What the strange bedfellows in the return-to-office debate say about the future of work

My book with Ranya Nehmeh, In Praise of the Office, about the benefits of face-to-face interactions, is being released this month. Along with the attention that comes with it, I am learning about who advocates for remote work and who advocates for returning to the office.

For the record, we argue that it is possible to have the benefits of in-person working with a hybrid schedule, but it requires management to be much more purposeful with how it uses that in-person time than what we are seeing now.

But back to the advocates … what is surprising about them is that there is one set that we might think of as conservative and pro-business, arguing for remote work, and another that is also pro-business and conservative, arguing against it. There is another set that we might think of as pro-employee and progressive, arguing for it, and another that is also pro-employee and progressive, arguing against it. In other words, return-to-office has neatly fractured the usual political and social lines.

Let me explain.

Who supports remote work?

Within the business community, the strongest advocates for remote work initially were the CFO function. They began arguing for remote work in the first month of the pandemic. This is surprising because, as pro-employee and progressive as most CFOs are (as Bill Maher would say, “I kid the CFOs”), they wanted remote work not to help employees but to cut offices and save money on real estate. That would be an especially important savings because it is slashing fixed costs, the kind that investors hate the most.

The other set of advocates, of course, are employees themselves, especially those with families who are working from home so that they can more easily juggle their family and home demands: watching the kids when they come home from school and then picking work back up in the evening. A different group with a strong interest in permanent remote work is those who want to relocate to a place where they prefer to live and never have to return to the office.

Hybrid poses a challenge for CFOs, as the goal is to get everyone back on “anchor day.” If that actually happens, we would need as much office space as before, but it would sit empty on non-anchor days. It also confounds employees who want to move elsewhere, because they would have to fly back for a few days each week. Let us return to that below.

Who supports return-to-office?

Then we turn to the “return-to-the-office” supporters. Here we also have two groups. One of the business sides is who we might call old-fashioned thinkers who believe that employees are goofing off when they are not in the office, where they could otherwise be watched.

On the same side, though, are who we might call the progressive thinkers, the “Theory Y” advocates who know the research showing the value of human interaction, the importance of face-to-face working for collaboration, especially in agile environments.

The hybrid model does not make these two particularly happy, either, as the conservatives still think employees are goofing off at home outside of anchor days, and the Theory Y advocates think they are not getting enough interaction with the limited anchor days.

How does the push-and-pull of these different groups play out? Consider the internal dynamics within HR: There are those who advocate for more remote work, and those from the “Organisation Development” side—dating back to the Human Relations movement—who emphasise the importance of social relationships and face-to-face interaction.

The tugging from four different positions helps make sense of the messy practices we see in most hybrid organisations.

A changing conversation

First, it helps explain the biggest befuddlement of the hybrid era: why employers have anchor days—many of them three per week—but they do not enforce them. It allows the hybrid model to work with a small office space because, in fact, not everyone will be there on anchor days. The fact that organisations are not enforcing these policies makes the employees who want to stay home happier. It is also possible that the anchor day policy is enough to persuade the conservative thinkers that they can watch employees, and the progressive thinkers that employees are getting enough interaction with each other.

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Second, the tugging of these forces explains one of the new practices that employees hate: open offices, which, in theory, allow more employees to be packed into a smaller space. This initiative meets the CFO’s goal of reducing office space and could potentially increase employee attendance on anchor days. That change, however, contributes to employee resistance to returning: They are not going back to their offices; they are moving to something much less pleasant.

Finally, it explains all the expectations of the rules that we see, as those exceptions tempered employee opposition. Some employers have allowed more senior employees who relocated to become “permanently remote” on a case-by-case basis until they retire. At the local level, we have what my colleague Denise Rousseau would call unofficial “i-deals,” where exceptions allow individuals to skip out of attendance requirements.

A look ahead

Why has the balance now shifted from the “hybrid theory but not in practice” model to a more serious push to return to the office? It is a shift in the positions within these four parties.

On the management side, CEOs are more aligned with the progressive management view. Yet, they are seeing performance problems they attribute to employees not working together, although some of this may also be that they are discovering and not liking the widespread flouting of attendance rules. On the employee side, the softer job market is making employee threats to quit if attendance rules are tightened less credible.

The story to watch is what happens with the return-to-office approach when it means cramming employees into much smaller spaces than they had before. Let’s see how that plays out.

About the Author:

Peter Cappelli is HR Executive’s Talent Management columnist and a fellow of the National Academy of Human Resources. This article was first published on HR Executive.