The pandemic heralded a historic shift toward virtual work, but employers may soon have more leverage in bringing employees back into the office as fears of a recession grow.
COVID-19 is increasingly being viewed from the country’s collective rearview mirror, and more companies have been asking employees to come back into the office, at least on a hybrid basis. For months, employers have struggled to retain employees, given the tight labor market, but as the economy shows signs of slowing, workers will likely have less leeway in exacting concessions such as fully remote work from their employers.
James Bailey, a professor of leadership at the George Washington University School of Business, told the Washington Examiner that he has noticed an uptick in businesses and organizations starting to reel employees back into the office.
Bailey said that while the United States still has very low unemployment, the employment situation could grow worse in the coming months, handing employers more power to ask their workers to come into the office.
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“An organization has a right to determine the location of their employees. If they say move to California and you say no … they can let you go because you’re an at-will employee,” he said. “If they say come back to the office, then you better come back to the office or else you’re subject to dismissal.”
Joseph Liu, an assistant professor of management at Florida Gulf Coast University, said that as the pandemic has worn on, people have started to return to many of the patterns and practices from before COVID-19. For example, people are traveling more. He also said he has noticed, anecdotally, more people starting to return to in-office work.
One of the most common business operation models to come out of the pandemic is the hybrid model — in which employees come in part time and work at home on other days. For instance, many companies now allow employees to work virtually on Mondays and Fridays but require them to be in the office on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.
Some businesses see the hybrid model as the best of both worlds. Employees are happy to save time and money by being allowed to work from home, while employers are happy to see workers collaborate and build real in-person connections simultaneously.
Still, Liu noted that the labor market continues to be quite strong despite the economy contracting in the first quarter and fears of recession. Employment reports over the past few months have been strong. The economy notched another 372,000 jobs in June — more than 100,000 more jobs than most economists had forecast.
“I think the employees have still historically a pretty strong position to enact kind of concessions from employers. I don’t think it’s completely turned the tide yet,” Liu told the Washington Examiner.
Employers might want their workers to return to the office, even if only a few days per week, for several reasons. One reason is cohesiveness in the workplace, which is bolstered by informal interactions — for example, two co-workers talking about their plans for the weekend as the coffee percolates.
Another role of having at least some in-person work is that it helps socialize new employees to a workplace, according to Liu, who said many companies have been running on some form of “social capital” — a holdover from the employees who have already met and already worked together before the pandemic. When turnover at a company starts increasing and new employees join, that social capital will begin fading away.
Bailey said business organizations cannot create organizational culture remotely, noting that research has shown that one of the factors that distinguish “outstanding organizations” from “merely mediocre” organizations is that they have a work culture of unity, clarity, support, and even fun. “It’s a place where people want to be and work collectively to achieve the goals of the organization,” he said.
The social dynamic of a workplace is also entirely different when workers come into the office versus solely interacting online.
“We don’t chat with our colleagues anymore. Nobody does a Zoom to chat — no one sets up a Zoom and sends you an invitation and it says ‘chat’ on it,” Bailey said. “We used to chat all the time, and by chatting, we developed collegiality.”
When everything is conducted virtually, meetings and conversations are all preplanned work invitations rather than spontaneous interactions, which can play a big role in building camaraderie and esprit de corps within an organization.
The return to some in-office work doesn’t just affect employees at the company in question but also has a chain reaction on other business activity. When a major company has workers back in one place again, surrounding local companies, such as a sandwich shop, receive an influx of customers, which helps the entire area’s business ecosystem.
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The original, and perhaps still the biggest motivator in keeping people working remotely, is the coronavirus itself.
While cases and hospitalizations have ticked up in recent weeks, the seven-day average of deaths is still near the lowest it has been since the pandemic began, and government-imposed health restrictions, such as mandatory mask wearing, are now largely nonexistent — highlighting to employers the continued shift toward pre-pandemic norms.
