- Alexander Christian
- BBC working life
3 hours ago
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“Why do I have to go back to the office and my colleague can work from home?”: This question is being asked more and more frequently in companies
In February 2022, the energy company where Mark works — based in Ohio, US — said he needed to return to the office.
Mark’s supervisor, a software engineer, praised his productivity while working remotely after all, he had never missed a deadline. But at a company with over 1,000 employees, the department where Mark works was the first to be told to return to the office three days a week.
“Our team is small and we all get along well. We don’t have to be there,” argues Mark (his last name is withheld to avoid trouble at his job). “Being in the office is not beneficial for my daily tasks I can do all my tasks at home.”
For Mark, the reality is that only his team of five and a few other employees are back on site. “I can count on my fingers how many employees are there most days. We’re at the base of the pyramid and we’ve just been told we have to be in the office,” he says.
But highlevel colleagues in the same company can continue to work remotely. Some of them work while traveling across the United States.
“They’re never in the office,” says Mark. “We had companywide meetings and these employees videoattended tourist attractions. Someone must have commented on the footage and they turned off the cameras at subsequent meetings.”
For Mark and his team, this disconnect between working remotely and returning to the office creates tension. Different employees are subject to different rules and it seems unfair that the reasons for the decisions were never explained.
“[Essa questão] It was never discussed by management,” he reports. “We can ask questions about returning to the office during virtual meetings, but they’re never answered directly.”
As the restrictions caused by the pandemic are lifted, more and more companies are recalling their employees to offices, but the rules do not apply to all workers. Some employers are making exceptions for individuals or for specific groups of workers in decisions that will be difficult to explain when the world returns to the office. While some behaviors are required of most employees, others are permitted to comply with certain agreements.
And as employees within the same organization work with vastly different attendance policies, tensions begin to bubble to the surface, with consequences for work dynamics.
“No clear policy”
Unsurprisingly, getting employees back into the office is difficult.
When the pandemic struck, employees had to transition to remote work almost overnight. Lockdowns ensued and workers faced tremendous disruption in their daily lives.
Managers then needed flexibility in deciding when and where teams would get their work done. In some cases, parents changed their working hours and people without available jobs in the cities moved to the countryside.
Two years later, many employees have created bespoke work environments that keep them productive outside of traditional office work patterns. And the employers of some of these employees now do not offer accommodations that allow them to maintain that standard.
This group could include people who have moved from their jobs during the pandemic and now want to keep their jobs remotely. And then there are the new employees already hired to work remotely.
But a large portion of the workforce is being directed by the same bosses to return to the office for fulltime or hybrid work. This created a problem for employers: the apparent favoritism shown by allowing a select few workers flexibility while imposing restrictions on the majority.
It’s easy for bosses to bring in employees who live a reasonable distance from the office and junior staff. But senior and middlelevel workers may have more leverage to keep arrangements flexible.
“Often more experienced employees will vigorously defend their desire for remote or hybrid practices,” says Helen Hughes, a professor at the University of Leeds School of Business in the UK. “They often already have influence and social capital based on the relationships and reputation they’ve already built.”
With the current labor shortages, experienced workers could also be in high demand especially in industries where competition for talent is tougher. And if companies want to retain these employees, they sometimes have to make concessions.
However, offering special working conditions to some employees can create a sense of injustice, potentially dividing teams and fueling resentment. “If decisions about who works from home and who has to go to the office seem unfair, and some employees get better deals, there’s a chance that onthejob and offthejob teams will become segregated,” Hughes said.
She adds that this situation is fraught with intrigue and the division of the workforce into two camps most office workers and a minority of telecommuters which can create divisions between teams.
And the lack of cohesion in an organization, coupled with employee dissatisfaction, can have a range of negative consequences, with potential implications for work dynamics, according to Amy Butterworth, advisory director at Timewise, a flexible working consultancy in London. For her, “the quality of the work will suffer, there’s a strong hit in terms of inclusion and you won’t get the best returns from the teams”.
While companies struggle to develop returntooffice policies, the lack of plausible explanations from bosses can exacerbate builtup tensions.
When Sarah, a digital agency worker, started her new job in the north of England, her boss said they needed her fulltime in the office because she lives nearby. But his colleagues were allowed to work remotely because they lived further away.
“My boss didn’t have a clear policy for flexible working: he just made decisions along the way,” she says. “They said that since it was easier for me to go to the office, I should be there every day.”
For Sarah, this work dynamic did not lead to resentment against her colleagues, but against her employer. “At the end of the day, I was being punished for where I lived. Flexible working shouldn’t have anything to do with being close to the office,” she says.
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Some employees have reported that senior executives are working from anywhere, while others have to go to the office.
“The managers themselves are ghosts”
In order to choose which employees must return to the office and which can work flexibly, employers inadvertently create unbalanced work dynamics, leading some workers to question this enterpriselevel decisionmaking. In Mark’s case, he’s particularly irritated that the company he works for hasn’t explained why employees who have been productive in remote environments should be forced back into the office.
“We were simply told that we have to go back, but the managers themselves are ghosts,” he says. “If access to the Internet is all you need for your work, then work shouldn’t be limited to one specific location.”
Butterworth says adopting fair labor practices ultimately boils down to consulting employees directly.
“When an employee is reluctant to return to the office, the employer must demonstrate the importance to the individual, their job and the team as a whole. And if employees have been specifically hired to work remotely, you must share the reason. they have a different structure,” she explains.
Understanding why employers allow one employee to work remotely and ask another to come into the office can help ease team tension. For Butterworth, “It’s about looking at the needs of the job, the team, and the employee. When people understand these decisions, it’s easier to find a solution.”
The risk is that without careful consideration and transparent processes, some employees may feel disadvantaged when asked to return to the office while others remain remote. As well as an immediate attack on your motivation, it can create problems among coworkers that, in the long run, create deep divisions in the workplace.
With little explanation for why he needs to be in the office while others can work from anywhere, Mark is now looking for another job. “[Os gerentes] They use terms like ‘team building’ and ‘collaboration’ to justify going back to the office,” he says. Companies that can’t offer flexibility will end up missing out on quality employees.”
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