a structured method to learn their employees’ greatest day-to-day needs and then meet those needs. This specific WFH retention solution is to combine the five Stay Interview questions with skill-building for asking those questions, listening to each employee’s responses, probing to learn more, taking a full page or two of notes, and then building individualized stay plans to retain that employee longer.

Need help establishing retention goals for WFH, RTO, or Hybrid?  
Schedule a conversation with me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com and we’ll discuss the numbers and needs you should have to evaluate your retention goals. We work with companies in every type of industry to cut turnover by 20% and more by building trust and accountabilities.

The Stay Interview goal is to identify and address work-driven issues versus virtual happy hours and other social activities which fail due to their simplicity, their superficial quality. While helping employees meet their peers virtually is a worthy objective, the absolute most important relationship is the one they develop with their manager…and that manager must have training and tools to lead that relationship.

Improving retention and engagement among WFH employees is a very, very tall task. Training managers to facilitate Stay Interviews on a regular schedule provides the absolute best opportunity to retain and engage them.

[i] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/careersandeducation/we-re-now-finding-out-the-damaging-results-of-the-mandated-return-to-the-office-and-it-s-worse-than-we-thought/ar-AA1eDefg?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=1c82f1dc40644b398135a3d0e5745381&ei=16

[ii] https://www.gallup.com/workplace/468233/employee-engagement-needs-rebound-2023.aspx?thank-you-subscription-form=1

[iii] https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/markets/bosses-are-fed-up-with-remote-work-for-4-main-reasons-some-of-them-are-undeniable/ar-AA1cyh0l?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=6ab063aa84fa4eb5abcae434f66ef879&ei=18

[iv] https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2020/demo/p25-1144.html

[v] https://news.gallup.com/poll/508520/americans-value-immigration-concerns.aspx

The post Confirmed: Mandated Return-to-Office = Higher Turnover appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

What I can tell you is there are more unknowns than knowns. As the British say, “There is much to sort out”. This decision is about more than any CEO’s gut feelings because good talent might leave if they don’t like your policy. And those might be your very top performers.

Permit me, though, to break my rule and share a very recent survey where an overwhelming majority of employees said they would rather take a $30,000 pay cut than return to their offices. This poll covered 3,000 employees who represented 45 large employers.[i] At first glance, one would conclude most employees are desperate to work from home…though I am always a wee bit skeptical of hypothetical survey results, the kind that imply “If you could do this, would you?” Actions, as they say, speak louder than words. And with $30,000 being a large chunk of change, you would have to conclude that some of these folks are so eager to work from home that they are willing to work from smaller homes.

If I were an executive staring at developing a policy for my company, here are things I would consider:

1. What do my employees want to do? This decision risks so much money regarding retaining and losing talent that any executive who doesn’t consider their employees’ opinions is foolish…even if those opinions are in conflict. You can’t please everyone but there is an advantage to pleasing most.

2. The rarely-noted and extreme benefit to permitting work from home is recruiting for talent moves from local to global because new hires can work from anywhere…at a time when talent is scarce.

3. Recognize that there are concrete advantages to everyone being in the same location sometimes, too. This quote from a major-company CEO nails it with a specific example: “I am concerned that we would somehow believe that we can basically take kids from college, put them in front of Zoom, and think that three years from now they’ll be every bit as productive as they would have had they had the personal interaction.”[ii]

4. Be careful that executive quotes don’t become billboard material for employees to quit or lose engagement steam. During a recent Wall Street Journal CEO Council meeting, JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon commented that remote work doesn’t work well “for those who want to hustle.” And Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon described working from home as “an aberration that we’re going to correct as soon as possible.”[iii] These are clearly my-way-or-the-highway comments that might trigger some high-performers to take the highway.

5. Realize that your company’s policy decision impacts not just current employees but also future ones…and this is one of those great unknowns because we don’t know how many thousands or millions of workers will draw a hard line for working from home forever; and this includes hotly-contested recent college grads, too.

