As companies increasingly pull employees back to the office, in some cases 4-5 days a week, I’m hearing about all kinds of lifestyle disruptions with few employees saying they’re seeing the glass half full.

While some like the idea of a few days a week in the office, most are not happy with schedules requiring them to be in-office more than 2 days a week. 

For example, friends recently had to lease an apartment in Manhattan, where housing is already challenging, because their companies mandated 3 days a week in office starting this month. They’d be losing at least 12 hours per week if they were to commute to/from their home (in Bucks County, PA) to midtown Manhattan. Animal shelters are filling up with pets whose owners were promised permanent work-from-home flexibility by employers now reneging on that deal. Many people cannot afford to live in the locations their companies are based, even if they are lucky enough to find housing.

It would be understandable if data showed people are more productive working in the office 3+ days per week. But it doesn’t. 

I had a long conversation over the weekend with a CIO who monitors productivity globally. He said he finds people are more productive when they work together in an office, but as we talked longer, he admitted that opinion wasn’t data driven. He said he feels more connected to people when they’re with him during in-person meetings because with video meetings, people often turn their cameras off. 

This was a key ah-ha for me. I think a lot of the return to office mandates are being driven by a lack of management vision. They’re opting to go backward instead of pioneering forward.

This NY Times opinion piece shares anecdotes about CEOs who live far from the office and enjoy work-from-home privileges while insisting employees work together at the office. Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, the spotlight is on you. Not cool. The article shares interesting data about the upsides for work-from-home, and questions the push to get people together in person. For example, data points to  increased productivity and reduced sick time for work from home options. WFH also enables caregivers to work full time and care for those who need them. And then there are all the benefits to the environment when fewer cars are on the road.

Yet, despite the growing research that advises otherwise, C-Suite execs are forcing employees back to the office in greater numbers. Easy prediction: they are not going like the results. 

Just look at WPP’s recent order for all employees to work from the office 4 days a week and the response it got from employees. As decision makers at the top ignore the research for all kinds of reasons, they’re going to discover, yet again, today’s workforce is not your father’s workforce. They’re motivated by different factors with flexibility being high on the list. Facing lost productivity, increased use of sick time (and less healthy workforces when the ill show up to the office), plus increasingly disengaged employees will have these short-sighted execs once again in reaction mode.

It’s time for companies to lose the command-and-control mindset and partner with their employees in realistic and meaningful ways. The answers don’t lie in forcing people back to grueling commutes that we all now know are not essential. We have tasted the benefits of working from home, with significantly more hours added back into “our” lives. 

The answers are in better, forward-looking leadership that invests in shifting management strategies to address the real needs of today’s employees so we can work together for a better tomorrow.

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