Workers resisting the office grind suddenly feeling lonely at home
Three years after the pandemic closed down offices around the world, the remote-work revolution has morphed into a tug-ofwar between frustrated bosses and fed-up staff.
While workers don’t want to give up flexibility, leaders want teams back to boost collaboration and avoid a productivity slump. The impasse is the latest phase in a high-stakes battle that’s putting careers, profits – and mental health – on the line. It’s also prompting conversations about how to move beyond binary debates over “working from home” and “return to the office.”
Some executives are losing patience with remote and hybrid working. “Things changed over the course of the pandemic,” said Martin Sorrell, founder of WPP and chairman of S4 Capital, who has performed an about-turn on the issue. “At the beginning, it worked well. Then the productivity levels and enthusiasm waned a bit and the lack of engagement on a face-to-face basis was an issue,” Sorrell said in an interview.
Sorrell, whose company employs almost 9,000 people in 32 countries, now fears that corporate culture is being eroded as workers stay at home. “If you are paying people to look at a screen, they’ll end up going to the highest bidder. There’s no glue.”
Corporate return-tooffice mandates are multiplying, and they’re coming with extras. Google last week told staff to head into the office three days per week, with attendance to be taken into account during performance reviews.
IBM’s chief executive officer warned that it’s harder to get promoted if you’re not in the office, which his company requires three times a week. From September, BlackRock will only allow staff to work from home for one day a week.
Executives know that these rulings will likely mean losing some staff. AT&T, the largest U.S. telecommunications company, expects to shed about 15,000 employees. On
Wall Street, which has some of the most stringent in-office requirements, one in two people who work in finance would rather quit than spend more time in the office, according to Bloomberg’s latest Market Live Pulse survey. Just 20% of respondents globally prefer working from the office, the survey showed.
Few companies are insisting on a full-time return to the office, with most preferring hybrid models that allow some flexibility. Even backers of face-toface contact are now thinking of ways to engage their teams. “You have to decentralize. What we’ve done is give the office heads the flexibility and authority to work out which system is best,” said Sorrell.
Still, half of UK businesses now say staff mental health has deteriorated since COVID, a recent
PwC study showed. Ayming, a British business consultancy, concluded that motivation at work has been dropping over the past three years.
Without guidance on when to go in, staff can easily spend days in the office on video calls. Mandating attendance with no set schedule, though – for example for key client meetings – means it’s equally hard to plan childcare, travel or other everyday tasks.
In theory, days spent in the office offer cultural benefits and greater opportunities to collaborate. That doesn’t always happen, said Christine Armstrong, a U.K.-based workplace researcher. “If it’s not well organized, when they do go in, they don’t get those things anyway.”
While bosses wrestle with how to manage hybrid workers, about a third of Americans whose jobs allow them to work from home still choose to do so all the time, according to a Pew Research Center survey in March. That’s down from 43% in January 2022 but much higher than before the pandemic, when the figure stood at 7%.
Against this backdrop there are signs that output is stagnating, with leaders unclear on how to motivate employees who choose to stay away. U.S. productivity fell in the first quarter by more than forecast, even as working hours and pay increased, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In May, U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy issued a report on what he termed the nation’s “epidemic of loneliness,” comparing the harm that social isolation causes to the effect of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Managers often don’t have the tools to even measure the work that’s produced at home. “People who work from home do a lot of invisible labor,” said Tessa West, a professor of psychology
at New York University speaking at a MindGym conference in London. “That is eroding their sense of purpose because their manager literally doesn’t see them do it.”