HR expert says biz leaders scared RTO mandates lead to staff attrition
- Reference: 1715848211
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2024/05/16/hr_say_biz_leaders_scared_rto/
- Source link:
According to a Gartner-led survey of 3,500 employees in the tech industry undertaken in November 2023, 19 percent of non-executives said they'd quit over a return-to-office mandate, and an even larger proportion in management positions expressed similar sentiments.
Return to Office mandates boost company profits? Nope [1]READ MORE
"While 58 percent of executives with a mandate to return to the office said their organization provided a convincing reason for the decision, many senior leaders are unwilling to come back into the office," said Caroline Ogawa, director of Gartner's HR practice.
In another Gartner poll run in September of 170 HR heads, some 63 percent voiced higher expectations of staff coming back to the traditional workplace; 34 percent said a mandated return was already in place, and 13 percent warned that “consequences” of not complying had “intensified”.
[2]Dell , [3]Meta , [4]IBM , [5]Google , [6]Wipro and many, many others have started to monitor the presence of employee at their desks. Repeated violations could [7]limit promotion opportunities at some companies. Roblox took an ever harder line, [8]telling staff that didn’t want to return to find a new job .
[9]
Ogawa added: “An April 2024 Gartner survey of 64 HR leaders revealed 64 percent say senior leaders are concerned onsite requirements will increase attrition,” she added.
[10]
[11]
Canalys predicted more than 18 months ago that tech businesses need to [12]re-consider the metrics they use to evaluate how productive an employee is: because being tethered to a desk is not giving an accurate picture. Proximity bias, the analysis said, would have implications for staff retention.
[13]Productivity paranoia remains a problem, something that Microsoft pointed out some time ago.
[14]
Amazon said last year that [15]engineers worked better when together in person and Meta’s policy concurred, adding that working side by side in the physical sense was [16]essential to help new starters or graduate imbibe corporate culture .
[17]Working from home could kill career advancement, says IBM CEO
[18]Meta to use work badge and Status Tool to snoop on staff
[19]80% of execs regret calling employees back to the office
[20]Get your staff's consent before you monitor them, tech inquiry warns
Pandemic poster child Zoom also ironically said it wanted the [21]workforce to return to the office , and put in place a [22]swanky new office in London where “remote work” meets “we need you back in the office”.
Just this week, research from the University of Michigan and the University of Chicago found a number of [23]senior staffers exiting their employers including Microsoft, Apple and SpaceX due to RTO mandates . Microsoft contested the study.
Gartner's Ogawa pointed to research in April that almost two-thirds (64 percent) of HR bosses it spoke to said senior execs at their organizations "are concerned onsite requirements will increase attrition."
It's not all one-way traffic, though: [24]Nvidia , [25]Atlassian , [26]Dropbox and others are sticking to their pledges to foster more hybrid, flexible working policies. Perhaps some researchers should look to see if those businesses are retaining more staff. ®
Get our [27]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/02/return_to_office_mandates_do_not_boost_profits/
[2] https://www.theregister.com/2024/02/16/return_to_office/
[3] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/02/meta_return_to_office_mandate/
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/18/ibm_consulting_office/
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/08/google_three_day_week_enforcement/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/08/wipro_office_return/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/15/amazon_in_person_mandate/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/18/relocate_to_our_hq_or/
[9] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2ZkXZQYb0GBuBA4yyQbgWagAAAA0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[10] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZkXZQYb0GBuBA4yyQbgWagAAAA0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33ZkXZQYb0GBuBA4yyQbgWagAAAA0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://www.theregister.com/2022/10/21/proximity_bias_workforce_productivity/
[13] https://www.theregister.com/2022/09/23/microsoft_highlights_productivity_paranoia/
[14] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_onprem/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44ZkXZQYb0GBuBA4yyQbgWagAAAA0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[15] https://www.theregister.com/2023/02/20/amazon_mandates_return_to_office/
[16] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/02/meta_return_to_office_mandate/
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2023/05/04/working_home_ibm/
[18] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/18/meta_tracking_office_attendence/
[19] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/15/return_to_office_survey/
[20] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/10/workplace_monitoring_select_committee/
[21] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/07/google_launches_99_a_night/
[22] https://www.theregister.com/2023/08/11/zoom_london_office/
[23] https://www.theregister.com/2024/05/14/return_to_office_mandates/?td=rt-3a
[24] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/16/nvidia_working_from_home/
[25] https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/12/wfh_mandates_bad_for_staff/
[26] https://www.theregister.com/2023/10/23/dropbox_shrinks_hq/
[27] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
That's the way it works
I remember at a previous employer when the IT head held a department meeting to tell us that we had to meet an impossible deadline or we'd all be out. Within a couple of months, all the people who could easily get another job (the most experienced) had done so.
