As increasing numbers of companies are requiring employees to return to the office for at least several days per week, they’re running into challenges with resistance, attrition, quiet quitting, and diversity–what one of my clients called the “Four Horsemen of the return to the office.”
These issues all stem from the fact that workers who are able to work remotely prefer to do so most or all of the time. An August Gallup survey of remote-capable workers shows that 34% of respondents want to work remotely full time, 60% want to work a flexible hybrid schedule, and only 6% want to work in a traditional office-centric setting. A June McKinsey survey of all workers, remote-capable and not, found that over half of all respondents want to work less than half the time in the office. And a September survey from the School of Politics and Economics at King’s College reported that 25% of respondents would quit if forced to return to the office full time.
