Good morning!
CEOs are bringing employees back into the office, but they’re still struggling to find the sweet spot when it comes to a successful RTO push.
A new report from Boston Consulting Group sheds light on what companies are getting wrong—and right—about their hybrid work arrangements. The management consulting firm surveyed more than 1,500 office-based workers across the globe, and found that employees who have less control over their office schedules are more likely to be unhappy, which could lead to higher attrition—especially for diverse workers.
First, the good news. Both workers and managers believe they should be in-person at least one-third of the time, according to the study. They also agreed that tasks like trainings, social events, or collaboration in general were better done in person.
But hybrid work is not a one-size-fits-all endeavor, and employee contentment varied significantly based on the version companies implemented. Around 70% of employees were satisfied with a hybrid model that had set days every week. That number rose to 82% when workers’ office schedules varied each week, and reached 99% when they were asked to attend only key in-person events. Employees want their time in office to be used meaningfully, to do things like connect with coworkers, instead of “focus work,” which they could do better remotely.
Employees were also more likely to be unhappy with work models that come from top management and apply to everyone. Company-wide guidelines made around 24% of employees unhappy, compared to manager-led guidelines which dropped that number by 10 percentage points. And when teams or individual employees were able to decide what their hybrid policy would be, only 6% of workers were unhappy.
“All of a sudden, for the first time in our lives we're being told, like children, ‘You need to show up, I'm taking attendance.’ What does that say about trust?” says Debbie Lovich, head of people strategy at Boston Consulting Group and a lead author of the report. “It's about agency, and control. And what makes people the least unhappy is when we're deciding together as a team.”
The stakes are high for companies when it comes to getting their RTO plans right. Employees dissatisfied with their work model were more than 2.5 times more likely to consider leaving their organization in the next year, compared to those who were satisfied. Females, caregivers, LGBTQ workers, and disabled employees were also more likely to say that flexible work options were a key driver in deciding whether to stay or leave.
“It’s less about the days per week in the office,” says Lovich. “It's about: How do you build the muscle as an organization to create work that delivers the joy, flexibility, trust, accountability, and productivity to the organization? If you don't, you're at risk of losing your best.”
The researchers outlined five steps organizations can take to start getting hybrid work right:
1. Make sure the leadership team agrees on the company’s needs, and the amount of freedom that individual teams and managers will have about how to work.
2. Empower the heads of different business units to identify the kind of hybrid model that works best for their own team.
3. Allow individual team leaders to customize work models—and prepare to further modify them as work and personal priorities shift.
4. Invest in “key enablers” to make the models work, including teaching managers to build work routines and schedules that allows their teams to do their best work when together, and get them the collaboration tools they need.
5. Don’t monitor badge swipes or track workers online. Instead, make sure that KPIs are about quality, innovation, productivity, growth, and engagement. And adapt as needed.
Paige McGlauflin
paige.mcglauflin@fortune.com
@paidion
