Dive Brief:
- Remote work isn’t just confined to the home, a recent report from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York reveals. About half of in-office days are “spent entirely on Zoom calls or doing solo work,” a September survey of 1,835 full-time U.S. workers revealed.
- The phenomenon — referred to by study authors Natalia Emanuel and Emma Harrington as “in-office remote work” — has proliferated in recent years, resulting in an office that “has become less effective in delivering on its promise of co-location with colleagues,” the authors wrote.
- The report illuminates how the office has changed post-pandemic — and how and why the return-to-office mandates of recent years have failed to produce the engagement and cultural effect leaders claimed they would achieve.
Dive Insight:
If companies are mandating in-office work, why are employees still isolated? The answer lies in a handful of contributing factors, Emanuel and Harrington wrote.
For one, entire teams are rarely in the office together. The authors found that on in-office days, 7 in 10 workers still had at least one teammate who was not in the office. Compliance with in-office mandates is “spotty,” they found, with people generally showing up less often than is requested by leadership. Uncoordinated attendance is also a problem, with people attending the office on different days. On average, teams were missing about one-third of their members at a time.
Being down even one teammate can substantially change the in-office dynamic, the authors found. Nearly half of respondents said their teams “operate with a ‘One Zoom, All Zoom’ (OZAZ) norm: they switch to fully virtual meetings once one participant needs to dial in,” Emanuel and Harrington wrote. “Teams that do not adhere to a OZAZ norm will have more hybrid meetings if some teammates are not in the office. This, in turn, causes participants to spend more time looking at screens and less time making eye contact with one another.”
Emanuel and Harrington found that digital meetings had inexplicably become the norm for many even when not necessary; “for 37% workers, in-office collaboration becomes remote because meetings are online even when all participants are in the office,” they wrote.
In addition to mandate noncompliance, team members are now more disparately located, the authors found. When team members are in different cities, even when all comply with an in-office mandate, they must still conduct meetings digitally.
“Workers indicate that seeing colleagues is a prominent draw to the office,” the authors wrote. “But since the rise of remote work, the office increasingly fails to deliver this benefit.”
Because work from home can offer a variety of benefits — including fewer interruptions, more cost savings and better support for working parents — employers need to be able to truly offer the cultural and social benefits of in-office work if they hope to capitalize on its potential for renewed engagement.
Workforce consultants previously told HR Dive that employers needed to deeply think through the actual purpose of the office, including reconfiguring spaces as needed and setting “common hours” policies, when everyone is expected to be available and colleagues know they can reliably schedule in-person meetings. While the perceived lack of flexibility may at first generate pushback, the office fulfilling its promise eventually wins people over, a CEO at a tech firm focused on measuring office occupancy told HR Dive.
