- Back-to-office mandates risk eroding trust between employees and employers.
- Remote work and other flexibility that emerged during the pandemic often spurred employee goodwill.
- Companies implementing RTOs may lose some workers if the labor market tightens.
“Trust me, I’m doing my job.”
That’s the sentiment coming from some workers who have resisted back-to-office orders emanating from some C apartments.
Many bosses who call their employees talk about the desire to increase productivity, teamwork and innovation. What they don’t often talk about is faith.
Still, trust — or the lack of it, amid reports of crafty employees replacing Fridays as the de facto weekend day — is at the heart of why many bosses are asking workers to resume their commutes, workplace experts told Business Insider.
The rise of remote work during the pandemic created goodwill between workers and their employers “in a way we haven’t seen since the old days of IBM retirement with the golden hour,” Dan Kaplan, senior client partner at the recruitment firm Korn. Hell, he said.
Now, however, as more CEOs push workers back into the office — often against the advice of HR teams, Kaplan said — workers’ trust in their employers is also at risk.
“This will be studied as a time where companies lost the trust they worked so hard to build,” Kaplan told BI.
Autonomy fosters employee confidence
Disagreements over how work is done can erode relationships. PwC has reported that companies that offer remote work but monitor how often workers show up at the office or track things like when workers log in can reduce workers’ sense of trust in their employers.
In early 2024, PwC found in a survey of nearly 2,500 US workers — a mix of business leaders and employees — that nearly nine in 10 leaders said they had a high level of trust in their people, but only six in 10 workers said that management considered them very trustworthy.
PwC found that when employees feel a sense of autonomy, trust in employers tends to increase. In the survey, for example, seven out of 10 workers said flexibility in how they do their work would build trust.
Employers have cause for concern
Reports of “overworked” workers holding down multiple remote jobs or other quiet vacations—thanks, rat bully—are sure to cause some leaders heartburn.
This potential abuse of trust by workers has broken bonds built during the pandemic. When COVID-19 emerged, many bosses screened workers and many employers provided information and resources to workers to help them stay safe, Kaplan said. Often, this included permission to work remotely.
Even as the pandemic faded, workers could still focus on family, going to the gym or walking the dog, he said.
Now, thanks to the tight job market facing many white-collar workers — and fewer remote roles — employers who want people back in the office have regained power.
Workers were trained with WFH
Peggie Rothe, chief knowledge and research officer at Leesman, which tracks employee experiences, told BI that when the pandemic hit, employers trusted employees to do their jobs remotely. This set many employees’ expectations of what life would be like when the pandemic subsided.
In part, many workers wanted to keep their setups because logging in from home is something people often enjoy, she said.
Rothe also said the pandemic showed that the average home is better at supporting work than the average office. That has left some workers struggling to understand why they have to return to the office every day, she said.
“If you don’t clearly communicate why — why you need your employees to come back — inevitably employees will feel like they’re no longer trusted,” Rothe said.
Workers who say they don’t trust their employers tend—not surprisingly—to be less happy at work. This dissatisfaction can then lead to productivity, innovation and teamwork.
I can’t see you
Randall Peterson, a professor of organizational behavior at London Business School, told BI that the biggest factor animating CEOs’ decisions to call people back into the office is the fear that they can’t see their people and that they can be weak.
Still, Peterson said one concern for CEOs should be that by forcing people back into the office, employers are taking away a way of working that many people have come to see as a right, not a privilege, as was the case before the pandemic.
“The fact that you’re making me come back is taking something away from me,” he said. “I don’t think enough employers have realized that yet.”
Kaplan, of Korn Ferry, echoed a similar concern. He said that if the U.S. economy heats up as he expects, there is a risk that companies will begin to lose workers who are frustrated by the bosses who are participating.
“I suspect the companies that are more flexible will look really, really smart in six months,” he said.
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