Consider This from NPR - Back To The Office: Not Everyone Is Welcoming The Return

Episode Date: June 10, 2021

For Americans who were able to work from home at the start of the pandemic, what felt like an extended snow day at first has now turned into 15 months and counting of Zoom calls and logging onto work in sweatpants. But now that about half of Americans are fully vaccinated, some are trickling back into the office. We asked you to tell us how your work has been for the last year and how you feel about returning to the office. The responses were mixed. Susan Lund, a partner at McKinsey & Company, says that after the pandemic it's unlikely that people will go back to the same pattern of working.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment that will help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Before the pandemic, it wasn't easy for Kristen Parisi to commute to her job at a PR firm in New York. The cities where the best jobs are are still our most inaccessible cities. Parisi uses a wheelchair, and some days it was impossible to navigate through the city's obstacles. The bad weather, the heavy doors, unreliable subway station elevators. And I would have to make those tough calls to make that awful email to my boss saying i'm going to have to work from home today please understand people looked at you as though you were trying to take advantage of a system that just wasn't built for you parisi left that pr firm back in 2018 and began a job search that lasted longer than a year.

Now, her luck changed during the pandemic. Some of my friends said, oh, you know, you're still applying for jobs every day. I said, I'm applying for more now than ever, because maybe places are going to be more open to the idea of long-term remote work. She was right. They were. And she got an offer for a remote marketing job that started in January. Cindy in El Paso also says her life drastically improved

when she shifted to working from home. So when her employer sent out an email saying all remaining remote employees were to return to the office by June 1st... I cried. And I'm not usually a crier. This is just something I'm particularly sensitive to. Cindy has health issues that make a day at the office especially painful. So she really misses her home setup. I think I'm still very productive and I just need a little more, you know, some, I don't necessarily want to say

it's accommodation because I think other people who don't have health concerns also benefit. Consider this as more and more people are vaccinated. This work from home era may be coming to an end and that's not welcome news for everyone. From NPR, I'm Adi Cornish. It's Thursday, June 10th. The following message comes from NPR sponsor, WeWork. Escape the distractions of working from home with WeWork All Access. One monthly membership gives you access to hundreds of convenient workspaces nationwide. Sign up today to get a free trial for new members at weWork.com slash NPR. Terms apply. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees.

Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. What happens to police officers who get caught stealing, lying, or tampering with evidence? Each week, we open up an internal affairs investigation that used to be secret to find out how well the police police themselves. Listen to On Our Watch, a podcast from NPR and KQED. It's Consider This from NPR. Now, it's important to point out that many people haven't had the luxury of working from home during the pandemic. According to a recent Gallup poll, the U.S. was at a nearly 50-50 split in January. For those of us who were able to hunker down last spring, what felt like an extended snow day at first has turned into 15 months and counting of Zoom calls and logging on to work in sweatpants.

But now that about half of Americans are fully vaccinated, some are trickling back into the office. My name is Shruti Kumar. I'm 36 years old. I live in Atlanta, Georgia, and I work in technology industry. So I'm Sam Underwood. I work for a data analytics and digital marketing firm here in Columbus, Ohio called Futurity. We asked all of you how your work has been for the last year and how you feel about returning to the office. The response was mixed. Most of my office and my team work three to four days in office and then one day work from home. So the whole transition working from home was very smooth. I'm here in our house, my wife and I, with our two kids under two.

So every now and then you hear some stomps on the floor and somebody cries and that sort of thing. So we both just kind of looked at each other one day and said, we can't sit around this house anymore. I do not want to work from home fully, full time. I miss my colleagues and especially having in-person meetings. When you're working remotely, the people that you're working with, no matter how hard you try, they tend to turn into icons on a screen just a little bit rather than people. So being back in the office, it kind of restores that relationship aspect. So now I know who is moving into a new house. I know who just bought a new car. Those are things that I didn't know as a manager when we were all home. Both Sam and Shruti say they are relieved to be back to some sense of

normalcy at work. On the flip side, some of you have really taken to working from home and don't want to give it up. My name is Cindy. I'm 44 years old. I'm in El Paso, Texas, and I'm in education administration. My name is Adam, and I am 30 years old. I am in advertising, and I live in Detroit. My name is Ashley Flynn. I'm 38 years old. I'm an associate director for a large university in Los Angeles, California. We heard from Cindy at the top of the show. Now she and Adam asked that we use their first names only because they're worried about potential blowback from their employers. Once we started working from home, we adopted a dog and we, I was spending more

time with my wife, meeting up for lunch, throughout the day, checking in on each other. My husband is a firefighter. And so when he's gone, he's gone for 24 hours at a time. But when he's home, it was nice to be able to stop and have lunch with him and do some of those things that we were missing out on. I'm probably one of those people that you see walking down the street and you didn't realize they have health concerns. I realized pretty quickly that the new routine I found working from home was really beneficial to me. The brain fog, those physical things just seem to vaporize.