6. Many companies are considering hybrid plans or choice plans where employees work some time in the office and some time at home. These organizations should make certain their policies are airtight to fight against the appearance of favoritism…including good reasons why those who must come to the office each day must do so.

7. Some employees who are expected to return to the office might be reluctant to do so purely for health concerns, sounding a claxon call for patience…at least for a while.

Perhaps the easiest mistake is to assume employees who work from home will feel the same glue to their managers and to your company as they did before in your workplace. Most of them won’t unless you do something different. There will be a work-from-home-relationship-gap, a subtle, intangible hole that will develop as managers replicate the same communications styles they did before that won’t work when talking through screens. Gone will be the daily banter in hallways, restrooms, and before and after meetings, what we used to call water-cooler talk. These informal chats humanized each of us because we shared family stories, work anecdotes, and our faces reflected our own joys and compassions.

Is it fair to say our leader-employee relationships risk becoming more robotic? I think so. Let’s watch the impact on engagement scores in the next 12-24 months.

This takes me back a decade ago when I invented Stay Interviews. The simplistic goal at the time was why wait until employees left to ask them how they liked their jobs when you can ask them now before they go. My mind has evolved since to where Stay Interviews are essential because they help leaders build trust…by asking/listening/probing about work from the employee’s point of view. Never, ever have Stay Interviews mattered more.

Dick Finnegan is CEO of C-Suite Analytics which consistently helps organizations cut turnover by 30% and more…and he is SHRM’s top-selling author and top-rated webcast presenter. Please email him your comments to DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.  You are also welcome to forward this blog to anyone you believe would find it helpful.

[i] https://www.wusa9.com/article/money/30k-pay-bump-or-work-from-home-permanently-poll-asks/65-871391e4-f48b-4c75-8e12-215bf2841380

[ii] https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-ceos-really-think-about-remote-work-11600853405?mod=hp_lead_pos11

[iii] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/employee-relations/pages/rewarding-employees-who-leave-remote-work-behind.aspx?utm_source=marketo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial~HR%20Week~NL_2021-6-7_HR-Week&linktext=Rewarding-New-and-Current-Employees-Who-Leave-Remote-Work-Behind&mkt_tok=ODIzLVRXUy05ODQAAAF9g61K-pczaSj-JVcx68KwMMBDd6y-vggW33GuoUgE9raQokFK28-JTGHycl7S0yVfMZ2OYW2s1jI1U6TBHKRyFztWEu_hwOxOh1hL9TsrLMnpVg

The post Will Work From Home Create More Turnover or Less Turnover For You? appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

1. Pre-pandemic, 7% of U.S. workers did their work from home[i]
2. University of Chicago researchers found 37% of all U.S. jobs could potentially be done from home,^[ii] meaning about two-thirds of our total U.S. jobs are outside of work-from-home consideration.
3. The most famous work-from-home buster was a working mom.

That disruption happened in 2013 when then-Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer declared shortly after taking office that all who worked from home would return to headquarters, saying “Some of the best decisions and insights come from hallway and cafeteria discussions, meeting new people, and impromptu team meetings. We need to become one Yahoo!”^[iii]

I’ve been tracking work-from-home surveys since the pandemic began, and the summary trendline is the longer time goes on, the less happy most people are with work from home.  And everyone includes executives, managers, and employees.

But another important fact is this pandemic-driven work-from-home experience is not a legitimate try but rather an imposed one. We are experiencing “shelter-in-place-work-from-home”. Let’s convert that into a new acronym: SIPWFH.

So, one could say many of the newfound opinions regarding SIPWFH are as artificial as our make-shift desks. Or that dining room table we share with our kids as long as they are in an artificial school environment, too. No one planned for this, just as we didn’t plan to wear masks in the drug store.

