As offices reopen we’ll have one of the best A/B tests for productivity, well-being and employee experience.
The great office reopening is underway as employees head back to work after 18 months of working from home. This migration is expected to result in a new normal of hybrid work, but there is a bevy of questions to ponder as this grand experiment kicks off. Hybrid work is expected to be the new normal, but there are a few firms such as Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs that expect everyone back in the office every day. The edict from these two financial giants boils down to this: Get your asses back to the office. We’ll see how the Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs approach goes and how many employees rivals ultimately poach, but that’s one end of the spectrum. On the other end of the hybrid work spectrum are companies like Atlassian, which plan to use their remote work DNA to poach talent. Most companies are falling somewhere in the middle with a hybrid approach. In other words, the rest of 2021 will be one giant experiment on hybrid work, productivity, employee/ employer leverage and management. Here are some data points to ponder: Among the key questions during this great work experiment: Will companies be data-driven about hybrid work, remote work and in-person? By most counts, productivity improved amid remote work spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. However, Microsoft Research found that 54% of employees are overworked, and 39% feel exhausted. The productivity signals from Microsoft 365 indicate digital overload as Microsoft Teams meetings more than from February 2020 to February 2021, and email and document collaboration has surged. Simply put, the workday is intense. What remains to be seen is whether companies will handle a productivity dip. Companies say they care about employee wellbeing, but Microsoft Research found that one in five global respondents say their employer doesn’t care about their work-life balance.