I can't pretend to, like, I want to pick a new outfit every day and play the games and cubicle life. Previous to the pandemic, the university that I work for had been one of these workplaces that we hear about now that previously didn't want employees working from home, but is now beginning to rethink that policy and kind of understanding that yes, work can get done remotely without them seeing a break in productivity. Is it the chain of ego where it's like, I'm going to make sure that you do what I say. You better be here at nine. You better be here a little bit past five. And you do this between these hours, five days a week.

We haven't had that sort of conversation probably since the industrial revolution. And it seems entirely too long to have not had that conversation as a society. Why do we need to go back to the office? Why and how to bring employees back into the office, those are the kinds of decisions company leaders are having to make. And they're thinking about how to give employees flexibility, how the pandemic has impacted innovation and company culture. We spoke to a variety of CEOs. Christina Seeley, CEO and founder of video game publisher Maxim Games in California, was one of them. Innovation's a big one. I think that innovation, I haven't seen the technology yet that replicates what it's like to be in a room with people and bounce off of each

other. And Dan Rudenberg, CEO of Spear, a physical therapy company in New York. I do believe that people learn from each other more. There's more collaboration. There's Zoom fatigue. I mean, I'm on so many Zoom meetings. It's, you know, it's really exhausting after a while. And so there's a totally different feeling when you get together. Those at the C-suite level, they turn to experts at places like McKinsey and Company. So we're getting calls from executives and chief human resource officers to say, OK, we've now gotten used to everybody remote, but how do we bring people back? When do we bring them back? What protocols do we need? I spoke with Susan Lund, a partner at

McKinsey & Company and leader of the McKinsey Global Institute. They put out a report in 2020 that was updated this year looking at the lasting impact of the pandemic on the workforce. If you had told any business leader a year and a half ago that we were going to send the whole workforce home, at least the ones who could work from home, home for more than a year, they would say this is going to be a disaster. And in fact, it's worked out quite well. But Brass Tacks, were we all more or less productive when it comes to remote work? What did your research find? So what we find is that in the short term, people are definitely as productive,

that it looks like they're spending more time at work in part because they don't have the commute, they don't have to go out necessarily to get lunch, they don't even have the office chit-chat. So on one level, it looks like the number of hours that people are working is actually up. But long term, there are questions about innovation and new products and new ideas are going to be as forthcoming because of the remote work setup. I want to dig into this data more. But first, who do we mean when we say we? Who's been able to work from home? What portion of the workforce are we talking about? It's really office-based workers who are able to work from

home. Overall, we found that 60% of the U.S. workforce doesn't have any opportunity to work from home because they're either working with people directly, like doctors and nurses or hair cutters, or they're working with specialized machinery in a factory or in a laboratory. So it is a minority of people who even have this option. But overall, so 40% of the U.S. workforce could, in theory, work from home one day a week or more, and about a quarter of people could spend the majority of their time, three to five days a week, working from home one day a week or more, and about a quarter of people could spend the majority of their time, three to five days a week, working from home. When we talk about that 40% of people who do computer or office-based work, now a large number of them have had the experience of remote

work. With that experience in mind, what are people learning about what a post-pandemic scenario could be for them? So when you look at employee surveys, you typically find that the majority of people say, going forward, when we're vaccinated, when it's safe to return to the office, they still would like the flexibility to work from home a few days a week. So that's a hybrid model. But then you do have a segment of people, maybe a quarter who say, I want to be in the office full time. Now, maybe they don't have a good homeworking setup. It's often young people in their 20s who are starting out in their careers. They want the mentorship and the camaraderie. And then you have another small portion who say, I would like to work remote 100% of the time and work from

anywhere. There have been CEOs out there quoted here and there saying things like, well, we're going to know who's really committed to the job. Yeah. So there's a lot of issues. So for companies going down this hybrid approach, there are a lot of pitfalls to watch out for. And one is that you end up with a two-tier workforce, that the people, it's always the same people in the room making the decisions and other people are on Zoom or video conference. And that those on video conference end up being passed over for promotion, not considered for different opportunities because they're not there. So companies are being thoughtful. The ones who are pursuing some kind of hybrid approach are

thinking through these issues. And how do we avoid that to keep a level playing field? We've been talking about this idea of who comes back, whose decision it is, that sort of thing. Legally, what do we know? Can employers force employees to come back? Can employers gently encourage employees to be vaccinated? What have you learned so far? Well, it's a complicated question. So on vaccination, it looks like it's a bit of a gray area, but it looks like under federal law, yes, companies can require employees to be vaccinated if it impacts the health and safety of their workforce. part of the employment contract. But what they risk, especially for talented professionals, is that people will go to other companies that do allow more flexibility on some remote work or work from home. When people look back at this time, will it be considered a reset in some ways when it comes to work? Or are we going to be

back to where we were in 2019? Well, my crystal ball is broken, but I think it will be a reset. I don't think that we will go back to the same pattern of working. I think that the forced pause for everyone to spend more time at home with family and friends has really caused many people to rethink. I think that this really has been a reset. Susan Lund, partner at McKinsey and Company and a leader of the McKinsey Global Institute. You're listening to Consider This from NPR. I'm Audie Cornish.