The ultimate decision-makers on who will work from home are our CEOs. And the Wall Street Journal just polled a bunch of them to learn their opinions.[iv] I’ll share some of those opinions here along with the company names:

• Netflix: “I don’t see any positives.”
• BlackRock: “I don’t believe BlackRock will ever be 100% back in office.”
• Chief Robotics: “We tried it. It’s just not the same.”
• JP Morgan Chase: “I think going back to work is a good thing.”
• Apple: “I can’t wait for everybody to be able to come back into the office.”
• Herman Miller: “That unplanned kind of interaction that contributes so much to how we build relationships with people and how we build culture, those things are what are missing.”
• Stifel Financial Corp: “I am concerned that we would somehow believe that we can basically take kids from college, put them in front of Zoom, and think that three years from now, they’ll be every bit as productive as they would have had they had the personal interaction.”
• Rite Aid: “We have adapted to work-from-home unbelievably well.”
• Microsoft: “We’re realizing that some people would rather have workspace at work once the Covid-19 crisis goes away because they want dedicated workspace with good network connectivity.”
• Facebook: “I think we’re going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale.”
• Waste Management: “Most of us are not hermits…We need that social interaction, not only from a business standpoint but truly from a kind of personal-development standpoint.”
• Carbon Inc: “What I worry about the most is innovation. Innovation is hard to schedule—it’s impossible to schedule.”
• Marriott: “It’s a much harder way to work for anything that requires a personal relationship.”

This is a small sample for sure, but the results read as though the absence of personal interaction will weigh down on problem solving and creativity. And I will add that it is hard to build the personal level of trust that is required for true engagement and retention without those in-person interactions that cover subjects like how little Joanie’s little league game was last night.

Or those big subjects like What are you learning here? which is the second of our five Stay Interview questions.

Many variables will contribute to the ultimate percentage of U.S. workers who work from home like how soon we move past this pandemic if ever, how many employees will feel safe returning to work, and how many employees will demand that they work from home even if they have to change jobs to do so. But it looks like CEOs will have the biggest vote.

What’s your preference? Would you prefer working from home, working in the office, or some mixed schedule?  Please email me if you will to tell me your answer and why.

Please email your comments to me at DFinnegan@C-SuiteAnalytics.com.  You are also welcome to forward this blog to anyone you believe would find it helpful.

[i] https://www.shrm.org/hr-today/news/hr-news/Pages/Remote-Workers-Experiencing-Burnout.aspx?utm_source=marketo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial~Talent~NL_2020-6-3_Talent-Acquisition&linktext=Remote-Workers-Are-Experiencing-Burnout&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTldNM09HUTJOekU0TVRKayIsInQiOiI5NzVmZk9BTWlwdmhpa2UyNmtSMTJ1dFNFZEhJQk0wczIrNnorWFwvcFM0T0JFM0czbEkrYjdDOWZCNW1ZYk81TU9mZnN0WlFaZ0ZJQzl5bmlqaXZGS21ZSXBsZVFJWTRyTTArVEVWRU84S1pIY1I1KzErTUZiOWNNXC9kV24zV3l3In0%3D

[ii] https://brentneiman.com/research/DN.pdf

[iii] https://www.forbes.com/sites/jennagoudreau/2013/02/25/back-to-the-stone-age-new-yahoo-ceo-marissa-mayer-bans-working-from-home/#57ced3c41667

[iv] https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-ceos-really-think-about-remote-work-11600853405?mod=hp_lead_pos11

The post The Truth About Who Will Work From Home appeared first on C-Suite Analytics.

I’m there, too, writing a new book for SHRM about the pandemic…and how organizations can build happiness for their employees as a result. The daily book-writing ritual has turned up a bunch of interesting data, not the least of which is about what many of us would have said is the smallest part of enduring the pandemic at work…which is working from home.

To establish a baseline for our discussion, University of Chicago researchers found 37% of all U.S. jobs could potentially be done from home,^[i] meaning about two-thirds of our total U.S. jobs are outside of WFH consideration.

