Does Your Boss Regret Asking You to Come Back to the Office?

By Aoibhinn Mc Bride

Holding your hands up and taking accountability for a mistake is never easy.

So, spare a thought for the 80% of business leaders who are now admitting that hastily issuing return to office (RTO) orders wasn’t their best decision.

A new report by Envoy found that most leaders made their decision around forcing staff back to the office by analyzing keycard monitoring data and by seeing how many times meeting spaces were utilized, rather than by speaking to employees and taking their thoughts around returning to the office five days per week into consideration.

Additional data compiled by Owl Labs for its State of Hybrid Work 2023 report found that 69% of employees believe companies are insisting on a return to office because of traditional work expectations rather than functional benefits.

Using employee monitoring data to ensure their staff are coming into the office is nothing new—companies including JPMorgan Chase and Google have been using employee badge swipes to monitor in-office attendance for over a year—but is counting swipes the best way to make decisions around workplace location?

While 94% of those who took part in the Owl Labs survey shared that they could be convinced to come back to the office, 56% said their level of work-related stress increased since last year, highlighting that being in the office full-time isn’t serving everyone.

Moving Forward

So what can you do if your employer is insisting you wave goodbye to your home office for good and return to the office permanently?

For starters, if commuting to an office every day is going to leave you worse off financially, you could ask for a pay rise to cover the cost—29% of those Owl Labs spoke to expect a pay increase if forced back to the office.

Or perhaps you can speak to your manager about revising its technology so that it facilitates remote work more effectively, meaning you can adopt a hybrid working model instead.

Additionally, you could try and negotiate a four-day week where you consolidate your work into four days but your productivity and output stay the same.

However, if your employer is refusing to meet you half or even part of the way, one solution is to find a new job in a company that facilitates remote work. If so, the HackerNoon Job Board is the perfect place to start your search.

It features thousands of jobs in companies that are actively hiring remote workers, including the three below.

Senior Sales Engineer, Coder, Remote

Coder is on a mission to build enterprise software that makes software developers’ lives easier and keeps them in flow. We are looking for a Senior Sales Engineer who will work with enterprise account executives to qualify, progress, and close revenue opportunities with Fortune 500 customers for Coder’s self-hosted Development Environment Platform.

In this role, you will be a stakeholder in the technical relationship with customers, demonstrate the Coder platform from both the end user (developer) and administrator points of view, and install the Coder platform on various cloud and on-premise Kubernetes and VM infrastructure. Find out more information here.

Product Manager, Search Platform Integration, Virtuoso Ltd, Remote

Virtuoso is the leading global travel agency network specializing in luxury and experiential travel. The Product Manager, Search Platform Integration will oversee the integration of the Algolia search platform and play a crucial role in enhancing the search capabilities of the platform, ensuring a seamless and intuitive search experience for travel products, travel advisors, network-specific content, and travel inspiration content for valued travelers.

As such, you will work closely with technical teams to define data structures, indexing strategies, and search algorithms that optimize search results across various content types. See the full job description here.

Salesforce Solutions Architect, Vantage Point Consulting, Remote

As a Salesforce Solutions Architect, you will play an integral role in the high satisfaction of Vantage Point's clients through the design and development of scalable, high-quality Salesforce services and solutions.

The Solution Architect is responsible for owning the overall design of the technical application and recommending best practice solutions based on client business needs. View additional details here.

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