Companies continue to experience challenges with return-to-office policies. Motivational Work Design provides answers.
The Covid pandemic reshaped the way we work, thrusting work-from-home policies into the limelight. As companies transitioned their workforce to remote setups, it became apparent that ensuring employee motivation and productivity in a virtual environment posed new challenges. And companies continue to experience challenges with return-to-office policies.
Enter motivational work design, a powerful framework that can help companies unlock the potential of their remote teams. Motivational work design can be utilized to enhance work-from-home policies and decisions, fostering a culture of employee engagement, customer focus, and high performance.Tensions Rising
Today, nearly 9 in 10 workers considering a job change (87%) are interested in hybrid or fully remote positions. Many workers are willing to take a pay cut to work remotely. Nearly one-third of workers (32%) who go into the office at least one day a week would earn less for the ability to do their job remotely – all the time.
More than three-quarters of professionals (77%) who can work where and when they are most productive are putting in more hours now than three years ago. And despite those longer workdays, a remarkable 46% report higher job satisfaction. Business units with engaged workers have 23% higher profit compared with business units with disengaged workers, according to Gallop.
Perhaps ironically, Zoom, the company that arguably became synonymous with working from home during the COVID pandemic, has issued a return-to-the-office mandate for the majority of its workers. Part of the rationale is that remote work doesn’t let employees be as innovative.
As we see from current headlines, employee preferences are running directly into a renewed push by employers to compel people back into offices: a staggering 9 out of 10 companies will require employees back to the office sometime in 2023.Help or Hinder
Does working from home help or hinder productivity? Remote work may not be as productive as once thought, recent studies show. The number of people working from home has increased 5 times in the years from 2019 to 2023, with 40% of US employees now working remotely at least one day a week.
