(Bloomberg) -- During the pandemic lockdowns that began in 2020, millions of office workers suddenly abandoned their workplaces and started doing their jobs from home in what McKinsey & Co. researcher Ryan Luby called “a social experiment at scale.” The debate over what it proved rages on.
Does giving people agency over where they work, and on which days, reduce productivity? Erode company culture? The research isn’t conclusive. Still, managers and workers tend to have strong feelings based on their own experiences, leading to a broad range of office policies and reactions to them, now that the choice is back with employers.
With lockdowns over, some companies have stuck with fully remote workplaces. Others — Walmart Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., for example — have recalled office personnel to the workplace five days a week, with limited room for exceptions or patience for complaints. Those in the middle, such as insurance giant Allstate Corp., have settled into hybrid arrangements.
What are the trends?
Today, 85% of companies globally expect office workers to be present in the workplace at least three days a week, according to commercial real estate giant JLL, and 97% are tracking attendance through badge swipes.
The so-called Return to Office (RTO) trend hasn’t played out evenly across continents.
In the US, the average percentage of workdays people worked from home (WFH) has found a new normal slightly north of 20%, according to data from survey company WFH Research. That was after soaring to 61% in 2020 from just 7% in 2019, as measured by a survey with a similar question by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The RTO trend has been strongest in the Asia—Pacific region and in Latin America, based on the percentage of office capacity in use on any given workday. Loyalty to employers is more steadfast in places such as Japan and South Korea than, say, the US. High office attendance in China in particular is attributable in part to its so-called 996 culture, a norm of working from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week, in tech industries.
Are differences in WFH rates only geographical?
No. In all but a few countries, women place a higher average value on working from home than men do, according to Stanford University economics professor Nicholas Bloom. Also, workers with higher earnings and educational levels tend to prefer working from home.
Larger firms, having the financial capacity to invest in hybrid work infrastructure, tend to be more flexible about WFH, according to a 2023 McKinsey report. They also are more likely to decentralize that decision, deferring to individual teams, whereas smaller companies assert a more concentrated pull back to the office, according to Luby, a co-author of that report.
What are the frictions over RTO mandates?
Many employees are eager to retain at least some remote work flexibility. “It’s difficult to take something away that’s already been given,” said Luby. “Employees increasingly see the ability to work flexibly as part of their total compensation.”
When employers withdraw that privilege, they often cite company culture, according to Mark Ma, an associate professor of business administration at the University of Pittsburgh who has examined RTO mandates at S&P 500 companies. Sometimes, Ma says, employers call workers back after a company’s stock price has crashed. Facing pressure from investors to determine what’s gone wrong, unproductive remote workers provide an easy scapegoat, he says.
PwC, a Big Four accounting firm, has gone so far as to request location data from its UK employees to track adherence to a policy requiring partners and staff to spend at least three days a week with clients or in the office.
Some workers are so committed to remote work that they’ll quit rather than give it up. According to a May 2024 survey of more than 750 business leaders, 80% of companies have lost employees over RTO mandates.
Are RTO edicts used to induce workers to quit?
Some workers have speculated that RTO mandates have been used as a way of reducing headcount. Amazon Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy and other corporate executives have explicitly denied it. But the idea has been embraced by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, who’ve been tasked by President-elect Donald Trump with reducing the size of the federal bureaucracy. “Requiring federal employees to come to the office five days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome,” they wrote in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. About half of federal workers are eligible to work remotely, and approximately 40% of their work was being done that way as of May 2024, according to a report by the Office of Management and Budget.
What rights do workers have to work remotely?
Enforceable legal rights to work remotely are scarce, but in Europe, policymakers have taken steps to promote more flexible arrangements. In 2023, a law went into effect in Ireland that requires employers to consider employee requests to work remotely based on both parties’ needs. If employers refuse, they must provide reasons in writing. The UK adopted a similar measure that took effect in 2024.
Nothing is that codified in the US, but workers suing for the right to work remotely as a “reasonable accommodation” under the Americans With Disabilities Act have succeeded more often since the pandemic arrived than before. According to a Bloomberg Law analysis, employees won about 40% of such cases in federal court in the two years before July 2023, up from about 30% in a two-year period before the pandemic.
--With assistance from Matthew Boyle and Jo Constantz.
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.