Just 6 out of 158 U.S. CEOs said they’ll prioritize bringing workers back to the office full-time in 2024, according to a new survey released by the Conference Board.
Why it matters: Executives are increasingly resigned to a world where employees don’t come in every day, as hybrid work arrangements — mixing work from home and in-office — become the norm for knowledge workers.
Zoom in: “Maintain hybrid work,” was cited as a priority by 27% of the U.S. CEOs who responded to the survey, conducted in October and November.
- A separate survey of chief financial officers by Deloitte, conducted in November, found that 65% of CFOs expect their company to offer a hybrid arrangement this year.
State of play: “Remote work appears likely to be the most persistent economic legacy of the pandemic,” write Goldman Sachs economists in a recent note.
- About 20%-25% of workers in the U.S. work from home at least part of the week, according to data Goldman cites.
- That’s below a peak of 47% during the pandemic but well above its prior average of around 3%.
My company just finished a multi-million dollar office buildout and we all worked from home for 6 months while it happened. Now we’re back in the office the only people really into it are the managers… Who have private offices. With doors. The rest of us get “hotelling” without cubicle walls.
But they did it for us, they say. Because, ya know, we were all begging for a louder, more distracting work environment and a fancy kitchen with 140" ultra wide displays and not enough cabinets for personal storage
Open plan is the worst. I don’t need all my co-workers to see me scratching myself.
The half-walls we have are lower than the webcams on the monitors. Which means they pick up EVERYTHING so people have to mute until they have something to say. I had a meeting that included someone like 10 desks away and I just muted and talked through their mic
Half our computers didn’t have webcams, so people would do the meeting on their phones instead, and many of them didn’t have headphones, so the meeting would be a bunch of echoes around the room. Fucking ridiculous. And the stupidest part was that it was an office in a manufacturing facility and we all worked hybrid schedules. Even when we were there, all of our communication was on Slack and all of our meetings were on Zoom. None of us had to ever be there for any good reason. And if we weren’t there, they could have gotten rid of the office added more production lines. I’m glad I’m not there anymore. The only good part of that job was I got to work from home half the time.
Brutal. One of the worst parts for me is that the majority (I’m talking 90%+) of my work communication is with people in another state…so what do we gain by having me in the office 3 days a week? The only real benefit I see is that it will impress clients…but we only have clients visit a few times a year.
The worst part is that the open office plan has been shown time and time again to actually decrease work output yet somehow people are still pushing for it.
Yep, it’s total shit but hey, the pictures of it look nice!
I’ve been asking everyone at work to find me a single study that says open offices are good for productivity
I guarantee that there were some in the mid 1990s when it was a new concept and few people had implemented it. Now we have a generation of people who never looked back since.
It would be a real shame if productivity were to fall off a cliff due to all the distractions. A real shame.