- More CEOs are stepping up their efforts to get workers back in the office, at least part time.
- Workers who have been doing just fine on their own often see the mandates as unnecessary.
Your boss wants you back where he can see you.
That's the thrust of why more CEOs are calling workers back to the office several days a week. Sure, there might be well-founded concerns about sparking innovation and fostering cohesion. But smart in-person events and other strategies can address a lot of that.
What the honchos should want is engaged workers. Instead, what they seem to want is the satisfaction of looking out over clusters of employees bound to desks. Forcing people to endure grueling commutes isn't a winning strategy for making the rank and file more excited about their work. It's likely to make the person who doesn't want to be there pantomime the diligent corporate soldier.
To get more engaged workers, CEOs need to embrace the research around innovations like the four-day workweek, look to revolutionary tech like artificial intelligence, and reflect on what they said to their employees during the pandemic: We appreciate you and we trust you to do what's best for the business, in part, by taking care of yourselves.
The RTO demands simply miss the point — and workers know it.
That's partly why some employees at Amazon walked out in protest last month and why many staffers at Farmers Group grew apoplectic — even threatening to quit or unionize — when the new CEO recently did a 180 on his predecessor's decision by telling employees they can't work remotely full time after all.
Salesforce, for its part, is trying the honey approach: The software giant said that for a couple of weeks in June, it would donate $10 a day to charity for each worker who made it into the office.
Yet instead of taking attendance, CEOs might be wise to look at how they can make workers feel more tied into what they're doing.
"If you look at employee engagement, it's embarrassing," Felicia Lyon, principal, human capital advisory at KPMG, told Insider.
She pointed to recent data from the Conference Board that found 62.3% of American workers were satisfied with their jobs last year — a new high. But the think tank's survey, conducted in November, also showed the reverse was true: Nearly four in 10 workers weren't happy. That means they're less likely to do their best work.
Among the strongest factors that made the glad-to-be-here crowd say as much was progress they'd made on work-life balance. Gains toward that elusive goal trumped factors like pay and benefits. So clocking badge swipes at the office seems likely to jeopardize the very thing that helped a record share of workers report being satisfied.
The pandemic helped clear out a lot of the underbrush that had creeped up around our office routines. Workers — and even bosses — realized we didn't need to fly all over the place for 30-minute IRL meetings or schlep into an office every day just to do what could be accomplished from home. And knocking off a bit early to catch your kid's soccer game makes it more likely that you'll be happier at work and ultimately more productive.
Lyon said she was initially skeptical that changes like a four-day workweek — where it's actually fewer hours for the same pay and not just five days crammed into four — would make workers more effective. But that's what experiments like a high-profile test case in the UK have revealed.
"We are more productive in that finite period," Lyon said, referring to a shortened workweek. She said tools like AI that can help workers do even more in less time could make it easier for employers to move to shorter weeks and still increase what they accomplish. "If you throw in AI, then that just gives you more flexibility," she said.
"We keep acting like we're on assembly-line work, but we are more knowledge workers now than we ever have been," Lyon said, adding that's even the case for some hourly wage earners. She advised leaders to "really push the limit of thinking about work differently."
Lyon said AI can help workers enjoy higher productivity and increased engagement, in part by weeding out some of the boring stuff. "We're using technology to do work faster, better, different," she said.
Boosting productivity, which has been lagging, could mean there's a need for fewer workers, she added. That could help alleviate some of the labor shortages that employers have been grappling with for years.
"It's like the perfect storm of positive impact," Lyon said.