"Perhaps some researchers should look to see if those businesses are retaining more staff."
Also,whether they are gaining some of the senior staff their competitors are losing.
No great loss if this "talent" aren't able to follow simple business rules and come to the office.
Let me guess - you're a micro-managing middle manager - although you may be unaware of the first part of that description.
I guess you are the kind of person who would have sent someone home from an insurance company in the 90s for wearing brown shoes instead of black shoes (in a non customer facing role no less) !? That's not following "business rules". You just follow the rules as you perceive them, even if they don't make any sense.
I don't want to invoke Godwin's Law here, but it's very tempting to make the comparison with "just following orders"
Ain't nothing going on but the rent
MD comes out of his little office and his gaze falls upon a rather large amount of empty desks. We're paying money for this office space he thinks. And it comes to pass that thou shalt come into the office at least once a week if hot desking (there are not enough hot desks to accommodate all the potential host deskers), or if you have a fixed desk, though shalt come into the office at least two or three days a week.
Me, I'm happy with my flexible hybrid. I have my fixed desk and so do have to venture in. But I'm happy to do that and I get to choose which days (no-one really cares). That way I can work around my own life but also can choose to go in to meet up with people. Sometimes it really is easier to get stuff done in person opposed to Zoom etc.
Overall I think horses for courses. Not everyone is the same and likes doing the same things. But I feel there has to be a little bit of meeting somewhere in the middle.
"tech businesses need to re-consider the metrics"
Either that, or re-consider their managers . . .
It's a difficult balance. When you're experience in the job, and a bit older (maybe with family committments), then working from home is great. Gives you more time to do other stuff. You probably have too much human interaction with your horrible children anyway... A bit of peace and quiet is nice.
But what if you're new to all this working malarkey and haven't built up either rexperience or organisational habits yet?
I work in building services engineering and there's a lot of graduates come in every year. Everyone's done a general engineering course and so have a hell of a lot to learn, in quite a lot of different disciplines. Also there's a whole bunch of legislation to get to grips with. In the old days, you were with a design team, in an office, and when starting you were doing lots of odd jobs for senior engineeers while you picked stuff up. Nowadays you might be working from home, dealing with lots of drawings and emails and getting very little face-to-face time with the people that you're supposed to be learning from. Sure, you can ask questions, but for those little things you can't really keep phoning them, and so it's going to be a lot harder to get experience.
This means that not only do you need your juniors in the office a bit to learn this stuff, but you also need your seniors around to teach them.
In fact we, as a small company all did WFH back in 2010, as the company had grown from a one-man band to a small team, and only then got an office. We've now got one person home working who comes in once a week one on the road and two in the office.
In my experience some people are suited to working from home, enjoy it more and are probably more productive doing it. But quite a lot of people get distractred and are less productive out of the office. And that's experienced people. Who's going to teach the newbies?
I guess it depends on the job. And also on whether the company only hires people with experience - or has lots of trainees.
We do train people "on the job", and in fact have a formal program for that as well (3 months some basic courses that are perceived to be neccessary, then you join a group to work, which involves a lot of training (some laws, some politics, some non-documented scheming of other companies that we need to work around, the "real" training, you know).
I had three recent graduates enter during the pandemic, one unfortunately left due to medical reasons. The other two were trained reasonably well remotely, as we had a mandatory WFH phase, followed by the brain-dead "come in 50% of the time but do not meet your colleagues face to face"-phase (nobody could explain the reasoning behind that to me, so I stayed at home, as did my boss). So this works. I'm the first one to admit that it is way easier to just shout across the table to ask your questions, though! So a hybrid model, but one where you meet the whole team when you come in, makes some sense.
I have indeed reduced hours so I only have to come in twice a week, and still work no more than 50% from home, it's their problem if stuff does not get done because I'm not allowed to work (and my boss supports that view) - that said, I use all sorts of rules bending to get the work done, or book time in such a way that the ... (in German we use "Korinthenkacker" - raisin shitters) don't get too upset.
I suspect some of the "big names" going against WFH are really doing it as a stealth lay-off strategy, but they might discover it leads to the best talent moving first.