In-person collaboration has been linked to high performance and job satisfaction, but these benefits don’t increase with more days spent in the office.
An oft-cited reason for in-person work mandates is that they help drive connection among a team. As more employers push for four and five days in the office, rhetoric has focused on the importance of collaboration and a sense of belonging that some leaders believe can only be fostered in a shared physical environment.
Yet some data shows the number of days people attend the office doesn’t directly correlate to that sense of connection. In fact, there’s only a 1% difference in the number of employees who say they feel connected to their organisation working four or five days a week as compared to those working two or three days on site. That slim leading edge went to the latter group, at 60%, according to a global survey of 1,115 employees by London-based workplace insights firm Leesman, seen by the BBC.
“There just doesn’t seem to be huge gains from the number of days people are in the office,” says Allison English, deputy CEO of Leesman. “It’s about the quality, not quantity, of time that matters. In fact, we see that the greater the number of in-person days, the less the worker is generally satisfied with work-life balance, impacting engagement and their connection to the organisation.”
My last job had so much hardware troubleshooting involved that when we had that talk about RTO after COVID, I told that boss flat-out I wouldn’t do hybrid. All Hybrid would mean is that I would have two labs, and inevitably whatever I needed would be in the other place. I told him to either keep me home full time, or I come into the office full time.
For unrelated reasons, I left for a full time remote role. Very little hardware troubleshooting required. I could not have done my last job like this, but for this job it’s perfect.
Everyone’s situation is different. Anyone who says that there’s only one way to do it is ignorant.
Yeah, having to split your gear up between two workplaces gets exhausting. For a long time I was a self-employed contractor primarily working for one company and I’d never have the right tool or part where I needed it. I now work full-time for that company and most of the gear stays in one place and is a lot more manageable. Plus, I set up a co-management agreement with an IT company that is literally our upstairs neighbor so if there’s a hardware problem that needs to be fixed in a hurry on a day I’m working from home I can just escalate the ticket to them instead of driving into the office.
But yeah, there’s absolutely no one size fits all approach to every workplace or specific job. I’ve been pushing for more flexibility there at my office for other roles because of that.