Want a bit of summary of the confusion on the return to work – –thanks, Axios. Quoting extensively.
In the 22 months since U.S. companies sent their workers home, they’ve collected droves of poll data, paid workplace consultants billions of dollars, and drafted plan after plan.
But they still don’t know much more about post-pandemic work than they did in March 2020; not only do companies not have a return-to-work date, they also don’t exactly know what that return to work will look like.
Senior employees and young, early-career workers want to return to the office full time. But a vast majority of the middle wants a flexible, hybrid workweek.
“It’s way more complex and way more difficult to make that transition [to hybrid] than we thought,” says Brian Kropp, head of Gartner’s human resources practice. “It’s going to take another two to three years at least. It is that big of a change.”
That’s because marrying remote and in-person work is not a technology problem like we originally thought, Kropp says. “It’s a consistency and evenness-of-experience question.”
And in an update to this confusion – Apple has indefinitely delayed their return to the office. In an email sent Wednesday, the return date is “yet to be determined,” – and employees are all getting a one thousand dollar bonus for “work-from-home” needs. This after similar moves from Meta and Google.
CNBC acquired an internal Google memo that outlines its plan for unvaccinated workers. Employees who haven’t been vaccinated could be put on forced leave and then let go from the company if they fail to follow its COVID-19 rules.
Why do we care?
There’s the key – return to work isn’t a technology problem. Sure, technology enables the experience, but creating that consistency and evenness is a process problem… and, thus, a consulting one. It’s why this space appeals to me.
The risk for IT providers is that if they only offer the technology portion, they aren’t the solution provider… and the choice of words there is deliberate. We’re not any closer to an answer than we were 18 months ago, and more importantly, the status quo does not appear to be changing any time soon.