In the early days of COVID, businesses scrambled to work out how to operate remotely. Later in the pandemic and since emerging, we switched to a ‘flexible’ approach where businesses let employees decide what worked best for them. Now we are entering the ‘optimise’ phase where the reality of maintaining an employee-led approach is kicking in, with businesses feeling the financial impact of unused office space and the longer term productivity, learning and innovation impacts of working from home.
Businesses are starting to take a firmer line about returning to the office, with a number making headlines recently: AO World has told staff to work in the office ‘or quit’, JP Morgan has insisted on managing directors being in the office five days a week to ‘lead by example’, BNY Melon has demanded that all workers attend the office 3 days a week or face ‘corrective action’, and Aviva is basing part of senior management bonuses on getting their teams back to the office.
What is driving this increasingly frequent approach of telling employees they MUST return to the office? Is it good or bad for business? And it is it possible to do this without alienating the workforce?
Actual Experience PLC (LON:ACT), an analytics-as-a-service company, provide digital experience quality analytics services in the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, and internationally. The Company work with business leaders and people-centric organisations to continuously analyse the Human Experience of the Digital Workplace.