How popular is working from home during the pandemic? See if you can connect the dots through these numbers:

• Per Gallup, more than half of at-home workers say they would prefer to continue working remotely as much as possible once restrictions on businesses and school closures are lifted; this percentage has dropped, though, from 62% to 53% as employees have had more of the daily WFH experience.
• Among managers whose employees are working from home, slightly more than half say they will allow their employees to work remotely more often as a result of this experience[ii].
• Yet a Glassdoor study found that 72 percent said they are ready to return to their company’s office; Socializing with co-workers and collaborating in person topped their lists of reasons for wanting to return.[iii]
• Similarly, a Korn Ferry survey revealed that 77 percent are finding it difficult to concentrate, citing the top distraction as watching news reports about the pandemic, followed by worrying about friends and family, worrying about the virus, and trying to work from home with kids present.[iv]
• In a Monster survey, nearly three-quarters of at-home workers experienced nightmares, loss of focus, depression and anger, while 27 percent reported physical stress symptoms like weight loss or gain, back pain and lack of sleep; a strong majority believed stress and anxiety were impacting their job productivity.^[v]
• In a SHRM study, a full 95% of employers believe most work from home will end after the threat of the coronavirus pandemic passes.[vi]
• Yet a Willis Towers Watson survey indicates employers anticipate the percentage of their full-time workforce who work from home to be three times larger after the pandemic than before, resulting in 22 percent of the entire U.S workforce working from home.[vii]
• While some commercial real estate professionals see an upcoming glut in office space that will drive prices down, others anticipate social distancing infrastructure changes will require even more space; one in-depth study by MetLife estimates U.S. occupied office space will continue growing at its pre-pandemic rate, predicting most attempts at full-time virtual work will fail.[viii]

So, there you have it, about as clear as mud, like the answers to most other pandemic-related questions.  There are other factors, too, as working from home beats riding on a crowded subway or bus with no social distancing. And then there is the birth of management surveillance tools that take a screenshot of your at-home computer every 10 minutes.^[ix] Yikes.

I think it’s important to separate opinions about working from home before the pandemic and during the pandemic. The first was routine and the new kind is forced. No employer asked our permission to force us to work in the same restricted spaces as our out-of-school kids, working spouse or partner, or aging parent who lives down the hall. Many of us don’t even have enough laptops to go around.

This same book I am drafting also shares the top seven characteristics of happy people. Among the seven are (1) happy people have overcome adversity so they have confidence they can do so again, and (2) happy people see all life events as both positive and negative, intertwined in such a way that they find emotional balance during conflicting times.

This pandemic is providing a strong test, yes? Stay Interviews have taught us the best approach to any issue is to solve it with each employee’s input, one-on-one, to learn their true needs and preferences. For those 37% of jobs that can be done from home, managers and their individual employees should collaborate regarding what works best. This is just one area where we are training managers today to facilitate Stay Interviews effectively by asking, listening, and probing for more information…to get to the best answer for all. 

Contact us to train your leaders to conduct Stay Interviews virtually with your employees today at dfinnegan@c-suiteanalytics.com.

[i] https://brentneiman.com/research/DN.pdf

[ii] 2. Gallup new workplace: https://www.gallup.com/workplace/309620/coronavirus-change-next-normal-workplace.aspx

[iii] https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/Pages/Nearly-75-Percent-Remote-Workers-Eager-Return-to-the-Office.aspx?utm_source=marketo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial~HR%20Daily~NL_2020-5-29_HR-Daily&linktext=Nearly-75-Percent-of-Remote-Workers-Eager-to-Return-to-the-Office&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWVdJek5HRTJPR0ptTlRSaSIsInQiOiJNb0dYdDU0blRDcEJDOEgzRjUrY25HT3l3TU55cWk4XC8xVTloYVdLRGgzYVBJdjhwTldFc01iUFpwNU14Z1Y4U05kaXF1WHNWa3RTVWs4SVhwcEc2VG1DbWw1TVp4bktjYmE5TjJQUTBtY05DZnpESGtYZlp6aExWXC9mcWp1Vyt2In0%3D

