The return to work: employers and employees face off

When it comes to returning to the office, employers and employees are on not on the same page.

Only 4% of employers think their employees would like to return to full-time in-person work, and 71 percent believe most would prefer a hybrid model, according to a survey by labor and employment litigation law firm Littler Mendelson. Still, 28% of those employers plan to bring workers back to the office.

A large portion of the discrepancy may be due to the kind of companies, according to Littler’s COVID-19 task force and return-to-work team leader, Devjani Mishra. Certain jobs can’t continue to thrive remotely, such as retail, construction and hospitality.

“Some industries like tech, there's a lot of comfort with remote work,” Mishra says. “But there are many businesses that until the start of 2020 would never have considered remote work in any serious way.”

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Mishra says she’s surprised the number of employers pushing for in-person work isn’t higher, which is perhaps a testament to the overall success of remote work: the majority of workers say they have been more productive during the pandemic and 30% say their collaboration skills have improved, a survey conducted by Flexjobs found. Plus, for employers, a shift to virtual work offers an expanded talent pool and the chance to create a more diverse workplace.

“We're seeing applicants bring up [working from home] right in the interview room and ask about policies on remote work and hybrid work,” Mishra says. “We’re seeing employers who really would not have thought about it now looking at this as a way to get some folks on board who we might not have had a shot before.”

In response to a rise in demand, 55% of employers are currently planning for a hybrid workforce — a mix of remote and in-person — and some management teams are left questioning their own ability to oversee a scattered workforce.

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“There are managers who don't necessarily have strong skills in terms of supervising remotely and they could use some upskilling in that area,” Mishra says. “That's going to take some time to support them but it's definitely something that’s changeable.”

The challenges of a hybrid modelchallenges of a hybrid model include everything from scheduling obstacles and where employees should sit, to measuring remote work performance and tracking time worked and ensuring employees working from home don’t feel left out or passed over for opportunities, the survey found.

“We will have to look at this across the whole workforce to see how to make it work,” Mishra says. “It's going to take some work, but it's what a lot of us have been doing for the past year.”