A recent report from Nick Bloom, a Stanford professor and co-founder of WFH Research, reveals a widening compliance gap in return-to-office (RTO) policies among companies. Across the country, corporate America is calling employees back to the office. In the meantime, countless workers are left rearranging their lives to meet personal needs on the one hand and company priorities on the other. This trend is a symptom of the struggle between managerial dictates and employee desires in the new post-pandemic labor force.
Bloom’s analysis finds that people are working at home roughly a quarter of their workdays, still impressive and unanticipated in scale. This share has remained steady since the spring of 2023. This statistic comes out of the regular pulse survey of 10,000 Americans, which is administered by Bloom’s research team. Remote work is a permanent fixture, a historic shift in our relationship with the workplace. In response to this, many offices et al are re-evaluating their rto plans.
One Fortune 100 company shows us how far this trend can go with its draconian, three-day-in-office-only policy. The company closely monitors attendance using an eight-week rolling average. They only penalize employees who show up less than 1-and-a-half days per week on average. The company’s HR chief attributed some absences to employees being away on business travel, suggesting that attendance tracking can be complex.
Bloom stated, “It just does not look like employees are following through on the ground.” Additionally, his other observations cut to the heart of it all. Even as corporations lobby for mandate return-to-office policies, employees remain largely able to perform their work without adhering fully to those mandates.
The burden of tracking employee attendance is made even more challenging by several factors. Right away, employees will start to miss in-person days where they are called away by client meetings, conferences, appointments, or simply sick days or vacations. Over half of those penalized for not maintaining expected attendance reported that their employer showed little interest. This indifference emboldened them to persist with the practice. This connection is part of a growing cultural change toward leniency and flexibility as workers try to juggle increasing professional and personal demands.
In response to the evolving workforce landscape, Weishaupt, CEO of Owl Labs, noted that employees are finding flexibility “wherever they can.” Bloom’s research backs up this intuition. Perhaps most interesting is what it tells us about the demand for hybrid and remote roles—still robust, but not as much as in prior years.
Surprisingly, research shows that 43% of hybrid workers participate in a new trend called “coffee badging.” This term describes employees going to the office for just a few hours to appear present without necessarily fulfilling traditional work requirements. Additionally, 12% of hybrid workers expressed a desire to try coffee badging, highlighting how some seek to navigate office culture while maintaining flexibility.
As organizations adapt to these new realities, managers are under more pressure to focus on the performance of their teams, instead of rigid adherence to attendance policies. This change makes it improbable that they will be able to see stricter attendance policies in a positive light. In fact, as Bachaud noted, demand for these hybrid roles continues to be strong. The urgency for these positions has waned from the earlier days of the pandemic.
New research from ZipRecruiter indicates that only about one in five employers are ready to recruit talent in entirely remote positions. Furthermore, an equally high percentage is seeking candidates to fill hybrid roles. Even as some companies continue to push back against RTO mandates, employee demand for remote work continues to drive hiring trends. Reading between the lines of Weishaupt’s findings, it sounds like your typical hybrid worker is back in the office three or four days a week. That is up from their record high last year.