“In a recent discussion with 11 high growth companies, only one chose a three-day in-person option; all the rest were either fully remote or hybrid ‘Office optional’,” start-up growth coach and award-winning HR executive Daneal Charney told Bored Panda in a recent interview.
“While companies are getting braver about strongly encouraging in-office town hall [meetings] or quarterly offsites, they are not mandating it, and probably don’t plan to,” she continued, adding that almost all companies take into consideration how far employees are from the office. “Many companies are continuing to listen to employee sentiment and take their cues from this data.”
According to Charney, companies have to decide if they are location-based or if they can adopt a more flexible model. “If they are location-based then they are limited to talent that is close to their office so they need to be able to live with the impact of a limited talent pool,” she pointed out.
“Companies need to pick a model that can work for them, but be realistic about the upside and downside of their choice and mitigate any challenges. For example, remote companies often put aside a bigger budget for local city get-togethers, optional co-working spaces, and annual offsites.”
The expert added that for workplaces that provide co-location experiences, the best practice is for people to have overlapping time with others. It’s also important for companies to make their employees’ experiences valuable, make exceptions if needed, and lead from the top. “Many remote companies are offering shared space when there’s more than a few employees in a city and even paying for lunch get-togethers,” Charney noted.
Once arguably a rarity, working from home became not only what’s attainable but what’s expected from employees during the pandemic. Before 2020, roughly 17% of employed adults in the US were working from home for five or more days per week, during the covid years—as much as 44% of them did.
The new reality quickly became the only option in some workplaces, at least for a certain period of time, which wasn’t met with equal levels of enthusiasm from everyone. People seemed split into camps about how they felt about working from their dwellings or torn by a somewhat of a love-hate relationship with it.
According to Forbes, the main advantages people saw in remote work were flexibility and increased productivity, while those opposing such an arrangement said they experienced burnout and lacked connection with fellow employees.
Be that as it may, a staggering majority of employed individuals—98%, to be exact—reportedly wished to continue to work remotely at least to some extent. That might be one of the reasons why roughly 16% of companies no longer have a physical office and operate fully remote.
“For some employees who have moved far from the office, remote work is non-negotiable,” Daneal Charney told Bored Panda. “For most, it’s highly preferred at least most of the time, which means three days a week minimum. Working from home is less available for early stage companies, though, who are building hardware products or working in labs to develop new drugs or in the early stage of formation.”
For those in favor of working remotely, such an option has become so important that nearly 60% of them said they would quit their jobs if it was no longer available. Chances are that the people who favor such an arrangement the most represent the industries of computer and IT, marketing, or accounting and finance, as these, according to Forbes, are believed to be the top industries for remote workers in 2024.
Roughly 65% of employed individuals say they would work remotely all of the time if they could. One of the main reasons for that seems to be the need for a better work-life balance, which, according to Forbes, they find more easily attainable while working from home. (Though, while for roughly seven-in-ten people it helps maintain a healthy work-life balance, for around 12% of them it reportedly has an adverse effect.)
Another reason people enjoy working from home is because they find it more productive, which might be the case, especially if they have an equivalent of Kelly Kapoor—the chatty employee from ‘The Office’—at their workplace.
According to Owl Labs’s Annual State of Remote Work report from 2021, as many as nine-in-ten people who have worked from home during the pandemic said their levels of productivity either matched or exceeded the levels when working from the office.
The Owl Labs report found that more than half of people found virtual meetings less stressful than real ones, which is not that hard to believe, especially considering all the entertaining scenarios such meetings often entail. From babies cooing and husbands dancing in the background to participants in the meeting failing to mute their microphones—a situation that can entail some rather awkward moments—among other things, people in virtual meetings have seen it all.