Look… let’s just face the facts. Your employer only wants you in the office so they can play mind-control games with you and your family’s health. You’ve worked two years from home and come to find out; life has been lying to you this whole time.
Why do most big companies still run their workplace like a prison for free adults? Really it’s actually run almost like a halfway house. You go and do eight-plus hours 5 days a week. They tell you when and where to report to, when to eat and when it’s okay to go to the doctor. By the time you get home to see your family, everyone is getting ready to go to sleep, just to repeat this vicious life-killing cycle.
Companies who are demanding workers back at the office every day may actually see their workers join the Great Resignation instead. It may especially be a challenge to get Gen Z workers to work in person all the time.
That’s based on survey findings from ADP Research Institute. The new report, “People at Work 2022: A Global Workforce View”, included a November 2021 survey of over 32,000 workers in 17 countries. The countries surveyed include the US, India, and the Netherlands.
According to the survey, 71% of 18 to 24-year-olds said that “if my employer insisted on me returning to my workplace full-time, I would consider looking for another job.” That’s a higher rate than among older workers. Overall, ADP Research Institute found that 64% of the workforce said this.
“I think that for them, for this segment of workers, the change from workplace to home was probably pretty natural,” Nela Richardson, the chief economist at ADP and co-author of the report, told Insider about younger workers. “It probably felt like an extension of their social lives in some sense, because they hadn’t yet been cemented by the workplace. And so the challenges of going back to work are more formidable.”
“I didn’t want to be at a company where leadership was so unwilling to listen to their employees and control was more important than keeping your people happy,” she told Insider. More flexibility in work hours and locations could be a way to attract and retain workers hesitant to go back in the office full-time.
“If you look at the survey, it’s not necessarily that people want to just work at home. They want more flexibility in their workday, Richardson said.
“It’s great that remote workers feel like they’re well paid and compensated and that they have good career progression, but what we don’t want to do is lose out on the people who have to go into the office,” Richardson said, adding that remote jobs “tend to be more knowledge jobs.”
“And so that dichotomy between people who have to go into the office and who don’t, I think companies should be aware and make sure that they are providing the same employee experience and career progression to their on-site workers as they are their remote workers to keep those workers engaged and retained.”
