With CEOs increasingly issuing back-to-office mandates and remote work advocates saying it’s not so fast, managers can be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed.
Many bosses feel that their younger employees, in order to grow and absorb the company’s culture, need personal guidance and the opportunity to network with other workers. Meanwhile, many senior employees, especially those with children, feel that working from home is actually more effective in their situation.
One problem with today’s back-to-office discussions is that they often bring these two very different types of employees together, believes Hong Lei, writer and founder of Recruiting Brainfood. the news.
he said on the a16z podcast episode Posted this week. “But we’re probably now at the point where we need to introduce nuance because what’s positive for one group of people is negative for another.”
He referred to the iCIMS report reconnaissance Which indicates that among college seniors entering the workforce, fully remote work is not receiving much acceptance. Only 2% of them said they would like such an arrangement. Nearly 60% said they don’t have all the equipment they need at home, and a third said they lack a dedicated workspace. Nearly 90% said they wanted to meet frequently with co-workers to build relationships and networks.
And Lee noted that if you look at companies that had already been successful with remote-first before the pandemic, they tend to avoid those employees and instead focus on senior employees with a lot of experience. Today, “the people who are most pro-distant — televangelists, so to speak — are all from that demographic,” he said. “They are individual contributors who have established a level of expertise.”
He noted that these workers have already built up social capital and have an efficient workspace at home, and they often have children they want to be near: “They don’t feel the need to come to the office in order to make friends.”
By contrast, younger workers may live with roommates or their parents or they may feel isolated in a small apartment and crave the opportunity for face-to-face contact with their colleagues. Marc Andreessen, venture capitalist and cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, believes that remote work has “exploded” the way we communicate, with younger workers suffering the most. “You can sit in your studio apartment in front of your laptop and good luck — you’re cut off from everything else,” he said at a summit last November.
Backlash to return to the office
Many companies settle into a hybrid schedule, where employees are required (or required) to work in the office three or four days a week. Things don’t always go smoothly. Amazon recently saw an employee get fired for being mandated to return to the office, and last month those at Google reported their displeasure.
“There’s a little bit of tension at this point as some companies are backing away from remote policies, or at least starting to put additional clauses on them, which you can see is kind of a mission creeping into the office,” Lee said.
He believes the power is oscillating towards employers, who see “an opportunity to take back some of what they may have always considered a very permissive attitude when it comes to remote working.”
Either way, when “building a company or designing an organization,” employee demographics must be considered, Lee says. “If we were ever a telecommuter first, we would probably be optimized as the employer of a large individual shareholder who has already achieved some degree of material comfort.”