Bosses Are Not Following Their Own Return-to-Office Policies

Bosses are hellbent on getting their staff back into the office. But they don’t necessarily see the rules as applying to them.

While 35 percent of non-executive employees are now working in a corporate office five days a week, just 19 percent of executives can say the same, according to a survey by Future Forum, a research consortium backed by messaging channel Slack. Among the employees who are commuting daily, more than half say they’d like to at least have some flexibility, and non-executives broadly report a much worse work-life balance than their bosses.

Furthermore, the disparity is growing. In the fourth quarter of 2021, non-executives were about 1.3 times as likely as their bosses to be fully in the office. Now that ratio has grown; non-executives are nearly twice as likely to work on company premises full-time, and the share of non-executives who are in the office five days a week is the highest it’s been since the survey began in June 2020.

Future Forum surveyed more than 10,000 white-collar workers across the United States, Australia, France, Germany, Japan, and the U.K. The firm’s definition of “executives” includes those with a title of president or partner, or anyone in the C-suite.

The gap between executives and non-executives points to a double standard in return-to-office messaging. Executives from Bank of America Corp. to Alphabet Inc.’s Google are prodding workers to return, in part to boost in-person collaboration, but bosses themselves remain somewhat exempt. Companies are also trying to justify long-term office leases or state-of-the-art headquarters like Apple Park in Cupertino, California.

Employees aren’t having it. According to the survey, workers who are dissatisfied with their flexibility are now three times as likely to say they will “definitely” look for a new job in the coming year. The survey also shows that employees’ feelings about their own work-life balance fell twice as much for full-time office workers than for employees with location flexibility. “Top-down mandates just generally don’t work,” said Brian Elliott, executive leader of Future Forum.

In addition to improving workers’ mental health, offering more options for where employees do their work can move the needle on diversity, equity, and inclusion. Some 82 percent of Asian or Asian-American workers, and 79 percent of Black respondents, said they would prefer a hybrid or fully remote work arrangement, compared with 77 percent of White respondents. Women and working mothers expressed a stronger-than-ever desire for location flexibility as childcare costs continue to rise.

As the debate on return-to-office policies evolves, Future Forum recommends that companies offer flexibility in schedules and location in order to retain top talent, even if it means breaking cultural traditions and developing new workflows. “People being in the office gives you the illusion of control, but it’s just an illusion,” Elliot said. “It doesn’t mean they are being productive.”

—With assistance from Matthew Boyle.

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