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Confirming and Refuting, Part 4

  • speedandbalance24
  • Jan 4
  • 4 min read

Updated: Feb 1

Preamble

This blog is about work. How and where we work, and why the discussion generated by these questions is relevant to the future of work. The world of work is evolving. This blog will provide some history and context, highlight the push and pull between employees and employers, and sample some Return To Office (RTO) policy considerations. It’s important enough to repeat: The world of work is evolving. Correspondingly, this blog will try to keep pace.


 

Confirming and Refuting, Part 4

The COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on how, and where, many people work. Prior to the pandemic, the vast majority of workers spent 5 days in the office every week. The shutdowns in response to the pandemic forced employees to work from home, or not at all, for an extended period of time. Companies have shared various reasons for instituting their RTO policies and mandating that their employees work from an office location at least part of the time, as we shared in our September 2024 article titled “Why RTO”. In Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3 of this series on Confirming and Refuting, we looked at a variety of reasons that a company may be instituting an RTO policy. As we enter 2025, we’ll dive into the last, and potentially most interesting and provocative reason for instituting RTO in the final installment of the Confirming and Refuting series.


Lack of trust

Many companies survived the lockdowns without too much of a slowdown in output, but there’s always that kernel of doubt as to whether or not the company would have done more if everyone was in the office. The perception among some leaders is that if you’re not in the office, you’re not working: “We can’t have people working three days a week and picking up five days a week pay.” according to one CEO on hybrid work.


A Gartner study found only 63% of companies trust their employees, and 53% of employees trust their employer. This bi-directional lack of trust has generated a Cold War style of escalation among employers and their workers when it comes to remote work:


Employer action

Employee reaction

Employers invested in monitoring software to make sure employees were actually working while remote.

Some employees installed software that periodically moved the mouse or entered random keystrokes to simulate busy-ness.

Employers started enforcing office days by tracking badge swipes.

Some employees started coffee badging - badging into the office to grab a cup of coffee with colleagues, then turn around and leave to work remotely.

Employers started tracking badge-in / badge-out times, to measure their employees’ number of hours in the office.

Some employees started sharing their badges with their co-workers, allowing one person to simulate multiple people being in the office for the requisite number of hours.

Employers started inspecting the name of the WiFi that their workers logged in from.

Some employees renamed their home WiFi to match the corporate network name to give the semblance of logging in from work.

NOTE: This blog does not condone any of the above practices.


This lack of trust has consequences. Consider the following:

  • Employees working under monitoring / surveillance software are more likely to work on tasks that register in the software, rather than the most important items.

  • Employees in low-trust organizations are far less likely to bring game-changing ideas to work.

  • Employees who are mandated back to the office are far less likely to spend any more time than they absolutely have to in the office.


If employees are working on lower-value items, withholding innovative ideas, and putting in bare-minimum effort at work, it’s logical to ask the question: How would the company’s products and financials be impacted?


One report found that, on average, public companies that give employees work flexibility outperformed companies that mandated some form of RTO. The specific performance measure was revenue growth, and the gap was 16 percentage points – 21% revenue growth for companies offering work flexibility versus 5% for companies with employer-mandated RTO policies.


It’s impossible to prove causality, but the correlation is undeniable.


Let’s say that Company A offers teams and individuals the choice of when / if they want to be in the office. Employees given this choice may perceive a higher level of trust from their employer. This perception of trust leads them to feel more empowered, which leads to higher employee engagement. And higher employee engagement is a traditional hallmark of higher revenue growth.


In counterpoint, let’s take Company B, which mandates some form of in-office policy, either fully in-person or prescriptive hybrid (e.g. Tuesdays and Thursdays in the office). Employees may perceive this lack of choice as a lack of trust. The lack of trust leads to unmotivated and demoralized employees, which result in lower revenue growth for the company.


One clear and important note from the various studies: a company that allows employees / teams the choice to work in a hybrid fashion outperforms a company that mandates their employees / teams to work in a hybrid fashion. It’s not about whether or not you’re in the office, it’s entirely about employee choice and employer trust.


Possible additional contributing factors to revenue growth include:

  • Flexible work policies allow a company to scale up faster because the company is not geographically limiting their resource pool

  • Flexible work policies allow a company to field more candidates for roles because of the desire on the part of workers for work flexibility


The Bottom Line

Lack of trust is typically a subconscious justification for mandating employees back into the office, but this lack of trust is demonstrated to lead to negative consequences for the employer.


Up Next


Citations

 

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