Return to the Office? Managers Shouldn’t Overstate the Benefits
Employers can keep insisting that offices are Valhallas replete with opportunities for career development, or they can work harder to make the workplace live up to the hype.
Office life could be better.
Photographer: Menahem Kahana/AFP/Getty Images
Managers who would like remote workers to return to the office are frustrated. The winter Covid-19 pandemic surge is over, yet nine out of 10 people working remotely would like to continue to do so at least some of the time. Workers in the major U.S. cities say they plan to cut their time in the office by half from prepandemic levels and office occupancy rates remain low.
To persuade more workers to return, a number of prominent executives have stepped up their critiques of work-from-home arrangements and doubled down on pro-office evangelism. Remote work is unambitious, disengaged, “an aberration,” lazy, the primrose path to burnout — to channel the CEOs of Morgan Stanley, WeWork, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and Cisco. In offices, by contrast, mentoring, idea generation and synergies flow in a mighty stream!