Why The Future Of Remote Work Is Still Local

Forbes

3 days ago

Companies have settled on the hybrid model to embrace both the benefits of working from home and ... More maintaining company culture.
While most workers remember a time when daily commutes were the norm, millions of people joined the job market since 2020, and all they have known – up until the return-to-office (RTO) movement – is working from home. According to the AI-powered education data company Admissionsly, there are approximately 4.16 million new graduates a year entering the job force. That means up to 20 million recent graduates only know working from home (WFH), remote work, or have never been to the office five days a week. If you asked me five years ago about WFH, I would have told you that companies would exclusively hire remote employees indefinitely. Companies' talent pools increased exponentially (literally to all 50 states) and included strong candidates from lower-cost-of-living areas. It was a gift that kept on giving: more candidates at a cheaper price. Plus, companies could save money by decreasing or eliminating their commercial real estate footprint. Companies may spend upwards of 20% of their revenue on office space and commercial property. Time is the one asset you can never get back. WFH gave people hours of their time back because they didn't have to commute to and from their offices. On average, remote workers save 55 minutes per day, according to the U.S. Career Institute, by eliminating their commute.
That was extra time to work, spend time with their kids, or have breakfast and dinner in peace. Those small perks were vital during such a tough time. And, on a side note, imagine how much better it was for our climate that we didn't have thousands of cars sitting in traffic! Lastly, many people, ironically, felt a sense of freedom and excitement (discounting the fear of a killer virus) because they could work from anywhere. I know people who traveled the country in an Airstream, sometimes working in one state one day and another the next. Some people, primarily younger and without children, traveled the world working through VPNs. Many people and families decided to finally make the move to their dream home, which was usually out of the city and into more remote areas of the country.
Well, my prediction in 2020 was wrong. On May 5, 2023, the RTO debate began when the World Health Organization officially declared the pandemic over. But was it ever a debate? The statistics say WFH wasn't as common as you might believe.
It Seemed Like Everyone Was Working Remotely, Right?
Except for first responders, I felt all private workers were WFH 100% of the time. Only about 7.3% of employed Americans were working remotely before the pandemic, according to George Washington University Professor Hilary Silver. However, by the end of 2020 – the height of the pandemic – the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated only 22% of US workers were working remotely 100% of the time. The Federal Bank of Atlanta estimated it was only 15% by January 2021. Many more were working partly from home. Gallup's June 2022 poll found 70 million, 56% of full-time employees, said they can do their job remotely. Another five in 10 (35 million) worked at home part of the time. A large portion of the U.S. working population was already working the hybrid model.
WFH Versus RTO is a Corporate Culture Battle
Culture is a collection of values, principles, and beliefs that a group of people share. Before the pandemic, our corporate culture was based on a straightforward social contract: you commute to the office Monday through Friday. You take paid time off or sick time when you're not in the office. Pretty simple. After the pandemic, what changed was not our expectation that we would have the ability to work remotely exclusively; instead, it was our understanding of what it means to work remotely. The question became: how many days a week are we going back into the office? How safe was it to have people crammed into an office at the same time, while there were still seasonal spikes in COVID cases? How could we create hygienic and safe work environments? The simple social contract we had pre-pandemic was not nullified. It was renegotiated. And my prediction that WFH and exclusively remote work was the future was inherently flawed.
Cities are heavily reliant on workers commuting. I live in New York City, and the pandemic brought the five boroughs back to the 1980s. Small businesses shut down, restaurants were closed, and the theater district was decimated. NYC lost its soul and culture. The same goes for the other major cities in the U.S., especially San Francisco, which has only recently regained its normalcy.
The commercial real estate industry is vital to the U.S. economy. If people aren't going to offices, leases are broken, and loans default, we would have another Great Recession. We need businesses to pay rent. Office space attracts commuters, who purchase breakfast and lunch from local businesses, who in turn pay taxes that support their local municipalities' infrastructure and growth. It's a positive feedback loop.
And, most importantly, human interaction. Humans are social beings. Zoom and Teams meetings and happy hours saved our sanity in 2020 and 2021, but there's nothing more important to mental health than physically being around other people, whether you like them or not. Along those lines, CEOs of companies of all different sizes are using company culture as the main reason for creating RTO policies. I, professionally, believe that companies can only maintain, control, and enhance their cultures by having people in the office interacting, gossiping, brainstorming, and engaging in all the activities we were doing before 2020. I also professionally believe the company culture reason is being overused, abused, and twisted.
The New Social Contract: The Hybrid Model
As a recruiting professional, I can say that my recruiting strategy is back to where it was pre-pandemic: focusing on finding local candidates. I do executive recruitment and contingent staffing. Contingent staffing is a fancy term for temporary workers and contractors. Temporary and contract workers are the only subset of U.S. workers who can work remotely. This comes down to both cost and efficiency; temps and contractors are working on specific projects that have a beginning and an end. Companies engage contractors to help with projects that need to be completed without having to bring on permanent employees who require benefits, paid time off, and are eligible for bonuses.
From an executive recruitment standpoint, I work primarily in financial services, so I can say that, based on empirical evidence, foreign banking organizations are my only clients that require their employees to be in the office five days a week. My fintech and crypto clients are the only ones that are open to fully remote employees. However, they are becoming less open to that option. They want people in the office. As a corporate culture, we have settled on a hybrid model, which we refer to as either two or three days a week in the office. The other days are WFH days. This is common across industries, as a Pew Research Center report in January indicated that 75% of survey respondents have employers who require some time in the office, and 72% of workers even indicated they prefer hybrid as opposed to working remotely full-time.
Company culture only exists when people are in the office at the same time. Many companies have hybrid models that require employees to be in the office two or three days a week. It is useless and inefficient (and perhaps counterproductive) to have people come in on random days or whenever they choose. You are not building a company culture if employees come in on Mondays or Fridays to be on virtual calls all day. I highly recommend that, as you refine your RTO policy, you make sure that employees are in the office on the same days so they can interact in person, build relationships, maintain a healthy mindset through socialization, and get face time with executives who make decisions on promotions. Having people waste time commuting only to spend time doing what they could have done at home is going against the new corporate culture and social contract.