Majority Of U.S. Employees Skeptical About Return-To-Work Plans
As many employers push back deadlines to return to the office, employees are growing less confident in their company’s return-to-work plans, a new survey suggests.
The findings come as many of the country’s big-name employers are still weighing how and when to bring employees back to the office, with companies like Google now looking at a return sometime in 2022.
A survey released Wednesday by workplace analytics company Humanyze found that 63% of the nearly 2,300 employees who responded lacked full confidence that their company’s post-pandemic workplace strategy was the best for employees. The results represent a significant rise over the 46% of survey respondents who felt the same in April, Humanyze noted.
More than half of employees said they didn’t feel thoroughly informed about their company’s plans post-coronavirus, nor about how those plans are getting made, Humanyze found, and about 20% of managers said they didn't have any say or involvement in those decisions. That last figure shows that “leaders have significant work ahead of them to achieve a more inclusive, transparent culture,” a release for Humanyze stated.
A LinkedIn report from August found that 36% of people working remotely were still in limbo about their future workplace expectations and were waiting on employers to make a call about whether they would be expected to come back to the office at some point, CNBC reported.
Not surprisingly, the survey found that employees are looking for flexibility as they transition out of the fully remote pandemic-era workplace into whatever comes next. The majority of employees want to return to the office at least some of the time, citing collaboration with co-workers as the main motivating factor for wanting to go back. But Humanyze’s survey also found that 37% of respondents want to stay out of the office entirely.
Return-to-work decisions vary from company to company, with some major names considering hybrid schedules rather than a five-day-a-week return. While these decisions are still in progress, office occupancy remains low across the country. In October, occupancy in 10 of the U.S.’ largest cities was 36% on average — a high since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
