In-person work: why do companies force returns? – 09/17/2023 – Market

Companies offer a variety of benefits—free food, concerts, and yoga—to entice employees back to the office, with varying degrees of success. Now, some are taking a more drastic approach: tying employees’ presence in the office to performance reviews.

Google and JPMorgan have told employees that office presence will be taken into account in performance reviews. US law firm Davis Polk told employees that fewer days in the office would result in lower bonuses.

Meta and Amazon have told workers they are now monitoring badge passing, with potential consequences for those who don’t comply with attendance policies — including job loss.

Increasingly, workers in many companies and sectors seem to be heading towards the same destination.

In some ways, it’s not surprising that bosses are returning to in-person work as the default. After all, we have long been conditioned to believe that showing up is vital to success since our earliest days.

At school, full attendance is still often seen as a badge of honor. The obsession with attendance has also been a mainstay of workplace culture for decades.

Before the pandemic, remote work was virtually unheard of and employees were expected to be physically present at their desks throughout the workday.

However, following the success of hybrid arrangements during the pandemic, in-person work is still entrenched as a core metric. But what is your objective?

“It begs the question: What is work? Is an employee’s job to do something?” asks Bruce Daisley, a UK-based workplace consultant and author of The Joy of Work. free), “or does it look like they are doing something?”

‘Control is a powerful aphrodisiac’

Many companies justify requiring in-person work by citing the value of face-to-face teamwork, relying on research that suggests remote work can impede such collaboration.

“There is evidence that people are more innovative and collaborative when they are together,” says Robert Sutton, an organizational psychologist at Stanford University and co-author of the upcoming book The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder ( The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder

“It’s rational for employers to say there’s something good about having everyone physically in the same place.”

Maintaining corporate structure and identity is another concern, notes Anna Tavis, a clinical professor at NYU’s School of Professional Studies. “Companies pride themselves on having a specific way of running their business,” she says.

“And even when remote workers are productive at the transactional level, management looks holistically at cultural cohesion. They ask: what is our culture and who do we want to be?”

These may be legitimate concerns, but Daisley argues they also reveal a crack in the management’s façade. “This demonstrates a state of corporate anxiety,” he says. “Employers feel a lack of control and are trying to reassert themselves.”

Jay Sterling Silver, a professor at St. Thomas University School of Law in Miami who has written about attendance policies in higher education, agrees. He says that while it’s true that in-person teamwork can stimulate creativity and build rapport, tying workers’ performance to office presence reveals employers’ desire to maintain control.

“Control is a powerful aphrodisiac,” he says. “And requiring people to go through exhausting steps to show up for you, being required to show respect – whether genuine or not – when they pass you in the hallway, and being available to you at any time, helps satisfy that desire for control .”

The issue of inclusion

Mandatory in-person work can apply to all employees, but along with the preference for working from home, some groups also fear that these policies may actively oppose them in the workplace.

For employees with young children, disabilities or long commutes (studies show that minority groups have experienced significant declines due to proximity to work) as the workload in the office can be greater.

This includes the time and costs associated with getting to and from the office, as well as the additional challenges of balancing work with parenting or caring for a disability.

“Flexibility may not seem like a diversity and inclusion issue, but it is,” says Daisley. “Employers aren’t just asking people to sit at their desks. They’re demanding that they face logistical and emotional hurdles that can add a cascade of struggles to their already complex lives.”

The resurgence of in-person attendance policies is a bitter pill for many workers in these groups, who have found a better way to make work work in the more than three years since organizations were forced to embrace flexibility during the pandemic.

For parents, remote and hybrid work has helped them become happier and more productive employees. A small survey of 1,000 active workers and 500 C-suite executives, conducted by child care website Care.com and work and life benefits platform Mother Honestly, showed that the overwhelming majority of respondents felt hybrid work had improved. your quality of life, both at home and professionally.

Labor force participation among women with young children is also higher than before the pandemic. An August 2023 report by The Hamilton Project at The Brookings Institution showed that 70.4% of U.S. women with children under five were in the workforce, compared to a peak of 69% before the pandemic.

The researchers noted that remote work was a significant factor in the shift. For people with disabilities, researchers suggest that remote work can eliminate barriers and remove the stigma often associated with special needs.

Additionally, February 2023 data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that in 2022, labor force participation of people with disabilities increased — reaching the highest figure since the data was first released in 2008. The unemployment rate for people with disabilities also decreased.

‘Powerful Levers’

Despite growing evidence that remote work is not only effective but can also promote greater diversity, inclusion and satisfaction, the emphasis on in-person work is still deeply ingrained in many companies.

On the one hand, workers feel pressure to comply with orders to protect their job security and career prospects. The looming threat of a bad review can be enough to make many employees fall into line, according to Tavis.

“Performance management has always been one of the most powerful levers companies have in terms of impacting employee behavior,” she says. “When it tightens, employees pay more attention to issues of compensation, incentives and professional mobility.”

Plus, the persistent problem of proximity bias can be hard to get out of managers’ minds, says Sutton. The phenomenon — an innate tendency to prefer those in our direct line of sight, regardless of talent or merit — leads bosses to believe that workers they can physically see are more productive or engaged than others.

Still, some employees appear less willing to accept these orders, as they have in the past. Although American workers are spending more time in offices, workplaces are still sparsely populated as some employees have simply decided not to come into the office. And the data suggests that many of them would rather quit their jobs than return to their desks full time.

Bosses may also see that calls for a forced in-person return backfire. Instead of cultivating a thriving business culture, experts say the requests can lead to a culture of surveillance and distrust. Instead of promoting collaboration, it can undermine morale. Bosses may end up learning this the hard way.

It may also weigh on the fact that, in addition to workers, other groups are questioning attendance policies, especially now. In US and UK primary schools, for example, parents are calling for attendance to play a smaller role in the final assessment and for the requirement for “perfect attendance” to be eliminated.

Law professor Silver agrees that mandatory attendance should be phased out because it “corrupts grades as if they were a measure of performance.”

Stubbornly clinging to mandatory office attendance has the potential to create missed opportunities, reduce productivity, and lower employee satisfaction.

“Bosses are sending the message that physical presence trumps actual performance,” says Daisley. “But that’s a trap. And it’s a wrong idea of ​​what work is.”