Back to the office! Just don’t expect to see your boss there

Bosses are hell-bent on getting their staff back into the office. It’s just that the rules don’t necessarily apply to them.

While 35% of non-executive employees are in the office five days a week, just 19% of executives can say the same, according to a survey by Future Forum, a research consortium backed by messaging channel Slack. Of the share of employees who are making the commute, more than half say they’d like at least some flexibility, and nonexecutives broadly report having a much worse work-life balance than their bosses.

Furthermore, the disparity is growing. In the fourth quarter of 2021, non-executives were about 1.3 times as likely as their bosses to be fully in office. Now it’s nearly twice as likely, and the share of non-executives who are in five days a week is the highest since the survey began in June 2020, according to the more than 10,000 white-collar workers polled in the U.S., Australia, France, Germany, Japan and the U.K.

The gap points to a double standard in return-to-office messaging — executives from Bank of America to Google are prodding workers to return in part to boost in-person collaboration, but bosses themselves are somewhat exempt.

Employees aren’t having it. According to the survey, workers who are unsatisfied with their flexibility are now three times as likely to say they will“definitely” look for a new job in the coming year. It also showed a feeling of work-life balance fell twice as much for full-time office workers.

“Top-down mandates just generally don’t work,” said Brian Elliott, leader of Future Forum.