[iv] 2  Employees embrace remote work: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/majority-employees-embrace-remote-work-coronavirus-covid19.aspx?utm_source=marketo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial~Talent~NL_2020-4-29_Talent-Acquisition&linktext=Majority-of-Employees-Embrace-Remote-Work&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTTJNeU1UUTBNVEF4T0dJeSIsInQiOiJ0b2JzQjFPXC9mNjNwdDFmOENOZmVsaUJwNlNUZDJCQ0pKWHRsS3Vldmg1Wmc3ejhMUzBLYlhYNkx6ak5cL3g4QklTdU5oZXNGWnlYejBBZTNVM1dnY3VMdzBzc2lcL1FmYU5RQ1VIMzh4NUJwcDExNWdTOEpGSUttVnNvcHNcL1BGXC94In0%3D

[v] https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/majority-employees-embrace-remote-work-coronavirus-covid19.aspx?utm_source=marketo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial~Talent~NL_2020-4-29_Talent-Acquisition&linktext=Majority-of-Employees-Embrace-Remote-Work&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTTJNeU1UUTBNVEF4T0dJeSIsInQiOiJ0b2JzQjFPXC9mNjNwdDFmOENOZmVsaUJwNlNUZDJCQ0pKWHRsS3Vldmg1Wmc3ejhMUzBLYlhYNkx6ak5cL3g4QklTdU5oZXNGWnlYejBBZTNVM1dnY3VMdzBzc2lcL1FmYU5RQ1VIMzh4NUJwcDExNWdTOEpGSUttVnNvcHNcL1BGXC94In0%3D

[vi] 2  WFH not permanent: https://www.shrm.org/resourcesandtools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/pages/shrm-covid-coronavirus-employers-say-remote-work-not-here-to-stay.aspx?utm_source=marketo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial~Talent~NL_2020-5-6_Talent-Acquisition&linktext=Employers-Say-Remote-Work-Is-Not-Here-to-Stay&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiTkRZNVlUY3dPREkyTWpSayIsInQiOiJrMlVWbzBSckI5bWpnXC81dHZyT1RKUGdqbGlYcnk1elp4MUFoUSswcDl0eHNGek8wQUkyWVl6TzFCR0JiOUMxdTEzTVVtNHI0T05KaldZRCthTjk5U1h1Ukx1bW9QVGNmVGNpdGQyMWtDdkV3OUhPTk4zSUNlWUFcLzZhN1BlNlF4In0%3D

[vii] 2. 75% eager to return to offices: https://www.shrm.org/ResourcesAndTools/hr-topics/talent-acquisition/Pages/Nearly-75-Percent-Remote-Workers-Eager-Return-to-the-Office.aspx?utm_source=marketo&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=editorial~HR%20Daily~NL_2020-5-29_HR-Daily&linktext=Nearly-75-Percent-of-Remote-Workers-Eager-to-Return-to-the-Office&mkt_tok=eyJpIjoiWVdJek5HRTJPR0ptTlRSaSIsInQiOiJNb0dYdDU0blRDcEJDOEgzRjUrY25HT3l3TU55cWk4XC8xVTloYVdLRGgzYVBJdjhwTldFc01iUFpwNU14Z1Y4U05kaXF1WHNWa3RTVWs4SVhwcEc2VG1DbWw1TVp4bktjYmE5TjJQUTBtY05DZnpESGtYZlp6aExWXC9mcWp1Vyt2In0%3D

[viii] https://investments.metlife.com/content/dam/metlifecom/us/investments/insights/research-topics/real-estate/pdf/MetLife_Investment_Management_Back_to_Work_Office_Demand_in_a_Post_Pandemic_World.pdf

[ix] https://www.wsj.com/articles/youre-working-from-home-but-your-company-is-still-watching-you-11587202201?mod=djemwhatsnews&mod=djemfoe

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